Object of Your Love Page 5

“Hedda, stop!” He turned then and crossed the room, a little impatient, frowning. He looked restlessly out at the river. Hedda, noticing for the first time the fine lines on his face, illuminated by the bright reflection from the water, was shocked to see the toll exacted by the events of their life together. He was nearly fifty. She knew he had to get out now.

  “There’s another complication,” he said unhappily.

  “A woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  Hedda smiled sadly to herself. “When did it happen?” she asked, as though knowing the exact sequence of events might help her understand.

  “I don’t know,” said Dempster, looking guilty, confused. “Months ago. It was one day when I was out in the Chevy. It was spring.”

  * * *

  The day after Dempster left, Hedda closed the door to the cellar, pressed her forehead against the rough wood and prayed, though she did not know to whom. She waited for the fall to come. She wanted something to change, to mark off from the past this new stage in her life, but summer wouldn’t leave. She longed for rain and wind and cold weather and coloured leaves but they didn’t come. It occurred to her that this might be some kind of test, some trick, calculated to confuse. Life seemed full of tricks now. She had to be careful.

  In the air there was a sense of dangerous ripeness and a feeling of both luck and impatience at this gift of a prolonged summer. The gardens were saturated with colour, the flowers threatened to explode, and the apples, heavy in the backyard tree, still refused to drop. Through September, the reflection of the willows in the glass room was so convincing that birds flew against the windows all day long, killing themselves. Daily, Hedda found their stiff little bodies on the porch and buried them in the garden. She saw people passing along the river, pedestrians and cyclists on the dirt path hugging the bank, so many people passing. For the first time in her life, she wondered who all these people were and where they were going.

  Walking with Charles along the river one Saturday, Hedda ran into Dempster, accompanied by a woman. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Look at this fall we’re having, Hedda!” he cried, embarrassed, ridiculously cheerful. It was October and finally the leaves were in full colour. “I never knew autumn was such a beautiful season!” He introduced his companion as Suzie and Hedda wondered if a grown woman could really be called that. Suzie was somewhere in her thirties, healthy, energetic, with straight brown bangs and a perky ponytail. Hedda marvelled at her wholeness, her contentment, her smooth face. She looked entirely unscathed by life. She smiled kindly at Hedda and walked on a little further, leaving Dempster and Hedda to talk.

  “She’s very pretty,” said Hedda. Dempster reddened, objected mildly.

  “It’s not her prettiness, it’s—she’s so—she’s just so damned happy. Hedda, I—”

  “Do you hear from the boys?”

  “Yes. They send their love, of course. They do love you. Never doubt that.” As he spoke, Dempster was patting Charles soundly on the head, scratching him under the chin, rubbing his big floppy ears, all the while unable to take his eyes off Hedda.

  She said, “I thought at least Angus—”

  “Angus—even Angus has a lot of healing to do.”

  Walking home with Charles, Hedda said, “Well, what do you think of her, Charles? She seems to be making Dempster very happy. Are you sure you don’t want to go and live with them? Join the great exodus? She looks like she might be a dog lover.”

  In November, Hedda put on a coat and went out onto the second-storey deck to pull the geraniums up out of her big clay pots. She tied string around their roots so that she could take them in the house and hang them upside down over the winter. While she was working with the string, she heard Charles bark. Looking down, she saw him racing across the narrow park to greet Dempster, who was passing by.

  “How are you doing, old soldier?” Dempster’s voice drifted across the yellowed grass and up to Hedda. He clapped Charles on the back. “You old trooper! Where do you get your energy?” Hedda continued tying her string. Then, feeling Dempster’s eyes on her, sensing his curiosity, his guilt, she withdrew to the house and watched him walk away down the dusty path, throwing glances over his shoulder at the house.

  The first snow fell early in December. Hedda, removing the curtains on the deck windows to wash them, pushed aside the sliding door, bent and scooped up a handful of light, fresh snow. She pressed it to her cheek, felt its purity, its numbing cold. She placed her hand flat on the cool glass and looked out at a film of ice forming on the river. When he was packing his bags in September, Dempster had said to her, “I always wondered why you never tried to drown yourself in the river. It’s so obvious and so handy. I would think it would be a gentle way to go, after all the things you’ve tried.”

  In January Hedda worked in the kitchen, potting up narcissus, daffodils, crocuses, in anticipation of spring. She rubbed the moist black earth between her fingers, raised it to her nostrils, sniffed and thought about her clay. She refinished the kitchen table, running her hand over and over the aged wood, warm as flesh in the winter sun. She mended curtains that had needed attention for decades, scraped the old wax off the wide floorboards. It came up in great yellow curls. She worked not with her old manic pace, but slowly, reflectively, while Charles followed her from room to room. If she could just keep herself grounded this way, in touch with all the surfaces, the textures of the house, she thought an existence might just be possible for her.

  Then one day in February, when she was upstairs watching workmen cutting keys on the river to prevent spring flooding, the telephone rang.

  “Mom?” a voice at once foreign and achingly familiar came over the wire. “Mom, it’s Angus. Do you know where Dad is? I’ve been trying to reach him.”

  “No. What’s wrong?”

  “His office said he was on a holiday. It’s urgent. Garreth has slashed his wrists.”

  “Where is he?” asked Hedda. “I’ll come at once.”

  “You can’t, Mom,” said Angus gently. “He doesn’t want to see you. He made that very clear. It’s not that he doesn’t love you, Mom. It’s just that he’s afraid of the effect you have on him. He’s afraid he’s like you. I guess he’s known that for a long time. It’s Dad he needs right now.”

  Joseph came to visit her that afternoon. He found her upstairs looking out the window, where the men, working with winches, were drawing great plugs of blue ice out of the river and lining them up, forming what looked like a primitive and mysterious monument.

  “I look out at this scene,” she said to Joseph. “The river, the park, the trees. I don’t understand how everything can be so beautiful, and yet I can’t be happy within it. I look out and I see people leading such simple, steady lives and I wonder how they can do it. There was so much potential for all of us to be happy here on the river, in this comfortable old house, but I made it impossible. What am I going to do? My family is gone. I’ve nearly destroyed my son.”

  “You’re going to get out your clay and start making art again,” said Joseph gently. He was small, quiet, elegantly dressed, a white-haired man of sixty years. He looked very lonely. It was the first time Hedda had ever noticed this. Possibly he’d always looked lonely. He was a bachelor. She wondered if anyone had ever loved him.

  “I feel sick when I think Garreth is going to live the same cycle I’ve been through.”

  “If he does,” said Joseph, “so be it. Hedda, you’ve got to stop wishing your life had been different. You have to accept that this is the journey you were meant to take. The attempted suicides, Dempster leaving, the estrangement of your children, all of this was in the cards for you from the day you were born and all of it has its own necessary place in your life. If you could just embrace that, maybe you would find a measure of happiness.”

  * * *

  Then it was fall again and the suns in the evenings were pink and the river had a pink skin. Hedda was out when Dempster came to see her, but he
sat patiently on the sagging couch in the sunroom, with one hand resting on Charles’s old head, until she came in around dinnertime, carrying two paper bags of groceries, which she set on the kitchen counter. The movement of his rising from the couch caught her eye. She wasn’t as surprised to see him as he thought she’d be.

  “Hello,” she said neutrally, as if she’d found another dead bird on the porch blinded by an illusion of free passage through willow trees. She was wearing a longish tan skirt buttoned as far down as her knee, a pale blue blouse, a creamy vest. She looked younger, healthy and strong. The stark white parting down the middle of her hair reminded Dempster of a seagull’s feather.

  She remembered Dempster standing there, both of them standing there exactly like this a little more than a year ago—the open door through which he’d silently stepped, his figure filling the kitchen doorway before she even heard him, the water shining behind him, a river of light.

  It was a breezy afternoon. Outside, a golden rain was now falling from the willow trees. The sweet, heavy smell of apples, rotting in the long, cold grass, drifted in through the windows. Hedda had thought, every day for a year she had thought about what she’d say if Dempster ever came back. She’d thought she had something prepared, but now she only said, “You’ve gained weight.”

  Dempster laughed ruefully, looking down at himself. “I know. I look terrible.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said quickly. “Really. Your face—your face looks younger this way. No, you look good.” She sounded so fragile and innocent, she looked so wronged that Dempster hated himself for leaving her. He glanced around, impressed.

  “You’ve been working hard.”

  “For a few months.”

  She could have told him that she had a dealer in Toronto now, and that another one in Vancouver was taking a serious look at her work. This was what she’d thought she might tell him if he’d come to the gallery, to her recent show. But she didn’t say it now. It was still good news, but it belonged to her.

  Dempster stepped forward, anxious to speak. “I wondered,” he said. “I wondered about moving back in with you.”

  “You’ve got tired of this Suzie, then?”

  Dempster laughed, laughed at himself. “I’m not sure she needs me. She has such equilibrium. I have the feeling all the time that if I weren’t there, she’d be just as happy. Maybe we’re too much like each other. Life can get dull in that sort of relationship. Suzie doesn’t have your depths, Hedda. I miss the intensity of living with you.”

  Hedda looked around at the kitchen. For some time she’d been working there. Why stay in the basement when she had the whole house to herself? There was clay everywhere, cans of paint, vats of water, tools, the plywood she cut up to make bases, a saw leaning in a corner, drifts of sawdust on the floor, lumber in the hallway for the construction of shipping crates.

  Dempster read her mind. “I love things just the way they are,” he assured her. “I always missed you when you worked downstairs. I always felt cut off. This way I could watch you. I don’t care about the mess. No, really, it’s perfect this way.”

  Hedda looked at him, dangerously tempted. Of course she still loved him. There was nothing she wanted more than to take him back. But she said, “You were right. The only way I can survive is to depend on myself. If you come back, I’ll start to rely on you. I’m afraid of your strength. I know now that I can’t live with anyone. I’m ready to accept that. I’ve got a new prescription. I’m stable enough to keep myself from eating a bottle of pills in one sitting.”

  “But you’re alone here. You can’t be happy.”

  “Perhaps not. But I feel more at peace with myself than ever before. I’m not lonely. My mind keeps my heart company. This seems to be as good as life gets.”

  Soon, she thought, she’d have enough money to buy out Dempster’s interest in the house. This was the best place for her, here where the light was palpable, the air musical with the cricket’s song, and the river flowed by, with its power to give life and to take it away.

  OBJECT OF YOUR LOVE

  “AND, DEAR LORD,” says my brother Floyd at dinner, “let us pray for our beloved father, who is in exile in the United States, and hope that he’ll return to us some day.”

  “You don’t know where he is,” I say. “For all you know he’s dead.”

  Mother, Floyd and his wife Blanche raise their eyes warily and look at me. It is a September evening and their faces are thrown back into the room by the black kitchen windows: Floyd with his brittle Christian smile disclosing a mouthful of tiny rotting teeth, Blanche batting her fleshy eyelids at me in disapproval, Mother swallowing a small, anxious, let’s-not-fight gulp of air. Blanche and Floyd grip Mother’s bony hands in prayer, holding her arms high, like a prize-fighter in a boxing ring. Mother wears the expression of surprise and reluctant salvation of a suicide victim pulled from a river. She joined Floyd’s church a year ago.

  “You brought us up as atheists,” I reminded her at the time. “How can you go against everything you ever taught us?”

  She shrugged. “It’s made my life easier. Floyd doesn’t pester me any more. Maybe you should consider it yourself.”

  “I’d sooner take poison.”

  Ten years ago Father ran away. At the time, I was twenty, Floyd twenty-five. Weeks after he disappeared we realized he’d taken Floyd’s credit card with him. We were able to trace his progress through the States by reading the credit card bill: a gasoline purchase in Watertown, New York. Dinner in Syracuse. Motel rooms in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia.

  “He’s following the Interstate 81,” I said, examining an atlas. “He’s taking his time. Probably headed for Florida.”

  “I hope he’s not ill,” Mother fretted, referring to a pharmacy purchase that appeared on the bill. She is a simple, unquestioning woman who does not always grasp the magnitude of things.

  “Now,” said Blanche with extraordinary insight, “we’ll be able to tell people we have relatives in Florida.”

  Floyd said he wasn’t angry with Father for running up his credit card bill. “He didn’t mean any harm,” he said.

  “Floyd,” I shook my head, “you are a simpleton.”

  “If you were in touch with God,” he smiled at me with gentle pity, “you’d know how to forgive.” Floyd is small, fastidious, womanish, tiny-boned, a physical weakling with round wire-rimmed glasses and a red goatee. He has grown a beard because he thinks it makes him look biblical, but he lacks the moral presence of a holy man.

  Floyd got religion in his early twenties. He was working then at the dairy. He became so crazed with God that he marched around the dairy crying, “Praise the Lord, brother! Hallelujah, sister!” his face blazing with religious fervour. He sang hymns on the job. He tried to get a prayer group going at lunch break. One day he put proselytizing flyers in the empty milk bottles riding down the conveyor belt. That was when they fired him.

  Now he is a lay preacher in the Church of the Risen Christ. He assists the minister: opens the church up on Sundays, greets worshippers at the door, counts the collection money, that sort of thing. He teaches Sunday school and gives the Scripture readings at services. Once in a while, they let him give a sermon. For this, they pay him a small salary.

  Floyd and Blanche have a tiny apartment over near the bus depot but they are always at our place. The apartment, they say, makes them restless, there’s nothing to do there. I can’t blame them for being bored with each other. Floyd reads the Bible all day and Blanche wants to watch television but their set is broken. At our house, she turns on the TV and sinks down onto the sofa, an enormous woman with long black hairs clinging like spiders to the corners of her mouth. Her body is, itself, like a piece of furniture in its cumber-someness and inertia, its soft preponderance. She is like an armchair swollen with cotton wadding. All afternoon she watches the game shows, a plate of Mother’s lemon squares balanced on her knee.

  “They need a child to distract them,” Mother says of Blanc
he and Floyd.

  “They’re children themselves,” I tell her.

  “And, brethren,” Floyd says at dinner, his eyelids fluttering with piety, “let us bow our heads once more, for we are not finished with the Lord’s work at this table. We will pray for our sister, Jean, that she may open her heart to the love of God—”

  I push my chair back. “I’ll take my plate to my room rather than sit here listening to this rot.”

  “Before you go,” interrupts Blanche, “could you pass the mashed potatoes?”

  Around nine o’clock, I hear the front door close. I go to the head of the stairs. “Are the idiots gone?” I call down.

  “Do you mean Blanche and Floyd?” replies Mother.

  Once, I thought they’d left and they hadn’t. “Are the idiots gone?” I called down.

  “No,” Blanche answered without thinking. “We’re still here.”

  * * *

  On the weekends, Mother and I lead a quiet life. Mother rises late and drifts from room to room in her mules and thick flannelette nightgown. She stands at the kitchen window, motionless, looking out at Father’s bird feeder, at the chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, the hardy, faithful birds who will abide the Canadian winter with us. Their bright wings, their swiftness, their greed entertain her. For a long time she stands fixed at the window, thinking no doubt of Father, perhaps believing that as long as we feed the birds in his stead, there is hope that one day he will fly back to us.

  Pressed to the cold windowsill as though frozen there, Mother’s fingers turn as white as bones. A circle of vapour forms on the glass where her face comes close to it, her lips moving in silent entreaty. Later, she sits in her swivel rocker and says her prayers, reading from a small scarlet book. Around noon she takes a bath in an inch of tepid water. “Fill the tub up,” I call to her through the bathroom door. “Pour in the hot. Spoil yourself. Enjoy your bath.” “I don’t want to waste water,” she says. Her skin has gotten very thin, slippery and loose. Like an old silk suit that doesn’t fit her any more, it ripples and sags. On the backs of her hands, there are big brown spots the size of coppers. She can pinch the skin there and pull it away a distance of an inch. The hair has fallen out of her arms and legs. She is smooth as a newborn baby.