Part 14 (1/2)

When he thought I wouldn't notice, Lawrence examined the photos again, again. I heard his fingers handling them, not notes or reports. He tried to bring the images into bed. I wouldn't agree. He persisted. I sensed a new rule arriving. When he reached for me I was sure, and quickly moved to my own margin. By now I understood my mother's twin bed. She had no notebooks, though, poor woman. Then and there in front of Lawrence I got out my stories and began to write in my own idiom.

He did not ask. He, we did not speak our language very much any more (another conundrum for the translators).

Her third birthday approached. Lawrence wanted to go to Canada.

”What would a child that age know about celebration?”

He had no scientific comeback, but one day after a siege of meetings he and I were having drinks with other partic.i.p.ants. A fellow translator asked me with gentle concern if I were tired.

Lawrence snapped, ”No, Ellen always slouches like that. And she gets all worked up.”

The inquirer stammered. Others lowered their eyes while my husband publicly raged, glared, sulked.

At last I said I'd go. Not then. At Christmas. With conditions. Our arrival must be unannounced, so no airport reunion. No gambols, no funny gifts of the kind that Mrs. Whatsit, given opportunity, would invent. And we'd stay at a downtown hotel, to prevent a child from slipping into our room at dawn expecting special treatment.

I had to force myself to get on the plane. Even my parents' rather austere seasonal practices reared up like penitentiary walls. (That's the last, unless I've lost count. Four's plenty.) At dusk the taxi moved through softly falling white to the old neighbourhood and so to the Whatsits' house, its bas.e.m.e.nt dark. Snow flowed around us.

Peering through the bright living-room window, we saw our daughter, arms akimbo, face red, tongue stuck out. Her body shook with shouting, ”No no no, I hate you!” Tears sprang off her face.

Lawrence gasped, laughed. His eyes too were wet.

My mother-in-law, her back to us, spoke inaudibly. Her hair was greyer. She was fifty-five now, I calculated.

”When the worst teen years. .h.i.t, she'll just be getting her pension.”

Lawrence's fist almost reached me, but we flinched. That idiom, alien still. We watched as the woman and child calmed down, smiled, kissed.

He and I kissed too, a long deep final word. Then the father ran up to his front door.

I walked, wondering where under the everywhere whiteness lay that delicate lichen, frilled, leathery.

Through the living-room window of my parents' house glinted an enormous Christmas tree. For her. They never used to do that. A light shone in the attic, another by my private door. My key slid in. On the stairs I sat to note the essentials. In the airport lounge I'd go further, for likely there'd be hours before the flight above the tumbling snow, hours to live in my idiom. Ours no more. Never hers.

Some women take to it, some don't.

Writing poetry was now imaginable.

I tiptoed up.

My parents' huge TV and chairs and beds were in the attic, as were they, two tiny dried-apple dolls in robes and slippers by the fire. They nibbled mince-tarts. On the dormer windows, glittering lichen bonded with the sky. The trees, sheathed in ice, stood silent.

My mother sighed. ”So nice with just the two of us.”

”What did you say?”

Dirty Work WITH DEEPEST SYMPATHY?.

In Your Hour of Loss?

Certainly not.

I searched through the rack of cards with no text.Flowers and rivers cooled both the September heat and my anger at the day's news reports from Afghanistan about Bush at his dirty work again, cosying up to the Taliban's leaders. Stars, clouds, ocean beaches.

Then-a wide field where two old trees stood close, their colours muted, the sage and olive conveying respect, I thought. Admiration.

Rowena deserves neither. Light and lethal as plastic wrap she is, so I bought that card. Very sorry to hear the news. Catherine. She'll get it. With snail mail you can't see recipients react, though, unless your daily lives are linked. Perhaps she never noticed that ours briefly were.

Entering the Vancouver branch thirty years ago, Rowena wore an ankle-length coat, black wool. Richard walked behind, royal consort. She was tall, pale; the fas.h.i.+onable coat gave her still more height and presence. This twenty-something pair were fresh to the Coast, had just driven his old beater cross-country from the movement's Centre in Toronto. Who forked over for that garment? Not Ms. Radical, who never had a nickel for the collection bucket. Her man was taller, paler, with a curly smile, and bent to Rowena like a folding measuring-stick. They wore Beatles gla.s.ses. His long hair was carroty red, hers a stream of black.

Sally, the a.s.sistant organizer, stood no chance. Her stocky build would have made that coat grotesque, and her face-after years of poverty, fluorescent light, cheap food, the stress of political crises-was sallow mud. Organizer Pete's skin was as coa.r.s.e. Unimportant, for an important man. Nor did his hands matter, stained by Gestetner, silk-screen, spirit ditto, Remington and Underwood. He and Sally exuded the twinnish affect of the long-coupled. Pals.

Cordially they brought the new comrades to the hall's kitchen for the Friday supper, and sat by them: Sally, Richard, Rowena, Pete. I was there, only a contact, not seated by the leaders, but I too saw Pete draw on the paper table-cover a map of downtown. As Rowena watched, his ballpoint showed the route for the anti-war march coming up in April 1971.

”See?”

”You're the chief marshal?” Admiring gaze. Wide eyes. The works.

Pete blushed.

Richard's death thirty years later, a week ago: sad. Not tragic, like those of others once in the movement, Josie, Bruce.

In today's newspaper, tomorrow's, Richard wouldn't rate a line of print, but last week the Sun did note yet another drunk driver's kill: male, 55, credit union manager. No family mentioned. Local TV showed a rainy crosswalk. Diagonally across the white stripes, a reflective yellow jacket. Long legs scissoring. A crushed bike.

Right after Richard and Rowena's arrival on the Coast, anti-war worked hard to build the protest against America's war in Vietnam. What hard means, people unfamiliar with radical politics have no idea. Friends of mine do time in the standard parties, but even if angry, worn out, tricked of victory, they're safe. Secure. The left that I knew felt itself alone on a shattering rim.

That march was a huge success, Vancouver's biggest to date, the cops nearly brutal. Seventeen seconds on The National.

At the movement's social that night (the hall antic with exhausted revelry), the a.s.sistant organizer located me in the crowded half-dark. The Age of Aquarius reverberated so that Sally had to repeat her question.

”Cathy, could you find s.p.a.ce for a comrade?”

”Catherine. I don't understand?”

She explained. How humiliating.

My apartment then had an odd ell off the hallway where I stored camping gear.

”Of course!”

Sally obviously wanted to leave at once. I had no one to stay for. Silent, she walked by me down the hill towards the West End, where freighters' lights glinted on English Bay's blackness. The mountains, invisible.

At my place, as we cleared away tent and paddles to roll out foam and sleeping bag, I accidentally touched her arm. Tense. Almost rigid.

The next week, two small cartons and a suitcase appeared. The revolutionary stored her food in a corner of the fridge and washed her few dishes right away.

”I'll be gone by month's end,” paying her share of the rent to the penny.

Why did Sally ask a contact for refuge? Not a comrade. Not even a former comrade who'd dropped to sympathizer. Among the latter, old Duncan had heroic status, having gone to Spain with the Mac-Pap brigade. Others had cachet if they'd continued radical work in unions or the NDP, but most were judged as simply having failed to cut the mustard.

In Vancouver as elsewhere, thousands came around the far-left in the 1960s, 70s. Some were just here on a visit, as the comrades said, but others lasted over a decade, into the death years. I did. Rowena was soon history, off to write her dirty work-aka gossip columns-for any paying rag, but Richard, another relict, kept on through turn and fusion, faction and split, all the while studying accountancy.