Part 11 (2/2)

So if Alfrida was going to talk about it, I thought, it was a good thing that my fiance had not come. A good thing that he didn't have to hear about Alfrida's mother, on top of finding out about my mother and my family's relative or maybe considerable poverty. He admired opera and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy-for the squalor of tragedy-in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly sunny circ.u.mstances. Failures in life-failures of luck, of health, of finances-all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background.

”They wouldn't let me in to see her, at the hospital,” Alfrida said, and at least she was saying this in her normal voice, not preparing the way with any special piety, or greasy excitement.

”Well, I probably wouldn't have let me in either, if I'd been in their shoes. I've no idea what she looked like. Probably all bound up like a mummy. Or if she wasn't she should have been. I wasn't there when it happened, I was at school. It got very dark and the teacher turned the lights on-we had the lights, at school-and we all had to stay till the thunderstorm was over.

- 109*

Then my aunt Lily-well, your grandmother-she came to meet me and took me to her place. And I never got to see my mother again.”

I thought that was all she was going to say but in a moment she continued, in a voice that had actually brightened up a bit, as if she was preparing for a laugh.

”I yelled and yelled my fool head off that I wanted to see her.

I carried on and carried on, and finally when they couldn't shut me up your grandmother said to me, 'You're just better off not to see her. You would not want to see her, if you knew what she looks like now. You wouldn't want to remember her this way.'

”But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me. ”

Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful.

”I must've thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn't I? She would want to see me. ”

This was a part of the story I had never heard.

And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself, She would want to see me.

The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place.

I thanked Alfrida and said that I had to go. Alfrida went to call Bill to say good-bye to me, but came back to report that he had fallen asleep.

”He 'll be kicking himself when he wakes up,” she said. ”He enjoyed meeting you.”

She took off her ap.r.o.n and accompanied me all the way down the outside steps. At the bottom of the steps was a gravel path - 110*

leading around to the sidewalk. The gravel crunched under our feet and she stumbled in her thin-soled house shoes.

She said, ”Ouch! Goldarn it,” and caught hold of my shoulder.

”How's your dad?” she said.

”He 's all right.”

”He works too hard.”

I said, ”He has to.”

”Oh, I know. And how's your mother?”

”She 's about the same.”

She turned aside towards the shop window.

”Who do they think is ever going to buy this junk? Look at that honey pail. Your dad and I used to take our lunch to school in pails just like that.”

”So did I,” I said.

”Did you?” She squeezed me. ”You tell your folks I'm thinking about them, will you do that?”

Alfrida did not come to my father's funeral. I wondered if that was because she did not want to meet me. As far as I knew she had never made public what she held against me; n.o.body else would know about it. But my father had known. When I was home visiting him and learned that Alfrida was living not far away-in my grandmother's house, in fact, which she had finally inherited-I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose. My father said, ”Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.”

He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started? I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida's objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.

- 111*

”It wasn't Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. ”I changed it, I wasn't even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”

But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.

”Well,” my father said. He was in general quite pleased that I had become a writer, but there were reservations he had about what might be called my character. About the fact that I had ended my marriage for personal-that is, wanton-reasons, and the way I went around justifying myself-or perhaps, as he would have said, weaseling out of things. He would not say so- it was not his business anymore.

I asked him how he knew that Alfrida felt this way.

He said, ”A letter.”

A letter, though they lived not far apart. I did feel sorry to think that he had had to bear the brunt of what could be taken as my thoughtlessness, or even my wrongdoing. Also that he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out. Had he felt compelled to defend me to Alfrida, as he had to defend my writing to other people? He would do that now, though it was never easy for him. In his uneasy defense he might have said something harsh.

Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him.

There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own.

Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting-set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else 's?

My father had said that Alfrida was living alone now. I asked him what had become of Bill. He said that all of that was outside of his jurisdiction. But he believed there had been a bit of a rescue operation.

- 112*

”Of Bill? How come? Who by?”

”Well, I believe there was a wife.”

”I met him at Alfrida's once. I liked him.”

”People did. Women.”

I had to consider that the rupture might have had nothing to do with me. My stepmother had urged my father into a new sort of life. They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton's. She had been a widow for a long time before she married him, and she had many friends from those days who became new friends for him.

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