Part 12 (1/2)
What had happened with him and Alfrida might have been simply one of the changes, the wearing-out of old attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people-particularly, as I would have said, in the lives of people at home.
My stepmother died just a little while before my father. After their short, happy marriage they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners. Before either of those deaths Alfrida had moved back to the city. She didn't sell the house, she just went away and left it. My father wrote to me, ”That's a pretty funny way of doing things.”
There were a lot of people at my father's funeral, a lot of people I didn't know. A woman came across the gra.s.s in the cemetery to speak to me-I thought at first she must be a friend of my stepmother's. Then I saw that the woman was only a few years past my own age. The stocky figure and crown of gray-blond curls and floral-patterned jacket made her look older.
”I recognized you by your picture,” she said. ”Alfrida used to always be bragging about you.”
I said, ”Alfrida's not dead?”
- 113*
”Oh, no,” the woman said, and went on to tell me that Alfrida was in a nursing home in a town just north of Toronto.
”I moved her down there so's I could keep an eye on her.”
Now it was easy to tell-even by her voice-that she was somebody of my own generation, and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida's, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.
She told me her name, and it was of course not the same as Alfrida's-she must have married. And I couldn't recall Alfrida's ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names.
I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her own eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.
”Other than that-?” she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister, because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.
”So she doesn't travel too good,” she said. ”Or else I would've brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That's where I saw about your dad.”
I wondered out loud, impulsively, if I should go to visit, at the nursing home. The emotions of the funeral-all the warm and relieved and reconciled feelings opened up in me by the death of my father at a reasonable age-prompted this suggestion. It would have been hard to carry out. My husband-my second husband-and I had only two days here before we were flying to Europe on an already delayed holiday.
”I don't know if you'd get so much out of it,” the woman said. ”She has her good days. Then she has her bad days. You never know. Sometimes I think she 's putting it on. Like, she 'll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she 'll just say the same thing. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That's what she 'll say all day long. Fit-as-a-fiddle-and-ready-for-love. She 'll drive you crazy. Then other days she can answer all right.”
- 114*
Again, her voice and laugh-this time half submerged- reminded me of Alfrida, and I said, ”You know I must have met you, I remember once when Alfrida's stepmother and her father dropped in, or maybe it was only her father and some of the children-”
”Oh, that's not who I am,” the woman said. ”You thought I was Alfrida's sister? Glory. I must be looking my age.”
I started to say that I could not see her very well, and it was true. In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was hard to make out her features or her expression.
She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, ”Alfrida was my birth mom.”
Mawm. Mother.
Then she told me, at not too great length, the story that she must have told often, because it was about an emphatic event in her life and an adventure she had embarked on alone. She had been adopted by a family in eastern Ontario; they were the only family she had ever known (”and I love them dearly”), and she had married and had her children, who were grown up before she got the urge to find out who her own mother was. It wasn't too easy, because of the way records used to be kept, and the secrecy (”It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me”), but a few years ago she had tracked down Alfrida.
”Just in time too,” she said. ”I mean, it was time somebody came along to look after her. As much as I can.”
I said, ”I never knew.”
”No. Those days, I don't suppose too many did. They warn you, when you start out to do this, it could be a shock when you show up. Older people, it's still heavy-duty. However. I don't think she minded. Earlier on, maybe she would have.”
There was some sense of triumph about her, which wasn't hard to understand. If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you've told it, and it has done so, there has - 115*
to be a balmy moment of power. In this case it was so complete that she felt a need to apologize.
”Excuse me talking all about myself and not saying how sorry I am about your dad.”
I thanked her.
”You know Alfrida told me that your dad and her were walking home from school one day, this was in high school.
They couldn't walk all the way together because, you know, in those days, a boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible. So if he got out first he 'd wait just where their road went off the main road, outside of town, and if she got out first she would do the same, wait for him. And one day they were walking together and they heard all the bells starting to ring and you know what that was? It was the end of the First World War.”
I said that I had heard that story too.
”Only I thought they were just children.”
”Then how could they be coming home from high school, if they were just children?”
I said that I had thought they were out playing in the fields.
”They had my father's dog with them. He was called Mack.”
”Maybe they had the dog all right. Maybe he came to meet them. I wouldn't think she 'd get mixed up on what she was telling me. She was pretty good on remembering anything involved your dad.”
Now I was aware of two things. First, that my father was born in 1902, and that Alfrida was close to the same age. So it was much more likely that they were walking home from high school than that they were playing in the fields, and it was odd that I had never thought of that before. Maybe they had said they were in the fields, that is, walking home across the fields. Maybe they had never said ”playing.”
Also, that the feeling of apology or friendliness, the harmless-ness that I had felt in this woman a little while before, was not there now.
- 116*
I said, ”Things get changed around.”
”That's right,” the woman said. ”People change things around. You want to know what Alfrida said about you?”
Now. I knew it was coming now.
”What?”
”She said you were smart, but you weren't ever quite as smart as you thought you were.”
I made myself keep looking into the dark face against the light.
Smart, too smart, not smart enough.
I said, ”Is that all?”
”She said you were kind of a cold fish. That's her talking, not me. I haven't got anything against you.”
That Sunday, after the noon dinner at Alfrida's, I set out to walk all the way back to my rooming house. If I walked both ways, I reckoned that I would have covered about ten miles, which ought to offset the effects of the meal I had eaten. I felt overfull, not just of food but of everything that I had seen and sensed in the apartment. The crowded, old-fas.h.i.+oned furnis.h.i.+ngs. Bill's silences. Alfrida's love, stubborn as sludge, and inappropriate, and hopeless-as far as I could see-on the grounds of age alone.
After I had walked for a while, my stomach did not feel so heavy. I made a vow not to eat anything for the next twenty-four hours. I walked north and west, north and west, on the streets of the tidily rectangular small city. On a Sunday afternoon there was hardly any traffic, except on the main thoroughfares.