Part 22 (2/2)

Come here.

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

- 217*

What Is Remembered In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote-something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.

”Balmain taught me everything. He said, 'Always wear white gloves. It's best.'”

It's best. Why is she smiling at that? It seems so soft a whisper of advice, such absurd and final wisdom. Her gloved hands are formal, but tender-looking as a kitten's paws.

Pierre asks why she 's smiling and she says, ”Nothing,” then tells him.

He says, ”Who is Balmain?”

They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night from their home on Vancouver Island to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they'd stayed in a hotel since their wedding night.

- 218*

When they went on a holiday now it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.

This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre 's father was dead, and Meriel's mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year a teacher at Pierre 's school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.

The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre 's best friend for years and Pierre 's age- twenty-nine. Pierre and Jonas had grown up together in West Vancouver-they could remember it before the Lion's Gate Bridge was built, when it seemed like a small town. Their parents were friends. When they were eleven or twelve years old they had built a rowboat and launched it at Dundarave Pier. At the university they had parted company for a while-Jonas was studying to be an engineer, while Pierre was enrolled in Cla.s.sics, and the Arts and Engineering students traditionally despised each other. But in the years since then the friends.h.i.+p had to some extent been revived. Jonas, who was not married, came to visit Pierre and Meriel, and sometimes stayed with them for a week at a time.

Both of these young men were surprised by what had happened in their lives, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so rea.s.suring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre 's parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on a sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any - 219*

company, and the girls-at least to hear him tell it-were always on a sort of probation with him. His last engineering job was in the northern part of the province, and he stayed on there after he either quit or was fired. ”Employment terminated by mutual consent,” he wrote to Pierre, adding that he was living at the hotel, where all the high-cla.s.s people lived, and might get a job on a logging crew. He was also learning to fly a plane, and thinking of becoming a bush pilot. He promised to come down for a visit when present financial complications were worked out.

Meriel had hoped that wouldn't happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night talking about things that had happened when they were teenagers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was p.i.s.s-hair, a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool or Doc or Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard-Stan or Don or Rick. He recalled with a gruff pedantry the details of incidents that Meriel did not think so remarkable or funny (the bag of dog s.h.i.+t set on fire on the teacher's front steps, the badgering of the old man who offered boys a nickel to pull down their pants), and grew irritated if the conversation turned to the present.

When she had to tell Pierre that Jonas was dead she was apologetic, shaken. Apologetic because she hadn't liked Jonas and shaken because he was the first person they knew well, in their own age group, to have died. But Pierre did not seem to be surprised or particularly stricken.

”Suicide,” he said.

She said no, an accident. He was riding a motorcycle, after dark, on gravel, and he went off the road. Somebody found him, or was with him, help was at hand, but he died within an hour.

His injuries were mortal.

That was what his mother had said, on the phone. His injuries were mortal. She had sounded so quickly resigned, so unsurprised. As Pierre did when he said, ”Suicide.”

- 220*

After that Pierre and Meriel had hardly spoken about the death itself, just about the funeral, the hotel room, the need for an all-night sitter. His suit to be cleaned, a white s.h.i.+rt obtained.

It was Meriel who made the arrangements, and Pierre kept checking up on her in a husbandly way. She understood that he wished her to be controlled and matter-of-fact, as he was, and not to lay claim to any sorrow which-he would be sure-she could not really feel. She had asked him why he had said, ”Suicide,” and he had told her, ”That's just what came into my head.” She felt his evasion to be some sort of warning or even a rebuke. As if he suspected her of deriving from this death-or from their proximity to this death-a feeling that was discreditable and self-centered. A morbid, preening excitement.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their s.e.xual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.

How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn gra.s.s, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back-during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children-into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

- 221*

After the funeral some people had been invited back to Jonas's parents' house in Dundarave. The rhododendron hedge was in bloom, all red and pink and purple. Jonas's father was complimented on the garden.

”Well, I don't know,” he said. ”We had to get it in shape in a bit of a hurry.”

Jonas's mother said, ”This isn't a real lunch, I'm afraid. Just a pickup.” Most people were drinking sherry, though some of the men had whisky. Food was set out on the extended dining-room table-salmon mousse and crackers, mushroom tarts, sausage rolls, a light lemon cake and cut-up fruit and pressed-almond cookies, as well as shrimp and ham and cuc.u.mber-and-avocado sandwiches. Pierre heaped everything onto his small china plate, and Meriel heard his mother say to him, ”You know, you could always come back for a second helping.”

His mother didn't live in West Vancouver anymore but had come in from White Rock for the funeral. And she wasn't quite confident about a direct reprimand, now that Pierre was a teacher and a married man.

”Or didn't you think there 'd be any left?” she said.

Pierre said carelessly, ”Maybe not of what I wanted.”

His mother spoke to Meriel. ”What a nice dress.”

”Yes, but look,” said Meriel, smoothing down the wrinkles that had formed while she sat through the service.

”That's the trouble,” Pierre 's mother said.

”What's the trouble?” said Jonas's mother brightly, sliding some tarts onto the warming-dish.

”That's the trouble with linen,” said Pierre 's mother. ”Meriel was just saying how her dress had wrinkled up”-she did not say, ”during the funeral service”-”and I was saying that's the trouble with linen.”

Jonas's mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, ”That's the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him.”

- 222*

Pierre 's mother said, ”That's quite a venture.”

”Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend people in the bush.”

The man they were talking about was speaking to Pierre. He was not wearing a suit, though he had a decent jacket on, over a turtlenecked sweater.

”I suppose he would,” said Pierre 's mother, and Jonas's mother said, ”Yes,” and Meriel felt as if something-about the way he was dressed?-had been explained and settled, between them.

She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as c.o.c.ktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. n.o.body had disturbed them, or if they had-for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins-they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way and this order had been maintained.

At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas's life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter after we have survived the travail of death. If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous, as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given a.s.surance.

Even so, our blind brains cannot imagine, cannot conceive of, what we will pa.s.s into. The baby is lapped in its ignorance, in the faith of its dumb, helpless being. And we who are not entirely ignorant or entirely knowing must take care to wrap ourselves in our faith, in the word of our Lord.

- 223*

Meriel looked at the minister, who stood in the hall doorway with a gla.s.s of sherry in his hand, listening to a vivacious woman with blond puffed hair. It didn't seem to her that they were talking about the pangs of death and the light ahead. What would he do if she walked over and tackled him on that subject?

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