A Bird in the House Page 2

  “Is there such a thing as software?” my mother asked.

  “Not in his language, kiddo,” Aunt Edna said.

  Then they both giggled, and I, all at once wanting to be included, dropped my camouflage of silence.

  “Why does Grandfather always say ‘I seen’ and ‘I done’? Doesn’t he know?”

  Aunt Edna laughed again, but my mother did not. “Because he never had your advantages, young lady, that’s why,” she said crossly. “He had to leave school when he was just a child. Don’t you ever mention it to him, either, do you hear? At least he doesn’t say ‘guy,’ like some people I could name.”

  “Haw haw,” I said sarcastically, but I said it very quietly so she did not hear.

  “Nessa,” Aunt Edna said, “where’s that clothespeg doll you were making?”

  I had forgotten it. I got it out now and decided I would be able to finish it today. Everyone else in Manawaka used the metal-spring type of clothespegs, but my grandmother still stuck to the all-wooden ones with a round knob on top and two straight legs. They were perfect for making dolls, and I used a pipe cleaner for the arms and bits of coloured crepe-paper for the clothes. This one was going to be an old-fashioned lady.

  “You know, Beth,” Aunt Edna said, “that’s not right about advantages. He had plenty. Anyone could make a go of it in those days, if they were willing to work.”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” my mother said. Her voice sounded peculiar, as though she were ashamed that she had brought the subject up. She turned away and bent her dark head over the big woodstove that said “McClary’s Range” in shining script across the warming oven at the top. She poked at the bubbling cauliflower with a fork.

  “I’ll bet a nickel Ewen won’t be back in time for dinner. It’s Henry Pearl, and I guess he’s in a pretty bad way, poor old fellow. He wouldn’t come in to the hospital. He said he wants to die on his own place. Ewen won’t get a cent, of course, but let’s hope they pay in chickens this time, not that awful pork again, just loaded with fat.”

  “Why don’t you ask me if I’d had any word?” Aunt Edna said coldly. “Since that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Well, have you?”

  “No. The ad’s been in the Winnipeg papers for the full two weeks now. Tell Ewen thanks but I’m afraid the money was wasted.”

  “If you think it would be any use, maybe we could –”

  “No,” my aunt said. “I’m not borrowing any more from Ewen. The two of you have enough to worry about.”

  “Well, maybe Winnipeg’s not the right place to try. Maybe you’d have a better chance right here in Manawaka.”

  “Oh lord, Beth, don’t you think I’ve gone to every office in town? They’ve all got stenographers already, for pity’s sake, or else they can’t afford to hire one. Won’t this damn Depression ever be over? I can see myself staying on and on here in this house –”

  I had put too much mucilage on the crepe-paper, and the pieces of the lady’s skirt were slithering and refused to stick properly, on the doll. Then half the skirt got stuck on my hand, and when I angrily yanked it away, the paper tore.

  “Darn it! Darn this darned old thing!”

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

  “It won’t stick, and now it’s ripped. See? Now I’ll have to cut out another skirt.”

  I grabbed the scissors and began hacking at another piece of paper.

  “Well, as your grandmother says, there’s no use getting in a fantod about it,” my mother said. “Why don’t you leave it now and go back to it when you’re not so worked up?”

  “No. I want to finish it today, and I’m going to.”

  It had become, somehow, overwhelmingly important for me to finish it. I did not even play with dolls very much, but this one was the beginning of a collection I had planned. I could visualise them, each dressed elaborately in the costume of some historical period or some distant country, ladies in hoop skirts, gents in black top hats, Highlanders in kilts, hula girls with necklaces of paper flowers. But this one did not look at all as I had imagined she would. Her wooden face, on which I had already pencilled eyes and mouth, grinned stupidly at me, and I leered viciously back. You’ll be beautiful whether you like it or not, I told her.

  Aunt Edna hardly appeared to have noticed the interruption, but my mother had her eyes fixed dubiously on me, and I wished I had kept quiet.

  “You know what he said yesterday?” Aunt Edna went on. “He told me I was almost as good as Jenny – she was their last hired girl, remember? Not as good, mark you. Almost.”

  “You mustn’t be so touchy,” my mother said. “He meant it as a compliment.”

  “I know,” Aunt Edna said in a strained voice. “That’s the hilarious part. Oh, Beth –”

  “Nessa, honey,” my mother said hastily, “run in and see if Grandmother wants to wait dinner for Daddy or not, will you?”

  Humiliated and furious, I climbed down from the stool. She reached out to ruffle my hair in an apologetic gesture, but I brushed away her hand and walked into the living room, wrapped in my cloak of sullen haughtiness.

  Grandfather was walking up and down in front of the bay window, first looking out and then consulting his pocket watch. He stared at me, and I hesitated. His eyes were the same Irish blue we all had, but the song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” had certainly not been referring to him.

  “Where’s your father got to, Vanessa?” he said. “He better get a move on.”

  Exhilarated with an accumulation of anger, I looked for something offensive to say.

  “It’s not his fault,” I replied hotly. “It’s Mr. Pearl. He’s dying with pneumonia. I’ll bet you he’s spitting up blood this very second.”

  Did people spit blood with pneumonia? All at once, I could not swallow, feeling as though that gushing crimson were constricting my own throat. Something like that would go well in the story I was currently making up. Sick to death in the freezing log cabin, with only the beautiful halfbreed lady (no, woman) to look after him, Old Jebb suddenly clutched his throat – and so on.

  “You mind how you talk,” Grandfather was saying severely. “Do you want to upset your grandmother?”

  This was a telling blow. I did not want to upset my grandmother. It was tacitly understood among all members of the family that Grandmother was not to be upset. Only Grandfather was allowed to upset her. The rest of us coddled her gladly, assuming that she needed protection. I looked guiltily at her now, but she appeared unaware that anything nasty had been spoken. If it had been a week-day, she would have been knitting an afghan; but as it was Sunday she was reading the Bible with the aid of a magnifying glass. She did not believe in eyeglasses, which were, she thought, unnatural. She did not believe in smoking or drinking or the playing of cards, either, but she never pushed her beliefs at other people nor made any claims for her own goodness. If a visitor lit up a cigarette, she did not say a word, not even after he had gone. This was not a question of piety to her, but of manners. She kept one ashtray in the house, for the use of smoking guests. It was a thick glass one, and it said in gilt letters “Queen Victoria Hotel, Manawaka.” Uncle Terence, the second oldest of her children, had swiped it once, out of the hotel beer parlour, but Grandmother never knew that, and she was always under the impression that the management had given it to him for some reason or other, possibly because he must have been such a polite and considerate dining room guest, which was the only part of the hotel she thought he had ever been into.

  My grandmother was a Mitigated Baptist. I knew this because I had heard my father say, “At least she’s not an unmitigated Baptist,” and when I enquired, he told me that if you were Unmitigated you believed in Total Immersion, which meant that when you were baptised you had to be dunked in the Wachakwa River with all your clothes on. Unlike the United Church, where I went with my parents and where the baptisms were usually of newborn babies and the event happened only once for each person, in my grandmother’s church the ritual
was often performed with adults and could occur seasonally, if the call came. Grandmother had never plunged into the muddy Wachakwa.

  “With her tendency to pleurisy,” my father had said, “we can count it a singular blessing that your grandmother believes in font baptism.”

  Grandfather had started out a Methodist, but when the Methodists joined with the Presbyterians to form the United Church, he had refused to go because he did not like all the Scots who were now in the congregation. He had therefore turned Baptist and now went to Grandmother’s church.

  “It’s a wonder he didn’t join the Salvation Army,” I had once heard Aunt Edna remark, “rather than follow her lead.”

  “Now, Edna,” my mother had said, glancing sideways at me. So I heard nothing more of any interest that day but I did not really care, for I was planning in my head a story in which an infant was baptised by Total Immersion and swept away by the river which happened to be flooding. (Why would it be flooding? Well, probably the spring ice was just melting. Would they do baptisms at that time of year? The water would be awfully cold. Obviously, some details needed to be worked out here.) The child was dressed in a christening robe of white lace, and the last the mother saw of her was a scrap of white being swirled away towards the Deep Hole near the Wachakwa bend, where there were bloodsuckers.

  Grandfather did not believe, either, in smoking, drinking, card-playing, dancing, or tobacco-chewing. But unlike my grandmother, he did not permit any of these things in his presence. If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chanced to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.

  Grandfather had stopped his pacing now, and stood squarely in front of Grandmother’s chair.

  “Agnes, go and tell them girls to serve up the dinner now. We can’t wait around all night.”

  “Will you go, pet?” Grandmother said to me. “Your feet are younger than mine.”

  When I conveyed the message, Aunt Edna stood in the kitchen doorway and bellowed loud enough for a person to hear in South Wachakwa.

  “Tell him the cauliflower isn’t done yet!”

  “Edna!” my mother hissed. Then she began laughing, and put her handkerchief over her face. I was laughing, too, until I looked again and saw that my mother was now crying, in jerky uncertain breaths like a person takes when he first goes outside in forty-below weather.

  “Beth –” Swiftly, Aunt Edna had closed the kitchen door.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “What an idiot. There – I’m fine now.”

  “Come on – we’ll go up to my room and have a cigarette. Glory! What are we going to do when the Attar of Roses is all gone?”

  The Attar of Roses was a decidedly strong-smelling perfume that had been given to Aunt Edna by one of her boyfriends in Winnipeg. It was in an atomiser, and she used to squirt it around her bedroom after she had finished a cigarette. On these occasions, my mother always said, “Do you think we are teaching the child deception?” And Aunt Edna always replied, “No, just self-preservation.”

  I went up the back stairs with them. Aunt Edna’s room had a white vanity table with thin legs and a mirror that could be turned this way and that. Beside the mirror sat a dresser doll that had been given to Aunt Edna by another admirer. “An old boyfriend,” she had told me, and now that I was ten I understood that this did not refer to his age but to the fact that they were irrevocably parted, he being in the city and she in Manawaka. The doll had a china head and body, set on a wire hoop-skirt frame that was covered with fluted apricot crêpe de chine. Her high coiffure was fashioned of yellow curls, real hair cut from a real person’s head. “Probably somebody that died of typhoid,” Aunt Edna had said. “Well, toujours gai, kid, but I wish he had sent chocolates instead.” Aunt Edna’s room also had a blue silk eiderdown stuffed with duck feathers, a Japanese lacquer box with a picture of a chalk-faced oriental lady holding a fan, a camphor-ice in a tubular wooden case with a bulb head painted like a clown, a green leather jewellery case full of beads and earrings, and a floppy pyjama-bag doll embroidered with mysterious words such as “Immy-Jay” and “Oy-Ray” which I, like Grandmother, had believed were either meaningless or else Chinese, until I became acquainted with Pig Latin.

  My mother sat down on the bed and Aunt Edna sat at the vanity table and began combing her hair. The smoke from their cigarettes made blue whorls in the air.

  “Honey, what is it?” Aunt Edna asked in a worried voice.

  “It’s nothing,” my mother said. “I’m not myself these days.”

  “You look worn out,” Aunt Edna said. “Can’t you quit the office? You’ll have to, soon, anyway.”

  “I want to keep on as long as I can. Ewen can’t afford to hire a nurse, Edna, you know that.”

  “Well, at least you needn’t do your spring house-cleaning this year. Beating the carpet like you were doing last week – you’re out of your head, Beth.”

  “The house is a disgrace,” my mother said in a small voice. “I just want to get the rugs and curtains done, and the cupboards, that’s all. I don’t intend to do another thing.”

  “I’ll bet,” Aunt Edna said.

  “Well, what about you?” my mother said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you’d done the pantry cupboards this week. This house is far too much for you, Edna.”

  “Mother ran it, all those years.”

  “She had us to help, don’t forget. And she was hardly ever without a hired girl.”

  “The least I can do is earn my room and board,” Aunt Edna said. “I’m not going to have him saying –”

  She broke off. My mother got up and put an arm around Aunt Edna’s shoulder.

  “There now, love. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  The phone rang, and I ran down to answer it, feeling some unaccustomed obligation. Their sadness was such a new thing, not to my actual sight but to my attention, that I felt it as bodily hurt, like skinning a knee, a sharp stinging pain. But I felt as well an obscure sense of loss. Some comfort had been taken from me, but I did not know what it was.

  “Hello.” It was Central’s voice. She had a name, but no one in Manawaka ever called her anything except Central. “Is that you, Vanessa? Your dad’s calling from South Wachakwa.”

  I heard a buzzing, and then my father’s voice. “Vanessa? Listen, sweetheart, tell your mother I won’t be home for a while yet. I’ll have dinner here. And tell her she’s to go home early and get to bed. How is she?”

  “She’s okay.” But I was immediately alert. “Why? What was the matter with her?”

  “Nothing. But you be sure to tell her, eh?”

  I ran upstairs and repeated what he had said. Aunt Edna looked at my mother oddly.

  “Beth?”

  “It wasn’t anything,” my mother said quickly. “Only the merest speck. You know how Ewen fusses.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Aunt Edna said. “You tell me the truth this minute, Beth.”

  My mother’s voice was slow and without expression.

  “All right, then. It was a pretty near thing, I suppose. It happened on Tuesday, after I’d been doing the rugs. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. You don’t need to say it was my own fault. I know it. But I’d been feeling perfectly well, Edna. Really I had.”

  She looked up at Aunt Edna, and there was something in her eyes I had not seen before, some mute appeal.

  “If I’d lost it, I’d never have forgiven myself. I didn’t do it on purpose, Edna.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” A
unt Edna cried. “Don’t you think I know?”

  And then, strangely, while I sat on the cedar chest and watched, only partially knowing and yet bound somehow to them, they hugged each other tightly and I saw the tears on both their faces although they were not making a sound.

  “Mercy,” my mother said at last, “my nose is shining like a beacon – where’s your powder?”

  When my mother had gone down to start serving the dinner, Aunt Edna put away the ashtrays and began spraying Attar of Roses around the room.

  “How’s the poetry?” she asked.

  I was not shy about replying, for I loved to talk about myself. “I’m not doing any right now. I’m writing a story. I’ve filled two scribblers already.”

  “Oh?” Aunt Edna sounded impressed. “What are you calling it?”

  “The Pillars of the Nation,” I replied. “It’s about pioneers.”

  “You mean – people like Grandfather?”

  “My gosh,” I said, startled. “Was he a pioneer?”

  Then I felt awkward and at a distance from her, for she began to laugh hoarsely.

  “I’ll tell the cockeyed world,” she said. Seeing I was offended, she cut off her laughter. “When do you work at it, Nessa?”

  “After school, mostly. But sometimes at night.”

  “Does your mother let you keep your light on?”

  I looked at her doubtfully, not sure how far she could be trusted. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?”

  “Cross my heart,” she said, “and hope to die.”

  “I don’t keep my light on. I use my flashlight.”

  “Mercy, what devotion. Do you write some every day?”

  “Yes, every day,” I said proudly.

  “Couldn’t you spin it out? Make it last longer?”

  “I want to get it finished.”

  “Why? What’s the rush?”

  I was beginning to feel restless and suspicious.

  “I don’t know. I just want to get it done. I like doing it.”

  Aunt Edna put the perfume atomiser back on the vanity table.

  “Sure, I know,” she said. “But what if you ever wanted to stop, for a change?”