A Bird in the House Read online

  “Beth, do you think she ever considered marrying him?”

  “What? Mother? Don’t be ridiculous. What makes you say that?”

  “Remember how Uncle Dan used to take us out in that cutter of his in winter, when we were kids? Mother always worried in case we got dumped in a snowdrift or the horses ran away. Well, I went out once with him, and out of a clear sky he said ‘She picked the right man, Edna, your mother, no question of it.’ That was a funny thing for him to say, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t suppose it meant anything,” my mother said.

  “I wonder, though,” Aunt Edna mused, “what all of us would have been like, if she’d –”

  “A pretty ragged bunch,” my mother said. “There’s not much doubt about that. Oh Edna, think how he must feel – Father, I mean. We’ve never given him credit for what he’s done.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Aunt Edna said. “Imitation is the sincerest form of compliment, after all.”

  My mother’s head came up and she looked around this way and that, as though she smelled smoke and thought the house might be on fire.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You know quite well what I mean,” Aunt Edna replied. “Not one of us could go any other way. And what’s more, for all you’re always saying Vanessa takes after Ewen, you know who she really takes after.”

  “That’s not so!” my mother burst out.

  “Isn’t it?” Aunt Edna cried. “Isn’t it?”

  I was hardly aware of her meaning. I was going instead by the feel of the words, the same way the faithful must interpret the utterances of those who rise up and speak in tongues. Her voice was high and fearful, burdened with a terrible regret, as though she would have given anything not to have spoken.

  We went downstairs then, and I helped to pass the coffee around, walking carefully because it was in the good Spode cups. Grandfather and Uncle Dan took theirs without a word. Grandmother said, “Thank you, pet.” Her face was calm, and no one could even have begun to guess, from looking at her, what she might have been thinking, if anything. When he had finished his coffee, Uncle Dan said he thought he would just stroll down to the Regal Café and get a few humbugs.

  My mother, coming in with the coffee pot to see if anyone wanted a second cup, hesitated and looked from Uncle Dan to Grandfather, as though she didn’t know which of them to ask, and couldn’t ask both of them at once. Finally she sighed, a mere breath, and refilled Grandfather’s cup. Uncle Dan went out, humming softly to himself, and when he had reached the front sidewalk he began to sing. We heard the song growing fainter as he ambled away.

  Glory-o, Glory-o,

  To the bold Fenian men –

  Aunt Edna smothered a laugh. “Fenian! Grandma Connor would have a fit!”

  My mother suddenly put a hand out and touched me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Go with him, Vanessa,” she said. “Keep him company.”

  And I ran, ran towards the sound of the singing. But he seemed a long way off now, and I wondered if I would ever catch up to him.

  TO SET OUR HOUSE IN ORDER

  When the baby was almost ready to be born, something went wrong and my mother had to go into hospital two weeks before the expected time. I was wakened by her crying in the night, and then I heard my father’s footsteps as he went downstairs to phone. I stood in the doorway of my room, shivering and listening, wanting to go to my mother but afraid to go lest there be some sight there more terrifying than I could bear.

  “Hello – Paul?” my father said, and I knew he was talking to Dr. Cates. “It’s Beth. The waters have broken, and the fetal position doesn’t seem quite – well, I’m only thinking of what happened the last time, and another like that would be – I wish she were a little huskier, damn it – she’s so – no, don’t worry, I’m quite all right. Yes, I think that would be the best thing. Okay, make it as soon as you can, will you?”

  He came back upstairs, looking bony and dishevelled in his pyjamas, and running his fingers through his sand-coloured hair. At the top of the stairs, he came face to face with Grandmother MacLeod, who was standing there in her quilted black satin dressing gown, her slight figure held straight and poised, as though she were unaware that her hair was bound grotesquely like white-feathered wings in the snare of her coarse night-time hairnet.

  “What is it, Ewen?”

  “It’s all right, Mother. Beth’s having – a little trouble. I’m going to take her into the hospital. You go back to bed.”

  “I told you,” Grandmother MacLeod said in her clear voice, never loud, but distinct and ringing like the tap of a sterling teaspoon on a crystal goblet, “I did tell you, Ewen, did I not, that you should have got a girl in to help her with the housework? She would have rested more.”

  “I couldn’t afford to get anyone in,” my father said. “If you thought she should’ve rested more, why didn’t you ever – oh God, I’m out of my mind tonight – just go back to bed, Mother, please. I must get back to Beth.”

  When my father went down to the front door to let Dr. Cates in, my need overcame my fear and I slipped into my parents’ room. My mother’s black hair, so neatly pinned up during the day, was startlingly spread across the white pillowcase. I stared at her, not speaking, and then she smiled and I rushed from the doorway and buried my head upon her.

  “It’s all right, honey,” she said. “Listen, Vanessa, the baby’s just going to come a little early, that’s all. You’ll be all right. Grandmother MacLeod will be here.”

  “How can she get the meals?” I wailed, fixing on the first thing that came to mind. “She never cooks. She doesn’t know how.”

  “Yes, she does,” my mother said. “She can cook as well as anyone when she has to. She’s just never had to very much, that’s all. Don’t worry – she’ll keep everything in order, and then some.”

  My father and Dr. Cates came in, and I had to go, without ever saying anything I had wanted to say. I went back to my own room and lay with the shadows all around me. I listened to the night murmurings that always went on in that house, sounds which never had a source, rafters and beams contracting in the dry air, perhaps, or mice in the walls, or a sparrow that had flown into the attic through the broken skylight there. After a while, although I would not have believed it possible, I slept.

  The next morning I questioned my father. I believed him to be not only the best doctor in Manawaka, but also the best doctor in the whole of Manitoba, if not in the entire world, and the fact that he was not the one who was looking after my mother seemed to have something sinister about it.

  “But it’s always done that way, Vanessa,” he explained. “Doctors never attend members of their own family. It’s because they care so much about them, you see, and –”

  “And what?” I insisted, alarmed at the way he had broken off. But my father did not reply. He stood there, and then he put on that difficult smile with which adults seek to conceal pain from children. I felt terrified, and ran to him, and he held me tightly.

  “She’s going to be fine,” he said. “Honestly she is. Nessa, don’t cry –”

  Grandmother MacLeod appeared beside us, steel-spined despite her apparent fragility. She was wearing a purple silk dress and her ivory pendant. She looked as though she were all ready to go out for afternoon tea.

  “Ewen, you’re only encouraging the child to give way,” she said. “Vanessa, big girls of ten don’t make such a fuss about things. Come and get your breakfast. Now, Ewen, you’re not to worry. I’ll see to everything.”

  Summer holidays were not quite over, but I did not feel like going out to play with any of the kids. I was very superstitious, and I had the feeling that if I left the house, even for a few hours, some disaster would overtake my mother. I did not, of course, mention this feeling to Grandmother MacLeod, for she did not believe in the existence of fear, or if she did, she never let on. I spent the morning morbidly, in seeking hidden places in the house. There were many of these – odd-sh
aped nooks under the stairs, small and loosely nailed-up doors at the back of clothes closets, leading to dusty tunnels and forgotten recesses in the heart of the house where the only things actually to be seen were drab oil paintings stacked upon the rafters, and trunks full of outmoded clothing and old photograph albums. But the unseen presences in these secret places I knew to be those of every person, young or old, who had ever belonged to the house and had died, including Uncle Roderick who got killed on the Somme, and the baby who would have been my sister if only she had managed to come to life. Grandfather MacLeod, who had died a year after I was born, was present in the house in more tangible form. At the top of the main stairs hung the mammoth picture of a darkly uniformed man riding upon a horse whose prancing stance and dilated nostrils suggested that the battle was not yet over, that it might indeed continue until Judgment Day. The stern man was actually the Duke of Wellington, but at the time I believed him to be my grandfather MacLeod, still keeping an eye on things.

  We had moved in with Grandmother MacLeod when the Depression got bad and she could no longer afford a housekeeper, but the MacLeod house never seemed like home to me. Its dark red brick was grown over at the front with Virginia creeper that turned crimson in the fall, until you could hardly tell brick from leaves. It boasted a small tower in which Grandmother MacLeod kept a weedy collection of anaemic ferns. The verandah was embellished with a profusion of wrought-iron scrolls, and the circular rose-window upstairs contained glass of many colours which permitted an outlooking eye to see the world as a place of absolute sapphire or emerald, or if one wished to look with a jaundiced eye, a hateful yellow. In Grandmother MacLeod’s opinion, these features gave the house style.

  Inside, a multitude of doors led to rooms where my presence, if not actually forbidden, was not encouraged. One was Grandmother MacLeod’s bedroom, with its stale and old-smelling air, the dim reek of medicines and lavender sachets. Here resided her monogrammed dresser silver, brush and mirror, nail-buffer and button hook and scissors, none of which must even be fingered by me now, for she meant to leave them to me in her will and intended to hand them over in the same flawless and unused condition in which they had always been kept. Here, too, were the silver-framed photographs of Uncle Roderick – as a child, as a boy, as a man in his Army uniform. The massive walnut spool bed had obviously been designed for queens or giants, and my tiny grandmother used to lie within it all day when she had migraine, contriving somehow to look like a giant queen.

  The living room was another alien territory where I had to tread warily, for many valuable objects sat just-so on tables and mantelpiece, and dirt must not be tracked in upon the blue Chinese carpet with its birds in eternal motionless flight and its water-lily buds caught forever just before the point of opening. My mother was always nervous when I was in this room.

  “Vanessa, honey,” she would say, half apologetically, “why don’t you go and play in the den, or upstairs?”

  “Can’t you leave her, Beth?” my father would say. “She’s not doing any harm.”

  “I’m only thinking of the rug,” my mother would say, glancing at Grandmother MacLeod, “and yesterday she nearly knocked the Dresden shepherdess off the mantel. I mean, she can’t help it, Ewen, she has to run around –”

  “Goddamn it, I know she can’t help it,” my father would growl, glaring at the smirking face of the Dresden shepherdess.

  “I see no need to blaspheme, Ewen,” Grandmother MacLeod would say quietly, and then my father would say he was sorry, and I would leave.

  The day my mother went to the hospital, Grandmother MacLeod called me at lunch-time, and when I appeared, smudged with dust from the attic, she looked at me distastefully as though I had been a cockroach that had just crawled impertinently out of the woodwork.

  “For mercy’s sake, Vanessa, what have you been doing with yourself? Run and get washed this minute. Here, not that way – you use the back stairs, young lady. Get along now. Oh – your father phoned.”

  I swung around. “What did he say? How is she? Is the baby born?”

  “Curiosity killed a cat,” Grandmother MacLeod said, frowning. “I cannot understand Beth and Ewen telling you all these things, at your age. What sort of vulgar person you’ll grow up to be, I dare not think. No, it’s not born yet. Your mother’s just the same. No change.”

  I looked at my grandmother, not wanting to appeal to her, but unable to stop myself. “Will she – will she be all right?”

  Grandmother MacLeod straightened her already-straight back. “If I said definitely yes, Vanessa, that would be a lie, and the MacLeods do not tell lies, as I have tried to impress upon you before. What happens is God’s will. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”

  Appalled, I turned away so she would not see my face and my eyes. Surprisingly, I heard her sigh and felt her papery white and perfectly manicured hand upon my shoulder.

  “When your Uncle Roderick got killed,” she said, “I thought I would die. But I didn’t die, Vanessa.”

  At lunch, she chatted animatedly, and I realised she was trying to cheer me in the only way she knew.

  “When I married your Grandfather MacLeod,” she related, “he said to me, ‘Eleanor, don’t think because we’re going to the prairies that I expect you to live roughly. You’re used to a proper house, and you shall have one.’ He was as good as his word. Before we’d been in Manawaka three years, he’d had this place built. He earned a good deal of money in his time, your grandfather. He soon had more patients than either of the other doctors. We ordered our dinner service and all our silver from Birks’ in Toronto. We had resident help in those days, of course, and never had less than twelve guests for dinner parties. When I had a tea, it would always be twenty or thirty. Never any less than half a dozen different kinds of cake were ever served in this house. Well, no one seems to bother much these days. Too lazy, I suppose.”

  “Too broke,” I suggested. “That’s what Dad says.”

  “I can’t bear slang,” Grandmother MacLeod said. “If you mean hard-up, why don’t you say so? It’s mainly a question of management, anyway. My accounts were always in good order, and so was my house. No unexpected expenses that couldn’t be met, no fruit cellar running out of preserves before the winter was over. Do you know what my father used to say to me when I was a girl?”

  “No,” I said. “What?’”

  “God loves Order,” Grandmother MacLeod replied with emphasis. “You remember that, Vanessa. God loves Order – he wants each one of us to set our house in order. I’ve never forgotten those words of my father’s. I was a MacInnes before I got married. The MacInnes is a very ancient clan, the lairds of Morven and the constables of the Castle of Kinlochaline. Did you finish that book I gave you?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then, feeling some additional comment to be called for, “It was a swell book, Grandmother.”

  This was somewhat short of the truth. I had been hoping for her cairngorm brooch on my tenth birthday, and had received instead the plaid-bound volume entitled The Clans and Tartans of Scotland. Most of it was too boring to read, but I had looked up the motto of my own family and those of some of my friends’ families. Be then a wall of brass. Learn to suffer. Consider the end. Go carefully. I had not found any of these slogans reassuring. What with Mavis Duncan learning to suffer, and Laura Kennedy considering the end, and Patsy Drummond going carefully, and I spending my time in being a wall of brass, it did not seem to me that any of us were going to lead very interesting lives. I did not say this to Grandmother MacLeod.

  “The MacInnes motto is Pleasure Arises from Work,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed proudly. “And an excellent motto it is, too. One to bear in mind.”

  She rose from the table, rearranging on her bosom the looped ivory beads that held the pendant on which a fullblown ivory rose was stiffly carved.

  “I hope Ewen will be pleased,” she said.

  “What at?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Grandmoth
er MacLeod said. “I hired a girl this morning, for the housework. She’s to start tomorrow.”

  When my father got home that evening, Grandmother MacLeod told him her good news. He ran one hand distractedly across his forehead.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, but you’ll just have to unhire her. I can’t possibly pay anyone.”

  “It seems distinctly odd,” Grandmother MacLeod snapped, “that you can afford to eat chicken four times a week.”

  “Those chickens,” my father said in an exasperated voice, “are how people are paying their bills. The same with the eggs and the milk. That scrawny turkey that arrived yesterday was for Logan MacCardney’s appendix, if you must know. We probably eat better than any family in Manawaka, except Niall Cameron’s. People can’t entirely dispense with doctors or undertakers. That doesn’t mean to say I’ve got any cash. Look, Mother, I don’t know what’s happening with Beth. Paul thinks he may have to do a Caesarean. Can’t we leave all this? Just leave the house alone. Don’t touch it. What does it matter?”

  “I have never lived in a messy house, Ewen,” Grandmother MacLeod said, “and I don’t intend to begin now.”

  “Oh Lord,” my father said. “Well, I’ll phone Edna, I guess, and see if she can give us a hand, although God knows she’s got enough, with the Connor house and her parents to look after.”

  “I don’t fancy having Edna Connor in to help,” Grandmother MacLeod objected.

  “Why not?” my father shouted. “She’s Beth’s sister, isn’t she?”

  “She speaks in such a slangy way,” Grandmother MacLeod said. “I have never believed she was a good influence on Vanessa. And there is no need for you to raise your voice to me, Ewen, if you please.”

  I could barely control my rage. I thought my father would surely rise to Aunt Edna’s defence. But he did not.