A Bird in the House Read online

  “It’ll be all right,” he soothed her. “She’d only be here for part of the day, Mother. You could stay in your room.”

  Aunt Edna strode in the next morning. The sight of her bobbed black hair and her grin made me feel better at once. She hauled out the carpet sweeper and the weighted polisher and got to work. I dusted while she polished and swept, and we got through the living room and front hall in next to no time.

  “Where’s her royal highness, kiddo?” she enquired.

  “In her room,” I said. “She’s reading the catalogue from Robinson & Cleaver.”

  “Good Glory, not again?” Aunt Edna cried. “The last time she ordered three linen tea-cloths and two dozen serviettes. It came to fourteen dollars. Your mother was absolutely frantic. I guess I shouldn’t be saying this.”

  “I knew anyway,” I assured her. “She was at the lace handkerchiefs section when I took up her coffee.”

  “Let’s hope she stays there. Heaven forbid she should get onto the banqueting cloths. Well, at least she believes the Irish are good for two things – manual labour and linen-making. She’s never forgotten Father used to be a blacksmith, before he got the hardware store. Can you beat it? I wish it didn’t bother Beth.”

  “Does it?” I asked, and immediately realised this was a wrong move, for Aunt Edna was suddenly scrutinising me.

  “We’re making you grow up before your time,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention to me, Nessa. I must’ve got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

  But I was unwilling to leave the subject.

  “All the same,” I said thoughtfully, “Grandmother MacLeod’s family were the lairds of Morven and the constables of the Castle of Kinlochaline. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  Aunt Edna snorted. “Castle, my foot. She was born in Ontario, just like your Grandfather Connor, and her father was a horse doctor. Come on, kiddo, we’d better shut up and get down to business here.”

  We worked in silence for a while.

  “Aunt Edna –” I said at last, “what about Mother? Why won’t they let me go and see her?”

  “Kids aren’t allowed to visit maternity patients. It’s tough for you, I know that. Look, Nessa, don’t worry. If it doesn’t start tonight, they’re going to do the operation. She’s getting the best of care.”

  I stood there, holding the feather duster like a dead bird in my hands. I was not aware that I was going to speak until the words came out.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  Aunt Edna put her arms around me, and her face looked all at once stricken and empty of defences.

  “Oh, honey, I’m scared, too,” she said.

  It was this way that Grandmother MacLeod found us when she came stepping lightly down into the front hall with the order in her hand for two dozen lace-bordered handkerchiefs of pure Irish linen.

  I could not sleep that night, and when I went downstairs, I found my father in the den. I sat down on the hassock beside his chair, and he told me about the operation my mother was to have the next morning. He kept on saying it was not serious nowadays.

  “But you’re worried,” I put in, as though seeking to explain why I was.

  “I should at least have been able to keep from burdening you with it,” he said in a distant voice, as though to himself. “If only the baby hadn’t got itself twisted around –”

  “Will it be born dead, like the little girl?”

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “I hope not.”

  “She’d be disappointed, wouldn’t she, if it was?” I said bleakly, wondering why I was not enough for her.

  “Yes, she would,” my father replied. “She won’t be able to have any more, after this. It’s partly on your account that she wants this one, Nessa. She doesn’t want you to grow up without a brother or sister.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, she didn’t need to bother,” I retorted angrily.

  My father laughed. “Well, let’s talk about something else, and then maybe you’ll be able to sleep. How did you and Grandmother make out today?”

  “Oh, fine, I guess. What was Grandfather MacLeod like, Dad?”

  “What did she tell you about him?”

  “She said he made a lot of money in his time.”

  “Well, he wasn’t any millionaire,” my father said, “but I suppose he did quite well. That’s not what I associate with him, though.”

  He reached across to the bookshelf, took out a small leather-bound volume and opened it. On the pages were mysterious marks, like doodling, only much neater and more patterned.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Greek,” my father explained. “This is a play called Antigone. See, here’s the title in English. There’s a whole stack of them on the shelves there. Oedipus Rex. Electra. Medea. They belonged to your Grandfather MacLeod. He used to read them often.”

  “Why?” I enquired, unable to understand why anyone would pore over those undecipherable signs.

  “He was interested in them,” my father said. “He must have been a lonely man, although it never struck me that way at the time. Sometimes a thing only hits you a long time afterwards.”

  “Why would he be lonely?” I wanted to know. “He was the only person in Manawaka who could read these plays in the original Greek,” my father said. “I don’t suppose many people, if anyone, had even read them in English translations, Maybe he would have liked to be a classical scholar – I don’t know. But his father was a doctor, so that’s what he was. Maybe he would have liked to talk to somebody about these plays. They must have meant a lot to him.”

  It seemed to me that my father was talking oddly. There was a sadness in his voice that I had never heard before, and I longed to say something that would make him feel better, but I could not, because I did not know what was the matter.

  “Can you read this kind of writing?” I asked hesitantly.

  My father shook his head. “Nope. I was never very intellectual, I guess. Rod was always brighter than I, in school, but even he wasn’t interested in learning Greek. Perhaps he would’ve been later, if he’d lived. As a kid, all I ever wanted to do was go into the merchant marine.”

  “Why didn’t you, then?”

  “Oh well,” my father said offhandedly, “a kid who’d never seen the sea wouldn’t have made much of a sailor. I might have turned out to be the seasick type.”

  I had lost interest now that he was speaking once more like himself.

  “Grandmother MacLeod was pretty cross today about the girl,” I remarked.

  “I know,” my father nodded. “Well, we must be as nice as we can to her, Nessa, and after a while she’ll be all right.”

  Suddenly I did not care what I said.

  “Why can’t she be nice to us for a change?” I burst out. “We’re always the ones who have to be nice to her.”

  My father put his hands down and slowly tilted my head until I was forced to look at him.

  “Vanessa,” he said, “she’s had troubles in her life which you really don’t know much about. That’s why she gets migraine sometimes and has to go to bed. It’s not easy for her these days, either – the house is still the same, so she thinks other things should be, too. It hurts her when she finds they aren’t.”

  “I don’t see –” I began.

  “Listen,” my father said, “you know we were talking about what people are interested in, like Grandfather MacLeod being interested in Greek plays? Well, your grandmother was interested in being a lady, Nessa, and for a long time it seemed to her that she was one.”

  I thought of the Castle of Kinlochaline, and of horse doctors in Ontario.

  “I didn’t know –” I stammered.

  “That’s usually the trouble with most of us,” my father said. “You go on up to bed now. I’ll phone tomorrow from the hospital as soon as the operation’s over.”

  I did sleep at last, and in my dreams I could hear the caught sparrow fluttering in the attic, and the sound of my mother crying,
and the voices of the dead children.

  My father did not phone until afternoon. Grandmother MacLeod said I was being silly, for you could hear the phone ringing all over the house, but nevertheless I refused to move out of the den. I had never before examined my father’s books, but now, at a loss for something to do, I took them out one by one and read snatches here and there. After I had been doing this for several hours, it dawned on me that most of the books were of the same kind. I looked again at the titles.

  Seven-League Boots. Arabia Deserta. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Travels in Tibet. Count Lucknor the Sea Devil. And a hundred more. On a shelf by themselves were copies of the National Geographic magazine, which I looked at often enough, but never before with the puzzling compulsion which I felt now, as though I were on the verge of some discovery, something which I had to find out and yet did not want to know. I riffled through the picture-filled pages. Hibiscus and wild orchids grew in a soft-petalled confusion. The Himalayas stood lofty as gods, with the morning sun on their peaks of snow. Leopards snarled from the vined depths of a thousand jungles. Schooners buffetted their white sails like the wings of giant angels against the great sea winds.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Grandmother MacLeod enquired waspishly, from the doorway. “You’ve got everything scattered all over the place. Pick it all up this minute, Vanessa, do you hear?”

  So I picked up the books and magazines, and put them all neatly away, as I had been told to do.

  When the telephone finally rang, I was afraid to answer it. At last I picked it up. My father sounded faraway, and the relief in his voice made it unsteady.

  “It’s okay, honey. Everything’s fine. The boy was born alive and kicking after all. Your mother’s pretty weak, but she’s going to be all right.”

  I could hardly believe it. I did not want to talk to anyone. I wanted to be by myself, to assimilate the presence of my brother, towards whom, without ever having seen him yet, I felt such tenderness and such resentment.

  That evening, Grandmother MacLeod approached my father, who, still dazed with the unexpected gift of neither life now being threatened, at first did not take her seriously when she asked what they planned to call the child.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Hank, maybe, or Joe. Fauntleroy, perhaps.”

  She ignored his levity.

  “Ewen,” she said, “I wish you would call him Roderick.”

  My father’s face changed. “I’d rather not.”

  “I think you should,” Grandmother MacLeod insisted, very quietly, but in a voice as pointed and precise as her silver nail-scissors.

  “Don’t you think Beth ought to decide?” my father asked.

  “Beth will agree if you do.”

  My father did not bother to deny something that even I knew to be true. He did not say anything. Then Grandmother MacLeod’s voice, astonishingly, faltered a little.

  “It would mean a great deal to me,” she said.

  I remembered what she had told me – When your Uncle Roderick got killed, I thought I would die. But I didn’t die. All at once, her feeling for that unknown dead man became a reality for me. And yet I held it against her, as well, for I could see that it had enabled her to win now.

  “All right,” my father said tiredly. “We’ll call him Roderick.”

  Then, alarmingly, he threw back his head and laughed.

  “Roderick Dhu!” he cried. “That’s what you’ll call him, isn’t it? Black Roderick. Like before. Don’t you remember? As though he were a character out of Sir Walter Scott, instead of an ordinary kid who –”

  He broke off, and looked at her with a kind of desolation in his face.

  “God, I’m sorry, Mother,” he said. “I had no right to say that.”

  Grandmother MacLeod did not flinch, or tremble, or indicate that she felt anything at all.

  “I accept your apology, Ewen,” she said.

  My mother had to stay in bed for several weeks after she arrived home. The baby’s cot was kept in my parents’ room, and I could go in and look at the small creature who lay there with his tightly closed fists and his feathery black hair. Aunt Edna came in to help each morning, and when she had finished the housework, she would have coffee with my mother. They kept the door closed, but this did not prevent me from eavesdropping, for there was an air register in the floor of the spare room, which was linked somehow with the register in my parents’ room. If you put your ear to the iron grille, it was almost like a radio.

  “Did you mind very much, Beth?” Aunt Edna was saying.

  “Oh, it’s not the name I mind,” my mother replied. “It’s just the fact that Ewen felt he had to. You knew that Rod had only had the sight of one eye, didn’t you?”

  “Sure, I knew. So what?”

  “There was only a year and a half between Ewen and Rod,” my mother said, “so they often went around together when they were youngsters. It was Ewen’s air-rifle that did it.”

  “Oh Lord,” Aunt Edna said heavily. “I suppose she always blamed him?”

  “No, I don’t think it was so much that, really. It was how he felt himself. I think he even used to wonder sometimes if – but people shouldn’t let themselves think like that, or they’d go crazy. Accidents do happen, after all. When the war came, Ewen joined up first. Rod should never have been in the Army at all, but he couldn’t wait to get in. He must have lied about his eyesight. It wasn’t so very noticeable unless you looked at him closely, and I don’t suppose the medicals were very thorough in those days. He got in as a gunner, and Ewen applied to have him in the same company. He thought he might be able to watch out for him, I guess. Rod being – at a disadvantage. They were both only kids. Ewen was nineteen and Rod was eighteen when they went to France. And then the Somme. I don’t know, Edna, I think Ewen felt that if Rod had had proper sight, or if he hadn’t been in the same outfit and had been sent somewhere else – you know how people always think these things afterwards, not that it’s ever a bit of use. Ewen wasn’t there when Rod got hit. They’d lost each other somehow, and Ewen was looking for him, not bothering about anything else, you know, just frantically looking. Then he stumbled across him quite by chance. Rod was still alive, but –”

  “Stop it, Beth,” Aunt Edna said. “You’re only upsetting yourself.”

  “Ewen never spoke of it to me,” my mother went on, “until once his mother showed me the letter he’d written to her at the time. It was a peculiar letter, almost formal, saying how gallantly Rod had died, and all that. I guess I shouldn’t have, but I told him she’d shown it to me. He was very angry that she had. And then, as though for some reason he were terribly ashamed, he said – I had to write something to her, but men don’t really die like that, Beth. It wasn’t that way at all. It was only after the war that he decided to come back and study medicine and go into practice with his father.”

  “Had Rod meant to?” Aunt Edna asked.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said slowly. “I never felt I should ask Ewen that.”

  Aunt Edna was gathering up the coffee things, for I could hear the clash of cups and saucers being stacked on the tray.

  “You know what I heard her say to Vanessa once, Beth? The MacLeods never tell lies. Those were her exact words. Even then, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “Please, Edna –” my mother sounded worn out now. “Don’t.”

  “Oh Glory,” Aunt Edna said remorsefully, “I’ve got all the delicacy of a two-ton truck. I didn’t mean Ewen, for heaven’s sake. That wasn’t what I meant at all. Here, let me plump up your pillows for you.”

  Then the baby began to cry, so I could not hear anything more of interest: I took my bike and went out beyond Manawaka, riding aimlessly along the gravel highway. It was late summer, and the wheat had changed colour, but instead of being high and bronzed in the fields, it was stunted and desiccated, for there had been no rain again this year. But in the bluff where I stopped and crawled under the barbed wire fence and lay stretched out
on the grass, the plentiful poplar leaves were turning to a luminous yellow and shone like church windows in the sun. I put my head down very close to the earth and looked at what was going on there. Grasshoppers with enormous eyes ticked and twitched around me, as though the dry air were perfect for their purposes. A ladybird laboured mightily to climb a blade of grass, fell off, and started all over again, seeming to be unaware that she possessed wings and could have flown up.

  I thought of the accidents that might easily happen to a person – or, of course, might not happen, might happen to somebody else. I thought of the dead baby, my sister, who might as easily have been I. Would she, then, have been lying here in my place, the sharp grass making its small toothmarks on her brown arms, the sun warming her to the heart? I thought of the leather-bound volumes of Greek, and the six different kinds of iced cakes that used to be offered always in the MacLeod house, and the pictures of leopards and green seas. I thought of my brother, who had been born alive after all, and now had been given his life’s name.

  I could not really comprehend these things, but I sensed their strangeness, their disarray. I felt that whatever God might love in this world, it was certainly not order.

  THE MASK OF THE BEAR

  In winter my Grandfather Connor used to wear an enormous coat made of the pelt of a bear. So shaggy and coarse-furred was this coat, so unevenly coloured in patches ranging from amber to near-black, and so vile-smelling when it had become wet with snow, that it seemed to have belonged when it was alive to some lonely and giant Kodiak crankily roaming a high frozen plateau, or an ancient grizzly scarred with battles in the sinister forests of the north. In actuality, it had been an ordinary brown bear and it had come, sad to say, from no more fabled a place than Galloping Mountain, only a hundred miles from Manawaka. The skin had once been given to my grandfather as payment, in the days when he was a blacksmith, before he became a hardware merchant and developed the policy of cash only. He had had it cobbled into a coat by the local shoemaker, and Grandmother Connor had managed to sew in the lining. How long ago that was, no one could say for sure, but my mother, the eldest of his family, said she could not remember a time when he had not worn it. To me, at the age of ten and a half, this meant it must be about a century old. The coat was so heavy that I could not even lift it by myself. I never used to wonder how he could carry that phenomenal weight on himself, or why he would choose to, because it was obvious that although he was old he was still an extraordinarily strong man, built to shoulder weights.