A Bird in the House Read online

  Whenever I went into Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear with my mother, and made grotesque faces at myself in the long mirror while she tried on dresses, Millie Christopherson who worked there would croon a phrase which made me break into snickering until my mother, who was death on bad manners, tapped anxiously at my shoulders with her slender, nervous hands. It’s you, Mrs. MacLeod, Millie would say feelingly, no kidding it’s absolutely you. I appropriated the phrase for my grandfather’s winter coat. It’s you, I would simper nastily at him, although never, of course, aloud.

  In my mind I sometimes called him “The Great Bear.” The name had many associations other than his coat and his surliness. It was the way he would stalk around the Brick House as though it were a cage, on Sundays, impatient for the new week’s beginning that would release him into the only freedom he knew, the acts of work. It was the way he would take to the basement whenever a man came to call upon Aunt Edna, which in those days was “not often, because – as I had overheard my mother outlining in sighs to my father – most of the single men her age in Manawaka considered that the time she had spent working in Winnipeg had made more difference than it really had, and the situation wasn’t helped by her flyaway manner (whatever that might mean). But if ever she was asked out to a movie, and the man was waiting and making stilted weather-chat with Grandmother Connor, Grandfather would prowl through the living room as though seeking a place of rest and not finding it, would stare fixedly without speaking, and would then descend the basement steps to the rocking chair which sat beside the furnace. Above ground, he would not have been found dead sitting in a rocking chair, which he considered a piece of furniture suitable only for the elderly, of whom he was never in his own eyes one. From his cave, however, the angry crunching of the wooden rockers against the cement floor would reverberate throughout the house, a kind of sub-verbal Esperanto, a disapproval which even the most obtuse person could not fail to comprehend.

  In some unformulated way, I also associated the secret name with Great Bear Lake, which I had seen only on maps and which I imagined to be a deep vastness of black water, lying somewhere very far beyond our known prairies of tamed fields and barbed-wire fences, somewhere in the regions of jagged rock and eternal ice, where human voices would be drawn into a cold and shadowed stillness without leaving even a trace of warmth.

  One Saturday afternoon in January, I was at the rink when my grandfather appeared unexpectedly. He was wearing his formidable coat, and to say he looked out of place among the skaters thronging around the edges of the ice would be putting it mildly. Embarrassed, I whizzed over to him.

  “There you are, Vanessa – about time,” he said, as though he had been searching for me for hours. “Get your skates off now, and come along. You’re to come home with me for supper. You’ll be staying the night at our place. Your dad’s gone away out to Freehold, and your mother’s gone with him. Fine time to pick for it. It’s blowing up for a blizzard, if you ask me. They’ll not get back for a couple of days, more than likely. Don’t see why he don’t just tell people to make their own way in to the hospital. Ewen’s too easy-going. He’ll not get a penny nor a word of thanks for it, you can bet your life on that.”

  My father and Dr. Cates used to take the country calls in turn. Often when my father went out in the winter, my mother would go with him, in case the old Nash got stuck in the snow and also to talk and thus prevent my father from going to sleep at the wheel, for falling snow has a hypnotic effect.

  “What about Roddie?” I asked, for my brother was only a few months old.

  “The old lady’s keeping care of him,” Grandfather Connor replied abruptly.

  The old lady meant my Grandmother MacLeod, who was actually a few years younger than Grandfather Connor. He always referred to her in this way, however, as a calculated insult, and here my sympathies were with him for once. He maintained, quite correctly, that she gave herself airs because her husband had been a doctor and now her son was one, and that she looked down on the Connors because they had come from famine Irish (although at least, thank God, Protestant). The two of them seldom met, except at Christmas, and never exchanged more than a few words. If they had ever really clashed, it would have been like a brontosaurus running headlong into a tyrannosaurus.

  “Hurry along now,” he said, when I had taken off my skates and put on my snow boots. “You’ve got to learn not to dawdle. You’re an awful dawdler, Vanessa.”

  I did not reply. Instead, when we left the rink I began to take exaggeratedly long strides. But he paid no attention to my attempt to reproach him with my speed. He walked beside me steadily and silently, wrapped in his great fur coat and his authority.

  The Brick House was at the other end of town, so while I shuffled through the snow and pulled my navy wool scarf up around my nose against the steel cutting edge of the wind, I thought about the story I was setting down in a five-cent scribbler at nights in my room. I was much occupied by the themes of love and death, although my experience of both had so far been gained principally from the Bible, which I read in the same way as I read Eaton’s Catalogue or the collected works of Rudyard Kipling – because I had to read something, and the family’s finances in the thirties did not permit the purchase of enough volumes of Doctor Doolittle or the Oz books to keep me going.

  For the love scenes, I gained useful material from The Song of Solomon. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine, or By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth; I sought him but I found him not. My interpretation was somewhat vague, and I was not helped to any appreciable extent by the explanatory bits in small print at the beginning of each chapter – The church’s love unto Christ. The church’s fight and victory in temptation, et cetera. These explanations did not puzzle me, though, for I assumed even then that they had simply been put there for the benefit of gentle and unworldly people such as my Grandmother Connor, so that they could read the Holy Writ without becoming upset. To me, the woman in The Song was some barbaric queen, beautiful and terrible, and I could imagine her, wearing a long robe of leopard skin and one or two heavy gold bracelets, pacing an alabaster courtyard and keening her unrequited love.

  The heroine in my story (which took place in ancient Egypt – my ignorance of this era did not trouble me) was very like the woman in The Song of Solomon, except that mine had long wavy auburn hair, and when her beloved left her, the only thing she could bring herself to eat was an avocado, which seemed to me considerably more stylish and exotic than apples in lieu of love. Her young man was a gifted carver, who had been sent out into the desert by the cruel pharaoh (pharaohs were always cruel – of this I was positive) in order to carve a giant sphinx for the royal tomb. Should I have her die while he was away? Or would it be better if he perished out in the desert? Which of them did I like the least? With the characters whom I liked best, things always turned out right in the end. Yet the death scenes had an undeniable appeal, a sombre splendour, with (as it said in Ecclesiastes) the mourners going about the streets and all the daughters of music brought low. Both death and love seemed regrettably far from Manawaka and the snow, and my grandfather stamping his feet on the front porch of the Brick House and telling me to do the same or I’d be tracking the wet in all over the hardwood floor.

  The house was too warm, almost stifling. Grandfather burned mainly birch in the furnace, although it cost twice as much as poplar, and now that he had retired from the hardware store, the furnace gave him something to do and so he was forever stoking it. Grandmother Connor was in the dining room, her stout body in its brown rayon dress bending over the canary’s cage.

  “Hello, pet,” she greeted me. “You should have heard Birdie just a minute ago – one of those real long trills. He’s been moulting lately, and this is the first time he’s sung in weeks.”

  “Gee,” I said enthusiastically, for although I was not fond of canaries, I was extremely fond of my grandmother. “That’s swell. Maybe he’ll do it again.”

&nbs
p; “Messy things, them birds,” my grandfather commented. “I can never see what you see in a fool thing like that, Agnes.”

  My grandmother did not attempt to reply to this.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Timothy?” she asked.

  “Nearly supper-time, ain’t it?”

  “Well, not for a little while yet.”

  “It’s away past five,” my grandfather said. “What’s Edna been doing with herself?”

  “She’s got the pot-roast in,” my grandmother answered, “but it’s not done yet.”

  “You’d think a person could get a meal on time,” he said, “considering she’s got precious little else to do.”

  I felt, as so often in the Brick House, that my lungs were in danger of exploding, that the pressure of silence would become too great to be borne. I wanted to point out, as I knew Grandmother Connor would never do, that it wasn’t Aunt Edna’s fault there were no jobs anywhere these days, and that, as my mother often said of her, she worked her fingers to the bone here so she wouldn’t need to feel beholden to him for her keep, and that they would have had to get a hired girl if she hadn’t been here, because Grandmother Connor couldn’t look after a place this size any more. Also, that the dining-room clock said precisely ten minutes past five, and the evening meal in the Connor house was always at six o’clock on the dot. And – and – a thousand other arguments rose up and nearly choked me. But I did not say anything. I was not that stupid. Instead, I went out to the kitchen.

  Aunt Edna was wearing her coral sweater and grey pleated skirt, and I thought she looked lovely, even with her apron on. I always thought she looked lovely, though, whatever she was wearing, but if ever I told her so, she would only laugh and say it was lucky she had a cheering section of one.

  “Hello, kiddo,” she said. “Do you want to sleep in my room tonight, or shall I make up the bed in the spare room?”

  “In your room,” I said quickly, for this meant she would let me try out her lipstick and use some of her Jergens hand-lotion, and if I could stay awake until she came to bed, we would whisper after the light was out.

  “How’s The Pillars of the Nation coming along?” she asked.

  That had been my epic on pioneer life. I had proceeded to the point in the story where the husband, coming back to the cabin one evening, discovered to his surprise that he was going to become a father. The way he ascertained this interesting fact was that he found his wife constructing a birch-bark cradle. Then came the discovery that Grandfather Connor had been a pioneer, and the story had lost its interest for me. If pioneers were like that, I had thought, my pen would be better employed elsewhere.

  “I quit that one,” I replied laconically. “I’m making up another – it’s miles better. It’s called The Silver Sphinx. I’ll bet you can’t guess what it’s about.”

  “The desert? Buried treasure? Murder mystery?”

  I shook my head.

  “Love,” I said.

  “Good Glory,” Aunt Edna said, straight-faced. “That sounds fascinating. Where do you get your ideas, Vanessa?”

  I could not bring myself to say the Bible. I was afraid she might think this sounded funny.

  “Oh, here and there,” I replied noncommittally. “You know.”

  She gave me an inquisitive glance, as though she meant to question me further, but just then the telephone rang, and I rushed to answer it, thinking it might be my mother or father phoning from Freehold. But it wasn’t. It was a voice I didn’t know, a man’s.

  “Is Edna Connor there?”

  “Just a minute, please,” I cupped one hand over the mouthpiece fixed on the wall, and the other over the receiver.

  “For you,” I hissed, grinning at her. “A strange man!”

  “Mercy,” Aunt Edna said ironically, “these hordes of admirers will be the death of me yet. Probably Todd Jeffries from Burns’ Electric about that busted lamp.”

  Nevertheless, she hurried over. Then, as she listened, her face became startled, and something else which I could not fathom.

  “Heavens, where are you?” she cried at last. “At the station here? Oh Lord. Why didn’t you write to say you were – well, sure I am, but – oh, never mind. No, you wait there. I’ll come and meet you. You’d never find the house –”

  I had never heard her talk this way before, rattlingly. Finally she hung up. Her face looked like a stranger’s, and for some reason this hurt me.

  “It’s Jimmy Lorimer,” she said. “He’s at the C.P.R. station. He’s coming here. Oh my God, I wish Beth were here.”

  “Why?” I wished my mother were here, too, but I could not see what difference it made to Aunt Edna. I knew who Jimmy Lorimer was. He was a man Aunt Edna had gone around with when she was in Winnipeg. He had given her the Attar of Roses in an atomiser bottle with a green net-covered bulb – the scent she always sprayed around her room after she had had a cigarette there. Jimmy Lorimer had been invested with a remote glamour in my imagination, but all at once I felt I was going to hate him.

  I realised that Aunt Edna was referring to what Grandfather Connor might do or say, and instantly I was ashamed for having felt churlishly disposed towards Jimmy Lorimer. Even if he was a cad, a heel, or a nitwit, I swore I would welcome him. I visualised him as having a flashy appearance, like a riverboat gambler in a movie I had seen once, a checkered suit, a slender oiled moustache, a diamond tie-pin, a dangerous leer. Never mind. Never mind if he was Lucifer himself.

  “I’m glad he’s coming,” I said staunchly.

  Aunt Edna looked at me queerly her mouth wavering as though she were about to smile. Then, quickly, she bent and hugged me, and I could feel her trembling. At this moment, Grandmother Connor came into the kitchen.

  “You all right, pet?” she asked Aunt Edna.

  “Nothing’s the matter, is it?”

  “Mother, that was an old friend of mine on the phone just now. Jimmy Lorimer. He’s from Winnipeg. He’s passing through Manawaka. Is it all right if he comes here for dinner?”

  “Well, of course, dear,” Grandmother said. “What a lucky thing we’re having the pot-roast. There’s plenty. Vanessa, pet, you run down to the fruit cellar and bring up a jar of strawberries, will you? Oh, and a small jar of chili sauce. No, maybe the sweet mustard pickle would go better with the pot-roast. What do you think, Edna?”

  She spoke as though this were the only important issue in the whole situation. But all the time her eyes were on Aunt Edna’s face.

  “Edna –” she said, with great effort, “is he – is he a good man, Edna?”

  Aunt Edna blinked and looked confused, as though she had been spoken to in some foreign language.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “You’re sure, pet?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Edna repeated, a little more emphatically than before.

  Grandmother Connor nodded, smiled reassuringly, and patted Aunt Edna lightly on the wrist.

  “Well, that’s fine, dear. I’ll just tell Father. Everything will be all right, so don’t you worry about a thing.”

  When Grandmother had gone back to the living room, Aunt Edna began pulling on her black fur-topped overshoes. When she spoke, I didn’t know whether it was to me or not.

  “I didn’t tell her a damn thing,” she said in a surprised tone. “I wonder how she knows, or if she really does? Good. What a word. I wish I didn’t know what she means when she says that. Or else that she knew what I mean when I say it. Glory, I wish Beth were here.”

  I understood then that she was not speaking to me, and that what she had to say could not be spoken to me. I felt chilled by my childhood, unable to touch her because of the freezing burden of my inexperience. I was about to say something, anything, however mistaken, when my aunt said Sh, and we both listened to the talk from the living room.

  “A friend of Edna’s is coming for dinner, Timothy,” Grandmother was saying quietly. “A young man from Winnipeg.”

  A silence. Then, “Winnipeg!” my grandfather exclai
med, making it sound as though Jimmy Lorimer were coming here straight from his harem in Casablanca.

  “What’s he do?” Grandfather demanded next.

  “Edna didn’t say.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Grandfather said darkly. “Well, I won’t have her running around with that sort of fellow. She’s got no more sense than a sparrow.”

  “She’s twenty-eight,” Grandmother said, almost apologetically. “Anyway, this is just a friend.”

  “Friend!” my grandfather said, annihilating the word. Then, not loudly, but with an odd vehemence, “You don’t know a blame thing about men, Agnes. You never have.”

  Even I could think of several well-placed replies that my grandmother might have made, but she did not do so. She did not say anything. I looked at Aunt Edna, and saw that she had closed her eyes the way people do when they have a headache. Then we heard Grandmother’s voice, speaking at last, not in her usual placid and unruffled way, but hesitantly.

  “Timothy – please. Be nice to him. For my sake.”

  For my sake. This was so unlike my grandmother that I was stunned. She was not a person who begged you to be kind for her sake, or even for God’s sake. If you were kind, in my grandmother’s view, it was for its own sake, and the judgement of whether you had done well or not was up to the Almighty. Judge not, that ye be not judged – this was her favourite admonition to me when I lost my temper with one of my friends. As a devout Baptist, she believed it was a sin to pray for anything for yourself. You ought to pray only for strength to bear whatever the Lord saw fit to send you, she thought. I was never able to follow this advice, for although I would often feel a sense of uneasiness over the tone of my prayers, I was the kind of person who prayed frantically – “Please, God, please, please please let Ross MacVey like me better than Mavis.” Grandmother Connor was not self-effacing in her lack of demands either upon God or upon her family. She merely believed that what happened to a person in this life was in Other Hands. Acceptance was at the heart of her. I don’t think in her own eyes she ever lived in a state of bondage. To the rest of the family, thrashing furiously and uselessly in various snarled dilemmas, she must often have appeared to live in a state of perpetual grace, but I am certain she didn’t think of it that way, either.