He drinks his coffee with a long, pleasurable slurp, leans back in his chair—such tiny shoulders—quite amazingly relaxed. Again he strains to speak, and we lean forward, Martin, Judith and I, to catch what he says. “Do you mind ...” he whispers raspily, “if I smoke?”
He puffs contentedly on a Capstan, using, to my astonishment and horror, the rim of my mother’s saucer for an ashtray. The smoke curling from his lips and rather oily nostrils makes him look exceptionally ugly. He has always—I feel certain of this—been ugly; he wears his ugliness with such becoming ease, as though it were a creased oilskin, utilitarian and not at all despised. And as he smokes, he talks, a light and general conversation, faintly paternal with a scattering of questions, the sort of conversation which has rarely filled these rooms. I feel myself grow tense at the obvious exertion of his voice, its separate sounds eased out of the creaking wooden machinery of his throat, dry, high-pitched, harshly monotone, a voice pitted with gasped air as though his windpipe is in some dreadful way shredded and out of his control.
Judith and Martin and I attend scrupulously to his questions, making our replies as lengthy as possible in order to relieve him of the torment of speaking. Turning deferentially to Martin, he inquires about his position at the university, and Martin, not quite blushing but almost, tells Louis that he has recently been appointed chairman of his department.
I am startled. Judith has never mentioned Martin’s promotion to me; indeed, at that moment, listening to her husband describe the duties of his new office, Judith fidgets, rises, reheats the coffee, even yawns behind a politely raised hand. She has never pretended to be a standard, right-hand wife, but her nonchalance about Martin’s success seems excessive, almost indifferent.
Is Martin himself pleased about his promotion? I wonder. It is difficult to tell because, with his academic compulsion toward truth, he outlines for Louis the enormous liabilities of the position, the toll it takes in terms of time, patience and friendship. Never have I heard Martin so expansive, never so carefully expository, and it occurs to me that he is deliberately prolonging his explanation out of an inclination to break through the aura of surrealism which possesses us, to flatten with his burly, workaday facts the sheer unreality of our being gathered here around this particular kitchen table on this particular late May morning.
Louis turns next to Judith—I am becoming accustomed to his dry-roofed rasp—and asks her whether she has read the biography of Lawrence Welk, a question which disappoints me somewhat by its banality. (Already I am investing Louis with wizened, cerebral kindli ness.)
No, Judith answers, she hasn’t read it but she respects those who discover ways, whatever they may be, of uncovering currents of the extraordinary in even the most ordinary personalities. Actually, Judith protests, she doesn’t believe there is such a thing as an ordinary person, at least not when examined from the privileged perspective of the biographer. What consumes her now, she tells Louis, is her investigation into the scientific impulse—no, not impulse, she corrects herself; in the case of scientists, impulse becomes compulsion. Louis nods; his twisted muzzle face registers agreement. Judith continues: science, she says, often drowns men with its overwhelming abstractions, snuffing out human variability and hatching the partly true myth of the cold, clinical man of science. Human whim, human dream if you like, become obscured, and for the biographer, Judith admits, not unhappily, the scientific life is the most complex of all to write about.
Louis questions me next—I wonder if he has rehearsed the pattern of our discussion—asking me if dreams inspire the poems I write. (It is a morning for speeches, each of us taking a turn, except, that is, our mother who sits in one corner of the table, peevishly sipping her coffee and filling the dips and hollows of our phrases with nervous, trailing “yes‘s” and “well’s”). No, I tell Louis, I never write poems inspired by dreams.
“Why not?” he creaks.
I shrug, thinking of the Pome People who treasure their dreams as though they were rare oriental currency blazoned with symbolic stamping. For me dreams are no more than rag-ends caught in a sort of human lint-trap, psychic fluff, the negligible dust of that more precious material, thought. To value one’s dreams is to encourage the most debilitating of diseases, subjectivity. (Watson nearly died of that disease; our marriage almost certainly did.) To pretend that dreams are generated whole out of some vast, informing unconsciousness is to imagine a comic-strip beast (alligator, dragon?) slumbering in one’s blood. The inner life? I shrug again. The poet has to report on surfaces, on the flower in the crannied wall, on coffee spoons and peaches, a rusted key discovered in the grass. Dreams are like—I think a moment—dreams are like mashed potatoes.
Martin awards me a yelp of laughter. Louis smiles a yellow, fish-gleam smile, and Judith, smiling approval, refills my cup. She is flushed with her own impromptu eloquence and proud of mine. And puzzled too. Is it Louis’s questions that have stirred us? Or our desire to make him understand exactly how far we have travelled from this cramped kitchen?
After this it is Louis’s turn to speak.
“With your permission,” he begins hoarsely, “I would like to invite each of you—you, Judith and you, Charleen—to have lunch with me.” He stops; a coughing fit seizes him, shaking his thin shoulders with wrenching violence. We watch helplessly, tensely, listening to the dry, squeezed convulsions of his heaving chest.
“It’s just the asthma,” our mother tells us calmly, almost flatly, sipping again at her coffee. “It happens all the time.”
Three operations and asthma!
At last Louis’s coughing stops and he pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose noisily. Half choking, he begins again, explaining how he hopes to get better acquainted with us by taking us in turn, Judith today and me tomorrow, out for a nice, long lunch. (The order, I can only think, is dictated by our relative ages; Judith being older has priority, and I cannot help smiling at the thoroughness of his planning.) When he has finished his arduous invitation, he sits back again, smashes his cigarette in my mother’s saucer, and asks “Well?”
Judith—brave, kind, curious Judith—leaning over the table and placing her hand on Louis’s amber-stained fingertips, repeats the word Louis used earlier, a word which has never before, as far as I know, been used in this house and which is now being spoken for the second time in a single morning. “I would be honoured,” she pronounces.
“In that case,” Louis says rising, “I think we should be on our way.”
“You mean right now?” Judith stammers.
“I know a nice quiet place,” he rasps, “in the country. It’ll be after twelve o‘clock before we get there.”
Turning to me he says, “Tomorrow then, Charleen? We can ...” he coughs his parched, tenor cough, “we can talk some more about poetry.”
Judith, a little bewildered, picks up a sweater and her handbag and they leave by the back door, walking together around the lilac tree at the side of the house. My mother rises at once to place the cups in the sink. Martin returns to his newspaper and I, following him into the living room, watch the two of them move toward the car; Judith is a full head taller than Louis; she seems to lope by his side.
It is very strange watching Louis walk to his car. Louis, sitting in the kitchen and puffing his cigarette, seemed dwarfed and bleached and freakish, like an aged, yellowed monkey, but Louis walking to the car is close to nimbleness; with his lightsome step, his short, little arms swinging cheerfully, and his head tossing as though he were searching out the best possible breath of air, he appears, from the back and from a distance, like a man in his prime.
We have scrambled eggs on toast for lunch, Martin, my mother and I.
In this household, guests have never been frequent: occasionally when we were children my Aunt Liddy, my mother’s older sister who lived in the country, would come to spend a day with us. And there was a second cousin of our father, Cousin Hugo, who owned a hardware store, a large, fat man with wiry black hair and cur
ving crusts of dirt beneath his fingernails. And once a neighbour whose wife was in the hospital with pneumonia had been invited for Sunday lunch, an extraordinary gesture which remained for years in my mother’s mind as the “time we put ourselves out to help Mr. Eggleston.” Always on these occasions when guests were present she would serve scrambled eggs on toast.
Doubtless she considered it a dish both light and elegant. She may have read somewhere that it was the Queen Mother’s favourite luncheon dish (she is always reading about the Royal Family). Certainly she is convinced of the superiority of her own scrambled eggs and the manner in which she arranges the triangles of toast (side by side like the sails of a tiny boat), for she always compares, at length, the correctness of her method with the slipshod scrambled eggs she has encountered elsewhere.
“Liddy doesn’t put enough milk in hers and I always tell her that makes them rubbery. If you want nice, soft scrambled eggs you have to add a tablespoon of milk for every egg, just a tablespoon, no more, no less. And use an egg beater, not a fork the way most people do. Most people just don’t want to bother getting out an egg beater, they’re too lazy to wash something extra. They think, who’ll notice anyway, what’s the difference, but an egg beater makes all the difference, all the difference in the world. Otherwise the yolk and white don’t mix the way they should. Liddy always leaves big hunks of white in her scrambled eggs. And she doesn’t cut the crusts off her toast. She thinks it’s hoity-toity and a waste of bread, but I always save the crusts and dry them in the oven to make bread crumbs out of them afterwards so there’s no waste, not a bit; you know I never waste good food; you’ll have to admit I never waste anything. Most people won’t bother, they won’t go to the trouble; they’re too lazy; they don’t know any better. And I always add the salt before cooking, that makes them hold their shape, not get hard like Liddy’s but just, you know, firm. But not pepper, never pepper, never add pepper when you’re cooking, let people add their own pepper at the table if that’s what they want. Me, I never liked spicy food like what the Italians and French like. And Greeks. Garlic and onions and grease, and I don’t know what, just reeking of it on the subway these days, reeking of it; I don’t dare turn my head sideways when I go downtown. Toronto isn’t the same; not the way it used to be, not the way it was way back.”
We eat lunch in the kitchen. Martin is quiet. So am I. Our forks clicking on the plates chill me into a further silence.
“Hmm, delicious,” Martin says politely.
“Yes.” I agree, forcing my voice into short plumes of enthusiasm, “Really good. So tender.”
Afterwards she washes the dishes and I dry. Always take a clean tea towel for each meal. It may be a little bit extra in the wash but when you think of the filthy tea towels some people use ....
I yearn desperately to talk to her; to say that, despite my foreboding, I have been rather taken with Louis Berceau, that I am immeasurably pleased that he and she have found each other and she will no longer have to endure the loneliness of the ticking clock, the sound of the furnace switching on and off, the daily paper thudding against the door, the calendar weeks wasting, the reminders of time slipping by which must be unbearable for those who are alone. But the words dry in my throat; if only I knew how to begin, if only I could speak to her without shyness, without fear of hurting her. Instead I poke with my tea towel into the spokes of the egg beater.
“Don’t bother drying that,” she turns to me, taking it out of my hands. “Here,” she says, “I always put it in the oven for a little, the pilot light dries it out; the gears are so old, I’ve had it since just after the war, it was hard to get egg beaters then. Cousin Hugo got it for me from the store. I don’t want the gears to rust, they would if I didn’t get it good and dry. I’ve had it so long and it will have to last me until—”
Until what? Until death? Until the end? That is what she means; the words she couldn’t say but which she must have recognized or why did she stop so suddenly? I have never thought of the way in which my mother thinks of her own death. No doubt, though, she has a plan; she will do it more neatly, more thoroughly than her sister Liddy, better than the neighbours, more gen teely than Cousin Hugo, more timely than our father; no one will laugh at her, no one will look down on her.
Still, it may be that she is a little uncertain: the way she plunges into vigorous silence beside the scoured sink hints at uneasiness, an acknowledgement at least of life’s thinned reversal, of the finite nature of husbands and egg beaters and even of one’s self.
After lunch Martin carries a kitchen chair out into the backyard (my mother has never owned. a piece of lawn furniture) and there in the sunshine he reads a book of critical essays, a recent paperback edition which he opens with a sigh. He is, I suspect, a somewhat reluctant academic, preferring perhaps to while away his time with the small change of newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless he enjoys the warmth and the serious Sis ley sky, finely marbled, gilt-veined, surprisingly large even when viewed from the postage stamp of our tiny, fenced yard.
One-thirty. My mother goes about the house closing the curtains, first the living room and then the three bedrooms. (Much of her life has gone into a struggle against the fading of furniture and curtains and rugs.) Then she goes into the spare bedroom where she slept last night and closes the door. She is going to lie down, she is going to have her rest. She has always, since Judith and I were babies, had a “rest” after lunch. Never a nap, never a sleep, never, oh never, a doze, but a rest. She will remove her laced shoes and her dress, she will button a loosely knit grey and blue cardigan over her slip and she will turn back the bedspread into a neat fan; then she will get into bed, and there she will remain for between an hour and an hour and a half. Sometimes she falls asleep, sometimes she just “rests.” “A rest is as good as a sleep,” she has said at least a hundred times. A thousand times?
Quietly I carry the Metropolitan Toronto and Vicinity telephone book from the hall into the kitchen and settle myself down at the table. I turn to the P‘s, running my finger down a column, looking for The Priory, Priory, the. For some reason my heart is beating wildly. But there is nothing listed. I look under the The’s where I find quite a few listings: The Boutique, The Factory, The Place, The Shop, The Wiggery. But not The Priory. I even look under the B’s for Brother Adam. There is no Brother Adam, (nor any other Brothers) then I try Adam, Brother. Nothing.
Perhaps the Priory is listed under Religious Houses or under Churches, but my mother has no Yellow Pages. I decide to phone Information.
It is necessary to whisper into the phone because my mother is resting a few yards away behind a closed door; she may even be sleeping. The operator is enraged by my muffled voice and my lack of specificity—“Did you say it was a church?”
“No.”
“Well, is it or isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure. I think it is but I’m not—”
“Is Adam the first name or last name?”
“His first. I think.”
“I have to have a last name.”
“I’ve got the address. It’s on Beachview.”
“Sorry. I need the last name.”
“But I don’t have it.”
Actually, I reflect hanging up, it was absurd of me to think that a contemplative man like Brother Adam would have a telephone. Hadn’t he implied in his many letters his ascetic obsession, his distrust of cramped, urban industrial society? A man like Brother Adam would never put himself in bondage to Bell Telephone; a man like Brother Adam would no sooner have a telephone than he would own a car. (He does, however, have a typewriter—all his letters were typewritten—but it is undoubtedly a manual model.)
I carry the phone book back to its place. I am not going to be able to phone Brother Adam after all. And it’s too late now to drop him a note. I should have written from Vancouver as I had planned. What’s the matter with me that I can’t even make the simplest of social arrangements? I’ll have to go to The Priory, there’s no other solution. I
f I want to see him at all I will have to turn up at his door unannounced.
But I can’t go today; my mother wouldn’t like it if I disappeared on an unexplained errand, and besides Eugene is going to phone me from downtown at three o‘clock. And tomorrow? Wednesday? Tomorrow is my day to have lunch with Louis Berceau. Friday?—the wedding is on Friday, and Friday night we’re flying back to Vancouver.
Thursday—if I go at all I’ll have to go on Thursday. Yes, I will definitely go to see Brother Adam on Thursday. He is in the city, he is within a few miles of me, looking out of his window perhaps, sitting in the sun on his fire escape perhaps, and who knows, maybe he is writing a letter, perhaps even a letter to me, a letter beginning Dear Charleen, the sky is benignly blue today, the sun falls like a blessing across this page ...
Martin is restless. He has brought his chair inside; the sky has clouded over with alarming suddenness, and a few drops of heavy rain have already fallen onto the pages of his book. He is brooding mysteriously by the living room window.
I can never quite believe in the otherness of people’s lives. That is, I cannot conceive of their functioning out of my sight. A psychologist friend once told me this attitude was symptomatic of a raging ego, but perhaps it is only a perceptual failure. My mother: every day she lives in this house; it is not all magically whisked away when I leave; the walls and furniture persist and so do the hours which she somehow fills. When Seth was five and started school I came home the first day after taking him and grieved, not out of nostalgia for his infancy or anxiety for his future, but for the newly revealed fact that he had entered into that otherness, that unseeable space which he must occupy forever and where not even my imagination could follow. It is the same with Martin who, year after unseen year, pursues objectives, lives through unaccountable weeks and months. Martin by the window, shut up in his thoughts, might be standing on the tip of the moon.