The mother of Louise possessed a calm brow of marble. The father had small blue eyes and hard cheeks. He was the author of a history of the Canadian Navy. It was, he told Meershank, the official history. Meershank was given a signed copy. And he was given, too, with very little noise or trouble, the hand of Louise in marriage. He had been stunned. Effortlessly, it seemed, he’d won from them their beloved only daughter, a girl of soft hips and bland hair done roundly in a pageboy.
“What exactly do you do?” they only once asked. He worked as a correspondent for a newspaper, he explained. (He did not use the word Journalist.) And he hoped one day to write a book. (“Ah! A book! Splendid!”)
The wedding was in the month of June and was held in the garden. Meershank’s relatives did not trouble to travel all the way up from Chicago. The wedding breakfast was served out-of-doors, and the health of the young couple—Meershank at twenty-seven was already starting to bald—was toasted with a non-alcoholic fruit punch. The family was abstemious; the tradition went back several generations; alcohol, tobacco, caffeine—there wasn’t a trace of these poisons in the bloodstream of Meershank’s virgin bride. He looked at her smooth, pale arms—and eventually, when legally married, at her smooth pale breasts—and felt he’d been singularly, and comically, blessed.
There is a character, Virgie Allgood, in Meershank’s book, Sailing to Saskatchewan, who might be said to resemble Louise. In the book, Virgie is an eater of whole grains and leafy vegetables. Martyrlike, she eschews French fries, doughnuts and liver dumplings, yet her body is host to disease after disease. Fortified milk fails. Pure air fails. And just when the life is about to go out of her, the final chapter, a new doctor rides into town on a motorbike and saves her by prescribing a diet of martinis and cheesecakes.
There is something of Louise, too, in the mother in Meershank’s tour-de-force, Continuous Purring. She is a woman who cannot understand the simplest joke. Riddles on cereal boxes have to be laboriously explained. Puns strike her as being untidy scraps to be swept up in a dustpan. She thinks a double entendre is a potent new drink. She is congenitally immune to metaphor (the root of all comedy, Meershank believes) and on the day her husband is appointed to the Peevish Chair of Midbrow Humor, she sends for the upholsterer.
When Encounter did its full length profile on Meershank in 1981, it erred by stating that Louise Lovell Meershank had never read her husband’s books. The truth is she not only had read them, but before the birth of the word processor she typed them, collated the pages, corrected their virulent misspelling, redistributed semicolons and commas with the aplomb of a goddess, and tactfully weeded out at least half of Meershank’s compulsive exclamation points. She corresponded with publishers, arranged for foreign rights, dealt with book clubs and with autograph seekers, and she always—less and less frequently of course—trimmed her husband’s fluffy wreath of hair with a pair of silver-handled scissors.
She read Meershank’s manuscripts with a delicious (to Meershank) frown on her wide pale brow—more and more she’d grown to resemble her mother. She turned over the pages with a delicate hand as though they possessed the same scholarly sheen as her father’s Official History of the Canadian Navy. She read them not once, but several times, catching a kind of overflow of observance which leaked like oil and vinegar from the edges of Meershank’s copious, verbal, many-leafed salads.
Her responses never marched in time with his. She was slower, and could wave aside sentimentality, saying, “Why not?—it’s part of the human personality.” Occasionally she said the unexpected thing, as when she described her husband’s novella, Fiend at the Water Fountain, as being, “cool and straight up and down as a tulip.”
What she actually told the journalist from Encounter was that she never laughed when reading her husband’s books. For this Meershank has always respected her, valued her, adored her. She was his Canadian rose, his furry imbiber of scented tea, his smiling plum, his bread and jam, his little squirrel, his girlie-girl, his Dear Heart who promised in the garden by the river beside the limestone house in 1949 to stay at his side for ever and ever. What a joke she has played on him in the end.
She has, Meershank said to Maybelle, taken a turn for the worse. He phoned the doctor, who said he would come at once. Then he handed Maybelle a piece of paper on which two telephone numbers were written. “Please,” he said. “Phone the children.”
Maybelle was unprepared for this. And she had never met the children. “What should I tell them?” she asked.
“Tell them,” Meershank said, and paused. “Tell them it could be sooner than we thought.”
One of the daughters, Sonya, lived in London, Ontario where she was the new director of the program for women’s studies. (For those who trouble to look, her mirror image can be found in Ira Chauvin, post-doc researcher in male studies, in Meershank’s academic farce, Ten Minutes to Tenure.) Sonya did not say to Maybelle, “Who is this calling?” or “How long does she have?” She said, “I’ll be there in three hours flat.”
The other daughter, Angelica, ran a health-food restaurant and delicatessen with her husband, Rusty, in Montreal. They were just closing up for the night when Maybelle phoned. “I can get a plane at midnight,” Angelica said in a high, sweet, shaky voice. “Tell her to wait for me.”
After that Maybelle sat on a kitchen chair in the dark. She could have switched on the light, but she preferred to sit as she was and puzzle over what level of probability had landed her on the twenty-fourth of May as a visitor—she was not such a fool as to mistake a single embrace for anything other than a mutation of grief.
The tiles of the kitchen wall, after a moment, took on a greenish glow, and she began to float out of her body, a trick she had perfected during her long years of commuting between Cookston Corners and downtown Toronto. First, she became Sonya flying down an eastbound highway, her hands suddenly younger and supple-jointed on the slippery wheel. She took the long cloverleafs effortlessly, the tires of her tough little car zinging over ramps and bridges, and the sleepy nighttime radio voices holding her steady in the middle lane.
Then, blinking once and shutting out the piny air, she was transformed into Angelica, candid, fearful, sitting tense in an aisle seat at the rear of a plane—she had her mother’s smooth cheeks, her father’s square chin and her own slow sliding tears. On her lap she clutched a straw bag, and every five minutes she pushed back the sleeve of her blouse and checked her wristwatch, trying to freeze its hands with her will.
Next she was the doctor—springing onto the veranda, tapping at the screen door and taking the stairs two at a time. She drifted then into the amorphous body of Louise where it was hot and damp and difficult to breath, but where shadows reached out and curved around her head. Her hands lay surprisingly calm on the sheet—until one of them was lifted and held to Meershank’s beating heart.
She felt his bewilderment and heard with his ears a long popping chain of firecrackers going off. A window in the bedroom had been opened—at last—and the scent of the mock orange blossoms reached him with a rushing blow. Everything was converging. All the warm fluids of life came sliding behind Maybelle’s eyes, and she had to hold on to the sides of the kitchen chair to keep herself from disappearing.
In each of Meershank’s fictions there is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” by those writers—Meershank is not one—who like to gad about the country giving “readings.”
In Meershank’s recently published book, Malaprop in Disneyfield, the set piece has four characters sitting at dusk on a veranda discussing the final words of the recently deceased family matriarch. The sky they gaze into is a rainy mauve, and the mood is one of tenderness—but there is also a tone of urgency. Three of the four had been present whe
n the last words were uttered, and some irrational prompting makes them want to share with the fourth what they heard—or what they thought they heard. Because each heard something different, and there is a descending order of coherence.
“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.
“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.
The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirtsleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”
All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.
The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.
Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”
“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.
Pardon
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON Milly stopped at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law whom she had apparently insulted.
“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”
Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or amind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.
“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hot-cakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”
“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”
Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.
Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.
At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.
Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”
“And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”
“These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”
“Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”
“That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”
“Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger and her eyes filled with fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”
“Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”
“You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.
Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.
“Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”
Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.
“I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”
Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: it’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.
But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel and his eyes twinkled.
“We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”
Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.
“It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.
The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”
The instant the words left his mouth the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black and soon rain was pelting down loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.
“I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”
Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snugly inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their newspapers back and forth. The headline on one paper said TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES TO REAGAN, and another said REAGAN APOLOGIZES TO SUMMIT. By the time the sun burst through, many of the passengers had exchanged names and phone numbers and announced to each other how cleansing a good storm can be, how it sweeps away unspoken hostilities and long-held grudges.
Milly, walking home from her bus stop, breathed in the shining air. Her feet were drenched and she was forced to step over several fallen tree branches, but she noted with pleasure the blue clarity of the sky. It was going to be a splendid evening. A single cloud, a fluffy width of cumulus, floated high in the air over her house. It was shaped like a pair of wings, thought Milly, who was in a fanciful mood. No, not like wings, but like two outstretched hands, wonderfully white and beseeching, which seemed to beckon to her and say: Sorry about all this fuss and bother.
Seeing the great cloudy hands made Milly yearn to absolve all those who had troubled her in her life. She forgave her father for naming her Milly instead of Jo Ann, and her mother for passing on to her genes that made her oversen
sitive to small hurts and slights. She forgave her brother for reading her diary, and her sister for her pretty legs, and her cat for running in front of a truck and winding up pressed flat as a transfer on the road. She forgave everyone who had ever forgotten her birthday and everyone who looked over her shoulder at parties for someone more attractive to talk to. She forgave her boss for being waspish and her lover for lack of empathy and her husband for making uncalled for remarks about stale breakfast cereal and burned toast.
All this dispensing of absolution emptied Milly out and made her light as air. She had a sensation of floating, of weightlessness, and it seemed to her that bells were chiming inside her head.
But it was only the telephone ringing—without a doubt her father-in-law phoning to ask forgiveness. She hurried inside so she could sing into his ear, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Words
WHEN THE WORLD first started heating up, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation.
Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate. She wore a terrible green dress the first time he saw her, and rather clumsy shoes, but he could see that her neck was slender, her waist narrow and her legs long and brown. For so young a woman, she was astonishingly articulate; in fact, it was her voice more than anything else that he fell in love with—its hills and valleys and its pliant, easy-sided wit. It was a voice that could be distinguished in any gathering, being both sweet and husky and having an edging of contralto merriment that seemed to Ian as rare and fine as a border of gold leaf.