Mildred was suddenly taken out of school and adopted. Their mother’s sister, one of the aunts they had seldom seen, had lost a daughter by drowning. She said she would treat Mildred as she did her own small son, and Mildred, who wished to leave the convent school, but did not know if she cared to go and live in a place called Chicoutimi, did not decide. She made them decide, and made them take her away. When the girls were fifteen and nineteen, and Mildred was called Desaulniers and not Collier, the sisters were made to meet. Cathie had left school and was studying nursing, but she came back to the convent when she had time off, not because she did not have anywhere else to go, but because she did not want to go to any other place. The nuns had said of Cathie, laughing, “She doesn’t want to leave — we shall have to push her out.” When Cathie’s sister, Mildred Desaulniers, came to call on her, the girls did not know what to say. Mildred wore a round straw hat with a clump of plastic cherries hanging over the brim; her adoptive brother, in long trousers and bow tie, did not get out of the car. He was seven, and had slick wet-looking hair, as if he had been swimming. “Kiss your sister,” said Mildred’s mother, to Cathie, admonishingly. Cathie did as she was told, and Mildred immediately got back in the car with her brother and snatched a comic book out of his hands. “Look, Mildred,” said her father, and let the car slow down on a particular street. The parents craned at a garage, and at dirty-legged children with torn sneakers on their feet. Mildred glanced up and then back at her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen it before, or would ever again.
The Prodigal Parent
We sat on the screened porch of Rhoda’s new house, which was close to the beach on the ocean side of Vancouver Island. I had come here in a straight line, from the East, and now that I could not go any farther without running my car into the sea, any consideration of wreckage and loss, or elegance of behavior, or debts owed (not of money, of my person) came to a halt. A conqueror in a worn blazer and a regimental tie, I sat facing my daughter, listening to her voice — now describing, now complaining — as if I had all the time in the world. Her glance drifted round the porch, which still contained packing cases. She could not do, or take in, a great deal at once. I have light eyes, like Rhoda’s, but mine have been used for summing up.
Rhoda had bought this house and the cabins round it and a strip of maimed landscape with her divorce settlement. She hoped to make something out of the cabins, renting them weekends to respectable people who wanted a quiet place to drink. “Dune Vista” said a sign, waiting for someone to nail it to a tree. I wondered how I would fit in here — what she expected me to do. She still hadn’t said. After the first formal martinis she had made to mark my arrival, she began drinking rye, which she preferred. It was sweeter, less biting than the whiskey I remembered in my youth, and I wondered if my palate or its composition had changed. I started to say so, and my daughter said, “Oh, God, your accent again! You know what I thought you said now? ‘Oxbow was a Cheswick charmer.’ ”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“Try not sounding so British,” she said.
“I don’t, you know.”
“Well, you don’t sound Canadian.”
The day ended suddenly, as if there had been a partial eclipse. In the new light I could see my daughter’s face and hands.
“I guess I’m different from all my female relatives,” she said. She had been comparing herself with her mother, and with half sisters she hardly knew. “I don’t despise men, like Joanne does. There’s always somebody. There’s one now, in fact. I’ll tell you about him. I’ll tell you the whole thing, and you say what you think. It’s a real mess. He’s Irish, he’s married, and he’s got no money. Four children. He doesn’t sleep with his wife.”
“Surely there’s an age limit for this?” I said. “By my count, you must be twenty-eight or — nine now.”
“Don’t I know it.” She looked into the dark trees, darkened still more by the screens, and said without rancor, “It’s not my fault. I wouldn’t keep on falling for lushes and phonies if you hadn’t been that way.”
I put my glass down on the packing case she had pushed before me, and said, “I am not, I never was, and I never could be an alcoholic.”
Rhoda seemed genuinely shocked. “I never said that. I never heard you had to be put in a hospital or anything, like my stepdaddy. But you used to stand me on a table when you had parties, Mother told me, and I used to dance to ‘Piccolo Pete.’ What happened to that record, I wonder? One of your wives most likely got it in lieu of alimony. But may God strike us both dead here and now if I ever said you were alcoholic.” It must have been to her a harsh, clinical word, associated with straitjackets. “I’d like you to meet him,” she said. “But I never know when he’ll turn up. He’s Harry Pay. The writer,” she said, rather primly. “Somebody said he was a new-type Renaissance Man — I mean, he doesn’t just sit around, he’s a judo expert. He could throw you down in a second.”
“Is he Japanese?”
“God, no. What makes you say that? I already told you what he is. He’s white. Quite white, entirely white I mean.”
“Well — I could hardly have guessed.”
“You shouldn’t have to guess,” she said. “The name should be enough. He’s famous. Round here, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been away so many years. Would you write the name down for me? So I can see how it’s spelled?”
“I’ll do better than that.” It touched me to see the large girl she was suddenly moving so lightly. I heard her slamming doors in the living room behind me. She had been clumsy as a child, in every gesture like a wild creature caught. She came back to me with a dun folder out of which spilled loose pages, yellow and smudged. She thrust it at me and, as I groped for my spectacles, turned on an overhead light. “You read this,” she said, “and I’ll go make us some sandwiches, while I still can. Otherwise we’ll break into another bottle and never eat anything. This is something he never shows anyone.”
“It is my own life exactly,” I said when she returned with the sandwiches, which she set awkwardly down. “At least, so far as school in England is concerned. Cold beds, cold food, cold lavatories. Odd that anyone still finds it interesting. There must be twenty written like it every year. The revolting school, the homosexual master, then a girl — saved!”
“Homo what?” said Rhoda, clawing the pages. “It’s possible. He has a dirty mind, actually.”
“Really? Has he ever asked you to do anything unpleasant, such as type his manuscripts?”
“Certainly not. He’s got a perfectly good wife for that.”
When I laughed, she looked indignant. She had given a serious answer to what she thought was a serious question. Our conversations were always like this — collisions.
“Well?” she said.
“Get rid of him.”
She looked at me and sank down on the arm of my chair. I felt her breath on my face, light as a child’s. She said, “I was waiting for something. I was waiting all day for you to say something personal, but I didn’t think it would be that. Get rid of him? He’s all I’ve got.”