Flustered, I said, “It’s a beautiful day, it’s been the most beautiful drive.” So it was. So it had been. The trees not turned yet, just rusting at the edges and the stubble fields like gold. So why does this benevolence of landscape fade, in my father’s presence and in his territory (and don’t forget it’s in Mrs. Barrie’s presence and in her territory)? Why does my mentioning it-or the fact that I mentioned it in a heartfelt not perfunctory way-seem almost in a class with my embracing Mrs. B.? One thing seems to be a piece of insolence and the other pretentious gush.
When the debate was over my father got up and turned off the television. He won’t watch a commercial unless Mrs. B. is there and speaks up in favor, saying she wants to see the cute kid with his front teeth out or the chicken chasing the thingamajig (she won’t try to say “ostrich,” or she can’t remember). Then whatever she enjoys is permitted, even dancing cornflakes, and he may say, “Well, in its own way it’s clever.” This I think is a kind of warning to me.
What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon? “Aw, they’re just a couple of Americans.” I tried to open the conversation up a bit. “How do you mean?”
When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don’t need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn’t need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a pair of big tobacco-stained teeth.
“Just a couple of Americans,” he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.
So we sit there not talking but not in silence because as you may recall he is a noisy breather. His breath gets dragged down stony alleys and through creaky gates. Then takes off into a bit of tweeting and gurgling as if there was some inhuman apparatus shut up in his chest. Plastic pipes and colored bubbles. You’re not supposed to take any notice, and I’ll soon be used to it. But it takes up a lot of space in a room. As he would anyway with his high hard stomach and long legs and his expression. What is that expression? It’s as if he’s got a list of offenses both remembered and anticipated and he’s letting it be known how his patience can be tried by what you know you do wrong but also by what you don’t even suspect. I think a lot of fathers and grandfathers strive for that look-even some who unlike him don’t have any authority outside of their own houses-but he’s the one who’s got it exactly permanently right.
R. Lots for me to do here and no time to-as they say-mope. The waiting-room walls are scuffed all round where generations of patients have leaned their chairs back against them. The Reader’s Digests, are in rags on the table. The patients’ files are in cardboard boxes under the examining table, and the wastebaskets-they’re wicker-are mangled all around the top as if eaten by rats. And in the house it’s no better. Cracks like brown hairs in the downstairs washbasin and a disconcerting spot of rust in the toilet. Well you must have noticed. It’s silly but the most disturbing thing I think is all the coupons and advertising flyers. They’re in drawers and stuck under saucers or lying around loose and the sales or discounts they’re advertising are weeks or months or years past.
It isn’t that they’ve abdicated or aren’t trying. But everything is complicated. They send out the laundry, which is sensible, rather than having Mrs. B. still do it, but then my father can’t remember which day it’s due back and there’s this unholy fuss about will there be enough smocks etc. And Mrs. B. actually believes the laundry is cheating her and taking the time to rip off the name tapes and sew them onto inferior articles. So she argues with the deliveryman and says he comes here last on purpose and he probably does.
Then the eaves need to be cleaned and Mrs. B.’s nephew is supposed to come and clean them, but he has put his back out so his son is coming. But his son has had to take over so many jobs that he’s behind etc., etc.
My father calls this nephew’s son by the nephew’s name. He does this with everybody. He refers to stores and businesses in town by the name of the previous owner or even the owner before that. This is more than a simple lapse of memory; it’s something like arrogance. Putting himself beyond the need to keep such things straight. The need to notice changes. Or individuals.
I asked what color of paint he’d like on the waiting-room walls. Light green, I said, or light yellow? He said, Who’s going to paint them?
“I am.”
“I never knew you were a painter.”
“I’ve painted places I’ve lived in.”
“Maybe so. But I haven’t seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you’re painting?”
“I’ll do it on a Sunday.”
“Some of them wouldn’t care for that when they heard about it.”
“Are you kidding? In this day and age?”
“It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.”
Then I said I could do it at night, but he said the smell the next day would upset too many stomachs. All I was allowed to do in the end was throw out the Reader’s Digests and put out some copies of Maclean’s and Chatelaine and Time and Saturday Night. And then he mentioned there’d been complaints. People missed looking up the jokes they remembered in the Reader’s Digests. And some of them didn’t like modern writers. Like Pierre Berton.
“Too bad,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that my voice was shaking.
Then I tackled the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the files of patients who were long dead and if I could clear those files out I could fill it up with the files from the cardboard boxes, and move the whole thing back to the office where it belonged.
Mrs. B. saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me.
He said, “Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn’t.”
R. The days you were here Mrs. B. was off for Christmas with her family. (She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema it seems for half his life, and no children, but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections.) I don’t think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me yesterday, “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” She’d seen of course that I wasn’t wearing my ring. “I imagine in Toronto,” I said.
“I was up at my niece’s last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe and my niece said, ‘I wonder where them two are off to?’ ” This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me except when I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on, but there was a deep freeze on, if you remember, and we were just walking to get away from the house. No. We were getting outside so we could continue our fight, which could only be bottled up for so long.
Mrs. B. started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married, or to work in war plants. When I was nine or ten and had been to some of my school friends’ houses, I said to my father, “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them.”
My father said, “You call Mrs. Barrie Mrs. Barrie. And if you don’t like to eat with her you can go and eat in the woodshed.”
Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. Often she wouldn’t. But when she did, it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school.
(Me) Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barrie.
(Mrs. B.) Everyone in my family is got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That’s on my mother’s side. It stays black in their coffin. When my grandpa died they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other us says, “Let’s take a look see how he made it through the winter.” So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was looking fine with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. Black.