Читать книгу Bewilderment - Don Gutteridge - Страница 4

“Car nival?” Blossom said as if he had just taken the Lord’s name in vain with the whole congregation agog. She gave the nearest pork chop an extra slap with the spatula, sending beads of grease flying onto her apron and over her already freckled forearms.

“When I was a kid, we always had a carnival on the twenty-fourth,” Gabe said, “an’ then the fireworks afterwards.”

“Well, you ain’t been a kid for some time now,” Blossom said, turning just far enough away from him to let him know there were more immediate demands on her necessarily limited attention. The aroma of pork chops and home fries with onions was making its own demands on Gabe’s concentration. For a moment he was content to breathe it in, and savour the brown, muscled forearms of his wife, supple as a matched pair of brook trout and twice as strong (the kind he and Teddy pulled out of the icy streams of Grey County every spring except the last one). Strange, when you thought about it, that her arms made the rest of her body all that much whiter under the moon-stroked sheets, and when they gripped or tensed as they needed to or not, how soft was their insistence, how reticent their purchase.

“We ain’t had a carnival of any sort here since the Depression started,” Gabe said.

Blossom gave him the look usually reserved for Rosie whenever she concluded she was far too consumptive to make it to the end of the block let alone the schoolyard three streets away. “Maybe that’s got somethin’ to do with the Depression,” she said more to the nicely crisping potatoes than anything else in the vicinity.

“People need a bit of cheerin’ up,” Gabe said.

The front door squealed open and slammed. Rosie, as was only too common of late, went straight up to her room.

“That girl’s gonna need a talkin’ to.”

“I bet City folk’d come down here in droves,” Gabe said. “Carnivals’ve been banned there since twenty-nine.”

“She’s gettin’ about two sizes too big for her britches.”

Suddenly Gabe wanted to put an end to the foolhardiness of talk. He wanted to slink up behind his wife, wrap both arms around her till her compliant breasts that had no shape of their own, acquiesced to the urgent bevelling of his coal-man’s grip, and then squeeze till she harrumphed, dug an elbow into the rib God ripped out to render Eve, and waggled her rump against him in a movement that was never entirely dismissive.

The talking carried right on.

“We could make some money for the town,” he said, “an’ give the kids an’ grownups somethin’ to do together.”

“Gert Murphy may be her cousin, but that don’t make her fit company for your daughter,” Blossom said. She turned the gas down under the chops and peered beneath the lid of a steaming pot that gasped once before it was throttled.

Gabe was about to say ‘They’re only kids’ but realized just in time that he had said the very same thing yesterday or the day before when Rosie had come in a half-hour late – her face beaming with the kind of bliss that didn’t come from homework done over Gert Murphy’s dining-room table.

Blossom began to set the table while Gabe watched. She gave no hint that she was being observed and appreciated, but still there was in every gesture the sense of a performance, infinitely rehearsed and lovingly repeated (this was Gabe’s particular opinion). How could such a capacious body – freighted with its fulcrum of bone and generous pendula of flesh – move so nimbly, dealing plate and cup and utensil with the exactness and aplomb of a slim-fingered, gaunt-jawed card shark? Still, it was talk that always got the better of him.

“We could donate the proceeds to the church poor boxes,” he persisted.

Blossom continued dealing, but managed to say, “We got enough goin’ on on the twenty-fourth as it is, an’ Breezy Harkness’ll be too busy turnin’ sod for the bridge an’ gettin’ his picture took with the poohbahs to think about the poor boxes or anythin’ else.”

Ah, yes, the bridge. How much of their fast-diminishing hope the good citizens of the County were transferring without condition to that spider web of steel and rivet they had all seen time and again in artist’s renditions, in intricately wrought scale models, and in the cartoon bubble of an MLA’s overworked imagination.

“You gonna wash up?” Blossom said, at last looking directly at him and speaking in the tone she used more to camouflage than parry, holding back those things he knew ought to be said and said smartly, for which forbearance he was daily grateful, and never more so than at this moment. “Or are you plannin’ to dribble soot all over your supper!”

Gabe got up from his captain’s chair, made an ineffectual swipe at the smudge on the seat, and headed for the cellar steps. He heard Blossom call up to Rosie:

“Quit gawkin’ at yourself in the mirror, young lady, an’ get down here for your supper!”

Gabe went over to the washstand he had installed years ago quite close to his dad’s workbench. He ran the basin full of hot water, stripped off his shirt and underwear vest, and began to scrub. Within seconds the basin blackened, then curdled. Gabe let the dirty water run away and then filled the basin again. This time he used the brush, much like the one Blossom wielded over the kitchen linoleum – scouring the skin of his hands, forearms, shoulders and chest with a vigour that might suggest he expected eventually to succeed in cleansing himself of the day’s contaminants. But where the coal dust had insinuated glove and sleeve and turned-up collar – and steeped itself in the hourly sweat of his body’s effort – the skin was indelibly shadowed, making the stark white of his upper arms and chest appear leprous as the underbelly of a mullet. Finally, into a fresh basin of hot water and lather he plunged his face, then his entire head. He thrashed about as if he were drowning, drew back, and shook himself like a dog. Then he dried himself on the towel laid out for him and slipped on the clean undershirt that smelled intoxicatingly of bleach and blueing. The lower half of his workaday body he would tend to later.

“Supper’s on the table!”

Gabe ran a comb through the tight, black curls of his hair without the aid of the mirror he had installed at Blossom’s request but years ago took down and hid behind the furnace. Despite his hunger and the talk still inside him that must come out – or because of them – he moved up the steps very slowly. And in that deliberate slowness an image formed and flowered: Blossom in her Saturday-night bath, before the kids were old enough to roam about the house after dark. The hot-water tank was not large (still wasn’t) and Blossom did so like to have suds and soak enough to match her commodiousness and Gabe had earned money enough in those days before the Depression and the halving of his pay cheque that he could afford to boil kettle after kettle of steaming water on the gas-range and whisk it into the bathroom and pour it ever-so-gingerly into the voluptuous froth while Blossom sighed or yipped – her head thrown back, her enflamed hair cringed into ropes that later would fletch in dry surprise, her eyes lidded with comfort yet alert and sentient, her breasts grateful to be afloat, the erotic acre of her flesh purified with its own perfumes, while Gabe scuttled and topped up and gentled her here and there with his scuffed, coal-digger hands.

At the table, Rosie was speaking: “Why can’t Daddy put on a shirt for supper like other fathers do?”

“Like Gert Murphy’s father, you mean?” Blossom said sharply.

“And why can’t he call you Flo like everybody else does?”

“You mind your mouth,” Blossom said, more sharply still.

“An’ how’s my Rosie?” Gabe said, coming to his place.

“I ain’t Rosie any more.”

Blossom set his supper down before him, the plate teeming with the food she had cooked and arranged just the way he liked it. “It seems her name is now Rose,” she said, sliding the salt and pepper shakers within range.

“Rosie’s a child’s name,” Rosie said, pouting prettily.

“So it is,” Gabe said, and the smile she beamed his way more than compensated for the glower he got from Blossom (whom he last called Florence in the Methodist church where he had mimicked the stilted vow-statements of the Reverend Blackadder who certainly would not have sanctioned the use of sentimental epithets within the hallowed precinct, however apt they might prove to be).

Halfway through his first chop Gabe said, “Where’s Rennie?”

Blossom put down her fork and smiled. “At the City library next to the Collegiate. He’s workin’ on an essay for Mr. McTaggart.”

“What else!” Rosie snorted.

“Eat!” Blossom said, “or it’s straight up to your homework.”

Rosie was right, though. It was forever Mis ter McTaggart this and Mis ter McTaggart that throughout the meal, and afterwards even, should they be foolish enough to linger. Between forkfuls they were treated to Mr. McTaggart’s views on the inevitability of fresh wars (“The Reds and Fascists are gonna go at it in Spain, and Mr. McTaggart says Mr. King and the rest of us are gonna have to abandon our holier-than-thou posture and take a stand”) and the unavoidability of old ones being rekindled (“Hitler’s got control of the Reichstag and there’s no stopping him now”). Worse still (Gabe was not even sure what a Reichstag was), Rennie’s axioms, uttered at length and full throttle, cut across the easy flow of Blossom’s customary supper-talk: the casual unburdening of her day’s petty irritations and disappointments. How he loved her eloquent winks and consoling nods and the occasional, irreverent chuckle at the Missus Durham’s next-door foibles. And worse still was the look of pure and motherly pride on Blossom’s face as she drank in her firstborn’s newly-minted words, most of which she had never before heard and was not likely to repeat in any of the public forums offered by the village.

Without Rennie they settled into supper as of old. Or seemed to.

“Missus Durham tells me there’s been a real-estate salesman, some carpetbagger from London, she says, slinkin’ about town an’ askin’ decent folk if they’d be interested in sellin’ their property.”

Gabe raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, I know she’s about as reliable as a used vacuum cleaner, but I did see some fellow all duded up in a suit waltz up to Meg Stewart’s door, an’ he wasn’t luggin’ a satchelful of brushes.”

“Gert’s mom seen him too,” Rose added in her grownup voice. “She said he looked like the principal on the first day of school.”

“Gertie an’ her mother’ve got big ears an’ bigger mouths,” Blossom said. “But this is just the sort of nonsense that’s bound to come when the bigwigs get ideas about buildin’ bridges in places they got no business bein’ in. Mark my words, the only people who’re gonna get rich outta these shenanigans’ll be the politicians an’ the Bridge Company.”

Gabe did mark her words, and normally he would have relished them, not so much for what they said as for how they were said – the esprit of the speaker they carried with them and the subtle stratagems that underlay them. Into the brief silence, during which he was expected to nod approval or wry assent, Gabe instead spoke:

“Rosie, love, what would you think of havin’ a carnival come here for the twenty-fourth?”

Two peas and a home fry dropped back onto Blossom’s plate.

After an initial flinch at the mispronunciation of her name, Rosie took even deeper umbrage and said, “Carnivals are for children.”

“An’ young ladies in grade eight don’t speak with their mouths full,” Blossom said.

“It wouldn’t only be merry-go-rounds an’ pony-rides,” Gabe said. “There’d be a Ferris wheel an’ bingo games an’–” He stopped. Try as he might, he could not force another word into the pool of astonishment around him.

“I’m goin’ over to Gert’s to study, ah, geography. Okay?” Rosie said to her mother, who got up with a meaning-laden sigh and moved over to the sideboard to fetch the raisin pie. But the look that accompanied the sigh was wordlessly clear: speak to her, you’re the father .

Gabe cleared his throat, but few words of any point presented themselves for his immediate use and none that were unhurtful enough. Blossom had always expected both salient words and practical actions from the children’s sire and principal parent (as the Bible and the Reverend Blackadder ruefully reminded him). But he was even more reluctant to execute the latter duty. Only once had he struck Rosie, in a rage of pent-up frustration not at the three-year-old he loved more than his own life but at Blossom who one moment ranted at the antics of the child she herself had suborned with indiscreet affection and the next moment shamelessly relented till the maddening cycle reached the point where she had to blame someone other than herself. And Gabe, just home from work, pulled Rosie out of the havoc she had just been encouraged to create in the pantry, tipped her over his knee and, not waiting even to flip up the yellow petal of her sunsuit, spanked her hard two or three times before Blossom dragged him away and took the sobbing child into her arms. So angry with him was Blossom that she put the yellow sunsuit on Rosie and made her wear it all day Sunday in full view of her brutish parent. And there on the lower back portion of the skirt was the scalloped imprint of a gross, male hand – as cindrous as Beelzebub’s eye. Two or three days later Rosie hopped onto his knee for her nightly story, smiling up at him, clutching his cradling arm whenever the billy goats got overly gruff, as if nothing untoward or unpardonable had happened. Next day he took the sunsuit to work and tossed it into the furnace.

Blossom had finished cutting the pie and was about to serve it when Gabe said, “Rosie, your mother tells me you come home from Gertie’s half-an-hour late the other night.” Rosie started in on her pie. “An’ that ain’t the only time you’ve not –”

Apparently Rosie was waiting until she had satisfactorily swallowed a mouthful of her mother’s raisin delight, for the moment her tongue and fork-hand were free, she leapt straight up, knocked her chair backwards, and stomped out of the room. But not before letting go a parting shot: “You treat me like a child, a baby , the whole bunch of you!”

Gabe counted her steps up the front stairs, his pie unacknowledged. A bedroom door slammed and shivered like a slap in the face. Books and more precious items were heard to strike other random objects in anger. Gabe stared down at his plate, unable for the moment to accept the justified rebuke of Blossom’s well-see-what-you’ve-done-now look. He was startled to hear her say, softly: “It’s just a phase. She’ll get over it.”

Then he saw that her face was full of the same confusion he himself felt.

“You gonna eat that pie or let the flies have it?”

Minutes later, as Gabe opened the cellar door, he stopped, and smiled: Blossom was already on her way up to Rosie’s room, pie-plate in hand.

Gabe had just finished washing up and was slipping into the moth-eaten cardigan Blossom had given him that first Christmas (a gift his mother had depreciated by whispering too loudly to Aunt Vi, ‘I didn’t know the poor thing could knit’), when he heard Rennie clunk into the front hall. He went over to the workbench, picked up a piece of fine bird’s-eye maple, inserted it into the wood-lathe (not the modern motorized one he’d used when they had had enough money to squander on hydro bills but his dad’s pedal-driven heirloom), and began to pump and guide the chisel against the wood rotating to the rhythms of his own stationary stride, which very quickly became the rhythm of the song that was soon singing inside him. In spite of everything, he believed Rosie would be pleased with the vanity-stool he was crafting for her thirteenth birthday in June. In the pauses required to brush away the minute scrapings and to picture the next stage in the patient evolution of fluting and scroll out of squared maple, he could not help but hear Blossom and Rennie directly above him.

Rennie was no doubt wolfing down the supper she had kept warm for him in the oven but not likely noticing it much, so enamoured was he of his own voice, carrying and confident (the individual words fortuitously blurred) as he declaimed the ungainsayable truths of Mr. McTaggart. And Blossom would be nodding helpfully between full stops – not in agreement or demurral or contradiction but rather in that way which all mothers appropriate to keep some manner of possession, of contiguity, with sons grown willfully estranged, monstrous even, out of the child that was. At one point Rennie’s fist rapped the table, dislocating a teacup. Gabe let the swell of the wood-grain draw his finger along its demure curvature, and for some reason an image swam unaided into his mind: Teddy’s fingertips playing out the six-pound line from the oiled reel till the ‘daredevil’ was just about to settle among the reeds of the bay, then flipping the line with the ease of a raised eyebrow and winding it in oh so delicately, so alluringly with the same hands that breathed music out of his aunt’s piano on Saturday nights, and seven-year-old Rennie beside him shouting, ‘Show me ! Show me !’

When Gabe finally emerged from the cellar, Rennie waved a gloved hand at him, tucked his protruding ears (a family trait) under his tuque, bounded down the hall and took the porch steps two at a time. Blossom was cleaning up after him. She looked at Gabe.

“He’s off to see that Molly again.”

“You ain’t fond of her, I take it?”

Blossom snorted, and watched her suds escape. “He was just tellin’ me he’s gonna go off to the university in London in a couple of years. I asked him who was gonna print the money for him.”

Which would account for the quivering teacup.

“He says Mr. McTaggart knows all about scholarships an’ bursaries an’ things like that.”

Gabe surmised he was expected to say something at this point. “Then I reckon he oughta be in his room studyin’.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing for sure. Him an’ Molly Muldoon won’t spend much time talkin’ about history.”

The laugh was out of Gabe’s mouth before he could intercept it. Molly – who, like himself, had barely surmounted grade seven – kept house for Aunt Feemie Waggoner while her body continued to round out alarmingly in so many places that a Christian gentleman didn’t know where to rest his eyes if he were fortunate enough to be, however fleetingly, in the same room with her.

“It ain’t funny,” Blossom said, and then began to laugh, all the more uproariously because the things that weren’t funny were so often the funniest.

‘Fibber McGee and Molly’ had just started when Blossom came into the sitting room, untied her apron one strand at a time, laid down her knitting and slumped into the big easy chair with a theatrical sigh. When the days were short, they often sat in the after-supper dark like this, with the orange blob of the radio-dial glowing like a friendly beacon on some oriental lighthouse. And often these were the best hours of the week, just the two of them side by side in the shadowed room: not touching, not talking, connected by mutual laughter through the faraway, disembodied voices of foolish Fibber and his wise spouse or Lum and Abner or Edgar and the incorrigible Charlie, who were as vivid as their own neighbours yet as insubstantial as the air they travelled on, as tenuous as the knob whose quarter-turn would vanquish them.

Fibber was particularly funny tonight, and when his closet surprised him (but no-one else on the continent) by evacuating its contents piecemeal upon him, Blossom hooted her best: a bugling blat of a laugh like an elephant who’s just been punched in the belly. Still, it wasn’t quite the same: the silences between her laughs were just that. Something further was expected of him: that much he knew. But that was all.

Just before the ten o’clock news Blossom said straight ahead into the dark, “Rosie says Gertie an’ her seen Rennie an’ Molly smoochin’ behind the pool hall.”

Blossom was already in bed, curled under the quilt Aunt Vi had given them as a wedding present. Not a good omen. But the ginger wavelets of her hair, like honeyed wood-shavings, fanned out against the moon-blanched pillow and her left arm – unsleeved, as velvet as belly-flesh – lay open to view and ultimate enticement. She was not asleep, though she appeared to be breathing evenly, without effort, like a whale serene in its element. Warily, Gabe undressed at the foot of the bed. He had slept naked (even in the winter of twenty-nine) ever since his wedding night, taking all the warmth he needed from the presence and pleasure of his wife’s ample body and from the heat generated by their separate, colluding desires. Embarrassed by the beginnings of an erection, Gabe turned away from the moonlit window. The bedsprings creaked. Blossom had moved, but only her head tilted up to observe him.

“You gotta ask Cousin Goose to let you drive full time,” she said. “You’re gonna wear your body out.”

Gabe slipped adroitly under the covers, but her back rose up against him like a stone rampart. The languorous arm slithered away to seek the comfort of its own kind. He stretched across the abyss between their bodies and kissed her hair, careful to touch her nowhere else, to leave the necessary distance between them – the chill, body-long inch that would have hurt less had it been a mile of no-man’s-land or a wilderness of unfeeling. He rolled onto his back, and stared at the ceiling. Something was required, something needed to be done. Suddenly his hand was enfolded by another’s, was given a single squeeze: not invitational, no, not that: but nonetheless proprietorial, and consoling.

And welcomed.

“You’re just missin’ Teddy, that’s all.”

But Teddy was not at the apogee of the thought that swept all else aside: tomorrow – after work, after supper – he would march up to Michigan Ave. and demand to speak with the Reeve. Why not?