Читать книгу The Stubborn Season - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 4

Sometimes ten-year-old Irene MacNeil lay in bed at night and listened. It was a weird trick of the house that the radiators and air vents acted as a kind of amplification system, conducting every sound, no matter how subtle, to every corner of every room. The heart-jumping thud of coal settling in the furnace. The gurgle of water in the pipes. The hum of the refrigerator. Her father’s snore. Her mother’s body turning, making the coils of the bedsprings squeak. She imagined the house was a creature in whose body they all lived, and the sounds were like those her own stomach made when she’d eaten something hard to digest.

For all the seeming order in the layout of the rooms it was a narrow, jumbled-up house, where even their small family of three felt like more. They were forever excusing themselves to pass in the hall, both people pressed up against the wall; or feeling as though a window should be opened to let in a little more air.

A concrete path led from the sidewalk to two wooden steps and the porch that ran the width of the house. The door opened into a small vestibule with hooks for coats, facing the steep stairs to the second floor. To the right was the living room, made cheerful enough by a rose-and-violet chintz sofa on one side of the green-tiled fireplace and a matching chair on the other. In the corner a radio stood proudly next to a potted split-leaf philodendron, and next to that, Douglas MacNeil’s orderly desk, with neatly piled papers and envelopes and a little brass clock. In the dining room, no more than a dark nook behind the living room, was an imposing walnut table and a hutch containing the good dishes and two Toby jugs, which had been wedding gifts. The kitchen was in the rear of the house. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one for Irene at the back with a window that overlooked the yard, and one for her parents in front, as well as a summer sleeping porch.

This morning Irene was in the upstairs bathroom brushing her teeth. She was a deceptively sturdy little girl, her wrists thick and her face square and determined. Her nose was pug, her eyebrows sparse and her eyes nut brown. When she was finished brushing her teeth she ran a comb through her wavy hair, the colour of reddish earth. She thought her hair was pretty. It might even be what magazines referred to as a “best feature,” except that her mother insisted on cutting it blunt and no longer than the bottom of her ears. It was parted on the side and held tightly with a hairpin so that it did not get into her eyes, although a stray wisp or two always escaped and sat rather ridiculously on her forehead. Such a curl now straggled out, no sooner than Irene pressed the pin into her scalp, and she hurried to wet it and pat it into place. Her parents’ voices floated through the vent from the kitchen below, along with the smell of coffee and bacon.

Irene did not want to walk in on what was clearly one of her parents’ “discussions.” If she did, they would stop talking, and her mother’s mouth would set in that way that made Irene feel as though she were a bother. So rather than interrupt, she brushed her teeth a second time, and although she knew it was wrong to listen to other people’s conversations, she listened anyway. What choice was there? Sometimes she felt they were all mushed up together in the house and it was unclear where one of them ended and another began.

Douglas read the day’s headlines. The news was bad, but he saw no need to alarm his wife further. She was far too easily alarmed as it was. The early-morning light made the red-walled kitchen look downright angry. It hurt Douglas’s eyes, as he knew it would even when he had, on a benevolent whim, agreed to the colour two months ago. He held the newspaper up to block a shaft of light knifing through the black venetian blinds.

“We should have invested while we had the chance,” Margaret said. “The boom’s all over now, isn’t it, and we’ve lost an opportunity.”

A banner across the front page of the Toronto Star read: “Stock Prices Crash.” There were stories telling how the streets around the Montreal and Toronto exchanges were filled with crying men and women who pushed and shoved each other, losing their hats and bruising their shins, hoping to salvage something of their evaporating fortunes.

Douglas did not respond and so Margaret tapped the paper. “Put that down and talk to me, please, Douglas. We’ll never get rich now, will we?”

Margaret’s insistence upon wealth puzzled Douglas, for it was not as though they lacked for anything. They had an electric refrigerator as well as electric cooking range. They had a radio. He’d given Margaret a fox stole for Christmas last year. They’d recently modernized the kitchen and painted it the garish red she’d insisted on. Douglas was a pharmacist, a professional man with a well-respected business. They lived a better life than their Scottish immigrant parents had ever dreamed of.

And Douglas loved his wife. She was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, with her sleek bobbed black hair and smoky eyes and Clara Bow mouth. When he’d married her she was twenty, a tiny girl with a waist his hands could nearly span, and even now, ten years after Irene’s birth, she had kept her figure. He wanted to make her happy. He had never given her the impression he would ever be anything except exactly what he was, take it or leave it. By marrying him he assumed she’d decided to take it.

“Margaret, there’s a story here in the Star about a woman, a Lottie Nugent, who lost her entire life savings and went home and turned on the gas. Would you rather we had put all our money in the stock market and lost it? I don’t understand you, my dear.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t know if you ever have,” she said and marched out of the kitchen, her heels clacking on the new linoleum floor.

Douglas carefully folded his newspaper. He ran his fingers along the crease, making it sharp. It was time to go to the drug store.

“Irene, stand still!” Margaret rubbed furiously at a spot on Irene’s chin with a handkerchief on which she’d spit.

“Ow! Mum!”

“Oh, don’t carry on. How you manage to get as much toothpaste on the outside of your mouth as you do on the inside, I’ll never know.” She stepped back and surveyed Irene, who squirmed uneasily. Margaret hated it when Irene fidgeted, but bit her tongue. After all, she was annoyed at Douglas, not Irene.

“I’m going to be late, Mum.”

“Hurry up, then. Hurry up! Get your books. Where’s your sweater?”

Irene grabbed her sweater and dashed down the stairs. She picked up her books from the chair by the door.

“Daddy? Are you ready? I’m going to be late.”

“Coming, Pet.”

As he put on his coat, Douglas checked the inside pocket for his flask. Its smooth cool solidity reassured him. A little dram of rye whisky now and again kept him steady, especially after a spat with Margaret.

It was the habit of father and daughter to walk along the street together every morning, until Irene came to her school and they parted ways. As they left the house, neither of them mentioned that Margaret had gone upstairs into her room and closed all the curtains against the day’s bright sunshine.