The Box Garden Part 16

"East. I'm going East."

I came close to smiling, for there was a central, un-nourished innocence in the way Watson p.r.o.nounced the word East, and I saw that I would have to be careful or run the risk of destroying him entirely.

"Tell me exactly where you're going," I persisted.

"India, j.a.pan," he waved vaguely.

"Alone?"

"Of course!"

"You're not taking anyone with you?"

"No one."

"Something's happened, Watson. Something you should know about."

"Is it really so important? I'm sure you can look after whatever it is."

"Seth is missing."

I watched his eyes; they blinked once, that was all. I remembered once years ago when Watson had seen a dwarf tapping his crutch by a bus stop; he had come close to weeping; something should be done, he had said. But the compulsion to relieve suffering was an abstraction for him, a folk belief in husk form. (Later I realized that outrage was only another form of innocence.) For a missing son he could only blink.

"I said Seth is missing."

"Missing?"

"Have you seen him, Brother Adam? Just tell me if you've seen him."

"No. Why would I see him?"

"Greta Savage has taken him. Taken him away."

"Greta Savage."

"We think ... the police think ... she's going to bring him here."

"Why would she do that?"

"Are you sure they didn't come here?"

"They wouldn't come here."

My throat closed with helplessness. Why did he have to speak in these dead, ritualized negatives? This convoluted room with its lights and mirrors and riotous gra.s.s was just another dead-end. I bent down for a moment and touched the tops of the gra.s.s. "You're leaving all this behind?" I asked.

"I'll take seed," he said, pointing to a suitcase beside the bed.

I stood up abruptly, and at that instant Watson's face took on a startled expression. For the first time I became aware of a commotion down below on the street, a screeching of brakes, car doors slamming, people running on the road, some of them shouting. We heard too the sound of footsteps on the stairs of the house. Brother Adam rose with haste; the folds of his robe sighed around him.

Then, quite clearly, I heard Eugene's voice calling me. It seemed to come from the street. Or was it echoing up the stairwell? He was shouting something. It sounded like, "We've got Seth, Charleen, we've got him. We've got Seth and he's okay." I stood completely still. I had never, it seemed, listened before with this degree of intensity. There were more voices. And again there was the sound of running on the stairs.

Brother Adam picked up his suitcase, and with a sweep of his robe, he moved toward the fire escape. But he stopped there, staring at me for a moment as though waiting to be released.

"Charleen," was all he said. A question or a cry? Even afterwards I couldn't decide. Who was it who said that the sounds of our own names are the only recompense we have for the difficulties of living? I am certain, however, of one thing: that Watson didn't actually step out onto the fire escape until I nodded across at him. Then without a sound he dropped into darkness. I never even wished him good luck.

The next face I saw was Seth's. He burst into the room with Eugene behind him, absurdly off-hand in his tan windbreaker. My arms around him, his tumbled hair smelling of potato chips, his familiar face laughing at me above the brilliant jungle of living gra.s.s.

Late Wednesday night. Some days are too long; it seems too much to ask of mere human beings that we live through them. What we need, what I Ineed, is release from today. I need sleep, darkness.

But I can't sleep. Consciousness is flaking away, but I'm still absorbing the various levels of unreality which have suddenly invaded my mother's Scarborough bungalow; I'm breathing them in, examining them, puzzling over their intricate folds and, like a cla.s.sic insomniac, reliving all of it.

The policemen-they've all gone home now. How do policemen manage to get to sleep after a night like tonight? Of course, it's probably nothing to them; line of duty and all that; a ho-hum affair really; wouldn't even make the papers, one of them had told us.

Doug and Greta. It has been so simple in the end, so completely unspectacular. (Greta had simply driven up to the house and opened the car door. She never even suspected she was being followed.) How tender Doug had been with her. In the middle of the street with the searchlights and the beginning of a curious crowd, how gently he had held her, crooning into her hair, "It's okay now, baby, I'll take care of you, there now, don't cry like that." But she had cried. A small, animal weeping perforating the quiet neighbourhood, her thin shoulders shaking, "I don't know what I was doing. He was going to India. I wanted Seth to see him. I didn't know what to do. All I want to do is go to sleep."

"I know, I know," Doug had said. "You need to sleep. I'll take care of you now. You don't have to worry about anything."

Watson. No one had seen him come down the fire escape. No one knew where he went. "Too much confusion," one of the officers had said, rather embarra.s.sed. "Anyway, it looks as though he wasn't involved."

"He was moving out anyway," the scrawny man told us. "Paid up his rent yesterday, but the b.u.g.g.e.r left all his G.o.dd.a.m.n garbage behind. Lived there two years and you oughta see the G.o.dd.a.m.n junk he's got. A real nut, one of yer hopheads, oughta be in jail."

Watson living alone for two years! Watson, a crouching ascetic! How extraordinary really, considering his terrible need for an audience. (Then I remember the mirrors.) Louis Berceau, another solitary-but his time is coming. What a lot he's giving up, the enormity of the sacrifice! Why? Why? His blissful detachment is ending; now he will be a.s.saulted by all sorts of troubling concerns; his life will begin to overlap with others in ways which are not casual but responsible and which may throw into jeopardy his springy step and his childish good faith. Ah, Louis, sleep well tonight.

My mother who will be married the day after tomorrow: she has taken a sleeping pill. As soon as we came home with Seth, she announced that she was going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed. She explained that she does not normally indulge in such drugs. The doctor had given her these, but she takes them very sparingly. Only for pain and anxiety, she explained. Pain and anxiety: she p.r.o.nounced these two words absently as though they amounted to nothing more than a case of indigestion, a stomach cramp, a twinge of heartburn. Judith and I exchanged wry looks. Only pain and anxiety? Was that all?

Judith and Martin. They are sleeping together in the back bedroom off the kitchen. Judith has been offhand but tactful. "Look, Char, it's not that I don't love you and all that, but as long as Mother's dead to the world-if you don't mind-the fact is, I just can't sleep soundly unless Martin and I are ... you know ... you get used to the feel of someone, and Eugene probably-"

Eugene, yes. Lying in my mother's veneer bed, his arms around me-he is sound asleep now, but he has thought of everything: he has set his travel alarm for six-thirty so we can be sure to switch back before morning. He has also driven Greta to a hospital, found Doug a hotel room nearby, bought Bill Miller a bottle of rye. And checked Seth over for damages: "Of course I'm not a doctor, but there's nothing wrong with him that a good night's sleep won't fix."

And Seth is here in this house. Still a little baffled, a little confused-"I know it sounds crazy but she said you and Dad were getting back together again and she was supposed to take me to Toronto and I was too mixed up and half asleep. I guess I even believed her for the first day or two. It sounded like a dream, you know ... like a wish come true."

"A wish? You mean you wished-?"

"Well, not exactly a wish-" He stopped, smiling suddenly, a self-mocking grin, but I could tell he was smiling at something else too, smiling at that swelling intangible that the "pome people" refer to as fate and others simply call life. It was a dazzling smile.

He was glad to see Eugene. Eugene is going to get him a plane ticket so we can fly back together Friday night after the wedding. The concert is Sat.u.r.day; with luck they'll let him play even if he did miss a few rehearsals. He's in good spirits and went to sleep almost immediately.

And that's the most extraordinary thing of all: Seth is asleep in this house and he's sleeping where no one else has ever slept before, not my father, not Cousin Hugo, not Aunt Liddy, not Eugene, not anyone. Wound in a sheet and topped with a single blanket-for it is surprisingly warm tonight-he is sound asleep in the living room on my mother's sacred chesterfield.

The whole house, in fact, is asleep.

Chapter 7

Friday. My mother's wedding day. I wake up early and something whispers to me: get this right. Remember every detail. Be accurate, be objective, be thorough. Make a Chronicle of this, make a Wedding Alb.u.m, get it Right. Begin with the cloud-crammed dawn, the sky oily-blue and unsettled. A heavy dew, a choking, webby haze. Around noon the sun nuzzles its way through, making the day exceptionally humid. A little cooler late in the afternoon. At six there is a brief downpour, at eight a swollen, streaky-eyed sunset, but by that time Eugene and Seth and I are on our way back to Vancouver and it's all over.

We start the day by eating breakfast together, my mother and I, Eugene and Seth, Martin and Judith. Since there are only four kitchen chairs, Eugene carries in two from the dining room. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the largest number ever to gather in this room for breakfast.

We drink coffee-my mother allows for exactly two cups each-and eat b.u.t.tered toast. "Margarine is cheaper," she reminds us, "but the day hasn't come when I can't afford a bit of b.u.t.ter in the morning."

There is a great deal of conversation around the table; the six of us are surprisingly comfortable together. Eugene, laughing, tips his chair back slightly and fails to respond to my mother's sharp, disapproving glance.

My mother speaks to Seth-this grandson she scarcely knows, this grandson whose arrival has occasioned embarra.s.sment and chaos but whose presence has somehow enlivened and restored the household-"I suppose you'd like some corn flakes for breakfast?"

"Yes," he answers, "if you have any."

"Well, I don't," she returns. "I refuse to spend good money on rubbish like that."

At this Seth laughs uproariously, as though his grandmother has said something exceptionally witty.

"What you you need is a good haircut, that's what you need," she continues. need is a good haircut, that's what you need," she continues.

Seth claps his hands over his ears in mock horror. Or is it mock horror? I refuse to meet his eyes.

"Maybe you're right, Grandma," he says amiably, demonstrating his instinct for the inevitability of things. "I'll give it some thought."

"If I were you I'd give it more than thought," she retorts with spirit.

"I think there are some hedge clippers in the bas.e.m.e.nt," Martin says.

We linger over our coffee with the languor of pa.s.sengers on a steams.h.i.+p, the last leg of the journey in sight. The wedding looms ahead-three-thirty in my mother's living room-but even that event is overshadowed by the liberating awareness of our separate departures, the return to our other lives which, like real sea voyagers, we view with a mixture of reluctance and antic.i.p.ation.

"Martin," Judith says after breakfast as she tidies my mother's kitchen, "did you see that thing in The Globe and Mail The Globe and Mail about the judge?" about the judge?"

"No," Martin answers, "what judge?"

"You know, that Supreme Court judge, old what's his-name. Seventy-six years old and getting married."

"Oh yes," Martin says, "I think I did did see the headline." see the headline."

"And he's marrying a woman about the same age. Second marriage for both of them."

"Hmmm," Martin comments.

"So it's not so odd really, people getting married in their seventies."

"Who ever said it was odd?"

"Maybe it's the coming thing."

"Maybe."

"It's logical, when you think of it," she says thoughtfully. "There's a nice-you know-economy to the whole thing. In fact, it sort of fits in with the recycling philosophy."

"Oh?"

"After all, here's Mother getting an escort and chauffeur. And Louis is getting a cook and housekeeper."

"Is that all?" Martin looks up amused.

Judith scours the sink with energy.

"Is that all?" Martin asks again. Then he starts to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Judith asks turning around.

But Martin is laughing too hard to answer.

My mother spent almost all morning at the hairdresser's.

It had been Judith's idea: "Look," she had reasoned with her, "you don't even have a hair dryer. And it's so damp this morning your hair will never dry. It would be a whole lot easier if you just went down to that little beauty place next to the Red and White. Eugene could drive you over, couldn't you Eugene? And you can have it washed and set and be back by noon."

"It's such a waste ..."

"I'll phone right now and see if they can work you in. I'll explain ..."

"There's so much to do here ..."

"Charleen and I can tidy up the house. You have a nice restful morning under the dryer. I'll phone ..."

"I don't know ..."

"I'll ask if they can take you at ten-fifteen."

She had gone. Judith had won. It was in every way a sensible plan, but I had been appalled by my mother's quick surrender, her willingness to be led. This weakness is something new; she is getting old.

"She's getting old," I say later to Judith.

"Yes," Judith nods briskly. She is plugging in the old vacuum cleaner, and I watch as she attacks the living room rug. How realistic Judith is, how offhandedly she deals with the externals of life. She knows how to manage our mother, how to persuade her against her will, and she accepts her victories with stunning ease.

The vacuum cleaner is thirty years old, an upright Hoover with a monstrous black bag, and the sound of its roaring motor fills the house.

I picture my mother in the hands of a bullying shampoo girl in platform shoes, I think of the painful plastic rollers and the chemical sting, the scorching heat of the hairdryer, the futile aggression of Harper' Harper's Bazaar, and suddenly I am swept with a desire to rush out and find her and protect her. That is when it strikes me that I must ... love ... her in a way which Judith would never comprehend.

"It'll do her good to get out of the house," Judith yells over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.