A Circle on the Surface Read online

  “Dogs’ll be pissing on the tires, Winnie, we go any slower.”

  Win yelped once more at Clint to slow down: “You’re gonna give poor Una here a cardiac.” Not missing a beat, she started in again, more crazy speculation, about “drinkers” at the show: “Holy dying dirt, anyone and their dog could land, walk right over us, and have a time.”

  Clint let out a long, noisy sigh. He snuck a wry grin at Una.

  “Don’t make fun. I saw what I saw, like Iris Finck did too.” Win clicked her tongue. “I saw a few fellas trooping over the hill, up back of the beach. I was out there this morning seeing what the tide brought us.” Win didn’t worry about the Mounties slapping her on the wrist for salvaging “treasures” from ships that got hit. Una had picked up a can or two herself, on occasion—tinned pears, tinned peas—but it wasn’t something to broadcast. “Swear to God,” Win’s oath joggled as they swung over a bump.

  “Who were they? Tell us. See some fresh new faces from town, not just our old mugs all the time. Una would like to know.” He winked, for her benefit or Win’s?

  “How would I know? ARP men looking for something? They were too far away. Still, like I said, I seen them.”

  “I hear you’ve taken the Twomey one under your wing. Time somebody helped her, since Enman won’t. You’re a better woman than most, a credit to Enman for doing it.” Clint rubbed his jaw. “Hold your bladders, girls!” As he swerved around a rough patch, his elbow accidentally nudged Una’s breast. Against the harbour’s glint burled spruce stood in silhouette, their wafting scent recalling Christmas. She pictured kids colouring that day before the holidays. Teaching high school would be more demanding but a chance to fully exercise her gifts. Just then a screwdriver clanking across the dash rolled off and, reaching for it, Clint’s hand brushed her knee. His eyes on the road ahead, he apologized.

  “You think any more about going out to see the staircase? On the island, I mean. Any time you’d like to go I could run you and Enman out there. Since we’re on about devils and that, eh, Win.” He laughed.

  “Were we?” Win sounded miffed.

  The clock’s whirring stirred the emptiness. The house suddenly felt larger and too quiet. Since New Year’s Eve, she and Enman had not spent a night apart. She lit a candle, tidied up the remnants of their picnic fixings left out in haste. His mother’s basket was a hostage now, riding in the car’s back seat to God knows where. God also knew what they would do if the car wasn’t found; maybe God had the answer up his sleeve? Being car-less might force Enman to come to his senses, to orchestrate the move back to the world of trolleybuses and piped-in water. He must know that life meant sacrifices. Once she was working she’d buy a car—like Kit’s—though it was hard to imagine Enman behind the wheel of anything new. So? She would purchase it for herself.

  She slid what was left of the bread into the breadbox. Funny to think of her first sighting of Enman, braced for his climb up Duke Street’s exhausting hill. Here’s a man of purpose, she had imagined, a forthright man who liked his comforts, enjoyed advancement. She’d had no reason to question this until after their wedding at city hall, when he brought her to meet his mother, who disputed whether weddings that happened outside churches were legitimate. No reason to doubt his sincerity, wary as she was after Gregory’s lies. All Gregory had said of her firing was “I’m sorry.” He had not sounded sorry at all.

  Traipsing outside to the privy, picking her way by flashlight, Una refused to let Win’s ideas about strangers swell in her mind or take shape. She hoped Enman was comfortable with a decent bunk to crawl into. The Grove was overrun with guests, the clerk had said. Officers on leave for some lake fishing—if, given the drought, the lakes still had fish.

  She paused to listen to the sea’s shushing and the faint, eerie moan of a buoy offshore, the groaner that marked the entrance to Barrein’s harbour, Enman said. Both sounds, the surf’s restless pull, the buoy’s desolate groan, would be comforting if they foretold an incoming fog. But not a peep came from the island’s foghorn, which had been silent for weeks. On the radio they said the Germans preferred to attack under fog. Una loved fog, the way, in town, it drew itself like a sleeve up the length of the city’s peninsula, softening the outlines of buildings and trees. “Oh we get our share of fog here, don’t worry,” Mrs. Greene had said. Una couldn’t remember the last day Barrein had been socked in, fog a sure sign of rain. Would she have to bathe in the lake all summer? Along with the fellow whom she recalled as looking vaguely like a very young Gary Cooper.

  Una hurried back inside, creeping through the mudroom. God, if Win knew the half of it, that she had been caught naked by someone who could easily have been Win’s son. Setting down the flashlight her hand bumped one of Enman’s botanical experiments, knocked it over. Dirt and bits of clay pot lay everywhere. She tried to remember exactly how many sons the Goodrows had, four or five? Enman had told Una, and at the time she could not resist saying, “Win is quite a breeder. Don’t suppose you’d have liked that.”

  Enman had laughed. “And, as Clint will tell you, there’s nothing wrong with being childless and enjoying the rest of your life.”

  But life was a slippery thing, Una knew, as was time. In ten years where would she be? In four or five, if she conceived, would she have the energy to chase one preschooler, possibly two? And this didn’t touch on the risks that multiplied with age: giving birth to someone like Hannah. Ten more years and without question she would be in the grips of The Change. Was it crazy to even want a child, or, as Enman mused, to bring one into the world as it was?

  A dullness overcame her as she paused in the front room. Under the feeling’s spell, she imagined her uterus as a pear snapped from a twig, her spirits sinking the way the car had earlier in ruts of dried mud. In her imagination Enman whistled a country tune he claimed to hate. Who knew what Enman really thought, what he truly felt? His true feelings surfaced about as often as a whale did: a flash of fin, a bit of spray, appearing mostly to be a vague, random nothing.

  Yet his absence cornered her. Collapsed on the sofa, she was a bundle of nerves, a set of empty arms. The upholstery smelled of his hair tonic. Then she imagined the garlicky-sweetness of his breath. Was he lying awake now, at the Grove Hotel? Did he miss her? Not likely, with Beulah on his mind. Men were one-tracked that way, she decided: unable to spot a single bush for the forest it grew in.

  Caring for them, for him, was what complicated everything—making plans, acting on wishes about where she could be, what she might be doing.

  Keep busy, Kit would say. Moving by candlelight, Una rose and dug out the paintbox and brushes her friend had left, remembering too late the lack of water. All this evening’s efforts, those jerry cans lost along with Mrs. Greene’s basket. She opened the cabinet and the empty rum bottle rolled free. Can’t draw blood from a stone, can you? she remembered Enman’s favourite saying. Yet Enman could have been on the far side of the moon, their date at the Magnet a distant dream.

  And what sorts of noises would be pouring, she wondered, through the walls of the Grove’s dingy rooms? Its guests enjoying more than the daytime fishing, no doubt. If she had stayed over too, she and Enman could have at least tried. The strange surroundings might have fanned romance into their doing it. She might have talked him into calling in sick next morning and taking a taxi or a bus with her downtown.

  She didn’t like drinking, had no desire for it, but a sip or two might have helped summon sleep. Why, oh why, would he keep an empty? She opened one drawer after another, looking for liquor: nothing. All she stumbled across was Mrs. Greene’s figurine, its chipped, beheaded body and noggin cocooned in a doily. The spirit of good taste had intervened! Pity help her if she had been the one who’d broken it.

  There was nothing for her sleeplessness but to try and read for a while. The Hygiene of Marriage fell open to a page headed “Venereal Diseases.” Good grief. Her face warmed, the movie screen in her head
featuring the scene with Rick Gregory, his cameo appearance in her apartment. She had let nothing slip about him or the sordid little affair. As far as she knew about Enman’s past, it was a blackboard with barely a smudge of chalkdust. Its highlights were puppy love, a childish crush on Win, once, a couple of brief, juvenile flings with tellers, fairly platonic, he said. By his own admission, there was no one in a skirt worth chasing in Barrein, except perhaps Isla.

  So there you go, she told herself. Nothing to worry about, certainly not in matters of hygiene. She tried not to wonder about Gregory’s philandering, the chances of a man who appeared decent being infected. But, oh God, the language the writer of this stuff used: the word carrier made it sound like newspaper delivery.

  She stifled a laugh at the thought of Mrs. Greene holding forth about Shag Cove’s glory days—who begot whom, a homespun Sodom and Gomorrah—while the Sunday roast withered in the oven.

  Lighting a fresh candle, she skipped ahead to “Childbirth.” A few lines in, she could have used a large drink of anything, for courage. The pages brimmed with warnings about “quality” people shirking their duty to supplement, strengthen, “the stock” of future generations. “Possessing an automobile carries more prestige than having a baby,” the author lamented, and noted that “We have been more concerned about preventing sexual experience to the time when certain magical words are said over a couple than we have been about preventing feeble-minded or syphilitic children from being born.”

  True enough, Una thought.

  “When one stops to consider what a childless old age may mean,” the chapter continued, “one will see that there are not only eugenic and other social reasons for rearing a family but that parenthood has no small value from the standpoint of self-interest as well.”

  Una imagined Enman reading this. Had it helped sway and bring him around to the idea of being a father?

  Then the author asked, “Who are the persons that society would select as parents for the next generation if it had the power and a reasonable amount of eugenic enlightenment to enable it to make such a selection? What tests would be applied? One may imagine a eugenic test as something fantastic that might eliminate even some good people like ourselves.” Then Professor Millard Spencer Everett posited seven questions to determine who was qualified for parenthood, questions about a couple’s desire for children, their demonstrated ability to provide a happy home, their economic, educational, and moral qualifications, their ability to provide “a reasonably good mental and physical heredity.” The remaining questions made Una pause. One asked whether the husband or wife had “any disease which could be acquired by the child congenitally.” The other was even more sobering: “Will childbirth injure the health of the mother?”

  The rest of the questions made Una think of Hannah. It took an educated, kind person such as herself, Una thought, to see the merits of a Hannah. For no reason, she remembered a photo she had seen in the paper, showing the mannequins the ARP used in teaching recruits first aid. Boy Scouts wearing armbands were administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the inert rubber figures laid out upon the Common’s grass. Smiling life-size substitutes for wounded, suffering people.

  Of course it was callow, even a little cruel to think of Hannah as a practice pupil. But then Una imagined some of the children she had taught during her practicum, in which teaching felt like no more than babysitting, with the homeroom teacher casually observing. Maintaining and improving your skills meant practising them. Practising them on Hannah would keep her occupied until things changed.

  Una heard a noise from outside. It was very late. A rap on the window, someone tapping on the pane. The paleness of a face loomed there—enough to nearly send her out of her skin. The ARP? Didn’t they know to come to the door?

  But it was no ARP man. It was Clinton Goodrow, never mind it was nearly one o’clock. He was shouting in, “We seen the light and Win said, ‘that poor Una, all alone with no Enman and no water. Whyn’t you see if she’d like to come and stay here?’”

  “Thanks, but it’s all right—I’m fine.” She felt a fleeting sense of obligation to invite him in, a courtesy in exchange for his concern. Minus that gait of his and his hint of an underbite, Clint was not a bad guy. Not a bad guy at all. A person like Win could do worse, or a woman whose husband cheated on her.

  Had Mrs. Gregory been made the wiser? she wondered. Perhaps, more likely than not. As swiftly as the thought occurred to her, Clint’s face bobbed away from the window. By the time Una peeked out the door he was gone.

  Of course, the more people who knew about her lapse in judgment, the harder it would be to ensure it stayed behind her. People never blamed the man. She hoped, fervently, that Gregory’s wife had been kept in the dark, exactly where she resolved to keep Enman. The past was past. But there was no fury like that of a wronged woman, Una knew from her own feelings. Without a job, she could not possibly return to life on her own. And since she was married, the thought struck her anew, the letter to the superintendent was, for now, a futile move.

  “You’re in a right piddle,” Kit would say. “Might as well get cracking, start breeding, unless you want to float along forever idle.” Teach, have a baby, or fritter her days away being a trinket hanging off Enman’s arm, amusing herself tutoring someone who would never do algebra, or thrive past grade four.

  13

  Smoking one cigarette after another did nothing to quell the shakes. The evening ending up as it had, he would have killed for a drink—though he had begun to think being relieved of a burden was not a bad thing. Beulah couldn’t bring his friend back, or the proper feeling in his legs. But if ever he had faced a test of will, this was it, because Clinton’s boy could not be too hard to track down; the gal at the desk might even have directions. Enman had seen the truck himself once, at Hubley Hill’s springtime gig when Hubley had him run home for his violin then coaxed him up on stage. The Goodrow kid had handled any thirst the dancers worked up. Everyone on their feet, except for Una.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the truck nearby, in a clearing by the Run that wound through O’Leery. Bottles tucked to cool amongst the stream’s mossy rocks. He could easily walk; losing a car that was a money pit was more than a mixed blessing. Maybe Beulah’s going missing was Fate’s odd seal of approval on his return to Barrein, where plenty of people got along without owning a car.

  And this was a test, all right. It must be. There was a higher reason for Beulah’s disappearing into thin air. Borrowed? If that was the case, she would have been returned by now, so much for Enman’s being unburdened. So, stolen: it really didn’t matter by whom. A test of his mettle, Ma would say, of his resolve to quit drinking. The ability to let useless things go.

  But why?

  Why not, my son? It isn’t for you to ask, she might say. The inscrutability of things rested as grimly as the room around him, with its grimy sink wedged between the bed and the window, which was jammed shut.

  After splashing his face, Enman trudged reluctantly along the narrow upstairs corridor to the bathroom. The smell of vomit greeted him, and a spattering of blood in the toilet and along the edge of the yellowed tub.

  Thank heavens Una wasn’t here to savour this taste of the city spilling past its bounds into O’Leery. People’s bodily functions on public display. He did what he had to, then hurried back to the room, shoving a chair against the door with its busted lock. The Grove had seen better days; just ask Hill, who had entertained in its dining room a thousand years ago.

  He wished he could call Una, but the hour was much too late. He hoped she wasn’t nervous being alone, and that she had locked up. He stripped to his shorts. His getting into bed set the springs jangling. At least the sheets were clean, stiff from the clothesline. A surprise, like the surprise relief that had come to him that Beulah was, or might no longer be, his to maintain. A goner. The relief hit him afresh, finding its spot again, a lightness between his ears
. The writing had been on the wall for months, that the car was a goner. All the better that some unsuspecting loser had taken her off his hands.

  The hard part was how he would get home—hitch a ride with someone who just happened to be driving? No more than two or three cars a day passed on either route, and with tomorrow being Saturday, not even the mail truck would be running. Home to Una. Once he got there, he would just have to swallow his loathing of the sea and get Inkpens’ to fix him up with a boat—or never leave Barrein again in this life or the next. This would be troubling for Una, and trouble for Una could mean trouble for him, but they would adapt. He liked that she wasn’t a pushover; he didn’t mind her petulance so much, it kept him on his toes. It signalled some small vulnerability of hers, he guessed. Whatever it was, it kept her at a slight distance from him, which was curious. Enticing. It only made him want her more.

  The thought made him smile, despite his craving for a drink. Smiling was infinitely better than putting a fist through the wall.

  Una, Una—the narrow, noisy bed was much too wide without her. And what if, what if, just say for some reason he never made it home again? A foolish notion. But life threw such sucker punches, oh yes, it did. The thought of not seeing Barrein’s headlands or the cape house at the top of the lane filled him with an ache, a regret for how easily he had left them behind once, believing life was better lived in a hive of streets, among strangers.

  That’s what I like about you, Enman Greene, the way you fear the worst, Una liked to tease. But say he stepped out right now, into the hall, out onto the porch, or by the road, and met the eye, let’s imagine, of some good-for-nothing drunk, only the wary, violent type spoiling for a fight, spoiling for some kind of action? O’Leery was crawling with these, certainly by its reputation. What if he ended up going home in a box? Death would be the end of the same road he had started out on, and there was something acceptable about this, death being death. But where would his passing into oblivion leave Una? Alone, virtually friendless. But maybe she would fare all right, who knows, once she let herself get acclimatized. Found her sea legs, so to speak. People did. Give her another month and she would thank him for rescuing her from the morass of town.