A Circle on the Surface Page 27

  The next morning snow covered his tracks.

  That winter, the winter of 1944, two years after the sinking that had cost Enman his good friend, business at Inkpens’ ground to a halt. By then the Allies had turned things around to all but reclaim the Atlantic, so the news went, and all around the province work at the little yards was drying up. With fewer ships getting hit and needing repair, there was nothing the big yards couldn’t handle as they gobbled up business—the way Una’s condition gobbled her up, consumed the person Enman thought she had been.

  “Be patient. Wait till the baby comes, she’ll snap out of it,” Snow insisted on the phone. “She’ll be so delighted she won’t even remember this phase. Neither will you. You’d be surprised how many mothers—”

  Win’s visits were the one uplifting thing. Through January and February she popped over regularly, bringing casseroles and other goodies, she herself bubbling over with a determined glee. It seemed she couldn’t contain herself: “A baby in the house—just wait!” Funny, given Una’s trepidations and how these might characterize their anticipation. But maybe Win was trying, nicely, to prepare him, to prepare all of them, while unloading foodstuffs Clinton could no longer bear to look at—enough creamed corn and tinned peas to feed all of Barrein and O’Leery, gleaned from her summer’s beachcombing.

  “You’re not leaving yourselves short?” he would say. With fewer sinkings, far less flotsam, useful and otherwise, beached itself these days. People turned their attention to Una’s well-being. The most standoffish Meades asked after her. “She certainly is making herself a stranger,” even Isla, who was so friendly towards Una, said. At least Una was eating, while not, as Win said, “at risk of becoming a lard-arse.” The way people talked in the store, they would have come up to the house just to have a feel of her belly. Enman wasn’t sure how he should react, grin like a cat, or step into the shadows the way some men did, letting women hold sway. He knew Una would appreciate their attention about as much as she’d have enjoyed being told she was fat.

  “She’s a study in human nature,” Enman said, as was he, he thought.

  He resolved to dedicate more time to practising. Consistency was everything, ten minutes every day better than thirty every now and then. Chords: two note, three note, four note. More bow, less bow. Arpeggios, major and minor. Hubley’s style of music favoured down-bow fiddlers, but the key to a sweeter sound than a Cape Breton fiddler’s edge, created by a hard back-and-forth sawing across the strings, was letting a figure-eight motion of the bow soften the tone. Steady speed. The pulse from the bow’s angle, not its pressure, setting rhythm and tone. The trick was keeping the hand relaxed, all the movement in the wrist. The muscles remembering.

  But then Una would appear, massaging the mound of her belly. “Can’t you stop now? Can’t you do that someplace else?”

  “Fine, then. You’re overdue for your checkup. I’ll quit if you’ll agree to see Snow.” He put the violin in its case, propped it behind the radio. Out of sight, out of mind, he thought, and not such a terrible sacrifice, he had decided. For Hill’s down-home tunes did have a sameness, a tiresome repetition of rhythms and chords.

  “What will he tell me, that I’m pregnant?”

  Enman booked the appointment anyway. He drove her, fingers crossed that the car would get them there. Waiting with her in the reception area he was an interloper, the only man in the place besides the doctor. They were surrounded by people only remarkable for bellies pushing out ugly flowered smocks. Those with the largest shifted awkwardly in their chairs, responding with a certain weariness to the receptionist’s perky questions. “When are you due? Have you dropped yet? My, you’re carrying low, must be a boy?” Una dodged them all, avoiding empathetic glances.

  “I won’t look like a beach ball, will I?” Una had asked Snow that balmy day in September. It was odd to think of it. “It won’t be forever. Patience,” the doctor had said, and he repeated it now. “Baby will come like a thief in the night, be prepared.”

  Patience, Win also said. Isaac had no choice but to cut Enman’s hours to a couple of days a week. The Lord opened a window every time he closed a door, or was it the other way around? Or did he just shut them both tight?

  March, the Maritimes’ cruellest month, amounted to waiting and more waiting. Enman could hardly afford to pay a carpenter to build on a room, which scuttled his plans to move Hannah downstairs and make her bedroom a nursery. On the dreariest night, the first day of spring, forgetting his bargain with Una he rosined his bow and placed it and the violin in Hannah’s eager, clumsy hands. Better this than presiding over her efforts at sums and spelling. He tried to get her to bow something, anything, while he reached around her to form notes, pressing strings to the fingerboard. He tried getting her to bow a steady single note on an open string to train her ear. It was a largely fruitless exercise made more fruitless by Una’s sighs or her cursing.

  He thought of the human brain as flypaper, the way things did or didn’t stick. He thought of Hannah’s as being especially un-sticky, the way she stumbled over things.

  Oddly enough, Tippy the cat became Enman’s most reliable companion, a chummy comfort in the early evenings, curled on the back of the sofa and purring in Enman’s ear. But just before bedtime the cat would yowl to go out, then make himself scarce until morning. And then Tippy disappeared altogether, a result of his tomcatting, Enman guessed. No one could have credited the grief Tippy’s vanishing brought him and Hannah, fearing as both did that the cat had been carried off by a coyote or fox, feeling guilty at the thought. “That’s just the way it goes,” Una said. Told to stay off her back, by then she was having trouble sleeping. At least Enman’s acknowledgement of her discomfort made her a bit more talkative, enough to complain of the baby booting her in the ribs each time she turned.

  “Booting or mooning her, take your pick.” Win gave a wink when he told her. “Oh, now, paying for your fun, that’s being a mom.”

  As March’s snow and sleet gave way to April’s mud, he liked to think Tippy was up there somewhere with Ma, having Ma rub his chin.

  “You know, I don’t see too much wrong with Hubley’s guitar-picking,” Clint said, around Eastertime. There was talk of Robart and Greely throwing a dance party in honour of Isaac’s birthday near the end of May, and Hill had volunteered to play.

  Giving up on teaching Hannah much of anything, Enman had put the violin away for good. “Maybe music’s not in everyone’s genes,” he told the girl as kindly as possible. “Never mind. We can’t all luck out in that department.”

  He gave her a wink, mostly for Una’s benefit. If she was watching.

  Who knew what she saw or didn’t see any more.

  You heard about marriages landing on the rocks, a couple’s future getting swept away in the lightest gale. But having a baby made for rock-solid ground and an anchor both, wasn’t it so? A baby was bound to save a foundering marriage, he had heard it said.

  This baby would save theirs. He lived out the last, most sullen weeks of Una’s pregnancy believing it.

  Such an angry, bawling thing she was when she came near the end of April, a little over a year after Ma took ill, a tiny, squalling, red-faced infant. Perfectly formed limbs, hands and feet, nose and mouth, and perfect little seashells for ears, and eyes—the world’s oldest soul was in those eyes that had no idea, yet, what colour they ought to be. Something of Ma was in them, he was sure, taking his first glimpse of her. Smears of white on her bloodied skin, white like zinc oxide, before someone bathed then wrapped her up tight as a bug in a rug, in the crooked little blanket Hannah had proudly sewn.

  He had no idea who bathed her, or who if anyone besides Isla and the doctor were in the room. Something he will not forget, though—as long as he’s this side of the sod—was the doctor slipping her into his arms, not Snow but the one from O’Leery who did house calls. The sound of her cries made his lungs seize, truly.

&n
bsp; One glimpse of her, that’s all it took, and the child grabbed hold of his heart and would not let go.

  Things had happened too fast to get Una to the hospital, miles away in town. The most he’d managed was to run to Isla, thank the good Christ for Isla, who came to assist the doctor and was there to hold the newborn while he himself went outdoors to gulp fresh air.

  God knows where on earth Win was.

  She had arrived with the gloaming, the little girl. So he liked to think of her, descending like that. The crocuses were just up in the yard and it was still light enough to see them standing their ground after how many freezing rainstorms? Poor man’s fertilizer, rain following sleet following snow.

  Catching his breath, he stood listening to the first cries of peepers waking up in the bogs.

  “Holy jeez. Holy Hannah—I have a daughter!” he called back to the clamouring peepers and the sharp, salty dampness. He hadn’t guessed he would have a daughter. If he’d had a son, he might have named him Isaac: God’s little trick, a trick played on parents who probably were not up to the task of childrearing.

  If Ma had had a nicer name, anything but Marge, he would have plugged for that. But “Penelope” came and lodged in his head while he stood getting used to the idea—a baby, a baby!—and lingered when, after a little while, Clinton crossed the yard and handed him a lit cigar.

  “Guess I can’t give you a drink, buddy.”

  Hating how the cigar pushed away the smell—traces of the mother’s body turned inside out, of blood and a more primal scent than those of bone or skin—he’d stubbed it out.

  The name stuck with him. Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus. Never mind its archness, he liked its elevated, classy, classical sound. Win—who, as it turned out, had stayed holed up next door the entire time Una laboured, figuring she’d best stay out of Una’s way—thought the name was all right.

  “Penny,” he proposed.

  “Call her whatever you like,” Una said.

  Win spoke sharply—“I don’t see a thing wrong with giving formula”— when he went over there after the third day, seeking advice. “If the kid won’t suck she won’t suck.”

  In a funny way Win seemed to side more with Una and her needs than he had expected she would.

  “Feed her whatever you want,” was what Una said. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  When her friend Kit came bearing a pink sweater set and booties, Una barely looked at them. She thanked Kit, though, and promised to call, before asking Hannah to take the child away and change her diaper.

  Una seemed in despair. “Why must she cry so much?”

  Enman wondered the same, rising repeatedly at night to help her rock the infant. “Babies cry.” He said it in the kindest way possible, given Isla’s reassurance that crying was normal. “We’re all she has to comfort her.”

  Una closed her eyes. “Comfort only goes so far. And when we’re no longer around to hold her hand, what then? When she’s old, when she’s sick. But that’s neither here nor there, you think. That’s just life, isn’t it.”

  “You’re just lucky she’s not colicky,” Win was quick to point out, on a mission delivering tinned milk. “My second boy? You remember Garson? Clint and me, we suffered something fierce, let me tell you. Kid wouldn’t sleep unless he was on me. Cried for a year without stopping.”

  That winter, realizing that Una could not run a business, Win had taken over from Iris Finck and by the spring was firmly in charge of the store, despite Iris overseeing it—pretending to—from the room behind the store where she stayed and wasted away with dementia.

  “I appreciate your help.” Enman repeated it more than once, hurrying Win out the door. They needed quiet, after all, so the baby would let her mother sleep, didn’t Win realize? May had barely arrived and Una was exhausted.

  “Like mother, like daughter. Tiptoe around and she’ll never learn to settle, what with listening for every pin that falls.”

  “If we need your advice, we’ll call.” He spoke as gently as he could. Then Win did a funny thing. She rolled up onto her toes, patted away his hair where sweat pasted it to his forehead, and wiped spit-up from his shirt.

  “I feel for you, Enman Greene. Always have, always will. There are some things that don’t change—much. It’s not my fault you’re hard to reach. Once a pushover, always one.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re going to spoil her, holding her all the time.”

  Less than a month into this and he already felt like the infant was a second skin or a shirt not to be removed. He didn’t want to put her down, couldn’t bear listening to her crying in her crib in Hannah’s room when Hannah was at Isla’s or off on her aimless jaunts. Following Una’s former habit, Hannah seemed more bent on wandering than on buckling down. Win said maybe she was looking for another home.

  Una grew more despondent, lay in their bed watching the ceiling. She seemed immune to his efforts, his confusion, seemed not to register his exasperation.

  “You can’t blame her for being born. I thought you longed for a baby.” He asked point-blank, “Is it something I’ve done?”

  “You? Of course not.” Her face scrunched into a horrified look, even as she laughed, sort of. “Enman Greene, you are good to a fault.”

  It’s not that he blamed Win—why would he?—or in any way construed Win’s stepping in and helping out in ways she didn’t have to, as any kind of harbinger of what happened. There was absolutely nothing in The Hygiene of Marriage to fill him in on whatever plagued Una.

  He tried to get her to see Snow. She refused.

  Finally, towards the end of May, he went to see Snow himself.

  The doctor showed him into his examining room, the inner sanctum where previously Enman hadn’t set foot. The examining table had lobster-shaped oven mitts covering the stirrups, and, dangling over it, a baby’s mobile with tiny pink and blue teddy bears. A floppy cloth rabbit wore an apron like one of Ma’s, and wooden blocks sported the alphabet. They were arranged in a row to read Love is Patient.

  One would have been forgiven for thinking the patients were four-year-olds.

  Offering a strained laugh, nodding to him, Snow perhaps misread the weariness on his face. “It takes the ladies’ minds off la divina commedia—the decor does. You know what I mean. When I’m in there, poking and prodding.” The doctor sounded half apologetic. His light brown eyes looked tired but seemed kinder than Enman remembered them being.

  “The baby blues? As I’ve said, these hormonal upheavals happen, far more often than we—”

  But Enman hadn’t come here to be brushed off so easily, or to beat around any bushes.

  “When will she snap out of it?” He matched Snow’s gaze with his.

  Postpartum depression? Might last a week or two, or even a couple of months, he heard. “Having a child takes adjustment.” As if Enman didn’t know. Snow spoke impatiently but not without sympathy. Seeing the doctor’s instruments—shiny stainless steel objects laid out on a pristine-looking towel—brought back things Enman couldn’t imagine bearing, if The Hygiene of Marriage was in any way accurate. Una’s lengthy labour. The animal grunts and screams he had tried to block out then banish from memory, noises accompanied by Isla’s honeyed pleas to breathe, just breathe. He had tried his best to forget all this, especially Una’s cursing: Fuck the man who’d done this to her, how she’d take the kitchen knife to it should a man, any man, come near her again.

  “Now, now, Una. That’s it. That’s it,” he had heard from behind closed doors, Isla working to calm her till the doctor arrived, the same one who’d come from O’Leery more or less just to sign Ma’s death certificate.

  These women, he thought. His beautiful mother. Penelope’s beautiful mother. The two who mattered more to him than anyone in the world.

  Dr. Snow was a taller man, a more imposing man than that
other doctor. He looked bemused rather than shocked, hearing about all this.

  “Oh?” he said. “A lot of them say things like that, ladies in labour. The thing about pain? Trust me, they always forget. So I wouldn’t be too worried, Greene.”

  24

  The world was a child’s crying, it was unwanted clutter and cares, it was knowing that Penelope, like everyone, would grow up, suffer, and die. The world spared no one. It was noise and chaos, smells and colours, too many colours, complications, when all Una wanted was sleep. A smooth, silent, uniform grey she longed to sink deeper into, not silvery, not speckled like a mackerel sky, but a soft unending grey which would be easier on the self, more restful than any blackness. A place where granite met cloud, a place without shadows was her hope. In this hope she saw that she had choices, choices in how to reach this place. The island would be a stepping stone, she could take a boat or swim.

  Enman’s Christmas gift was a blessing, a beacon that flared through the darkness that closed around her. Anne Boleyn’s poem shone through the darkness, it possessed a sense all its own, a deep, gleaming sense, surrounded by the gift’s bright, tinny lyrics about Christ the perfect baby, his perfect virgin mother, his hallowed, mysterious birth. Anne’s lines were rolling waves, her words were colourless birds floating on the waves’ crests. Anne’s words had a sanctity that whispered their encouraging approval, gave Una their glowing permission.

  For Una, there would be no steely flash, as Anne’s fate dictated, no huckleberries, no red besides the lighthouse’s stripes, if, swimming like a fish, cold-blooded, she reached the island’s rocks. She would slip under the lightkeeper’s eye, beneath his beam. Meet a perfect stranger, dance with him over whalebacks, down the perfect black staircase and into the sea, to wash, perhaps, against Mad Rock. Her sorrows, her faults, her confusions and contradictions dashed away by surf. Bones dissolved in a nothingness that would absolve her of her failings and the world of its failings, and bring such peace. Rest. An end.