A Circle on the Surface Page 29

  It was hard not to picture her admiring herself in Wood’s three-way mirrors, tucking in her chin to admire its single-breasted row of buttons. “Gosh, I’ve never seen anything like these, have you? Oh, En. Hon.” She had pressed close, watching him pay, a little in awe of him, perhaps, and spared making her usual joke, “Buy it for me and I’ll be your best friend.” One day he would give the button to Penny, he decided, not that it would mean an awful lot.

  Though he asked anyone with a boat to continue keeping an eye out, nothing further was found. Una had left nothing to suggest she meant to leave them forever, to do such a thing as walk deliberately into the sea. Who knows but leaving home to get some air she hadn’t slipped from a rock, and before she could scramble back up and gain her footing, a wave hadn’t caught her and pulled her out. In that heavy coat she would not have had half a chance.

  Then, not long after burying the coat, opening the English Galaxy book, Enman stumbled upon and re-read that poem of Anne Boleyn’s.

  Oh Death, rock me asleep

  Bring me to quiet rest.

  Let pass my weary guiltless ghost

  Out of my careful breast.

  If not for Una’s beautiful signature inside the book, penned in her schoolteacher’s hand, he might have buried it, too.

  He struggled not to imagine her last breaths as she entered the ocean’s airless vault. For months, night after night, this image floated then beached itself in his dreams: his wife’s greyish face, still lovely though lost-looking and thin, a little choker of eelgrass around her neck and her blue eyes cold. A beachstone, perhaps, in each filmy pocket of the green dress he’d helped her pick out before he ever entertained the notion of moving them to Barrein and into Ma’s house. The dress’s bodice was girlishly modest and maybe this was a good thing, as the tides and the currents did their best to twist and tear it away.

  When Penny was older, much older, he decided, he might tell her about the dress, and even about the coat, though probably not. When she was ready, though, he would tell her, one day, how it was the worst thing to find and fall for someone who only pretended that you were their heart’s desire. Remember never to hide your true feelings, he would say, he promised himself. Don’t hide your true thoughts, especially from yourself. Remember, my duck. It’s what he would always call her. Because at four or five months of age, that’s what she reminded him of, a duck, the noises she made blowing spit bubbles. Those eyes, resolutely blue, gazing up at him. Tiny fingers wrapped around the bottle, tiny mouth sucking away on its kelp-coloured nipple like her life depended on it, which it did. One solid thing she had to hold onto.

  While she fed, that trusting infant gaze of hers had steadily warmed to him as she gave herself over completely to his care and to Hannah’s. Poor Hannah, who, unbeknownst to herself, kept them going. Even the day, not sixth months after Penny’s birth, when Win phoned while he was at work—Inkpens’ busy enough with repairing and an interest in building small, inshore craft—to say a letter had come. A letter for Una. From someplace in Ontario. It was odd for Win to call like that, since she preferred to avoid using the phone with Mrs. Finck there. By then, of course, the rumours were flying, because of Una’s disappearance. That she’d been a spy! And other rumours wilder than anything a dozen Wins and Iris Fincks could have concocted. But enough, sometimes, to make him wonder how he could have taken up with such a woman, and think he might’ve been better off had he chosen not to marry but to remain single, like some old priest, like Father Heaney in his big draughty glebe.

  That blustery autumn day, Hannah had bundled up the baby and gone to collect the letter. He found her at the kitchen table, scrutinizing the postmark through a magnifying glass, the one he used for reading extra-fine figures.

  “Es-pan-o—?”

  Then she looked at him palely, the colour draining from her face. “Who could be writin’ to Missus? Jesus—is it Jesus writin’ her, you think?”

  Enman drew in a breath. “What kind of a joke is that, now—?” He might’ve risen to it too, as arch as it was playful. He might’ve laughed. Instead, “Espanola,” he read out, as calm as could be, bouncing Penny, then depositing her into the girl’s arms. The name rang a bell. There had been mention of the place in the paper, maybe: a prisoner-of-war camp set up in an old pulp mill or factory, up there somewhere in Northern Ontario? Not a place you’d want to visit let alone stay—and he remembered that day in the car with Una, seeing those prisoners being marched across the railway tracks. The day the Prime Minister of Britain had promised everybody victory, victory for either side in any war a pyrrhic victory, Enman thought.

  The letter, written in pencil, had no date and no salutation besides “Hello.”

  I hope this finds you. You might not remember me, in Freundschaft I thank you that some Canadians are decent. My mother, father, and sister as you remember are no longer living. I did not mean to frighten you, what I said about whores in Berlin I ask you to forget. Here, is too much forest, more trees. In your countryside my men and I walked many miles through Gottverlassenen wilderness in search of Unterhaltung, amusement. We found Sehr schlecht alcohol. Violence broke out between my men, ein kampf. One became defunct, he would not have died had I commanded better. In war, far from home, this happens.

  It was signed, simply, Wilhelm Mohr, and on the back was drawn a map. It showed all the continents laid out crudely—rolled flat like pie dough, Hannah remarked—with dots marking, roughly, two distant points. One was the East Coast Port, it appeared, and the other was some place above the northern shoreline of a Great Lake, Lake Huron. “Weltkarte” had been pencilled below in the same hand.

  Map of the World, he guessed it meant, balling the letter up. Lifting a burner, he went to stuff it into the stove.

  “Shouldn’t do that, Mister. What if Missus comes back?”

  So he put the letter inside a ledger, one the bank had no need of seeing any time soon. Then he took the baby back into his arms and pressed his nose to her scalp, the triangular spot where the bones of her skull hadn’t yet fused. He hugged her as fiercely as you can hug a baby.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for something that’s not going to happen.”

  Nodding, she slouched over to the bottom drawer, the one for cake pans and muffin tins, which he avoided because these things reminded him so sharply of Una’s attempts at baking, and said, “I’m sorry too, Mister.” She dug out a clean diaper, wrapped around something.

  Ma’s figurine, the head snapped off in precisely the place he’d glued it last time

  “I didn’t mean to bust it. Cross my heart and hope—”

  “Oh, now. I’ve got just the stuff to fix ’er up—don’t worry.”

  It was Win who said he couldn’t and mustn’t keep things from Penny. Win who insisted that when Penny was old enough to get her period she should be old enough to know about her mother. This might have been Win simply breaking the ice before catching him off guard:

  “It was my mistake, see, taking up with Clinton. I don’t suppose, Enman, you and I are too old to reconsider?”

  Win had brought over a tall loaf of porridge bread fresh from the oven, and he’ll never forget how good it smelled cooling in his kitchen. Laying a dishtowel over it, she’d looked at him, suddenly all a-flush.

  Taken utterly by surprise, knocked off his pins, aghast, he had felt robbed of speech.

  “Let’s pretend you never said that.” He flung the loaf back into her empty pan. “Edwina. You go home now and tell Clinton to make you some toast and a pot of tea. Go on home and be good to him.”

  Enough charity, he almost said, we’ll make out on our own just fine, thanks. But watching Win flee with her offering, he guessed there was no need to.

  For charity began at home, everyone knew. Only after that, proper thing, should it be spread around. So when at last he could bring himself to go through Una’s clothes
—dresses still on their hangers, all but the green one she must have been wearing when she disappeared, tops, slacks, and undies stuffed into their drawers—he gave them to Isla’s daughter, who was about Una’s size. Once he got started, it wasn’t so hard unloading the rest: all Ma’s glad rags, which he fobbed off on poor old Iris Finck, not that she noticed.

  And dutifully he found the glue and reattached the Beautiful Mother’s head, broken off at the familiar faultline. Some day he’d see if they could mend it at Birks, have it professionally fixed, or else toss it. But at what point was a trinket worthless enough to throw out? When it no longer made him think of Ma, Una, and carols like “Silent Night” and Britten’s “There is No Rose of Such Virtue,” with their lyrics about a blessed virgin mother?

  26

  He hasn’t seen the Goodrows in years now, neither hide nor hair of either one, not since he and the girls left—seven years this summer, to be exact. Sometimes he misses having such close neighbours. He doesn’t suppose they’ve changed much, Win and Clinton, the way the food at Camille’s, this joint by the bridge, hasn’t.

  Sitting across from him, Penny waves her fork like a baton, like she’s conducting a symphony for the waitress’s benefit. Why is lunch taking so long?

  Enman gives her the eye. She’s always been a little impatient, precocious.

  “What, Dad—they had to go catch the fish? Go all the way out to sea?”

  All the way to sea, all the way to Barrein, he thinks. After the war, he’d been keen to get both girls moved and settled before Penny started school. Edgar Lohnes was looking for a house, his wife having a baby, so it was a no-brainer, in a way, selling off the old place to a ready buyer. It was just a house after all, just a building, just some wood, bricks, and fieldstones—though no amount of money could cover its worth. He still feels that way. But he doesn’t suppose, given how things have turned out, Ma would mind so much having the neighbours eating off her Royal Albert plates. Still, it wasn’t easy getting rid of everything—everything but a few keepsakes packed into a box placed on Beulah’s back seat for the drive, Ma’s figurine among them. It wasn’t easy leaving Barrein, even harder, maybe, for Hannah. But she’s made out all right since getting hired as a packer at Moir’s chocolate factory. The Beautiful Mother—he could almost laugh, and barely stifles a smile—hasn’t done nearly as well, having not made it as far as O’Leery, intact. It could survive a shipwreck, but not that road. One of these days he’ll get around to taking it to Birks, he will. Maybe.

  Penny’s fish arrives. Steam rises from the battered halibut as she squirts on ketchup, vinegar, pours on salt.

  “Whoa, there—that’s plenty, duck.” He says it just to bug her. Still, that much salt can’t be good for you. Is there a point with a child when you can quit repeating yourself, repeating things like a broken record?

  “Don’t forget your tartar sauce.”

  She pushes the tiny cup of it his way.

  “You’re as bad as your grandmother, salt on everything. She used to put it on salt cod, for Pete’s—”

  “Sheesh. That’s one of my favourite stories.” She doesn’t roll her eyes, the way he imagines a teenager would. He’s already said, too often, that for the longest time she reminded him of his mother.

  Watching Pen stripe each fry with ketchup, he searches for Ma’s reluctance in her smile. Of course it’s not there. It never has been. No matter what, though, he loves watching Pen eat, he can almost feel the fish flake between his molars. Her smile is as reserved and mysterious and, exactly in these ways, as resilient and half-cracked as the Beautiful Mother’s—the thought of which makes him smile. Again.

  “If it could survive a shipwreck, so can you,” he used to tell her as a baby, and he says it now.

  Her uncomprehending eyes are pools, reserves, of what happened before she came into the world and, perhaps—who knows?—what might go on happening after she leaves it. After they all leave it.

  It gives him pleasure watching her do almost anything, even certain activities that he expects she will complain about, with justification or not. Get ready, he’s heard, teenagers do a lot of this. But Pen’s thoughtful. Unhooking itself from the chair, his cane clatters to the linoleum. Penny retrieves and hooks it over the table’s edge. She’s always been good like this, a good kid, kind, even-tempered, except when she was three or four and would throw a fit if her socks didn’t match her skirt.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Win once sniped.

  “Don’t give me that,” was all he had said.

  She’s always been good with Hannah, Pen has. Patient. Sometimes too patient. As a tiny thing she’d take Hannah by the wrist and lead her around the yard. “This, Hannah, is larkspur—that is a delphinium.”

  “Well I seen it’s got a flower on it!”

  He still keeps a garden, though there’s not the time to give it the attention it needs. Arthritis in his knees now and the old damage to his shins means that for every day spent digging, the price is two days’ hobbling. But the soil’s better here in town, even if the neighbouring houses are so close they block the sun and limit his beds’ exposure. Too much shade is a small price for the advantages both girls would have missed, otherwise. It hasn’t been all bad, his accountant’s position at the bank, the best they could offer him—not too shabby a move, after Isaac Inkpen died and the boatyard closed. A little more luck and he’ll be done there before too much longer. Retirement, what a concept.

  “Remember to remember,” he hears himself say. “When something’s right, you just know, duck.”

  She has a slight sprinkling of acne, a few tiny pimples, probably from eating the seconds that Hannah brings home from her job. All three of them, him, Pen, and Hannah, are idjits for chocolate, just ask Hannah.

  Patting her stomach, his girl pushes her plate towards him. “Going once, going twice, Dad?”

  He allows himself a fry. Just one. Greasy stuff doesn’t agree with him, if it ever did.

  At the counter, customers who’ve been here all along—both of whom, he noticed when they arrived, have had too much to drink—argue over the bill. The waitress argues back, fed up, you can tell. Did he get this stroppy when he used to hit the bottle? He hopes not. Steering clear of the sauce hasn’t been easy. But doing so is the thing that relegates his worst sins to the past and keeps them there.

  “Aren’t you gonna have your drink, Pen?”

  On cue, she takes a big pink slurp of cream soda. It moves like mercury inside the straw. God, he thinks, Una and her temperature-taking, which he had happened upon a couple of times. The rigamarole, the performance. But it led to this, didn’t it, more or less? To this perfect girl. Once she gets her period, wait till then to tell her? Or that was Win Goodrow’s advice. So he may be jumping the gun, a little?

  Her round, bright eyes search his. “So what’s the big secret? You’ve got something to tell me?”

  Teenagers. They have the attention span of grasshoppers, he’s read—but maybe that’s a good thing? Or she could be like Ma, poor Ma, with her superstitions and practicality. But maybe we’re all like that, it strikes him. Silly and stalwart, impulsive and wise.

  There are so many ways to avoid being broken.

  There are so many ways to be. In Penny’s eyes he sees life’s possibilities. In her eyes, so straightforward and blue, are the world’s currents pooling as effortlessly as the ocean’s, swirls and stripes, striations, moving past the offing at each tide’s turn. Whether ebbing or flowing, it hardly matters. What matters are their ripples and ceaseless, shifting hues.

  Who knows but someday—while watching herself in the mirror, brushing her hair or putting on lipstick—she’ll glimpse all of this too and be reminded, somehow. That before she or anyone was born, something of herself and of everyone—though nothing you might put a finger on—was known to the world:

  The way we love, in spite of everythin
g. The way nothing is fair in love or in war, and yet we keep breathing.

  Ignoring the part about breathing, not having faith in it, shiza, we’re kitty litter, Hannah would say.

  “Okay, Dad. Didn’t you say there’s cake? And presents? And since you’re taking for-flipping-ever and not going to tell me this big scary thing—”

  Catching his eye, rid at last of those gnarly drunks, the waitress brings the bill. She’s set two pink Chicken Bones on top of it, which happen to be Hannah’s favourite candy.

  Presents, yes—lots of presents, he’s thinking. These include a bracelet similar to Penny’s for Hannah, hardly expensive but a token to even things out, not that this trinket with its tiny charms—a miniature book, sewing machine, and harmonica—begins to.

  He fingers the thing left wrapped in his hankie, the button as thin as a dime, best forgotten. Just wait till Pen sees the piano: the brand new, walnut-finished, apartment-size Heintzman, which, with any luck, Phinney’s has delivered in plenty of time to swap out the rental. Yet even as he thinks this he imagines her reaction, preparing for what might be a letdown, his.

  “My darling girl. If that’s what I said, that’s what I said. Sweetpea,” he calls her. Except for her eyes, she looks nothing like her mother. She looks nothing like his mother, nor does she look anything like him. It’s taken a long time to reconcile himself to this. Now he feels for the envelope in his jacket’s inner pocket, the envelope with its crumpled, one-page letter. The strange, solemn respect for Una it had imparted, eventually, once its chill and his numbness subsided. The respect of distance.

  Otherwise, he might’ve taken a cue from Iris Finck, poor dead Iris, steaming open envelopes, but gone further, held the letter in the steam from the kettle not to smooth but obliterate it, turn its paper and pencilled words to grey mush.