Exit Lines Page 6

  Plus Sylvia’s sharp tongue, not necessarily an advantage, although perhaps reserved for her mother. “I’m glad you came,” Sylvia tells her now, and having said it, finds that in its way, it could almost be true. Or at least that making the small effort to say so makes her feel warmish and semi-benevolent. “A cosy feet-up visit with a couple of glasses of wine, what could be nicer?” But she goes too far, that doesn’t sound like her at all. “I do enjoy an afternoon sip,” she adds.

  “I know.”

  What the hell does that mean? Sylvia is hardly a lush, so what’s Nancy’s problem?

  Nancy’s problem goes back years. For four decades she has cherished her great grievance, which by the way was really Sylvia’s, and moreover could have been, could still be, much, much worse—Nancy has no idea. As it is, Sylvia would wish to have raised a daughter who didn’t dwell, but it seems Nancy is addicted to dwelling. Permanently attached. Over time this must become deliberate and at this stage, Sylvia suspects, is even a kind of delight. Still, one of them has to try. “Now you’re here, I hope you can see the place is perfectly fine.” Perfectly is pushing it; relatively fine, better than lying helplessly alone in a big old house with broken arm, broken leg, broken hip—that kind of fine is what the Idyll Inn is.

  Or, all right, it’s also fairly fascinating, although how long this fascination can last is a question. But for the time being there are new voices and sounds and new people, a two-storey Petri dish of adjustments among the lame, the halt, the partly deaf, the half-blind, the liver-damaged, ovary-missing, joint-stiffened, determined veterans of decades of breathing: quite a crew. Every sag and wrinkle in the place a medal for some kind of valour.

  “The point is, you moved without even mentioning you were going to. You didn’t even ask what I thought. Or about the house, and everything in it.”

  “Well, it’s not as if you were ever going to come back here to live. And if you waited before you jumped to conclusions, I’d remind you the sale hasn’t closed yet, so you can still wander through the house to your heart’s content.” To do that, to be there again, with light glancing from window to sideboard to candlestick to bookcase to shining hardwood, to be home to the heart’s content—it’s no wonder George cries out and flails. “As to all our things, everything I need is here, and a lot of the rest is in storage, more than you could possibly want, from some really good furniture to boxes of books, and the bookcases, and your grandmothers’ china and silverware and most of the paintings and prints, and a carton or two of old photographs—all sorts of things. After you make your choices we can arrange to get rid of what’s left, but there’s time, I’ve paid storage for another couple of months. And look at it this way, I’ve put myself into storage as well, at no cost or trouble to you. I’m not a nitwit, I did think it through.”

  “All by yourself.”

  See? There she goes, dwelling. “Consider yourself lucky, then. Often enough it’s families that get stuck making decisions, so there are some very unhappy faces around the place—you met one at the front door—but mine’s not among them and yours shouldn’t be either. Really, think what I’ve saved us from.” She should leave it there, she should bite her tongue, but no. “Can’t you just say Thank you, Mother, and be pleased?”

  “Thank you?” Nancy has her own lines at her eyes and her mouth—medals for which acts of courage?—and the beginnings of puckerings down her throat. Sylvia remembers when that started happening to her own throat: a touch of despair and, yes, even horror to start with, then a brief, futile battle with creams and upward strokings of skin grown unfirm. Eventually acquiescence, because—what the hell. It happens. Does Nancy know that, that it happens and you might as well ride it? Nancy is leaning forward, hands tight on her crystal glass—Sylvia hopes she doesn’t break it, it’s one of the five remaining of the dozen that were a wedding gift to her and Jackson. “You didn’t think I should have something to say about you and my home?”

  Nancy hasn’t lived in this town since she was eighteen. In her subsequent thirty-five years, shouldn’t she have found another place to call home by now? “I knew you’d be interested, but think about it, what was there to say? I didn’t feel easy living alone after those falls, and I know you’d agree that moving in with you, or vice versa, would be considerably less than ideal. I thought of trying to find an unusually helpful tenant, but how likely would that be? And this place is new and clean and not unattractive, and there’s company, and help if I need it, and so—what more do you want of me? To talk? Go ahead then, say your piece if you must.” Sylvia crosses her arms. It crosses her mind, too, that that cry of What more do you want of me? is an old one. She relaxes her arms. “Nancy,” she says. “My dear.”

  A distinctly unlavish effort. Oh, to be like George Hammond, capable of weeping at the drop of a hat for love of his kind, unwilling daughter.

  What will Nancy see, going through the photos in storage? They gave Sylvia herself pause, contemplating the many gaps between then and now. There were she and Jackson, she in flaring-out skirt and twin-set, he loose-limbed in charcoal trousers, sky blue sweater over paler blue shirt, only its cuffs and collar visible. Both of them young and angular then. Both sizzling, too, never mind twin-sets and peeping-out collars. They were obviously not the only ones in town climbing zestfully into back seats, but they must have felt like the only ones.

  There is an album of wedding photographs. In the end, some things go better than, at certain points, could have been dreamed. Or deserved.

  There are golf tournaments and celebrations at the country club, a table for four very often when everyone was still young, all glasses raised and much tossed, buoyant hair and white teeth. Cigarettes between fingers—everyone smoked in those days. Bright lipstick stains on filters stubbed out in glass ashtrays.

  Barbecues and birthday parties at various homes, including their own, and Peter and Susan Walker’s. Children in the frames: first Annabel; two years later Nancy, in bare feet and playsuits, a jolly child showing off for the camera; a couple of years later Annabel’s brother, young Peter. How contained the dramas of those days, behind several sets of eyes giving nothing away. So many cameras over the years taking hundreds of photographs, and the striking thing about looking rapidly through so many is how lightly and easily important themes of the time flow through the fingers, while themes undiscerned then are obvious now. “You’ll never guess,” Sylvia blurts, because this has popped into her head in terms of Nancy the energetic, adorable child, not Nancy the cross grown-up in the easy chair facing her, “who’s managing this place.” A blunder as soon as it’s out of her mouth, so she hurries on. “Annabel Walker. You should say hello if we run into her while you’re here.”

  “Really?” The word is drawn-out and forbidding. “Are her parents here too?”

  “No. They both died. He had a heart attack, she had cancer. Breast, I think.” Ridiculous to go through this sort of alarmed conversational dance years after everyone’s emotions, except Nancy’s, apparently, were thoroughly settled.

  “I see. You never said.”

  “No, well, why would I?”

  Nancy looks down into her wine, looks back up. “Weird for Annabel to end up back here if her parents are gone. And running a—what’s it called?—retirement lodge.”

  “Yes, and I can tell you people are touchy if it’s confused with a nursing home. I don’t know why she’s come back. Her brother is off being an engineer someplace in Asia, I think. But some people do seem to want to return to where they began.”

  “I can’t imagine anything worse.”

  No doubt.

  Nancy sighs. “You’ll need to give me whatever authorization gets me into the storage place so I can get started on sorting. I don’t suppose there’s any furniture left in the house?”

  “Well, no. Because I wouldn’t be going back. And it needs to be empty on closing day.”

  “Then I’ll have to look around for a place to stay. Can you suggest a motel? Is the ABC still in
business?”

  Oh, that Nancy. She’s got far more of Sylvia in her than bones.

  “I have no idea,” Sylvia says curtly. “But I could scarcely recommend it anyway to someone as virtuous as yourself. I can, however, recommend you grow up and get over it. You can be very tiresome, Nancy.” What a shame. It’s all gone wrong. Again. Sylvia pushes herself to her feet. “We’re both too old for this. Let’s take a tour, so you can see that if nothing else, this place will do fine.” Both their wineglasses make discernible clicks on Sylvia’s coffee table. How much blood does Nancy want?

  Perhaps she wants something more tender, more, oh, maternal than a mere uncrossing of arms and that single dragged-out, dredged-up My dear.

  In the lounge, Greta and Ruth look up with interest from what appears to be another effort to cheer George. Greta’s effort, anyway, since it’s her hand on his knee. Ruth is in the soft nearby chair that’s become hers as long as there’s someone to help her out of it. By and large she strikes Sylvia as a person who observes closely and carefully, although not maliciously. It would be interesting to know what she watches for. “You must be Sylvia’s daughter,” Greta says. “You are the very image.”

  Indeed. “Yes, this is Nancy. I’m showing her around, trying to reassure her I was smart to move myself here.”

  “Oh yes,” says Ruth, “it’s quite pleasant so far. We’re just talking with George about how we should enjoy ourselves while the staff take all the cares and chores off our shoulders. And then too, your mother,” she advises Nancy, “encourages us to keep lively.”

  “I bet she does.”

  There’s a silence as they absorb the mystifying chill of that before Greta says, “It is nice you visit your mother. I have three daughters who were here to help me move in, and George’s daughter has been here twice from far away. She has left again today to go home, and we are reminding George that our children have their lives and we must get on with ours. Would you not say so, Sylvia?”

  She certainly would, and given Nancy’s mood, the sooner the better.

  Except that’s not the entire state of affairs. It’s also true that now and then, although usually not until nightfall, when there’s no seeing the river or skyline and even the best suite grows barren and cramped, good reason to pour a little more wine—at any rate, it’s true that now and then, including right now in full daylight, Sylvia’s spirits plunge downwards like stones from the sky. It’s hard to stay armoured. Love and history—even without looking too closely, those can be hard to bear. “George’s daughter,” she tells Nancy, “was pleased about her father moving here, especially since it’s new and in demand. She and her husband live out west, right, George?”

  “Umph,” he says sadly.

  “And,” Ruth pipes up, “since she’s a busy banker, it’s unusual she’s been able to get away as much as she has. How long will you be staying, Nancy?”

  “Only a couple of days, and I gather I have a lot of sorting to do. In fact, now I’ve seen around the place, Mother, I’ll be off. I’ll find a hotel and drop in here tomorrow, but if there’s as much to deal with as you say, I won’t have much time.” And off she marches. As stiff-necked as her mother ever has been.

  If imitation’s what it’s cracked up to be, there should be a way to feel honoured by that.

  Sylvia sighs. She rests a hand on George’s shoulder, which means he has her hand there, Greta’s hand on his knee, which is a great deal of attention and comfort for the one man among them, so she takes hers away so that he doesn’t grow spoiled. Perhaps he is already spoiled by women, perhaps that’s his problem. “Really, George, you must know we can’t rely on our children. Certainly not to make us happy. And it’s years since they’ve been around all the time anyway.”

  “Umph,” he says again. How determined he is to be downcast.

  Still, even when they’re gloomy, Sylvia doesn’t consider these unuseful companions. George keeps the fierce little ember of rebellion alight, however misguided his tactics. For her part, Ruth knows from her work a staggering and reassuring amount about truly bad mothers; although that’s balanced by the sterling Greta, whose daughters evidently care to such an extent that most evenings right after dinner, one or another calls to check how she’s doing, or she calls one or another of them. Presumably that is love, and presumably among mothers and daughters—among anyone—it must be a very nice thing to feel.

  9

  CARPE DIEM…

  SYLVIA HAS GIVEN uncountable dinner parties in her day, organized charity auctions, canvassed for political purposes, danced charmingly at the country club with total strangers, served at various times on the boards of the local art gallery, the theatre, the child welfare agency for which, as it happens, Ruth Friedman worked—an irony, perhaps, given the abuse Sylvia’s own daughter feels she has suffered. She has lived with a husband and daughter, then just a husband, and for the past three years as a widow in a large house alone. She has travelled with that husband to quite a few countries, visiting museums and cathedrals and hotels, and restaurants with unusual foods, although never, and this is too bad, to the many places on earth where the sights would have been radically foreign to her.

  Whatever else all that means, she has plenty of experience in adaptability and shifting gears. So Ruth, Greta and George are a breeze, all things considered—not particularly deferential, but with their own virtues; including a mutual determination, not by any means shared by all Idyll Inn residents, not to maunder on endlessly confiding their ailments. Also, they don’t really gossip much. Discretion is often underrated when it comes to companions, but not by Sylvia. Rummaging about in the nature of humans is a worthwhile endeavour, no doubt about that, and she’s acquainted with a fair number of residents and enjoys a good natter herself, but it’s…unnerving how much time some people can spend performing autopsies on the lives, real or fictional, of their fellow citizens.

  “He drank, you know,” someone in the lounge or dining room will remark. Or “She’d come into the hospital bruised up and down and swear she’d tripped and fallen downstairs.” To which someone else will point out, “She had all those children, though, one after the other. What was she to do?” “I don’t know, but if Bob had ever raised a hand to me, he’d have been a goner. And it’s no favour to the children—look at hers, two of them hellions who landed in jail.”

  It’s not so much the tales themselves, but the undertone of satisfaction at other people’s misfortunes—schadenfreude, one of the few foreign words Sylvia’s used that Greta has grasped. “A drug addict, you know,” a beamish Pauline Parker will announce with regard to someone else’s grandson. “Joined one of those cults, and no one sees him any more,” Jocelyn Reynolds will offer about another. In the telling their own offspring are, by contrast, professionally successful and personally triumphant. Rather like Greta’s librarian and soap-seller and druggist—never a mention of disappointments or failures.

  Well, people don’t become better humans for being old, and here, where idle hands may well be the devil’s workshop, it seems to Sylvia that a lot of decorative embellishment goes on well beyond the walls of the arts and crafts room.

  She herself knows all sorts of private stories, and Ruth must have some grim ones indeed. Greta, working in a drugstore, would have learned much about local lives—who used what sort of birth control, for instance, or dyed their hair, and who was prescribed antibiotics, and for what—and who’d have a clue what George knows but has doubtless forgotten? Imagine the stories that’ve been woven around Sylvia, and Jackson too, over the years; or what gets said about Nancy. Speaking of whom, “Nancy opened a bottle of wine but we didn’t make much of a dent in it, so why don’t I bring it down here? We could drink to our daughters, how about that, George?”

  “I shall help,” Greta offers, and off they go, and when they return Sylvia is clasping a corkscrew and two bottles—half a Riesling and a full Chardonnay—and Greta is holding four glasses. Greta pours—the good helper, as well as the one
with good hands.

  Sylvia raises her glass. “Right then, here’s to our offspring present and absent, and to that excellent advice to for heaven’s sake get on with our lives.” Immediately she feels she has misspoken, as she sometimes does, sounding as bitter and unpleasant as, oh, Nancy. She used to be, if not exactly merry, more amusing, wasn’t she? In old laughing country club photographs, did she not look genuinely lighthearted? Now there’s rust in her voice, and it seems to have spread, as rust will, to more significant parts, and when did that happen?

  “Yes, we don’t want to waste the time we still have.” Easy for Ruth to say, never mind the grim tone. She has no children to wound, or be wounded by.

  “Your daughter cares to come a long way for you, George,” Greta adds. “I think you must be content about that.” She means with that, but now and then these days her grasp of language takes minor slides. This could be worrisome. George has told her haltingly about his wife and her Alzheimer’s. “Alz,” he said. “Head,” tapping his own head with his right hand. “Not her fault.” Greta would not wish to be cruel, but she herself does not surrender willingly to her heart, and if George’s wife had similar fortitude, she would not have to give in to her brain. It is necessary to be determined. George used to know this. “So we have a toast to our children, but to ourselves also.”

  They don’t need to keep saying it over and over, bloody women. George’s eyes are as furious as his heart as he lashes out with his right arm and splash, there goes his wine flying over the table. Greta dodges back. Sylvia leans forward. Ruth watches. “Room,” he says. “Shut up,” he adds.