A Fairly Good Time Page 5

  “I think I’d better tell him the truth before it gets any more complicated.”

  “No point,” said Mrs. Castle, calmly. “If you start on a long-winded story like you keep doing with me, he’ll just drop off to sleep. If you want to make him pay attention then write him a letter. That’s always a shock to a man. It seems like the last word. He can take it to the place, and have a good read, and think it over. In my experience, that’s effective provided you don’t try it too often. Keep your letter short. Only crazy women write long letters. Tell him the truth if it sounds realistic. Otherwise invent something better. You don’t have to go through life saying any daft-sounding thing just because it happens to be true. Keep it plausible but mostly keep it short.”

  “A party is plausible. He thinks we’re always drinking and racketing around.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Oh . . . Americans.”

  “I’m not American. To the best of my knowledge you weren’t born one. If you’re going to be that way, forgetting your heritage, I don’t want to hear any more. I guess he’d be against suicide because he’s a Catholic.”

  “It isn’t that so much. Philippe’s sick of my friends and their troubles. He thinks you should keep things to yourself, unless you can make them sound like sums. Philippe isn’t anything like Mother’s family. More the opposite, in fact. I’d sooner tell him I’d been to a party than looking after a friend. I do go out without him, sometimes. We suddenly started living that way, with my going to parties on my own, because he’d be working evenings or else be out of town on an assignment. Even when he’s here he won’t go anywhere if it’s a Saturday. But I think Saturday night is lonely just staying home. To tell you the truth, Philippe scares me. I’m scared to go to my mother-in-law’s now. When he’s with his sister and his mother I’m nervous all the time. I feel I’m being judged for things I don’t understand. If I understood what they were maybe I wouldn’t care.”

  “Has he ever laid a hand on you?” said Mrs. Castle. “Ever hit you?”

  “No. Oh, no. He’s nothing like that. But if you could see him with his sister you’d realize what I mean. Right from kindergarten they were told they were better than other people. We weren’t ever told anything one way or another, so I’ve got nothing to fall back on.”

  “You’ve messed up two marriages now,” said Mrs. Castle. “Why are you always in such a hurry to get married, I wonder? You seem to get married in a rush, then you rush the other way.”

  “Pete died, Mrs. Castle.”

  “So he did. Now his mother was American.”

  “He didn’t die of that,” said Shirley, seeing herself in miniature in the other woman’s glasses. “You get over things,” she muttered suddenly.

  “Married in a rush” seemed to Shirley wide of the mark. It had taken weeks to collect the documents needed for the marriage of a French citizen to a foreigner. She remembered, among a dozen stone-faced officials, a woman who seemed to have the power of life and death over Shirley, and how this woman had licked a stamp, placed it just so at the foot of a letter, initialed the stamp, sat down, typed three words, taking her time, before looking over the brown counter that separated her from pleas and petitions. “Why can’t you marry someone in your own country, miss?” she asked. “Aren’t there any men where you come from?” Fat toad in a greasy nylon smock . . . her nails were gray. When Philippe approached his own godfather to ask if he could use influence toward having the wedding speeded up, giving as a reason that Shirley was pregnant, his godfather answered, “She is certainly lying,” and did nothing. Then had come the warning letter from Shirley’s mother: “Remember that they are sacred in their own minds. God looks out for them. God interfered on their behalf through Joan of Arc. I have heard that she was really a man, or a lunatic, or a royal by-blow, but I’ve never read one word that put the divinity of her mission in any doubt. That nation is directly beholden to the Almighty, and direct lines are always dangerous. Anyway, dear girl, do THINK!”

  Shirley and Philippe read the letter together, laughed over it and one day were married in the mairie of the sixth arrondissement, not in a church. The next day they set off for Berlin in Philippe’s Deux-Chevaux. Philippe had an assignment there: “The Wall One Year Later: The Soundless Cry.” They had trouble crossing the East Zone because Philippe had to make frequent stops where no one was supposed to so that Shirley could get out and throw up. He noted all this, intending to weave it in as something both poignant and comic, but in the end found it was no use to him. He could not really describe a honeymoon where the wife was some twelve weeks pregnant, while referring to Shirley as someone easily carsick made her sound tiresome. In the end he eliminated Shirley altogether. In the long first-person account of the trip that appeared in Le Miroir it was clear that Philippe had traveled alone.

  “I was in a rush to get married because I thought he was sent from heaven,” Shirley said abruptly. “I thought he was too good for me, that I didn’t deserve him. I was twenty-five and all the men I knew were married or childish or neurotic or homosexual.”

  “Safe,” was Mrs. Castle’s comment, perhaps of the latter.

  “Oh, Mrs. Castle, it isn’t. What’s safe about it? Everything between two people is equivocal.”

  “Equivocal as you like, Shirl, but no morning sickness.”

  “Look at Prince Albert,” Shirley said. “Queen Victoria had nine children and she was sick with every one.”

  Expecting to be challenged or, at the very least, asked to deliver evidence, she began to prepare a case—the well-known but hushed-up affair of Baron Schwartz-Midland would do to begin with—but Mrs. Castle merely answered in her normal Western whine, “Your grandmother Woodstock had Prince Albert on a very old authentic milk jug. Stood in her kitchen at the end of a shelf. Always looked like it was going over the edge. You’d see celery in it. Parsley. That jug, which should be in your possession, is now in a museum in Buffalo. So much for our national treasures. For this reason I’ve brought you something. It belongs to me, but knowing how your family is, I feel if I don’t give you this you’ll never have anything.”

  One of her two guidebooks was what she meant. She pushed it across the table, opening it, as she did so, to the flyleaf. With sepia ink, in a lilliputian hand, someone had written:

  For the Fifth Birthday of

   Charlotte S. Mackie

  from

  Shirley Ann Horsburgh

   November 5th, 1873

  Beneath this, in a somewhat fresher color was:

  To Little Cathie Murray Pryor

  From Her Godmother

  Charlotte S. Woodstock

  Regina, July 2nd, 1892

  Then, with a biro pen, came Mrs. Castle’s long scrawl:

  For Shirley Norrington, souvenir of a meeting in Paris, this book comes back to by rights.

  Catherine M. Castle, Whitsunday 1963

  “Lots of women, eh?” said Mrs. Castle. “If I waited another ten years I’d be giving you a real antique—one hundred years old. But I can’t wait that long. I found this last winter when I was doing out the house before coming over here. I put a lot of stuff in storage. Anything my children couldn’t agree about—who was to have what, I mean—I just stored. They can fight after I’m dead. I told them that before I move into a small apartment and spend my old age babysitting . . .” She lost the thread of whatever she meant to say. “The book . . . I’ve got a sentimental attachment to it. But I figure you ought to have something from your own people, and knowing the Woodstocks like I do I think it’s all the heritage you’re likely to see. Don’t look so blank. Don’t any of these names mean anything to you? Why, Shirl, with the exception of my name, and your mother’s being skipped because she was overlooked, this is your female line. It sure shows it’s a man’s world. I’ll bet you know every surname on your father’s side!”

  “I know Woodstock—not that it means anything to me. Pryor, now . . . Look, there’s a Shirley! I was always told I was called
after a maid we had.”

  “Pryor’s me,” said Mrs. Castle. “I was Cat Pryor. Mackie’s your grandmother—her maiden name. I put you down as Norrington because I can’t keep track of you. You’ve been what? Higgins? Perrigny?” She pronounced the latter name with great sureness, with the accent on the second syllable. “Norrington was at least how you started off. Your grandmother wasn’t really my godmother. She was self-appointed. I was created, christened and confirmed an Anglican, and to your female family that was practically the pope’s pocket. A lot of them have got more respectable since, though. Your mother doesn’t believe in anything except reincarnation any more. That’s respectable. I mean, no one would attack it, though I’m darned if I want my soul to come back in any form but me. Me, Shirl—me all the way. I didn’t think that way before, but I advise it. When you get up in the morning say to yourself, ‘Me now, and I’ll see about the rest later.’ ”

  It was not a guidebook Mrs. Castle had given her but perhaps the very text Shirley’s grandmother had read to the unemployed: the price the poor had been obliged to pay for fried eggs in the Woodstocks’ kitchen.

  The Peep of Day

  or

  A Series

  of the

  EARLIEST RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION

  the

  Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving

  “I don’t mean you’ve got to read it,” said Mrs. Castle, sounding offended. “You can do that later. There can’t be anything there you don’t already know.” But Shirley was already immersed.

  How easy it would be to hurt your poor little body!

  If it were to fall into the fire, it would be burned up.

  If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run through your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out of the window, your neck would be broken. If you were not to eat food for a few days . . .

  “. . . in the train coming up from Rome I fell in with a French-Canadian,” said Mrs. Castle. “Nice boy, round your age, maybe younger. A lot younger most likely. Went to the diner with me. Drank white wine, said he was allergic to the red. Gives him a rash on the neck. Father a dentist. This boy kept running down his own family till I didn’t know where to look. Said they were vulgar. Well, I haven’t met them so I wouldn’t know. I told him there were vulgar people in Saskatchewan and any place else he cared to mention. He said, ‘Well perhaps you always were vulgar. We only became vulgar because of our contact with the English.’ ”

  “What English?” said Shirley, leaving Peep of Day with reluctance. “What did he mean?”

  Mrs. Castle shrugged. She began gathering together her notebook, her pen, her gloves. “He let me pay for his lunch,” she said.

  “Half the men I know are like that. Is that vulgar?”

  “Careless. It might have been all I had in the world.”

  “I suppose it was rude. Was it? I’m never sure what rude means.” She tried to see the train, the hand around the glass of wine.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Castle quite cheerfully. “From his point of view I think it was just sociable. He was trying to make the conversation interesting for me. Well, Shirl, you’ve got plenty to read now, so don’t let me keep you.”

  “Mrs. Castle—I’ve loved this. Aren’t we going to see each other again?”

  “There’s no real need, is there? I’ve had a good look at you and I’ll know what to tell your mother. We’ve been here, at Pons, which I was desiring to see. I’m going to Fontainebleau with a group from American Express this afternoon. I liked those éclairs.”

  “What are you going to say to Mother?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t put on tape for others to hear. That you’re thin as a rail and you seem to know a lot of people. You’re about like you always were, to tell you the truth. Reading instead of listening. Life isn’t books. Did you know you were born feet first? If we see each other again sometime I’ll tell you a lot that might interest you.”

  •

  On the street Shirley felt as if she were a stranger in Paris and that Mrs. Castle had been here all her life. She saw her heading purposefully for what certainly must be the right bus stop. Had they said good-bye? Mrs. Castle swung back and called, “What’d your Italian friend—Gina?—what’d she do it for?”

  “Renata—she’s not Italian.”

  “Never mind. Why’d she try the suicide? To see what comes next?”

  “Why, I think I told you, Mrs. Castle. She said she felt lonely, and she had a pain.”

  “Your mother had you without so much as an aspirin—feet first. Your husband is right. That girl is a pest. Keep away from her.”

  Under a shifting lace-pattern of leaves and sunlight, Mrs. Castle disappeared. Where she had been now stood a man carrying a folding chair. Shirley was myopic and accustomed to watching people vanish. She spoke confidently into the light and shadow: “Oh, Mrs. Castle, I left the house without any money this morning. I’ve got nothing on me, not even a bus ticket. Could you lend me something? I’ll bring it round to your hotel tomorrow.”

  “Now, that’s something I’d just never do,” came the prairie voice. “Couldn’t and wouldn’t. You’ve had your book, and you’ve had your breakfast, and that’s all I’m good for. Anyway, Shirl, your mother would be the first to remind you that a lady never needs anything. Never needs, never wants. Anyway, never asks.”

  4

  SHIRLEY never failed to expect her mother’s letters to contain magical solutions, and never failed to be disappointed. The correspondence between mother and daughter, Montreal and Paris, was an uninterrupted dialogue of the deaf. Shirley would beg for advice, only to be assured that her questions were unreadable; having solicited answers, she was afraid of what they might turn out to be, even though she envied the clairvoyance that must surely have inspired them. Sometimes she let the envelopes lie unopened for days, as though she feared that some form of unsatisfied justice might leap out of them and claw her to death. For that was the way she envisioned justice—a leopard in the dark. As for Mrs. Norrington, if she had chosen to ignore Shirley’s last letter on the pretext that it was scrawled in rune, that did not mean she had failed to grasp what it might be about or that she lacked an opinion. Shirley’s mother was one of a family of militant, university-trained prairie women. Long before Shirley was born she had published a thesis entitled “What Ruskin Missed,” which dealt not so much with Ruskin as with an insignificant aspect of the Italian Renaissance: all Ruskin had missed in life was one or two painters. (Years later Shirley came across her mother’s thesis field in a university library under “Scottish Chieftains” with “Gray Family” as a cross-reference, which did not displease Shirley, for it meant that only the most persevering and gifted students would trace their way back to the proper century.)

  Mrs. Norrington had emerged from her years of research far more affected by the lamentable story of Ruskin’s marriage than by the history of art, for which, in spite of herself, she felt much of the prim contempt of her part of the world. For some time now she had been accumulating material for a second work she intended to call “What Effie Didn’t Say.” This would be a pamphlet—Shirley saw it in stiff, olive green covers—and would deal with Effie Gray’s capacity for suffering and for forgiveness, with her sexual innocence, her long married virginity and the possible reasons for the final stroke of gumption. Time and passion moved in circles. Mrs. Norrington understood Effie, though an inborn prudence kept her from understanding Shirley. Now Effie and Shirley had somehow overlapped. Some seven months ago, in November, Mrs. Norrington’s birthday present to her daughter—a pillow stuffed with pine needles—had arrived with a message skewered to its iron heart: “Well, dear girl, you are now twenty-six, the age Effie Gray was when she finally got rid of that Ruskin.” It was not her mother’s innocent obscurity that Shirley
found dismaying, but the bland dialectic that led her to judge two men as one. In vain Shirley composed blotted, coffee-stained assurances that Philippe and Ruskin had nothing in common except the basic error-as-to-person that haunts every marriage. Mrs. Norrington continued to hint that although an unfulfilled union must be the most restful of all relationships, it had no spiritual merit if the husband were merely impotent or homosexual. No, it had to be more complicated still. An unshared religious vow would have received her approval even though she had often assured Shirley that she herself was and always would be “an extremely calm-minded agnostic.”

  I ought to stop bothering my mother, Shirley said, leaving Mrs. Castle with her principles and her independence at the right bus stop. She will never want to understand my handwriting. Why insist?

  She had nothing to look forward to now except a long walk home. She thought of taking a taxi to Philippe’s mother’s house and asking the driver to wait while she tore up several flights, rang a bell, was inspected through a peephole, and then breathlessly asked for money. The picture was so terrifying that she was thankful to be here, penniless, crossing the road and entering the light and shade of the Luxembourg Gardens. Today’s letter had at least assured her she might use a typewriter: it had been Mrs. Norrington’s habit until now to tear up, unread, any message not written by hand. Some sharp drifter, some cunning neighbor, had probably talked her into believing that the progress of mankind depended on those who still wrote with a ballpoint pen. This person had then produced a broken-down Remington and sold it to her at an exorbitant price. On such encounters were based, usually, her mother’s changes of heart.

  Here is the fountain next to which Geneviève memorized Goosey Gander, Geneviève’s green chair trustingly drawn up to Miss Thule’s, Geneviève’s bare knees against Miss Thule’s postwar utility skirt. Shirley selected a chair in the consecrated spot and opened her guidebook, her true Word from home, The Peep of Day. “Could your father die?” she read. “Oh yes; many little children have no father. I have heard of a little child whose father fell down from a high ladder, and was killed. Another child’s father was kicked by a horse, and died. Another father was digging a deep well, and his breath was stopped. Some children’s fathers fall sick, and die.” Shirley was pleased to be told something at last that seemed irrefutable. At her feet two children who did not appear to know each other crouched back to back drawing in the dust. She heard a whey-faced park mother asking in a sly whinny, “Are both of them yours?” Only then did she notice that one of the children was dark, perhaps North African. She shut the book, keeping a finger between the pages.