Dance of the Happy Shades

to be living here, this is going to be
my house
, so you better stop calling it the Mansion in that tone of voice.” She and I both looked up at the house with all its dark green awnings decorated with big, white, old-English Ms, and all the verandahs and the stained-glass window set in the side wall, like in a church. No sign of life, but upstairs old Mrs. MacQuarrie was lying, and is still, paralyzed down one side and not able to speak, Willa Montgomery tending her by day and Clare by night. Strange voices in the house upset her, and every time Clare took me in we could only whisper so she wouldn’t hear me and throw some kind of paralytic fit. After her long look Momma said, “It’s a funny thing but I can’t imagine your name MacQuarrie.”
    “I thought you were so fond of Clare.”
    “Well I am, but I just think of him coming to get you Saturday night, him coming to dinner Sunday night, I don’t think of you and him married.”
    “You wait and see what happens when the old lady passes on.”
    “Is that what he told you?”
    “It’s understood.”
    “Well imagine,” Momma said.
    “You don’t need to act like he’s doing me a favour because I can tell you there are plenty of people would consider it the other way round.”
    “Can’t I open my mouth without you taking offense?” said Momma mildly.
    Clare and I used to slip in the side door on Saturday nights and make coffee and something to eat in the high, old-fashioned kitchen, being as quiet and sneaky about it as two kids after school. Then we’d tiptoe up the back stairs to Clare’s room and turn on the television so she’d think he was by himself, watching that. If she called him I’d lie alone in the big bed watching the programme or looking at the old pictures onthe wall—him on the high-school hockey team playing goalie, Porky in her graduation outfit, him and Porky and friends I didn’t know on holidays. If she kept him a long time and I got bored I would get downstairs under cover of the television and have more coffee. (I never drank anything stronger, left that to Clare.) With just the kitchen light to see by I’d go into the dining room and pull out the drawers and look at her linen and open the china cabinet and the silver chest and feel like a thief. But I’d think, why shouldn’t I have the enjoyment of this and the name MacQuarrie since I wouldn’t have to do anything I’m not doing anyway? Clare said, “Marry me,” soon after we started going out together and I said, “Don’t bother me, I don’t want to think about getting married,” and he quit. When I brought it up myself, these years later, he seemed pleased. He said, “Well, there’s not many old buffaloes like me hear a pretty girl like you say she wants to marry them.” I thought, wait till I get married and go into King’s Department Store and send Hawes scurrying around waiting on me, the old horse’s neck. Wouldn’t I like to give him a bad time, but I’d restrain myself, out of good taste.
    “I’m going to take that postcard now and put it in my box,” I said to Momma. “And I can’t think of a better way for us to spend this afternoon than for us both to take naps.” I went upstairs and put on my dressing gown (Chinese-embroidered, and Clare’s present). I creamed my face and got out the box I keep postcards and letters and other mementoes in, and I put it with the Florida postcards from other years and some from Banff and Jasper and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. Then just idling away the time I looked at my school pictures and report cards and the programme for
H.M.S. Pinafore
, put on by the high school, in which I was the heroine, what’s-her-name, the captain’s daughter. I remember Clare meeting me on the street and congratulating me on my singing and how pretty I looked and me flirting with him a bit justbecause he seemed so old and safe and I would as soon flirt as turn around, I was so pleased with myself. Wouldn’t I have been surprised if I had seen all of what was going to happen? I hadn’t even met Ted Forgie, then.
    I knew his letter just from looking at the outside, and I never read it anymore, but just out of curiousity I opened it up and started off.
I
usually hate to write a typewritten letter because it lacks the personal touch but I am so worn out tonight with all the unfamiliar pressures here that I hope you will forgive me
. Typewritten or not it used to be that just looking at that letter I would get