Friend of My Youth

to the Lions Club and asked them to help her, as they sometimes did help poor people in an emergency? No. No, she couldn’t. She did not believe that she and her children were poor in the way that people helped by the Lions Club werepoor. They lived in a large house. They were landlords, collecting rent from three small houses across the street. They still owned the lumberyard, though they were sometimes down to one employee. (Their mother liked to call herself Ma Fordyce, after a widow on a radio soap opera, Ma Perkins, who also owned a lumberyard.) They had not the leeway of people who were properly poor.
    What is harder for Joan to understand is why Morris himself has never done anything. Morris has plenty of money now. And it wouldn’t even be a question of money anymore. Morris pays his premiums on the government health-insurance plan, just the way everybody else does. He has what seem to Joan very right-wing notions about mollycoddling and individual responsibility and the impropriety of most taxes, but he pays. Wouldn’t it make sense to him to try to get something back? A neater job on the eyelid? One of those new, realistic artificial eyes, whose magic sensitivity enables them to move in unison with the other, real eye? All that would entail is a trip to a clinic, a bit of inconvenience, some fussing and fiddling.
    All it would entail is Morris’s admission that he’d like a change. That it isn’t shameful, to try to turn in the badge misfortune has hung on you.
    Their mother and her friend are drinking rum-and-Coke. There is a laxity in the house that might surprise most people Joan and Morris go to school with. Their mother smokes, and drinks rum-and-Coke on hot summer days, and she allows Morris to smoke and to drive the car by the time he’s twelve years old. (He doesn’t like rum.) Their mother doesn’t mention misfortune. She tells about the tramp and the rake, but Morris’s eye now might as well be some special decoration. She does give them the idea of being part of something special. Not because their grandfather started the lumberyard—she laughs at that, she says he was just a woodcutter who got lucky, and she herselfwas nobody, she came to town as a bank clerk—and not because of their large, cold, unmanageable house, but because of something private, enclosed, in their small family. It has to do with the way they joke, and talk about people. They have private names—their mother has made up most of them—for almost everybody in town. And she knows a lot of poetry, from school or somewhere. She will fix a couple of lines on somebody, summing them up in an absurd and unforgettable way. She looks out the window and says a bit of poetry and they know who has gone by. Sometimes she comes out with it as she stirs the porridge they eat now and then for supper as well as for breakfast, because it is cheap.
    Morris’s jokes are puns. He is dogged and sly-faced about this, and their mother pretends to be driven crazy. Once, she told him that if he didn’t stop she would empty the sugar bowl over his mashed potatoes. He didn’t, and she did.
    There is a smell in the Fordyce house, and it comes from the plaster and wallpaper in the rooms that have been shut off, and the dead birds in the unused chimneys, or the mice whose seed-like turds they find in the linen cupboard. The wooden doors in the archway between the dining room and living room are closed, and only the dining room is used. A cheap partition shuts off the side hall from the front hall. They don’t buy coal or repair the ailing furnace. They heat the rooms they live in with two stoves, burning ends from the lumberyard. None of this is important, none of their privations and difficulties and economies are important. What is important? Jokes and luck. They are lucky to be the products of a marriage whose happiness lasted for five years and proclaimed itself at parties and dances and on wonderful escapades. Reminders are all around—gramophone records, and fragile, shapeless dresses made of such materials as apricot georgette and emerald silk moiré, and a picnic hamper with a silver flask. Such happiness was not of the quiet kind; it entailed lots of drinking, and dressing up, with friends—mostly from other places, even from Toronto—who have now faded away, many ofthem, too, smitten by tragedy, the sudden poverty of those years, the complications.
    They hear the knocker banging on the front door, the way no caller with decent