Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

to make out her features or her expression.
    She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, “Alfrida was my birth mom.”
    Mawm. Mother.
    Then she told me, at not too great length, the story that she must have told often, because it was about an emphatic event in her life and an adventure she had embarked on alone. She had been adopted by a family in eastern Ontario; they were the only family she had ever known (“and I love them dearly”), and she had married and had her children, who were grown up before she got the urge to find out who her own mother was. It wasn’t too easy, because of the way records used to be kept, and the secrecy (“It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me”), but a few years ago she had tracked down Alfrida.
    “Just in time too,” she said. “I mean, it was time somebody came along to look after her. As much as I can.”
    I said, “I never knew.”
    “No. Those days, I don’t suppose too many did. They warn you, when you start out to do this, it could be a shock when you show up. Older people, it’s still heavy-duty. However. I don’t think she minded. Earlier on, maybe she would have.”
    There was some sense of triumph about her, which wasn’t hard to understand. If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power. In this case it was so complete that she felt a need to apologize.
    “Excuse me talking all about myself and not saying how sorry I am about your dad.”
    I thanked her.
    “You know Alfrida told me that your dad and her were walking home from school one day, this was in high school. They couldn’t walk all the way together because, you know, in those days, a boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible. So if he got out first he’d wait just where their road went off the main road, outside of town, and if she got out first she would do the same, wait for him. And one day they were walking together and they heard all the bells starting to ring and you know what that was? It was the end of the First World War.”
    I said that I had heard that story too.
    “Only I thought they were just children.”
    “Then how could they be coming home from high school, if they were just children?”
    I said that I had thought they were out playing in the fields. “They had my father’s dog with them. He was called Mack.”
    “Maybe they had the dog all right. Maybe he came to meet them. I wouldn’t think she’d get mixed up on what she was telling me. She was pretty good on remembering anything involved your dad.”
    Now I was aware of two things. First, that my father was born in 1902, and that Alfrida was close to the same age. So it was much more likely that they were walking home from high school than that they were playing in the fields, and it was odd that I had never thought of that before. Maybe they had said they were in the fields, that is, walking home across the fields. Maybe they had never said “playing.”
    Also, that the feeling of apology or friendliness, the harmless-ness that I had felt in this woman a little while before, was not there now.
    I said, “Things get changed around.”
    “That’s right,” the woman said. “People change things around. You want to know what Alfrida said about you?”
    Now. I knew it was coming now.
    “What?”
    “She said you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were.”
    I made myself keep looking into the dark face against the light.
    Smart, too smart, not smart enough.
    I said, “Is that all?”
    “She said you were kind of a cold fish. That’s her talking, not me. I haven’t got anything against you.”

    That Sunday, after the noon dinner at Alfrida’s, I set out to walk all the way back to my rooming house. If I walked both ways, I reckoned that I would have covered about ten miles, which ought to offset the effects of the meal I had eaten. I felt overfull, not just of food but of everything that I had seen and sensed in the apartment. The crowded, old-fashioned furnishings. Bill’s silences. Alfrida’s love, stubborn as sludge, and inappropriate, and hopeless—as far as I could see—on the grounds of age alone.
    After I had walked for a while, my stomach did not feel so heavy. I made a vow not to eat anything for the next twenty-four hours. I walked north and west, north and west, on the streets of the tidily rectangular small city. On