The Love of a Good Woman

the smell the next day would upset too many stomachs. All I was allowed to do in the end was throw out the
Reader’s Digests
and put out some copies of
Maclean’s
and
Chatelaine
and
Time
and
Saturday Night.
And then he mentioned there’d been complaints. People missed looking up the jokes they remembered in the
Reader’s Digests.
And some of them didn’t like modern writers. Like Pierre Berton.
    “Too bad,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that my voice was shaking.
    Then I tackled the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the files of patients who were long dead and if I could clear those files out I could fill it up with the files from the cardboard boxes, and move the whole thing back to the office where it belonged.
    Mrs. B. saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me.
    He said, “Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn’t.”
    R. The days you were here Mrs. B. was off for Christmas with her family. (She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema it seems for half his life, and no children, but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections.) I don’t think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me yesterday, “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” She’d seen of course that I wasn’t wearing my ring.
    “I imagine in Toronto,” I said.
    “I was up at my niece’s last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe and my niece said, ‘I wonder where them two are off to?’” This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me except when I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on, but there was a deep freeze on, if you remember, and we were just walking to get away from the house. No. We were getting outside so we could continue our fight, which could only be bottled up for so long.
    Mrs. B. started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married, or to work in war plants. When I was nine or ten and had been to some of my schoolfriends’ houses, I said to my father, “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them.”
    My father said, “You call Mrs. Barrie Mrs. Barrie. And if you don’t like to eat with her you can go and eat in the woodshed.”
    Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. Often she wouldn’t. But when she did, it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school.
    (Me) Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barrie.
    (Mrs. B.) Everyone in my family is got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That’s on my mother’s side. It stays black in their coffin. When my grandpa died they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other us says, “Let’s take a look see how he made it through the winter.” So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was looking fine with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. Black.
    I could even do the little laughs she does, little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation.
    By the time I met you I’d got sick of myself doing this.
    After Mrs. B. told me all that about her hair I met her one day coming out of the upstairs bathroom. She was hurrying to answer the phone, which I wasn’t allowed to answer. Her hair was bundled up in a towel and a dark trickle was running down the side of her face. A dark purplish trickle, and my thought was that she was bleeding.
    As if her blood could be eccentric and dark with malevolence as her nature sometimes seemed to be.
    “Your head’s bleeding,” I said, and she said, “Oh, get out of my road,” and scrambled past to get the phone. I went on into the bathroom and saw purple streaks in the basin and the hair dye on the shelf. Not a word was said about this, and she continued to talkabout how everybody on her mother’s side of the family had black hair in their coffins and she would, too.
    M Y father had an odd way of noticing me in those years. He might be passing through a room where I was, and he’d say as if he hadn’t seen me there,
    “The chief defect of Henry King,
Was chewing little bits of string—”
    And sometimes he’d speak to me in a theatrically