The Love of a Good Woman

supreme.
    • • •
    S O we come round to Mrs. B. again. In the present, Mrs. B.
    I came in last night at about ten o’clock. I’d been out at a meeting of the Historical Society, or at least at a meeting to try and organize one. Five people showed up and two of them walked with canes. When I opened the kitchen door I saw Mrs. B. framed in the doorway to the back hall—the hall that leads from the office to the washroom and the front part of the house. She had a covered basin in her hands. She was on her way to the washroom and she could have gone on, passing the kitchen as I came in. I would hardly have noticed her. But she stopped in her tracks and stood there, partly turned towards me; she made a grimace of dismay.
    Oh-oh. Caught out.
    Then she scurried away towards the toilet.
    This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away. Even the way she held the basin out so that I had to notice it. That was all deliberate.
    I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice in the office, talking to a patient. I had seen the office lights on anyway, I had seen the patient’s car parked outside. Nobody has to walk anymore.
    I took off my coat and went on upstairs. All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization. No
What is that you have in the basin, Mrs. B., oh what have you and my daddy been up to?
(Not that I ever called him my daddy.) I got busy at once rooting around in one of the boxes of books I still hadn’t unpacked. I was looking for the journals of Anna Jameson. I had promised them to the other person under seventy who had been at the meeting. A man who is a photographer and knows something about the history of Upper Canada. He would like to have been a history teacher but has a stammer which prevented him. He told me this in the half hour we stood out on the sidewalk talking instead of taking the more decisive step of going for coffee. As we said good night he told me thathe’d like to have asked me for coffee, but he had to get home and spell his wife because the baby had colic.
    I unpacked the whole box of books before I was through. It was like looking at relics from a bygone age. I looked through them till the patient was gone and my father had taken Mrs. B. home and had come upstairs and used the bathroom and gone to bed. I read here and there till I was so groggy I almost fell asleep on the floor.
    A T lunch today, then, my father finally said, “Who cares about the Turks anyway? Ancient history.”
    And I had to say, “I think I know what’s going on here.”
    His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse.
    “You do, do you? You think you know what?”
    I said, “I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.”
    “Is that so?”
    “I believe in abortion,” I said. “I believe it should be legal.”
    “I don’t want you to use that word again in this house,” my father said.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.”
    “You don’t understand what I’m saying.”
    “I understand that you’ve got too loose a tongue. You’ve got too loose a tongue and not enough sense. Too much education and not enough ordinary brains.”
    I still did not shut up. I said, “People must know.”
    “Must they? There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.”
    • • •
    W E have not spoken for the rest of the day. I cooked the usual roast for dinner and we ate it and did not speak. I don’t think he finds this difficult at all. Neither do I so far because everything seems so stupid and outrageous and I’m angry, but I won’t stay in this mood forever and I could find myself apologizing. (You may not be surprised to hear that.) It’s so obviously time that I got out of here.
    The young man last night told me that when he felt relaxed his stammer practically disappeared. Like when I’m talking to you, he said. I could probably make him fall in love with me, to a certain extent. I could do that just for recreation. That is the sort of life I could get into here.
    D EAR R. I haven’t gone, the Mini wasn’t fit for it. I took it in to be overhauled. Also the weather has changed, the wind has got into an autumn rampage scooping up the lake and battering the beach. It caught Mrs. Barrie on her own front steps—the wind did—and knocked her sideways and shattered her elbow. It’s her left elbow and she said