The Love of a Good Woman

dark-blue lace-collared crepe dress. She can’t stay still. She refills the serving plates and passes them around, deplores the fact that people’s tea may have got cold, hurries to make a fresh pot. Mindful of her guests’ comfort, asking after their rheumatism or minor ailments, smiling in the face of her tragedy, repeating over and over again that hers is a common loss, that she must not complain when so many others are in the same boat, that George would not want his friends to grieve but to be thankful that all together we have ended the war. All in a high and emphatic voice of cheerful reproof that people are used to from the Post Office. So that they are left with an uncertain feeling of perhaps having said the wrong thing, just as in the Post Office they may be made to understand that theirhandwriting cannot help but be a trial or their packages are done up sloppily.
    Ailsa is aware that her voice is too high and that she is smiling too much and that she has poured out tea for people who said they didn’t want any more. In the kitchen, while warming the teapot, she says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m all wound up.”
    The person she says this to is Dr. Shantz, her neighbor across the backyard.
    “It’ll soon be over,” he says. “Would you like a bromide?”
    His voice undergoes a change as the door from the dining room opens. The word “bromide” comes out firm and professional.
    Ailsa’s voice changes too, from forlorn to valiant. She says, “Oh, no thank you. I’ll just try and keep going on my own.”
    I ONA’S job is supposed to be to watch over their mother, to see that she doesn’t spill her tea—which she may do not out of clumsiness but forgetfulness—and that she is taken away if she starts to sniffle and cry. But in fact Mrs. Kirkham’s manners are gracious most of the time and she puts people at ease more readily than Ailsa does. For a quarter of an hour at a time she understands the situation—or she seems to—and she speaks bravely and cogently about how she will always miss her son but is grateful she still has her daughters: Ailsa so efficient and reliable, a wonder as she’s always been, and Iona the soul of kindness. She even remembers to speak of her new daughter-in-law but perhaps gives a hint of being out of line when she mentions what most women of her age don’t mention at a social gathering, and with men listening. Looking at Jill and me, she says, “And we all have a comfort to come.”
    Then passing from room to room or guest to guest, she forgets entirely, she looks around her own house and says, “Why are wehere? What a lot of people—what are we celebrating?” And catching on to the fact that it all has something to do with George, she says, “Is it George’s wedding?” Along with her up-to-date information she has lost some of her mild discretion. “It’s not your wedding, is it?” she says to Iona. “No. I didn’t think so. You never had a boyfriend, did you?” A let’s-face-facts, devil-take-the-hindmost note has come into her voice. When she spots Jill she laughs.
    “That’s not the bride, is it? Oh-oh. Now we understand.”
    But the truth comes back to her as suddenly as it went away.
    “Is there news?” she says. “News about George?” And it’s then that the weeping starts that Ailsa was afraid of.
    “Get her out of the way if she starts making a spectacle,” Ailsa had said.
    Iona isn’t able to get her mother out of the way—she has never been able to exert authority over anybody in her life—but Dr. Shantz’s wife catches the old woman’s arm.
    “George is dead?” says Mrs. Kirkham fearfully, and Mrs. Shantz says, “Yes he is. But you know his wife is having a baby.”
    Mrs. Kirkham leans against her; she crumples and says softly, “Could I have my tea?”
    E VERYWHERE my mother turns in that house, it seems she sees a picture of my father. The last and official one, of him in his uniform, sits on an embroidered runner on the closed sewing machine in the bay of the dining-room window. Iona puts flowers around it, but Ailsa took them away. She said it made him look too much like a Catholic saint. Hanging above the stairs there is one of him at six years old, out on the sidewalk, with his knee in his wagon, and in the room where Jill sleeps there’s one of him beside his bicycle, with his
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newspaper sack. Mrs. Kirkham’s roomhas the one of him dressed for the grade-eight operetta, with