The Love of a Good Woman

child. Sometimes Brian saysto her, “Oh, dry up, Mother.” His tone is mostly affectionate, but his father may ask him if that’s the way he thinks he can talk to his mother nowadays.
    “She doesn’t mind,” says Brian.
    “How do you know?” says his father.
    “Oh for Pete’s sake,” says his mother.
    P AULINE slides out of bed as soon as she’s awake every morning, slides out of reach of Brian’s long, sleepily searching arms and legs. What wakes her are the first squeaks and mutters of the baby, Mara, in the children’s room, then the creak of the crib as Mara—sixteen months old now, getting to the end of babyhood—pulls herself up to stand hanging on to the railing. She continues her soft amiable talk as Pauline lifts her out—Caitlin, nearly five, shifting about but not waking, in her nearby bed—and as she is carried into the kitchen to be changed, on the floor. Then she is settled into her stroller, with a biscuit and a bottle of apple juice, while Pauline gets into her sundress and sandals, goes to the bathroom, combs out her hair—all as quickly and quietly as possible. They leave the cottage; they head past some other cottages for the bumpy unpaved road that is still mostly in deep morning shadow, the floor of a tunnel under fir and cedar trees.
    The grandfather, also an early riser, sees them from the porch of his cottage, and Pauline sees him. But all that is necessary is a wave. He and Pauline never have much to say to each other (though sometimes there’s an affinity they feel, in the midst of some long-drawn-out antics of Brian’s or some apologetic but insistent fuss made by the grandmother; there’s an awareness of not looking at each other, lest their look should reveal a bleakness that would discredit others).
    On this holiday Pauline steals time to be by herself—beingwith Mara is still almost the same thing as being by herself. Early morning walks, the late-morning hour when she washes and hangs out the diapers. She could have had another hour or so in the afternoons, while Mara is napping. But Brian has fixed up a shelter on the beach, and he carries the playpen down every day, so that Mara can nap there and Pauline won’t have to absent herself. He says his parents may be offended if she’s always sneaking off. He agrees though that she does need some time to go over her lines for the play she’s going to be in, back in Victoria, this September.
    Pauline is not an actress. This is an amateur production, but she is not even an amateur actress. She didn’t try out for the role, though it happened that she had already read the play.
Eurydice
by Jean Anouilh. But then, Pauline has read all sorts of things.
    She was asked if she would like to be in this play by a man she met at a barbecue, in June. The people at the barbecue were mostly teachers and their wives or husbands—it was held at the house of the principal of the high school where Brian teaches. The woman who taught French was a widow—she had brought her grown son who was staying for the summer with her and working as a night clerk in a downtown hotel. She told everybody that he had got a job teaching at a college in western Washington State and would be going there in the fall.
    Jeffrey Toom was his name. “Without the B ,” he said, as if the staleness of the joke wounded him. It was a different name from his mother’s, because she had been widowed twice, and he was the son of her first husband. About the job he said, “No guarantee it’ll last, it’s a one-year appointment.”
    What was he going to teach?
    “Dram-ah,” he said, drawing the word out in a mocking way.
    He spoke of his present job disparagingly, as well.
    “It’s a pretty sordid place,” he said. “Maybe you heard—ahooker was killed there last winter. And then we get the usual losers checking in to OD or bump themselves off.”
    People did not quite know what to make of this way of talking and drifted away from him. Except for Pauline.
    “I’m thinking about putting on a play,” he said. “Would you like to be in it?” He asked her if she had ever heard of a play called
Eurydice.
    Pauline said, “You mean Anouilh’s?” and he was unflatteringly surprised. He immediately said he didn’t know if it would ever work out. “I just thought it might be interesting to see if you could do something different here in the land of Noel Coward.”
    Pauline did not remember when there had been a play by Noel Coward put on in Victoria,