The Love of a Good Woman

particularly so tonight.
    But Brian did not know that. Brian was still figuring out how to come to her rescue.
    “Pauline is gorgeous,” Brian said.
    “Yes indeed,” said his mother.
    “Maybe if she’d go to the hairdresser,” his father said. But Pauline’s long hair was such an old objection of his that it had become a family joke. Even Pauline laughed. She said, “I can’t afford to till we get the veranda roof fixed.” And Brian laughed boisterously, full of relief that she was able to take all this as a joke. It was what he had always told her to do.
    “Just kid him back,” he said. “It’s the only way to handle him.”
    “Yeah, well, if you’d got yourselves a decent house,” said his father. But this like Pauline’s hair was such a familiar sore point that it couldn’t rouse anybody. Brian and Pauline had bought a handsome house in bad repair on a street in Victoria where old mansions were being turned into ill-used apartment buildings. The house, the street, the messy old Garry oaks, the fact that no basement had been blasted out under the house, were all a horrorto Brian’s father. Brian usually agreed with him and tried to go him one further. If his father pointed at the house next door all crisscrossed with black fire escapes, and asked what kind of neighbors they had, Brian said, “Really poor people, Dad. Drug addicts.” And when his father wanted to know how it was heated, he’d said, “Coal furnace. Hardly any of them left these days, you can get coal really cheap. Of course it’s dirty and it kind of stinks.”
    So what his father said now about a decent house might be some kind of peace signal. Or could be taken so.
    Brian was an only son. He was a math teacher. His father was a civil engineer and part owner of a contracting company. If he had hoped that he would have a son who was an engineer and might come into the company, there was never any mention of it. Pauline had asked Brian whether he thought the carping about their house and her hair and the books she read might be a cover for this larger disappointment, but Brian had said, “Nope. In our family we complain about just whatever we want to complain about. We ain’t subtle, ma’am.”
    Pauline still wondered, when she heard his mother talking about how teachers ought to be the most honored people in the world and they did not get half the credit they deserved and that she didn’t know how Brian managed it, day after day. Then his father might say, “That’s right,” or, “I sure wouldn’t want to do it, I can tell you that. They couldn’t pay me to do it.”
    “Don’t worry Dad,” Brian would say. “They wouldn’t pay you much.”
    Brian in his everyday life was a much more dramatic person than Jeffrey. He dominated his classes by keeping up a parade of jokes and antics, extending the role that he had always played, Pauline believed, with his mother and father. He acted dumb, he bounced back from pretended humiliations, he traded insults. Hewas a bully in a good cause—a chivvying cheerful indestructible bully.
    “Your boy has certainly made his mark with us,” the principal said to Pauline. “He has not just survived, which is something in itself. He has made his mark.”
    Your boy.
    Brian called his students boneheads. His tone was affectionate, fatalistic. He said that his father was the King of the Philistines, a pure and natural barbarian. And that his mother was a dishrag, good-natured and worn out. But however he dismissed such people, he could not be long without them. He took his students on camping trips. And he could not imagine a summer without this shared holiday. He was mortally afraid, every year, that Pauline would refuse to go along. Or that, having agreed to go, she was going to be miserable, take offense at something his father said, complain about how much time she had to spend with his mother, sulk because there was no way they could do anything by themselves. She might decide to spend all day in their own cottage, reading and pretending to have a sunburn.
    All those things had happened, on previous holidays. But this year she was easing up. He told her he could see that, and he was grateful to her.
    “I know it’s an effort,” he said. “It’s different for me. They’re my parents and I’m used to not taking them seriously.”
    Pauline came from a family that took things so seriously that her parents had got a divorce. Her mother was now dead. She had a distant, though