The Progress of Love

conspiracy, offering his halfway joke. It’s not meant as comfort, particularly. Yet it radiates—what he said, the way he said it, just the fact that he’s there again, radiates, expands the way some silliness can, when you’re very tired. In this way, when she was young, and high, a person or a moment could become a lily floating on the cloudy river water, perfect and familiar.

W HITE D UMP
I .
    “I don’t know what color,” says Denise, answering a question of Magda’s. “I don’t really remember any color in this house at all.”
    “Of course you don’t,” says Magda sympathetically. “There was no light in the house, so there was no color. There was no attempt. So dreary, I couldn’t believe.”
    As well as having the old, deep, light-denying veranda on the Log House torn down, Magda—to whom Denise’s father, Laurence, is now married—has put in skylights and painted some walls white, others yellow. She has hung up fabrics from Mexico and Morocco, and rugs from Quebec. Pine dressers and tables have replaced badly painted junk. There is a hot tub surrounded by windows and greenery, and a splendid kitchen. All this must have cost a lot of money. No doubt Laurence is rich enough now to manage it. He owns a small factory, near Ottawa, that manufactures plastics, specializing in window panels and lampshades that look like stained glass. The designs are pretty, the colors not too garish, and Magda has stuck a few of them around the Log House in inconspicuous places.
    Magda is an Englishwoman, not a Hungarian as her name might suggest. She used to be a dancer, then a dancing teacher. She is a short, thick-waisted woman, still graceful, with a smooth, pale neck and a lovely, floating crown of silver-gold hair. She is wearing a plain gray dress and a shawl of muted, flowery colors that is sometimes draped over the settee in her bedroom.
    “Magda is style through and through,” Denise said once, to her brother, Peter.
    “What’s wrong with that?” said Peter. He is a computer engineer in California and comes home perhaps once a year. He can’t understand why Denise is still so bound up with these people.
    “Nothing,” said Denise. “But you go to the Log House, and there is not even a jumble of scarves lying on an old chest. There is a calculated jumble. There is not a whisk or bowl hanging up in the kitchen that is not the most elegant whisk or bowl you could buy.”
    Peter looked at her and didn’t say anything. Denise said, “Okay.”
    Denise has driven up from Toronto, as she does once or twice every summer, to visit her father and her stepmother. Laurence and Magda spend the whole season here, and are talking of selling the house in Ottawa, of living here year-round. The three of them are sitting out on the brick patio that has replaced part of the veranda, one Sunday afternoon in late August. Magda’s ginger pots are full of late-blooming flowers—geraniums the only ones that Denise can name. They are drinking wine-and-soda—the real drinks will come out when the dinner guests arrive. So far, there have been no preposterous arguments. Driving up here, Denise determined there wouldn’t be. In the car, she played Mozart tapes to steady and encourage herself. She made resolves. So far, so good.
    Denise runs a Women’s Centre in Toronto. She gets beaten women into shelters, finds doctors and lawyers for them, goes after private and public money, makes speeches, holds meetings, deals with varied and sometimes dangerous mix-ups of life. She makes less money than a clerk in a government liquor store.
    Laurence has said that this is a typical pattern for a girl of affluent background.
    He has said that the Women’s Centre is a good idea for those who really need it. But he sometimes wonders.
    What does he sometimes wonder?
    Frankly, he sometimes wonders if some of those women—some of them—aren’t enjoying all the attention they are getting, claiming to be battered and raped, and so on.
    Laurence customarily lays the bait, Denise snaps it up. (Magda floats on top of these conversations, smiling at her flowers.)
    Taxpayers’ money. Helping those who won’t help themselves. Get rid of acid rain, we lose jobs; your unions would squawk.
    “They’re not my unions.”
    “If you vote New Democrat, they’re your unions. Who runs the New Democrats?”
    Denise can’t tell if he really believes what he says, or half believes it, or just feels compelled to say these things to her. She has