Chapter Three

3

Anglican Cowgirls

KATHERINE & BEA & TILLIE

Katherine was pleased with herself and slightly surprised that she felt so comfortable wearing David’s suit. Self-assured, this must be how men felt, she thought, controlled and controlling, having figured out how to cinch the waistcoat tight. David had not yet emptied out his side of the bedroom closet, which Katherine took with crossed fingers as a hopeful sign, and there it was, a blue, almost black cloth with a pale pin-stripe, his funeral suit, his unavoidable-occasion suit, he called it. Her hips held up the trousers. When she slipped her arms into the jacket, the sleeves only a trifle long, she half expected revelation of some sort, a sudden understanding of futures trading, perhaps, the real purpose of a carburetor, but instead her body heated with a lavish sexiness that almost spoiled the crease. Her anger that this secret had been withheld from her, that men hid this pleasure and passed it from father to son, called for another drink. She found David’s favourite tie on the back of the closet door and finally worked out a reasonable knot. She downed the last of the vodka and tonic, satisfied that she had solved the mystery of male confidence.

Pulling open the restaurant door, Katherine was exhilarated and, she believed, sober. A slight wobble, when the door offered less resistance than expected, she blamed on her badly-cobbled boot heel. Swinging from her shoulder, a large deerskin bag carbuncled with brooches urged a path through a milling queue of shorter people in shoes.

Hooker, thought the hostess, a pretty brown woman dressed in sharp lime polyester and a headband of tissue pumpkins around a cardboard turkey. Dyke, for sure, but only a hooker’d have the nerve. “Sorry, diningroom’s full. There’s room at the counter.” She begged herself not to say Sir. She’d been insubordinate about having to wear the headband, she couldn’t afford a scene.

“S’all right, I’m meeting friends.” Katherine’s scanning eyes found them, dropped for a moment, and focussed on the headband. She patted her own treacherous hair, bagged and pinned into a soft beret of black and gold threads, and smiled, “I like your turkey.” She strode between tables unaware of the flaming eyes on her back, but feeling a sudden tension at the base of her skull, blamed it on her mother smiling anxiously from a chair beside the flapping kitchen door. Katherine patted her bag for the bottle of pain-killers.

“Hi! I’m late. Here long? Hello, Mother.” To avoid her mother’s stare, which had flown up a trouser leg and fixed at the second waistcoat button, Katherine circled behind, trailing her fingers across her mother’s cardiganed shoulders. Feeling a muscle flinch, she paused to pick invisible lint from the sweater and brush it to the floor. “Hi, Gran!” She reached her grandmother, bent to hug her gently and kissed at her crown of white curls, careful not to disturb it. “Good to see you. Nice dress.”

“Thank you, Katherine.” Tillie Sutherland patted her plum silk bodice in the timid manner of old ladies, disguising the straightening of a fine cameo in heavy gold. “We’ve just settled.” Her lips twitched as she darted a glance at Beatrice whose fixed stare had turned into a frown of distaste. “You’re looking well,” Tillie said, turning her head to watch Katherine sit, and hearing a disgusted intake of breath, continued, “Your mother was late.”

“You weren’t even dressed!” Beatrice McAlpine lurched forward in her chair. Sideswiped in her displeasure, it took her a moment of concentrated breathing to switch back from her mother to her daughter, “Katherine, why on earth are you wear…”

“You’ve never been late that I recall.” Tillie interrupted with her eyes on the ceiling.

“I didn’t expect the roads to be so busy!” Beatrice snapped. “That’s a suit! A man’s…”

“It is busy. Did you have to wait for a table?” Katherine looked briskly around the restaurant and pointedly at the doors to the noisy kitchen beyond her mother’s shoulder, “This table?”

“No, not long, dear. I leaned on this,” Tillie patted the curve of a malacca cane hooked over the arm of her chair, “and gave that girl my lady-on-a-stick look. She’s a sweet thing, but have you ever seen such a get-up as she’s got on?” With a toss of her lean head, Tillie indicated the hostess busily dealing out napkins and forks in the wake of a busboy at an adjacent table.

“Shush, Mother! She’ll hear you. It’s a uniform! She can’t help what she has to…” Trying to keep her voice from rising with her blood pressure, Beatrice fairly whistled with exasperation, “Why are you wearing that suit?”

“We having a drink first?” Katherine’s arm rose, “Which one’s our waitress?”

“Oh, Katherine!” Beatrice’s mouth trembled, “It’s only noon, you don’t need…”

“Look, Mother!” The arm waved, four brass bangles escaped the sleeve and clashed. Katherine planted both elbows on the table and finally focussed on her mother’s face, ignoring a tear starting in the corner of one eye, “It has already been a long day. A long, long day. Yes, it’s a suit. David’s suit. I knew you wouldn’t like it. I felt like wearing it. I like wearing it. I feel good in it. And I need to feel good because I’ve had a miserable, lousy, rotten day since I opened my eyes this morning. You don’t…” Her determination failed and she sagged to the back of her chair, “You don’t know…” She was thinking they didn’t know what it cost to be like her, “Tea for you, Gran? Are you coming tonight, Mother?”

“Yes, surely, dear, with lemon, please.” Tillie fiddled with her knife, “Stainless steel! They used to have silver here.”

“Times change, Mother.” Beatrice reached and pressed Tillie’s knife to the tablecloth, “It’s likely the dishwashers. No, Katherine, I don’t think we’ll be able to come.”

“Tea with lemon, a vodka and tonic with lime, please, and…” Watching for her mother’s response, Katherine didn’t notice that the hostess had answered her call, “…don’t you want anything, Mother?” The hostess wasn’t so sure of her first impression, maybe hooker was too precise.

“D’you mean they’ve stolen it all?” Tillie resented her daughter’s maternal fingers on her knife.

“No, Mother! The automatic washers are hard on the… Oh, for pete’s sake!” Beatrice held her chin with her breath and blinked hard.

“Make that a double vodka, please,” Katherine pressed fingers to the base of her skull, “Could I have some water right now.” She noticed the headband again and smiled.

Beatrice sighed a long-suffering little headshake at the hostess and unpursed her lips, “Maybe I will have a little something. Do you have an old-fashioned? I’ll have one of those, please.” And before the hostess could leave the table, “Do you need the ladies’ room, Mother?”

“Most certainly not!”

“Are you sure you can’t come tonight?”

“Why d’you always wear that ratty old cardigan?”

“I don’t always! No, Katherine. I mean yes, I’m sure we can’t. It’s not old, Mother, I bought it last spring, it’s…”

“All pilled at the elbows.”

The hostess went to the bar for the drinks and told the section waitress in passing, to leave the trio to her, “Social studies,” she said, “You can have the tip. I just want to listen. But don’t count on a trip to Jamaica, they don’t look like Dallas to me.” She told the busboy to take water to the table.

“But it’s the Imperial Trust, Mother! I’m hanging in the new foyer, I will be tonight, where you come in off the street, three stories, marble and glass and me on the wall!” Katherine pulled the deerskin bag to her lap and rummaged to the bottom for pills.

“I know what a foyer is.” Beatrice waggled a half-yard of plasticized card, “Here, Mother, look at the menu,” and watched her daughter uncap and roll out two white codeine tablets onto the tablecloth, “Have they paid you yet? Martin handling it for you?”

“Unhuh, he knows… Thank you.” She ran her eyes up the busboy who set the full water glass in front of her, nice body, bad skin, and swallowed her pills. “Martin knows the woman who’s acquisition committee Chair-whatever, lady, probably. She’s a family friend. The Board of Directors has to see it yet, that’s what tonight’s for. Just a formality, though, Martin says she’s the boss. Somebody’s wife. You sure you…” Katherine tilted back her head and exercised her jaw against the loosening knot of pain behind her ears, “…can’t come?”

“Yes. Well make sure they pay you, dear.” Beatrice cast an eye at Tillie, “Know what you want yet, Mother?” and turned with a pucker back to her daughter, “Have to get her back and see to things, you know. She’s lost the hydro bill somewhere and I…”

“Not the hydro bill, the phone bill! And it’s not lost, I just mislaid it.” Tillie glared at her daughter and closed the menu. “Treats me like a fool, Katherine. She talks as if my mind’s gone, let alone going, trying to hurry it. Thinks she’s finally going to get some decent jewellery.” Tillie again patted the cameo on her breast, “I expect to be buried with this,” and gave Beatrice a smile of benign malice, “Your picture, Katherine, have I seen it? Is it nice?”

“No, you haven’t, Gran, it’s way too big for my workroom, twelve by sixteen, biggest thing I’ve ever done, had to do it in the studio at school. But I think you’d like it, you’ve seen the little ones, the smaller versions, the rocks, abstractions, but not quite. You know the ones. Colour studies, in a way, mass and matter studies, I’m trying to get the weight without piling up the paint, density with just a skin. You know? I look at a rock and there’s the skin, the surface, hard and tight, but for all I know, all my eyes know, anyway, it could be hollow, eh. And I don’t know it isn’t unless I try to pick it up, or rap on it, or somebody tells me, and even then how do I know unless I cut it in half?” Katherine’s absorption was turned wide-eyed upon her grandmother, “A painting you can only touch with your eyes, so it is just a skin. Maybe rocks are like this, if we don’t touch them,” she described tissue thinness with thumb and forefinger, “Only yay thick. Or maybe they’re weightless till you try to pick them up, and then they dig their toes in.”

Tillie approved of her granddaughter, she wasn’t frightened of her, as Beatrice was, though she was often mystified. Why the suit, for instance? Why was Katherine wearing David’s clothes, not just a shirt or a pair of sneakers, but an entire suit of clothes, an entire personality? A personality not hers but David’s, or was it also hers? Of course, the suit had been guaranteed to throw Bea into a swivet, Katherine had known perfectly well there’d be a scene, but Katherine was not merely malicious, she wasn’t only cruel. Tillie knew that there had to be at least one more reason for the suit. Perhaps the fact that it was David’s? “This reception business tonight, will David be with you, dear?” Watching Katherine’s eyes, Tillie thought she detected a dimming, a falter in the shine. She listened for doubt.

“Of course! Yes, of course, David’ll be there. We’re having dinner together with Martin first at my… our place, David’s cooking. I don’t know what. And then we’ll go from there. David’ll be there for sure. I really wish you could come, Gran.”

Tillie heard what she was listening for. There was panic behind the pin-stripes, perhaps she ought to go, perhaps she and Bea should be on hand for what was, after all, surely, quite a triumph, a picture hanging in a city bank. Bea mightn’t have any sympathy for her daughter’s painting, but she certainly admired banks, if anything, Bea had far too much respect for money. “And will it be a large crowd, d’you think? A formal crowd? A lot of money and clothes?” Oh dear, shouldn’t have said that, Tillie thought, Bea was intimidated by other people’s clothes.

“I don’t know. A lot, I suppose. Of people. It’s the first show for the bank’s new decorating job, too, you see, not just me. But it’s not formal, Martin showed me one of the invitations and it said informal. Although god knows what informal means to these people – tennis whites? smoking jackets? I don’t know who they are. Oh God!” Katherine wilted again, “I’m not going to know anybody.”

Tillie knew who they were, and she knew how badly dressed they could be when allowed out of their formal uniforms. The men weren’t so bad, out of one suit, they simply wore another, another kind of tie; it was the women, allowed out of their giving or receiving clothes, they didn’t know a hem from a gusset. “Perhaps,” she said with a confidential elbow in her granddaughter’s direction, “perhaps just this once we should come along.”

“No!” Beatrice was still fuming over that remark about decent jewellery, as if she’d ever asked for, ever wanted that ugly old-fashioned brooch anyway! Fuming and hurt, she had perfectly nice things of her own! “I’m not taking you anywhere.” She was sorry she’d brought her here. I mean it’s best, she thought, to ignore Katherine when she gets talking about paint and things, it doesn’t make any sense, all that about rocks having skins, it’s silly. She hoped nobody else had heard, and peeked from the corners of her eyes at the other tables and saw the hostess weaving towards them with a tray in hand. I mean, it’s bad enough having a daughter show up for lunch in a suit and drink and talk like a… What? Like a drug addict, maybe, or a retarded person. I wonder if those really are 222s she takes? But Mother! Mother pretending she understands every word when she doesn’t know a picture from a postcard, and asking about people’s clothes, being mean about people’s clothes, and thinking she’s going to get me to take her to this business tonight – Well, she’s crazy. “No! It’s not possible, Mother. Now here’s your tea coming. D’you want a pork chop? Some chicken? It looks nice.”

Katherine accepted her drink with a nod and drank thirstily, “Would you bring me another one of these, please, when you come back. I haven’t even looked at the menu yet.”

“Katherine, don’t be silly!” Beatrice frowned disagreement and shook her head no at the hostess, “Have something to eat. Don’t keep the waitress standing around, order something. Mother, the chicken looks…”

“I’ll have an omelet and…”

“Mother! You don’t like eggs, for crying out loud! Have the chicken, or a por…”

“I know what I don’t like.” Tillie’s eyes flashed reproof at her daughter. “And I still have my teeth.” She turned calmly to the hostess, “I’ll have a little piece of rare roast beef, please, and some french-fried potatoes, with gravy on them, if I may. And I’ve changed my mind, young lady,” Tillie smoothly slid her cup and saucer to the centre of the table, “Would you bring me one of those nice whiskey-sour drinks that you have here. Do you still? Please. Leave the tea. I can at least drink a toast to my granddaughter’s triumph, eh?” And with an arching turn, she spoke distantly to Bea, “Someone ought to show a little appreciation.”

“Mother!” Bea’s voice cracked, “Katheri… oh… The chicken, please… mashed… oh, I need the Ladies… Excuse…” Her hands fluttering about her face, Beatrice made a dash for the washroom.

Tillie allowed herself to lean gracefully on the arm of her chair and smile after her daughter with grim affection, “We’re a sorry pair, Katherine, you and I.”

Unfolding her lips, Katherine said, “She does it to herself.” And thought, Damn her! She’s going to do that when I tell her about David.

It’s not meanness, Tillie thought, and with a gentle nodding turned to study her granddaughter. Exasperated, but not mean, either of us, not yet. She has big hands, uses them like flags. Bea sits on hers. Mine… Mine were as big, before they dried up. What did I ever do with them? Hold a man? Oh, dry up! Bea’s catechism – Why don’t you just dry up? The skin goes first and she thinks the mind goes with it. Dry up! Okay, I used them to make jelly. “Oh yes, Bea pushes and we pull, she does it to herself. It seems you and I are always going the other way and she gets caught with her head in the fence. She’s ornery that way.” Tillie sipped a full breath, “You know I’m not going to be around for ever, and…”

“Ahh, Gran!”

“Never mind the testimonials, I’m not. And then what are you going to do when there’s only the two of you? She won’t fight, you know, she’ll say black is white instead. Are you going to pick each other off the fence? She wants to be nice, Katherine, you’re going to have to give her a hand. I don’t want to die before she says what she means.”

“I should go see she’s all right.”

“Oh, give her a minute to fix her face.” Tillie paused, “Even when your father left, she couldn’t be mad enough to tell that Bessie Everett what a mean piece of goods she was.”

“Bessie… what goods? What’re you talking about, Gran? What’s it got to do with my father? Bessie Ever… who?”

“Everett. No, now there I go. It’s your mother’s business. Forget I said it.”

Katherine’s eyebrows and voice rose with indignant humour, “You old…” she laughed, “gossip! Don’t you dare try to weasel your way out of what you just said! Who was Bessie Everett and what’s she got to do with my father?”

“No, now…” Tillie patted the air above the table, “We’d all be best to mind our own business.” She wanted the idea to have time to set.

“Gran!” Katherine was getting annoyed, “You know she won’t tell anything. They got married. I was born. He left. That’s it! No details, no reason, nothing!” A thought occurred to her, “I guess it must be my fault,” she said in a dying voice.

“Don’t be cunning, it makes your lips wrinkle. Here come our drinks. You make sure you have something to eat. Why don’t you go and get your mother? Be nice.” Tillie sat erect as the hostess reached the table, and spoke again as Katherine rose from her chair, “Tell her I said her nice chicken’ll be cold.”

KATHERINE & BEA

When Katherine followed her mother into the restaurant washroom, she made straight for the mirror wall above the basins and peered at the high line of her brow. Her tickling hairline felt like bugs, but she saw a glisten of sweat and patted that and tucked some escaped hairs back under her beret with a fingernail. One hair, possibly white, or was it the light? She set her teeth and pulled. “Mother?”

“Here, Katherine.” Bea’s small voice dingged around a steel-walled cubicle. “I’ll be right out.”

Katherine began rooting through her bag, pulling out eye-liner, some lip rouge, setting them on the tiled ledge before her reflection. “Mother…” she found a mean, black-bristled hairbrush and began tugging out dead hair, “…are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” A flushing, a minor struggle with the latch, and Beatrice emerged, tucking her waistband and smoothing her skirt, “Let’s forget about it.” She could see the line of her daughter’s jaw from the nape to the chin reflected in the glass. A fragile and demanding line, she thought. Had always thought.

“Mother…” Katherine’s chin rose in the glass to follow her mother’s approach behind her, “…who’s Bessie Everett?”

Beatrice held her breath and fingered the little round collar of her blouse, aware suddenly that Katherine, like Tillie, displayed her throat, called attention to it. They wear ties and brooches, pins and fancy collars and scarves and things like that… Beatrice pinched the loose skin that she kept hidden with her chin. They wave their necks, wag their wattles at the world… “Oh!” she gasped a breath, panic was making her silly. What was it that was wrong? “My purse! I’ve left my purse out there. Do you think it’s all right? I left it under my chair.” Her reflection bit its lips and patted at its hair. “Mother can’t be trusted to watch… you can’t expect her to notice… she’s so… Did she… D’you have a comb?”

“Oh, Lord!”Her fists pressed to the rim of a basin, Katherine bumped her forehead against the mirror, and her rage, ebbing down past a hysterical bubble laughing in her throat, came to rest in her belly, and burned.

“I need a comb, look at my hair.” Avoiding the spectacle in the mirror, Bea’s glance fell upon the hairbrush tumbled into the basin between Katherine’s rigid arms, “Is that all you’ve got?” She winced at the matted bristles, “My hair’s too fine for that.”

“Mother!”

“Really, you shouldn’t use that. It’s what’s so hard on your…”

“Bessie Everett.” A hissing sound.

“…hair.” Beatrice feared contempt could crush her collapsing into misery and tears. Here, here in a public washroom where anybody could walk in any minute and see her dissolved in frumpy tears… “She told you. That old… woman. She told you.”

“She didn’t tell me anything. She pretended it was an accident, her senile slip showing. It’s such a routine. She said it’s about… my Dad.” Solemnity fell about Katherine like a garment, “I have a right to know about it, Mother.”

Beatrice was rapidly losing ground, “An accident? You weren’t an accident.” She dug into her waistband and thumbed up her slip, “You know quite enough, all there is to know. That’s all in the past. It’s nothing. We’d better get out there before my purse gets walked off with,” and she turned for the door.

“Mother, David’s leaving.” Katherine spoke in a flat rush.

Beatrice stopped and trembled as a goose walked her grave, “Oh. Where? His job, do you mean?”

“ME! For Christ’s sake, he’s leaving me!” Hurt and fury fought a sob.

Beatrice hovered, one foot on its heel, unable to turn back, unwilling to go on, “Oh. …What have you been doing, that he’s decided to leave?”

“ME! I haven’t done…” Katherine stopped in astonishment and stared at her mother. I could kill her. Right here. I could drown her in the toilet. Bang her head with the seat and put the lid down. I could. “I want to know about my father and about this woman. And what do you mean, I wasn’t an accident?”

Something fell loose in Beatrice, perhaps the thought of her mother’s ‘accident’ allowed her to turn around and see her daughter standing in a man’s suit, David’s suit, her son-in-law’s suit; her daughter’s throat standing on a knot of striped silk rep in the ladies washroom. In Fran’s. “You were no accident.” She watched a vein in Katherine’s temple and thought it badly knotted, “She told people… Bessie Everett told people that I tricked your father into marrying me, that he didn’t want to, but that I tricked him and that was why he ran away as soon as my back was turned. When you were born.” Beatrice pinched her lip with her teeth and let it go, “You were a little early, is all.”

“You mean… Oh, God!” Katherine felt like a criminal, like a murderous, blundering fool, a mean and nasty bitch. She felt like… “Bastard!” she whispered.

“No! We were married.” Beatrice understood her daughter’s irritated headshake, “Oh, no, he wasn’t, no.” Curling and uncurling the fingers of each hand, her arms locked down her sides, Beatrice realized that she understood nothing of what was happening, that she could and would say things that would mean something later, if she could remember. If she allowed herself. “He was a good man, Katherine. It was… Well, I don’t know. I only knew him for a year. How much could I know?” She could feel her feet swelling, the soles growing hot in her shoes, “I don’t like to think about it. I’m not sure what I remember.” She felt rather than saw the trembling of her daughter, the big capable hands rising between them, rise and cross on the suited breast and grip the shoulder points with livid fingers. Her own hands scooped a little air before her, “But it wasn’t because of you, don’t you think that. He asked me to marry him. Out on the river. In the old green rowboat. We didn’t say ‘premature’ in those days, I don’t think. We said ‘early’. You were early.”

Katherine didn’t care about the meaning, one way or the other, of what her mother was saying, or wasn’t. She’d think about that later. Right now she wanted to know why, “I don’t care what you did. Why did he go?” She felt something was trying to escape through her crossed arms and pressed tighter.

“I don’t know if I ever did know, Katherine.” Beatrice blew a sigh and showed her empty hands, “He was… Well, he was from the bush, you know, he wasn’t easy with people. He was used to being alone. And then they put him in the War. And then he tried to make a living out of hunting and fishing, the things he knew how to do. They were the things he had to do. I don’t think, maybe, he could stand to make a business out of them.” She paused and gave her daughter a rueful smile, “Or maybe it was me,” lifted her shoulders, “I used to think it was me,” and dropped them, “I’ll never know.”
Katherine didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that there wasn’t a good reason, this Bessie, or some other woman, a secret sickness, a war wound even, something. There must be a mistake, something her mother had done, perhaps, something forgotten, something she didn’t know she had done. It had to be like that. It had to be.

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