Chapter Four

4

Anglican

Cowgirls

KATYA

Katya’s house looked strange in the city, perhaps because it persisted as a cottage, a little house, unashamed and self-sufficient in a neighbourhood dissolved into houses with decks. Framed into the top of an old bump of rock on the side of a rail line, the front drop to the street a tangle of moss and sapling and briar, it was hidden in the summer, and in winter the white painted porches melted into the snow.

To save herself the steep climb of the front steps, Katya trudged round the corner, up the alley next the rusting tracks, and shoved herself through the lilac hedge. The yard which she had planted and which Bena had left untouched could hide a half dozen Indians. Meadowsweet seeded with goldenrod, and blue bugloss crept around birch clumps and half-tumbled silver maple. Her linden, set in the centre, would one day shade the whole yard. Betony, mullein and blue aster crowded paths in tall grass. Elder and spirea advanced on the house.

In the back porch, Katya propped the bag of pears against her rubber boots, took a key from the pot of a stout old begonia curled over a table in the sun, and unlocked the door. The kitchen looked like a meal in the making, every inch deep with pots and plates and jars and spoons, a haphazard cleanliness dusted with flour and smeared with butter. Opening the refrigerator with one hand, Katya reached the kettle to the tap with the other. Coffee, and she needed a bite. Salty, she lifted out a big jar of herring, a piece of cheese. She turned the burner on under the kettle and went back to the porch to choose a ripe pear. Sweet, she took down butter from a cupboard, two and then two more puula from the breadbox, switched on the oven and slipped them in. She thought of her weight and pulled two of the buns out, licked cinnamon from her fingers, asked herself who cared and put them back in. The telephone rang.

BENA

Bena had given back Katya’s house with a snort of relief. She’d grown lean as the neighbourhood had dried under yards of crushed stone and cedar. She’d packed and wandered over by the ravine and found herself nine white rooms under a hairdresser clinging to the edge of Rosedale. She had clipped an extra coupon and furnished herself with a mattress, and with a chair and a table for each room.

Bena spent her day in the street. She used what the city possessed, pavements and tiles, shops, malls and galleries, museums, parks and boulevards, monuments, ghettos, lobbies, tunnels, restaurants, bars, paths, alleys and corners. She visited places, her swift downhill halting gait paused only for necessity at a counter, a cash-desk, and she would rear and wheel before the clerk or ticket-taker and be off before a door could shut.

She was seen, familiar, expected. She was greeted by Madame, for there was no doubt of her title to the van and train of her passage, she owned the air two yards before and two yards after, she wore the felts and lodens, the fleshy gold and savage cloisiné of an old, mad, horse-bound orthodoxy, her blood rich and thin from centuries of stirrup breeding lent dignity to her startled rolling eye, translucence to her trembling unsure hand. And she passed as a princess passes.

BENA & KATYA

“Katya! You will come, of course. I have tickets.” Bena was talking before Katya got the receiver to her ear; ‘tickets’, Bena believed in tickets, pieces of paper, pasteboard, plastic, believed in the apparent freedom of having a pass, Katya shuddered from the responsibility, and tingled in anticipation, Bena always had more than one ticket. “My friend has given them to me. They are for the picture gallery. There are hundreds, very many pictures, all made by one man, my friend says, and very nice even though I think he is an Englishman. An Englishman who made the pictures, not my friend, he is Canadian.”

“When, Bena?”

“Oh, always, Katya! He was born right here, from a family, an old one, though nothing here is old.”

“The Gallery, Bena. The pictures. When?”

“Ah hah! Today, this afternoon at four o’clock. You will come, we will meet in a restaurant for a drink of coffee.”

“So that you can flirt? No, no, Bena, in front of the Gallery, I’ll wait for you on a bench, on the end by the big sculpture. The Englishman is Blake, Bena. Was.”

“Oh, yes? Maybe you could wear something nice, Katya, and we will have coffee after.”

“I’m not in this competition, Bena, not the running jump, either. Your friend, your Canadian, what does he do?” Katya knew how to be Canadian, “Who does he work for?”

“He is a man of business, Katya.” A thick note of satisfaction honeyed Bena’s throat.

George Preston lived with his head down. He wasn’t young at seventy-five, hair thistledown, face a map, wrists mottled, waist locked, he’d worn pants on the beach for thirty years and kept his feet covered.

“A man of business, Bena?” Katya’s voice raised an eyebrow. One of Bena’s friends had imported religious artifacts, a gift of a seashell shrine crumbled into pot drainage beside the begonia in Katya’s porch. “Trinkets and trade goods?”

George was so well disguised that no one, not family, not colleagues, or friends considered for a moment that this safe, smiling George Preston was anything other than what he appeared to be.

“The best business, Katya.”

Born into cushioned pews, mahogany boat decks and occasional evening dress, coloured in the neutral tones best reflected in Waterford and quiet pieces of sterling, George only looked up once.

It was the War that made George look up. He had flown a Spitfire as duty, gotten drunk as a hero, and spent enough hours cocooned in the air to distinguish a pattern. Too many people wanted for too long, lacked a living and pride; the few who had it saw a way to get more, heaped humiliation like dung until heat and rot loosed a rich, fetid stream that burnt the ground.

George came home to the University, to the law and to finance just as intended. Head down, he became what he was expected to be, but unlike most of his fellows he knew what that was.

“Broadloom carpeting! Wholesale.” There had been a low-cost accident insurance salesman. The accidents were unlikely to happen even to Bena.

“A gentleman who does the very most conservative of business, Katya.” Pride was keeping her temper.

“Oh, Bena. Not a pimp.”

“Perhaps you could wear this afternoon, Katya, a nice skirt. And a blouse.”

“Perhaps rubber boots and a straw hat! A blanket and feathers!” Bena knew an Ojibwa parole officer. She claimed a mystic relationship, noble savages, overrun aristocrats. He was grateful she wasn’t an anthropology major.

“Katya! You will not meet my friend!”

“Oh, now, I didn’t mean it. I was teasing. You aren’t angry. They’re your friends.”

“You are a dangerous woman, Katya. You are not always nice.”

“That’s true, I’m sorry. I try to be nice, but I’ve had a shock. Therapy, actually. No, now there I go again, sorry. The old woman by the park wasn’t in her chair.” Katya was suddenly breathless.

There was a longish pause before Bena said, “The pen of my aunt is on the… Katya…” another long pause, “I used to think that you had learned a different English language, a dialect, the grammar is Finnish, maybe, you arrived in a different airport, came by water, or walked, maybe. But it is better now to tell you what I think…” Bena was in the middle of a deep breath when Katya stopped her.

“Is your friend married?”

GEORGE

Old boarding school girls can move boats, compete in mixed doubles and, often enough, learn to recognize a straight flush. Companionship is essential to a girl of small means with an end in view and the pretty, dark Elizabeth with the red bow of a mouth made certain she had several best friends.

George had been intended as a weekend date for Elizabeth’s friend Bunny’s sister, a long weekend of sailing and picnicking and groping on verandahs. Cold rain confined the young men to cards in the boathouse; Bunny’s parents went to bed with digestive biscuits and books; Bunny’s sister got poison ivy rash from her facecloth and Elizabeth double-dared Bunny herself to throw on a slicker and go down to learn poker.

“Does he have a wife, Bena?”

George had determined to be childless, conceded himself unsuitable for women to whom continuity was recently a patriotic duty and always a dynastic imperative, and stoically practised bachelorhood. He was hunched over two pair and a highball when he saw the hot eyes, the selfish cupid mouth. He could control that. Do the world a favour and put a rope on her. He might never know quiet again, but he wouldn’t have to look silly in a big house alone, grow old with virgins in reception lines and drown in a punchbowl.

George shifted on the white ring of the life preserver that eased his discomfort and drew to a tight, full house. He finished his drink and took Elizabeth behind the boat house under a dripping black hemlock.

“He has a wife, Katya, yes.” Bena was exasperated, she had met George drinking coffee against the damp in a fake rathskeller in an underground mall, she didn’t want to bear his children. “You’re so conventional, Katya. For a crazy person. Perhaps you have a skirt with a jacket that matches. It is a good thing to look nice, Katya.”

“Four o’clock, then. On the corner in front of the Gallery, the bench next to the Moore.”

“Moor?”

“The big bronze sculpture is a Moore.”

“Ahh… A Moor! That is what it is?”

“Goodbye, Bena.”

“A nice blouse.”

DAVID

David Bailey really wished he hadn’t let Jane read his I Ching after the cheese gnocchi last night. She’d misinterpreted his resistance and told him to stop acting like some old bush-hippie; her spiritual stomach didn’t mind, it knew she couldn’t do decent Chinese in the microwave. It wasn’t that, David actually liked having his fortune told, it tickled his scalp with the pleasure of a barber’s hands. “Sorta like God’s hands with a pair of scissors at your ear,” he had said, resisting Jane’s tug to the goatskin hearth rug. “Didn’t one of the Fates carry scissors? To snip your thread?”

“That’s myth, this’s real.” Jane said, punching him behind the knee to bring him down. “Get out your coins.”

David extracted the three George VI dimes which were always in the right hand pocket of any pants he wore, along with his silver penknife. “D’you suppose there’s a difference?” He picked at the goat hair, “Whether your first haircut was snipped by a man or a woman. Somebody should do a paper on that.” David was addicted to mental essays which never made it to paper. It was his passion to explain the world to itself from a mountain top; contemplation, speculation, Papal Bull. “You’d have your Sharp Object trauma, and your Samson trauma, if you had Sunday School soon enough, and you’d get your Isaac trauma, if your Dad did the cutting. There’d be a built-in variant there, circumcised versus foreskin…”

Jane refused to be side-tracked by dirty talk, she was a long way from Chatham by way of a Perth County commune and pre-med at Western, to Gynecology at Women’s College Hospital, and she believed very much in casting the bones. The Ching came first, then she’d consider the sexy bits. She had poised her plastic bamboo ballpoint over the pad of rice paper and told him to start tossing.

Right now, David was tossing balled socks and underwear into his old boyscout dufflebag, clearing the one drawer of four in the bedroom bureau that Katherine had ever allowed him. Actually, she’d originally let him have two drawers, but when she began encroaching on his t-shirts, he’d found it prudent to retreat and hide the two or three she hadn’t yet appropriated under his boxers and yellowed jockeys. Frowning, concentrating hard on when he’d last seen his dark pin-stripe, David knew it couldn’t be at the cleaners because it had only ever been there twice in its life. And he certainly hadn’t worn it somewhere and come home in a barrel, he didn’t have that kind of life, even if he liked the idea. Coming home once from cub camp with somebody else’s underpants, the fear in his father’s face had nipped loose tendencies in the bud. So, where was the suit? The Ching had mentioned loss.

Katherine wouldn’t dare give it to the Sally Ann, she knew how much it mattered. Didn’t she? And besides, if she’d stooped to charity, or worse, thrown it away, she’d have chucked his old camel sport coat and his Tom Jones shirt. She hated them. But he had crammed them already into a garment bag. Even though they were past wearing, they held memories of innocence and a couple of fantastic lays. So, where was the suit?

The trouble with David’s fortune was that throwing his three dead Georges never seemed to move the universe. Tail-lights flashed – Warning! Hubris! Warning! Pride before a Fall! Warning! – but the peony phrases of the Ching sounded a lot like ‘pin-steps’, ‘baby-steps’, ‘Mother-may-I’, and although he was promised the shining throne and the pink-petalled princess in the end, they invariably glimmered and waved hankies from the far side of an eggshell bridge. David imagined his karma looked like Woolworth’s fruit cake, beige and thin in the nuts.

He closed his empty bureau drawer, checked for the fourth time to make sure the suit hadn’t slipped into the rubble on the closet floor, poked and toppled heaps of Katherine’s clothing and worked himself up to irate frustration. She couldn’t have worn the damned thing! Could she? He mightn’t be so sure if she were out on a midnight crawl, she had a party persona that crossed Queen of the Gypsies with Clint Eastwood and she tended to bleed the line between dress and costume. But not to lunch at Fran’s with Bea and Tillie! Unless her sense of decorum had finally cracked. David hoped not, for Bea’s sake, but then, he thought with the beginnings of a grin, Katherine in full melt-down would be a sight to see.
He checked his watch. According to what Katherine had told him yesterday, bitching in detail, she’d be meeting Bea and Tillie right about now. If he hurried, taking what was packed and leaving bathroom things for later, he could taxi the bags up to his new place and get over to Fran’s before they finished. The telephone rang.

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