Chapter Eleven

11

Anglican

Cowgirls

PAUL

Paul Magarry had given up painting and taken up guarding pictures when the sweating became impossible to ignore. At first he’d been annoyed when his fingers slithered and lost possession of the brush; he began to be afraid when he knew that he couldn’t be just a little flu-ish every time he sat down to play. So, what was he afraid of? He knew how to move paint. Why did his fingers drip and his throat close like a fist?

He didn’t imagine that he was dying, he believed too much in magic and his corpuscles could pass tests. Home from the gallery, he spent nights drinking wine at his window high above tree level. Pressed dangerously across the sill, he watched for falling stars, or anything else that moved. He could have gone out, but he knew that bored drinks in a bar would wash up the fear, he’d cry for his weeping hands and commit drunken foolish acts. He was safer at home correcting the television.

But tonight! Paul was too busy flinging through his wardrobe to be bothered getting out his chart for a looksee, but it was pretty obvious that his moon was up and his stars were out. What with Liz Preston climbing her high horse in front of The Rubberboots and The Gypsy and dear David’s invitation to the reception all of an afternoon, well, there’s certainly something directing celestial traffic! Paul decided to give himself drinks at an uptown bar as a treat, to loosen up for the main event.

MARTIN & KATHERINE & DAVID

The golden crust of skin had lifted neatly from the pale fish and the rice and egg stuffing was rich with fragrant oil, but Martin, all pretense of sophistication aside, had never really outgrown canned salmon and he poked his fork suspiciously at some flecks of dark green in the rice on his plate. Onion? Whatever, he thought, that colour is Hooker’s green. Katherine likes Hooker’s green. It’s the name. Painters are whores. Maybe it’s parsley. The woman’s a tramp.

Feeling ballast in her belly, Katherine lay back in her chair, picked up her glass and put down her fork, “That fish deserved us.” She waved for the wine bottle which Martin passed by the neck, and refilled her glass, “We know how to eat a fish.”

David’s elbows were on the table, jaw propped on his fists. He gave Katherine a slow smile, “He came to the right house all right. You laughed at us, but I’ll bet that our little death-row dialogue lightened him up. Flakey.” David cocked a look at his wineglass, “Never hurts to be polite.”

Katherine reached to fill his glass and squinted a dubious eye, “Flakey is true. Cigarettes and a blindfold?”

“You brought the bouquet and bottle.”

“What?” Martin swung a suspicious look between them. He, after all, had brought flowers and wine.

“I beg your pardon, Marty.” David’s smile twitched, “It never hurts to be polite.”

Martin hated being called Marty, especially by David who made the name sound like a pimple-faced suck who couldn’t tell one end of a hockey stick from the other. Big Balls Bailey, Dave the Dong, macho jerk! “What the hell are you being so cute about? I’m the one with some manners around here. I’m the one who brings flowers…” he glared at Katherine, “and I don’t hit people in the face with them!”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, “For Christ’s sake, Mart, we were talking about the fish. David was playing with the fish before. You didn’t see. David’s just…”

“Oh yes, David’s just precious, isn’t he?” Martin had developed a cold fury. “And he knows how to sit properly at the dinner table too, does he?”

David hid behind his fingers and shook his head.

“You think you’re so damned funny! You…”

Katherine’s fingers came down hard on Martin’s hand clenched by his plate. She looked for a long moment into his eyes, patted his fist and said, “Shut up, Martin. He’s just teasing.”

Martin made a small purse of his lips, arched his back and ruffled his chest and rose with a bump, “Sorrreeee! Pardon me for living, and for bringing gifts, and for not making fun of people behind their backs. I’m just the help who, shut-my-mouth, does all the dirty work.” He reached for Katherine’s plate, “Excuse me, Ma’am, I’ll just clear off this here table and do up the dishes and dry them and put them away and then I’ll tidy up the kitchen while you nice folks sit and have coffee, I’ll go make that right now, and then I’ll call a taxicab in time to get you nice folks down to the bank where I spent the whole day hanging your enormous nice picture and found somebody with the money to pay for it and then…”

“Use the good coffee in the freezer, will you?”

MARTIN & KATHERINE & DAVID

Watching Katherine finish the wine, David considered brandy as a sop to Martin’s bruises. But she’ll want one and she’s already glazing between sentences, and Marty just sharpens his blades on every drink. Toller Cranston on a cocktail – to hell with that. David rose from the table with the empty wine bottle and went to help with the cream and sugar.

“You never have anything for dessert in this house,” Martin dug into a drawer, “or silver polish either, for God’s sakes, look at these!” He wagged spoons under David’s nose. “You just don’t care. Poor Katherine…”

David brushed the tarnished silver from his face, “The polish is under the sink. Sara Lee’s in the freezer – Double Devil’s Food – just your thing. And Poor Katherine can rub and thaw just as well as I can. So get off my case, Martykins.”

“Charming! She doesn’t know how lucky she is you’ve packed your boxer shorts and your boy-scout badges.” Martin jabbed his clutch of spoons disgustedly at the saucepot of boiling coffee, “She’ll be better off without you. She’ll be free. Free to paint what she wants. She paints rocks, for God’s sake! Rocks!” He twisted his head about, trying to find the sieve and spotted the handle poking out of a pile of pots on the back burner. “With you around she paints rocks and that black thing she’s been messing with. Now she’ll be able to paint flowers and… Oh, Jesus! The black painting… it’s… Oh, Jesus! It is the widow thing, isn’t it? Black holes, Portuguese widows… Me and my big mouth.”

“Yes.” Softly, in Martin’s presence, David took a long, deep, breath. “She’s used me.” He took the sieve from Martin’s suspended hand. “I’ve been in this movie before.” He crossed to the sink and rinsed the sieve under the tap. “She’s painted me down and ripped me up, had a little vodka and sung the done-me-wrong-song.” David lifted the saucepot from the burner, aligned the sieve and poured slowly into an enamelware coffeepot. “Midnight rides. Déjà vu. She gets loud and breaks something. Spins a few wheelies on the bartender’s heart and passes out with her boots on.” He presented the coffeepot to Martin, handle first, “Not this time.”

Martin’s nose twitched, perhaps it was the coffee, perhaps it was the prick of recognition, “Maybe I should’ve picked up a cute cake for this party, an old cherry cheesecake might’ve been right, but I didn’t have time.”

“Are we out of wine!?” Katherine hollered from the diningroom.

“Then again… Should’ve brought champagne, eh, David. You got some for later, when you’re all alone with the telephone? Or not.” Martin bounced quickly away from the counter, “You bring the condiments, I’ll do us some brandies.”

As David threw the sieve at the sink, the doorbell rang.

“Oh Christ!” Her napkin flailing, Katherine almost upset the coffeepot Martin had set before her. “Ma and Gran, and I haven’t done my face yet.” She made a begging face at David as he set cream and sugar before her, “You get the door. I’ve got to brush my teeth.”

Scrambling up from the table, she tipped her wine glass smashing against the cream pitcher which, faulted as it was, cracked, fell neatly in half and released a white tide to flood her open pack of cigarettes. “Shit!” Her hands flapped, “David!” She whined and pointed.

Shaking his head in mock despair, David plucked a couple of still dry cigarettes from the swimming pack, handed them to her and shaking out her crumpled napkin, draped it over the worst of the destruction.

Martin reappeared in the kitchen doorway with three unmatched glasses clutched by the stems in one hand, “I can’t find the…” The doorbell rang a second time, long and loud. “Is somebody going to answer that? Shall I?”

David jerked a thumb at the table, “She’s done it again.”

“Oh, shut up!” Katherine glared at David, elbowed her way past Martin and ran for the bathroom, “It’s my house, I can do what I like!”

The two men smiled weakly at one another. David shrugged, jerked a thumb toward the front of the house and said, “You go.” Martin set his clutch of glasses on the edge of the table, polished his hands, poked the silk puff in his breast pocket and glided from the room. David gathered what he could of the mess into the shielding napkin.

MARTIN & KATHERINE
& DAVID & BEA & TILLIE

Swinging open Katherine’s front door, Martin brushed his knees in a sweeping bow, “Good evening, ladies! Come in, come in, hope you wore your thickest skins this evening. Your daughter, Bea…” he squeezed her hand in both of his and pecked her on the cheek, “…good to see you. God, am I glad you’re here. Your daughter is doing her double-breasted, three-piece best to be bossy, bitchy and artistically temperamental. I’m dooring, David’s bussing, and she’s hiding in the bathroom.” He turned his head to Tillie, “Mrs Sutherland, it’s nice to see you again. Here, let me take your coats. She’s got a face to build, this could take a while.”

A bit overwhelmed, Bea shuffled backwards and elbowed Tillie forwards, “You remember Martin, Mother? He came up to…”

“Yes. How do you do.” With a powerful shrug of each shoulder, Tillie dislodged her coat. “Just let me get my stick into the other hand. Thank you.”

“I’m so glad you’re here, Martin. Maybe we should just… Is Katherine all ready? Maybe we just leave our coats on, Mother, and…”

“Light, woman! Give him your coat.” Smoothing the length of her dress, Tillie caught Martin admiring the heavy old silk, and winked, “Where’s David? He promised us a drink.”

“He’s in the diningroom being useful.” Martin took Bea by the shoulders, “Katherine’s working on her face, and I was just going to pour the brandy. If I can find any.”

“David promised whiskey-sours.” With a pat at her own white curls, Tillie rolled her eyes to indicate the drum of a rust velvet hat riding low on Bea’s brow, and bent her head confidentially towards Martin, “See if you can’t lose that in the back of the closet before we go.”

“Mother!” Bea’s hands flew to her head.

“I tried to talk her out of it. See what you can do.” And Tillie thumped away through the livingroom calling for David.

“That wasn’t called for. You old…” Bea bit her lip and her eyes watered. “Martin, you must think we’re the worst…” Stuck for a speakable description, Bea sighed, dropped her hands, and surrendered her coat. “You must think we were brought up in a barn. I can’t do anything with her, and she gets worse every day. She was in the yard this afternoon, yelling. At my father. He’s dead, you know. A spell. Her, I mean. She was having a spell. She got out of the car and… The things she said! I wonder the neighbours don’t call the police. It wasn’t nice. And Katherine, what’s gotten into her? The language she used! I was ashamed of her. Trying to have a nice lunch, and her in those boots and pants… Oh, good grief! What did you say, Martin? She’s not wearing that suit, a three-piece suit, you said, she can’t…”

Martin raised a commanding hand, “Unh unh, calm down, no suit. She’s got a dress that’ll do. It’s a bit… you know, fringes and sleaze.” He could feel her wince, “No, not really, it’s not sleazy, Bea, quite tasty in fact. I saw it when she got it. I was going to go with her, but that was the day the picture got framed and I had to rent a truck and…”

“You’re so good for her.”

“…David came home drunk and told her…” Martin clapped a hand over his mouth and made his eyes round at Bea; actions she considered a trifle disingenuous.

“I know.” And she knew that Martin would be anything but helpful at diverting the disaster. She recognized a troublemaker when she saw one. Bessie Everett had been all over concern, smarmy with sympathy at Bea’s pregnancy – and then! “Katherine told me at lunch.”

“Isn’t it awful?” He drew her into Katherine’s workroom and privacy.

“We’d better go see…” Some people stand too close, Bea felt crowded, it encouraged disloyalty. But there’s always the chance… He’s Katherine’s friend, after all, maybe he can help with David. And if he can’t, well, maybe… No! It’s not nice to think that way, it’s not… Besides, he’s not the right kind of man for Kath… Not that there’s anything wrong with him, I don’t think. Well, but he’s… Oh, dear Lord, I just don’t know. “Do you know what’s wrong with them?”

“It’s David.” Martin was laconic. “Early menopause, premature mid-life crisis, it happens in the fast lane. My cleaning lady saw him nuzzling Jeannie Anderson on the subway, and if that’s the speed he’s…”

“Who is…?”

“Sixteen, maybe seventeen.”

“Oh, surely…” Bea’s fingers sought her mouth.

“Exactly! Shirley Temple with all the big parts. It’s disgusting, but very fashionable these days. It’s the ‘Oh-God-I’m-forty and haven’t had any of that, or that, or that and some sweet young things and more cream sauce, please’, phase. The alternative’s fat-free margarine and clunky hiking boots and who needs it. Of course, David’s leading a little, he’s not as old as he looks, but it might be better for Katherine in the long run, you know, if her career’s about to go like buttered buns, which it is – tonight’s the night, the flag’s up and the saluting starts the moment we arrive – and if that’s what’s happening, it’s the best time to dump the dead wood.”

Besides, Martin was thinking, it may not have occurred to either of them yet, to Katherine or to Bea, and it certainly didn’t seem to have occurred to David, or he might not be so hasty, that the longer David stuck around, the more he could walk away with in the end, if he wanted to take advantage of the community-property laws – no, that’s California, isn’t it? – well, whatever it’s called, half the goodies. Actually, Martin didn’t think that David would give a damn, too proud, but there was a necessary mercenary streak in Katherine, she indulged in chronic insolvency, and as for Bea – well, she surely wasn’t going to drive that shuddering old tank of hers into the dirt just because she liked it, and that cow-pie of a hat she had on looked to be older than God – she knew where her next meal was coming from.

It was tempting to whisper money, divorce, legal fees, to put a bee in Bea’s ugly bonnet, it would sting Katherine soon enough, and Bea, of course, would be far too nice to say ‘Martin did it’, but it could backfire. The ‘Oh, David, dear David, David promised’ tone was still too much evident, they might gang up and shoot the messenger. Martin decided to wait and if he needed heavy guns… “Of course, there’s always the chance that David might realize tonight just who it is that he’s married to and unpack his bags.” With a sweep of his arms, Martin indicated the theatrical clutter of Katherine’s studio, “From the blackness of night comes the dawn.”

“Soup’s on!” Tillie’s holler was accompanied by a thick ringing clonk and, “You messy damned thing!” Another clonk and a couple of thumps later she loomed in the doorway, “This a private plot, you two, or can an old lady slip in?”

“Mother, what was that…”

“Old brass thing of Katherine’s, full of weeds. Weeds in the house! All over the floor in there.”

“Oh dear.” Exasperated, Bea bustled towards the door, “How could you fall into that? It’s against the wall, for pete’s sake!” She was halted by Tillie’s raised stick, “You hit it with your cane? I don’t think you’re fit to go anywhere tonight.”

“I rang it.” Tillie looked closely at her daughter, at Martin, and back again, “It’s none of your business.”

“Well, somebody has to clean it up. I’ll just give it a quick vacuum and…”

“For crying out loud, will you quit nattering, girl. I’m not talking about the blessed weeds. It’s Katherine and David you’ve no business meddling with. They’re old enough to solve their own problems.”

“But she’s my daughter.” Bea teared in frustration.

“And you’re mine. I didn’t stick my oar into your trouble. Maybe I should’ve, maybe he’d have stayed, maybe you’d have kept your head up, but maybe I’d still be having to row the boat for you, and that’s not my idea of fun. You’d get a nice ride and I’d get sunstroke.

“And you…” Tillie fixed Martin with a clear eye, “Katherine says, are a good friend. See that you are. Now, come along. I said, soup’s on, David’s got all the fixings fresh, none of your packaged powders for this lad. Of course, you can’t really call maraschino cherries fresh, but the rest…”

“Mesdames! and Marty,” David swanned into the hall behind Tillie, a tray of drinks poised on fingertips, “your beverages. Whiskey-sours, the cocktail created with marriage in mind. Yours is the one with two cherries, Tillie, and yours with the double rye, Bea. No, not really, all the same. I tasted and tasted. Katherine’s got hers in the bathroom, she’ll be out in a second.”

As they took their drinks, Martin downing his in a swallow, David watched them speculatively. Not hard to guess what they’ve been whispering about. Bea’s shivering like a whipped pup, and Marty looks slapped, his lip could shave ice. Please God, don’t let them start in on it. I won’t change my mind. “You three look like you’re cooking up some eye of newt and toe of dog. Has Tillie been…”

“Toe of frog.” Absently precise, Bea was trying desperately not to cry. She felt spanked. “Tongue of dog.”

“Thank you, Beatrice. You been telling dirty stories, Tillie? By the way, that’s a great dress.”

“Thank you, David. Think it’ll catch me a man?”

“You got one in mind?”

“Well, no, but when you’re in the market, it never hurts to squeeze the cucs.”

“Mother!”

Tillie sketched a curtsy with her stick hand, “I won’t say it’s new, but it’s well kept,” and raising her glass in the other, saluted them all.

Martin shook his head and smiled, “Lovely. And the dress is too.”

GEORGE & ELIZABETH

“We had this conversation before, Elizabeth.” George dropped his coat and laid his hat on a chair in front of his desk, crossed the office to one of the bow-bellied cabinets and took out a decanter and glasses. “You could have said ‘black-tie’ if it were just us.”

“Justice! If there were any justice I most certainly wouldn’t have to be here right now riding herd on a bunch of incompetent caterers! If there were any justice around here, your darling Darla would have done what I told her and…”

“Only us. Just us, we alone, my dear.” George poured, tasted and poured again. “Not them. Merely the Board and its wives. Cabinet and cloth, purple, for colour. Just us.” He downed a surreptitious shot.

“The Krieghof crowd. They think brown’s a colour.”

“My dear, you can’t have the flash set and ask them to dress up. It isn’t safe. They don’t know how. Somebody always gets poked in the eye with a fringe. Safer when they’ve one leg up.” Bearing doubles, George approached and presented one with a bow. For some reason he felt light-headed, memories of fun welled in his arteries and he couldn’t remember laughing in the bank before. “Madam, to your success! Think of it this way, old horse, without black-tie we don’t have to line up for a how d’ y’ do. You can dodge what you don’t like.”

Elizabeth managed to drink with a pouring motion that saved her lipstick. “Like that fathead, Monteith!”

“The Brigadier? Just drop him a curtsy and hum a few bars of Gilbert and Sullivan, he’ll be a sheet and a half to the wind.”

“He calls me Betty!”

“So, call him Al.” Definitely light-headed. “He calls you Betty, you call him Al.”

“His name’s Walter,” Elizabeth stared suspiciously at George’s glass, “Why would I…”

“It’s a song. Just a joke, dear.”

“I don’t know any song that…”

“No. Well never mind.” George headed back for the decanter, “See what a good idea it is? You can just keep moving and not have to speak to…”

“…where do you hear these songs, George? Who sings… Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that, George?”

“Just a snort. And don’t forget about your star attraction, your painter woman, she mightn’t have the right kind of formal frock for a black-tie do, you know. She looks a bit Bohemian, or whatever it is you say now, and you wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass her.”

“Oh God!” Elizabeth poked her glass at George, “Maybe just a little. I knew I should have had Martin show her to me first. How do you know what she looks like? She won’t come in tights or something? Where did you…”

“She was in to see her picture. Young Martin introduced us. He was trying to get it hung and I gather she stopped in to see the awful truth. Not any too pleased, you know. I don’t know why you didn’t just buy the damned thing and put it up properly in the first place.”

She gave him a pitying look and poured past her lipstick, “George, you don’t know the first thing about the workings of a selection committee. It isn’t as simple as your mortgage and bond stuff, you know. This is Art. What’s she look like?”

“Quite well in a suit.”

“A responsible selection committee, one that takes its mandate seriously can’t just make a decision in haste and repent at its leisure. A committee can’t…”

“You are the committee, Elizabeth.”

“Well, yes, in this case, but still. There’s a duty, you have to understand that, to the public, you know, to be sure that it’s the right thing, that it’s appropriate, a real work, that it’s…”

“Not a pig-in-a-poke, eh? I’m afraid your Katherine Bailey doesn’t think it a kindness to be strung up with rope.”

“Oh, George,” dismissed with a flick of nails, “She’s an artist! She’s used to it. A suit in the afternoon sounds safe enough.”

“Trousers.”

“Dear God!”

KATHERINE & MARTIN
& DAVID & BEA & TILLIE

Staring into the mirror over the basin, poising a lipstick clasped in both hands before her mouth, Katherine despised her lips. Thin, thin and mean and bitten rough and discoloured with cigarettes, a liverish old scar, a dirty rockcut. A mouth out of the north, a frost-scabbed, consonant-cracking, side-swiper of a mouth. Who’d want to kiss that? Not a south mouth, full-lipped and sexy, grape red and full of juice. Who ever wanted to kiss this? Or lick it. It’s always me who goes for the mouth. I’ve had other parts of me grabbed, but nobody ever went for the lips first. No man’d look at this mouth and go hot and wet to crush it. With his fist, maybe.

Oh, shit! It’s mean and sharp and says horrible things, bitchy things, but true things. It is my house. David helps, but it’s mine, I own it. And Martin is a spoiled, wimpy faggot, and Bea is a gutless goody-two-shoes, and Gran’s a self-righteous old battle axe, and David’s… David’s… David’s… gonna leave me all alone. Oh God! And with the house to pay for! Watching the tears well to roll down around the trembling flared nostrils, her lips parted for breath and she saw that they looked full and soft and she coloured them with deft strokes of the lipstick.

She patted her cheeks and nose with balled cotton, thankful she had settled for a touch of kohl on her eyelids and didn’t have a lot of damage to repair, swivelled her head to check for hairs escaping the purple and gold threaded toque, stepped into a slip-like shift of purple satin, its fringed hem deliberately uneven, jammed her toes into a pair of heeled sandals the colour of blood sausage, slipped a stack of gilt gold and brass on either arm, and taking up her drink from the rim of the sink, toasted herself in the mirror and left the bathroom.

“Abstraction’s so, you know, so personal, so singular, so what d’y’say – subjective – yah. So, how’s the audience supposed to know? I mean, how do you know what the painter knows? Let alone whether he’s got it right or not.” Martin was soliciting opinions on the black painting when a clash of bangles warned him, “Of course there’s no question here, this’s art. Art. No doubt about it.” A snort from the doorway iced his scalp, “I mean, Katherine’s a real artist and she made this and…”

“Why that’s just what’s so wonderful about being an artist, Marty,” David spoke wide-eyed, “whatever you want, you just make it yourself.”

“She can’t seem to make a faithful husband, David.”

“I am not unfaithful.”

“What about Jeannie Anderson?”

“What about…”

“Martin! Stop it! David!” Katherine tried, but the men were busy.

“…Jeannie Anderson? What about her? I…”

“You were seen…”

“I saw her on the subway. She…”

“Poor little Jeannie, sixteen if she’s a day, and you coming on like…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! I ran into her at the Bloor station. She’s doing a paper for school, a History paper, something on the Family Compact, I recognized the books. She remembered me from the party last summer, that’s where you met her, I remember you saying something about her dress – something bitchy I’m sure. She’s more than sixteen, Marty.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. You were…”

“I don’t give a damn how you heard it! What d’you know about it anyway? You don’t even like women. You wouldn’t know the difference between a come-on and a Tupperware party. It’s all the same to you.”

“Oh, now I don’t think this’s called for.” Bea spoke crisply, “That’s not very fair, David.”

“I do so like women!” Martin lurched sideways and pressed a proprietary hand on Bea’s shoulder.

“Sure, you like to go shopping.”

“You macho jerk. I happen to like women because they’ve got brains, David. Geewiz, they think about things besides hockey, Dave.”

A fleeting desire to belt Martin square in the smug yap squeezed a sigh from David as he rubbed a hand over his face. “I like women because they have brains, too, Marty. And because they have bodies, Marty, and because they eat pizza, and because they obey traffic lights, or because they don’t, and I don’t see what in hell this has got to do with anything. So why don’t we just drop it. Okay?”

“You don’t seem to like Katherine enough.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Tillie watched David’s temples swell and Martin’s chin narrow. She watched Bea’s lips purse and unpurse, another valve to a racing heart. Seeing Katherine’s eyes blaze up, she took a couple of deep breaths herself.

“Hey! Will you two cut this shit! I don’t want to hear it. You make me feel like a…” Katherine was at a loss.

“Like an old bone.” Tillie supplied.

For a moment dumbfounded, Katherine frowned at her grandmother, cleared, and returned to the men, “Yah. Like a bone to fight over. A pair of damned…”

“Mutts.” Tillie prodded.

“Yah. Mutts. So shut up, both of you. This’s my room and if you want to be in here you have to be nice. Right, ladies?” Katherine toasted her drink from Tillie to Bea, swallowed off the watery dregs, handed the glass to David, “More, please,” and walking over to the easel to drape a protective arm around the top of the canvas, said, “What do you think, Gran?”

Tillie stabbed a maraschino with the plastic rapier from her drink, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I’ve been full of hot air. Old lady’s problem, chronic and incurable, we run on gas.” She chewed with her eye on the floor and chased the other cherry in her glass. “I’ve been saying it’s none of our business, Bea’s and…” she pierced and pointed her dripping red victim at Martin, “…yours. You’re right to want to say your piece. It’s their choice, but we have to live with it, too. Times change. I was brought up not to talk about things like other people’s marriages. We said meddling was a sin. What we did was wear gloves.”

She plucked the orange slice from the rim of her glass and stripped the pulp with her teeth, “No acid in your life, you get trenchmouth.” She dandled the rind in her glass, “You make the oddest connections when you’re my age. I wonder is it the whole part about other people’s feelings that goes? I mean, it’s nice enough if people like you, but, you know, I’m not so sure it matters. There’s not that much use for them when you get old, and sleep alone. You pass up the hard-centres and go for the butter-cremes so your teeth can still meet. Whiskey doesn’t keep,” she offered her empty glass to David with a hopeful look, “but if teeth do, it’ll be the front ones, the incisors, the biters, you’ll keep – to the last, to the grindstone, it’s use that keeps them. Look what biting her tongue got Beatrice, store teeth, a mouthful of plastic and no nerve. Had to kill ’em off. You get what you pay for, satisfaction guaranteed. Are you satisfied, Bea?”

“Mother, you’re not making a lick of sense. You had a drink at lunch, and look what happened – yelling at the yard – and now you’re going on about chocolates and teeth. You know my teeth weren’t bad because of sweet things. I had…”

“Don’t I know it! Chocolate wouldn’t melt in your mouth, Missy. That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I don’t think you know what you mean! I think you’re… you’re…” Bea’s damp armpits made her angry, “… you sound like a… a bum… like an old wino, with your talk about teeth and whiskey doesn’t keep and y…”

“Oh, we know it keeps at your house, Beatrice. Whiskey, but not teeth. They drew them because you never used them, always mumbling at the edges of things. No nips for our Bea. No wogs or spics, either, for that mat… Oh Lord, somebody stop me! D’you see what I mean about the connections? It’s like a game of tag, the inside of your head like a schoolyard. And we’re all connected, and we all have to live with whatever it is that Katherine and David do, so let’s stop pretending that it’s none of our business.” Tillie came to a full stop and grinned triumphantly, “Didn’t think I could get there, did you? I think I deserve another drink for that. David, another round, please.”

Bea squirmed her shoulders to unstick her arms and with a determined rush managed to grasp her mother by both wrists, rattled them firmly to steady her own voice, and announced, “We’ve no time for more. If we’re going to get to this do, we’d better get a move on. Where’s your coat?”

“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry, eh,” Tillie looked over Bea’s head and winked at Martin who checked his watch and nodded. “Very well, we don’t want to keep Katherine from her triumph. A rain-cheque, David.” She withdrew her wrists and, fingertips on shoulders, steered Bea to the door, “And you’ll need the bathroom. Martin, would you dig out the coats, please. Katherine…” Tillie raised a thin finger as the others moved, “…a minute.”

“Oh, Gran!” She didn’t want advice, she wanted another drink, and to hell with the fruit.

“Only a minute. Something I want you to know.”

“Don’t you like it?” Katherine tried to smile and turned quickly to the easel, “I know it’s not what you’re used to.” A throat-clearing from Tillie sent her headlong, “I don’t know what got into me. Black, all the colours of black. Of course, all the colours are black, or none are, you know. I don’t know why, I just stared at it, at the canvas, and that’s what I saw. Weird, eh? And something else that’s there that I haven’t got yet, something hard, black and hard and shiny, like glass, but not glass. I know I know what it is, but I can’t remember. And it’s heavy and sharp. Stone, maybe, I haven’t caught it yet. I will though and…”

“Your father left because he didn’t like women.” Tillie’s voice cut low and clear. Her raised hands quickly smoothed the air before Katherine’s responding tremor, “Shush, now. She doesn’t know.”

“What d’you mean he doesn’t know? How d’you…”

“No, no, she doesn’t. Bea doesn’t. Though I’ve a mind to tell her. If she’d known, she might have tried again, or at least she mightn’t have felt so guilty about it.”

Her mind blank, Katherine rattled her head and, “You mean it wasn’t this Bessie person who…”

“No, no! That just burred his blanket. He was as good as gone already. We’ve not done Bea a favour. She’d have been better off knowing he was… oh, dear… what d’you call it? I can’t think of the word. You…”

“Oh, my God!”

“…don’t notice so many nowadays, everybody living in everybody else’s pocket, but it seems to me there used to be more men like that. Men who got on without a woman. Chose to, I mean, not just because they were between one and another one, or because they couldn’t keep the ones they had, but because they didn’t want them, didn’t like them.”

“You mean he was… that he was… that he liked… Oh, my God! How d’you know?” Katherine felt like she was going to cry out loud, fall down, throw up. She wanted to stop her grandmother’s voice and discovered that an agitated hand had found a tube of violet paint among the rubble of her worktable.

“I know because he told your grandfather and your grandfather finally told me, because he said somebody should know about it in case it was ever important enough to say so. Your father was sorry about it and didn’t want Stewart to think there was anything wrong with his daughter. It wasn’t just her he couldn’t live with, it was any woman.

“Maybe there are as many. You don’t know where people live now, I guess. There used to be the Levy brothers, three of them, kept the barbershop in town. Pink and clean as whistles they were. And Archie Graham lived with his books. Oh, and those two old fellows who farmed over the other concession, back by the river – didn’t farm so much as play with their horses, they kept Morgans, and they made faces behind each other’s backs, I remember that. Stewart liked them, called them Spic and Span. An awful mess, place looked like a junkyard what with…”

“Gran, for Christ’s sake! My father!” The tube cracked and violet paint spat unnoticed on the floor.

Tillie frowned, found her place again and continued, “Yes dear. Well, he was raised in the mountains out there you know, or maybe you don’t. He must have told Bea some of this – you know that he came from there, and that he went back. Somewhere in the north of British Columbia, they did something with trees, he and his father had done. Not logging, he did that later, before the war. They marked them maybe, for lumber, whatever. He told Stewart his mother died early and he only remembered that she was mean. Not much of a start, and after that he lived in camps, on the logging, and that’s all men, and then he went to the war and there weren’t too many women there. He said he didn’t think too much of the ones who were. He came back with a bit of money in his pocket and landed up in Strawbridge with a mind to make a business of some hunting and fishing. And what’s he do but get himself into a knot with your mother, and then that other business… Well, I guess he said he loved Bea, but he just couldn’t like her, and off he went. Back to the trees, I expect.”

“You mean he’s… Oh my God, Gran! You mean he’s… Oh God! Gay? Oh, Gran!”

“What? Gay? You mean… Oh, Good Lord, girl! You mean he likes men for… No, no, no. What’s that word? Starts with an ‘m’. You see… Oh, Katherine, we really haven’t done right by you.” Tillie reached for and held her granddaughter’s hands, and neither of them was aware of the crushed tube of paint. “Your father could love, loved Bea, and he wasn’t shy of the… physical part of it. He liked women for that. No, Katherine, he had love in him, I saw it, he had the feelings. But he found out too late that he couldn’t live with her, with Bea. And you.”

“But why, Gran?”

“Well, you know, Katherine, I thought he was lazy. Not in the way of work, no, he did his chores and then some, but lazy with people, d’you see. Wouldn’t get himself connected to people; wouldn’t and couldn’t. Maybe wouldn’t and women went back to his mother. Who knows what meanness can do? He told your grandfather that we take advantage, women do, and won’t admit it. We don’t play fair. Now that could’ve been a hard woman somewhere along the line, his mother, or another one he came up against, one he knew Saturday nights in a mountain town, maybe a brass-faced army nurse.

“He might have thought he had reason enough for keeping clear; he must have. But I just put him down for lazy.” Tillie sighed, chewed her bottom lip, ruminated, snorted, and raised her brows with a wry smile, “Or maybe he was just born old and, like me now, the need wasn’t in him.” Her head nodded the punctuation, “Now I think of it, it’s likely I’ve done him an injustice – wasn’t lazy after all, just never had the need.”

Tillie subsided then and noticed the blot of violet paint in the palm of her hand. Her heart yanked her shoulders with fear, but she spotted the colour on the floor, the crushed tube in Katherine’s fist, and with an old gentleness she picked a rag from the worktable and cleaned up her granddaughter, the floor and herself.

Her mind blank again in self-defense, Katherine was dimly aware of her grandmother’s ministrations. She tried shaking her head again, but her eyes refused to focus. Somewhere she found a useable thought, “D’you mean misogynist, Gran?”

“Yes, dear, misogynist.” Tillie dropped the rag onto a pile, “But now I think, maybe the other – misanthropist.” She drew a dry purpled finger down her bodice of black silk, “D’you know, I think I see the stone you mean at the back of my mind, hard and black… not coal, shiny and brittle… Nope, can’t touch my tongue to it. It’ll come.” And she turned to the sound of Bea panting and tugging in the doorway.

Beatrice kneaded the shoulder of her coat with one hand, sure that the padding had slipped from its stitches, and balanced her velvet drum on the other, “Haven’t you two gotten your coats on yet?”

“You finally got out of the bathroom, did you?” Tillie thumped from the room, and passing Martin rummaging in the hall closet she butted his backside with her stick and said, “She found it.”

Avoiding Katherine’s face altogether, Bea hummed an exasperated sigh, “The boys aren’t ready either! Here I am…” She lowered the round brown hat into place over her brow, “…all set to go…” The only one of the bunch, she thought, who doesn’t want to. “…and you two are still gabbing on about pictures!” But she knew from the blank dog stare that she could see but not meet in her daughter’s eyes that painting hadn’t been the subject and she blew out a noisy defeated breath, “Men! I’ll go warm up the car.” She opened and closed the front door behind her, and as she stepped from the porch a cold lash of wind caught her behind the ear.

Katherine stood by her easel, unmoving, unable to find a safe thought, until at a word from Martin she held out her arms as he slipped a smock of plain black cloth onto her back. He was chancing it, she wouldn’t think the jacket party apparel, but he knew that her choice would be the monkey fur bolero which he’d let slide from its hanger to the back of the closet floor and her drooping chin made him brave.

“Scarf?” Katherine’s fingers knitted one another at her breast, “Mart, can I have a scarf?”

“Simplicity, my dear Katherine, is elegance.” He wanted to tell her to keep her hands still and out of her pockets too, but the monkey didn’t have pockets and she might notice what she was wearing. A scarlet fingernail made its way up to her teeth. “All right, a scarf, then. Just one though. Better than chipped paint. You stay here, I’ll get it. Don’t move from this spot, we’ll be right out that door.”

Martin raced for the bathroom where a rack of antlers nailed high over the end of the tub served to steam-press a heap of scarves and bandannas. Skidding on the kitchen linoleum, he thought, I shouldn’t have said ‘door’, the mirror’s by the door. He hollered, “Don’t move!”

“Is it a hold-up?” Tillie’s voice sounded unconcerned behind the bathroom door.

“Shit.” Preoccupied with willing Katherine to freeze, Martin didn’t hear himself say it.

The knob turned, the door swung in and Tillie stared at him, “You’re seriously confused.”

Confused, Martin thought she was denying him the antlers. “But I need a purple scarf!”

“You would pick purple. Something in a social statement? A bit noisy, but not as loud as a hat.” She shook her head, “You’re not likely to be taken for a bishop at your age, you know.”

“Martin!” The cry of panic from the front hall terrorized him.

“Mirror,” he said as he ducked around Tillie into the bathroom, “Mirror,” and slammed the door between them.

“…on the wall,” stretching her shoulders against the panels of the door, Tillie finished the line, “Who’s the silliest of us all?” She looked up at the sound of steps in the kitchen doorway, “Seen any dwarves, David? Grumpy? Bashful?”

“Grumpy’s out warming up her car,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, “and that could be Sleazy screaming at the hall mirror. It sure ain’t Snow White.”

The bathroom door snapped open and only Tillie’s skill with her cane saved her balance as a ball of mauve silk sailed over her shoulder. “Give her that and tell her the damned monkey died!” and the door slammed shut again.

“Dressed against her will, d’you suppose?” David’s mouth buckled and Tillie answered his grin.

“David,” she tapped her lips quiet, “we must be nice.” He stooped and she accepted the scarf from his hand, “I’ll go tend the princess.”

David perched beside the sink, heels hooked on a drawer, and lit a cigarette. She’ll hate having to wash dishes. She’ll miss me doing them, and think she still loves me. Elbows on knees, he clasped the cigarette in both hands at his lip.

Martin spotted a fresh pimple rising at the corner of a nostril and erupted in spitting rage over the bathroom basin. Why can’t they do what they’re told!? He hammered a fist on the waist of a toothpaste tube. He hammered on the rim of the basin, connected on the porcelain with a wrist bone and whimpered with the shock. What’d I ever do to Tillie? She goes for my throat just because I try to help. He loosened the cap on the toothpaste a few turns. They’re all mean. Katherine’s already half over the edge… If she loses it… Oh God! Why can’t they…?

Unlocking his hands, David swatted at a bowl of apples on the corner of the counter. She’ll have fruit flies for company, no problem. He hopped down from his perch, “Hey, Marty, will you get out of there, I have to take a leak!”
With a snarl Martin slammed a fist at the tube and sent cap and toothpaste squirming into the sink.