The Box Garden Part 12

"Simple carpentry, nothing complicated, knife racks and wall shelves mostly. At the end of the school year, round about the middle of June, I'd say, we used to come out here, all the teachers, and have lunch." He coughs, a sudden attacking hack of a cough. "Sort of, you know, a celebration."

"Which school was it?" I ask politely.

"St. Vincent." He chokes again. "Not so far from where you went to school."

"St. Vincent," I say, remembering. "That's a Catholic school, isn't it?"

He nods, watching me closely.

"Some of the kids in our neighbourhood used to go there," I tell Louis. "The MacArthurs. Billy MacArthur? Red hair, fat, always in trouble?"

"I don't think I remember him," Louis says regretfully.

"Judith and I always kind of envied the Catholic kids. It seemed-I don't know-sort of exotic going to a school like that. Like a pageant. First communion and all those white dresses. And veils even. And catechism. And always calling their teachers Sister this and Father that."

Louis nods and smiles.

"But," I say thoughtfully, "I always thought that the teachers in those days had to be nuns and priests."

Louis nods again.

"But you ..."

"Yes," Louis says.

Silence. "A priest?" I whisper.

"Yes," he says in a level voice, "a priest."

"I can't believe it."

"I wanted you to know."

"Does Judith ..."

"I told her yesterday."

"And my mother. Of course she ..."

"Of course."

"But-" I try to gather in my words, I struggle for the right words but there don't seem to be any for this moment, "but weren't you ... I thought ... weren't you married before?"

"Only to the Church," he says with a faint, modest rhetorical edge.

"But now ..."

"I made the decision to leave," he says, "three years ago."

My mother is marrying a sick, seventy-two-year-old ex-priest, I can hardly breath, I cannot believe this.

"But Louis," I stumble on, "why did you ... I mean, it's none of my business ... but why did you leave?"

He is ready to tell me; he has, I can see, brought me here to make me understand. "It was when I first started to ... get sick. I know it seems strange. You'd think sickness would make me cling to my vocation. But it wasn't like that."

"What was it like then?"

"I started to feel afraid."

"Of death?"

"I could never be frightened of death. I'm still a Catholic."

"What were you afraid of then?" I ask, but already I know. Oh, Louis, I know what it is to be afraid.

"I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure now. But I think I was afraid I'd missed half my life."

For a sickening half-instant I think he is referring to celibacy, surely he doesn't mean that.

"I'd never lived alone," Louis explains carefully. "I'd never had the strength. But then, when I got sick, it seemed possible. Anything seemed possible. It doesn't make sense, I know."

But to me it does make sense, for why had I married Watson? Because his sudden arrival into my life had said one thing: anything was possible. Possibility rimmed those first days like a purplish light; love was possible; flight was possible; my whole life was going to be possible.

"So you decided to leave?" I say to Louis.

He nods. His face has become alarmingly flushed. How difficult this must be for him. I want to reach out and pat his arm, but I'm too awestruck to move.

"I've been quite happy," he says, "surprisingly so. Of course, being alone has its problems too."

I know. I know.

"Then I met your mother."

I smile uncertainly.

He makes a little laced basket of his hands and says, "I hope you don't think ... you don't think we're just old and foolish."

"Of course not," I gasp truthfully.

"Because we don't have ..." he pauses, "surely you realize ... we don't have all that ... much time." He says this lightly, he even gives a faint, ghoulish, baffling sort of chuckle which I find both shocking and admirable.

Now I do do reach out and pat his hand, his chamois-coloured, brown-spotted, hairless little hand. We sit in the red and yellow and blue pooled light without saying a word. A young waitress takes our plates away and brings us ice cream in tiny imitation pewter bowls. reach out and pat his hand, his chamois-coloured, brown-spotted, hairless little hand. We sit in the red and yellow and blue pooled light without saying a word. A young waitress takes our plates away and brings us ice cream in tiny imitation pewter bowls.

Louis sighs at last and says thickly, "It would have been nice ... nice ... to have a priest at the wedding, that's all. It doesn't matter though. Not really."

"You mean to perform the ceremony?" I ask him.

"Oh no. That would be a little ... uncomfortable for your mother, I think. But it would have been nice to have a priest, just to, you know, be there."

"Couldn't you invite one?" I ask him earnestly.

"It's awkward," he says. "I'm a little ... out of touch."

I tease the bitter chocolate ice cream with the tip of my spoon. I can't stop myself: I say, "Look, Louis, I know a priest. As a matter of fact I'm going to see him tomorrow. Why don't I ask him to come? I don't have to tell him anything about your being a priest. I could just invite him-you know-to my mother's wedding."

He tips his head to one side and smiles a startled amber-toothed asymmetrical smile; pleasure drains into his grouted eyes and, nodding his head, he surprises me by saying, "Why, that would be very kind of you."

Louis's confession has refreshed him; he looks rather tired but he orders coffee with the happy air of a man who has discharged his purpose.

For me the revelation is not so speedily digested; it hangs overhead like a bank of fresh steam, and my imagination struggles to picture Louis of the clerical collar; Louis of the ivory Sunday vestments, wafer in mouth, cup upraised; Louis as devout young novice; Louis as frightened lonely child-somewhere under the old, soft, yellowed skin that boy must still exist. It is too much for me-the idea of Louis as priest resists belief, but it must, it will be, a.s.similated.

And what, I ask myself, is so strange about my mother meeting a defrocked priest-an ex-priest, I should say, it is somehow kinder to think of him that way-certainly a lot of them are floating around these days. And how did I imagine they would look if not like Louis? Did I expect them to be exhausted and spiritual, hollow-eyed, pitted with recognizable piety, baroque in manner, fatherly and frightened with damaged holiness sewn into their fingertips? They were men, only men, a.s.sorted, various and unmarked. Was Eugene with his moist normalcy and gentle hands identifiable as an orthodontist? And Martin: to see him turning over the pages of the Globe and Mail in my mother's back yard, who would suspect the Miltonic peaks and canyons that furnished his intelligence: the very idea was ridiculous.

Meeting Watson Forrest when I was eighteen-there he was drinking orange soda in a run-down, soon-to-be-bankrupt drugstore-a short, frowsy boy of twenty-two with wrinkled corduroy pants, acne scars and tufted crown of reddish hair-I had not believed him at first when he told me he had graduated in botany from the University of Toronto, that he had already written his Master's thesis (what was a Master's thesis? I had asked) on rare Ontario orchids. Later, made restless by the romance of the North, Watson had turned to Arctic lichens; later still, drawn into the back-to-nature movement, he had focussed on the common pigweed and had theorized, often tiresomely, on the pigweed's ability to draw nutrients to the surface of the earth. Orchids to pigweed: Watson had continually evolved toward the more popular, more democratic, more ubiquitous forms of a plant life. Specialty was for those who were content to stand still. Watson had resisted, more than most, the stamp of profession.

And as for me, Charleen Forrest, who, seeing me buying oranges in the Safeway or mailing letters on rainy Vancouver corners, who would guess that I am a poet? My bone structure is wrong; all those elongations; all those undisciplined edges, the ridged thighs, the wire-brush hair, the corns on my feet, the impurities in my heart-how could I possibly be a poet, how could I, as some might say, sing in a finer key?

The truth is, I am a sort of phony poet; poetry was grafted artificially onto my lazy unconnectedness, and it was Watson-yes, Watson-who did the grafting. Watson made me a poet-at least he pushed me in that direction-by his frenzied, almost hysterical efforts to educate me. What a shock it must have been, when he recovered from the first s.e.xual ecstasies, to find himself married to an eighteen-year-old girl of crus.h.i.+ng ignorance. Our first apartment in Vancouver was crammed with the books he brought me from the library, books I read doggedly, despairingly, in an attempt to conceal from him the shallowness of my learning. I seemed always to be working against time; the bright lights of possibility he had lighted in my head were already flickering out one by one.

I took a short typing course in Vancouver and for three years I supported both of us by typing term papers for graduate students in the cluttered, dusty nest of our one-room apartment. And in between, in order to forestall Watson's ultimate disenchantment, I sweated through books of history, biography, science; in fact, whatever Watson selected for me. How he had loved the role of tutor, one of his many incarnations: he became a kind of magician and I the raw material to be transformed. His devotion to my education was, to be sure, less than altruistic : his first appointment was in sight; another incarnation, another role-that of brilliant young lecturer-awaited him, and he became, not without reason, worried about the handicap of a stupid wife.

Somewhere along the line my self-education ceased to be a wifely duty. Watson began edging into student politics and laying the groundwork for the Journal, and for me, sitting alone in the apartment, literature became a friend and ally. Surrounded by frayed basket chairs, brick-and-board book shelves, a card table desk, studio couch and bamboo blinds-the furniture, in fact, of the newly married-literature became the real world. And poetry, modern poetry, unlocked in me not so much a talent, but a strange narrow apt.i.tude, a knack, at first, and nothing more.

My first poems were experiments; I built them on borrowed rhythms; I was a dedicated tinkerer, putting together the shapes and ideas which I shoplifted. And images. Like people who excel at crossword puzzles, I found that I could, with a little jiggling, produce images of quite startling vividness. My first poems (pomes) were lit with a whistling blue clarity (emptiness) and they were accepted by the first magazine I sent them to. Only I knew what paste-up jobs they were, only I silently acknowledged my debt to a good thesaurus, a stimulating dictionary and a daily injection, administered like Vitamin B, of early Eliot. I, who manufactured the giddy dark-edged metaphors, knew the facile secret of their creation. Like piecework I rolled them off. Never, never, never did I soar on the wings of inspiration; the lines I wrote, hunched over the card table in that grubby, poorly ventilated apartment, were painstakingly a.s.sembled, an artificial montage of poetic parts. I was a literary con-man, a quack, and the size of my early success was amazing, thrilling and frightening.

But after Watson left us, after he walked out on Seth and me, poetry became the means by which I saved my life. I stopped a.s.sembling; I discovered that I could bury in my writing the greater part of my pain and humiliation. The usefulness of poetry was revealed to me; all those poets had been telling the truth after all; anguish could be scooped up and dealt with. My loneliness could, by my secret gift of alchemy, be shaped into a less frightening form. I was going to survive-I soon saw that-and my survival was hooked into my quirky, accidental ability to put words into agreeable arrangements. I could even remake my childhood, that great void in which nothing had happened but years and years of shrivelling dependence. I wrote constantly and I wrote, as one critic said, "from the floor of a bitter heart."

And the irony, the treachery really, was that those who wrote critical articles on my books of poetry never-not one of them-distinguished between those poems I had written earlier and those that came later. (What grist for the Philistines who scoff at literary criticism.) To these critics my work was one arresting-"the arresting Charleen Forrest"-seamless whole. Which goes to show ....

Louis Berceau takes an enormous amount of sugar in his coffee. Four heaped teaspoons. I watch him-his hands are remarkably steady for a man of his age-dipping into the sugarbowl. The smiling girl of a waitress refills our cups several times, and Louis almost succeeds in emptying the bowl of sugar.

The mind is easily persuaded, a fact which Brother Adam mentioned in a recent letter, and Louis suddenly appears to me to be an altogether holy man sitting here stirring his sticky coffee. A monk. He inspires, in fact, a torrent of confession. In half an hour I have told him rather a lot about my marriage with Watson. He is an excellent listener, something I noticed yesterday in my mother's kitchen; he simply nods from time to time and fixes me with his opaque gaze. And out it all spills.

Watson, I tell him, was a man without a centre; he took on the colour of whichever landscape he happened to stumble across. Watson was a man who went to a Cary Grant movie and for a week after spoke in a light, slight, c.o.c.ky English accent. He also did a weary, sneery Richard Widmark and-his favourite-a lean, mean, sinewy Dane Clark. Watson was a bit like a snake-the comparison is not really a good one for it suggests malice-but he was like a snake in his ability to continually shed his skin. Louis nods, and I hesitate, remembering that Louis too is a man who has shed his skin.

No, not like a snake, I correct myself, but like an actor who plays a number of roles one after the other, roles which he takes up energetically but later, with a kind of willful amnesia, shakes off and denies. Louis looks puzzled, and I try to explain. Watson's first incarnation I can only theorize about: he must have been a sort of child prodigy hatched into an otherwise undistinguished Scarborough family, bringing home to his bus-driver father and seamstress mother miraculous report cards and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with a kind of juicy, pedantic, junior-sized zeal. But by the time I met him, he had left that scrubbed good-son image behind and transformed himself into a studied, lazy dreamer of a student, tenderly anarchic, determinedly b.u.mbling and odd. Oh, very, very odd. A structured oddity, though, which both thrilled and terrified him; he needed someone, me, to bring reality to the role. Later, as a married graduate student in Vancouver he had stunned me with a whole new set of mannerisms and att.i.tudes; he literally fought his way into all-roundedness-he boxed, he ran for elec tions, he wrote articles on alfalfa, he signed pet.i.tions, he played softball, he even forced himself to attend chamber music recitals and read up on the history of ballet. And I had adored his earnestness, his determination, his rabid certainty which completed, it had seemed to me, some need of my own. I had not quite loved his Young Professor Self, his two year retreat-it seemed longer-into piped and bearded tolerant middle-cla.s.s academe, his almost British equanimity, the completely unforeseen manner in which he began to utter whole networks of archaisms, words like vouchsafe and gainsay, words strung together with a troubling catgut of hitherto's, wheretofor's and whilst's; once, completely unabashed, he began a sentence with a burbling I dare-say. It had been during that period that we actually bought a house with a garden. And actually conceived, with brooding deliberation, a child. House, wife, child, all he needed was the ivy. But already he was on his way to his next creation: rebellious young intellectual. For a while he did a balancing act between the two roles: one Sunday afternoon, sulky and depressed, the three of us had taken a walk around the neighbourhood. Seth, who must have been two years old at the time, walked between us, holding on to our hands. He was a little slow and unsteady, and Watson yanked him now and then angrily. But then we happened to pa.s.s by a house where an elderly couple were taking the afternoon sun. Seeing them, Watson had smiled gaily; he had swung Seth merrily to his shoulders in gruff fatherly fas.h.i.+on, crooning nonsense into his startled ears; this extraordinary display of affection had lasted until we were out of sight of the couple. Watching him, I had been sickened; that was when I knew he was a man without a centre.

As he careened toward thirty, he seemed to dissolve and reform with greater frequency, and each reincarnation introduced a new, more difficult strain of madness. Watson seemed unable, psychologically unable, physiologically unable, to resist any new current of thought. He was the consummate bandwagon man. Yet, I had loved him through most of his phases. Riding off to Vancouver on the back of his motorcycle, my face pressed for thousands of jolting miles into the icy smooth leather of his shoulders, hadn't I thought that I would be safe forever? And for most of the eight years we were together I tried to be tolerant, sometimes even enthusiastic. But what I could never accept was the way in which he coldly shut the door on his past lives. The fact that he so seldom wrote to his parents was a troubling warning; I could sympathize, but still it seemed heartless not to acknowledge the birthday gifts of knitted gloves and homemade fruitcake. Friends, abandoned along the way, wrote imploring letters-what is the matter with Watson, why doesn't he write or phone? The Journal Journal which he founded in a burst of professional ardour became another dead end. He and Doug Savage quarrelled irrevocably over the definition and degree of scientific responsibility. And he refused to have anything to do with the Freehorns after they once teased him about his intermittent vegetarianism. Seth he regarded as a kind of recrimination, a remnant of a former, now shameful, life which he wanted to forget. Of course I saw that eventually I too would have to go. which he founded in a burst of professional ardour became another dead end. He and Doug Savage quarrelled irrevocably over the definition and degree of scientific responsibility. And he refused to have anything to do with the Freehorns after they once teased him about his intermittent vegetarianism. Seth he regarded as a kind of recrimination, a remnant of a former, now shameful, life which he wanted to forget. Of course I saw that eventually I too would have to go.

"So it wasn't such a shock," Louis says, "when he ... when you separated."

"It was still a shock," I tell him. "I knew it was coming, but I couldn't believe it when it actually happened."

When I look at snapshots of myself taken during that period I am amazed that I am not deformed by unhappiness, that I am not visibly disfigured, bent over and shredded with grief. In fact, except for my bitter, lime-section mouth, I look astonis.h.i.+ngly healthy. In the first months I was so weighted with sorrow and relief that I slept twelve hours every night. I was so emptied out that I ate greedily and constantly, buying for myself baskets of fruit as though I were an invalid. My eyes in those photographs gleam like radium; perhaps I was crazed by the cessation of love, still disbelieving, always certain that Watson would return in another guise.

And in an entirely hopeless way I know I am still half-expecting him to turn up, remorseful, shriven, redeemed. Why else am I keeping Eugene waiting if not for my poor bone of expectation? Waiting has become my daily religion. Tomorrow I must remember to ask Brother Adam why, after all these years, I am still wearing my four-dollar wedding band.

When Louis speaks again, he asks with phlegm-plugged caution the perfect question. "Where is your Watson Forrest living now?"

One lives for moments like this. "Here," I p.r.o.nounce solemnly, feeling my tongue cooling in delicious irony. "Watson lives right here. Isn't that amazing, Louis? Can you believe it? He lives here in this very town."

Louis shows perhaps a lesser degree of astonishment than I would like, but nevertheless he shakes his head in slow, grinning wonder.

And both of us, sitting in silence over our coffee cups are stewing in the rarified, blood-racing excitement of knowing exactly what will happen next.

The Whole World Retreat is two and a half miles south-east of Weedham, reached by a neglected section of secondary road. The young-brown-eyed waitress at the Wayfarers' Inn is pleased to give us directions. "We buy all our lettuce and onions from them," she dimples, "and I don't care what anyone says about them, they make the best whole-wheat bread you ever tasted. Sort of nutty like, you know what I mean. Crunchy. All our customers ask where we get it."

We take the road slowly, swerving here and there to avoid potholes still glittering with yesterday's downpour. The countryside is green and rolling like calendar country; and the farms, though small, seem prosperous with good straight fences, herds of healthy cows and cheerful country mail boxes: The Mertins, Russell K. Anderson and Son, Bill and Hazel Rodman, Dwayne Harshberger, and, at last, a mail box that announces in blocky, green letters, The Whole World Retreat. Louis pulls the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

Back at the restaurant we agreed that we would simply drive past the place. It would be fun-I had emphasized the word fun, fun, while despising the sound of it-it would be fun, out of curiosity, to drive by and see what the place looked like. I had proposed this to Louis in my lightest, most floating accents, as though this were no more than a crazy whim, a mad impulse, as though I were one of those programmed eccentrics who love to do mad, mad, mad things on the spur of the moment. Like Greta Savage who spends her life crouched on the contrived lip of unreason with her: while despising the sound of it-it would be fun, out of curiosity, to drive by and see what the place looked like. I had proposed this to Louis in my lightest, most floating accents, as though this were no more than a crazy whim, a mad impulse, as though I were one of those programmed eccentrics who love to do mad, mad, mad things on the spur of the moment. Like Greta Savage who spends her life crouched on the contrived lip of unreason with her: who else does crazy things like eat sardines for breakfast, who else is mad enough to take a holiday in Repulse Bay, who else is demented enough to tune in everyday to the who else does crazy things like eat sardines for breakfast, who else is mad enough to take a holiday in Repulse Bay, who else is demented enough to tune in everyday to the Archers. I have long suspected that her insanity is partly an affectation ; now I adopt her shrill cry-"I know it sounds silly, Louis, but let's, just for the fun of it, drive by." Archers. I have long suspected that her insanity is partly an affectation ; now I adopt her shrill cry-"I know it sounds silly, Louis, but let's, just for the fun of it, drive by."

An act of adolescence, for don't high school girls in love with their math teachers furtively seek out their houses so they can cycle by, half-drowning in the illicit thrill of proximity. I hate Louis to see this undeveloped, irrational side of my personality which hungers for cheap drama, but not enough to pa.s.s up the opportunity of seeing the Whole World Retreat. And besides, hasn't something more than chance brought me this close? Isn't there at least a suggestion of predestination in this afternoon's events, and hasn't Louis with his surprise revelation introduced a note of compelling, almost mystical significance? This day clearly has not been designed for rationality. Even though it is almost four o'clock, it does not seem right to turn back toward Scarborough where the tunafish ca.s.serole awaits, no doubt about it, already browning in my mother's oven, and where my mother herself waits with her contained, wordless questioning. Something entirely unforeseen has been set into action; I can feel the piping tattoo of my pulse in my throat, and, looking sideways at Louis's suddenly brightened eyes, I can see that he shares at least a measure of my excitement.

Beside the mail box a sign in heavy lettering announces : Green onions, Rhubarb, Homemade Bread, Fresh Eggs, Nursery Plants. And at the bottom in larger letters: Absolutely No Chemical Fertilizers. Louis and I sit, thoughtful for a moment, reading the sign and thinking our thoughts.

The house itself is set well back from the road. It is a top-heavy house, late Victorian in old-girlish brick, and its porch skirt of turned, white spindles gives it a blithe knees-up-Mother-Brown gaiety. Red and yellow tulips, not quite open, stand cheerful in a curved bed. The sloping front lawn is exceptionally beautiful with its twilled, gabardine richness and its fine finish of new growth.

There is no one in sight.

"They sell nursery plants," I remark to Louis.

"Yes," he says, "they do."

"I wonder what kind of things they have at this time of year."

"Hmmm."

"Actually," I take a deep breath, "actually I'd thought of buying some nursery plants."

No response from Louis.

I try again. "For you, Louis, the two of you. Something for the backyard. I thought it might make a good wedding gift."

More silence, and then Louis says cheerfully, "The perfect thing."

"We could just see what they have in stock."

"Are you ... that is ... are you sure?"

I pause. Then lunge. "Yes. I'm sure."

We leave the car-Louis checks both doors to make sure they are locked-and walks up the loose-gravelled drive toward the house. He stumbles slightly, then catches himself, but I don't even turn my head. I can feel excitement leaking in through my skin and for an instant I feel I might faint.