I used to see him on the street and he seemed old to me then, at least old the way almost everybody grown-up did. He is one of those people who look older than they are when they’re young and younger than they are when they’re old. He was always around the Queen’s Hotel. Being a MacQuarrie he never had to work too hard and he had a little office and did some work as a notary public and a bit of insurance and real estate. He still has the same place, and the front window is always bleary and dusty and there’s a light burning in the back, winter and summer, where a lady about eighty years old, Miss Maitland, does his typing or whatever he gives her to do. If he’s not in the Queen’s Hotel he has one or two of his friends sitting around the space heater doing a little card playing, a little quiet drinking, mostly just talking. There’s a certain kind of men in Jubilee and I guess every small town that you might call public men. I don’t mean public figures, important enough to run for Parliament or even for mayor (though Clare could do that if he wanted to be serious), just men who are always around on the main street and you get to know their faces. Clare and those friends of his are like that.
“He down there with his sister?” Momma said, as if I hadn’t told her. A lot of my conversations with Momma are replays. “What is that name they call her?”
“Porky,” I said.
“Yes, I remember thinking, that’s some name for a grown woman. And I remember her being baptized and her name was Isabelle. Way back before I was married, I was still singing in the choir. They had one of these long, fangle-dangle christening robes on her, you know them.” Momma had a soft spot for Clare but not for the MacQuarrie family. She thought they were being stuck-up when they just breathed. I remember a year or two ago, us going past their place, and she said something about being careful not to step on the grass of the Mansion, and I told her, “Momma, in a few years’ time I am going to be living here, this is going to be my house, so you better stop calling it the Mansion in that tone of voice.” She and I both looked up at the house with all its dark green awnings decorated with big, white, old-English Ms, and all the verandahs and the stained-glass window set in the side wall, like in a church. No sign of life, but upstairs old Mrs. MacQuarrie was lying, and is still, paralyzed down one side and not able to speak, Willa Montgomery tending her by day and Clare by night. Strange voices in the house upset her, and every time Clare took me in we could only whisper so she wouldn’t hear me and throw some kind of paralytic fit. After her long look Momma said, “It’s a funny thing but I can’t imagine your name MacQuarrie.”
“I thought you were so fond of Clare.”
“Well I am, but I just think of him coming to get you Saturday night, him coming to dinner Sunday night, I don’t think of you and him married.”
“You wait and see what happens when the old lady passes on.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“It’s understood.”
“Well imagine,” Momma said.
“You don’t need to act like he’s doing me a favour because I can tell you there are plenty of people would consider it the other way round.”
“Can’t I open my mouth without you taking offense?” said Momma mildly.
Clare and I used to slip in the side door on Saturday nights and make coffee and something to eat in the high, old-fashioned kitchen, being as quiet and sneaky about it as two kids after school. Then we’d tiptoe up the back stairs to Clare’s room and turn on the television so she’d think he was by himself, watching that. If she called him I’d lie alone in the big bed watching the programme or looking at the old pictures on the wall—him on the high-school hockey team playing goalie, Porky in her graduation outfit, him and Porky and friends I didn’t know on holidays. If she kept him a long time and I got bored I would get downstairs under cover of the television and have more coffee. (I never drank anything stronger, left that to Clare.) With just the kitchen light to see by I’d go into the dining room and pull out the drawers and look at her linen and open the china cabinet and the silver chest and feel like a thief. But I’d think, why shouldn’t I have the enjoyment of this and the name MacQuarrie since I wouldn’t have to do anything I’m not doing anyway? Clare said, “Marry me,” soon after we started going out together and I said, “Don’t bother me, I don’t want to think about getting married,” and he quit. When I brought it up myself, these years later, he seemed pleased. He said, “Well, there’s not many old buffaloes like me hear a pretty girl like you say she wants to marry them.” I thought, wait till I get married and go into King’s Department Store and send Hawes scurrying around waiting on me, the old horse’s neck. Wouldn’t I like to give him a bad time, but I’d restrain myself, out of good taste.
“I’m going to take that postcard now and put it in my box,” I said to Momma. “And I can’t think of a better way for us to spend this afternoon than for us both to take naps.” I went upstairs and put on my dressing gown (Chinese-embroidered, and Clare’s present). I creamed my face and got out the box I keep postcards and letters and other mementoes in, and I put it with the Florida postcards from other years and some from Banff and Jasper and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. Then just idling away the time I looked at my school pictures and report cards and the programme for H.M.S. Pinafore, put on by the high school, in which I was the heroine, what’s-her-name, the captain’s daughter. I remember Clare meeting me on the street and congratulating me on my singing and how pretty I looked and me flirting with him a bit just because he seemed so old and safe and I would as soon flirt as turn around, I was so pleased with myself. Wouldn’t I have been surprised if I had seen all of what was going to happen? I hadn’t even met Ted Forgie, then.
I knew his letter just from looking at the outside, and I never read it anymore, but just out of curiousity I opened it up and started off. I usually hate to write a typewritten letter because it lacks the personal touch but I am so worn out tonight with all the unfamiliar pressures here that I hope you will forgive me. Typewritten or not it used to be that just looking at that letter I would get a feeling of love, if that is what you want to call it, strong enough to pretty near crumple me up and knock me over. Ted Forgie was an announcer at the Jubilee radio station for six months, around the time I was finishing high school. Momma said he was too old for me—she never said that about Clare—but all he was was twenty-four. He had spent two years in a San with T.B. and that had made him old for his years. We used to go up on Sullivan’s Hill and he talked about how he had lived with death staring him in the face and he knew the value of being close to one human being, but all he had found was loneliness. He said he wanted to put his head down in my lap and weep, but all the time what he was doing was something else. When he went away I just turned into a sleepwalker. I only woke up in the afternoons when I went to the post office and opened the box with my knees going hollow, to see if I had a letter. And I never did, after that one. Places bothered me. Sullivan’s Hill, the radio station, the coffee shop of the Queen’s Hotel. I don’t know how many hours I spent in that coffee shop, reciting in my head every conversation we ever had and visualizing every look on his face, not really comprehending yet that wishing wasn’t going to drag him through that door again. I got friendly with Clare in there. He said I looked like I needed cheering up and he told me some of his stories. I never let on to him what my trouble was but when we started going out I explained to him that friendship was all I could offer. He said he appreciated that and he would bide his time. And he did.