“Fixing up” is one of her girlhood expressions, one of her Hoosierisms, his father calls it. She says a number of other funny things too, like “waiting on” someone instead of “waiting for,” or “having a little lie-down” instead of “taking a nap.” Her voice has a cracked slant to it, slower but also brighter than other mothers’ voices.
“Just a picnic supper tonight,” she says to her husband, as though to confine his expectations. “Just odds and ends.”
Sometimes he takes her girlishness literally, sometimes not.
He kisses her cheek, feeling its cleanliness, and then he bends and kisses the tops of the children’s heads, each of them in turn. Are these bright little bodies really connected to his, his old blood running in their young veins, the marrow of his bone matching theirs? Their brushed hair smells of sunshine and dust. Their smiles have a wonderful polish to them but are nevertheless tentative. He is unfailingly moved by the way their expressions have gone shy since breakfast. He touches the knot of his linen tie, considers removing it for dinner, then decides against it.
Decades of parched solitude have made him a voyeur in his own life, and even now he watches himself critically: paterfamilias, a man greeting his family at the end of the working day, gazing into the faces of his children and beyond them to the screened porch where the supper table is set. A corner pane of the folded back porch door catches a ray of sun, and he observes this with a look that is almost seigneurial, his porch door, his rectangle of golden light. “Have you washed your hands?” he hears himself asking his youngest child, and she immediately sticks them straight out for inspection, palms up. His little Joanie, five years old — who is breathless with the sense of the moment, wriggling her wrists, ready to explode. “Perfect,” he tells her approvingly, making an announcement of it, but also a secret, and she hops up and down on one foot and then launches her body into a whirling off-center motion, so that he’s reminded of one of those pre-war wind-up toys from Japan.
“Steady there, sweetheart,” he says.
Is that his voice flowing out to her? “You’ll bump your head on the doorway.”
“No, I won’t.”
Of course she won’t.
Conversation at the Flett supper table is not demanding. The children are not made to give an account of their day or to discuss “current events” or, as in one Torrington Crescent family, to speak only in French. Talk just meanders along in an unstructured way, how high the temperature went at noon, what to do about the aphids on the rose bushes, whose turn it is to clear the table. A little sigh escapes the lips of Mrs. Flett (Daisy), who is suddenly exhausted and who can’t help noticing that no one has asked for a second helping of jellied veal loaf, though there’s plenty to go around. “Tired?” her husband (Barker) asks quickly. “The heat,” she says, fanning herself with the flat of her hand — as if that would do one bit of good — and he reminds her that the weather’s due to ease off tomorrow, that’s what the evening papers say, cool winds arriving from the west. “I might just as well wait till tomorrow evening to mow the lawn,” he says.
She gives him a look which is impossible to read. Tenderness?
Exasperation?
He is suddenly much older than he ever thought he’d be. In a matter of months he’ll turn sixty-five and be forced to retire from the Directorship of the Agricultural Research Institute. A farewell banquet is being planned, with speeches and gifts and all kinds of hoopla — as his wife will most probably call it. And then what? The thought frightens him. His own father reaching sixty-five had gone strange in the head, packing up his belongings without a word to anyone and returning to the Orkneys where he’d been born, cutting off all contact with his family — not that there’d ever been much. The old devil would be eighty-five years old if he were still alive, though that was doubtful. The north winds would have got him by now, or the poisons of his own mind, though they say anger can keep a body going. What would he look like? Barker Flett can’t help wondering. Only twenty-one years separate them, a mere twenty-one years. What had once seemed a great gulf has shrunk to insignificance. Their genetic structure, his and his father’s, must be close to identical, long limbs, dark coarse hair, a sorrowful mouth. Nothing divides them now but geography; if it weren’t for the width of the Atlantic Ocean, the two of them could stand side by side in old age, more like brothers than father and son, their blood thinned down to water and their limbs diminished by idleness.
Idleness: the notion frightens him, and so do his old temptations — solitude, silence.
What happens to men when their work is taken from them?
Barker Flett thinks of his father-in-law, Cuyler Goodwill, who, though in perfect health, is reduced to the inanities of travel and the false enthusiasms of backyard projects. No, he will not allow himself to slip into that kind of dotage. A number of kind friends have suggested he write his autobiography, but, no, the surfaces of his life have been smoothed and polished by the years so as to be almost ungraspable; where would he begin? He’ll work on his lady’s-slipper collection instead, it’s been years since he’s added a new specimen. Also, there are a couple of articles he’s been wanting to write, and — something altogether less academic — the editor of the Ottawa Recorder asked him to contribute a piece or two, perhaps even a weekly column, on horticulture in the Ottawa Carleton region. And he’ll go back to his old habit of taking the children for weekend walks, quizzing them as they ramble along the quiet streets on the common names of trees and shrubs. He can’t understand why these offspring of his are unable to retain such simple information about the natural world.
He wonders, in fact, what they do fill their heads up with. He wonders, too, if they’re ashamed to be seen with a parent as old as he. A man old enough to be their grandfather, a man who’s lived through two world wars and served in neither. Who almost never engages in a game of backyard catch. Who scarcely ever swings them up in the air or fills their ears with nonsense at bedtime. A man too tired to mow his lawn at the end of the day.
This day will end at eleven o’clock for the Flett family. The children will be in their beds much earlier, of course, with only a light sheet covering them, though a blanket will be fan-folded at the foot of the bed, ready to be pulled up for the cool early morning hours. The moon will have risen, a pale round peach at their windows. The branches of elms brush against the screens, and the whispery sound is absorbed straight into their dreams. Such sweetness of air. What heaven, this northerly city in the middle of its summer season. How blessed the members of the Flett family are, never mind their disparate ages, their hidden thoughts, and the fact that they have little in common.
Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett settle in their big double bed with the Hollywood headboard, he with the latest issue of The Botanical Journal and she flipping through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Quietude, propriety. A single moth flits back and forth between his bedside lamp and hers. Half an hour later, as though summoned by a bell, the two of them turn, embrace cordially, and reach for the light switch. Despite the heat they drift easily into sleep, each of them feeling full of trust for the other, but then they would, wouldn’t they?