Crow Lake Page 7

  Luke was looking at Matt, who was staring at him. “That’s okay,” he said absently. “I don’t mind it cold.”

  He sat down and dumped Bo on his lap.

  Matt said, “Where. Have. You. Been,” in the most deadly level tone.

  “In town,” Luke said. “I went to see Mr. Levinson. Dad’s lawyer. I had some things to sort out. Some things I needed to know. I can eat all those potatoes, if no one else wants them.”

  “And you couldn’t have told us you were going.” Matt’s voice was flat and hard and thin as a fish knife.

  “I wanted to get things sorted out before I mentioned anything. Why?” He looked around. “Has there been a problem?”

  Matt made a sound in his throat.

  Aunt Annie said, “Never mind, Luke. Just tell us now.”

  “Can I eat my supper first? I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “No,” Matt said.

  “What’s eating you anyway? Okay! Okay! Calm down! I’ll tell you—it’s not that complicated. Basically, I’m not going to teachers’ college. I’m staying here. The four of us are staying here. I’m looking after you guys. It’s all legal, I’m old enough and everything. We’ll have the money I would have used to go to college—not from the house, obviously, because we won’t sell it, but the rest of it. We’ll need more than that, but I can get a job. I can work nights—from when you get home from school, Matt, so’s you can look after Kate and Bo. It’d probably be in town though, so we’d need a car, so we’ll have to spend some money on that, but Mr. Levinson says he’ll keep his eyes open for an old one for us. I told him you wanted to go to university and he said we should talk to Dad’s bank about a loan, they might be sympathetic. Obviously you’d have to win a scholarship but since you’re a genius that’s no problem, right? Anyway, we don’t have to worry about that yet. The main thing is, we’re all staying here. So thank you very much for all your plans and everything, Aunt Annie, but we won’t be needing them. But thank everyone for us, okay?”

  There was silence.

  Bo pointed at the applesauce. “Dat,” she said, and smacked her lips. No one paid any attention.

  Matt said, “You’re not going to college.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re staying here. You’re giving up teaching.”

  “I didn’t want to be a teacher all that much. It was Mum and Dad who wanted it.”

  He stood up from his chair, dumped Bo down on it, took a plate, and started to help himself to the pork. My head felt funny, as if there were bees humming inside of it. Aunt Annie was sitting very still with her hands clasped in her lap, looking at the table. Her eyes were still red.

  “Dat!” Bo said, bouncing up and down on Luke’s chair and craning her neck to see into the bowl of applesauce. “Dat!”

  Matt said, “No thanks.”

  Luke looked at him. “What?”

  “I know why you’re doing this. I don’t want it, thanks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How would you feel?” Matt said. He was white as a sheet. “If I gave up a sure place at university so that you could try for a place—how would you feel? Your whole life, how would you feel?”

  Luke said, “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for Bo and Kate. And because I want to.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re doing it because of what Kate said last night.”

  “I don’t give a bear’s ass whether you believe me or not. Soon as you’re eighteen you can take your share of the money and go off to Timbuktu for all I care.”

  He finished loading his plate, plucked Bo off his chair and set her on the floor, sat down, and started to eat.

  “Dat!” Bo yelled. “Dat … pudding!”

  Luke lifted the bowl of applesauce off the table and set it on the floor beside her.

  Matt said, “Aunt Annie, tell him he can’t.”

  I was staring at him incredulously. Luke was offering us salvation, and Matt was turning it down. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand it. In fact, it was to be years before I understood it. Years before I realized how desperately he wanted what Luke was offering, for Bo and me as well as for himself, and how sick and enraged he was because he felt he had to turn it down.

  He said again, “Aunt Annie! Tell him!”

  Aunt Annie had been studying the meat platter. She drew a breath and said, “Luke, I’m afraid Matt is right. It’s very generous of you, very generous, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do.”

  Luke glanced at her but carried on eating. From under the table came the sound of Bo smacking her lips.

  “I’m sorry your parents can’t hear you make the offer,” Aunt Annie said. She smiled at him. Her face was stiff and white like Matt’s. Another thing I didn’t realize for years was how hard it all must have been for Aunt Annie. She wanted so much to do what was best for us—for her brother’s sake and also, I think, because in spite of everything we’d put her through, she had become fond of us all—and the options open to her were so limited. She must have seen how perfectly Luke’s sacrifice seemed to solve everyone’s problems, and she must also have understood Matt’s agony. Most of all, she must have known that Luke could not really know what he was suggesting.

  “The thing is, Luke, it wouldn’t work. I’m surprised that Mr. Levinson couldn’t see that. But of course he’s a man.”

  Luke looked at her, chewing his pork. “So what?”

  “He wouldn’t realize what hard work it is, bringing up a family. It’s a full-time job. You cannot do both that and earn money to support you all. And the rest of us couldn’t send enough to keep you. Not as a regular thing, to rely on.”

  “Matt will help. He’ll be able to work during the holidays.”

  “Even with Matt’s help, you couldn’t do it. You have no idea what’s involved, Luke. You can’t have. It’s been all I could do to cope with the girls the past few weeks, and I’ve been running a house for thirty years.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not used to kids,” Luke said. “I’m used to them.”

  “You are not, Luke. Living with them is not the same as being responsible for them. Caring for them. Looking after every single need they have, for years and years and years. It’s never-ending hard work. Heavens, Bo on her own is a full-time job.”

  “Yeah, but she likes me,” Luke said. He flushed. “I didn’t mean she doesn’t like you. I mean she’s easier with me. I know I can do it. I know it wouldn’t be easy, but neighbours would help and everything. We’d work it out. I know I can do it.”

  Aunt Annie straightened a bit in her chair. She looked full at Luke. Suddenly I saw our father in her— he’d had just that expression when he’d decided that an argument had gone far enough and it was time to bring it to an end. When she spoke she sounded like him too.

  “Luke, you cannot know. For a while you would cope all right, but it would get harder. The neighbours wouldn’t help forever. Matt would be gone, you’d be on your own with two small children. You’d find that you’d given up your own life—”

  “It’s my life,” Luke said. “I can do what I want with it, and this is what I want.”

  He sounded dogged, defiant, determined, but he put down his fork and ran both hands through his hair. He’d seen our father in her too.

  Aunt Annie said, “It’s what you want now. In a year’s time it may well not be, but you’d have lost your chance. I’m sorry, Luke. I cannot allow you—”

  There was another sound. High-pitched. A wail. It was coming from me. I found that my mouth was open, strained open, and my eyes were strained wide, and I was wailing, wailing. The others were staring at me, and my mouth was trying to form a word, quivering and straining and trying to shape around a word.

  “Please… . Please… . Please… . Please… . Please… .”

  part

  TWO

  chapter

  EIGHT

  The night after the party invitation arrived from Matt’s son, I did not sleep well. I
had a number of vague incoherent dreams, some of them concerned with home, some with work, and then, toward morning, a very vivid one which stayed with me the rest of the day. Matt and I— our adult selves—were lying on our stomachs at the edge of the pond, watching a slim, streamlined little water bug called a pond skater skim across the surface, hunting for prey. He came to a stop right under our noses, and we could clearly see the dimples his feet made on the surface of the water. Matt said, “The water has kind of a skin on top, Kate. It’s called surface tension. That’s why he doesn’t sink.”

  I was astonished that he thought he had to tell me something so absurdly elementary. I am working on surfactants—compounds which reduce surface tension—at the moment. It is part of my field of research. “I know,” I said gently. “And the surface tension is caused by the fact that water has such high cohesion. The molecules are polar; the positive hydrogen atoms of one molecule are attracted to the negative oxygen atom of another. It’s called the hydrogen bond.”

  I looked at Matt to check that he had understood, but he was looking into the water. I waited for a long time, but he didn’t say anything more. And then the alarm went off.

  It was a Saturday. I was due to go to an exhibition with Daniel in the afternoon, after which we were meeting his parents downtown for a meal. I had a great pile of lab reports to mark, which I was determined to finish first, so I got up and showered and made myself a pot of coffee, aware all the time of an unpleasant feeling left over from the dream. I ate a bowl of cornflakes standing at the kitchen window, with its splendid view of the kitchen window of the apartment across the light well, and then took my coffee into my poky little dining-cum-living room where the reports were heaped on the table.

  The marking of lab reports is one of the most depressing activities known to man. They are written immediately after a lab experiment, when everything the student has learned should be fresh in his mind, and they therefore reveal exactly how much he or she has failed to understand. It is enough to make you weep. This is only my first year of assistant professorship, but already the teaching part of it is getting me down. Why do kids come to university if they aren’t interested in learning? Evidently because they think it’s an easy option. They come for the beer and the parties; any facts they happen to pick up en route are strictly by the way.

  I read the first report. It made no sense, so I read it again. The third time I realized that, dismal though it was, the fault lay not with it but with me. I put the report down and tried to identify just what it was, this emotion I was feeling, this hangover from the dream, and realized abruptly that it was shame.

  It was totally illogical—feeling ashamed of something you did in a dream. In reality I would never lecture Matt. I’ve always been very careful about that sort of thing. I never even talk about my work with him because I’d have to simplify it, and it seems to me that that would be an insult to him. Possibly he wouldn’t see it that way, but I do.

  I turned back to the reports. One or two showed some effort at accuracy, some awareness of scientific method. Half a dozen were so depressing that I had to restrain myself from writing “drop the course” at the bottom. The door buzzer went when I still had two to go. I got up and pressed the door release and sat down again.

  “I’m nearly finished,” I said when Daniel walked in, panting from the stairs. Considering that he’s only thirty-four, he’s very unfit. He has the kind of lean build than never runs to fat, but thin isn’t necessarily healthy. I nag him about it, and he nods seriously and agrees that he must get more exercise/eat more sensibly/get a decent amount of sleep. I imagine that tactic—solemnly agreeing with criticism—was learned early. His mother (Professor Crane of the fine art department) has what you could call a dominant personality, and his father (Professor Crane of the history department) is worse. Daniel handles them both very deftly, by agreeing with and then ignoring everything they say.

  “There’s coffee,” I said. “Help yourself.”

  He went into the kitchen and came out with a mug of coffee and stood beside me, reading the reports over my shoulder.

  “I can’t believe how bad they are,” I said. “They’re absolutely tragic.”

  He nodded. “They always are. Why are you doing them yourself? That’s what teaching assistants are for.”

  “How else am I going to know how the students are doing?”

  “Why do you want to know how they’re doing? Think of them as elephants, passing through.” He waved vaguely at a vanishing herd.

  That is all pretence, of course. Daniel is at least as conscientious as I am. He says I take everything too seriously, implying that he just lets his students shift for themselves. In fact he spends more time on the teaching side of things than I do. The difference is that it doesn’t seem to drive him mad.

  I continued marking. Daniel wandered around the room sipping coffee and picking things up, turning them over, and putting them down again. He is a “fiddler”—his mother’s word. He fiddles with things. His mother has collected some very beautiful objects over the years and has had to resort to locking them away behind glass doors to keep Daniel from fiddling with them.

  “This has to be a relation.”

  I looked up. He was holding a photograph in his hand. Simon. I’d forgotten I’d left it on the sofa.

  I said, “It’s my nephew.”

  “He looks a bit like the grand old dame hanging in your bedroom. Your great-great-great-great-grandmother or whatever.”

  “Just one great.”

  I felt tense, all at once. I couldn’t remember where I’d put the invitation. It had Matt’s scribbled note on it, Bring someone if you want to. Was it with the photograph? Had Daniel seen it?

  “Do you all have the same amazing hair?”

  “It’s just blonde.”

  There must have been something in my voice, because he looked at me curiously and put the photo down. “Sorry. It was just lying there. I couldn’t help noticing the family resemblance.”

  “Sure,” I said casually. “I know. Everyone says we all look alike.”

  Had he seen the invitation or not?

  I should say here that Daniel introduced me to his parents within a month of our first going out. We went to dinner with them. They live exactly where you would expect to find distinguished academics living, in a fine old “century home” with a plaque on the wall in an area known as the Annex, near the university. There were paintings on the walls—originals, not prints—and several weighty bits of sculpture lying around. The furniture looked old, and good, and had a lustre to it which I imagine you get only with something that’s been polished lovingly once a week for at least a hundred years. Where I come from such conspicuous good taste would be viewed with vague disapproval, hinting as it does at a love of material things. But I know that this is a kind of snobbishness, and to be honest I found their home interesting rather than ostentatious.

  Nonetheless, it was an uncomfortable evening. Quite apart from the surroundings—the four of us ate in a dining room with dark red wallpaper and an oval table big enough to seat at least a dozen people—I found Daniel’s parents alarming. They are both extremely articulate and extremely opinionated and they contradict each other constantly, so that the air is thick with interruptions and denials and barbed remarks all flying at great speed. Every now and then one or other of them would suddenly remember that we were there and would pause midattack and look concerned and say something like, “Daniel, do give Katherine some more wine,” and then instantly resume battle.

  Daniel’s mother said things like, “Daniel’s father would have you believe so and so, Katherine.” She would raise an elegant eyebrow at me, requiring that I snigger at the absurdity of so and so. She is tall and gaunt and striking to look at, with hair which is going silver rather than grey, cut short at the back and falling with razorlike precision at an angle across her face.

  Daniel’s father, who is shorter than she but gives an impression of power and mass and fer
ocious, barely contained energy, would smile and dab his mouth with his napkin in a way that somehow made you think of a marksman calmly taking aim. He referred to his wife as “the honourable doctor.” “The honourable doctor is trying to recruit you to her cause, Katherine. Don’t be deceived. She does not have logic on her side.”

  I sat and listened to them, replying nervously when a reply was required, wondering by what genetic fluke the two of them had managed to produce someone as peaceful and non-competitive as Daniel.

  Daniel was tucking into the venison stew, paying no attention to either of them. I was impressed by his courage in daring to show them to anyone—if they’d been my parents I would have denied that I knew them—and I expected him to apologize for them afterwards. But he didn’t. He seemed to think they were perfectly normal. He took it for granted that I would like them, or if I couldn’t manage that, at least tolerate them for his sake. And in fact, once I got to know them better, I did like them, more or less, provided I could take them in small doses. They were both very welcoming to me and I do find them interesting. Besides, whether by fluke or not, they did produce Daniel, so they can’t be all bad.

  But the point is, Daniel took it for granted that I would get to know them. As far as he was concerned, that was what you did when you became close to someone—you drew them into your family circle. After that first meeting we got together with them at fairly frequent intervals, once every month or so. Sometimes we went to their house, sometimes we met in a restaurant downtown. They would phone Daniel, or he would say, “Time to see the War Department,” which was what he called them. He assumed that I would want to see them too. And I did.

  But of course, he expected me to do the same. The situation was different because of the distances, but still, I knew that he was puzzled—more than puzzled—that I had not taken him home before. I knew it for a fact, because only a month or so before the invitation arrived from Simon, he had virtually said as much.

  We had been out with friends for the evening, a colleague from the department and his new wife, who had been describing their first Christmas with their families. They had spent Christmas Eve with his family and Christmas Day with hers; the arrangement had pleased nobody and they’d had a one-hundred-mile trip in a snowstorm in between. They made it sound funny, but I found the tale depressing. Daniel was unusually quiet on the way home and I assumed he’d found it depressing too. I said something like, “Oh well, at least they can laugh about it,” and Daniel said, “Hmmm.” And then, after a minute’s silence, he said, “Kate, where are we going?”