The Young in One Another’s Arms
A Novel
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JANE RULE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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CHAPTER ONE
In the darkened street, Ruth Wheeler might have been mistaken for a boy of middle growth, spare-bodied, light on her feet. She nearly always wore trousers, and the empty right sleeve of her windbreaker could seem a boy’s quirk of style. But if she stepped under a streetlight, looked up and sharply beyond that illuminated space, her face redefined the first impression, the color of false pearl, dark eyes of remarkable size but limited by aging lids, anchored by taut lines to her temples: the face of a seventy-year-old woman. Ruth Wheeler was, in fact, just over fifty.
“I looked older than my mother when I was born,” she claimed.
Most newborn do but outgrow it. She had not. She had lived with that birth face until age became the excuse for it or was beginning to be. Her body, ordinary enough in growing, had refused to age, small breasts still high, belly firm as if it had never given room to the one child she had borne.
“I’ll die in pieces,” she said, her right arm the first sacrifice to that process, an accident she didn’t remember, though she’d lived with the fact of having one arm for fifteen years.
“I can only remember what’s happened to other people.”
Those accidents which she had not witnessed stayed vivid: her father crushed under a redwood tree (it didn’t matter that the report blamed a bulldozer), her daughter falling like a sparrow out of the sky (the late news invented an automobile accident). Ruth still dreamed occasionally of the falling tree and the falling child (who was twenty-two when it happened). She dreamed as well of the great six-lane highway that flowed over the valley in which she had grown up, a river of cars spawning to impossible cities, to be seen as broken and battered as fish on its urban shores.
Ruth had been part of the debris, carried along like an uprooted bush or root—or so she dreamed it, snagged here and there by a job that didn’t last, a man that didn’t last.
“You’re not a sort of woman to live with,” her husband explained to her when he left. But not the sort to leave behind entirely either. A memory of her would catch him like the first cold air in the lungs, and he would come back to her for a day or a week.
“Like a tooth you don’t get around to pulling right out. It flares up. You bite on it.”
Aching root, uprooted stick, walking the night streets often because she did not much like to sleep in the dark, Ruth Wheeler would speak to strangers or not. A cigarette smoked in the middle of the bridge or down by the beach was as good a companion as any. She did not stay out long, no more than an hour or so. She had a house to go back to and a number of invented responsibilities: her mother-in-law, her six boarders, an ailing runaway boy in the basement. She could sit by an open fire and look through the bulb catalogue, her inventions asleep about her, morning as far off as spring.
If planting bulbs could have stopped the dread of spring, Ruth would have gardened in the middle of the night, but for her there was never any way out of a fact. This house, along with all the others on the block, was to be razed to make way for a new approach to the bridge. In March, she would not sit in a rocking chair with a shotgun across her lap as young Gladys Ledger would like her to do, nor would she let Gladys organize the other boarders into any kind of protest. For most of them losing the house meant no more than finding another room to live in. Mavis Collingwood had been about to move out when the expropriation notice arrived and was staying on now only out of loyalty, knowing Ruth couldn’t easily rent her room again. The sick boy would be well and gone, in jail if Ruth couldn’t prevent that either, or in working safety on a boat or in the trees.
The only two who worried her were Clara, her mother-in-law, and Willard Steele, who had been in the house since Ruth bought it fourteen years ago, using as down payment the compensation money from her accident. Clara had decided that this was as good a winter as any to die, but she wouldn’t. Willard did not think about it, incapable of living in any terms that included change. Whatever Ruth decided for herself would have to include both of them somehow.
“I thought you’d be a fighter,” Gladys had said.
“What you lose is what you survive with,” Ruth answered, her right arm for a house, her husband for her mother-in-law, two rooms in the basement from the insurance paid for a dead child, and now whatever she could get with this new compensation.
“You can’t fight the expropriation itself,” Mavis Collingwood had agreed, “but you can fight for a fair price.”
Mavis, filling up her room with chapters of her Ph.D. thesis, which had everyone in the house reading Dickens, was good at the system and did not want to discover how little control one had over what happened, what a “fair price” for anything was.
“The government’s always fair, isn’t it?” Joanie Vaughan asked, her hair in curlers at breakfast and at dinner so that she always looked to Ruth like something to be opened later by lusting boss or lusting boy friend. For Joanie, with all her dependent daydreams, only people could be unfair, the men with big cars who either had wives or didn’t want them.
“You’re not going to try to buy another house, are you?” Tom Petross wanted to know. “Why don’t you get into business? Why don’t you go into business with me?”
“Doing what, Tom?” Ruth asked, her lined smile opening over handsome teeth, as young as her body.
Ten years younger, she could have been tempted not only because Tom Petross was an inventive and practical young man but because she would have liked to keep him near her. He had been with her longer than the others, except for Willard; he had been the first of the young Americans to come across the border for sanctuary. Tom had not needed her help after the first month, finding himself a job when no one could, in the middle of winter, as a short-order cook from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.
Ruth’s husband, who had married her in a grand gesture just before he went gladly off to war, didn’t like these young punks coming up across the border and curling up in Ruth’s pocket-book and heart.
“They’re my people,” she said.
“You talk like Americans were a bloody tribe of Indians. You changed your citizenship when you married me, didn’t you?”
She had and could therefore get a job sorting mail at Christmas, when she still had two hands, when she still had a daughter who would grow up Canadian, but a country for Ruth wasn’t so much something to belong to as something more to lose, as these young men were losing theirs. She understood them as she understood herself, glad of whatever snag could hold her still awhile. She was also angry for them, as she was not for herself.
Sometimes she was angry for all of them, even for Joanie and Gladys. Anger was the one thing that could keep them all alive for her, even in her dreams, so that they didn’t all come tumbling out of the sky at her like dying birds.
“I’m not fitting anyone with wings, Tom, especially you.”
“Hey, that’s cool, Ruth. You always stay in your space,” Stew said, his eyes shining behind his long hair, in his own space always.
Stew Meadow would get himself carefully stoned and sit on a curb across the street to watch the house come down over no one’s ears, a happening just for him, who would get past experience instead of going through it, taking nothing but new notes for his clarinet.
By the fire, late at night, with the bulb catalogue, Ruth listened to all their voices again, as another way of postponing her own dreams or listening to theirs, alive all around her in the sleeping house. Could she find an apartment somewhere? Might someone hire a fifty-year-old, one-armed caretaker with an arthritic mother-in-law and a three-quarter-witted man of forty? Two bedrooms—Ruth could sleep in the living room, when she slept, but how could she listen late at night to the sleep of all those other people from whom she might only collect rent and useless greetings? There had to be room for her own dreaming, the highway then flowing over this house as well, the sky falling.
“Ruth? Ruth? Can you hear the geese?”
Ruth got up, walked across the hall and into her mother-in-law’s room. There was no light on, but she went up to the bed and reached for the hand she knew was there, frail-boned, painful.
“I never feel sorry for them,” Clara said.
“All the pity’s for the robins.”
“And I don’t even like them.”
“Have you been asleep?” Ruth asked.
“It’s hard to know, isn’t it?”
Even after all these years it was difficult for Ruth not to offer Clara something more than her hand, but the old lady suffered being waited on only if she could give commands and stay unaware of how willing Ruth was, how willing they all were. She stood for a moment longer in case there was something Clara wanted. Then she put the hand back where she had found it and went out. Another thing they never did was say good night, perhaps because it would have closed off a time in which they often encountered each other briefly, like that, the two restless watchdogs of a house that was never locked. They were not afraid of burglars.
“No need to be while you’ve got all the thieves already living under your roof,” Ruth’s husband said.
Did many women marry because they loved their mothers-in-law? Ruth’s own mother remarried when Ruth was ten, too old to learn to be the child of another man, too old to compete with the babies that came one after another. If there had been books, she would have read them. Instead she read the seasons in the south fork of the Eel River, in the meadows at the edge of the redwoods until she was old enough—was it fourteen or thereabouts?—to work along the road, ladling up plates of gravied meat for the truckers, turning hamburgers for the tourists, listening to the locals’ yearly doubt: “Where will the road go next year?” One straightened curve would take out a café, another a sawmill. “What the road doesn’t take, the river will,” people said, but they went on planting their gardens within reach of the spring floods and building their hopes along the twisting and straightening road. Nobody imagined in those days that it would finally simply take the valley, everything in it. Ruth went north to Portland with a trucker one night, then farther north to Seattle, and finally for no good reason across the border into Canada to discover Vancouver.
And met and loved Clara and married her son and gave her a granddaughter to be outlived, a house to be outlived. Why not pity the geese? Did Clara long simply for the regularity of the journey? Was that all she really minded, not ever being able to read the road?
“Haven’t you gone to bed at all?” Tom asked, on his way to work at five in the morning, his young face still bland with sleep, no point in asking him if he’d heard the geese.
“Coffee?”
“No, I’ll get it there. I like the walk on an empty stomach.”
Ruth thought of herself, walking to the same kind of job those years ago, down the forest track, blind in that dark, on accurate feet, out into the night light of the sky over the river, across the lumber bridge to the road. Sometimes it was raining, but she could never remember wind at that time of the morning. Tom’s walk would take him across Burrard Bridge, which spanned the industrial confusion of False Creek, but in clear weather, even in the last darkness, he could look across the inlet to the mountains, lined against the open sky.
“Morning, Tom.”
“Morning, old lady,” he called in to Clara, a joke between them they didn’t explain. He never called her anything else.
At the front door, he hesitated and turned back to Ruth. “An all-night café, why not?”
“With one arm?” Ruth asked.
“With three.”
That sounded friendly. Nearly everything Tom said did, as if there were never broken things inside him, though Ruth knew better. As the door closed behind him, she began to set the table for breakfast, shoving the tea cart before her with one hip, quicker with one hand than a lot were with two, something Tom often pointed out to her.
“I use my head as well.”
She had not liked being efficient before she lost her arm. There hadn’t been any real point.
“Only solve the problems you have,” she tried to tell them all.
“And if there’s no solution?” Mavis had asked, baiting Ruth as she probably baited her students, with assumed detachment.
“Then don’t call it a problem. It isn’t one.”
“Cool, Ruth, cool,” Stew must always say.
“Cheating,” Gladys contradicted, on Mavis’ side for a change.
They couldn’t ordinarily agree, those two, Gladys a street radical, Mavis a conservative. Gladys had a heart as big as her mouth and should have trusted it more. Mavis had a mind, though what good it would do her Ruth wasn’t certain. So many gifts turn out to be obstacles, just by chance.
Willard was always the first up for breakfast, though he did not have to be at work until eight-thirty. The young people disturbed him in the morning. He preferred to begin the day quietly, neatly.
“You know, he even looks like a shoe,” Gladys remarked one day, not in his hearing; they were all absentmindedly kind to Willard. “Would it happen to anyone?”
His black hair polished to his small head, his eyes as close together as tightly laced dress shoes, his mouth a short, straight line, Willard went off every morning to sell shoes, came home every evening at quarter to six, endured dinner, and then went off on Monday night to the movies, on Tuesday night to the laundromat (he would not let Ruth or anyone else touch his clothes), on Wednesday night to a card game in Chinatown, at which he lost a budgeted amount of his salary, to his room Thursday night to write to his mother in Kamloops, to the beer parlor on Friday. Saturday night he stayed home to watch television since there was usually no one else around. Sunday he went to church and then read a thriller until it was time for him to sleep. Week in, week out, year in, year out, Willard endured the griefs and changes of the house as if they had not occurred, and came to weigh on Ruth like a negative habit. He was the only one in the house she was sometimes simply cranky with, nagging him about ashes on his butter plate, about the early hour he wanted breakfast. He was not meek so much as inattentive.
Willard had one odd, gentle mannerism. He always kissed Ruth goodbye in the morning, lips surprisingly soft and warm on her cheek. Then he knocked on Clara’s door and called, “Have a day, Mrs. Wheeler.” They had long ago stopped laughing about it or even using it themselves as a slogan. That persistent kiss and wish had lasted into minimal dignity. For the others, he behaved as if they weren’t there and perhaps didn’t notice when they had gone. Even Ruth’s daughter? Willard obviously had not thought it proper to acknowledge her while she lived. He had no way, therefore, of acknowledging her death. Could a life be made so small as to keep all suffering and joy out of it? Perhaps, with help. Ruth would not leave Willard behind.
Between Willard’s departure and the gang feeding at seven-thirty, Ruth took Clara her breakfast on the freshly cleared cart, an extra cup for herself for a companionable taste of tea until all sets of plumbing began their four-part morning harmony and it was time to cook the eggs.
Mavis was always on time, her short black curly hair wet and disciplined against her temples, her eyes shallow behind her glasses, refusing to focus a distance beyond her plate until she looked out over the podium at her first class. Because waking was always a bitter wrench for Mavis, in her dreams free of all that rational armor, she was extremely polite at breakfast.
Then Joanie, prattling about her dreams which were always violently obvious, the ill-stacked curlers riding above her childish face, would appear in the kitchen to “help.” Since she had never finished the buttoning and zipping when she arrived, Ruth simply herded her into the dining room in front of the cart, now carrying plates of eggs.
Gladys and Stew, cultural twins with their flowing hair and blue jeans, came in at the last minute, still sleepwalking into each other, disagreeable and affectionate. They both counted on a ride from Mavis, Gladys to the school for handicapped children where she taught a variety of uncertain skills, Stew to the university where he was slowly acquiring credits toward no degree.
Shortly after them came the boy from the basement, who had only the one name, Arthur. His military haircut had not had time to grow out, and he wore an army shirt tucked into his jeans. After a week with them, he had begun to eat with less furtive greed, and, though the nerves in his face still didn’t allow him to hold a smile, he risked quick ones now and then as a way of thanking. The others had learned not to ask these boys questions, waited for the tale to be told or not, and they didn’t offer suggestions either until Ruth indicated that it was time to help. But each of them spoke to him, even those who had not bothered in the dark morning to speak to each other, and they called him by name, for he would need them as friends when he was well enough to have friends again.
Stew always wanted to give them hash as a way through the first painful time, but Ruth did not approve. She said, for these kids, it had to be a halfway house, not a far-out house. She wanted the police to have no secondary excuse to take anyone back across the border.
“If you want to be first clarinet in the pen band, Stew, that’s your business.”
“I can’t see a narc getting through your front door, you know.”
“Not only through my front door but into the living room for a cup of coffee,” Ruth answered firmly. “I have no quarrel with them.”
“No quarrel with the pigs?” Gladys demanded.
Ruth would not argue past practical point. She hadn’t the patience. Mavis often did on principle. Gladys shouted out bits from The Georgia Straight, the local underground paper. Stew, even without aid of drug, floated out on his own smile, larking a whistle over the noise to counterpoint rather than harass.
“You’re irresponsible,” Gladys would shout after him. “A post-revolutionary state, achieved in isolation, isn’t morally any better than capitalist exploitation.”
“Oh, the poor language, the poor language,” Mavis would sigh, giving up again.
Still, she not only went out of her way in the morning to see that Gladys got to work on time but often waited for her in the late afternoon or went in to help with the last tying on of shoes and sandbagging into wheelchairs.
“You wouldn’t think Mavis had a way with kids,” Gladys said one day, “but she does. Nothing she says to them. Not the way she looks at them. It must be her hands. She has very good hands.”
Ruth had noticed that, too. When Clara needed help out of a chair, she did not turn to one of the men. She always ordered Mavis to her, who, not seeming to take more than ordinary care, could get Clara up without the briefest light of pain in her face. Ruth was at a disadvantage, but she and Clara together had developed a way for Ruth to get her out of bed fairly easily. It was Ruth’s last chore of the morning, after the dishes were cleared away and Arthur settled to wash the pots and pans.
Clara sat in her room most of the morning, reading, sewing, dozing. Ruth usually stretched out on the living-room couch and slept.
This morning the foghorns had begun with the first gray light, and now that Ruth was not distracted by human noise she looked out to them, to the heavy sea fog, darkened and seasoned by the slash burning on the northern mountains, closed off from view. The only evidence of water out there just a few hundred yards away was the persistent and repetitive conversation of foghorns and ship whistles. Ruth could not see much beyond the two mountain-ash trees on the boulevard, whose orange berries signaled to irresolute and quarreling robins, in this northern and yet temperate climate never certain whether to stay or go. The debate in the branches grew inevitably raucous and unreasonable until one drunken bird sailed out over the lawn and into the plate glass of the living-room window, leaving blood and feathers like a signature on the misty view.
“Another one?” Clara called, having heard the thud.
“Another,” Ruth confirmed and went to the back porch to find a shovel.
The fog-damp lawn soaked her sneakers, and she coughed against the taste of smoke, alerting the birds. They flopped out of the trees in disgruntled and alarmed pairs, racketing about Ruth and then shying off toward the house. She did not watch them, but her neck muscles stiffened to the dread of a mass suicide against the window. They circled back into the trees instead, though a few remained in the large lilac by the house, under which Ruth would bury the dead bird. She did not know, as she dug awkwardly with one hand, whether the drops that fell wet on her back through her thin shirt were shit or rain.
The first bird Ruth had ever buried was one she had killed, by aggressive accident, shying a rock at it as it perched on her favorite river boulder. She had probably wanted to stone the small children who had edged her out of her room, the yard, and even the orchard, so that the river bar was the only place left for her to be alone, if she walked far enough. She could not remember feeling sorry, only surprised and then responsible. A hardhearted child, her mother had called her. Closed-hearted, more truly. If she had let grief in then, there would have been room for nothing else. It was Clara who had taught her this stupid pity. In March, when the bulldozers arrived, they would unearth all this planting of bulbs and birds.
Arthur had gone back to his room in the basement, leaving the kitchen in careful order. Clara was listening to her radio. Ruth went to her own room, changed her shoes and shirt, and stretched out on her bed, her arm over her eyes.
The day wore differently for each one. Tom was usually the first home, smelling faintly of cooking grease, tired and quiet. He went as directly as he was allowed to his room and didn’t appear again until the others arrived, Mavis, Gladys, and Stew together, Joanie delivered to the door by one large American car or another, which would usually be back to collect her and the understood fare as shortly after dinner as she could get out of curlers again. Willard was last, carrying his head as he had all day, parallel to the floor. He did not straighten up until dinner was over and his evening routine was about to begin. Sibling rivals at the breakfast table, the young people courted each other at dinner or quarreled as lovers do for each other’s attention. Gladys, whatever else people tried to pretend, was the sexual center. She always looked as if she were comfortably and wonderfully naked under her clothes.
“Rape is the only adequate answer to any of Gladdy’s arguments,” Stew announced.
“Our radical male chauvinist,” Gladys replied, aware that Arthur was watching her, that Tom was refusing to.
Joanie shifted in her chair, restless with the attention Gladys always got, though she considered no one in the house eligible. Stew would be for Joanie the worst of the lot, with his hash and his clarinet and his long hair, never mind that he had lovely eyes. She did not know he had an allowance from his rich rather. Tom, well, if Tom had been something other than a cook—say, a lawyer or a stockbroker or even just some sort of executive—he was attractive enough, even sanitary, but Joanie was a little afraid of him, the way he was friendly for no good reason. Arthur was too new and illegal and sick to count. Once Ruth overheard Joanie asking Gladys why she would ever consider going to bed with Stew. “For the fun of it,” Gladys had answered. Sad that Joanie could not believe even a particle of that reply. Or did her passion for large cars have at least something to do with the size and comfort of the back seat? No.
“I have an extra ticket to Cinema 16 tonight,” Mavis said, apparently to the table at large, but Gladys immediately refused it. “Tom?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“Could you drop me at the pub, though?” Gladys asked.
“It’s not exactly between here and the university,” Mavis answered.
“I know, but I …”
“Yeah, I’ll drop you at the pub.”
Mavis was tired of being the household taxi, perhaps a reason she had decided to move out, though either Tom or Gladys was the important reason, Ruth couldn’t decide which. Mavis did not ask silly questions or make silly remarks; so what went on in her silly heart Ruth had more difficulty guessing than with the others.
“You’re not a keyhole peeper; you’re a mind fucker,” Gladys said to Ruth.
Not Clara herself, who usually joined them for dinner, could modify Gladys’ language.
“If you have to be obscene, couldn’t you at least be accurate?” Mavis asked. “I’m a mind fucker, if you like. Ruth’s a mind reader.”
No. Each of them had great areas of themselves which were closed off to Ruth. With Willard it might be because he was unaware of those areas himself. With Mavis, it was a matter of simple privacy. Ruth was not nosy. She felt required to know as much as each one of them wanted her to know, which was often more than they said. How else could she know unless she thought along with each one as far as she could?
The plot of Ruth’s own life had ended two years ago with the death of her daughter, or she saw it that way. Perhaps there had never been much cause and effect, only accidents and whims, but having a child deceives one into believing in a future, the child’s. Even birthdays are achievements. Then, afterwards, all those growing years seem random between the accidents of birth and death. She might have been, she might have had, she might have done anything … even lived.
Now, watching Mavis believe enough in the value of her thesis to fear failing it, seeing Gladys out the door with one of her dozen outraged placards to demonstrate for a new world, waiting for Tom to heal enough inside to risk himself again, knowing that Stew courted a jail sentence to punish himself for all his unpaid-for joy, wondering when the final car would carry Joanie off to daydream domesticity, Ruth could hope only one thing, that each of them might live awhile anyway, even if in fear, protest, pain, guilt, need. She could be watchdog, cook, mind reader, cipher, whatever, from day to day a while longer herself.
In the evening paper, which Willard always brought home, were all the ads for houses, for apartments, for jobs. It was too soon to look, the move still nearly six months away. Ruth hesitated at the personals, safe and amused in the knowledge that no one would be advertising for her. Then she put the paper down and went in to Clara, who liked to be read to for an hour or so at that time of evening. Mavis sometimes read her Dickens, which Clara enjoyed with some critical confidence. Tom read her Loren Eiseley, whose ideas she often failed to grasp but whose language she thought so beautiful it didn’t matter. With Stew, who read her concrete poems, and Gladys, who read her The Georgia Straight or The Pedestal, the local women’s liberation paper, Clara was simply patient. Ruth was the only one who asked Clara what she would like. Lately she had wanted to listen to the novels of Ethel Wilson, who lived still, an old and ailing lady, not many blocks away in another world.
“How does she live in her world and write about ours?”
“Why do you think being married to a doctor and living in that kind of place makes so much difference?” Ruth asked.
“Because I like to,” Clara admitted. “Still we all share the weather and the mountains. It is a bond.”
Ruth would have liked to read a book about her own past weather and the trees. She never found one, and how could it exist? There had been so few to know it, and now it was gone. No one traveling seventy miles an hour had to suffer the smell of rotting eels, the wakening bear, the irritated skunk. Bridges were built high now, so that, even if there had been someone to listen through a night of swelling rains, there would be no sound of thrashing cable and splitting timber as the lumber bridge went out. But Ruth seemed to carry her weather with her: what could survive the winter was still broken by spring.
“You’re tired tonight.”
Ruth nodded, looking for her place to begin reading. Before she had found it, she had to get up to answer an assertive knocking at the door.
“Police,” one of the two men said, neither in uniform.
“What can I do for you?”
“Answer a few questions.”
“Come in.”
Her age, her lack of arm, the family comfort of the large living room tempered their authority. She answered without hesitation questions about the ownership of the house, the number of occupants, the length of time she had lived there.
“Any Americans?”
“I was one once,” Ruth answered, smiling.
“Any deserters?”
“Would you call me one?”
“Army deserters.”
“I don’t ask questions like that,” Ruth said. “If the Canadian government has no objection to them, there’s no reason why I should.”
“Some of them aren’t here legally.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ruth said.
“If you harbor …”
“This isn’t a hideout; it’s a boardinghouse. I don’t harbor anyone. I do make a good cup of coffee.”
They did not stay for it. The younger of the two hesitated at the door as if to explain himself, but, before he had half a sentence out, his partner urged him away.
“Why are they coming here now?” Clara demanded. “They’ve never come before.”
“Just routine, I suppose,” Ruth answered, relieved that Arthur had gone to his room.
“Do you think he is illegal?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth answered, “and I’m not going to ask.”
Some of the others surely had been, but legality for them was such a frail security that you couldn’t read it in their behavior. The police, cooperating with American authorities, weren’t always concerned with such niceties. In a world where even God, never mind Abraham, killed his only son as a loving gesture, how could the police understand a young Isaac or Jesus who wouldn’t offer himself up to the slaughter? But they had not come to her house before. Something had happened.
In the morning, when Ruth saw the first moving van parked at the end of the block, she realized that the change was not to be put off until spring. One by one all the houses on the street would be emptied, waiting for demolition. As they were, the kids would begin to move in, paying a cheap rent by the month or even by the week. The police had anticipated that. They would be back, often.
CHAPTER TWO
Ruth’s restless insomnia had for years been a way for her to take the burdens of her own moods out of the house. Clara, who could not walk, needed space for the anxieties and griefs they shared, and the others in the house should not be infected by the seasons of bleak fright life could become. Ruth went out and returned at any hour, more like an animal than a human resident. She had always liked the friendly street she lived on, lined with mountain ash, open to the sky, its large old houses either converted into suites or used like her own as boardinghouses. There was more sociable traffic than in neighborhoods to the west, still zoned for single-family dwellings. But it was a street too close to the center of this young city to stay that way. The concrete canyon walls must inevitably rise against the hope of trees and sky. From wilderness to this edge where she was, Ruth had been moving closer and closer to that center. Was there any use in backing off now? The houses she walked by were for living in, high-rise apartments for jumping off, but where else was there to go?
On the beach that opened at the end of the street, Ruth sat on a great log, one of the many washed up from booms broken up in sudden storms. Often the students who stayed at the house got summer jobs on the tugboats, and they told stories of the slow-motion drama of that life, where there was no way to take quick shelter against unexpected weather. A cove in sight was still two hours’ dragging weight away. The log boom she watched now, anchored in the sheltered bay, would soon be towed into one of the mills or around under Lion’s Gate Bridge to the harbor, where ships waited for their cargo. Ruth knew men on the docks as well, those who balanced on the floating logs and dreamed of getting winch ratings in the winter weather. She had met several when they were clumped together for a time as industrial accidents of similar interest to hospital staffs, occupational-therapy clinics, and compensation boards. Five years ago she might have helped Arthur get a job either on the tugs or at the front, no awkward questions asked. Now there were too few jobs for such favors.
Ruth looked across the water to the north shore, which had been nearly wild coast when she first arrived in Vancouver in 1939. Now waterside apartment buildings blocked the view of smaller houses behind them, and roads cut higher and higher into the wooded mountainside, great wounds with scabs of houses forming on either side. She turned to look at the city itself, the west-end high rises a surprise growth of only ten years, where before there had been old wood frame houses, gradually abandoned by families but still creating arbitrary families like her own. Now it was one of the most densely populated areas in North America. She had heard her husband argue that such a concentration of people conserved land and fuel, cut down the need for transportation, and was a very civilized solution to population pressures. She had never heard anyone who lived in an apartment argue such virtues, probably because they did not sit down at large dinner tables to argue about anything. She saw a single TV dinner in the window of a toaster oven, a thin film of gravy bubbling on the surface of a dry slice of turkey.
She would not be alone, of course. There would be Willard and Clara. For Willard, if he noticed the difference at all, it would probably be a relief with no clutter of young people to evade or ignore. Clara would live more in books, and, if she wearied of the unaccustomed silence, she’d probably become one of those inveterate phoners of hot-line programs who occasionally amused or alarmed her now. Clara who had shaken her head in disbelief at a drunken old woman calling over the public airways, “My son’s a homosexual and I need help to face this tragedy,” might begin calling the world to say, “My son is a road builder …”
Ruth felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to greet Tom, taking a detour onto the beach on his way home from work, the afternoon sun a pleasure after the days of fog. He sat down beside her, closed his hands over a book he was carrying, and rocked himself as if for comfort and warmth against some interior cold. There was no wind.
“Do you see it?” he asked after a moment, nodding at the view. “I forget to look.”
“I see it,” Ruth said, a reservation in her voice to suggest that she hadn’t let it be a pleasure to her.
“I had a letter from my sister today.”