After the Fire Read online

“For heaven’s sake!” Henrietta exclaimed.

  But of course they had known that other Hart who had belonged to the Chamber of Commerce, run the bingo games at the Lions’ Fiesta, raised money to improve the dump. They somehow could remember a man who had become a fiction to her in these last days against the harsh reality of the man who had actually died and now howled and clawed at her consciousness, insisting on being acknowledged and mourned.

  On the boat, they all spoke to her, but then they kept a respectful distance. She understood that they simply wanted her to know that they were there. She had helped them bury their dead. They would help her now to bury hers. But they didn’t know, they didn’t know who had died! Then for a moment she remembered Riley’s young unshaven face when she asked him if he might say a few words about Dickie and how bitterly he had answered her at first. Had the drunken self-destructive Dickie been staggering around in his mind blotting out the friend, the hard worker, the hopeful builder of his own house?

  They had all seen Hart helpless before she’d finally been forced to give up his care. Hart Jr. and Georgie had dutifully gone to visit him in hospital when he hadn’t the faintest idea who they were. Yet here they all were, ready to mourn his loss without apparent hypocrisy.

  The ferry shuddered a little as it moved from the shelter of land into the open water where a spring wind freshened.

  “Look!” Hart Jr. said.

  Off to the port a killer whale broke the surface of the water, sleek black back, white belly flashing in the sunlight, then another, then another, a whole pod of them out there choosing to escort the ferry across the water to mock the horror in Henrietta’s heart.

  “He loved them,” Hart Jr. said with quiet satisfaction.

  Who? Henrietta wanted to demand. Who?

  The man who had just died cared for no one, for nothing. But Henrietta seemed to be the only one who was required to know that.

  Milly was sorry to be too weak to consider going over for Hart’s memorial. The only time she and Hen had talked on the phone, Milly was so shocked at her lackluster vagueness she forgot her own invalid state and made some real attempt to cheer Henrietta up.

  “You’d think she’d be relieved,” Milly said to Bonnie.

  “Red said a very odd thing to me about it,” Bonnie confessed. “She said Mrs. Hawkins never thought about that sick old man as her husband until he was dead. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “That’s Red. She hardly ever says anything, and then, when she does, I usually don’t know what she’s talking about. Hen went to see him every other day. He was the one who didn’t know her.”

  “Red said I shouldn’t go to see her just yet,” Bonnie said. “Mrs. Hawkins was so nice to me when you were in hospital. I’d like to think of something to do for her.”

  Milly was tempted to tell her daughter that only people like Red called Hen Mrs. Hawkins and Bonnie didn’t want to sound like the paid help, did she? But Milly didn’t. She’d finished raising Bonnie years ago and hadn’t the energy to take such tasks on again now.

  “What’s wrong?” Bonnie asked.

  “Not a thing, Miss,” Milly said, “and don’t keep trying to second-guess me or read my mind just because I’m your mother.”

  Bonnie laughed and then said, “I was afraid you’d get grumpy once you got out of hospital.”

  “And?”

  “And you haven’t, but it would make me nervous if you didn’t tick me off a bit sometimes.”

  “It’s not my fault you’re a better nurse than I thought you could be,” Milly retorted.

  Bonnie laughed again, obviously pleased by the backhanded compliment which was the only sort Milly was good at handing out—and she’d been pretty sparing with those in the last few years.

  “I feel so much better than I thought I would,” Milly said. “And that’s because you’re here so that I can stop the minute I feel tired and let you take over.”

  “Will you know how to do that by yourself?” Bonnie asked, concerned.

  “I’m learning, and it helps that I’m naturally bone lazy.”

  “You?”

  “Without an audience,” Milly modified. “I was surprised to find out how little I could do in a day without feeling guilty—bored sometimes but not guilty.”

  “Is it enough of a life here for you?” Bonnie asked.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so. It’s not what I wanted.”

  “Of course not,” Bonnie said.

  “But it’s what I’ve got,” Milly said. “When you’ve been as sick as I was there for a while, it leaves some sort of afterglow on everything. I suppose it will gradually wear off, but at the moment it would seem criminal for me not to be glad to be alive.”

  That was as much explanation as Milly could give for her continuing uncommon sense of well-being. It made her generous in ways she couldn’t remember ever being before. She did not begrudge Bonnie her long walks, her friendliness with Red, her occasional beer at the pub. Such venturings, far from leaving Milly alone and feeling sorry for herself, extended her own sense of her life on the island, the real pleasures there were here.

  Often, as they sat over a meal, Bonnie would recall a family outing that had been disastrous or comic or wonderful or all three at once.

  “Oh, and when Martin broke his arm!” Bonnie exclaimed and they both burst out laughing because he had been so stoically informational, holding up his arm as if it were something quite separate from himself, saying, “I broke it.”

  “We were awful to Martin,” Bonnie said.

  “Nonsense!” Milly said. “We treated him like a little prince.”

  “Like a frog with prince potential,” Bonnie amended, and again they laughed.

  The night before Bonnie was to leave, she said, “You know, I always used to wish I were a real islander and could stay after Labor Day and go to school here. When you came back to live, I still remembered that kid dream and thought maybe you would feel lucky, too.”

  “School only goes through the seventh grade,” Milly reminded her wryly.

  “Would you write to me sometimes?” Bonnie asked.

  “Write to you?”

  “When we talk on the phone, it feels like we have to do the mother/daughter act for half the island. I’d write to you, too.”

  “Rash hopes. Rash promises,” Milly said gloomily.

  “They’re not,” Bonnie insisted.

  Milly put her hand out to touch her daughter’s young cheek and said, “I’m going to miss you. I didn’t think an operation could be such fun.”

  “You forget the bad parts,” Bonnie said.

  In that week of reminiscing, they had both forgotten the bad parts, and for the first time in years Milly felt free to see beyond the past as a place to find mitigating if not vindicating evidence against the charge of failure. It was here on the island that so many of the memories did lie innocent of anyone’s wrongdoing. Not only the children but she and Forbes were freer to be outside the social definitions and requirements that increasingly overtook them in town. In Vancouver they had become a microwave family, each on his or her own fast track, until the speed had flung each one out of the orbit of family altogether, Forbes the first to go, and she hadn’t even noticed it until he was too far away to retrieve.

  Let go the bad parts, her body and her daughter were teaching her. She realized with no little amazement that she was never going to bleed again.

  “No,” Red said, “I’m not going to throw all that stuff out, Mrs. Forbes. What happens when your daughter comes to visit again? It would be like not having any toilet paper.”

  “I didn’t mean you to throw it out,” Milly said. “You could use it.”

  “Not for a while,” Red said. “I’m pregnant.”

  Milly, usually so casually appraising of other female bodies, could have known that, her eyes easily verifying Red’s announcement. In her own physical preoccupation she hadn’t noticed.

  “You’re having it?” Milly asked, incredul
ous.

  “Yes,” Red said, “in about four months.”

  “Without a father?”

  “I’m a bastard,” Red said.

  “You don’t have to let a man get away with that, Red,” Milly said. “Make him marry you.”

  “I don’t want to be married,” Red said. “I just want a kid.”

  “But you can’t just have one,” Milly protested. “What will people say?”

  “What they say already,” Red answered.

  “Have you told Hen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t she tell you to get an abortion?”

  “No,” Red said, looking quite directly at Milly with that unreadable face.

  “Surely she doesn’t approve!”

  “What difference does that make?” Red asked.

  “Well, she’s done so much for you. She’s thought so well of you. She’s tried to teach you how to lead a decent life,”

  “Decent,” Red repeated.

  “She has. We all have. How could you do such a thing? Why would you want to disappoint so many people who’ve been so good to you?”

  “It’s none of your business, Mrs. Forbes,” Red said, and she turned and left the vacuum cleaner standing in the middle of the hall.

  “Red!” Milly called. “You come right back here! You can’t walk out just like that!”

  The back door slammed. The weakness, which could come over Milly suddenly, kept her from following Red out into the drive. She sank instead onto the living room couch and burst into tears. She couldn’t do without Red. She wasn’t even strong enough to put the vacuum cleaner away.

  When Milly had recovered herself, she reached for the phone to call Henrietta, to demand some explanation for Red’s circumstance and behavior. How could Henrietta have allowed it? Then Milly remembered that Henrietta was not sufficiently strong enough to come to see her. Henrietta was as dependent on Red as Milly was. But surely they couldn’t be expected to put up with Red’s pregnancy without so much as an explanation or apology.

  “Don’t be a prig, Dred,” she heard her husband say. “It doesn’t become you.”

  “Morality isn’t supposed to be part of my beauty contest mentality?” she had asked in her most sarcastic tone.

  “She’s pregnant. I want to marry her.”

  Nothing priggish about that, of course! Honorable.

  Where was the sense of benign well-being she had been wrapped in over these last weeks? Why did she have to face all the hurtful ugliness of the world again? Bonnie had left her much too soon.

  “It’s none of your business, Mrs. Forbes.”

  What came into her house certainly was her business, and, if she let Red go on working for her, it would amount to condoning her behavior. Then it occurred to Milly that Red wasn’t offering her that option. She had quit. She couldn’t be allowed to do that. Red was irresponsible to leave Milly still nearly helpless. Who else could come? There wasn’t another young woman on the island trained the way Red had been trained.

  Are we all to turn into victims of our own servants? Milly might even have to apologize to get her back. Never!

  Karen saw Red off with Rat in his car on the day she was to take her written test. Karen wondered if she’d pass it. Red wouldn’t be helped with it. She said she learned things better by herself when they had to do with words. She certainly wasn’t stupid, but she’d had so little schooling that Karen worried she mightn’t realize what was expected of her. She had been in a bad mood since she’d walked out on Milly Forbes.

  “You get gold marks for leaving her alive,” Karen had told her.

  “Mrs. Hawkins isn’t going to like it,” Red said. “She’s going to say to me, ‘Who’s to look after her then?’”

  “Let her look after herself,” Karen said without any sympathy, “until she learns to be civil and to mind her own business.”

  “She’ll die of old age first,” Red said, and grinned.

  But she hadn’t really cheered up. She was a funny combination, short in patience and long in concern for people. She didn’t forgive Milly, but she worried about her.

  All her ladies, as she ironically called them, were a worry just now. Miss James’ cold persisted with a deep phlegmy cough, and Henrietta could be roused from lethargy only by the firmest coaxing and then not for long. Karen would have nothing to do with Milly, but she had told Red she’d look in on both Henrietta and Miss James.

  Henrietta hadn’t got out of bed.

  “Are you sick?” Karen asked, concerned.

  “No,” Henrietta answered in a voice that had lost all resonance, “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “Have you had any lunch? Could I fix you something?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, dear,” Henrietta said.

  Karen, with a boldness she was just discovering, sat down on the bed beside Henrietta and took her hand.

  “You have to trouble yourself now, Hen.”

  Henrietta patted her hand absent-mindedly.

  “Would you like me to help you get dressed?”

  “What for?” Henrietta asked.

  “It’s the wrong question,” Karen told her.

  She knew from her own experience. There wasn’t any answer to it. With no one to urge her, she had lain in bed for days until she had bored herself into getting up, a natural vitality asserting itself. Henrietta was too old to count on that. Karen and Red had determined they would lend her their vitality in turns until she learned to be self-propelled again.

  “Tell me what you’d like to put on,” Karen said.

  “Oh, whatever.”

  “Then I’ll pick one of my favorites,” Karen said, going to the closet.

  She realized that she knew only the wardrobe Henrietta had for town, that she rarely saw her in the knockabout sorts of things people wore on the island. She chose a rust-colored linen and knew just the scarf Henrietta wore with it.

  “No, dear,” Henrietta said, shaking her head. “I’m not up to that.”

  Reluctantly Karen replaced it and looked for slacks and a top. Once she’d helped Henrietta into those, Karen had to put a comb in her hand to remind her that her hair needed attention.

  “I’ve had such a shock,” Henrietta said to her image in the mirror.

  “Yes,” Karen said.

  “Nobody seems to understand that,” Henrietta said.

  “Come out now and sit by the view,” Karen said, “and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “I haven’t any appetite,” Henrietta said.

  Karen ignored that complaint. Red had suggested a menu of smoked tuna, Ritz crackers and cranberry juice. Obviously Henrietta liked bright colors even in her food and drink. It was a garish little tray Karen carried back into the living room.

  Henrietta ate dutifully, nearly automatically, her attention fixed somewhere deep and out of reach. As long as she ate, Karen was content to leave her alone. But once the small meal was finished, Karen determined to rouse her from her torpor. It could become habitual if she was allowed her grieving way.

  “Have you heard from your son?” Karen asked.

  “He calls too often.”

  “He’s worried about you,” Karen said. “We all are. Of course, you’ve had a shock, and you have to grieve, but …”

  “I don’t grieve,” Henrietta said, tears she could hardly have noticed leaking out of her eyes.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because love dies,” Henrietta answered.

  Karen had no response to that. Certainly her own had, but she had come to doubt that it ever had been love. Fantasy, need, habit: could these in combination actually be called love? The genuine feeling should certainly transcend such things, be ultimately altruistic and, yes, undying.

  “Why do you say that?” Karen asked, trying to keep her own urgency out of the question.

  “Simply because it does,” Henrietta answered. “It’s a shame.”

  The tears continued to find their downward way by the detou
ring wrinkles of that beautiful old face. It wasn’t an idle cliché she offered. She was suffering shame. Karen didn’t understand why, since Henrietta had clearly done all she could do for her husband, even long after he had forgotten who she was. No one could fault her behavior as a loving wife. Karen supposed his love for her had seemed to die, but years ago, something she had come to terms with, surely, had come to understand and accept. It wasn’t his choice.

  Was it ever a choice for anyone? Peggy couldn’t have wanted to be bored, could she? We stop recognizing each other, and love dies. Karen found herself memorizing Henrietta’s face.

  Miss James was failing against her will. Unable to hear Karen, that ancient of days turned to her usual solution, but talking started up her cough, and Karen understood for the first time why people with pneumonia were said to drown. There seemed such a shallow space in Miss James’ lungs left for her to take air, short gasps of it between fits of coughing. She seemed to be collapsing in on herself, flesh hollowing into bone.

  “Should I call the doctor?” Karen asked.

  Miss James shook her head. When she had enough breath again, she said, “He’s coming later.”

  “Lie quiet now,” Karen shouted, wondering how the deaf could ever be soothed.

  She sat very still herself, willing Miss James to rest, and she did, her breathing finally so even that Karen knew she had fallen into a light sleep. Karen didn’t suppose it would be like this if you actually nursed the old. You’d have too many patients to give peaceful time to any of them. She could hear her father, if she said she was thinking about nursing as a career, asking her what was wrong with being a doctor. The fact that she was nearly thirty would seem to him more an excuse than an impediment.

  She was doing what she wanted to do right now and would get better at it with practice rather than training. Her ambition, as it awakened, was of the heart, and she would listen to that, however indefensible it was.

  Red signaled victory as she drove off the ferry with Rat that late afternoon. She had passed her written test and was now a legal driving student who could be taken off island and into the traffic.

  Chapter XI

  IT HAD BEEN THREE days since Red had walked out on Milly, and the vacuum cleaner remained in the hall to be climbed over every time Milly went from one room to the next. When she finally phoned Henrietta, Henrietta’s voice was so faint that she might have been speaking from beyond the grave. Milly didn’t mention Red’s pregnancy or complain, about being left helpless. In fact, she was more worried about Henrietta than she was about herself, for, though she was still weak—too weak to indulge in the kind of temper tantrum she had had over Red—she gained new strength every day. The doctor had told her she could begin to drive again at the end of the week, and then she could call on Henrietta and see for herself what was to be done about her collapse.