After the Fire Read online

  “Red’s had her hands full, hasn’t she?” Henrietta said. “She’s been here nearly every day.”

  “Not just her hands,” Milly retorted. “What have you said to her about her condition?”

  “Once I knew she wanted the baby, I told her I’d be any help I could.”

  “Oh, Henrietta Hawkins, have you no shame?” Milly mockingly demanded.

  “Plenty,” Henrietta answered, “but doesn’t it seem funny now to think in terms like unwed mothers? Such a lot of bad sermons we were raised on.”

  “Aren’t you even concerned it will be a bastard?”

  “Heavens no,” Henrietta replied. “That’s just as silly.”

  “She says she’s going to bring it to work. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the money to pay her to baby-sit her own child.”

  “Maybe you’ll have to do it then,” Henrietta suggested.

  “Are you going to suggest that to Miss James?”

  “Ah, Miss James,” Henrietta said thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen her for weeks. She’ll know by now, of course.”

  “It seems to me Red’s expecting a good deal more tolerance than she has any right to,” Milly said.

  “Oh, she doesn’t expect it,” Henrietta said. “Why should she? She hardly knows what it is.”

  “And the father? Shouldn’t he be made to take some responsibility? Disapproval isn’t a sin, you know. It can nudge people in the right direction.”

  “I’ve never found that so,” Henrietta replied.

  Something in her tone reached and warned Milly not to press her any further. Milly’s own energy for a good debate was also limited, and she had come close enough to losing Red to think it might not be such a bad idea to take a page out of Henrietta’s book. The only disapproval that had done Milly any good was her own, and did she really enjoy it?

  Chapter XIII

  KAREN WAS SITTING ON her deck, willing herself away from finding something to do. She needed to think about her mother. Each time she tried, she found she was thinking about herself instead. Karen had for a long time strained to identify not with her father exactly but with the Japanese side of herself. She didn’t know why, since he had always been so firm in rejecting his own racial identity and had never offered her the slightest clue to its meaning. Aside from an occasional Japanese meal, there had never been anything in the house, a dish or a print, to suggest a Japanese heritage. It was as if her father had accepted the lessons of the camp or, to prove them wrong, insisted there was nothing different or distinctive about his race. Perhaps she clung to her difference to dissociate herself from a mother who had run away. Had Karen, too? Had she simply lacked the energy or insight or whatever it took to get through the difficulty with Peggy and come out on some better side? And, if she were like her mother, would she finally become so detached or frightened or despairing or whatever it was that she’d kill herself?

  Karen had trouble remembering exactly what her mother looked like. When she took out the few photographs she had, it was the photographs rather than her mother that were familiar to her. How could she grieve for someone she didn’t even clearly remember? Peggy had never understood why Karen didn’t resent her mother. But her mother had never been very clear to her even when they had lived in the same house. Whatever sense Karen had of her had faded gradually. The woman she occasionally went to visit was a stranger who had wanted to please her but didn’t know how. What they had shared was embarrassment. And perhaps regret, though that was a stronger and more lasting emotion than Karen could really claim.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” Karen said aloud and did not know what she meant by it.

  Behind her in the cottage, the phone rang.

  “I’ve got a phone,” Red announced.

  “What made you finally decide?” Karen asked.

  “The baby, I guess. And Mrs. Hawkins and Miss James. I haven’t given Mrs. Forbes the number.”

  “All she has to do is look it up.”

  “Not for a while.”

  “Listen,” Karen said. “Why don’t I make up some sandwiches and we can go up on the bluff for lunch?”

  Red hesitated and then said, “Okay.”

  Since the driving lessons were over, Karen had seen very little of Red, and she missed her. Without being able to phone, she’d had no casual way of reconnecting; for Red, aside from being busy with her ailing old women, was never just out and about these days. Karen knew the whole island was speculating now about whose baby Red was carrying, though such conversations ceased abruptly at Karen’s approach. Rat was the only one of the young men to have a good word to say about Red. He was grateful for a free baby sitter so that he and his wife could occasionally come to the pub together. It was he who had asked Karen whose kid it was. “Ask her,” Karen replied. Rat had shrugged, obviously embarrassed.

  On the bluff at lunch time, they might meet an early tourist or two or a local walking a dog, but they wouldn’t have to deal with the rude stares Red had encountered from the young men even before her pregnancy was obvious. Karen couldn’t decide whether Dickie’s being the father would make Red better or worse in their eyes.

  “I’ve missed you,” Karen said as Red and Blackie got into the car.

  “It’s just this week Mrs. Hawkins has started to drive again,” Red said.

  “She’s really better?”

  “Getting there.”

  “And Miss James?”

  “Fed up she isn’t dead.”

  Karen laughed.

  “She doesn’t think it’s decent for someone her age to live through pneumonia.”

  As Karen turned up the road to the bluff, they fell silent. It was no more than a dirt track which took them up into the deep woods, cool on the warmest day of summer, sometimes impassable in winter when its deep potholes were filled with water, the ditches overflowing. The car lumbered along like a clumsy tank, and Karen wished they were walking instead, part of the silence around them. Emily Carr’s woods these were, and Karen had known them first in her paintings in the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr had probably wanted to be an Indian, the way she ventured into the forests and sought out the great totems. Maybe everyone here was a displaced person. You would be even if you were an Indian.

  “Do you ever feel like a displaced person?” Karen asked.

  “You’d have to have a place to come from to feel like that,” Red said.

  “Nobody really comes from here,” Karen said.

  “Dickie did,” Red said. “I can tell my kid his father and his grandfather both came from here.”

  Was Red assuming she’d have a boy? Did she want a boy? Karen hesitated to ask such a question. She didn’t want to sound like a lesbian separatist, even though she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want a boy. They grew up too alien and hard-surfaced.

  They got out of the car and Red stopped to put Blackie on a leash. By now the dog came obediently when called but Blackie still couldn’t resist a flushed deer, and she was young enough to be careless of her way on paths dangerously close to the cliff edge.

  Karen couldn’t wait. She strode over to the side of the rough parking lot and looked out over the pass, across to the clusters of other islands. Today it was clear enough to see the snow-defined Olympic range in the States. When Red and Blackie came up beside her, she turned to the path that led them to a high meadow where they could have their lunch. All along their way, tiny lavender and yellow and white wild-flowers poked up among the grasses.

  “I never learn their names,” Karen said.

  “Miss James says names aren’t any use because you just forget them. The only thing worth remembering is poetry.”

  “Do you ever read poetry?” Karen asked.

  “She teaches me. I memorize poems for her.”

  “I don’t think I’ve read a poem since I left school,” Karen said.

  “Kids like poems,” Red said.

  “I’ll get the baby a book of poems, shall I?” Karen suggested.

 
; “If you can find one at the thrift shop.”

  “Oh Red, we don’t always have to be so spartan.”

  Karen spread a beach towel a few yards away from the cliff edge so that their view, when they sat down, was mostly sky, alive with gulls at eye level, an occasional plane high above on its way to or from Alaska. In the middle air the sun caught the white of the heads and tails of coasting eagles.

  Red lay on her back looking up, her mound of belly like a little hill. As she watched, she began to recite:

  “If you would keep your soul

  From spotted sight or sound,

  Live like a velvet mole;

  Go burrow underground.”

  “That’s a bit grim, isn’t it?” Karen asked, suddenly very aware that Red carried a dead man’s child without remorse.

  “I make a better mole than an eagle,” Red said, grinning. “Ah, see him kick!”

  Karen could see the jumping flesh of Red’s stomach, little mole inside his hill.

  “Put your hand just there,” Red said.

  Karen hesitated, but the invitation was so impersonal that she reached out and laid her hand on Red, feeling the force of that tiny life beneath the thin layers of cloth and skin.

  Below them a ferry sounded at the west entrance of the pass.

  “Do you ever think about your mother?” Karen asked.

  “Not much,” Red said. “I don’t buy her birthday presents.”

  Karen pictured the ugly handbag, heavy with useless jewelry.

  “Well, I do think about her more now,” Red admitted. “She was only fourteen when I was born.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In jail. She killed a man,” Red answered flatly.

  “Oh Red!” Karen cried.

  “She wanted me to say she did it to protect me, and I wouldn’t do it,” Red said. “I ran away.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen,” Red said.

  “Why did she do it?” Karen asked.

  “Because she felt like it, I guess,” Red said. “I used to dream about it and worry about it at first. I don’t any more. I can just remember her sometimes now. But in my head my mother’s dead.”

  “Mine is, too,” Karen said, admitting and not admitting, not sure why killing yourself seemed more shameful than murder.

  “There are choices,” Red said, sitting up. “Anybody can make choices.”

  Karen did not feel that confident. Struggling against her passivity, she had been trying to make choices, but she wasn’t at all sure they were the right ones. In Red’s circumstance she would have been suicidal, if not from the terror of giving birth and taking total responsibility for another human being, then from the disapproval and hostility that surrounded Red. Karen could not have ignored it.

  “Eat?” Red asked.

  “Of course,” Karen said, getting out the sandwiches. “I even remembered Blackie.”

  She tossed a couple of biscuits to the young but increasingly patient dog. “You’ve done a good job with her,” Karen said.

  Red smiled and reached out to her dog. It was her own confidence she was building for the more important and complex business of raising a child, and Karen envied that sense of purpose in Red. She wondered. if she would have to live her own life without it.

  Henrietta was still a bit shaky, but she had put off her visit to Miss James long enough. They’d had several conversations on the phone, and though Miss James made no demands, Henrietta knew she was still housebound and lonely.

  “Oh, Hen, I have missed you,” the old woman confessed.

  Henrietta was as tactful as Miss James, not mentioning the change for the worse in each of them. In each setback now, there was some permanent damage. Miss James’ skull glowed through her nearly transparent skin.

  “I don’t know which has been more distressing, your being sick or my being alive.”

  It surprised Henrietta to realize she herself had never wished to die, even through the worst of it.

  “I can’t just wander off like an old Eskimo, not in early June, but what is that child going to do if I’m not dead by August?”

  “She’ll manage perfectly well,” Henrietta replied.

  “Will she?” Miss James demanded. “It’s a very willful thing she’s doing. I said to her, ‘You do know they grow up and leave home, don’t you?’”

  “There’s satisfaction in that, you know,” Henrietta said.

  “And what’s Sadie making of it, do you know?”

  “I haven’t seen Sadie in months,” Henrietta admitted.

  “Red refuses to talk about the father. She’s behaving as if it’s going to be a virgin birth.”

  “Would Dickie have had anything to do with it if he’d lived?”

  Miss James sighed. “I have too much time to think, when the only useful thing I could possibly do is die. I wondered for a while if I was making a mistake, leaving the house to her, thinking after all she didn’t have the gumption to live alone. She doesn’t think it’s gumption, mind you. But, of course, she’ll need the house all the more when the child comes. But will she want it?

  “I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson, a mistake at my age, I think. She’s very unsettling.”

  Miss James reached over for a book on the table by her chair.

  “Listen to this:

  I had been hungry all the years;

  My noon had come to dine;

  I, trembling, drew the table near,

  And touched the curious wine.

  ’Twas this on tables I had seen,

  When turning, hungry, lone,

  I looked in windows, for the wealth

  I could not hope to own.

  I did not know the ample bread;

  ’Twas so unlike the crumb

  The birds and I had often shared

  In Nature’s dining room.

  The plenty hurt me, ’twas so new,

  Myself felt ill and odd

  As berry of the mountain bush

  Transplanted to the road.

  Nor was I hungry; so I found

  That hunger was a way

  Of persons outside windows,

  The entering takes away.”

  Though Miss James’ voice was loud and flat, she brought such intent intelligence to the poem that Henrietta was moved by it, and yes, unsettled.

  “I was proud of being disinherited,” Miss James said. “I don’t want to hurt her pride. It’s about all she’s got.”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t make her proud,” Henrietta said, but she felt uncertain, human emotions being darker and more complex than she had realized until recently.

  “It’s for me after all,” Miss James concluded. “A last little vanity of having something to leave behind. I want her to be grateful to me.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Henrietta protested.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Don’t change your will,” Henrietta said, surprised at her own firmness.

  “No, I don’t suppose I will,” Miss James said, smiling. “I’ve been hermit-hearted enough.”

  Moving with careful slowness through Miss James’ garden, Henrietta wondered at that long life of proud solitude, cut off from family, without close ties of any sort. Had there been lovers, beloved friends somewhere along the way, left behind or outlived? Henrietta doubted it somehow. If Miss James had experienced ordinary attachments through her life, surely she wouldn’t be as fastidious about her motives as she was now. Or perhaps that was simply one of the hazards of old age, a filling up of empty hours with over-elaborate doubts and judgments, an idle trying on of one moral hat after another. Maybe poetry wasn’t good for people over a certain age, a certain kind of it anyway. Better to take up solitaire or crossword puzzles.

  Henrietta smiled at the first bloom in a patch of lilies and wondered if any of her own were out. She wanted enough strength back to garden again. Red was learning quickly, but the look of the garden was only half the pleasure. She wanted
the feel of the earth in her hands again, the sense of accomplishment.

  At home, though her first outing had tired her, Henrietta walked slowly about her land, calling on her flowers. Hart’s roses needed feeding.

  As Milly entered the pub, she noticed with distaste that Sadie was cackling drunk among a circle of young men willing to ply her with gin and then drive her home. Milly flinched at the memory of driving Sadie home after Dickie’s funeral. Dickie. Dickie was the father! Why hadn’t something that obvious occurred to her before?

  Milly sat down to that revelation and checked it out mathematically, counting back the months on her fingers. Then she recalled Red the morning after the fire. She hadn’t been vomiting up grief or remorse; she’d been pregnant. And even before Dickie died, Red hadn’t intended to make him marry her. She’d already dropped him. She hadn’t ever wanted Dickie—she’d wanted a child. Such casual use of a man shocked Milly far more than the casual use Dickie had obviously made of Red, mindless of the consequences. But would he have, if he’d known? He’d already built himself a house. Women weren’t the only nest builders. Forbes hadn’t been a diaper changer the way young men were now, but he’d loved his children. Dickie might have loved his. Red hadn’t even gone to the funeral. Like a mating spider she was without an ounce of human feeling. She didn’t even have the decency to feel ashamed.

  “Are you ready to order?” Karen asked.

  “It’s Dickie’s child!” Milly announced in triumph.

  Sadie sailed a laugh out over all the company.

  “You’re going to be a grandmother,” Milly called over to her.

  “Serves her right,” Sadie said in satisfaction. “Got the last laugh after all, he did.”

  Karen had turned away and was disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Hey!” Milly called after her. “I want to order.”

  Who was Karen to take offense over the facts of life?

  “I’ll take your order,” the bartender offered.

  “What’s with Miss Half-Jap? Too good for her job, is she?”