The Republic of Love Read online

  Republic of Love

  Carol Shields

  For Don

  ∼ CONTENTS ∼

  Cover

  Title Page

  Tom

  CHAPTER 1. Breaking

  CHAPTER 2. Beginning

  CHAPTER 3. Put That on My Tombstone

  CHAPTER 4. I Believe in One Thing

  CHAPTER 5. How Are You, How Are You?

  CHAPTER 6. Love Is the Only Enchantment

  CHAPTER 7. How Fortunate She Is

  CHAPTER 8. Running Lightly

  CHAPTER 9. The Pageant of Romance

  CHAPTER 10. Don’t Worry About It

  CHAPTER 11. Love and the Absence of Love

  CHAPTER 12. Riding High

  CHAPTER 13. Seduction and Consolation

  CHAPTER 14. Entering a Period of Good Fortune

  CHAPTER 15. Something I’ve Been Thinking About

  CHAPTER 16. Fortuitous Events

  CHAPTER 17. Anything Might Happen

  CHAPTER 18. What I’d Really Like

  CHAPTER 19. The Sacred and the Profane

  CHAPTER 20. I Love You

  CHAPTER 21. I Love You Too

  CHAPTER 22. Everything They Say Is True

  CHAPTER 23. So This Is How It Feels

  CHAPTER 24. Stardust

  CHAPTER 25. “It”

  CHAPTER 26. Happy Days

  CHAPTER 27. I Want

  CHAPTER 28. Moving Right Along

  CHAPTER 29. Keeping the Faith

  CHAPTER 30. What Has Befallen Him

  CHAPTER 31. Black Holes

  CHAPTER 32. It Groweth Cold

  CHAPTER 33. Putting Asunder

  CHAPTER 34. Practicing to Die

  CHAPTER 35. Important Announcements

  CHAPTER 36. Out of the Blue

  Fay

  About the Author

  Praise

  The Work of Carol Shields

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Tom

  AS A BABY, TOM AVERY HAD TWENTY-SEVEN MOTHERS. SO HE SAYS. That was almost forty years ago.

  Ask me more, his eyes beg, ask me for details.

  Well, then. At three weeks of age, there he was, this little stringy wailing thing, six and a half pounds of malleable flesh. His mother was sick, desperately sick, a kind of flu that worsened to pneumonia and then depression. In all, she was hospitalized for six months. Where was his father in all this? What father? Ha! That’s another story.

  A kindly social worker looked at scrawny, misshapen little Tom (rickets, one foot turning out sideways, not quite right) and said: “Leave him to me.” The next day Tom was installed in the Department of Home Economics at the University of Manitoba. He was moved straight into McDougal Hall, the Home Ec’s neo-Georgian practice house on the banks of the river, the wide Red, and put to sleep in a white enameled crib. Little Tom, the practice baby.

  McDougal Hall was a kind of paradise, equipped with a streamlined (for its time) kitchen, built-in cupboards made of fruit-wood, a scalloped colonial cornice around the ceiling, concealed lighting, everything – even a row of clay pots on the windowsill holding geraniums, begonias, pointed spears of chives, and thyme. There was a tiled laundry room down in the basement with a mangle and a Bendix washer, and upstairs, occupying the broad landing, a linen closet with stacked sheets and pillow cases tied prettily with pink ribbons, and wonderful ironed kitchen towels that bespoke a vision of order that would first admonish and then inspire the inhabitants of this house, the fourth-year girls, twenty-seven of them, who took up residence here. A Dr. Elizabeth French, D.Sc. (1900 – 76), occupied the ground-floor suite. From here the daily household duties were organized, the names of those girls assigned to dusting, to silver polishing, to the turning and mending of sheets, to menu planning, soup making, table setting, flower arranging, floor waxing, spot removing – the thousand and one skills needed by young homemakers who came into being in those passionate, scented postwar years. Dr. French herself took shifts of girls out onto the second-floor balcony and demonstrated the correct method for shaking a dust mop. “We’re not just here to play house, girls,” she warned at the planning session that launched each new day. And there they would be, listening and nodding, the twenty-seven sweatered beauties (as Tom Avery will always imagine them) arranged like lovely statuettes in Dr. French’s soft-colored sitting room, primly perched on the Duncan Phyfe sofa and side chairs or else sprawled, adorably, lusciously, on the gold-toned carpet with their full tartan skirts pulled down over rounded knees. Their gaze was tender – air and openness commingled – and their thoughtful chins rested on laced hands. And what hands! Some of those hands were already wearing diamond engagement rings. (These hands are now sixty years old; Tom has had occasion to meet a few of his old “mothers” around town, and he’s seen, and even held, some of their hands affectionately in his own, and listened to remembrances of that charmed time.)

  These were the pale pearly hands that dipped baby Tom into his daily bath water. (“Always test the temperature with your elbow, girls.”) The same hands that buttoned tiny Tom into his miniature shirts and nightgowns and tied his booties in place. (“But not too tight, girls, remember baby’s circulation.”) Fortunate, fortunate Tom Avery. Passed from hand to hand, rocked and tickled, fed, burped, coaxed, rewarded, exposed to the open air – if the weather was mild – and held up to the weak sunlight for five carefully regulated minutes. (“Vitamin D, girls, the sunshine vitamin.”)

  Sunlight and sterilized milk, strained cereal and vegetables and coddled eggs and mashed bananas and custard baked in little glass cups. Was baby wet? His diaper was checked hourly, the whitest, softest, most lovingly folded diaper imaginable. A line of these excellent flannelette diapers flapped in the clean air behind McDougal Hall, well away from the shaken dust mops, whipped by the wind and made incomparably fragrant. What went into baby was measured, and what came out as well. His miniature fingernails were trimmed, his weight recorded, his hand-eye skills observed, his small gassy noises noted. Whirled in the air, passed from lap to lap, kissed, oiled, powdered, wrapped tight, little Tom was never allowed to cry for more than a minute, never mind what Dr. French had to say about spoiling, about bad habits starting early.

  The twenty-seven mothers pressed him close to their tender sweater fronts. They would have given him anything, their own breast milk had there been any to offer. With the softest of brushes they smoothed his half dozen silken hairs. Such love, such love – ah God, he’d never know love like that again. They praised his given name, Tommy, Tomikins, or else Wee Fellow or Mister Sweetmeat or Little Puff-Cheeks. They loved him just for being alive, for doing nothing to deserve their love. No wonder he thrived and babbled; his rounded boneless limbs flopped and contracted and grew strong – the cleanest, brightest, most polished, ventilated, and smiled upon infant west of the Red River, maybe in the whole world.

  ∼ CHAPTER 1 ∼

  Breaking

  IT’S GOOD FRIDAY, A COLD SPRING MORNING, AND FAY MCLEOD, a woman of thirty-five, is lying in bed beside a man she no longer loves.

  His name is Peter Knightly. “Happy Good Friday,” he murmurs against her mussed hair, moving toward her under the blanket. He says this in his modified Midlands accent – which always sounds to Fay like someone doing an imitation of an Englishman – and at the same time he’s working her thighs apart with his right hand. We can stay in bed, his right hand is saying, we can take our time, and then his thumb moves sideways, elaborately positioning itself.

  Yesterday she loved him, but today she doesn’t.

  No, that’s not quite true. She’s known for a while. The knowledge has been working away at her, giving off its muted signals. For one thing, she finds that she looks in
the mirror a lot lately, squinting, making rude faces, and some mornings she sits on the edge of her bed, hunched there for minutes at a time, shivering. She has a longing to scrub herself down, cut off her hair, floss her teeth until her gums bleed, buy herself a lacy peach half-slip. She’s caught herself calculating lately, with her breath drawn in sharply, the length of time she and Peter have been together: three years, one thousand days.

  This morning she finds it hard to concentrate on Peter Knightly’s thumb, what it’s doing. Nevertheless, she registers his words – Good Friday. An official holiday. The folklore center where she and Peter both work is closed today, and somehow the next twelve hours will have to be filled.

  She ponders this while Peter Knightly’s thumb rotates back and forth – persistent, and very cunning, twiddling away. She’s going to have to tell him, today, that it’s over. Going on like this is making her sick. Her stomach, right this minute, is burning, and she knows it’s not hunger or even pain, but some species of angry embarrassment. The worst of it is that all this – this predicament, this loss and damage – it’s her own doing.

  Now Peter’s mouth has fixed itself on her left nipple, whispering and sliding, a suave licking. Oh, this is very familiar. He’s learned after all this time how to please. Don’t ever stop, she thinks, but knows he is about to travel over to her right nipple. Dutifully. Fairly.

  Her hand comes to rest on his back, where she discovers an appalling patch of dry skin.

  She tries to concentrate on the reverberations of Good Friday. The thoughts spill and roll. Does he know, she wonders, rocking him gently back and forth, that Good Friday has pagan roots? That it is the ultimate day of contradictions? Celebration mixed with gloom. Suffering with satiety. The dolorous and the delightful. Winter and spring. Cold and hot. Did he know, she silently pursues, that in certain quaint corners of England the entire population rolls a giant barrel of beer through the streets, and that this barrel has its origin in the bloodied heads of animal sacrifices?

  She is a woman plagued with information, burdened with it, and always checking an impulse to pass it on to others. Is Peter Knightly, her lover of a thousand wasted days, aware that in certain Slavic villages young men on Good Friday fashion squirt guns from reeds and spray each other with water, and that this, of course, has strong sexual implications?

  What is he thinking about at this moment? Is he thinking about anything?

  Does he realize the importance of Easter eggs? Could anything be more symbolically charged than an egg, a lustrous, fragile egg snatched from a hen house and piously engraved?

  No, it’s not just her stomach that hurts, it’s her heart. It hurts for both of them, and for the passage of time. Shouldn’t time add up to something?

  “Well,” Peter says to Fay – and his voice comes out in aggrieved gasps – “You seem a long way off this morning.”

  He pulls away, slides his arms from around her body, smoothing the blanket binding over her shoulder in a way that is faintly conciliatory. But his face, drained and hurt, gives him away. Why do you always have to spoil everything? his face says as he retreats to the bathroom.

  IF FAY MCLEOD no longer loves Peter Knightly, there is still the question of whether she can live without him, live alone that is. She is thirty-five years old, after all, and should know something about compromise.

  Toast, she says to herself, might be the test.

  She is being whimsical, of course, which is one of the ways she protects herself, but she is partly serious too: can she bear to stand alone in her kitchen on a Saturday morning, or any morning, for that matter, and push down the lever of her ten-year-old General Electric black-and-chrome toaster and produce a single slice of breakfast toast? One only.

  Other things she can do on her own. Traveling, for instance. Last summer, tracking down mermaid legends, she scoured half a dozen American libraries, California, Texas, Boston – three happy weeks, traveling light, one suitcase, three changes of clothes, two pairs of shoes, that was it. She relished the ease of arranging single-seat tickets and the sight every night of a neatly made-up hotel room, avoiding, if she could, those pompous doubles with their giant puffed duvets and bulging headboards. “A very small room, please,” she said to a succession of hotel clerks, interchangeable behind their crisp summer haircuts and narrow shirt collars and eager looks, and they’d complied, beaming as though she’d bent forward over the desk and smoothed their faces with the flat of her hand. Occasionally, vacationing families with young children called out greetings, but mostly she sat alone by pool sides or in hotel dining rooms with a book open by her plate. People looked her way and smiled, pitying or else envious, she wasn’t sure which, and it didn’t matter. She finds the bewilderment of travel rousing. Next summer she’ll be off again, Europe this time, her mermaids again, a second research grant, more generous than the first. She departs at the end of July and will be gone for four intense weeks. Most of the arrangements have already been made – and the thought that she will be on her own adds to, rather than subtracts from, her anticipation.

  The solitude of living alone does worry her, a grim little visitation of concern – mostly in the late afternoons, when the day feels vacuumed out, but she’s not at the point of paralysis, not yet. She’s capable, for instance, of going for a walk alone. The street she lives on, Grosvenor Avenue, is old, lined with trees and with Victorian houses, now mostly converted to rental apartments, or to condominiums, like the one she shares with Peter Knightly. The snow is almost gone, the sidewalks more or less clear of ice, and she likes on Saturday afternoons to put on a pair of jeans and her suede jacket and strike off, saying to herself: I, Fay McLeod, have every right to breathe this air, to take possession of this stretch of pavement. (Occasionally during these walks, the word “single” presents itself. She makes herself sigh it out, trying hard to keep her mouth from puckering – single, singleness, singlehood, herself engaged in a single-ish stroll.) Blasts of wind smooth the sky to a glossy blue-rose, and the sun sits weak and yellow. She can set her own pace, that is her right after all, and fill up her lungs with the chilly air, stop if she likes at the Mozart Café for a cup of coffee, come home when she chooses. Along the way she smiles and nods at elderly couples or joggers or women dragging shopping bags, and each time this happens she feels her ties to the world yank and hold firm.

  Sleeping alone is harder than going for a walk alone, oh yes, she admits it, but she’s learned a few tricks of accommodation. And sex these days is everywhere, abundantly, dismayingly available.

  As for the future, there will be other men. Or at least there probably will be others. This is one of the hopeful thoughts Fay has about herself. Before Peter Knightly, she lived for three years with a man called Nelo Merino, an investment consultant who was later transferred to Ottawa; she still feels swamped at times by her lost love for Nelo, who is married now, she’s been told, and the father of three children. Before Nelo it was Willy Gifford (two years), who produced business training films and was a philosopher of sorts, a Cartesian he liked to call himself, whom she might have married if his political views had been less rigidly anchored and less tiresomely voiced. Between Willy and Nelo, and again between Nelo and Peter, there had been short periods of living on her own, and she honestly can’t remember these intervals as being lonely. She has her job at the National Center for Folklore Studies, her friends, her family (mother, father, brother, sister, all of them living close by), her summer trips, and her book on mermaids that she hopes to finish sometime in the next year. She’s always busy, too busy, and is always reminding herself of this fact, so that the notion of an empty apartment, even an empty bed, holds no more than a faint flush of alarm. And only when she thinks about it – those late afternoons when her blood sugar dips and the overhead lights in her office go on. She’ll manage, though. She knows she will.

  It comes down, then, to just one brief moment, which is inwoven in her morning routine and located in that most familiar of rooms, the kitchen. Pete
r Knightly, with whom she has lived for three years now, will be making coffee, stooping in the manner of tall men and registering on his long face the kind of seriousness she finds silly but endearing. A temporary hood of domesticity and sexual ease hovers over them, sending down its safe blue even heat. He grinds his special French-roast beans and measures out water, and she, standing with her back to him, is making toast, dropping the seven-grain bread into twin slots, pushing the lever down and eliciting a satisfying double click as it first strikes the bottom of its long silvery groove and then locks into place. The heat rises gradually to her face. Her image bends on the satiny chrome – a woman performing a simple but necessary task – and inside the mechanism, down there where she can’t see, separate molecules of bread are transcending their paleness and drifting toward gold. She imagines a pair of scented clouds, rectangular and contained, rising up and mingling with the coffee odors. The toastness of toast, its primary grainy essence. Peter is pulling cups from a cupboard, smooth white porcelain objects out of a cartoon, and heating a little jug of milk in the microwave.

  Then the toast pops. It always takes her by surprise, those two identical slices bounding upward, perfectly browned and symbolically (it seems to her) aligned, and bringing every single morning a shock of happiness.

  FAY IS GREGARIOUS by nature. She’s even wondered from time to time – and idly worried – about being perhaps overly sociable, too dependent on the response of others and incapable of sustaining any kind of interior life for more than a few seconds at a time. Who is she anyway but a jumble of other people’s impressions? A receptor of external stimulation. A blank lake.

  It’s a vaguely frightening thought.

  People ought to be able to appreciate a sunset, or a waterfall, or a flower, as a solitary experience; she’s heard people say so a thousand times and believes it, but doubts she could pass the test. She likes sunsets but doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t distinguish much between one sunset and the next, and isn’t chased by them into flights of private reverence or extrapolated awe. She’d never dream of sitting down and writing a sunset poem, for instance. What would she say? Crimson hues, orange bands. Blah, blah, blah.