A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [48]
“He’s at the movies,” Nick says, glancing at me, and then I see I must have spoken with much more alarm than I meant to. “You worry too much – you know that?”
“I know. It’s very silly. But I can’t seem to help it.”
“It’s not exactly silly. But it’s a waste of energy. Look who’s talking.”
“You’re not a worrier.”
“I don’t strike you that way, eh?”
“No. No, you don’t.”
“Well, I never thought I was, either, until I came back here this summer. I don’t worry about anything that anything can be done about, you understand. Only about things I can’t possibly change. That is really a waste of effort. I hadn’t been back here for quite some time, as you know. I used to get them to come to Winnipeg once or twice a year. They always thought it was good of me. Good, hell. I didn’t want to come back here, that was all. They used to hate those visits, although both of them put on this mighty act of having a wonderful time. My dad used to pace around the apartment and nearly die with boredom. I used to take them to movies. Once I made the awful mistake of taking them to a Russian film – that one about the young soldier trying to get home on leave, and everything goes wrong. I guess it was the Ukraine, millions of miles of nothing but wheat fields. My mother sat there bawling her eyes out, and my dad kept making loud comments about how the Reds had ruined his heart’s earth. It was just great.”
“You were embarrassed?”
Nick isn’t looking at me, and again I have the feeling that he’s talking to himself, and yet, obscurely, he reaches out and moves his hand along my arm.
“Yeh. I was. That’s what bugs me, to tell you the truth.”
He is silent. When he speaks again, his voice is low and unempathetic, and with an edge of self-mockery as though he is warning me not to respond too seriously, and yet he cannot help saying the words aloud.
“I have forsaken my house – I have left mine heritage – mine heritage is unto me as a lion in the forest – it crieth out against me – therefore have I hated it.”
Then he draws away and shrugs.
“Jeremiah,” he says. “A great guy with the gloomy phrase. Did you ever know my sister Julie?”
“She was a few years younger than I. I never knew her very well. I used to see her around town. She’s married now, isn’t she?”
“Yeh. For the second time. She lives in Montreal. They’ve got two quite nice kids, one from her first marriage. She thinks I’m a dead loss because I don’t come here more often. She can’t, she says – look how far away she lives, and how could she leave Dennis and the kids? All quite true.”
“My sister Stacey gives the same reason for not coming home.”
“Really? Well, how can you contradict it? What I was going to say was once when we were kids, my dad got a brainwave about painting the house. Why white, he said. Blue would be more cheerful. He used to get those free paint charts from the hardware store, and study them like he was preparing a thesis. He had the colour all picked out. It was called Robin’s Egg Blue, and it was a very violent turquoise. My sister nearly threw a fit. Nobody, but nobody, had houses that colour, she said. Where in the whole of Manawaka could you see houses that were anything except white or light brown? She raised one hell of a row. According to her, the Kazlik abode was going to be the laughing-stock of the entire province. Finally my dad got fed up and didn’t paint the house at all, not even white. About five years later, coloured houses came in, and every second person was doffing up their residence with Lime-Green or Salmon-Pink or some such godawful shade. So Julie said very nicely why not paint the house blue, Dad? But he said no, he didn’t think so, not now. I haven’t thought of that in years. Do you remember what my dad used to be called, around