Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [91]
Another strange thing. Tucked into an envelope with some loose photos of the lake, and the rowboat, and the Lab – those not selected for pasting – I found a few pages from one of her diaries. She had not burned each and every page, therefore; she had saved a few. She had chosen them, torn them out, preserved them from destruction. But why these? I studied them carefully, but I couldn’t figure it out. No dramatic events had occurred, no responses of any note had been recorded. Was it a message, left so I could find it? Was it an oversight? Why save a page with nothing written on it but “A perfectly beautiful day!!!”?
Now it’s four years later, and my mother is much older. “We live a long time,” she said once, meaning the women in her family. Then she said, “After you’re ninety, you age ten years for every year.” She foresaw herself getting fainter and fainter, more and more papery, more and more whispery, and this is what has happened to her. She still smiles, though. And she can still hear, through the one good ear.
I turn her head away from the pillow so I can talk to her. “It’s me,” I say. She smiles. She doesn’t say much any more.
“Do you remember Dick and Nell?” I begin. The two horses, usually dependable.
No response. Her smile flickers out. I’ll have to pick another story. “Do you remember the Indian?” I say.
A pause. “What Indian?”
“The Indian who came to the Lab one year. When you were living up north, remember? He came from India. He had a tennis racquet. You told me about him.”
“Did I?”
No hope for the Indian. He will not be resurrected, not today. I try something else. “Do you remember Cam and Ray? You’ve got some pictures of them, in your photo album. They had bicycles. Remember them?”
A long pause. “No,” says my mother at last. She never lies.
“They slept in a tent,” I say, “with their feet sticking out. You took their picture. Cam died young. He had a condition.”
She turns her head on the pillow, closing off her good ear. She shuts her eyes. That is the end of the conversation. She’s back inside, way back, back in the time of legend. What’s she doing? Where is she? Is she galloping through the trees on horseback, is she fighting the storm? Is she herself again?
The fate of the boys is now up to me. Also that of the young man from India. I picture him getting off the little train, hauling an enormous leather valise, with his tennis racquet in its press under his arm. What would have been inside the valise? Beautiful silk shirts. Fine cashmere jackets. Casually elegant shoes.
He crunches downhill on the gravel, toward the village dock. Then he stands there. His dismay – which has been deepening with every mile he’s travelled, through forests and more forests, past bogs where dead spruce stand knee-deep in water, black and naked as if burned, through gaps blasted out of the granite bedrock, past lakes as blue and blank as closed windows, then through more forests and more bogs and past more lakes – this dismay settles over him like a net. His soul feels the pull of the empty space before him: of the trees and trees and trees, of the rocks and rocks and rocks, of the bottomless water. He’s in danger of evaporating.
Clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes are already attacking him. He wants to turn and run after the retreating train, calling to it to stop, to save him, to take him home, or at least to a city, but he can’t do that.
From the Lab – not that he knows yet where the Lab is – a motorboat has set out. Not a launch, nothing fancy. A crude wooden boat, handmade. He’s seen similar boats, but not in rich places. The boat grinds toward him over the flat water, which glares with the light from the descending sun. In the boat sits a man who is obviously a peasant: stubby in shape, wearing a battered felt hat, an old khaki jacket, and – he now sees – a peasant’s wide but crafty grin. This is the servitor sent out to help him with his valise. Perhaps the country house with the lawns and tennis courts is concealed in the forest, around that hill, or the next