still don't think he's good for you.'
'Good for me?' Sylvia hadn't worried about that. 'He's… interesting. Things happen when he's around, and you never know beforehand what they'll be.'
'Maybe,' Mary Jane said, 'but some of the time I bet you wish you did.'
She was right. Sylvia knew it. Ernie had frightened her in ways no one else had matched, or even approached. She sometimes-often-thought he was most in earnest when his mood turned blackest. Even so… 'Never a dull moment,' she said. 'That counts for something, too.'
'Pa would have said the same thing, wouldn't he, after his destroyer dodged a torpedo?' Mary Jane replied. 'But one day the destroyer didn't dodge, and that's how come I hardly remember my own father.'
'Yes, that's right,' Sylvia said. 'I paid him back, though.' Roger Kimball was dead, sure enough. But that didn't, wouldn't, couldn't, bring George Enos, Senior, back to life. Mary Jane would never have the memories she was missing. All Sylvia had left were her memories.
Mary Jane changed the subject as abruptly as anyone could: 'Let's go over to the Union Oyster House for an early supper. I can't remember the last time I was there.'
'Why not?' Sylvia said, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. They'd already spent a lot of money today; after that, what was a little more? The Union Oyster House was only a couple of blocks from the market square. The building in which it operated had stood on the same spot since the early eighteenth century. The restaurant itself had been there for more than a hundred years. People said Daniel Webster had drunk at the cramped little bar.
Almost everything about the Union Oyster House was cramped and little, from the stairs people descended to get down to the main level to the panes of glass in the windows to the tiny wooden booths into which diners squeezed. Sylvia and Mary Jane snagged a booth with no trouble-they got in ahead of the evening rush.
The one place where the restaurant didn't stint was on the portions. The plates of fried oysters and fried potatoes a harried-looking waiter set in front of the two women would have fed a couple of lumberjacks, or possibly a couple of football teams. 'How am I going to eat all that?' Sylvia asked. Then she did. Mary Jane cleaned her plate, too.
Going home happily full, carrying things they'd wanted to buy, made a good end to a good day. And two men on the trolley car stood up to give Sylvia and her daughter their seats. That didn't happen all the time, either.
Spread on the bed, the quilt looked even finer than it had in Chris Clogston's stall. It promised to be warm, too. Sylvia wanted to burrow under it right then and there.
'How about that, Ma?' Mary Jane said.
Sylvia nodded. 'Yes. How about that?' She wondered what Ernie would say when he saw the quilt. Probably something sarcastic, she thought. Well, if he does, too bad for him.
Lucien Galtier cleaned the farmhouse as if his life depended on it. He was not the sort of slob a lot of men living by themselves would have been. Marie wouldn't have liked that, and he took his wife's opinions more seriously now that she was gone than he had while she was there to enforce them. But he knew he couldn't hope to match the standard she set, and he hadn't tried. He'd set his own, less strict, standard and lived up to that.
Now, though, he tried to match what Marie would have done. That meant a lot of extra scrubbing and dusting. It meant cleaning out corners where dirt lingered-though he still didn't attack the corners with needles, as Marie might have done. It meant putting things in closets and deciding what was too far gone even to linger in a closet any more. It meant a lot of extra work.
He did the extra work not merely from a sense of duty but from a sense of pride. He was going to bring Йloise Granche here, and he wanted everything perfect. If she thought he lived like a pig in a sty… Well, so what? some part of him jeered. She doesn't want to marry you anyhow.
He ignored the internal scoffing. He didn't so much think it wrong as think it irrelevant. Seeing a clean house wouldn't make Йloise change her mind and want to live here. When she spoke of patrimony and the problems marriage would cause both families, she was firm, she was decisive-and, as far as Lucien could see, she was dead right.
That wasn't why he worked till his lungs burned and his heart pounded and his chest ached: worked harder than he did on the farm at any time of the year but harvest. He worked himself into a panting tizzy for one of the oldest reasons in the world: he wanted to impress the woman he cared about. They were already lovers; impressing her wouldn't get him anything but a smile and perhaps a quick, offhand compliment. He knew that. His mother hadn't raised a fool. Hoping to see that smile kept him slaving away with a smile on his own face.
After he couldn't find anything else left to clean, he cleaned himself. He made lavish, even extravagant, use of water he heated on the stove. On a warmer day, he could have luxuriated in the steaming tub for a long time, letting the hot water soak the kinks out of his back. But water didn't stay hot forever, not in winter in Quebec it didn't. When it started to cool off, which it did all too soon, he got out and dried off in a hurry.
He thought about putting on his black wool suit when he went to get Йloise: thought about it and discarded the notion in the next breath. She would think someone had died, and he was on his way to the funeral. And besides, the suit smelled so strongly of mothballs, it would have made her eyes water. It stayed in the closet. He put on the clothes he would have worn to a dance-work clothes, but the best he had, and also impeccably clean. If he wouldn't go to Йloise's reeking of mothballs, he wouldn't go reeking of stale sweat, either.
He'd just set a warm wool cap on his head and was putting on his overcoat when someone knocked on the door. 'Tabernac!' he snarled. Who the devil would come bothering him now, when he had more important things to worry about than a neighbor who'd run out of chicken feed?
Before he went to the door, he shrugged on his overcoat. I was just going out would cut any visit short. With dramatic suddenness, he threw the door open. Whoever was out there, Lucien intended to make him feel guilty.
Dr. Leonard O'Doull stared at him, surprised but not visibly afflicted with guilt.
'What have we here?' Galtier's son-in-law asked. 'Is it that you are so eager to escape my company?'
Yes, Galtier thought, but he couldn't say that. 'I was about to go out for a drive,' he replied.
'In this?' O'Doull waved at the swirling snow. Now he sounded more than surprised; he sounded astonished. 'Me, I had to come down to the hospital today, and from the hospital it is but a short hop here. But why would you go out for a drive if you don't have to?'
'To visit a friend,' Lucien replied, which was part of the truth, though he was careful to say un ami and not une amie: he didn't want O'Doull knowing his friend was of the feminine persuasion. Realizing his son-in-law wouldn't disappear in the wind, he stepped aside. 'Come in. No point letting the heat out of the house.'
'No, certainly not.' O'Doull did come in, and stamped snow all over the tidy entry hall. Lucien did his best not to wince. Slowly, he shed his own coat and cap. Leonard O'Doull slithered out of his overcoat with a sigh of relief. He went on, 'I won't keep you long, since it's plain you have such important business elsewhere.'
Galtier pretended not to notice the sarcasm. 'Unfortunately, I do,' he said, which made O'Doull raise a gingery eyebrow. Lucien waved him to the couch. 'But sit down. What sort of gossip have you heard at the hospital?'
'At the hospital? Nothing much.' O'Doull stretched his long legs out in front of him. To Galtier's relief, he didn't put his feet up on the table, as he'd sometimes been known to do. 'Still, though, gossip does come to a doctor's office.'
'Does it?' Lucien said tonelessly.
'Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it does,' his son-in-law replied. 'And it could even be that the gossip that comes is true, though I did not think so before I knocked on your door.'
'Since you have not told me what this gossip is, I have no idea whether it is true or not,' Lucien said. 'Should I care?' Were people starting to talk about Йloise and him?
Leonard O'Doull didn't directly answer that. Instead, he asked, 'Mon beau-pиre, are you a happy man?'
That question took Galtier by surprise. He thought for a moment, then answered, 'Most of the time, I am too busy working even to wonder.'
'All right. Never mind.' Dr. O'Doull smiled. 'I hope, when you do have time away from your work, I hope you are happy, however you get to be that way. I hope so, and so does Nicole. And I have talked with Charles and Georges and Denise. They all feel the same way. I have not talked with your other two daughters, but I am sure they would agree.'
