Chapter 14
Fourteen
Bonnie Lathbury drives downtown and takes Clemence out for sushi, telling her that if she apologizes to her sister, Sandro will hook her up with one of his colleagues for an editing job.
“I can’t read Italian,” says Clemence.
“It’s a translation.” Bonnie efficiently moves the wasabi away from her California roll. She and Roger don’t do spice. “Just say you’re sorry. I don’t understand the point of you moving all the way back here if you’re only going to be on the outs.”
“That wasn’t up to me!” says Clemence. “Prudence is being dramatic.”
“Prudence is being Prudence,” says Bonnie, eyeing her carefully. “Besides, I think you’ll need the money.”
Clemence nods, picking up the last sweet potato tempura; this is true.
Bonnie’s still watching her.
“What?” Clemence asks, with her mouth full.
“Toad called.”
Clemence chokes, which is distressing, but also opportune because, as she struggles to breathe, she doesn’t have to hear what comes next, or say anything herself, and maybe this could be a convenient way to go …
except that she doesn’t really want to die, and the tempura is easily dislodged from her throat.
Bonnie refills her water glass, and Clemence takes a sip, wondering how long she can drag this out for, if she might get away without saying a word.
But no. Bonnie says, “We thought you’d been in touch with the lawyer. You told us you’d been.” Clemence is not going to get away with this at all.
“I didn’t say that, exactly.”
“You said you were dealing with it.”
“And I was,” Clemence protests. “I mean, I was going to. I still am. Just …” She picks up a dab of wasabi and uses her chopsticks to mix it into her soy sauce.
“When I’m ready.” She can’t look at her mother now.
She knows how feeble she sounds, though in theory the plan had made a great deal of sense.
“He needs to know about the house,” says Bonnie.
The townhouse that she and Toad owned together, where he lives alone now.
Clemence still owns half of it. He’ll have to buy her out eventually, and yes, that would help her finances more than some editing job, although still not enough for her to be able to afford a place in this city. “You need to move forward.”
But isn’t that been exactly what she’s been doing?
Leaving her whole life behind, and Toad is welcome to it, to all of it.
Clemence hoping that if she waited long enough, Toad would forget he ever knew her, forget what she’d done.
Does she even need her half of their house?
If she gave it to him outright, could that be atonement?
“But you don’t need ‘atonement,’” says Bonnie.
“You just need to take responsibility for your own life. Especially the parts that are bound up with his. He deserves that. He doesn’t deserve much, but he deserves that.
” And Clemence is surprised to hear this from her mother, which Bonnie reads in her expression.
“Oh, come on now, you know I never really liked the guy.”
But Clemence hadn’t known. Her father, maybe, but never her mother. She’d always supposed her husband to be the chosen son-in-law, the one without a previous family, the one who wasn’t a pervert. All that, and Toad still couldn’t come out on top.
“He took you away. He made your world so small,” Bonnie laments. “But what was I supposed to do? If I said anything, you wouldn’t have listened to me. I don’t even know if you’re listening to me now.”
“No, I am,” Clemence says. Especially the parts about how she didn’t need atonement.
“How’s he doing, anyway?” she dares to ask.
The real reason all those letters remain unopened was because she didn’t want to know.
It was a terrible kind of power to be able to wreck a man’s entire life.
“Was he crying?” She’s got her eyes squeezed shut. She doesn’t want to know.
“Well, no.”
Clemence’s eyes fly open to stare at her mother in amazement. This was all she’d been waiting to hear—and yet …
“I mean, not at first,” Bonnie clarifies.
“He was holding it together, then he broke down partway through. He’s not doing well, and I don’t think it’s helping him any, your avoidance.
” And then she says, in a more sympathetic tone, “And I don’t think it’s helping you much, either.
” She says, and not for the first time, “Clemence, the whole world doesn’t only exist in your head. ”
Clemence says, “I’ll talk to him.” Sooner or later, it was going to have to happen.
“You will,” says her mother, popping the last piece of dragon roll into her mouth. “Because I gave him your number.”
“You what?”
Bonnie shrugs.
“Okay,” Clemence says. It was always going to come to this.
“And I’ll talk to Prudence.” Which seems to do the trick, for now, because the fraught conversation is over.
She and her mother order green tea ice cream, and finish their meal feeling easy with each other.
Clemence is telling her about the bookshop.
“Just a few hours a week, but the stuff I’m turning up is fascinating.
And you know that I’m volunteering at the church. ”
Her mother says, “I didn’t.” And now she’s worried that Clemence has gone and joined a cult.
She’s imagining hippies in a storefront, the women dressed like Little House on the Prairie, and whatever had happened to her neighbour Muriel Adelman’s niece who convinced her parents to invest their life savings in a pyramid scheme, then ran away to Montana and nobody’s seen her since.
“It’s not like the Adelmans’ niece. This one’s an actual church,” Clemence assures her mother.
“St. Saviour’s, established in 1872. They only meet on Sunday mornings and they’ve got an organ and everything, so you know it’s legit.
I went to just one service, but I’m still helping out.
It’s a community thing. They’re raising money for a new roof and to feed the homeless. ”
“That sounds pretty reasonable,” Bonnie admits.
“And it’s not your life savings they’re after. They want your jumble.”
“Jumble?”
“Housewares, crockery, costume jewellery, old books, and bric-a-brac. Whatever it is that’s cluttering up your drawers and closets that might be of good use to somebody else.”
“And they don’t make you wear a bonnet?”
“Mom, the women don’t even wear fancy hats. It’s a very progressive church.”
Clemence has to make an appointment to call her older sister, who is more difficult to reach than anyone else Clemence knows.
The kids are back to school now, which means that Prudence is up to her ears in lesson plans and glitter glue, and when she’s not running the home-school, she’s sleeping, which makes it sound like Prudence is avoiding her, but Prudence is so occupied that she doesn’t even have time to avoid her sister, because she’d have to go out of her way to do that.
Bonnie coordinates the whole thing, letting Clemence know that Pru is available on Tuesday morning at six thirty, and so Clemence has to set an alarm for the for the first time in months.
Usually the church bells are what manage to rouse her in the mornings (oranges and lemons), and they don’t start until eight o’clock.
Prudence answers, and the first thing Clemence says is, “I’m sorry.
” They haven’t spoken since the wallpaper stripping.
Alvin Puddicombe’s index will be finished by the end of the week, and Clemence is proud of her work, that it might be the most subversive index in the history of indexing.
Anyone who reaches the book’s conclusion and imagines the poet’s violence and misogyny excused will find otherwise within the pages that follow: B is for buffoonery; M is for moral standards (lax); P is for the poems that Puddicombe plagiarized from his second-last girlfriend (who was called Patricia).
P is also for pragmatism. Clemence hadn’t done anything wrong, but she needs the editing job from Sandro’s colleague.
Prudence is still explaining the extent of this betrayal. “When I confide in you, it’s confidential. I told you not to tell anyone, and especially not Grace. This is tough for her. I know it is.”
“But I didn’t tell Grace,” says Clemence. She never tells Grace anything. She shouldn’t even speak to Grace, because look where it gets her. “She already knew—Mom told her. It’s Mom you shouldn’t have confided in.”
“But Mom wasn’t the one who told Grace that I didn’t want this baby. You made me sound callous, Clemence. That was never what I said.”
“And I never told her that,” says Clemence.
“I know you’re not callous. I would never have said anything at all, but she just got me on the phone, and I thought everything was all out in the open.
I misjudged. And I’m sorry.” She’d said it twice.
And she was sorry. But she also needed this to be over. “And you know how she twists things.”
“I do,” says Prudence, after a pause. So they’re on the same side again. “Maybe I overreacted.” Clemence lets this stand. “I’m actually looking forward to it, you know. This baby. One more go-around. Sandro says he’s getting a vasectomy. He said our fertility awareness is lacking.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“And he mentioned it to his doctor, who asked him if he was really sure. She told Sandro to think of any future partners and what they might want.”
“How many families is Sandro going to have?” asks Clemence.
“He’s determined that ours will be his final one. He says any future partners will have to lump it. That they’ll probably be busy wrangling the scads of children I’ve born to him, anyway.”
“And where will you be?” asks Clemence.
“Hopefully sipping a stiff drink on a tropical island. Anyway, I suppose you’ll want to know about this editing job …”
And for the sake of family harmony, Clemence pretends not to know what her sister is talking about as she scrambles for a pen and paper to write down the details.