The Equations of Love (29 page)

“There’s one thing that sorta scares me … and it’s kinda hard to say … I don’t always talk very good, and if I try to
talk good I talk worse. I don’t know why I talk like I do,” she said plaintively, “but when I’m with folks that are edjcated, I get nervous and I just
know
I don’t talk right and so I stay quiet. I guess it’s because I was just a country girl and never had advantages. I wouldn’t like to make you ashamed ever. I don’t know about Paul and Eleanor, but they never …”

“Think nothing of it,” almost shouted Mr. Sprockett. “I’m not so hot myself. My my my, how I remember Bessy calling me down for something I’d say – kind of in joke! She was a great reader, all the magazines; movie magazines and everything,” (Lilly breathed a freer air) “there was nothing she didn’t know, but she’d just jolly me along. You talk fine! … Now let me tell you something. The law here says we can’t get married for three days after I get the licence. You fire the hotel tomorrow and get yourself fixed up.” Into Lilly’s vision swam Miss Larue’s grey woollen dress, followed by a pair of white gloves, in at the left side, out at the right. Into Mr. Sprockett’s vision swam the fur coat that he would soon get for Lilian Sprockett. How good he was! Yes, he was good.

“I don’t need anything but one thing and maybe a pair of white gloves to get married,” said Lilly. “I dress plain.”

(This woman is a wonder!) “Now you must let
me …”
said Mr. Sprockett, making feeling motions on his hip.

“No, I won’t, I certny won’t,” she said stubbornly. “I got plenty.”

“Lilian, you’re a great kid! And just taking me on trust!” (Trust! thought Lilly.) “You got a right to know if I can support you. Well, I can, same way Bessy and I lived and a bit for when we get old.”

What blessed words – yet over all still hung the second shadow. I gotta tell him, she thought, I can’t marry him not telling him and keep him in the dark … it wouldn’t be fair
and him so good to me … and maybe he won’t want me then and and …

Tears rose to her eyes at the thought of what she was going to disclose and what she might be about to lose and Mr. Sprockett not wanting her. The tears formed into round drops and hung trembling at her eyelids. Mr. Sprockett was dismayed.

“Lilian, what’s the trouble?” stretching out a hand to hers.

She took her hand away and said as firmly as she could “I gotta tell you something else … I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell you right now before you start getting the licence and everything. It wouldn’t be fair.”

As he looked at her, all his joy flowed down, away, and out, and where the joy had been was a nausea of cold fear. Is there another husband somewhere? thinks Mr. Sprockett in cold fear (what a fool I’ve been!). Is there a brother an alcoholic or in jail or is there madness in the family (what a fool I’ve been!)? He grew dizzy with the dimensions of his folly. In cold soberness he saw that he was proposing and planning to marry immediately and put into Bessy’s place a woman whom three days ago he had never seen. He was mad, mad! If anyone had told him that he would do this thing he’d have said they were crazy. If Herb or Al or Eddy did a thing like this, he’d say they were crazy, too. Well, he hadn’t done it yet but …

The waiter took away the plates, brought the coffee, and stayed too near the table. Mr. Sprockett was nearly sick with this cold fear. What had he done? He waited. It was insupportable. Lilly’s two tears stopped trembling, and rolled down her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. She looked piteous and quite childish.

When the waiter had gone, Lilly began in a low tone. She could not bear it if her joy were taken away from her, but she must tell him now, not later.

“I told you,” she said in her low tone, “that my sister was sick.” Mr. Sprockett assented. “And I told you she died and then I was sick.”

“Yes.”

“Well, when I began to get better my hair started to fall out something awful, and they said there was nothing would save it but to cut it all off and make me an Adaptation.”

“A what?”

“An Adaptation. It’s when they take and cut your hair and fix it so’s you can put it on again.”

“Is
that
right!”

“It’s your own hair. I said no at first because I thought they meant a wig and I couldn’t ever wear a wig, but they said no, they just take your own hair and make up an Adaptation. So they did.”

Mr. Sprockett stared and stared at her.

“And is that what you had to tell me and upset you like that?” He was so much relieved that he could have cheered.

Lilly nodded, still uncertain. “I wouldn’t have liked to deceive you,” she said, “ever. I wouldn’t want to have anything to hide.” Then she felt that her cheeks were still damp so she rummaged for her handkerchief and wiped each side of her little nose.

Oh, this perfect perfect woman! She’s like a little girl! Mr. Sprockett got up from his side of the table and came over and put his arms round Lilly and kissed her in McCloskey’s (old guy must be tight, said someone).

When he sat down again (oh no, he’s not tight) he said fondly “We can have the ceremony at a minister’s house or in a church. Which would
you
like?”

“I think the house would be nice and private.”

“Would you like a corsage or a
bo
kay?”

“Oh …” said Lilly and her reassurance and joy made her eyes to shine, “I
would
like a
bo
kay. I never had one ever.”

“What of?”

“You choose,” said Lilly who did not know the names of florists’ flowers.

“And now,” said Mr. Sprockett at the end of the meal, tucking Lilly’s arm in his, “we’ll go and have a little glass of something.”

“I don’t take licker,” said Lilly, hesitating.

“Just what Bessy used to say,” said Mr. Sprockett triumphantly, “but we’d have a glass of something just the same … Oh, say! I never ast you what church!”

Lilly thought quickly back to the days when she used to take Eleanor to the little church in Comox, and then to a different kind of little church in the Valley.

She was just going to say “Whichever’s handy” but she checked herself.

“United,” she said almost inaudibly, faint with her happiness.

T
he Equations of Love
has been hard to come by, for many years. I had lost or loaned my copy, long ago. I always said that it was my favourite, of all Ethel Wilson’s books, and that “Tuesday and Wednesday” was one of my favourite long stories or short novels written by anybody. During all this time I hadn’t once checked up on that, as I usually do with favourites, reading them over every five years or so. I have just been reading it again, after a lapse of thirty-five years.

It seems to me that “Lilly’s Story” got more attention and approval than “Tuesday and Wednesday” at the time of the book’s publication. (It got more disapproval, too, when the cbc did an adaptation, and brought Lilly to the notice of anxious parliamentarians.) I think I can see the reasons for this. It is a moral tale, with conventional morality set neatly on its head. This is always satisfying. We read it as we used to read stories before we had any notion of the more subtle and troubling pleasures of reading. We want Lilly to win through, we are with her all the way. Hard choice after hard choice she makes, and after all her self-denial and the lessons shrewdly learned, her
past unkindly catches up with her. She must lie and flee once more, to become a chambermaid in Toronto. Oh, surely, surely, this cannot be the end, for Lilly! We can’t leave her here, even after she gets herself styled and into a new black ensemble. (The “styling” scene is a jewel.) Surely life has a plum for her, at last?

Well, yes, it has, and this sort of story would not work so nicely if it hadn’t. Here comes Mr. Sprockett – unexpected, timely, believable – with his speedy and blunt and tender wooing. I felt just as happy and relieved about that as I did when Elizabeth Bennet got together with Mr. Darcy. A delightful resolution, everything worked out with elegance and economy.

“Tuesday and Wednesday” is another kettle of fish. Mort and Myrtle and Mrs. Emblem and Eddie and Victoria May Tritt and Pork and Old Wolfenden and some others swim around and around in the confines of two days. I do not care about any of them the way I care about what happens to Lilly. They do not strive, they don’t engage my sympathy, they don’t make interesting choices (until the very end), they go round and round and do what they can, they are mean or generous as their natures and circumstances allow. Each of them is a bit like the kitten that Myrtle mistakenly believes to be a tom – each arranges to find as much comfort as possible in an unreliable and somewhat preposterous world. Then comes the moment at the end when two of these most unheroic people do make choices – Mort a choice of action and Victoria May a choice of storytelling, of myth-making. The consequences of their actions are out of their control – it cannot be otherwise. The satisfaction the reader feels is austere – no cozy identification here, no plums or marriage proposals. This is another kind of fiction. It’s not one person’s fate that moves us here
but the pattern – all the lives that move at random and are then swiftly caught up in the absurd heroic moment, the transforming story-making miracle performed by the dullest of the characters.

When I read these stories for the first time, I was a newcomer to Vancouver, and one of the pleasures I had in them was the discovery of that place through Ethel Wilson’s eyes, just as I was discovering it through my own eyes. That Vancouver is now mostly gone. The West End with its streets of big wooden houses, painted dark green or dark red or brown, its shabby fish-and-chips and yarn-and-notions shops, its basement apartments and rickety outdoor staircases, its seaport air of temporary havens and dingy adventures, the smell of its trolley wires which was something like burnt chocolate – all gone. But I can find it again in “Tuesday and Wednesday” and in the first pages of “Lilly’s Story” (which hark back to a city earlier than the one I knew, but still perceptible, then, in a bit of wooden sidewalk, a grand battered house in a now shoddy district). There is no “description” – that paste of wordage that readers automatically slice away as if it were the fat on meat – just a sense of the story growing naturally out of the place. The shining dark wet streets and Mrs. Emblem’s rosy alcove, the nursery gardens where Mort hopes – but not too soon – to get a job, the Indian church across Burrard Inlet, the cpr dock where loners come to watch the seagulls – all that is anything but “background.” It’s essential as Mort and Myrtle are, and the kitten with its secret sex.

Does this mean, then, that the book passed the test, after thirty-five years? Yes, it did, it does, and because I think it’s a fine book, I will mention here a few things that jarred upon me, slightly, in a way they had not done in 1952.

Someone had mentioned to me that there was a problem with Yow, the Chinese cook whose desperate love for Lilly
precipitates the action in “Lilly’s Story.” The objection was that the depiction of Yow – his gambling, his thieving, his trickery and even his obsessiveness – is racist. But if he is close to a stereotype, he is not more so than the Welsh miner Ranny or the English Major Butler, or Lilly herself. To my way of thinking he is a more interesting and intelligent character than either the Englishman or the Welshman. Is it offensive to call him a “Chinaman,” any more than to call Ranny a “Welshman”? I don’t believe so, and yet the term grated, as “Welshman” did not. I think this is due to a change in public sensitivity, a welcome change. I don’t believe it has anything to do with the writer’s attitude. We are all to some extent prisoners of our time, and it is not the responsibility of a fiction writer to create “representative” characters or spread admirable propaganda. So far as I know, this is the first recognition in fiction of the Chinese presence in British Columbia, in the daily life of Vancouver. And it is not a picturesque background presence. Wilson makes Yow an independent and intelligent character, obsessive but complex – perhaps the most interesting man in the story.

Sometimes I found the tone of the prose – that hard clear prose, that glaze of perfect sentences, which I had worshiped in 1952 – sometimes I found it, just for a moment, too composed, too self-assured, too comfortable in its elegant playfulness. “Life on such terms as these is arid, one thinks, but it suits Vicky” is a sentence that doesn’t charm me quite so much as it once did. I’m on the alert for a self-indulgent flippancy, for that betrayal of the characters – a faintly giddy contempt for them – which is a pitfall waiting for so light-footed and ironic a writer. Careful here. Careful. Careful too lest the “lady” pop up under the writer’s skin. (See how we all have our sensitive spots – I can deal calmly with the “problem” of Yow, but I bristle at a threat
of condescension to a poorer, or serving, class.) There’s the shadow of a danger, but it passes. The writer wins.

And some sentences are such a joy that they stayed in my mind all those years, and turned up again wonderful as ever.

From “Tuesday and Wednesday”: “Maybelle phoned me and said are you going short or long.”

From “Lilly’s Story”: “‘Good afternoon,’ said Lilly, and thought Why don’t you style your own self?”

These sentences deliver whole worlds – the world of Mrs. Emblem with its gaudy good times, and the private world of shrewd and lonely Lilly with her tart self-respect. The joy is in the perfect ease and economy –
exactly
what Aunt Em would say and what Lilly would say to herself, and not a word more. The touch so light, so unemphatic, the comedy sharp and gentle. Oh, yes, the writer wins.