“One of my former students,” Hope said. Harriet would conclude eventually that the entire population of the city consisted of Hope’s former students.
“Is Blanche her real name?” Harriet asked, looking at the elaborate lettering of “Carte Blanche” in its circle of Georgia O’ Keefe poppies.
“Has been for as long as I’ve known her,” Hope said. “But I don’t know if the name or the vocation came first.”
“It’s hardly a vocation, is it?” said Harriet.
“For her it seems to be. She takes it very seriously,” Hope said, adding in her opinionated way, “Names can influence the directions lives take.”
Harriet was about to ask Hope if her name made her preter-naturally optimistic when they arrived outside Harriet’s rooming house. It was a white frame house, with an old sofa on the porch sprouting coiled wire springs and stuffing. Loud music blared out of one of the upstairs windows, and a compost heap at the side of the house was releasing a truly horrible smell.
“The usual foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” said Hope as if she was familiar with the place. “Not a very peaceable kingdom.”
“True,” said Harriet. “I’ll probably move soon.”
“I have a house on the crescents,” Hope said. “I often let the top floor to a student. It just so happens that it’s vacant at the moment.”
“I’m more or less committed,” Harriet said. “I have an aunt in town.”
The excuse was the knee-jerk reaction of someone who leads an irregular life, needs freedom, and doesn’t want anyone taking note of her comings and goings or counting the bottles in the garbage. But even without that, the idea of living under the scrutiny of those shrewd eyes would have been too much.
“That isn’t the aunt who knew Mazo?”
“No, she died. This is another one.”
“Well, we must get together and talk about our shared obsession,” Hope said. “You must come and see my collection of photographs of Mazo and Caroline.”
“I have some photographs of them too,” Harriet said, “if I can only find them.”
“Passed on by your aunt?”
“No,” Harriet said. “As a matter of fact, I stole them.”
It seemed from the dilation of the eyes behind the glasses that an explanation was necessary.
“I stayed with my aunt when I was just a kid, and I was fascinated by the pictures in the photograph album we looked at. Just before I left I took one last look at the albums, and on a sudden impulse I slipped out some of the pictures. I don’t know what made me do it. It was the only time in my life I ever stole anything, and I felt terribly guilty for a long time afterwards. When I got home, I hid them so well it was years before I found them again.”
“And it was discovered, your theft?”
“I never knew. There was a rift in the family, and I didn’t see my aunt for several years. By that time, we had other things on our minds.”
Again, an expectant silence, but this time Harriet volunteered no further information.
“What a funny character you are, Harriet,” Hope said. “I’m glad we managed this lunch together. I hope we’ll have lots more.”
After Hope walked off up the street, Harriet went into the house, sat on her bed for a while, and then came out again and walked back in the direction of the theatre. She was headed towards the liquor store, intending to pick up a paper on the way so that she could look up places available for short-term rent.
V
Harriet always knew her real life began when she was twelve years old. She’d known at the time that something important had happened, but it wasn’t until much later that she understood she’d started out then on the path she would tread as long as she lived.
Before she was twelve, Harriet had never had a proper holiday — the kind where you went to the beach and swam in the sea. She’d never even been off the prairies before. And then suddenly they let her go for two whole weeks to stay in a huge house by the ocean. It was almost like going to another country, because it was on an island off the west coast where there were whales and cougars and bears. And she went with her aunt Nina, who was the person she admired most in the world.
Even now, she couldn’t figure out why her mother had allowed it. Perhaps it had to do with her mother’s operation and her need for peace and quiet when she got out of hospital. But that wasn’t the real explanation, because Harriet at twelve would have been a help rather than a burden. Perhaps her aunt had paid for something and done so on certain conditions. It was all part of the undercurrent of tension that riddled the relationship between her mother and her aunt.
Aunt Nina came out regularly every spring before they went out to the acreage for the summer. The whole time she was with them, the house was fraught with tension that mounted gradually and resulted in at least one big explosion. It was so uncomfortable that Harriet couldn’t understand why her aunt kept putting up with it.
“Why do you hate her?” she asked her mother.
“I don’t hate her,” her mother said. “She’s my sister, isn’t she? She gets on my nerves is all, same as you and Donna.” That seemed reasonable enough because Harriet and Donna fought all the time.
“Why does she keep coming out here?” she asked.
“Because we’re family. The only one she’s got.”
Her mother said it with contempt, the same tone she always used for speaking of Aunt Nina. Harriet had been afraid her aunt would stomp out and they’d never see her again. But she never fought back, and Harriet often felt sorry for her, alone in the world and treated so badly by the only family she had. There was something pathetic about the way she hung about the house on sufferance, knowing she wasn’t welcome.
On the other hand, it was hard to feel sorry for Aunt Nina for long because she was so elegant. She held herself erect and walked with such an air in her high-heeled shoes that people turned to stare at her. Even if she did live alone, she had plenty of money, wore beautiful clothes, and drove a big car. She was a private secretary to a rich man in British Columbia. Harriet wasn’t sure of the details and didn’t exactly know what a private secretary or a pulp mill was.
“Do you wish you looked like Aunt Nina?” Harriet once incautiously asked her mother.
“We could all look like that if we lived the way she does,” her mother concluded when she finished blowing off a head of steam.
Her mother held it against her younger sister that she was single and worked for a living. That didn’t seem fair, because it wasn’t Aunt Nina’s fault that her fiancé had been killed in a farm accident. One of the neighbours was a widow who lived alone and had a job, and Harriet’s mother said she was very brave, but she never praised Aunt Nina. She just hinted that if Harriet spent too much time around her aunt some kind of contamination would rub off and she’d end up being an old maid and a career girl.
Anyway, it was a huge surprise when they told Harriet one night while they were having supper that her mother had to go into hospital and she was being sent to stay with her aunt. Donna didn’t mind that she wasn’t going too; she had a boyfriend and she didn’t like being separated from him for a minute. Besides, they all knew Harriet was her aunt’s favorite. That was another thing her mother held against Aunt Nina. She talked about favouritism as if it was one of the seven deadly sins, even though she favoured Donna in a hundred different ways.
The main thing Harriet worried about was travelling by herself on the train. A woman from church was going to a convention in Vancouver, and she promised to keep an eye on Harriet, but the woman was going to sleep in her seat on