After Corrie’s father died, the shoe factory had been taken over by a large firm that had promised—so she believed—to keep it running. Within a year, however, the building was empty, such equipment as was wanted moved to another town, nothing left, except a few outmoded tools that had once had to do with making boots and shoes. Corrie got it into her head to establish a quaint little museum to display these things. She herself would set it up and give tours describing how things used to be done. It was surprising how knowledgeable she became, helped by some photographs that her father had had taken to illustrate a talk that perhaps he himself had given—it was badly typed—to the Women’s Institute when they were studying local industries. Already by the end of the summer Corrie had shown a few visitors around. She was sure that things would pick up the next year, after she had put a sign up on the highway and written a piece for a tourist brochure.
In the early spring, she looked out of her window one morning and saw some strangers starting to tear the building down. It turned out that the contract she’d thought she had to use the building so long as a certain amount of the rent was paid did not allow her to display or appropriate any objects found within the building, no matter how long they had been considered worthless. There was no question of these ancient bits of hardware belonging to her, and, in fact, she was fortunate not to be hauled up in court now that the company—which had once seemed so obliging—had found out what she was up to.
If Howard had not taken his family to Europe the previous summer, when she embarked on this project, he could have looked at the agreement for her and she would have been saved a lot of trouble.
Never mind, she said when she had calmed down, and soon she found a new interest.
It began with her deciding that she was sick of her big and empty house—she wanted to get out, and she set her sights on the public library down the street.
It was a handsome, manageable redbrick building and, being a Carnegie Library, was not easy to get rid of, even though few people used it anymore—not nearly enough to justify a librarian’s wages.
Corrie went down there twice a week and unlocked the doors and sat behind the librarian’s desk. She dusted the shelves if she felt like it, and phoned up the people who were shown by the records to have had books out for years. Sometimes the people she reached claimed that they had never heard of the book—it had been checked out by some aunt or grandmother who used to read and was now dead. She spoke then of library property, and sometimes the book actually showed up in the returns bin.
The only thing not agreeable about sitting in the library was the noise. It was made by Jimmy Cousins, who cut the grass around the library building, starting again practically as soon as he’d finished because he had nothing else to do. So she hired him to do the lawns at her house—something she’d been doing herself for the exercise, but her figure didn’t really need it and it took forever with her lameness.
Howard was somewhat dismayed by the change in her life. He came more seldom now, but was able to stay longer. He was living in Toronto, though working for the same firm. His children were teenagers or else in college. The girls were doing very well, the boys not quite so well as he might have wished, but that was the way of boys. His wife was working full-time and sometimes more than full-time in the office of a provincial politician. Her pay was next to nothing, but she was happy. Happier than he’d ever known her.
The past spring he had taken her to Spain, as a birthday surprise. Corrie hadn’t heard from him for some time then. It would have been lacking in taste for him to write to her from the birthday-present holiday. He would never do a thing like that, and she would not have liked him to do it, either.
“You’d think my place were a shrine, the way you carry on,” Corrie said after he got back, and he said, “Exactly right.” He loved everything about the big rooms now, with their ornate ceilings and dark, gloomy panelling. There was a grand absurdity to them. But he was able to see that it was different for her, that she needed to get out once in a while. They began to take little trips, then somewhat longer trips, staying overnight in motels—though never more than one night—and eating at moderately fancy restaurants.
They never ran into anyone they knew. Once upon a time they would have done so—they were sure of it. Now things were different, though they didn’t know why. Was it because they weren’t in such danger, even if it did happen? The fact being that the people they might have met, and never did, would not have suspected them of being the sinful pair they still were. He could have introduced her as a cousin without making any impression—a lame relation he had thought to drop in on. He did have relatives whom his wife never wanted to bother with. And who would have gone after a middle-aged mistress with a dragging foot? Nobody would have stored that information up to spill at a dangerous moment.
We met Howard up at Bruce Beach with his sister, was it? He was looking good. His cousin, maybe. A limp?
It wouldn’t have seemed worth the trouble.
They still made love, of course. Sometimes with caution, avoiding a sore shoulder, a touchy knee. They had always been conventional in that way, and remained so, congratulating themselves on not needing any fancy stimulation. That was for married people.
Sometimes Corrie would fill up with tears, hiding her face against him.
“It’s just that we’re so lucky,” she said.
She never asked him whether he was happy, but he indicated in a roundabout way that he was. He said that he had developed more conservative, or maybe just less hopeful, ideas in his work. (She kept to herself the thought that he had always been rather conservative.) He was taking piano lessons, to the surprise of his wife and family. It was good to have that kind of interest of your own, in a marriage.
“I’m sure,” Corrie said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
One day—it was in September—Jimmy Cousins came into the library to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to cut her grass that day. He had to go to the cemetery and dig a grave. It was for someone who used to live around here, he said.
Corrie, with her finger in The Great Gatsby, asked for the person’s name. She said that it was interesting how many people showed up here—or their bodies did—with this last request and bother for their relatives. They might have lived their entire lives in cities nearby or distant, and seemed quite satisfied in those places, but had no wish to stay there when they were dead. Old people got such ideas.
Jimmy said that it wasn’t such an old person. The name was Wolfe. The first name slipped his mind.
“Not Lillian? Not Lillian Wolfe?”
He believed it was.
And her name proved to be right there, in the library edition of the local paper, which Corrie never read. Lillian had died in Kitchener, at the age of forty-six. She was to be buried from the Church of the Lord’s Anointed, the ceremony at two o’clock.
Well.
This was one of the two days a week that the library was supposed to be open. Corrie couldn’t go.
The Church of the Lord’s Anointed was a new one in town. Nothing flourished here anymore but what her father had called “freak religions.” She could see the building from one of the library windows.
She was at the window before two o’clock, watching a respectably sized group of people go in.
Hats didn’t seem to be required nowadays, on women or men.
How would she tell him? A letter to the office, it would have to be. She could phone there, but then his response would have to be so guarded, so matter-of-fact, that half the wonder of their release would be lost.