Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe Read Free Book Online Page A

hotel at Catherine’s insistence. Because Joseph’s parents’ house was so small, she didn’t want Rupert and Mary disturbed by Andrew, a fussing baby on their first visit and, on their second, a small child in the throes of the terrible twos. Joseph didn’t tell his wife that her middle-class consideration was interpreted by his parents as high and mightiness, a distaste for ordinary people and plain living.Overhearing his mother refer to Catherine as “Dr. Bringhurst” confirmed for her son that it was a sore point with his mother that his spouse had retained her maiden name.
    How Catherine reacts to this, or doesn’t react to this – she is oblivious in the way the protected, privileged so often are, they cannot conceive of opinions except the proper ones,
theirs –
makes Joseph swell with a mild, chafing contempt.
She has no idea
. For her the man with the prematurely, fiercely lined face and the woman with the home permanent and tough, callused hands are salt of the earth idealizations; honest, kindly peasants like the ones first encountered in a suburban fairy tale, Chicago-style. Deep in her heart she assumes that they must admire her because that is what peasants do with princesses. (Catherine would be shocked and hurt if Joseph accused her of such an attitude.) But Joseph knows what his parents think of women who give their boy child a doll to play with, or hang on to their maiden names, or put up in hotels on family visits. Hoity-toity bitch, is what they think. So his son turns five before Joseph can bring himself to pay another visit home, before he and Catherine, his mother and Andrew find themselves standing in the IGA parking lot, watching the local Canada Day parade assemble. This year, like each of the fifteen before, his father, on horseback, is going to lead the parade and bear the flag.
    It is not a good day for a parade. The morning is woolly and grey with a fine, misty rain, which recalls for Joseph the barely perceptible spray suspended in the air above the observation railings at Niagara Falls. He wishes it would piss or get off the pot. The day has the feel of a sodden Kleenex about to shred in his hands. He doesn’t know why he should feel this, but he does. Maybe it’s because Andrew, holding Catherine’s hand and delightedly awaiting the commencement of the parade in a brilliantly yellow raincoat and sou’wester, seems to his father the only genuine patch of brightness on the scene, a patch of brightness soon to be eclipsed by disappointment. It’s Joseph’s guess that the boy expects a parade of pomp and magnitude, an Ottawa parade like he’s used to. Andrew doesn’tunderstand that all he is going to get is what is already collected in the parking lot.
    That’s the local high-school band whose uniform consists of the high-school jacket, nothing splashier, showier, or more elaborate. Also the local Credit Union, which has resurrected its perennial float, a six-foot-high papier mâché globe spotted with cardboard Credit Union flags to illustrate the international nature of credit unionism. The owner and parts man of the John Deere dealership are drunk and in clown costumes. The owner will drive a John Deere riding mower pulling a child’s wagon in which the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound parts man will hunker, honking a horn and tossing wrapped candies to the children. The few remaining parade entries are of a similar calibre. Meanwhile the hapless drizzle continues, making everything fuzzier and murkier, wilting the pastel tissue paper flowers on the floats, frizzing the hair of the high-school queen and her attendants, painting a pearly film of moisture on the hoods, roofs, fenders of parked cars.
    Buried in Joseph is the nagging realization that it is wrong to assign the feel of the day, the foreboding that it is about to fall apart in his hands, to any possible disappointment on Andrew’s part. The real problem is his, adult disappointment. Because, ever since they arrived,