The Young in One Another's Arms

Jane Rule

Description

An award-winning novel of lesbian identity and camaraderie amid violence and war

Ruth Wheeler is the one-armed caretaker of a motley crew of boarders living in her rooming house in Vancouver, British Columbia. The miscreants and outcasts in residence include a sexually confused academic, a one-time-dope-addict-turned-law-student, a high-minded deserter of the Vietnam War, a socially conscious female radical, and a gay man on the run from the cops. Despite personal differences and a turbulent outside world teeming with police brutality, the renters’ affection for one another grows and they form a progressive and idealistic “chosen family.”
 
However, Ruth’s devoted and assimilative spirit is put to the test when her property is slotted to be destroyed by developers. The household packs up and sails to Galiano Island, where they establish a new home, start a business, and strive to overcome the initial antipathy of their neighbors. They even decide to collectively raise a baby born from an unwanted pregnancy.
 
Winner of the 1978 Canadian Authors Association Best Novel of the Year Award, The Young in One Another’s Arms stands as one of the most sophisticated portrayals of an alternative model for domestic life.
 
 
 

Sujets

• Vancouver
• Gay
• Coming out
• Canada
• Feminism
• Lesbian
• 1970s
• Canadian literature
• Lesbian fiction
• Bisexuality

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 23 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9781480479203
• Langue: English

Extrait

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The Young in One Another s Arms
A Novel
Jane Rule
FOR HELEN
CHAPTER ONE
In the darkened street, Ruth Wheeler might have been mistaken for a boy of middle growth, spare-bodied, light on her feet. She nearly always wore trousers, and the empty right sleeve of her windbreaker could seem a boy s quirk of style. But if she stepped under a streetlight, looked up and sharply beyond that illuminated space, her face redefined the first impression, the color of false pearl, dark eyes of remarkable size but limited by aging lids, anchored by taut lines to her temples: the face of a seventy-year-old woman. Ruth Wheeler was, in fact, just over fifty.
I looked older than my mother when I was born, she claimed.
Most newborn do but outgrow it. She had not. She had lived with that birth face until age became the excuse for it or was beginning to be. Her body, ordinary enough in growing, had refused to age, small breasts still high, belly firm as if it had never given room to the one child she had borne.
I ll die in pieces, she said, her right arm the first sacrifice to that process, an accident she didn t remember, though she d lived with the fact of having one arm for fifteen years.
I can only remember what s happened to other people.
Those accidents which she had not witnessed stayed vivid: her father crushed under a redwood tree (it didn t matter that the report blamed a bulldozer), her daughter falling like a sparrow out of the sky (the late news invented an automobile accident). Ruth still dreamed occasionally of the falling tree and the falling child (who was twenty-two when it happened). She dreamed as well of the great six-lane highway that flowed over the valley in which she had grown up, a river of cars spawning to impossible cities, to be seen as broken and battered as fish on its urban shores.
Ruth had been part of the debris, carried along like an uprooted bush or root-or so she dreamed it, snagged here and there by a job that didn t last, a man that didn t last.
You re not a sort of woman to live with, her husband explained to her when he left. But not the sort to leave behind entirely either. A memory of her would catch him like the first cold air in the lungs, and he would come back to her for a day or a week.
Like a tooth you don t get around to pulling right out. It flares up. You bite on it.
Aching root, uprooted stick, walking the night streets often because she did not much like to sleep in the dark, Ruth Wheeler would speak to strangers or not. A cigarette smoked in the middle of the bridge or down by the beach was as good a companion as any. She did not stay out long, no more than an hour or so. She had a house to go back to and a number of invented responsibilities: her mother-in-law, her six boarders, an ailing runaway boy in the basement. She could sit by an open fire and look through the bulb catalogue, her inventions asleep about her, morning as far off as spring.
If planting bulbs could have stopped the dread of spring, Ruth would have gardened in the middle of the night, but for her there was never any way out of a fact. This house, along with all the others on the block, was to be razed to make way for a new approach to the bridge. In March, she would not sit in a rocking chair with a shotgun across her lap as young Gladys Ledger would like her to do, nor would she let Gladys organize the other boarders into any kind of protest. For most of them losing the house meant no more than finding another room to live in. Mavis Collingwood had been about to move out when the expropriation notice arrived and was staying on now only out of loyalty, knowing Ruth couldn t easily rent her room again. The sick boy would be well and gone, in jail if Ruth couldn t prevent that either, or in working safety on a boat or in the trees.
The only two who worried her were Clara, her mother-in-law, and Willard Steele, who had been in the house since Ruth bought it fourteen years ago, using as down payment the compensation money from her accident. Clara had decided that this was as good a winter as any to die, but she wouldn t. Willard did not think about it, incapable of living in any terms that included change. Whatever Ruth decided for herself would have to include both of them somehow.
I thought you d be a fighter, Gladys had said.
What you lose is what you survive with, Ruth answered, her right arm for a house, her husband for her mother-in-law, two rooms in the basement from the insurance paid for a dead child, and now whatever she could get with this new compensation.
You can t fight the expropriation itself, Mavis Collingwood had agreed, but you can fight for a fair price.
Mavis, filling up her room with chapters of her Ph.D. thesis, which had everyone in the house reading Dickens, was good at the system and did not want to discover how little control one had over what happened, what a fair price for anything was.
The government s always fair, isn t it? Joanie Vaughan asked, her hair in curlers at breakfast and at dinner so that she always looked to Ruth like something to be opened later by lusting boss or lusting boy friend. For Joanie, with all her dependent daydreams, only people could be unfair, the men with big cars who either had wives or didn t want them.
You re not going to try to buy another house, are you? Tom Petross wanted to know. Why don t you get into business? Why don t you go into business with me?
Doing what, Tom? Ruth asked, her lined smile opening over handsome teeth, as young as her body.
Ten years younger, she could have been tempted not only because Tom Petross was an inventive and practical young man but because she would have liked to keep him near her. He had been with her longer than the others, except for Willard; he had been the first of the young Americans to come across the border for sanctuary. Tom had not needed her help after the first month, finding himself a job when no one could, in the middle of winter, as a short-order cook from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.
Ruth s husband, who had married her in a grand gesture just before he went gladly off to war, didn t like these young punks coming up across the border and curling up in Ruth s pocket-book and heart.
They re my people, she said.
You talk like Americans were a bloody tribe of Indians. You changed your citizenship when you married me, didn t you?
She had and could therefore get a job sorting mail at Christmas, when she still had two hands, when she still had a daughter who would grow up Canadian, but a country for Ruth wasn t so much something to belong to as something more to lose, as these young men were losing theirs. She understood them as she understood herself, glad of whatever snag could hold her still awhile. She was also angry for them, as she was not for herself.
Sometimes she was angry for all of them, even for Joanie and Gladys. Anger was the one thing that could keep them all alive for her, even in her dreams, so that they didn t all come tumbling out of the sky at her like dying birds.
I m not fitting anyone with wings, Tom, especially you.
Hey, that s cool, Ruth. You always stay in your space, Stew said, his eyes shining behind his long hair, in his own space always.
Stew Meadow would get himself carefully stoned and sit on a curb across the street to watch the house come down over no one s ears, a happening just for him, who would get past experience instead of going through it, taking nothing but new notes for his clarinet.
By the fire, late at night, with the bulb catalogue, Ruth listened to all their voices again, as another way of postponing her own dreams or listening to theirs, alive all around her in the sleeping house. Could she find an apartment somewhere? Might someone hire a fifty-year-old, one-armed caretaker with an arthritic mother-in-law and a three-quarter-witted man of forty? Two bedrooms-Ruth could sleep in the living room, when she slept, but how could she listen late at night to the sleep of all those other people from whom she might only collect rent and useless greetings? There had to be room for her own dreaming, the highway then flowing over this house as well, the sky falling.
Ruth? Ruth? Can you hear the geese?
Ruth got up, walked across the hall and into her mother-in-law s room. There was no light on, but she went up to the bed and reached for the hand she knew was there, frail-boned, painful.
I never feel sorry for them , Clara said.
All the pity s for the robins.
And I don t even like them .
Have you been asleep? Ruth asked.
It s hard to know, isn t it?
Even after all these years it was difficult for Ruth not to offer Clara something more than her hand, but the old lady suffered being waited on only if she could give commands and stay unaware of how willing Ruth was, how willing they all were. She stood for a moment longer in case there was something Clara wanted. Then she put the hand back where she had found it and went out. Another thing they never did was say good night, perhaps because it would have closed off a time in which they often encountered each other briefly, like that, the two restless watchdogs of a house that was never locked. They were not afraid of burglars.
No need to be while you ve got all the thieves already living under your roof, Ruth s husband said.
Did many women marry because they loved their mothers-in-law? Ruth s own mother remarried when Ruth was ten, too old to learn to be the child of another man, too old to compete with the babies that came one after