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This is the fourth of a 10-part series featuring Canadian writers' true tales of love.
Ralph, Ralph.
Dear God, Ralph had sent me 50 roses for my 50th birthday. And my husband, whose name wasn't Ralph, was holding his card. This wasn't a promising start to my second half-century, nor, it must be said, to our romantic getaway to Hovey Manor.
Up until this moment Hovey Manor had been our sanctuary, our haven. The place we went to celebrate or when the world proved a little too harsh, a little too sad. It's a grand old inn on the shores of Lac Massawippi, in Quebec's Eastern Townships, where the perennial gardens slope to the waterfront and we can eat lobster rolls and crème brûlée on the wide veranda.
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It always reminds me of my husband. Gracious, elegant, gentle, quiet. It's easy to overlook and once found never forgotten.
We'd been married at Hovey. Actually, we were "technically" married in an intimate service in the tiny Anglican chapel on the hill, where we had to pay the organist not to play and the minister had tried to interest us in an insurance policy, a little sideline of his. But when I think of our wedding I think of the rose garden filled with people we love.
Michael and I had met fairly late in life. I was 36 and he was 60. I worked at CBC Radio, hosting the noon show, and had become justifiably famous for both the 1 o'clock time signal and the hog market reports. Michael was the head of hematology at the Montreal Children's Hospital and every day tried to cure children with cancer. So we had a great deal in common. Though, as bright as he clearly is, I must admit to being much better at guessing games.
On one of our first dates we were in the living room of my Plateau Mont-Royal home when he took my hand and said, "You know, there's quite a big age difference between us."
"I know," I said, looking into his serious and adorable blue eyes. Eyes that had seen far more than I ever wanted to imagine.
"I want you to know that I'm 60 years old."
To be honest, that didn't surprise me. What he said next did.
"And I know you're, what? 45? 50?"
I could've brained him. I was 36. It's true that giving the hog market can age a gal, but really? And, what made it even worse, I could tell he was trying to be polite.
It was at that moment I knew I was in love. Instead of braining him, I kissed him. Perhaps, it's true, in an effort to stop him from guessing some more. 55? Maybe he thought he was the young one?
As the years went by people stopped mistaking us for father and daughter, though why they thought we'd be holding hands, as we always do in public, or kiss on the lips, is beyond me. At the Royal Academy in London last year, I was standing beside Michael and asked if it had senior's tickets and the woman said yes, and handed us two.
Somehow, and I'm not clear how this has happened, Michael seems to have gotten younger and I seem to have aged, so that his initial guess appears to be coming true. I'm lapping him.
Hovey Manor was where we went on our first weekend away. Shortly after that we went to a Christmas party at the Children's Hospital. All the kids were in the centre of the room opening gifts and playing. The room was ringed by parents and nurses. Some kids had no hair and lugged IV drips, others looked perfectly healthy. Across the divide I saw Michael. He was watching the kids and then he very softly, very slowly turned his face to the wall. I'd never seen a grown man do that before. He looked as though he'd been naughty and was being punished. I walked around the singing, clapping kids and as I approached I realized why he'd done that.
He was crying.
I stood with him and handed him a Kleenex and when he was ready he turned back to the room, his swimming eyes glued to the children. All he said was, "I know who's going to live and who's going to die."
Michael took me to Hovey when my mother died, and he took me there to propose. We went there to celebrate when I'd finished the first draft of my first book, Still Life, not yet appreciating that my idea of "finished" and the rest of the publishing world's was quite different.
Hovey had held us as we navigated between Scylla and Charybdis, between families uneasily blended and egos too easily hurt. As we tried to fit two hurt people together and tried not to produce even more pain.
Michael had lost his first wife, Sheilagh, to cancer a few years earlier. They'd married young and had three boys and just as the boys were all leaving and they were about to get their lives back, Sheilagh was diagnosed. Michael of course knew immediately, as soon as the doctor told them the extent of it. He took a year off work to travel with her and say goodbye to all the people and places she loved. And he was with her when she died.
Family and friends feared for his life, so deep was his sorrow. And he feared for his life too, knowing it was indeed possible to die from a broken heart.
But instead of dying, this remarkable man's heart mended and dared to love again, so that 14 years later we were standing in the loveliest room at Hovey, surrounded by roses.
He's now 74, and I'm 50. Holding a card saying the roses are from Ralph. Michael grabbed it out of my hands and examined it, then started to laugh. He laughed until he wept, and finally, after I handed him a Kleenex, he said only one thing: "Ralph is me. I told them to say, Love Michael, but they must have misunderstood and written, Happy, Happy Birthday, Ralph Michael."
I leaned in and kissed him and whispered, "I Ralph you too."
Louise Penny's The Cruellest Month was short-listed for the
Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel in Canada. She won the Agatha Award for best traditional mystery in the United States for Dead Cold and her next book,
The Murder Stone, will be out
in October.
