SIMPLE THINGS: The Story of a Friendship By Karen Lavut Mercury, 173 pages, $19.95
Christiane Pflug was an artist, wife and mother of two teenage daughters. In the early spring of 1972, she took the ferry to Hanlan's Point on the Toronto Islands, swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills, lay down among the winter-brown reeds, and died. Karen Lavut's intricately choreographed memoir is a loving re-examination of her friendship with Christiane during the years when she and her partner Jan were neighbours of Christiane and Michael Pflug, in a residential enclave in midtown Toronto.
Tension between Jan and Michael -- "it was always the same, Michael's egotism, Jan's hostility and my stomach ache" -- makes it clear that it was the women's friendship that kept the foursome together, in and out of one another's houses at all hours of the day and night. The women drink tea, prepare meals, sort laundry, walk Christiane's dog -- and talk.
The narrative moves like a stately pavane, circling and re-circling the horrific central act, stepping backward to the Pflug's early lives (both were born in Germany, as was Jan), advancing again to the hours and days immediately following Christiane's death. Lavut dreams that Christiane is alive, partly alive, dead. Conversations and scenes are reconstructed. The author's grief is poignantly expressed.
The women shared confidences about their men, as women will, men who even for those days were unusually autocratic and inflexible -- Michael in particular. "Michael admitted, rather proudly, that he had reduced Christiane to a helpless little girl, who always did what she was told. Esther and Ursula (their daughters) had to be impeccably dressed, but Christiane should not waste time sewing. Housework had to be done with the minimum of fuss. Meals had to be perfect . . . Michael insisted that it was necessary for them to attend dinner parties given by his colleagues, and they had to return the tedious hospitality. . . . The little girls were made to play quietly. They were all afraid of Michael."
Christiane wasn't allowed to go out on trivial excursions. She had to stay in her room all day and paint. "Every evening Michael would examine the day's progress over her shoulder. If he wasn't satisfied, he repainted parts himself. Sometimes he tore a painting up. . . . He believed that she couldn't paint without him, or live without him. So did she."
In a letter to Karen, Christiane says she hates having to fulfil the roles in which family life cast her. "Mothers . . . survive in people's imagination . . . as horrible, oppressive hags, and I feel daily how I am made to join this company. . . . I refuse to become something fixed, that is denied further development.'
Christiane painted the view from the window at the top of their house, again and again, with meticulous accuracy, once taking a whole afternoon to paint a telephone wire half way across the canvas. "There was no movement in her paintings . . . but the stillness was violent . . . 'Prison paintings,' one of the critics called them."
There is an "art naif" quality about Pflug's near-monochromatic work that makes one wonder what course her art might have taken had she been free to find her own way. In Paul Duval's High Realism in Canada, Pflug is described as a spiritual victim of 20th-century malaise who suffered recurring depression. But Lavut states categorically that "she was not a depressive, she was not mentally ill. . . . She didn't kill herself because of some inescapable torment. She killed herself because of external circumstance . . . which could have changed. She could have packed her bags and left."
Lavut's fine use of language tempers the sadness of the story: "The lake was very still. It looked thick, like mercury." When Jan intrudes on the women's conversation, Karen says: "I felt my loyalty divide. For the first few moments there was an imperceptible restraint in the air, until we got used to being three." The women go swimming. "I couldn't take my eyes off her, but I had a nagging feeling that I shouldn't be looking. She came and leaned against the wall, resting her chin on her raised arms, and looking up at me. The hair under her arms was left untouched. Something rushed through me, and I felt slightly drunk."
In an epilogue, Michael Pflug says he did not know what he was doing, that immigrant men suffer such loss of status that they turn on the only people they can control. It would seem that the wife in such a marriage had no status to lose. Simple Things is a beautifully written and disturbing book. Artist and writer Helen McLean's recent novel, Of All the Summers , is based on an incident in the life of the painter Pierre Bonnard.