Chapter 18

    This was the second visit to the Omagh's second Vancouver house. Nothing could ever equal the first visits to the first house, of course. The first house had been the house of his courting - if courting were an accurate description or a process in which no one in history had been more absolutely and immediately certain of his future spouse than Toby - and if it had been only a modest bungalow, by Point Grey standards, and the second house rather more palatial, it was still the castle, moat, drawbridge, and portcullis through which he had charged his steed and carried away the fair bride, through all the protests of the resident dragon, her mother. And carried her away, not only because she was fair, but because she also was so incredibly intelligent and such a reader, and so unshakable in her faith, that faith of the medieval knights, the faith of all the most penetrating and imitable writers, the faith of even himself, once he got around to realizing it. And once he had carried her off, there really was no need to keep the first house, so the Omagh's found the second one. Probably Jelena's industrious father had got himself a raise, so the bigger, definitely more elegant house was a possibility.
 
     And this was good, because it was bigger and therefore had adequate guest room for a husband, a wife, and two children, at least for a week or two. This second house had an ample second story, so there was room to sprawl on their own without being too much of a nuisance, and no end of the privacy they would need to analyze and debate the day by day results of this return to the city.
As I said, this was a second visit, and it had come three years after the first, when from making a nice chunk of money from keeping a mid-coast light house for six weeks, so the incumbent operator could take his family off for a holiday, they had been able to fly down and show little Johanna to her very full set of grandparents. This was in general a useful visit, but not without meaningful incident, both at the natural and supernatural level. As Toby's mother had born only sons, and was looking forward naturally to making up for such excessive maleness in the blood line with granddaughter, she had begun a certain course of fantasy which came a cropper at her first sight of the little one.
 
     "Oh! She's so chubby!" she had said at her first sight of Johanna. "I thought you said she was petite!" Toby's mother had always been full of declarations as to other people's physical attributes. But at least she had rallied and made the time at her house as comfortable as she could. Jelena's mother, although delighted to see the daughter Toby had spirited away from her and subsequently taken outside the city forever, had refused to move any of the household decorations on the lower floor at child level, assuming, apparently, that a one-year old should either be in complete control of her appetites, or have a mother that was continually interrupting the conversation to dash after Johanna as she laid hands on yet another quite expensive ash tray or delicate figurine. Johanna had learned to walk on the kitchen floor of the lighthouse and was busy celebrating her new found mobility, with a smile on little round face which indicated that she assumed everyone in sight relished her new found skill as much as her parents did.
 
     But in spite of these minor irritations, that first return as a couple had been a triumph. Returning to his home town had always been a triumph in Toby's happy, busy, optimistic youth, and the tradition showed every sign of continuing in his compounded situation. He and Jelena had a happy, healthy, child and he had a job that he loved and was useful at. And how many couples could say they lived in a rectory, with a priest of not a little heroic stature? True, the job did not pay as much money as would have pleased his father's worldly preferences, but it had relieved the anxieties of both grandmothers, especially the maternal. From long experience Toby's mother knew that her oldest was anything but lazy, but Jelena's, although she knew he walked all the time, or rode a bicycle, never actually saw him doing anything but talk, listen, and watch the Omagh television occasionally. Her one concrete sign of anything positive in his future, at least as being imagined by himself, had come at the end of the first summer of their acquaintance, when he had received an encouraging letter from one of Toronto's largest publishers, telling him that he definitely wrote well, but should not try do anything further with the submitted text, as the leading character in it didn't seem to do much. Toby did not write back to tell them this character was a deliberate attempt to show that he could write about an anti-hero as well as any of his peers. This particular novel had been conceived as a kind of exercise he was bound to before he settled down to deal with what he had actually experienced in himself, a kind of masterpiece in detachment from his own real person.
  
    Even without the letter from the major publisher, the book had brought some good effects to himself. Although it was working on a play script that had set him up as high as a kite the night he had first realized that Jelena was part of his new circle of literary friends, at the party right after Christmas, that had come to an inconclusive end pretty quickly, so that by the time they were really starting to get together, he had returned somewhat to the pages he had been creating in the spring, before he went into the wilderness. They not only gave him reason to keep on enjoying the campus in spite of his continuing on as such a duffer at legal studies, but they had been the very thing he was bashing away at in the editor-in-chief's room in the Ubyssey office the Saturday morning Jelena had walked in to drop off an article she had just written. Nothing had seemed more natural, or in accordance with the unfolding of Providence's intentions than that she should pull up a chair into the doorway and start talking to him. They had talked about many things, not the least of which was how the opening night of her play had gone, and that he was coming tonight. He had probably said, rather bluntly, that while he was enjoying the writing of the moment, it was not the sort of thing he would eventually settle down to once he was older. He had gazed at her steadily, let the conversation be an even one, and looked deeply into his own interior so as to monitor his own reactions.
  
    And, of course, only a few days before he had written her a poem, a small cautionary tale against another young man usually found in those offices, who although admirable in many ways, he already knew could never be Jelena's husband.
  
    Ah, those wonderfully successful, even triumphant, days and years. There had come the greater ravages of the Spirit of the Dark Night in his soul, of course, and the concomitant ecstasies and floods of light, throughout his conversion and afterward, but no real failures, no setbacks that were anything but short-lived signs of redirection toward new and better challenges. It had been a surprise to turn their backs on Vancouver, but a greater adventure to be more intimately useful to the more struggling areas of the Church because of that emigration. It seemed doubtful that this meant anything to their university friends, nor much more to either of their families, but neither Toby nor Jelena would have had it any other way.
  
    But now the grim reality of both of them being without work, for the first time ever, unless by their own choices, for the sake of schooling or creative activity.
 
     In his heart of hearts, from the solid years of theology, especially spiritual theology, behind him, Toby knew that this too was a change of direction, to be lived through from day to day. But it nonetheless would hold its own elements of trial and uncertainty, not the least of which was being so dependent on the hospitality of relatives who had no idea at all of his own real place in the schemes of Providence. His own parents had no relation whatsoever with literature, his own first vocation, and Jelena's parents, even with her mother a Catholic, and an excellent reader up to a certain level, had no interest in the spiritual writers by which he had come to learn he had either to live by, or not live at all.
 
     It was definitely a life few souls could be expected to understand, and he simply counted himself fortunate that he had found a wife who could do so. Who else could appreciate that merely passing from one text of the mystics to another could be such a major adventure? Or that mislaying one of them for a two or three days was such a source of anxiety?