After Alice (32 page)

But as he has grown in that direction, Alice has grown in another. They are the two little wooden figures in the Black Forest clock in the parlour: the husband comes out when it is sunny, with his newspaper and pipe; the wife when it is raining, with her kerchief and umbrella. Never the two together.

The funeral is held in a funeral home in town — a new idea, and Sidonie is surprised at Mother's choosing it. Mother says, “Your father didn't have much time for religion; it would seem all wrong to have him lying there in a church.” But Alice says, “Father was Roman Catholic, of course. Can you see Mother having the funeral at the Catholic church, the way she sneers at it?”

The funeral home is not like Father, either — it's kind of like a mid-level American motel, a Howard Johnson's. But the good thing is that Masao has been conscripted to provide the music, and he brings a tape deck and fills the room with Schubert
Lieder
, Mozart's
Requiem
, parts of Handel's
Messiah
. The sort of music Father would surely have chosen for saying goodbyes to his friends. The music makes Sidonie cry, against her intent. But Alice, sitting beside her, squeezes her hand and gives her a Kleenex. At my funeral, Sidonie thinks, we'll have some dry, mathematical Bach. Nobody will cry.

And after the funeral, a lot of people — Sidonie's and Alice's friends, as well as Mother's and Father's — come back to the community hall for a reception, where there are contributions of food from many, many friends and neighbours.

“Now,” says Mother brusquely, after they have gone home, “I want to talk to you about what I plan to do with the place.”

Is it Sidonie's imagination, or do both Alice and Buck sit up a little straighter, but keep their faces neutral, as if trying to pretend they haven't been anticipating something?

Mother says, “Your father wanted the place to be divided equally between you two girls when I'm gone. So you can think of it as yours in the future. You may divide the land or one of you may buy the other out. It won't matter to me what you do, then, though of course I think it'll be a tragedy if you decide to sell up altogether, after all the work we put into this place.

“But I'm not dead yet, and I don't want to go live in an old folk's home, so I'm going to stay here. But the house is too big for one person and I can't manage the orchards, so this is what I'm proposing. Buck and Alice, you will come and live here, and Buck will run the orchards and you'll have the house. I'll have my own little house; we'll convert the old barn into a cottage for me.”

There's a silence. Sidonie is not surprised by Mother's plan. Logically, it's the best solution. She sees that Buck looks moderately pleased, but also calculating. What more can he expect, she thinks. But Alice's expression is thunderous.

“No,” Alice says, flatly.

Mother looks completely taken by surprise.

“No? What do you mean?”

“No,” Alice says. “Not a good enough deal for us. For Buck and me.”

Buck looks confused, so Sidonie surmises that whatever he and Alice had speculated or planned, Alice's reaction had not been part of it.

“Why would we want to move out here and work like slaves in the orchard,” Alice asks, “and not even own it? Not even have it ours?”

“Well,” Mother says. “Of course you would own it one day. . .”

“Half of it,” Alice says. “We'd own half. And who knows when. Who knows how many years of back-breaking work?”

Buck interjects, “It would be all set up, right, so as to be fair? If we were running the orchard, we'd be paid, right? I mean, the value of the house, if we were paying rent, would be deducted, but we'd be paid fair and square for doing the foreman's work? A share of the profits: And then after — I mean, when we inherit, Sidonie would have to let us buy her share, right?”

“Since when do you want to run an orchard?” Alice asks.

“Since always,” Buck says, aggrieved. “I grew up on an orchard, you know.”

“It's harder work than you think,” Alice says, “running a proper orchard. Eighty acres is a lot different than five.”

Eighty? But then Sidonie remembers: Alice had been given ten when she got married. And another ten have been sold to the Rilkes.

“I know the basics, anyway,” Buck says. “And if your father could do it, why can't I?”

“But it doesn't pay anymore,” Alice says. “Don't you see? There wouldn't be any profit, and then we'd have to take out a mortgage just to pay Sidonie out. We'd be in debt forever.”

Buck says, “But wouldn't it be great for the boys. Keep them out of trouble. Healthy outdoor work.”

“Do you know what it's like to get kids to work in an orchard?” Alice asks. “They're too small to do any real work; they get hurt, or they're always goofing off when you need them. And do you always want to be working in the summer, in the heat, and worrying about late frosts, and rain and ice? Have you gone out in April and worked all night setting up smudge pots because of a late frost?”

“I could learn,” Buck says. “It's better than what I'm doing now.”

“And all for what?” Alice continues, as if he hasn't spoken. “So that she” — she nods at Sidonie — “can get half the pie?”

“Alice, we've explained the financial arrangements,” Mother says. “I think you'll see it's fair, if you think about it. . . .”

“You can have it all,” Sidonie says. “I don't want it. I'll never live here again. You can have my half.” She has a feeling that she shouldn't say this without consulting Adam, but on the other hand, Adam is far away and not very concerned about money.

There's a pause. Then Mother says, “Well, no, Sidonie, that wouldn't be fair,” but without, Sidonie thinks, quite enough conviction. And Buck says, “I don't think Sidonie can make that decision. Can she?” But Alice doesn't say anything.

“I mean it,” Sidonie says. “I'll telephone Adam. You can talk to him if you like. I'll be fine with it.”

“I don't think it would be legal, anyway,” Alice says finally.

What did Alice want?

Alice had been wild and foolish; Sidonie wise and careful, if one were to look at the outcome.

Revision, revision. It is always possible, she supposes.

Alice's life, her luck, at that point in her life, had all been aligned, maligned, by her husband Buck, who had a string of misfortunes lasting from the late 1950s to the mid-70s. The details come from her mother. Buck bought used cars that fell apart within weeks; loaned money to a supposed business partner, who vanished. One year, he decided to breed dogs, and acquired a bitch of indeterminate breed, had ended up having to shoot the pups for some reason or other — after, of course, the children had become attached to them.

After Father's death, Alice and Buck had moved back to Marshall's Landing, living in a trailer on the flats near the high school, and Buck had decided to start a business stripping junked cars and selling the parts. But he'd accidentally torched an old Chevy's fuel tank, which still contained some gasoline; the tank had vomited a fireball that had engulfed Buck's leg and left him with puckered scars from his anklebone to the top of his thigh.

All of this Mother tells Sidonie in the late spring of 1973. Mother is dying. Sidonie knows this, and Alice also, but not Mother. Or they are all maintaining a polite fiction, at least. Sidonie has been summoned, and stays with Mother in her house for a month, taking leave from her job. And Mother confides in her for the first time, telling her all of the things she has never known about their neighbours and about Buck.

He is the ruin of Alice.

Shiftless, selfish, stupid, destructive Buck Kleinholz.

After Alice's funeral, Stephen had said to Sidonie, “Grandma used to slip my mom cash, every time we saw her — five dollars or so. Sometimes as much as twenty. My mom hated it, I think. But we weren't supposed to tell my dad, or he'd take it.”

She had found another ledger, this one a record of loans and repayments. And there is Masao's starting-up loan for the music store, from 1957 — more generous than she'd have thought, but paid back quarterly until 1966. No interest charged, apparently, though she knew Masao would have made frequent gifts of recordings to her father. Other entries for loans, some to BK and AK — that would be Buck and Alice, surely. Mostly not repaid. A small sheaf of IOUs, paper-clipped together, signed by Buck, mostly, but also Alice.

Never loan anything it would kill you to lose, Father had always said.

Father's will had given joint interest in Beauvoir to Alice and to Sidonie, but not to Alice's heirs.

She calculates the total of the IOUs, the money loaned with probably no expectation of return, to Buck and Alice, over the years. The ten acres Father had given them for a wedding present, later, somehow, acquired by Buck's father, Mr. Kleinholz, and sold. Another lot of ten acres sold off in the 1960s. It had been an astounding amount of money, by her parents' standards. Not so much, perhaps, by hers, or by the standards of Adam's family. Where had the money gone? To modernize the house, she sees; the building expenses are all laid out. Some for her wedding, for her parents' travel to the wedding. The cash they had given her and Adam, which they'd spent on one painting.

She had sold off forty more acres after Alice had died to Walter Rilke and another neighbour, put the money in a fund for the boys. It would see them through a few years. They had been too young to live on their own — Stephen had been fifteen — but she'd found, through Dr. Stewart, an older couple in town who would take them in.

The remaining forty acres and the house she had kept; it was only fair. They'd had more than their share, Alice and her children.

When the call comes in
the late fall of 1974, it is from Walter, though the information about how to contact Sidonie in the middle of the day is transmitted from Hugh, a hemisphere away, via Mrs. Inglis. Five phone calls, Sidonie calculates, must be made in order to reach her. But she is not safe.

The phone call comes at 3:37 in the afternoon, Sidonie notes, holding the pink memo slip the secretary has brought down to her office. When she sees the phone number, she knows immediately that something has happened to both Buck and Alice. Why else would Walter call her in the middle of the day, at work? A cognitive leap, and the last one her brain will be capable of for some time.

Walt says: something terrible has happened. Brace yourself. (This, she knows, is the correct way to deliver bad news. But she also knows that Walter is sincere.)

“It's Alice,” Walter says. His voice is cracked: a wind-snapped tree.

“Buck has been arrested,” Walter says.

“The younger boys and the girl are still in school,” Walter says. “I'm going to go pick them up before the news travels there. I'm still trying to track Stephen down.

“We don't know what happened,” Walter says. “Buck saw the kids off to school and then called the doctor, and she called the police. I went over when I heard the sirens, but nobody would tell me anything. Dr. Stewart tried to tell me something, but the cops shut her up.”

Sidonie is present at the inquest, which is not held in Marshall's Landing, of course, but in town. Dr. Stewart testifies that Buck had called at 9:05, saying, in a “quair” voice, that something was wrong with Alice; that Alice was dead when she arrived at 9:30 in the morning; that Alice had been dead at least four hours, but not more than ten; that she could clearly see an indent about two inches in diameter in Alice's skull, at the right temple. Dr. Stewart looks as if she is about to faint as she says this.

Sidonie does not feel faint. She feels nothing, only the parts of her brain processing very slowly, and a buzzing, like the beginning or end of a headache.

They have said that they will not call the children to give statements, but Stephen has volunteered anyway. His parents had been arguing a great deal in the past few weeks. No, he didn't know what the arguments were about. Physical violence? Yes.

Alice died of a cerebral hemorrhage, the coroner says. Would she have lived, if she'd gotten medical attention sooner? Possibly, but likely with enormous damage, paralysis, loss of faculties.

Sidonie can see the forces in the room as if the facts were all chess pieces or musical instruments, the coroner and Dr. Stewart, the players. What each is trying to do. The coroner, she sees, must make a report that will go to the Crown prosecutor. He is interested mainly in how to classify the assault, as that will determine the charge. Dr. Stewart sees this, and wants to cover all the possibilities. She wants the most serious charges possible, but she isn't sure what will count most: whether possibly having left Alice to die in their bed will count in Buck's favour, on grounds of mental incapacity, or against him, on grounds of premeditation. Whether the death will seem more accidental if it is due not to the initial injury but the time lapse. But at the same time she wants to underscore the seriousness of the damage. And Stephen, she understands, doesn't want to indict his father, so he admits to frequent arguments, to suggest a blow in a rage. But he doesn't, either, want to suggest that his mother was a brawler, a woman who gave blow for blow.

So clearly she can see their machine-like brains moving.

All else is fog.

Clara telephones from Montreal. “This is what you do,” Clara says. “Call this colleague of mine who has moved out your way. I've already contacted him, so he's expecting you. Get him to evaluate your brother-in-law. We'll get him put away quietly, without a trial.”

Sidonie's brain can understand, coldly and clearly, exactly what Clara is proposing. She decides, without a qualm, to carry it through.

Buck's sister and parents at the inquest, looking dazed and stupid. Buck looking shifty, his eyes narrowed, his mouth open — but that was how he frequently looked.