Blind Assassin (28 page)

This aroused Elwood’s curiosity. He began to keep an eye on Laura, above and beyond his usual nosiness. I wouldn’t call it spying exactly—it wasn’t as if he lurked behind bushes. He just noticed her more. (He hadn’t found out about the purloined negative yet, however. It didn’t occur to him that Laura might have had an ulterior motive in seeking him out. Laura had such a direct gaze, such blankly open eyes, such a pure, rounded forehead, that few ever suspected her of duplicity.)

At first Elwood found nothing much to notice. Laura was to be observed walking along the main street, making her way to church on Sunday mornings, where she taught Sunday school to the five-year-olds. On three other mornings of the week, she helped out at the United Church soup kitchen, which had been set up beside the train station. Its mission was to dish out bowls of cabbagy soup to the hungry, dirty men and boys who were riding the rails: a worthy effort, but one that was not viewed with approval by everyone in town. Some felt these men were seditious conspirators, or worse, Communists; others, that there should be no free meals, because they themselves had to work for every mouthful. Shouts of “Get a job!” were heard. (The insults were by no means one way, though the ones from the itinerant men were more muted. Of course they resented Laura and all the churchy do-gooders like her. Of course they had ways of letting their feelings be known. A joke, a sneer, a jostle, a sullen leer. There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.)

The local police stood by to make sure that these men did not get any smart ideas into their heads, such as remaining in Port Ticonderoga. They were to be shuffled along, moved elsewhere. But they weren’t allowed to hop the boxcars right in the train station, because the railway company wouldn’t put up with that. There were scuffles and fist fights, and—as Elwood Murray put it, in print—nightsticks were freely employed.

So these men would trudge along the railway tracks and try to hop farther down the line, but that was more difficult because by then the trains would have gathered speed. There were several accidents, and one death—a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen fell under the wheels and was virtually cut in two. (Laura locked herself in her room for three days after that, and would eat nothing: she’d served a bowl of soup to this boy.) Elwood Murray wrote an editorial in which he said that the mishap was regrettable but not the fault of the railway, and certainly not that of the town: if you took foolhardy risks, what could you expect?

Laura begged bones from Reenie, for the church soup pot. Reenie said she was not made of bones; bones did not grow on trees. She needed most of the bones for herself—for Avilion, for us. She said a penny saved was a penny earned, and didn’t Laura see that during these hard times Father needed all the pennies he could get? But she couldn’t ever resist Laura for long, and a bone or two or three would be forthcoming. Laura didn’t want to touch the bones, or even see them—she was squeamish that way—so Reenie would wrap them up for her. “There you are. Those bums will eat us out of house and home,” she would sigh. “I’ve put in an onion.” She didn’t think Laura should be working at the soup kitchen—it was too rough for a young girl like her.

“It’s wrong to call them bums,” said Laura. “Everyone turns them away. They only want work. All they want is a job.”

“I daresay,” said Reenie in a skeptical, maddening voice. To me, privately, she would say, “She’s the spitting image of her mother.”

I didn’t go to the soup kitchen with Laura. She didn’t ask me to, and in any case I wouldn’t have had the time: Father had now taken it into his head that I must learn the ins and outs of the button business, as was my duty.Faute de mieux, I was to be the son in Chase and Sons, and if I was ever going to run the show I needed to get my hands dirty.

I knew I had no business abilities, but I was too cowed to object. I accompanied Father to the factory every morning, to see (he said) how things worked in the real world. If I’d been a boy he would have started me working at the assembly line, on the military analogy that an officer should not expect his men to perform any job he could not perform himself. As it was, he set me to taking inventory and balancing shipping accounts—raw materials in, finished product out.

I was bad at it, more or less intentionally. I was bored, and also intimidated. When I arrived at the factory every morning in my convent-like skirts and blouses, walking at Father’s heels like a dog, I would have to pass the lines of workers. I felt scorned by the women and stared at by the men. I knew they were making jokes about me behind my back—jokes that had to do with my deportment (the women) and my body (the men), and that this was their way of getting even. In some ways I didn’t blame them—in their place I would have done the same—but I felt affronted by them nonetheless.

La-di-da. Thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba.

A good shagging would take her down a peg.

Father noticed none of this. Or he chose not to notice.

One afternoon Elwood Murray arrived at Reenie’s back door with the inflated chest and self-important manner of the bearer of unpleasant news. I was helping Reenie with the canning: it was late September, and we were doing up the last of the tomatoes from the kitchen garden. Reenie had always been frugal, but in these times waste was a sin. She must have realized how thin the thread was becoming—the thread of excess dollars that attached her to her job.

There was something we should know, said Elwood Murray, for our own good. Reenie took a look at him, him and his puffed-up stance, evaluating the gravity of his news, and judged it serious enough to invite him in. She even offered him a cup of tea. Then she asked him to wait until she’d lifted the last jars out of the boiling water with the tongs and had the tops screwed on. Then she sat down.

Here was the news. Miss Laura Chase had been seen around town—said Elwood—in the company of a young man, the very same young man she’d been photographed with at the button factory picnic. They’d first been spotted down by the soup kitchen; then, later, sitting on a park bench—on more than one park bench—and smoking cigarettes. Or the man had been smoking; as to Laura, he couldn’t swear to it, he said, pursing his mouth. They’d been seen beside the War Memorial by the Town Hall, and leaning on the railings of the Jubilee Bridge, looking down at the rapids—a traditional spot for courtship. They may even have been glimpsed out by the Camp Grounds, which was an almost certain sign of dubious behaviour, or the prelude to it—though he couldn’t vouch for this, as he hadn’t witnessed it himself.

Anyway, he thought we should know. The man was a grown man, and wasn’t Miss Laura only fourteen? Such a shame, him taking advantage of her like that. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head in sorrow, smug as a woodchuck, his eyes glittering with malicious pleasure.

Reenie was furious. She hated anyone getting the jump on her in the gossip department. “We certainly thank you for informing us,” she said with stiff politeness. “A stitch in time saves nine. “This was her way of defending Laura’s honour: nothing had happened, yet, that couldn’t be forestalled.

“What did I tell you,” said Reenie, after Elwood Murray had gone. “He’s got no shame.” She did not mean Elwood, of course, but Alex Thomas.

When confronted, Laura denied nothing, except the Camp Grounds sighting. The park benches and so forth—yes, she had sat on them, though not for very long. Nor could she understand why Reenie was making all this fuss. Alex Thomas wasn’t a two-bit sweetheart (the expression Reenie had used). Nor was he a lounge lizard (the other expression). She denied ever having smoked a cigarette in her life. As for “spooning”—also from Reenie—she thought that was disgusting. What had she done to inspire such low suspicions? She evidently didn’t know.

Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.

According to Laura, on all of these occasions—and there had been only three of them—she and Alex Thomas had been engaged in serious discussion. What about? About God. Alex Thomas had lost his faith, and Laura was trying to help him regain it. It was hard work because he was very cynical, or maybeskeptical was what she meant. He thought that the modern age would be an age of this world rather than the next—of man, for mankind—and he was all for it. He claimed not to have a soul, and said he didn’t give a hang what might happen to him after he was dead. Still, she meant to keep on with her efforts, however difficult the task might appear.

I coughed into my hand. I didn’t dare laugh. I’d seen Laura use that virtuous expression on Mr. Erskine often enough, and I thought that was what she was doing now: pulling the wool over. Reenie, hands on hips, legs apart, mouth open, looked like a hen at bay.

“Why’s he still in town, is what I’d like to know,” said Reenie, baffled, shifting her ground. “I thought he was just visiting.”

“Oh, he has some business here,” said Laura mildly. “But he can be where he wants to be. It’s not a slave state. Except for the wage slaves, of course.” I guessed that the attempt at conversion hadn’t been all one way: Alex Thomas had been getting his own oar in. If things went on in this fashion we’d have a little Bolshevik on our hands.

“Isn’t he too old?” I said.

Laura gave me a fierce look—too old for what?—daring me to butt in. “The soul has no age,” she said.

“People are talking,” said Reenie: always her clinching argument.

“That is their own concern,” said Laura. Her tone was one of lofty irritation: other people were her cross to bear.

Reenie and I were both at a loss. What could be done? We could have told Father, who might then have forbidden Laura to see Alex Thomas. But she wouldn’t have obeyed, not with a soul at stake. Telling Father would have caused more trouble than it would be worth, we decided; and after all, what had actually taken place? Nothing you could put your finger on. (Reenie and I were confidants by then, on this matter; we’d put our heads together.)

As the days passed I came to feel that Laura was making a fool of me, though I couldn’t specify how, exactly. I didn’t think she was lying as such, but neither was she telling the entire truth. Once I saw her with Alex Thomas, deep in conversation, ambling along past the War Memorial; once at the Jubilee Bridge, once idling outside Betty’s Luncheonette, oblivious to turning heads, mine included. It was sheer defiance.

“You have to talk sense to her,” Reenie said to me. But I couldn’t talk sense to Laura. Increasingly, I couldn’t talk to her at all; or I could talk, but did she listen? It was like talking to a sheet of white blotting paper: the words went out of my mouth and disappeared behind her face as if into a wall of falling snow.

When I wasn’t spending time at the button factory—an exercise that was daily appearing more futile, even to Father—I began to wander around by myself. I would march along by the riverbank, trying to pretend I had a destination, or stand on the Jubilee Bridge as if waiting for someone, gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it—in love—you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.

Or I would walk along the main street, giving serious attention to what was in the shop windows—the pairs of socks and shoes, the hats and gloves, the screwdrivers and wrenches. I would study the posters of movie stars in the glass cases outside the Bijou Theatre and compare them with how I myself looked, or might look if I combed my hair down over one eye and had the proper clothes. I wasn’t allowed to go inside; I didn’t enter a movie theatre until after I was married, because Reenie said the Bijou was cheapening, for young girls by themselves at any rate. Men went there on the prowl, dirty-minded men. They would take the seat next to you and stick their hands onto you like flypaper, and before you knew it they’d be climbing all over you.

In Reenie’s descriptions the girl or woman would always be inert, but with many handholds on her, like a jungle gym. She would be magically deprived of the ability to scream or move. She would be transfixed, she would be paralyzed—with shock, or outrage, or shame. She would have no recourse.

A nip in the air; the clouds high and windblown. Sheaves of dried Indian corn have appeared on the choicer front doors; on the porches the jack-o’-lanterns have taken up their grinning vigils. A week from now the candy-minded children will take to the streets, dressed as ballerinas and zombies and space aliens and skeletons and gypsy fortunetellers and dead rock stars, and as usual I will turn out the lights and pretend not to be home. It’s not dislike of them as such, but self-defence—should any of the wee ones disappear, I don’t want to be accused of having lured them in and eaten them.

I told this to Myra, who is doing a brisk trade in squat orange candles and black ceramic cats and sateen bats, and in decorative stuffed-cloth witches, their heads made of dried-out apples. She laughed. She thought I was making a joke.

I had a sluggish day yesterday—my heart was pinching me, I could barely move off the sofa—but this morning, after taking my pill, I felt oddly energetic. I walked quite briskly as far as the doughnut shop. There I inspected the washroom wall, on which the latest entry is:If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all, followed by:If you can’t suck anything nice don’t suck anything at all. It’s good to know that freedom of speech is still in full swing in this country.

Then I bought a coffee and a chocolate-glazed doughnut, and took them outside to one of the benches provided by the management, placed handily right beside the garbage bin. There I sat, in the still-warm sunlight, basking like a turtle. People strolled by—two overfed women with a baby carriage, a younger, thinner woman in a black leather coat with silver studs in it like nail-heads and another one in her nose, three old geezers in windbreakers. I got the feeling they were staring at me. Am I still that notorious, or that paranoid? Or perhaps I’d merely been talking to myself out loud. It’s hard to know. Does my voice simply flow out of me like air when I’m not paying attention? A shrivelled whispering, winter vines rustling, the sibilance of autumn wind in dry grass.

Who cares what people think, I told myself. If they want to listen in, they’re welcome.

Who cares, who cares.The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.

A dog came over; I gave it half of the doughnut. “Be my guest,” I said to it. That’s what Reenie would say when she caught you eavesdropping.

All through October—the October of 1934—there had been talk of what was going on at the button factory. Outside agitators were hanging around, it was said; they were stirring things up, especially among the young hotheads. There was talk of collective bargaining, of workers’ rights, of unions. Unions were surely illegal, or closed-shop unions were—weren’t they? No one seemed quite to know. In any case they had a whiff of brimstone about them.

The people doing the stirring up were ruffians and hired criminals (according to Mrs. Hillcoate). Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money—any money at all—or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.

It was also said that Father’s factories were in trouble.

Both rumours—the outside agitators, the trouble—were publicly denied. Both were believed.

Father had laid off some of his workers in September—some of the younger ones, better able to fend for themselves, according to his theories—and had asked the remainder to accept shorter hours. There just wasn’t enough business, he’d explained, to keep all the factories going at full production capacity. The customers weren’t buying buttons, or not the kind of buttons made by Chase and Sons, which depended on high volumes to be profitable. Nor were they buying cheap, serviceable undergarments: they were mending instead, they were making do. Not everyone in the country was out of work, of course, but those with jobs did not feel very secure about holding on to them. Naturally they were saving their money up, rather than spending it. You couldn’t blame them. You’d do the same in their place.

Arithmetic had entered the picture, with its many legs, its many spines and heads, its pitiless eyes made of zeroes. Two and two made four, was its message. But what if you didn’t have two and two? Then things wouldn’t add up. And they didn’t add up, I couldn’t get them to; I couldn’t get the red numbers in the inventory books to turn black. This worried me horribly; it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk at the button factory—those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it—which was what had been going on at Chase and Sons for some time—this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour—without love, without justice, without mercy—but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter.

In the first week of December, Father announced a shutdown. It was temporary, he said. He hoped it would be very temporary. He talked about retreating and retrenching in order to regroup. He asked for understanding and patience, and was greeted with a watchful silence by the assembled workers. After the announcement he went back to Avilion and shut himself up in his turret and drank himself blind. Things were broken up there—glass objects. Bottles, no doubt. Laura and I sat in my room, on my bed, holding hands tightly and listening to the fury and grief rampaging around up there, right above our heads, like an interior thunderstorm. Father hadn’t done anything on that grand a scale for some time.

He must have felt he’d let his men down. That he’d failed. That nothing he could do had been enough.

“I will pray for him,” said Laura.

“Does God care?” I said. “I don’t think he gives a tinker’s damn, actually. If there is a God.”

“You can’t know that,” said Laura, “until after.”

After what? I knew well enough, we’d had this conversation before.After we’re dead.

Several days after Father’s announcement, the union revealed its power. There was already a core group of members, and now they wanted everyone in. A meeting was held outside the locked button factory and a call issued to all the workers to join up, because when Father reopened the factories, it was said, he would cut to the bone and they’d all be expected to take starvation wages. He was just like all the rest of them, he’d stuff his money into a bank in hard times like these, then sit on his hands until people were beaten down and driven right into the ground; then he’d seize the opportunity to grow fat off the backs of the workers. Him and his big house and fancy daughters—those frivolous parasites who lived off the sweat of the masses.

You could tell these so-called organizers were from out of town, said Reenie, who was telling us about all this as we sat at the kitchen table. (We’d stopped having meals in the dining room, because Father had stopped eating there. He was barricaded in his turret; Reenie took a tray up.) Those roughnecks had no sense of what was decent, bringing the two of us into it like that, when everyone knew we had nothing to do with anything. She told us to pay no attention, which was easier said than done.

There were still some who were loyal to Father. At the meeting, we heard, there had been disagreements, then voices raised, then scuffling. Tempers were set loose. One man was kicked in the head, and carted off to the hospital with concussion. It was one of the strikers—they were calling themselvesthe strikers, now—but this injury was blamed on the strikers themselves, because once you started that sort of disruption, who could tell where it would end?

Better not to start. Better to keep your mouth shut. Much better.

Callie Fitzsimmons came to see Father. She was very worried about him, she said. She was worried that he was going down the drain.Morally, is what she meant. How could he treat his workers in this cavalier and also cheapskate fashion? Father told her to face reality. He called her a Job’s comforter. He also said,Who put you up to this, one of your pinko pals? She said she had come on her own hook, out of love, because although a capitalist he’d always been a decent man, but now she found he’d turned into a heartless plutocrat. He said you couldn’t be a plutocrat if you were broke. She said he could liquidate his assets. He said his assets weren’t worth much more than her ass, which as far as he could tell she’d been giving away for nothing to anybody who’d asked. She said he hadn’t scorned the free handouts. He said yes, but the hidden costs had been too high—first all the food in his house for her artistic pals, then his blood and now his soul. She called him a bourgeois reactionary. He called her a corpse fly. By that time they were shouting at each other. Then there was a slamming of doors, and a car skidded away down the gravel, and that was the end of that.

Was Reenie glad or sorry? Sorry. She hadn’t liked Callie, but she’d got used to her, and Callie had been good for Father once upon a time. Who would replace her? Some other floozie, and better the devil you know.

The next week there was a call for a general strike, to show solidarity with the Chase and Sons workers. All stores and businesses must close, was the edict. All public services must be shut down. The telephones, the mail delivery. No milk, no bread, no ice. (Who was issuing these edicts? No one thought they were really coming from the man who actually spoke the words of them. This man claimed to be local, right from our own town, and was once thought to be—he was a Morton, a Morgan, something like that—but surely it had become clear that he was not local, not underneath it. He couldn’t have been, to behave like that. Who was his grandfather, anyway?)

So it was not this man. He was not the brains behind it, said Reenie, because he did not have any brains to begin with. Dark forces were at work.

Laura was worried about Alex Thomas. He was mixed up in it somehow, she said. She knew he was. He was bound to be, according to his lights.

In the early afternoon of that same day, Richard Griffen arrived at Avilion in a car, with two other cars accompanying him. They were large cars, sleek and low-slung. There were five other men altogether, four of them quite big, in dark overcoats and grey fedoras. Richard Griffen and one of the men went into Father’s study, along with Father. Two of the others posted themselves at the house doors, front and back, and two went off somewhere in one of the expensive cars. Laura and I watched the comings and goings of the cars from Laura’s bedroom window. We’d been told to keep out of the way, which meant out of earshot as well. When we asked Reenie what was going on, she looked worried, and said our guess was as good as hers, but she was keeping her ear to the track.

Richard Griffen did not stay to dinner. When he left, two of the cars went with him. The third one stayed behind, and three of the big men stayed with it. They took up unobtrusive residence in the former chauffeur’s quarters, over the garage.

They were detectives, said Reenie. They must be. That was why they always had their overcoats on: it hid the guns, which they kept in their armpits. The guns were revolvers. She knew this from her various magazines. She said they were there to protect us, and if we saw anyone out of the ordinary creeping around the garden at night—besides these three men, of course—we were to scream.

The next day there was rioting, along the main streets of the town. Many men present at it had never been seen before, or if they had been seen, they hadn’t been remembered. Who’d remember a tramp? But some of them hadn’t been tramps, they’d been international agitators in disguise. They’d been spying, all along. How had they got here so quickly? On the tops of trains, it was said. That was how men like them travelled around.

The rioting started at a rally outside the town hall. First there were speeches in which goons and company thugs were mentioned; then Father, rendered in cardboard and wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar—not things he ever did—was burned in effigy, to loud cheering. Two rag dolls in frilly pink dresses were soaked in kerosene and tossed onto the flames as well. They were supposed to be us—Laura and me, said Reenie. Jokes had been made about them being hot little dollies. (Laura’s strolls around town with Alex had not gone unremarked.) It was Ron Hincks who’d told her this, said Reenie, thinking she should know. He said the two of us shouldn’t go downtown right now because feelings were running high and you never knew. He said we should stay at Avilion, where we would be safe. He said it was a crying shame about the dolls, and he’d like to get his hands on whoever had cooked that one up.