View From a Kite (11 page)

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Authors: Maureen Hull

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #General, #JUV000000, #JUV039030

BOOK: View From a Kite
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“Teach me how to knit,” I say. “So I can make something for the baby too.”

By the end of the week, I've managed one bootie—such a bitty thing, and such a struggle. Personally I think it would make more sense to grease their little feet with baby oil, dip them in a box of unspun wool, and shake the excess off. Same effect and much easier. I've had to rip the miserable thing out three times. Knitting is far more difficult than I'd realized. Anyone can learn the stitches—but try and make them all the same size without developing a migraine and crippling your fingers. I've packed the instructions and the needles and yarn into my suitcase to go to the Alex. I'll finish the other bootie if it kills me. I want to welcome Donna's baby into the world. If it's a girl, I'll be the cousin it can stay with when it comes to the city, New York or Montreal. Elizabeth has completed an entire layette in the time it's taken me to do one bootie and has moved on to an afghan. It's for me, something colourful to put on my hospital bed when I have to go to the Alex.

In
The Magic Mountain
, which I flip though when I'm trying to make myself fall asleep in the afternoons, and in the old instruction books from the Adirondack Mountains I've liberated from the San library, there are pages and pages devoted to explaining the correct way to fold oneself into one's blankets.

For starters, you have to have a sleeping porch, or veranda, with a view of the mountains—or something equally uplifting. Next, you have to have the right sort of lounging chair. According to one book the Adirondack Chair originated from the design of these loungers. Then you've got to have the right sort of wool blankets, of a particular number, and a particular weight, and you have to have a carefully trained attendant to properly wrap you. God forbid if he/she laps the left side over the right instead of the right over the left, or folds the ends up over your feet before the sides are properly tucked under. Incorrect wrapping could compromise the whole cure. You've got to have the right sort of hat, and the right sort of muffler, and earmuffs, and fleece-lined gloves with silk liners, and—if you're in the Alps—some sort of fur-of-a-beast to nail down the whole wad o' wool. In the Adirondacks they seemed to have preferred a topping of waterproof, oiled canvas. Obviously you pee before you settle down because, once wrapped, you're there for the duration.

You lie there and haul in great lungfuls of fresh air, try to nap, or think calming thoughts if you can't nap, and try not to cough blood on the fur. If it snows, you breath in as much of that as you can, too. Lie passively and let the snow pile in great drifts on top of you—the trick is to freeze the germs without freezing yourself.

After a couple of hours, the attendant comes back and shovels you out, peels you like an artichoke, puts you back to bed indoors, and gives you something nourishing—asses' milk, wolf liver, or the like.

If you can't get to the mountains you're supposed to head for a desert. Lie out on the desert at night when it gets frosty, properly wrapped and bundled of course, and breathe in that crisp air while marvelling over the starry skies. At one time they set up whole tent cities in places like Arizona and New Mexico just for tubercular Easterners. Acres of cocooned invalids. Can't you just imagine all that hacking and coughing drifting out over the desert for a hundred miles in any direction? Enough to put the coyotes off their feed.

Although they're awfully fussy about the size and weight and position of the blankets, they don't seem to give a fig about the colour of them. This seems to me to be the most important thing of all. The blankets at the San are grey with dark grey bands or white with light grey bands. Deadly. Elizabeth is making mine sunshine yellow, pumpkin orange, and July-sky blue, at my request. After careful research, deep within my psyche, I have determined that these are the cheeriest colours in the world and the most conducive to plugging up lung holes.

CHAPTER 20

I've been digging around in Edith's drawers, looking for information. This would be reprehensible behaviour except for a couple of facts—well, only one, actually. The facts that I'm bored and curious and Edith's usually too drugged to care what I do are not legitimate excuses for terminal nosiness and the invasion of her privacy.

The fact that Robert was Edith's child and not her baby brother and I have just found out is the reason it's all right for me to poke around in Edith's—my grandmother's—stuff. She can't tell me anything, and this is my family history, so I have to dig up what I can by myself. Elizabeth told me some of it, over the knitting, two days ago. I can't believe I never guessed, it's so obvious. I can't believe I've been that dense.

I sat there with my mouth open, dropping stitches all over the place. Something about sitting in the parlour over tea and pointy needles makes Elizabeth get all confidential. The day before she'd told me all about the hysterectomy she'd had when she was thirty-five, despite my frantic objections to specific detail.

Maybe it's because I'm the only female in my direct line who's still got all her marbles in one basket. I'm the only one left to talk to. Or maybe she just thinks I'm old enough to know this stuff and there's nobody else left in the family to tell me. Mama and Edith, even working as a team, couldn't string together a coherent sentence.

“How? Where?” I sputtered.

“She went to Halifax,” said Elizabeth, “and worked as a maid for a Christian Society that looked after girls in trouble. Her parents told everyone she was taking training to be a phone receptionist. Susanna, her mother, pretended to be pregnant, and then pretended to have the baby prematurely on a visit to see Edith on her birthday. Your grandfather, Edith's father, stayed home and pretended none of it was happening. He was hard on Robert, growing up. Real hard.”

“What did she do afterwards? Edith, I mean.”

“She stayed there a couple of years, working. She trained to be a nursing assistant, and then when Susanna got real sick Edith came home to nurse her and to look after Robert. Susanna was always an invalid after that. We were always told it was because she'd had Robert so late, and it was too much for her. Almost nobody knew Robert wasn't hers to begin with. I wouldn't have known if Edith hadn't told me at her father's funeral. He was hard on her, too. As soon as he died she took out that picture of her fiancé, put it on the piano, and started wearing her engagement ring again.”

I'm having to reassess that silver-framed, weak-chinned, pasty-faced, long-nosed, cowardly little snot who ran off to Rome and left Edith unmarried and pregnant. His poetry probably stank, that's why nobody ever heard of him again. I can't find anything from him, not a note, not a pressed posy, not a picture, other than the one on the piano. That picture and the ring are the only things she has. She's still wearing the ring, she never takes it off. They won't let her wear it in the home, in case somebody steals it. Instead, they'll steal it from her and give it to me.

There are lots of pictures in bottom drawers of Robert. Some I've never seen before, him in Newfoundland as a young man, flying kites on the hill where Marconi set up to receive his first transcontinental messages. He told me once that Marconi used a kite to get his aerial up. In the picture he looks about twenty. He's grinning like a fool, in rolled-up shirt sleeves and heavy wool pants and suspenders, hanging onto kite strings. Whenever I look at that picture I hate the way the world is again. And him. I want a Hembold's Buchu Extract or six on ice with a twist of lime so I can feel better and pass out. I want hell to be a stinking cow barn and him upside down in it with his head buried in cowshit.

There are also several shots of his dog (Robert's, not Marconi's) in a wagon, being pulled along by three big kites. Well, at least he tried this out on his dog before he tried it on me. We went out to Dominion beach, as usual, this time with a little wagon and a string of kites, five or six. I must have been eight or nine. He got all the kites up in the air, then while he was holding them back with all his strength, I got in the wagon. When he let go I started to roll across the hard-packed sand, screeching with delight and terror.

Robert got the idea from some guy called George Pocock, an English schoolteacher from Bristol, who hooked up a train of kites, instead of horses, to a carriage. This was back in the 1800s. Pocock and his friends went tearing across the English countryside, probably guzzling port and screaming
Tally-ho!
in a jolly, drunken fashion. Robert said Pocock's crowd once reached thirty miles an hour in their contraption. He didn't mention whether they suffered any fatalities or mishaps, but I got dumped face-first in the sand and howled bloody blue murder. I got a triple-decker chocolate, vanilla, and pistachio ice cream cone and a five dollar bill in exchange for not telling Mama how my face really got scraped.

This Pocock maniac also sent his daughter up ninety metres in a chair tied to a kite, but there weren't enough ice cream cones and five dollar bills on the planet to make me agree to that one.

“Did Robert know who his real parents were?” I asked Elizabeth, but she said she didn't know. His parents—really his grandparents—never would have told him, and neither she nor George ever did. Edith, she said, would have been too ashamed.

So if he knew it was likely a schoolyard bully who'd over
-
heard some good gossip who broke the news.

It was the war that ruined Robert. That's what I think. I was ten or eleven when I first heard someone refer to his “trouble.” I stopped just short of the doorway I'd been about to enter, stilled my breathing and strained to listen. It took years of eavesdropping to piece it all together, and then a good session over the knitting needles with Elizabeth to get the facts sorted out.

He came home at the war's end, went upstairs to the attic, and sat down against the wall. He wouldn't speak to anyone. His (grand) father, then an old man, tried to haul him out, but he wouldn't budge and he was too strong to be forced. Edith begged him to come downstairs and have a cup of tea, but he wouldn't look at her and he wouldn't answer.

The doctor said he was shell-shocked and to give him water to drink and a bucket to pee in—he'd come out of it eventually. Or not.

After two weeks he came down one flight of stairs to his bedroom, lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He lay there, silently weeping, for another week or so. Then Edith had a fit.

There was the farm to be run, her parents were elderly and needed looking after, there was Mama, smiling bravely every day in Edith's kitchen, her hopes leaking away like Robert's tears. Edith hauled him out of bed, shaved and bathed him. She cut his hair and all the while she lectured him and ranted and raved. She forced him back into the world, she dragged him into daylight, she stuffed him into his suit, marched him off to church and made him marry Mama, like he'd promised.

For a year they lived on the farm, then Robert took the money offered to veterans by the government and went to teacher's college. They moved to Sydney, to the house my mother's grandfather built, and stayed there. Robert taught at the high school, history and English, and Mama tried to carry a pregnancy to full term. I was the only one who hung on long enough to get born. Two brothers, Elizabeth tells me, bailed out early. Queer I never knew that. I could have had two older brothers. I could be a different person, if I'd had two brothers. Maybe. Who knows? The old folks died, Edith and Robert sold off a good chunk of the land, and Edith stayed on, living in the old house and renting out what fields were left to George.

Robert was “moody,” people said. I always thought that meant something like “creative” or “sensitive,” something to be admired. I planned to be moody, too; it seemed a writerly sort of a thing to aspire to.

Do not think any of this excuses him one little bit. He stole everything. He turned my mother into a vegetable, he wrecked my life, he made me sick, he left me alone to deal with all of this. He's a coward, a coward, a miserable, selfish coward. All the blood and all the mess—the bastard couldn't even shoot straight. I try to imagine him in hell, boiled, flayed, spitted, vivisected, but all I can believe in is a cold, black nothing. He's completely alone, in an empty, black universe; black nothing fills his eyes, ears, mouth, mind. He's escaped and left me and Mama to suffer. I wish there was a hell, I wish the devil had flayed him alive and made luggage out of his worthless hide.

CHAPTER 21

I have to watch Edith to make sure she doesn't drink out of my cup or use my utensils. I'm supposed to be negative so it should be safe, but I don't take any chances. She picks up the cup nearest to her and drinks from it. I keep my dishes separate, and scald them with boiling water after I wash them, to be extra sure. I do my clothes separately from hers, though it means extra loads. I wash my hands all day long, and go around wiping doorknobs I've touched with rubbing alcohol. I know I'm being obsessive, to the point of crazy, but it's only for another few days and I couldn't bear it if I accidentally gave her tuberculosis. I even keep my room clean, you can see the floor at all times. Not that that has anything to do with the spread of germs, I'm just paying homage to the Cleaning Gods, in hopes that they'll spare Edith.

Although Koch published his paper on the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882 and made the profession rewrite the medical texts, it was quite a while before everyone gave up on the idea that the disease was caused by heredity, lack of sunlight, damp, dirty air, tight corsets, dancing the polka, or a melancholy and poetic disposition. Everyone, that is, except the Italians, who— while the rest of the world was wallowing about, romanticizing the disease and its wan, ethereal victims—had been following a strict set of regulations based on the belief that the disease was communicable. It's a damn good thing they did, too, since the doctors of England, France, and other northern countries kept sending their hacking, coughing, blood-spouting, germ-spraying patients to sunny Italy to avoid the cold winters and damp air of their own climes.

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