When Alice Lay Down With Peter (20 page)

A
BOVE THE BLACK SPRUCE
it was sunny and gay. At the end of April, the snow at last turned to cornmeal in green grass at the base of the trees. I awoke to the sound of snow tobogganing from the roof and opened my eyes directly into the solemn gaze of my child. Blue-black eyes and, at nearly two months of age, precise black eyebrows and thick black curls. No resemblance to her mother. She’d been watching me sleep with a look of unmistakable pity.

The heat woke up the flies, buzzing against the glass for a final hour before dying on the windowsill. Helen fumbled with dead flies and licked them into her mouth. I was unfamiliar with children and didn’t realize how remarkable was her coordination.

The door opened and Eli walked in, behind him the shadow of my mother-in-law. Her voice, that atonal bone sound, a falling note not unlovely to the ear but changeful, a tone of constant fall. “The baby should not eat bugs,” she chimed, “especially when the bugs are freshly dead.”

I sighed. Eli shrugged hopefully. There was the bright chirrup of melting snow on the wood porch. Helen twisted herself out of my arms like a fish out of a net, and Eli snatched her up just as she was about to fall off the bed. “There now,” he said, and turned towards the corner of the room, where Marie occupied a kitchen chair. She was more a collection of dark green light, a gathering into shape. She smiled peacefully and then she said, “It’s time you two were properly married.”

Now, at the sound of her voice, Helen lay her head on her father’s neck and fell asleep.

“But first, would you like tea?” Marie rose and went to the window. The daylight showed her to be quite real, though it
seemed to be evening where she was, or raining, or June. Beneath the window was a drawer that I had never been able to open. Marie pulled it easily and withdrew a packet of dried roots and herbs. She set the kettle on the stove and it quickly began to steam, and she offered us tea that smelled of licorice.

We sipped, smiling politely. It was sort of her house. I wondered if I’d get a chance to talk this over with Eli, if we could maybe set down a few rules in the future. Marie, more corporeal than usual, put her cup down and looked at each of us, candid and fond. She smiled at Helen. “Poor little one,” she said, “to be the cause of so much suffering.”

“But,” I protested, “she is a joy!”

Marie nodded, as if there was no contradiction. “Powerful wishes are always innocent.” She passed her dusky hand over Helen’s face, and Helen dreamed she was falling, flung her arms out. Marie said, “She will need more than forgiveness and mercy. But they will give her only pearls.” For a moment, this phantom grandmother looked infinitely grieved, then she brightened, and business-like, she asked us, “Would you like me to hear your vows now?”

Eli seemed to understand. He put the sleeping baby into her cradle and stood, waving me to attention. I joined him at his side. And we became husband and wife. Again. In Marie’s jurisdiction.

In a backstage whisper, Marie said, “Remove your gloves!” I realized that Eli and I were wearing ornate riding gloves with beadwork and long leather fringes. We took them off, embarrassed.

“And now,” she said, “repeat after me. I take off my glove…”

The promise we would make to each other would be a
beautiful misunderstanding, a necessary promise impossible to keep. It was the treaty between Mawedopenais, the leader of the Ojibwas, and the Great Mother, our dead queen, spoken more than thirty years ago, when I was a baby and Marie was the adoptive mother of a little boy precariously named Eli. We gave each other everything, and in exchange we were promised security and peace everlasting. In one hand, we held the right of trespass, and in the other, the privileges of privacy. We promised boundaries; we permitted access. One of us believed we’d won the right to unlimited enjoyment of life’s necessities and pleasures. The other understood that we’d placed limits upon ourselves (always in a free and non-compulsory arrangement), that we would thenceforth own a certain share of the land, the water, the air and all the gifts of the Great Spirit therein. We were both committed to this covenant, and spoke from the bottom of our hearts.

When we’d made our faulty promises, we kissed and thanked Marie, who nodded agreeably and offered us cold duck with choke cherry jam.

And when the time came for us to go, we bowed and saw each other to the door and waved goodbye, Eli and I, hopeful, waving goodbye to Marie, and Marie, with confidence, seeing us out, into our own futures, like tadpoles swimming into the fishy light of our flawless memories.

A
S SOON AS SHE WAS ABLE
to walk with some assurance, Helen used her new skill to walk away from me. When I remember her now, it is always the back of her head I’m seeing, her determined shoulders as she toddles out of the yard on some business of her own. She always treated me with dutiful affection. In fact, despite a certain distaste for the corruption of middle-aged flesh, she loved me, in her evasive fashion. I was non-essential. Everyone was. Though she was fond of us, especially when we were near by.

Helen’s beauty was an attribute of such magnitude it became an independent creature, a sort of symbiotic organism that attached itself to my daughter. In photographs, she seemed upstaged by her own beauty, which was like a competitive friend sticking her head in front of the camera, obscuring the presence of a shy child who satisfied herself with the vicarious pleasures of living life through another. Helen’s beauty robbed Helen of herself.

Her grandmother Alice was no fool. She saw that Helen was in danger. Alice would watch my little girl walking through the cow parsnip with the sun flashing from her raven hair. She called to her, but Helen never came when we called; we would have to fetch her. Helen was listening to her own ticking heart, dazed by the fracture between herself and the resplendent girl
the world saw. My mother was a nineteenth-century woman, and she perceived the problem as one of simple vanity. And being an idealist, she thought to correct what seemed like vapid girlishness with a good strong dose of her favourite medicine, that being formal education.

So Alice took Helen to school.

My mother would come for Helen every morning at five o’clock. I would gather Helen up in my arms and walk down the path separating our houses. She would clutch me with cool little hands about my neck while we bounded down the path through the dusky leaves. Her living grandmother greeted us at the clearing, a white figure half lit by a lantern held high, and with an easy shift of her weight, Helen was gone. From one life raft to the next. Always with that same detached gaze. I stopped them and demanded my kiss, and Helen would lean out from the ledge of Grandmother Alice’s arms and obediently put her lips anywhere in the vicinity of my face. Then with a trace of a smile, she was gone.

During the long buggy ride, she stared up at the fading stars, listening to Grandmother Alice sing, and when they were drawn into the streets of Winnipeg and the horses drummed on cobblestones and her grandmother fell silent, Helen sat up very straight to stare at people. The city had grown big by then, and there were many people walking and many carts with milk and newspapers and pigs and bread, and at least in the richer south part of the city, there were electric streetcars.

One morning on their way to the school, they saw a horse and wagon collide with a streetcar. The wagon tipped over, dragging the horse down with it. The horse struggled to its feet,
twisting the traces till one snapped off and splintered into its neck. It was trapped, speared, gaffed half-backwards, its front legs buckled, then it stood and pulled the wagon on its side over the street, the wood frame breaking up into pieces. Alice tried to cover Helen’s eyes, but Helen pulled away. She was keen, alert, interested.

By the time they arrived at the Mission school, there were a dozen children waiting at the door with that forthright insistence of hunger. Those were the ones without food at home. Some members of the church distrusted Alice’s method of supplying food and clothing to bribe the children to come to school. Salvation is sufficient unto itself, they argued; such economic meddling will defile the true spirit of the church. My mother agreed and removed the school to its shoddy digs near the CPR station and the Dominion Immigration Hall (which was always overflowing with those “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” so desirable to the Minister of the Interior—as long as the shabby Europeans left town quickly to farm, and as long as they did not get the vote).

The first job was to feed the children. Not all the students of Alice’s school needed breakfast; in another hour, nearly forty others would arrive, warmly dressed and fed. But the first hour was the loveliest. Mr. Kolchella had lit the stove long before. They sat peaceably at the refectory tables, to sip porridge sweetened with lots of Grandfather Peter’s honey. Helen had a couple of friends among the children attending this early communal meal, two silent little boys with handsome, dirty faces who became her companions. Helen unconsciously took the seat at the head of the table. The two boys sat at either side. The friends
spooned their porridge with darting efficiency and then sat mute, all three holding hands. These were Helen’s first suitors.

The children were let out to the yard to play while Alice and Mr. Kolchella washed the dishes and replaced the porridge bowls with tattered books. My mother hated the school bell, but the kids loved it, as they loved flags and military medals. She had only to stand on the steps, holding it by its clapper like a dead animal, and the kids would stampede inside.

Mr. Kolchella was Austrian-born. He was, like Alice, slight, and strong. He had a very wide mouth with long white teeth, a big, triangular nose and genial brown eyes framed by thick lashes. All of this eloquence was fit into a tiny face, just as his enormous energy was barely squeezed into his diminutive frame. Mr. Kolchella taught in German, Slavic and Bohemian. Alice somehow covered the others, with the help of the children themselves, who had little regard for their mother tongues and preferred bewilderment in English to knowledge in their own language.

Classes proceeded through a relay, in which information was spoken in, perhaps, Polish and transformed into Yiddish by the recipient, who substituted half the words with Russian or Chinese and sent it forward through a cycle of perhaps twenty languages before it was returned, transmuted, to Alice in English. A game of Grandmother’s Whisper.

The lessons had an athletic quality. Giddy children leapt up to pluck words out of the air. Knowledge was a fat man; the kids seized him roughly and tossed him around, shrieking with laughter. It was a boot camp for anarchists.

The school day ended at two o’clock. The students had been fed once more, some soup and, on some days, bread. It
made them drowsy. “Goodbye, old gentleman,” said Alice, shaking the sticky hand of one of Helen’s solemn suitors. The boy nodded and bowed to Helen, and then stopped at the door and said, “Here we are tomorrow.” “No,” said Alice. “Tomorrow is a holiday. We’ll see you in three days.” The suitor understood the word “no” but was confused by the rest and too proud to ask. Grief rippled through him. Helen went to him and kissed his cheek, murmuring something that seemed to fill him with painful admiration. Before my mother could stop him, the boy reached for a pair of scissors, and with his eyes upon Helen, his motion small and furtive, he stabbed the scissors into the palm of his hand. When Alice reached him, he was holding his bleeding hand up to Helen’s face; she wore that intent look again, awake. She drifted while Grandmother Alice bandaged the boy’s hand, but before he went off, he shyly came to her. Once more she kissed his cheek, and then she gently nudged him, Go
home
.

When he was gone, my mother kneeled down before her granddaughter and looked at her for a long time, thinking. Then she said, “People—male people—will try to give you strange gifts, Helen. You do not need to accept them all.” Helen pulled away. Grandmother Alice held her. “Be careful what gifts you take.” But with a quick, resentful glance, Helen was gone.

Every day on the way home from school, my mother and Helen stopped at a shop near by called the Evil Eye. Above the shop, Mr. Kolchella had two small rooms that he shared with his tiny wife.

Mr. Kolchella was Mrs. Kolchella’s second husband. Mrs. Kolchella’s first husband had been executed in Russia only a
year before. “It was a shock,” whispered Mr. Kolchella, taking Alice by the arm. “They made her watch.” He shook his head and looked back shyly at his wife, who was standing at the window looking down into the street. “There were other things,” confided Mr. Kolchella, “which I will not name in front of the child. The soldiers…” His eyes filled with tears, and he shrugged bitterly. “We are not far from the animals,” he said. Mrs. Kolchella turned from the window and smiled at them. Helen, who had been making pictures at the table near by, fiercely resumed her scribbling.