When Alice Lay Down With Peter (26 page)

Eli and I received her belated postcards, which I would read to him, inconclusive things rather like the effusions of a lover who has already left you for somebody else. She began to use the word “dashing.”

“What?” asked Eli, peering at her script.

“She says Dover is dashing.”

In dismay, he looked again at the yellow photograph: boats, a castle. We received postcards from cafés on the Continent (she had learned to say “the Continent”), and from coffeehouses in London. From these scraps, we learned that it was really nice overseas. And she mentioned a lot of shoes. She was, it would appear, buying many pairs of shoes.

I wrote her back, c/o a postbox in London. The anonymity of her address was a kind of sanction for intimacy. It was awkward at first, when she’d recently left and I still hadn’t hung up the clothes in her room and I still adopted the mother’s postponement, the politely maternal attitude of waiting, my first letters to her full of questions (which she never answered) and bits of information that had been carefully chewed till everything came out all grey. “Is your coat warm enough?” “Do you like overcooked beef?”

Eli and I were parents in waiting, standing in a triangle with one side missing. For a time. And then, after several weeks, something shifted and we began to face each other. We had a marital affair. We ate at funny hours. Winter was as imperative as sleep. We were living off the remains of last year’s rodeo money.

From this romantic cocoon, I wrote letters that gradually grew more reflective, chronicles of hibernation, snoozing notes about love and life, very effective emetics, I’m sure. Helen became a steady white porch light on the other side of an impassable field. Our correspondence never corresponded, my confessions to her deflections. During the cold months, our worry over her was numbed by our snowed-in helplessness, the pleasing darkness. Which, of course, must come to an end.

We woke up in March. Helen was to board the
Titanic
in April. She’d walked a beach at Brighton, had luncheon in Piccadilly, shot ptarmigan at Dundee. It was her fate that her body would exceed her, like a social class, like an addiction or a disease.

I blamed her for enjoying the banality of the age, the blond, blue-eyed world in evening dress, nibbling canapés behind the trelliswork of the Parisian Café, my raven-haired daughter presiding from the birdcage of the gilded age. From England to Newfoundland, from one island to another, fragment of the Old World to a rocky piece of the New.

We thought she was merely boarding a floating restaurant. What can we do with the occasion of our child’s pain?

O
N ENTERING THE DINING ROOM
at night aboard ship, it is the men’s white collars that you will see first, their black tuxedos invisible, the candles blown out by sea breezes. It’s dark. The pale flesh of their hands and faces, cigar smoke, and eventually, the nacreous glow upon the women’s tall necks, and dinner in the main salon may be observed.

Richard has never been so handsome. His is the most fashionable attire. While the older men may have something interesting to say, Richard’s amused silence, like a secret enforced by his own small hand at his lips, holds for Helen all potency.

American gentlemen, a senator named Remington and a banking something. The Remington senator reaches for an ashtray, touches Helen’s arm, turns with gruff Bourbon civility to apologize and really looks at her for the first time. He says nothing to Helen, but he draws on his cigar and then tips it at John Anderson. “Pretty girl,” he says, without much of the drawl of the second-class passengers, but with a boldness sufficient to cause John Anderson to lean privately to his ward’s beautiful ear and suggest it is time to say good night.

She retires unwillingly. Does not undress or remove her strand of pearls. Does not scribble or read or fully think, but runs her hands down her satin gown. Up and down.

Richard lingers with the men. He has, at the end of his line, a beautiful fish.

In the chaos that follows, Helen retains several images. One of Richard climbing into a lifeboat with the women and children. Is it the terror of the night that has reduced him to childhood?

Then the black, heaving back of the sea. Thirty-five people in the lifeboat. With the exception of the bosun and Richard, all of them are women with their children. Helen is colder than she has ever been. So cold when her small group of survivors pulls alongside the
Carpathian
, where ropes descend and arms reach to pull them up to safety, so cold that her hand has frozen to the gunnel and the sailor sent down to get her thinks she’s in shock. Her isolate calm spooks him, and he pries off each finger with a fearful viciousness disguised by the dark. He breaks three of Helen’s fingers. They haul her up by her arms because she can’t hold on to anything. Standing on the
Carpathian
, she looks at her hand. It is a dead bird; the pain shrills when she thaws and the swelling starts.

Richard, as one of a collection of women and children. His handsome tuxedo a costume. Helen comes to know counterfeit.

They disembark at New York, and at last we learn that she is alive. She is sent home to us, Richard too, with Mrs. Anderson, who does not walk, and they are collected by John Anderson’s lawyers while we take Helen away, and no one speaks. No baggage. No bodies in caskets, no corpses at all. Fifteen hundred people are drowned, their bodies consumed by tiny organisms, leaving behind jewels and many pairs of shoes. The ocean makes a clean sweep.

After that there are debutantes. In various pockets around the world, there will always be debutantes and their boys in evening dress. There are always
Titanics
, with lovely people dancing over treacherous seas. Our thirst for glamour remains. It is the innocence that we must, at this juncture in our story, pronounce extinct. Three men and one boy from Winnipeg died when the
Titanic
went down, which tells us more about the bold aspirations of this town in those days than would any figures for grain sales.
The Chicago of the North
. The icy sea swallowed the entire Edwardian era in one gulp.

Helen moved back into her little room. She’d finally grown taller than I was. I think I was afraid of her; I didn’t want to make her fly off.

I miss John Anderson. For a long time after, I was careful to be chilly with everyone. Despite their goodwill and imagination, for all their beauty and charm and brilliance and nice suits and plans for the future, people have a tendency to die.

I
WENT BACK TO WORK
for Mrs. Anderson. For several months, I drove to her house early and worked in the kitchen with a brittle sort of clarity. In the profound absence of John Anderson, KC, our relations in the house were altered. With Richard at the head of the family, Helen was no longer a girl. I went alone.

John Anderson’s drowning plunged a hole in the painted canvas that once made our world seem absolute. There was a constant buzz in my ear. I proceeded from the premise that there would be a bookend for the encyclopedia of our grief.

It was many weeks before I saw Richard; he was leaving by the summer doors leading from the sunroom. I said hello, and he froze for a few seconds before turning smoothly. He tried some unctuous chat and then dropped it. Looked at me with hurt, furtive eyes.

I suppose people thought Richard had grown up, assumed responsibility. Must look after his mother now, be a better man at business than John, bless him, but a man can’t be too soft, and John… well, he’s gone now, and what an awful way to go, makes me shiver.

Richard firmed up. The vague, casual boy became a series of taut muscles pinned to loose joints, a combination of soldier and ragtime dancer. No longer pensive or bored. Where once the house was calm with a thoughtless inheritance, a long measure without any expectation of change (which is uncanny, that an upper class can be invented out of homesteaders, truly, as if there had been countless generations of John Anderson, KCs, and their sons; in that house, built to emulate the British upper class, it was easily forgotten that the aristocratic lifespan of John Anderson’s lineage was about ten minutes), it seemed now to be a queer, chipper place, as if all the rugs had been removed. You couldn’t avoid the sound of shoes on the floor. The clocks chimed and the hours still equalled sixty minutes, but the big brass pendulum would surely swing loose on the quarter-hour and kill somebody. Richard was nervous.

Mrs. Anderson would not get out of the bath. She lived in the porcelain tub, in a room white with steam. She called me, her voice like a lamb’s or a sea creature’s, sounding the foghorn
of her fear. “Baarbaaraa!” I would fetch the kettle and go to her. Her skin was pulling away like butter in water, swelling up in the bath. She had a rather pleasant body, but for its gradual disintegration, and I was sorry to see her come apart. She was near-sighted and declined to wear her glasses while she “soaked,” as she liked to call it. I’d enter, quickly shutting the door behind me to keep the room hot, stunned by the conservatory humidity, and Mrs. Anderson would look up, blinking through the steam with the nocturnal defencelessness peculiar to near-sighted people, her pale, softening face above rather broad shoulders and plump breasts resting upon the folds of her stomach. “Oh, you brought me more hot,” she would say. “How kind you are.” She would turn her face away while I poured the water by her potato-like feet, and her eyelids would flutter in despair.

So it went, while the real world grew ripe and green and hard and rooted and dried and snowed and froze and then melted and grew ripe again. Richard was somehow too old to go with his chums to the university. But he bought a seat at the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and began to make a lot of money trading futures. His youth and the circumstances of his father’s death isolated him from the others of his class, and he was declined a membership in the Manitoba Club, it was said, until he came of age.

He liked to row in summer, and he grew strong. He played a good game of golf. His neck and chest were muscular, but his face remained narrow, a golden face framed by golden hair. As he got very rich, he became as porous as the pumice stone beside his mother’s bath. He never frowned, but he never fully smiled either; he always looked as if he’d tricked somebody and they
must have liked it. He was pleased. And he was wounded.

Living in a small city made it much worse. There was a moratorium on Richard’s respectability. He was haunted by an unspoken question; it hung in the air, made him jaunty with loneliness. Everyone needed to know, before fully gripping his hand, before opening their smiles to his eloquent mask: What saved Richard and what sank John? Everyone had liked John. Why was Richard here? A father without a grave. It made Richard an eternal son.

And at home with her dad, Eli, Helen shut herself in her room. Through her closed bedroom door, we heard her voice accompany her dead grandmother’s lament. Marie, inspired by our bereavement, had become an almost gladsome dirge, a marimba plunking, yet always with that vertiginous, descending atonality.

I don’t want a hyena in petticoats talking politics at me. I want a nice gentle creature to bring me my slippers
.

—Sir Rodmond Roblin, premier of Manitoba, to Nellie McClung, suffragist

G
ERMANY ENTERED BELGIUM
the day the United States opened the Panama Canal. Things had been fairly quiet on the home front. Mrs. John Anderson had been in the bath for more than two years. She looked like a parsnip.

With John gone, Richard came downstairs. He worked in his father’s library, which was at the front of the house, in the northeast corner, lamp-lit even on the sunniest days and cool. Like his father, Richard worshipped telecommunications. He spent the day on the phone, and when he went downtown it was to send telegrams or play with the phones at the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. He had not made contact with Helen since April 1912, when the train had brought them home empty-handed from New York. He slipped into adulthood the way a soldier slips into uniform. His adolescent hideout had been a room beside the billiard room on the third floor. But now he had no time for billiards. A bulb had burnt out on the landing and no one bothered to replace it.

The day the war started, my mother, Alice, got mad at a newcomer just moved in across the road, and she hitched Eli’s stallion to the harrow and ran over the man’s dog. It was partly an accident, but it upset her so badly she decided to resign from the Political Equality League (a group of social reformers and suffragists), which had been the secondary source of her distress. The League had been her hope and her life till then, but Alice was suffering from jealousy and shame.

Alice had been aiming to destroy the man’s lawn. He had bought ten acres of MacDonald’s farm. MacDonald (what they called an original settler because we’d lost the record of the grottos beneath his homestead) had grown too old, and with the exception of one son, who was a rancher in Alberta, his offspring had moved to Winnipeg, where they’d bought half a dozen apartment blocks and established a rental agency. Nobody wanted the farm, so old MacDonald was selling it off, piece by piece. My mother was of the opinion that it was degenerate to sell anything less than 160 acres at a time. Then when the newcomer planted a neat tea towel of Kentucky bluegrass and a tiny flowerbed, Mum saw red. A family of burrowing owls had been living in that field, which had never been cultivated, and there were tentative pools of lady’s slippers that had bloomed just that spring after an invisible presence of nine years (Alice had counted the years; she thought the invisibility of the pouting blooms signified her own decline, and though Peter continued to be demonstrative and she continued to respond, she felt in her heart that she had lost her allure, that it had in a sense gone underground, forever, unlike the furtive chthonic nourishment in the roots of the lady’s slippers).