When Alice Lay Down With Peter (27 page)

It was a nice dog, a well-groomed collie dog that kept to his own territory. When Grandmother Alice ran over the dog, Helen was forced to come to her aid, because Grandpa Peter was at an Impossibilists’ meeting and Eli was back on the fall circuit, which had started early because everybody was having fairs where they could hoist the Union Jack and show off how British they were, even at Brunkild and Tolstoi.

Helen hadn’t spoken since the
Titanic
went down. Not a word for more than two years. I tried sending her to the local school. The teacher came to see us, though, and suggested, looking carefully around our kitchen, that Helen, while a very pretty girl, appeared to be… um, that is… as some girls are… please understand, I’m not saying she’s dumb, but perhaps
distracted
… yes, distracted is the better word. From behind the closed door to Helen’s bedroom came a loud whumping.

At Helen’s request, Eli had built her a loom. She wove woollen rugs, which remained piled in her little bedroom. Sometimes when she was sleeping, I would steal in and unroll them and admire the pearly tones she favoured, the blood red waves woven through.

Her education was adjourned. Helen rarely left her room. She was
thinking
. But she was not thinking
about
. She inhabited a spot of time as precise as the quarter-inch scar on her hand, and that is where she lived: in the moments of John Anderson’s death, when wealth had proved no cure for the terrors of the body’s edge, the flesh that freezes, drowns, is cut and broken, and through that rupture Richard had fallen into the pantomime of outer space. Helen wove, and her broken hand ached when she wove. The loom banged, shuttled, interlaced
warp with the filling threads of those moments when luxury had betrayed her.

But when Alice harrowed the collie, the dog didn’t die right away, and its screams brought out the rather hysterical owner. Alice, who liked dogs and felt an awakening of her old guilt over Thomas Scott, nevertheless found the neighbour’s reaction ridiculous, and she climbed down and took the man’s hands and placed them on the stallion’s bridle and told him, “Hold tight, he’s going to rear.” Then she raced back to our shack, because she knew Eli kept his buffalo-hunting gun in good condition at all times.

Helen saw her grandmother come in, her skinny old face fierce and determined. She couldn’t help following her back to the neighbour’s lawn, running to keep up. Things were pretty much as Alice had left them, though the dog had quieted a little because one lung had been punctured. The dog looked up gratefully at Alice. And Alice, tender, dry-eyed, shot him in the head. The pioneer suburbanite cried out, and Alice removed his hands from the bridle and climbed up, motioning to the stunned Helen to join her. Alice shifted over to sit on Helen’s lap.

“You crazy woman!” The man wept as he stumbled beside the cart. “You killed my dog!”

“I’m sorry about the dog,” said Alice. “I truly am.”

Seated beneath her skinny grandmother, Helen sniffed at the scent of blood in the air. When she spoke, her voice had the sweet, oily timbre of pounded walnuts; she whispered, “May your lawn get leaf mould!” She had the reins. Louder, she called out, “May your grass be choked by knotweed, by black medick!” Her lungs full, her heart triggered by rage, galvanized by violence.
“I hope you get dandelions! I hope you get plantains and fungus!” She circled the man, who stood over his dead dog. “May you suffer from creeping charlie, from shepherd’s purse! May you spend the days that remain in a war against cutgrass and chick-weed and bedstraw!”

“Hush now,” said Grandmother Alice. “Take us home, girl.”

Helen cut across the lawn and took the ditch up to the road. She was panting when they pulled up at the barn. Grandmother Alice trembled. They were unhitching the horse, either side of the traces, when Alice looked her granddaughter in the eye and stopped. “What is happening to the world?” she asked Helen.

“Shhhh,” said Helen. “Hear that?” At the border of the yard, poplar leaves’ small slapping. “The outside edges are cracking.”

“Wait,” said Alice. “Hitch him up again. I’m going into town. I resign from the human race. But first, I’m going to resign from the League.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Helen. “I’m joining up.”

And so it came to pass that my mother, my daughter and I were running up the stairs towards the unlit boy’s den on the third floor of John Anderson’s mansion. Helen was ahead, tucking her skirts, her jaw set the way it had been when she was first learning to walk away from me. I chased after. “He’s not up there, you idiot!” I told her. “He’s in his father’s study! Wake up and smell the coffee! Everything has changed!”

Grandmother Alice came last. She was stuck there because Helen insisted and she had no choice, which was perfect,
because she had at last a chance to see the capitalist’s domicile against her own wishes. She didn’t even try to hide her curiosity, her delighted interest. Transparently happy, she stared at the velvet wallpaper and bevelled glass and voluminous drapery without avarice or disdain.

“I’m just stopping on my way to quit the League,” Mum said loudly. “I will not listen to that McClung woman a minute longer!”

“Helen, stop rushing off and talk to me!” I said. “Richard is downstairs in the library!”

But Helen had reached the landing. She stopped. Her hesitation was the first hint of shyness. Mum and I caught up with her. Though it was a sunny day, the landing was dark and smelled of mildewed books. We began to whisper.

“He’s here,” she hissed. “He’s always here.”

“Look at that!” Grandmother Alice pointed frantically at the billiard table in its abandoned, dusty room. She was waving her arms and jumping on her little feet. “I’m going to try it!”

“Grandma, no!” With one hand fastened to Alice’s arm, Helen pushed open the door to Richard’s den. Richard was standing in his father’s posture, hands in pockets, in a slant-ceilinged room lit by an unlikely mixture of electricity and pungent afternoon sun. He barely flinched, but his very blood seemed to thicken and ripen in his veins. I wondered how he always came to be so amused.

Helen, the instant lady, entered the room. “Hello, Richard,” she said.

My mother stuck out her hand. “Alice McCormack.” Richard took it, I thought, gratefully.

“Sorry to barge in,” I said.

He seemed pleased, careful but pleased. He found Alice a chair. He would not look at Helen. We glanced about. “I come here now and then,” he said to me. “I can’t stand the telephone.”

This was most likely true, as was his addiction to the instrument.

“I’d hate the telephone too,” Alice confided, “given the chance.”

“Those were John Anderson’s,” I said. I walked towards the framed plans for the
Titanic
, hung on the wall. The blueprints looked like a star chart. And beside it, also framed, a replica of the engineers’ drawings for the Panama Canal.

“It opens today,” Richard said. “Funny coincidence. Funny day.”

Helen put her finger on the speculative white line of the
Titanic’s
hull. Richard recoiled as if she’d touched him. You could have lit an entire town with the current that passed between them.

“Hot in here,” said Alice. “Reminds me of a judge I once knew. Only it was winter. He never really worked either. Oh! It’s a rocker!” She began to rock violently. “Pardon me,” she said. “It’s an awful affliction, being sensitive the way I am. Yes, this judge and you… All on paper, aren’t you.”

Richard took her literally. He searched for himself on the star chart, the drawings. “I imagine you’ve heard,” he said. He walked to a dark alcove and turned on a small brass lamp with a green shade, very Winston Churchill. There, behind him, a map of Europe with pins stuck into the border between Germany and Belgium. “The war has begun,” he said. He went to an old pine
toy chest and opened the lid and removed a bottle of Scotch whisky and three glasses. “We’ll have to share,” he said. Then he stopped suddenly and said to Alice, “You’re probably a prohibitionist. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Lord God, no,” said Alice quietly. “What’s the world coming to? Prohibitionist. Pour me a drink. This is the saddest day of my life.”

We drank to our health. We drank to the dead. We drank to the future. And to the future dead.

Helen sat down on the floor and Richard took a chair opposite. Helen, refreshed by two years’ silence, gave herself over to reading the curve of Richard’s lip. He looked well. More fully formed, much more formed. As if it had never happened. She felt, briefly, light. To suspend, to lie upon the high pressure of Richard’s quick forward motion, never to look to the side, never to look inside. He was ever-more stylish, for the effect of a new subtlety in both his manner and his dress. She swayed. The whisky helped, a luscious passivity, a holiday. Yes, Richard had recovered, and more. He looked at her without embarrassment. Something in Richard’s way of laying his eyes on you, a blue looking that displaced you, did not take you in, but knocked you out of way, that he might take your place. But oh, Helen thought, it is an intelligence, as abstract as a hawk’s, yet charismatic. She would marry him. And when Richard next looked at her, she masked herself, as if she were fencing.

M
Y MOTHER BEGAN TO QUIT
, and once she got the hang of it, there was no stopping her. Quitting left spaces in her life that could be filled only by starting. She quit eating beef and started eating chicken. She quit smoking and started drinking (Scotch in the evening for one hour only; neat, four ounces and no more, quickly). She quit sleeping and started to walk at night.

She remained keen, grew increasingly generous. She said to me when I caught up with her on one of her sleepless jaunts, the two of us walking beside the woods with the sound of broken trees bowing, “The shadows are red. I never knew that before. I mean, they’re red in daylight, Blondie. During the night, they’re green.” She sighed and drew her coat around her, for there was a south wind, rich with fall. “I have reached a conclusion,” she said. “Things will go on without me. True. It doesn’t matter. Things were going on without me all this time.” She chuckled. “I didn’t even know. I’m very lucky I stayed alive long enough to find out.” My mother took my arm, a rare event between us. I tried not to touch her too strongly in case she disappeared.

Quitting is an act of protest only if the quitter sticks around and reminds the joinees of her quitter status. Alice went through a bad patch when she quit the Political Equality League just when the League was having so much fun. Nellie McClung
and that brilliant group of suffragists, black cloaks thrown over their evening gowns, staged a mock Parliament at the Walker Theatre. McClung played the Conservative premier, Rodmond Roblin, a chivalric ass, and of course she stole the show. My mother didn’t have a mean bone in her bird-like body. But she had a lot of bones, and a few of them ached youthfully, like green willows divining the underground streams of envy.

The day Alice quit the League, she came home in a foul humour and poured herself a mug of Scotch and sat at the kitchen table with her cape on. My dad, Peter, was making cabbage rolls and singing one of Eli’s cowboy songs. When he saw his wife come in like that, he put his spoon down and pulled up a chair, wiping his hands, waiting. “They’re going to miss you, Alice,” Peter said.

“You’re just saying that because it’s impossible. It’s okay. I’m going to become the first female agricultural journalist and wear a man’s suit.”

“That’d be good,” said Peter thoughtfully. “Been done.”

Alice blinked. “I’m getting strange in my old age.” She offered him her mug. “Want some?”

Peter took a sip and gave it back. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You know what we become when we get old?” she asked. “Ourselves. It gets harder and harder to disguise ourselves.”

Peter moved his chair close to hers. He put his hands on her knees and looked into her face. “It would take a hundred years to know you.”

“I don’t really want to quit the League,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I just got petulant. Why’d they have to join up with that old fox? Why’d they have to put their
cards in with the Liberals? I want the vote as much as anybody. But it’s half a cup equality and six cups bigotry. What am I going to do?”

“Stick around and make a lot of noise?”

She winced. “I’m tired, Peter.”

“Shhhhh.” He put his arms around her.

“They’re stuffing the vote in with conscription, did you know? Tobias Norris wants to be premier. Give the ladies the vote if we’ll vote for his damn-to-God Liberals. Conscription. The liberty to send young boys to war. I can hardly wait. And prohibition for God’s sake! Ha! Ha, ha and ha!”

“It’s always a funny mix,” said my dad.

Alice pulled away. “Here I am telling
you,”
she said. She straightened herself, but then shut her eyes against some fresh pain. “I’m afraid of the future. What if they shut down the school? Everybody’s so… so Ontario all of a sudden.”

“It’s not so different.”

“But now there’s a war.”

Peter took the mug and drank from it. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got no choice but to drink down the bad with the good.”

“McClung is pretty funny,” said Alice. “She even does voices. I just wish she’d been born French or something. Jewish. It’s the taste of tea gets stuck in my craw.”

“That’s the taste of power,” Peter said. “Very bland, so nobody will notice it’s working.”

“I like her a lot. That’s the honest truth. It’s just such a tea biscuit, a fur hat and muff, kid gloves… Ohhhh, what’s the use? I don’t want to quit. But I don’t want to
belong.”