When Alice Lay Down With Peter (28 page)

O
NE MORNING
, Alice went downtown to teach school. She had been walking much of the night, travelling like a beetle over a piece of amber. It was like that in her quitting phase, moving towards the border between darkness and light.

My mother had always enjoyed the arbitrary nature of her own opinions. Whatever role she played, she played with gusto and more; she loved the excess of her own characterizations. She was happiest teaching at the school by the CPR station, where the kids understood perfectly that their teacher was a ham.

Humming a fugue tune, Alice trotted up the broken sidewalk to the school wrapped in the wing-cases of her black wool cape, around her neck a red muffler and on her head a red tam-o’-shanter. She swept into the classroom saying, in German, “Brrrrr, it’s as cold as Grampa’s bare knees!” She removed her cape and scarf, and then realized that the class was standing stock still. She recognized the smell of fear. The children stood rigid beside their desks, staring at her, immobile but for their lips, bird beaks through which came a reedy song.

“Rule Britannia,” the children were singing in falsetto, “Britannia rule the waves. Brit-ons never, never, ne-ver shall be slaves.” Alice took this in with horror, looking at her joyful mix of wildflowers and learning that only the petunias might be permitted to thrive. Above them, hovering over the teacher’s desk and covering the enormous hand-drawn map of the world that had been Mr. Kolchella’s great achievement, was a Union Jack the size of a golf green, the biggest, reddest, bluest Union Jack on the face of the earth.

My mother took a look around and saw the victorious figure of a classic marm, a real old biddy in a brown suit, an orphan’s nightmare, standing in one corner, keeping time with a ruler to the children’s prison song and fixing Alice with the loaded blunderbuss of her righteous eye. The children finished the last verse and waited.

“You sound like escaping gas,” Alice said gently to the children.

She removed her things and opened the closet beside her desk, where she’d hung a mirror just a bit too high, and stood on tiptoe to adjust her hair. Out of the blue, she took a lipstick and put it on, something that she’d never done before, and the children were heard to twitter. It was an inside joke. She could make out the reflection of the class behind her. The children met her eye in the mirror. Alice winked. Fifty-nine children did their best to wink back. To the mirror, she spoke, “And where is our good friend Mr. Kolchella?” All eyes went to the stranger lady standing in the corner. Alice closed the cupboard. Then she smiled. “How do you do!” With open vowels, she rushed forward, offering her hand like a hostess on Millionaire Row. “So glad! Welcome! Do sit!” She put the Marm in an empty desk. “We have a visitor! Children!” Alice clapped her hands. The kids were all smiling by then. “We’re going to play Who’s Got Mr. Kolchella?”

The Marm had a voice as pretty as a blue jay. “Mr. Kolchella is in custody. All enemy aliens are in custody.”

“Well, that’s a shame because I need him here to teach the children the history of democracy. Class! Let’s show Miss… uh, Mrs.…”

The dried old biddy squinted. “Smith. Mrs. I am from the education department. And I have come to shut down the school.”

“Smithstein! Smithski! Let’s show Miss Smitzniuk what a good Canadian class we are.”

The class tumbled into action. The room was filled with the sound of thirty wooden tables and fifty-nine wooden chairs dragged over a hardwood floor to make an erratic barricade. They worked like patriots preparing for a rebellion, a good thing, too, because that’s what they were. The children looked as if they were in a silent film, mouthing words to each other with a rational clarity you see at times of crisis.

Ten of the most underfed kids came downstage and sat on the floor, and then suddenly the play was on in earnest and they clutched their stomachs, moaned and fell over unconscious and woke up and moaned and fell over again. “I’m hungry, I’m so hungry, I’m really, really hungry. No, I am, I am.” The huge kid, seventeen and smarter than he looked, leapt out from behind the chairs and said, in a bully’s voice, “Pay up!” He pulled an old potato out his pocket and pretended to eat it, waving it in front of the starving habitants (because that’s what they really were). “I said
pay!”

“We don’t have money for tie-ethes,” the hungry kids whined. “We can’t pay the church the money, and we don’t have wheat because of the early frawest.” The big kid was at a loss for words, but with great significance, he waved the potato in their faces and stormed off. Everybody cheered.

“What is going on?” demanded Mrs. Smith.

“It’s the 1837 Rebellions. Well, we’re mostly doing the
Lower Canada drama, with Louis-Joseph Papineau leading the French against the British colonizers, but next week we’ll do William Lyon Mackenzie’s tavern brawl against the oligarchy in Upper Canada,” said Alice modestly.

The Marm’s mouth opened and shut, like a dying cod, and Alice leaned towards her as she would to a slightly dense child. “You remember, dear, the anticlerical, anti-British revolts out East?” prompted Alice. “Papineau? Exiled to the States? Never came back to Canada? Yes? He gets the children excited, you see. There just aren’t that many good Canadian revolts, yes? For self-government? Freedom? And the children do like to see a good rebellion, don’t you find? How kids like justice?” But Mrs. Smith really looked lost now. In a stage whisper to the kids, Alice said, “Our visitor is confused! Chase the seigneur!”

The kids covered their mouths with embarrassment. “We forgot to chase the seigneur!” And the red-headed boy leapt up and ran right out of the room. “Good riddance,” said the starving habitants, who didn’t want to leave the stage.

Alice said to Mrs. Smith, “Being from the education department, you do know what the seigneur is. The powerful landowner, yes?” She slapped Mrs. Smith’s knee. “Of course you do! How I’d hate to patronize you!”

Twelve handsome boys swaggered out, swinging pretend walking sticks and smoking pretend cigarettes. Every once in a while, one of them would say, “Polo?” through his nose, and his colleague would answer, “Certainly! After we kill the rebels.” For clarity’s sake, one boy asked, “What are we called again?” and he was answered, “We’re the Montreal cavalry!” “And what do we do!” “PROTECT THE RICH!”

Mrs. Smith was making a peculiar movement with her hands, fidgety and weird. Her chalky little body began to shake. Alice wanted to rub lanolin onto the flaky skin, but instead she reached over and handed Mrs. Smith her umbrella, anything to stop that autistic thing with the hands. It worked. Mrs. Smith gavelled the umbrella and shrieked, “Stop it! Stop it this instant!”

Some of the children stopped, but some of them had no time for Mrs. Smith, and with one eye on Alice, they skipped a bit and rushed to the climax, when they got to have a shootout and die in flames.

Mrs. Smith’s shoes were anvils, twenty pounds apiece. She walked onstage like the Industrial Revolution. Even the patriots were cowed. Silently, the starving habitants stood up, and the seigneur, who had been watching through the murky glass in the door, re-entered and stood uncertainly with the rest.

“What year is it?” snapped Mrs. Smith.

“1837!” cried half the class. And the other half cried out, “1914!”

“Of course it’s 1914! Put down that potato!” The potato hit the floor and rolled a little; fifty-nine children watched it in misery. “And now… Sing!”

She might just as well have demanded they laugh. They looked at her. “You are going to sing a goodbye song to Mrs. McCormack. Mrs. McCormack has decided she will not teach here any more.”

They looked at my mother in panic. Alice stuck her tongue in one cheek and rolled her eyes. The relief was instant. “Sing!” said Mrs. Smith. “It is your duty to the king!”

The children began to sing “England, My England” with all their ironic hearts and a trace of an accent. French, was it? German? Maybe Strasbourg, a bit of both.

Alice went to the closet and put on her cape and red muffler and red hat. The children were singing. She stood and listened a moment, and then she walked out, closing the door behind her. The song came to an end. The kids stood stunned, sentenced to compulsory boredom. In less than ten seconds, they learned the prisoner’s fake submission. A sheet of ice mixed with manure hardened their hearts. And just when they were nearly lost, Alice stuck her head with its red tam through the door and said, “See you around, darlings.”

R
ICHARD JOINED THE NAVY
. His mother, Mrs. John Anderson, got out of the bath and organized a luncheon in his honour. So unhinged was she, I was ordered to invite “Helen’s grandparents,” Alice and Peter. Grandmother Alice brought with her the few students remaining in her school—seven children in all, the only kids permitted to associate with the agitator Mrs. McCormack and her School for Historical Drama (or as my mother herself liked to call it, the School for Histrionics). Alice wanted them to see the capitalists’ domicile up close. And she thought they might like the food.

Everyone at the luncheon seemed to be very old, but the oldest person of all was Richard’s great-aunt, Mrs. Crumb. Mrs. Crumb was deaf, but she did have an ear for the voices of children. She was a Victorian dowager right out of Dickens, a black lace doily who was always awarded the best seat by the fireplace, but not too close because she believed that the flush from the heat made her “as red as an Indian.” My dad bent over to shout into the horn, “Or like an honest working man!”

Mrs. Crumb’s teeth shifted in her mouth when she smiled. She smelled of phosphate of lime. “Eh what? Say again?”

Dad’s back hurt. Reluctantly, he leaned over again and said, “The labourer is our only friend!”

“You haven’t any friends?” Mrs. Crumb patted his hand. “I can’t believe that.” She sucked on her dentures and looked expectantly at the children, awaiting some real conversation.

My mother’s smallest students ducked under the white tablecloth and reappeared with a piece of cake, a corner piece, thick with pink icing. Mrs. Crumb’s fireside chair sat directly beyond. She saw them and smiled flirtatiously. They approached, a scalloped dessert plate proffered to the crispy lady who looked like a stale piece of blueberry pie. “May we play with your horn?” they asked, standing three feet away. Mrs. Crumb heard them perfectly. “Of course, dears,” she said and handed it to them. They spoke to her in confidential tones through the horn. “Are you a suffragette?” asked one.

“What d’ye think I’d be? Stupid?”

“Have you ever been kissed?”

“A hundred thousand times,” said Mrs. Crumb. “I was married to Mr. Crumb, don’t you know? He was terribly handsome.”

“Is he dead then?”

“Dead as dead.” She sighed.

“Do you miss him a lot?”

“Oh.” It was all Mrs. Crumb could say. Her tiny skull, with its sparse grey pincurls, bobbed up and down, and tears filled her eyes and her face grew tender. The children saw this and handed over the cake. She sniffed and tilted the plate towards herself and began to eat the icing first, all the while nodding, oh yes.

A lovely going-to-war party for Richard. He and Helen came in from a walk in the garden. Richard held Helen’s hand. Everyone said how handsome Richard looked in his naval uniform. And then they remarked, Helen… well, isn’t she always
… perhaps more so than ever before. Her dark wavy hair, a rather simple dress, they found it elegant on no one else; clothes could not compete with that kind of beauty. Though she doesn’t say much, does she? And they sipped tea and hoped she could make Richard happy. A wartime wedding? My word, as young as that! Well, that won’t do. I’d no idea! She seems much older. What a strange girl. But then, Richard… well, without a father’s hand to guide him… Sipping tea. Prohibition. A rare sunny day, the end of April. Warm. The sun rubbed fragrances from the dried old earth yet again; what astonishing resilience.

Richard did not release her hand. They looked like they were playing at the maypole when they walked around the dining-room table. Richard avoided a conversation with his mother, who fluttered at him helplessly from behind the butler’s wagon. He backed into the kitchen, pulled Helen with him.

Into my domain. I was surprised to see her. We looked warily at each other, yanked out of our normal roles. The war had created a special brand of sentimentality, a potpourri in the great underwear drawers of the nation, infecting us all with the strain of being awfully nice, chipper and enthusiastic for our diet of horror.

The fight over Ypres had been going on for nearly a week. Germany had introduced us to chlorine gas. When we first heard about the yellow clouds of poison released into the wind, we stopped for just a moment; it takes only a moment for human beings to accept greater evil. A quick trip from a jagged blade, machine guns in Saskatchewan in 1885, smallpox on a blanket and exploding bullets to chlorine gas, mustard gas, napalm and Agent Orange. Within another three weeks, ninety-five thousand soldiers, Allied and German, would be rotting at
Ypres. Sir Robert Borden, the anxious and earnest prime minister, was sending boatloads of boys to the front. Without a doubt, we’d become a nation. We all suffered from neuralgia, even the prime minister. Real grown-up lumbago.

In those bad times, the kitchen became the only room where it was possible to breathe, blow a little smoke through the barrier between lump-in-your-throat cute and slash-and-burn despair. Sugar and strychnine mix better in the kitchen, as long as everybody has enough to drink, and if we still can’t exactly tell the truth, we can at least respect its absence.

We were growing up. Helen, who came in with her soldier-lover, looked me square in the eye; the barricade crumbled, and we met each other warmly, if not safely, in the no man’s land of womanhood. She even let me kiss her. I gave her a small glass of port. We talked about the war.

Richard lit a cigarette and leaned against the kitchen counter, Helen’s round white arm reaching to take it from his lips. She was just about to puff on it when she caught my eye. I said, “Let’s not push it.” She puffed anyway, and I was gratified to see her turn green.