When Alice Lay Down With Peter (30 page)

God save the king. All the women stood and sang “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows,” and all the good fellows stood and sang it right back. Alice rolled her eyes and sighed to the vaulted ceiling of the chamber. “God blessed so what? So blessed damn!” She was a dyslexic blasphemer. And then, when the cheering reached its sober, self-congratulatory, gee-it’s-a-relief-to-get-that-off-my-chest bonhomie, and bonnefemme too—of course they can vote; they have soldier-babies, they can vote; they make munitions, they can vote; they vote Liberal, they can vote!—bundled-up-in-good-wool-and-furs climax, Alice said, “Hell it all to damn!”

But she was excited. She was, after all, a founding member of the Political Equality League, and had attended meetings faithfully, especially after she’d quit and erased her name from their records. But ever since the “enemy alien” midwife had been run out of St. Norbert by the mothers of soldiers in
France, Alice had an inkling, like pepper in the salt, that women could be just as mean-spirited as men. But hush, it was time for the ladies to sit, nestling their velvet bums into comfy chairs, to listen with wifely charity to the men speak from the chamber below.

It was a love-in. Women who vote, it was testified, make good life partners. Why, we can all vote together! Ha ha ha! Only a coward would argue that the women’s vote will threaten the family! Foolish bigots! Women’s vote the cause of divorce? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Give ’em their rein, I say. Eve might have caused a whole lot of trouble, but (with a gallant nod to the gallery) I’ll bet Adam preferred a helpmate to a doormat. But seriously, if a mother will send her son to fight Kaiserism, she deserves the vote. And if that mother loses her son in the bloody fields of France, she deserves our protection and our undying gratitude. A-men!

And then the new premier rose; he rose and rose with his powder white skin and his way of inhaling all the time so his head seemed suspended by his nose, and his chest and neck remained full of air which he spent through a reedy, well-bred voice, a chivalrous milking of every milky election issue, and he said exactly this:

“If the women of the civilized countries had enjoyed the franchise ten years ago, then Mr. Kaiser Bill of Germany would not be doing what he is today, for he would have the privilege of being counselled and influenced by women as well as men. We hope the war will come soon to an end, but we must express our admiration of what the ladies of the Dominion are doing in this great crisis.”

Prophecy? A Cassandra in a suit? How obvious it is to us today, with countless millions dead, when we may refer to Mrs. Einstein, Mrs. Bohr, Mrs. Goebbels, Mrs. Truman, Mrs. Eisenhower, to the silky legs and comely lisp of Mrs. Kennedy, in whose immortal words we find the sentiment that won the women of the twentieth century a frost-free fridge and a second car: “I go where Jack needs me and I try to stay out of the way.” How stunningly obvious it is if we rerun the entire history of the human race, ride that movie backwards past January 28, 1916, past August 191
4
, back through Victoria’s widowing war against the Boers, backwards down time’s road to the hanging court sentencing Riel, to the moment in the courtyard when a bloodthirsty and pregnant woman dressed in a buffalo robe aimed her rifle at the chest of a blindfolded man; how blatantly obvious it is that if women were in the driver’s seat, there’d be no war, there’d be no poverty, there’d be no injustice.

It was obvious to Alice, anyway, in the chambers of the Manitoba Legislative Building in the winter of 1916, and she turned to the healthy apple face of the matron beside her, who smiled kindly, excited, and pinched my mother’s arm and said, “It’s the beginning of a brave new future full of peace!” And Alice uttered the only articulate curse of her lifetime: “Bullshit!” And looking past the crestfallen matron, Alice saw the barely discernible trace of a skinny rounder with wet shoes and before she fainted she saw that the sky had opened and through the gaping hole in the ceiling there descended a cloud of white feathers, falling falling falling falling.

O
UR SUMMERS OF WAR SEEMED
to occur in every shade of brown. Green ferns, you see, or geraniums, succumbed. All, all was the colour of war.

It was as Alice had predicted. We got really good at killing on a large scale. The musket that Alice had so proudly pointed at Thomas Scott could fire maybe three times in a minute. Now, a machine gun could fire six hundred rounds in sixty seconds, or ten shots a second.

We get dressed up for efficient killing. The most stylish thing about the twentieth century is the uniform. The next most stylish thing is Helen in a three-quarter length wraparound with a mink collar and a greyhound on a leash. But that would come later; it was as yet a gleam in Richard’s eye.

P
ETER AND ALICE
intensified the last years of their long marriage with a torrid love affair with one another. Their passion was perhaps not fully apparent to the naked eye. Both my parents had become the colour and texture of fine sand, their eyes bleached by long looking and their bones so luminous you could see them at night. Walking by the woods in the dark, they glowed like a pair of old and skinny arctic wolves.

During the war years, my mother began regularly to faint. There are goats that suffer from similar symptoms, in Australia, I think, a kind of sensitive goat that will fall down in a dead faint if you talk too loud. They don’t die, though; they just pass out. Alice would live many years like that. With a dry clicking sound she was always falling down, her sandstone bones as light as kindling. Once or twice, Peter would pass out too. But they didn’t die. That’s the good part.

After the vote at the Legislative Building, Alice kept her eye out for Thomas Scott, but he hadn’t reappeared. She told us this during one of our nocturnal jaunts, Alice and Peter, Eli and Helen and me. On this occasion, it so happened that Mum fainted. We were accustomed to it by then, and we simply talked quietly in the night, waiting for her to wake up and continue our journey. I did, however, contribute a small shock to perk her. Mum, on waking, pushed away my hands and stood peevishly and said, “He’s deader than a doornail.”

My dad pressed a lingering kiss to the bare white shell of her temple and said, “He croaked long ago, my loved one.” And then he let out a horse laugh. “Didn’t stop him, did it! He’s still croaking.”

Mum was serious. “No, no, he’ll croak no more.” The tears in her eyes shone with phosphorous. “I think he might truly be gone.”

We all sobered, stood silently, taking this in. The trees squealed, a crooked sound. We stood rigid, fearing the final absence of Thomas Scott. It takes more than mortality to make somebody dead. Since Scott’s brief appearance at the legislature, the rest of us hadn’t even given him a thought. We were
becoming positive and absolute in our ways at home, and no one had considered our martyr of bigotry, our patron saint of Error. His final departure was a double strike against us, a second and perhaps more terrible murder. It could mean an end of a world.

Helen laid her cheek against her grandmother’s hand. In the dark wooded night, the glow from Alice’s hand cast Helen’s beauty in silver.

“Grandma?” asked Helen. “Why did he not kiss me? When I was a baby. Why didn’t I get the mark?”

“Oh, you don’t want that devil’s kiss on you,” I said. Eli touched my shoulder,
Shhhhhhh, Blondie
.

“It’s a defect you’ll just have to live with,” said her grandmother Alice, somewhat impatiently. Then, softening, she studied Helen’s glaucous features. “Never forget, darling, what’s right is also wrong. Don’t let that scoundrel’s death be in vain.”

“I think we should go home,” I said. It was exceedingly creepy out there if we were no longer haunted. The woods were stark and vivid.

Chastened, we began once more to walk. “Maybe we can get new ghosts,” Helen said.

“Ghosts are not shoes,” said I, the unnecessary mother.

Just then, we heard a cry. With what hope we turned back towards the forest. And listened. Then the owl’s hoot. The night, stiff and real.

A
LICE THREW HERSELF
into materialism. By 1918, her School for Histrionics had gained such momentum that she had to develop a semi-professional arm, which she called the Histrionic Theatre Company. The company thrived. She was so busy that she was forced to move a cot into the green room, and there she stayed for the duration of the war and the duration of her life. Her lover, otherwise known as Peter, visited her every day, bringing breads and dainties from various delicatessens and bakeries around town.

Every day a different dainty from a different country. When he ran out of countries, he began to research the tribal origins of dainties at the library on William Street, arriving daily in a brand new Model T and wearing a beautiful hat, which he removed at the door as he entered the tortoiseshell shadows. This coda in his relationship with Alice was a formal affair, and he began to dress in modest but handsome brown suits, set off by his luminous white hair.

The Model T was mine. It cost me $725. I’d earned every second cent of it. John Anderson (bless him) had taught me to invest in the stock market, and I was without a doubt the most skilled investor in town, though I declined to flaunt it. I went by the name of B. McCormack and it was assumed that the B. stood for William, and so somebody in a big law firm sent me a letter inviting me to join the eminent Manitoba Club and the eminent St. Charles Country Club, but I just wrote them right back saying, “Shalom! Love to!” I never heard from them again.

Peter was researching food, a fitting subject during the war. His specialty was grains, of course, with subsidiary interests in breads and pastries. He wasn’t a cook, or much of an eater, but
he did adore recipes, and he tunnelled through the bulgur connections between pilafs and tabbouleh like a diviner seeking Mesopotamian streams beneath the Canadian Shield. It was perhaps one of his greatest thrills when he traced an unleavened kinship between bannock and pita. In his eighties, he developed a subtle sensitivity. The young librarians were all in love with him, leaning close to whisper their perceptive questions, showing him their pure complexions, their shining hair, all to no avail.

It might seem as if the Impossibilist had opted out. A war on, and here he was chasing Chinese dumplings, honeyed baklava, courting Alice with small boxes of cake. But it was more than an old man’s distraction, much more than a doddering hobby. He sat very straight at a wooden reading table at the William Street library, with a book set on its spine and the laugh lines like sun dogs around his radiant eyes. He was reading about cooking practices in Palestine, but he was thinking about Marquis wheat, about No. I Northern. As he read of stone pestles, cornmeal, rice flour (occasionally speaking aloud in his old man’s tenor; “barley,” he would say, or “legumes”), as he read about the ancient hands of women pounding grains and kneading dough, there dawned in another part of his soul a terrible regret, a chilling guilt. “Wheat,” said Peter. “We planted wheat and only wheat. My God. And the deep-tilling McCormack blade. What have I done?” The wind answered with a handful of overworked topsoil thrown against the tall windows of the library. One of the pretty librarians looked up and smiled hopefully at him.

Alice was his taste tester. He arrived at her office-boudoir, where she was schooling her company of performers. She
shooed them away. He sat upon a plain oak chair and offered her a bit of seed cake. Alice nibbled, then nodded and said, “Yes. I see exactly what you mean.”

She responded by developing a type of theatre theretofore, and pretty well thereafter, unknown to Winnipeg audiences.

Her friend Mr. Kolchella had resurfaced from the internment camp at Portage la Prairie. His wife had died of heart failure soon after they’d been imprisoned. The authorities had then let him go
on compassionate grounds
. I was saddened to see the hopeful part of him gone. I think he’d lost much of his love for the world. Still, he joined us, with a sharper, mordant wit, and with a certain disobedience that seemed somewhat dangerous despite his dancer’s stature.