When Alice Lay Down With Peter (33 page)

“N
OT MUCH OF ME LEFT.”
Eli stood in the kitchen by the sink while I changed the bandages. He held up his paw, and then examined himself in the mirror. His remaining ear had gained in stature, taking all responsibility for earness, increased in magnitude.

“Nobody will notice,” I told him.

“No, I know.” He pulled his undershirt gingerly over the bandage. “When the hair grows back, I’ll look roughed up like always.”

“You’re perfect. This”—I touched his wound—“just gets rid of anything that might’ve distracted us from your perfection.”

That nod again. The more Eli disagreed, the more he nodded.

He was resting when Richard came to call. The glamorous car looked like government itself in our yard. I met him at the door. He’d put on weight, strong weight. I could barely remember the slender boy, and I’m sure that Richard, in his self-assured, wilful clarity, had forgotten the origins of his own brokenness. When he came into our house, Marie set up a woeful, clattering ululation, so loud that Richard paused and looked about, and I shrugged, saying, “Those blessed frogs are mating again. Listen to all that lust. But come in, Dick. I’m sure Eli would like to have a word with you.”

And Richard said, “I’d like to have a word with him too.” I followed him into our bedroom, where Eli lay. Helen was in her room; Marie’s keening and the clatter of the loom had prevented her from hearing Richard’s arrival.

Eli had heard him, though, and he watched Richard enter our bedroom through narrow lids. Richard stopped a few feet from the bed. “I’ve come to apologize,” he said.

Eli gave a short grunt of laughter, wincing but truly amused.

Richard looked down at his hands, one hand holding its other, and smiled that particular smile, at the real joke beyond our understanding. “You should be more careful,” he said. And when Eli rose to protest, he added, “I don’t underestimate the necessity of my apology, nor do I wish to suggest less than my utmost sincerity in offering it to you.”

“You’ve been reading, Dick!” I said.

I saw the change to one of his eyes, a single black crescent in the otherwise perfectly blue iris, a tiny scar on his vision. A black sickle, there for good; it would always distract me when I looked at him.

“I do apologize,” he said. His voice was lighter, purified. “And I do wish for your health and safety.”

“You fucking little hypocrite.” Eli sat up in bed.

It stunned Richard. His body let go of its stiff propriety. He rallied. “I am the hypocrite? I took action against something I felt was wrong. We can either protect what’s ours, or we can help destroy it. I took a stand.”

“You almost murdered a man.”

“Yes.” Richard thought about this with solemnity. “I felt I had to. He’s dangerous. Perhaps I was wrong. The damn strike has been almost a war. Perhaps I did get carried away. But he’s not dead. Thanks to you. He’s not even been charged with any crime, not yet. But I know what he is. Disaffected. Dissatisfied
with his lot in life. But you’re right. That’s what I came here to say. I shouldn’t have shot at him. And I’m sorry.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Eli wearily. “I hope I like you better when you’re older.”

“It’s like having our very own Orangeman,” I added.

At that moment, Marie stopped her clatter and Helen, hearing our voices, came out of her room. She had taken to favouring shades of yellow and gold, deepening at times to burgundy, even cherry red. When she was weaving, she fell into a lazy physical aggression, much like someone riding a horse. And yes, her beauty brought with it its own tendencies, its change of direction. When she appeared, Richard forgot even the weight of his guilt. I was somewhat relieved to see in him a measure of affection for Helen, aside from his customary approbation. It suddenly occurred to me that he loved her.

In her renewed association with Richard, since his father’s death, Helen seemed to have chosen to trust him, which of course is a decision few of us can make. She thought that since she had seen him broken, that night when his tuxedo didn’t fit him any more, then she must really know him. She had seen him at his worst. Surely, she thought, that must make this bond trustworthy. She came into the room with her lazy confidence and joined Richard, unsurprised; she lay her head against his chest just long enough to be reassured of his heartbeat.

I
N THE FALL, HELEN BECAME ENGAGED
to Richard Anderson as a kite becomes engaged to the hand holding the string. Eggshell lacquer and Chinese silk. November, and the land as ugly as a frozen rat. Yet Helen soared above us in ether, the sun queen.

I immersed myself in the strike trials. Helen sewed her own wedding dress. One night, I came home late from an evening session in court in the city. The Crown prosecutor had been going after Bobby Russell for days, wearing Bobby down. Enter the age of advertising. The prosecutor
identified
Bobby Russell; he named him nearly to death. He held up before him, in the eyes of the court, images of a revolutionary Marxist, a grinning, unshaved, dark-featured crazy man with an appetite for small children. An
incendiary
. The more he identified, the more Bobby took on the features of a traitor, perhaps a disaffection of his own. A family man, a gentle man, gradually R. B. Russell became an acolyte of a great international conspiracy to overthrow the world. This was not a time for subtlety. Helen sewed her wedding dress. Bobby Russell became more radical than Karl Marx.

I came home very tired. I missed my mother and father. It was a cold night. Bare fields. No shroud of snow. I drove as fast as my Ford would carry me, singing, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired. Oh, Lord, I am so tired.” Pulled up with my auto’s lamps shining
on the house, and through the window saw the black hair of my daughter bent over the treadle machine. Her determined back. Her humility to the task.

I entered with some trepidation. I was embarrassed at how crabby I’d been with her. For a blissful moment, Richard was forgotten. I found her surrounded by frothy waves of white brocade. She didn’t look up but remained intent, with her own tired dignity. On the kitchen table there were fragments of wedding dress. I found the sleeves and sat down to baste the inside seam. We worked in silence like that, and gradually the air softened between us. Helen had become a statuesque woman, taller than I was, bigger boned, muscled as a trout. She relaxed. We worked like that for many hours without speaking. I could offer her only my presence. That was all that remained.

B
OBBY RUSSELL WENT
to the penitentiary for two years (from where he was soon elected to the legislature).

And Helen married Richard Anderson. In early March, three days after her eighteenth birthday.

Three hundred guests in the pink of health and witty as balloons. Much gin, much gin and much champagne, and then much brandy and eloquence. There was love; it was in the air. A very cold day. Our breath escaped like thin white snakes. He placed the diamond on her finger. The white cake was a castle. Everyone applauded. The wedding guests drew away from her; they protected themselves from her beauty, which filled the
rooms with the richness of strings and woodwinds. Helen’s white dress swayed around her, and when she moved quickly, it followed her, rustling. She kissed us goodbye, clear-eyed and regal. They left in the new yellow Packard, her crinolines filling the car and overflowing the pale cream leather seats. She smiled and waved and flew away.

And on that day, nothing happened to anyone else in all the world.

PART FIVE
1921

I
N STORIES WHERE THE WOLF
dwells with the lamb, and the leopard lies down with the kid, the calf with the young lion, the cow with the bear, and their young ones all lie down with one another, and together they are led by a little child round and round on a gold chain thinner than a strand of hair, a lot depends on water. Or wisdom. Water being the wisdom of the earth.

Ours would be a marine utopia, an ocean of air, which in its turn is occupied by our aging bodies, like sacs of ocean water, all of us muttering about love and pain as we swim here and there. In the realm of peace, as the weird old prophet Isaiah would tell us,
the waters will cover the sea
. This is pretty redundant, like rain becoming showers. And behind it, as in any utopia, lies an agreement that the large will also be the small (though the small will not necessarily be the large). It’s an arrangement of totality.

A utopia is somebody’s idea of a good time, that total agreement, the extreme familiarity, intimacy; the loss of distinction between wolf, lamb, leopard; the loss of distinction between the kid, the calf, the lion, cow, bear, child. The loss of distinction between the child and the utopia.

Into this utopia, this intimacy, we lost Helen. Marriage with Richard could only be a totality, and of course, it could only be bliss.

Bereft is a suitable word. It slides into place. Yes. We were
bereft
.

R
ICHARD WEATHERED THE POST-WAR
recession without a shudder. In those first years of their marriage, he proved to Helen that the
Titanic
had never sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. He did this by shopping for her. Richard knew the size of her gloves and how tightly the buttons will close at the wrist. He knew the shoes that would fit the high instep, the left heel that was slightly askew. He bought her backless evening dresses; they fell from narrow shoulder straps and clung to her hips, draped at her famous white ankles. He knew the shape of his wife. She was his. He did not suffer very badly from desperation at the beginning.

In 1923, in Thebes, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened up King Tutankhamen’s tomb and discovered the mummified boy-king with all his beaten gold. It had a huge effect on Helen. She promptly ripped out the red velvet interior of John Anderson’s house (an exhumation that excluded Mrs. John Anderson’s porcelain bathtub, which remains to this day, a white-and-green tiled crypt occupied by Mrs. John Anderson herself, an old lump of butter, soaking).

Helen made strange changes to the home of John Anderson, bless him. From pompous early prairie merchant to aggressive futurist supranational chic. The house seemed like a box of lozenges. The Persian carpet was replaced with a pastel floral, up the grand stairs, to the left of the mezzanine, a door, closed. Now and then, when I visited my daughter in the quiet
of the afternoon, I heard the taps turn and the water flow, and I knew that Mrs. Anderson was adding hot. I wondered if she had anyone to help her. In addition to the remodelling, Helen had initiated a number of more practical changes in the Anderson mansion, copper wires and iron water pipes among the first innovations. Now her mother-in-law could add hot all by herself.

I once asked Helen if Mrs. John Anderson had anyone to look after her, to keep the bathroom steamy and replace the face cloth when it got mouldy. Helen regarded me, imperious, and then nodded. She had thrown herself into marriage. It was a management position.