When Alice Lay Down With Peter (35 page)

When she emerged from her washing room, he was standing before the loom. He’d removed his jacket and now he stood in his white shirt, the collar removed, his gold hair curling at the nape. He studied the screen she’d placed before the loom, the sketching from which she would copy her weaving. The sketch was full-scale cliché, a replica of the old Flemish tapestries: “The Lady and her Lover,” the unicorn, birds, laurel, the inscription “To my only desire.”

She came out wearing a starched white nightgown, her arms bare and round, her black hair brushed back so that she looked less like a wife of the twentieth century. Richard walked around the loom to where she worked the treadles and shuttle. It was hard to decipher the picture because the weaver always works from the wrong side. But even so, it was clear the weaving bore no relationship to her sketching; none at all. Richard slowly walked around and removed the screen.

“What have you done?” he asked in surprise.

It was unmistakably an elm tree, and that would be caragana under it, the small yellow flowers of the honeysuckle,
cumulus clouds; you knew that it was a hot day, that the wind blew. That those were Richard’s blond locks, that he’d turned his back to her, the Lady, whose face was obscured by a yellow fan. And a ship. And a sea in the sky. The sky becomes an ocean, and a red-tailed hawk with a string of pearls flies away.

Richard stopped breathing. He would not look at her. He stared at his image, at the pearls flying off, as if staring would alter it or, better, make it disappear. Then he ran his fingers over the inchoate part, the new space that would scroll into view as she worked from left to right.

She’d begun with green, the familiar bush from her childhood home. There were the first lines of a man’s face; a square-faced man emerged on the surface, a stolid brown-eyed man with a peaceful smile. Richard seemed to hum with pain. “Who is this?” he asked softly.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth. It was not Edward Pennyfeather, who had bony cheeks, or Harold Burnside, with the saggy eyes, and it was not “the King” because he was not drinking. This was a man from the world beyond. They both looked at him, wondering when he would come true.

I
T SO HAPPENED THAT ONE DAY IN
1933, a young Jewish composer of twelve-tone music was assigned to a boondoggle a few miles north of “our property,” in the bush near rich farmland cultivated by Trappist monks. A boondoggle was a make-work project devised to get men to work for their relief during the Depression. On this occasion, the foreman marched his crew three hundred yards into the bush, tied a red flag to an aspen and told the men to start clearing. “The government wants a road toot sweet,” the foreman said. Somebody asked, What for? The foreman raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “Oh, it’s the chairman of the board wants to know.” It was an imaginary road in the middle, it seemed then, of nowhere.

The composer was as thin as a cadaver, six and a half feet tall and big with brain, his head like a heavy flower on a long stem. He had supported his wife in a refined, if modest, way by giving piano lessons, a service that proved dispensable in the Depression. He had no income. He’d never done manual labour. He looked up at the tops of the trees. Overhead, the wind was gritty with topsoil, but in the woods the mosquitoes swarmed in a moist green haze.

They worked like dogs on that boondoggle, though that certainly wasn’t the custom. The work made them obsessive and spiteful—they needed to hurt somebody, but they had access
only to themselves. They used a Swedish saw and ropes to haul down the trees, and their own backs to carry the boulders. The composer suffered from rheumatism. The pain was bearable, but the sense of futility was not. Reality had broken faith with him, so he had no choice but to break it right back.

The road to nowhere was nightmared into shape, the most perfect road in Manitoba. On the last day, the composer helped roll the gravel and then he walked three miles in the wrong direction, south, directly through the brush, without noticing that his feet were bleeding. He was falling from the constellation of the boondoggle road.

Eli and I were at home listening to CKY radio. I was sitting on Eli’s lap. Eli, at the time, was like an empty paper bag in the wind, and I sat on him often just to keep him from blowing away. The carcasses of grasshoppers made a clicking sound when they hit the house, and we turned up the cowboy songs on the radio to try to drown the noise, but it never worked. The afternoon was dark with dust, and we were sitting with the electric light on, all dressed up in our cowboy dancing clothes, me in my red dress with the white crinolines and Eli with his spurs and hat (and under the brim of his hat, his shadowed eyes). We still weren’t accustomed to electric lights, I guess, because we didn’t have them till we were already middle age, so we still had a vulgar relationship with, them. The lights and the radio ran our lives. With the garden in ruins and the rodeo no longer a paying option for Eli, we became employees of the light bulb, and we didn’t even figure out that we could turn the damn thing off and go back to candles. Anyway, there we were, dressed up for a circus in the ugly glare of the overhead lamp, when I thought I
heard a knocking. “Did you hear that?” I asked Eli, who turned his good ear towards me and said, “Say again?”

I slid off Eli’s knee and tentatively opened the door.

“Could I trouble you?” said the tall, skinny man, leaning into the wind. “I am in need of a piece of paper and a pencil.”

His mouth was very black and empty. Wordlessly, I fetched the things he wanted. Eli followed me to the door. With the blare of the yodel and guitar behind us, we watched his trembling hand draw five parallel horizontal lines. He looked up at us and nodded, as if encouraged by the function of pencil on paper. They were notes he wrote, all in a row, like bits of broken fence, like nowhere roads in the bush. Completely silent music. We stood on the front steps, Eli and the man and I, for almost an hour, not saying anything at all while we watched the notes come from his hand, though of course I heard nothing other than the click of the grasshoppers tossed in the wind. Later, Eli (who could read a chord chart, his only form of literacy) said that it was the strangest music he’d ever seen; he said it made him anxious, like he was under attack. I asked him, whispering, “So it’s not very good?” And Eli, startled, said, “No! It’s genius! It’s just not for people’s bodies, you know. More for their brains.” He sought the word. “Intellects.” It sounded funny coming through his long teeth.

The composer stayed with us for nearly a week, hardly saying a word, though we learned that his name was Daniel Zimmerman, and that he normally lived on Agnes Street, near the library downtown. We gave him Helen’s old room. He never seemed to sleep. It was nerve-racking having him around. He seemed unbearably vulnerable. I have never met a human being
with less
animal
in him. He filled page after page with those notes, and when I asked him to sing it, he gave me a look of such despair that I left off, only asked him, “Please eat something, then. Please, just this one sandwich, why don’t you?”

Saturday morning found him at the kitchen table as usual, still putting notes on paper, when through the window I saw a deer-like creature enter the yard, a diminutive young woman dressed in a shabby fur coat, despite the heat. She was sizing up our house, checking the yard for dogs, and then she stuck out her chin and approached. I opened the door to her. She saw the composer in our kitchen and cried out. The composer lifted his sunken eyes from his task. They looked at one another for several moments. I invited her in. She seemed surprised at my presence, and entered, her eyes on Daniel’s, like she was entering his cage. A slight thing with brown eyes, straight brown hair, her apprehension not quite fearful. A clicking distance between the two of them. Daniel spoke. “This is my wife,” he said. She leapt towards the word as if he’d tossed her a biscuit.
Wife
. Somehow the name didn’t stick.

It seemed she gained a certain stature when she wasn’t drained by her fascination with her objective husband. She offered her hand. She had that déclassé dignity you saw so often during the Depression. “Thank you for taking my husband into your home. I am Ida Zimmerman.”

I said I’d make tea. Daniel at last stood up and went to take her coat, and he fumbled trying to hang it on the hook by the door and then absently flung it over the woodbox. When he pulled out her chair for her, her hand darted out to touch his and he smiled slightly at her, oddly paternal, though they were
of the same age, in their twenties, and mawkishly serious. While Daniel was obviously not a mean man at all, his sadness was an
idea
, and as such, an exclusive part of him. Ida watched him admiringly, hungrily. She told us she’d taken the streetcar to the end of the line and then walked, walked for miles, each day going farther south, until she found our yard. While we talked, she leafed through the music, reading it apparently, because she looked up at him and murmured, “This would hurt the ears, Danny; so broken.”

The house was too stuffy. I left them and went out to milk the cow. For the moment, there was no wind. It was overcast, the day as warm and smooth as the inside of a wood chest. I was returning with a pail of milk when I saw, with some surprise, Helen’s yellow car drive up. A train drummed by, stirring the milk. The door to our cabin breezed open and Ida walked out. Without her bewildering coat, she looked very thin. Her dress was a dreary brown. She had a brave way of standing. Helen emerged from her Packard wearing a yellow crepe tea dress. She and Ida stared at each other, as if each presented to the other an entirely novel concept. Rich! thought Ida. Oh, thought Helen, Poor! It was an immediate bond, firm as plywood.

They were like two bristling young dogs in the kitchen. Helen was strangely covetous, watched Ida enviously. While we chatted, Ida stroked her husband’s hand. Helen must have smoked ten cigarettes. Eli couldn’t bear to look at her, so strained and artificial. She put another cigarette between her lips. Eli reached over and gently removed it. “There now,” he said. “There now.” Helen’s eyes filled up at her father’s reproach. She kept looking out the window. She was scared of something.

I tried to get her talking. “How ’bout that Royal Bastard
Bennett?” I said. R.B. Bennett had been elected prime minister three years earlier, and had proved to be a punitive overseer for the unemployed and the farmers blown off the land by drought.

Eli groaned and said, “Not worth the tanning fee.”

We winced at each other. Great way to calm down our daughter. But Helen had brightened. She seemed to shuck off an invisible golden cloak. She clasped her hands together in some ancient grieving act of prayer. “Goddamn bugger!” she cried out. “Bloody capitalist!” It stopped us all cold. The whole house shook. The rising wind battered the locusts into the walls of our wood shack.

Helen’s early education in the biographies of rich courtesans and wives had led us to believe that she had no interest in politics beyond an appetite for wealth. But in our recent visits to the Anderson house, Eli and I had been surprised to see in her rooms pamphlets and books of political theory, the old library we had foisted upon her in her youth—my favourite marital tract, Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class
, and her grandfather Peter’s dog-eared copy of
Capital
. I wondered how Richard would swallow his wife’s new interests. But more, I wondered what the salty winds of political criticism might do to the fractured soul of our beautiful daughter.

We were startled then by the sound of a car braking in the dust, and then Richard entered, quick as cold gin. Helen instinctively reached out to her father and touched his missing ear, her good luck charm. She was truant, defiant and uncertain.

Richard barely paused to register the existence of Ida and Daniel. He walked close to Helen, inches from her, and said hello as if it were a funny thing to say. Then he looked more
carefully at our guests (Ida sliding her arm around Daniel’s shoulder). Back at Helen: “You came here, did you?” Strangely, his statement did more to call Helen’s presence into question than to confirm her, yes, here. The only one obviously
present
was Richard.

“Dick!” I said. He stuck his hands in his pockets. Every chair was taken. He was as nervous as a propeller, spinning in tight circles. I wanted to hug the fear out of him, a sort of shuddering kindness—what people feel while they hold a bag of kittens under water. “You need a chair!” And we all scrambled to provide him with a place to sit, an ashtray, a cup of coffee, a little milk for his coffee.

At last, enthroned, he looked around. Again, that look of amusement. “It’s a shame what happened to you, Blondie,” he said, turning upon me his blue eye with its strange black sickle.

“What?” I asked. Considered. I was over sixty, so turning fifty wasn’t a big issue. Felt pretty good. Still had a cow. A sudden gust of wind blew dust under the door. I brightened. “Eli’s got a plan to fix the grasshoppers!” I told Richard proudly. “Tell him, Eli.”

The last thing Eli wanted to do was talk to Richard. But he was tempted. Since he’d had to give up the rodeo when the Depression hit, he’d fed his love for lyrics by reciting recipes, much like my dad once loved to do. And his recipe for grasshopper poison was a favourite. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to talk directly to his son-in-law. So he fixed his attention on Ida’s acorn brown eyes, as if it was she that needed to know. “You don’t know the green poison?” he asked. Ida smiled and looked at Daniel, hoping a story might interest him. “Well!” said Eli, “It’s, I take no credit for it, it’s God work.” When Helen heard
him say “God,” she winced and said, “Oh, fuck,” under her breath. Ida jumped. She and Helen exchanged a smile.

From his chair, Eli had a good view of the manure pile. He said, “In all of Creation, there is nothing as powerful as the attraction of locusts to horse manure.”

We all looked out. There they were, the pile covered with insects so it looked like the scales of a fish or shingles on a roof; it glittered and moved.