When Alice Lay Down With Peter (45 page)

Marie was at large, hovering over the sallow sea. Helen’s return was imminent, especially now that there was only water.
Dianna listened. She could not keep her eyes focused when the bullfrogs droned. Even in the sun, while her father was reading and water slapped against the house, she heard the footstep, felt the caress, and she slept.

I
WAS ALWAYS SWIMMING THEN
, when I walked down our road. Even in our living room, when we built it new, waltzing with Eli was wading with Eli, an effect not improved by our wonky sense of rhythm. The branches of trees were webbed with flax straw that floated up from septic fields, Gothic and hairy. Houses were turned inside out, swollen, distended couches and rugs, the colour of chicken fat, hauled out to the front yards. Our house had turned as black as a wet box of tissue. The old house, built by Peter and Alice. And Marie’s place, who knows how old it was.

We hauled everything out in buckets. Jack came back with us. He said he needed to get his plane. Richard showed up wearing tailored chest waders with railway gloves and a hunting cap. The trees were full of shredded sandbags that masked Richard’s approach, for he’d parked at the junction and walked down through the muck, like a landlord come to reclaim his castle after a peasants’ revolt.

It was Jack who greeted Richard. He walked up to meet him like a sentry. I watched from the doorway while the two men talked. Jack turned around and pointed at the roof. His glider, strapped down, its wings disengaged and laced to its sides, a trussed white goose.

Richard nodded and brushed by. He had an unfortunate blindness to whatever disturbed his consuming scheme of
things. Richard approved of the flood. It cleansed us of a lot of old junk. He worked with us for about nine hours. We tore down plaster and shovelled the mess into a dump truck. The smell was vegetable but sweet as blood, and it would sit in the back of your throat.

Richard worked non-stop, wordless, as hard as a man could work, though he was past fifty then. But he took one break, when Dianna purposefully, meaningfully, stood in his way. The two of them went for a short walk down the driveway. He appeared to be asking her the standard questions about school and hobbies and she giving him the standard answers. But the two of them were romancing. Dianna lisped beside him, toe in, tucking her straight brown hair behind her ear. She was feeling beautiful; I think she imagined that Richard admired her for her resemblance to her mother. Dianna didn’t look at all like her mother. She always watched the foreign map of Richard’s profile, but he never looked at her, though he was tuned to her presence. Richard soaked her up like she was a bandage on his wounded pride. And when Bill stumbled by with his buckets of rot, Richard lifted his head (age had lightened Richard’s hair from blond to an excessive eight-karat white gold, thick and wavy, very sensual), with a victorious and thoroughly covetous gleam in his eye.

At fourteen, Dianna appeared to be acquiring fathers. It was an era that demanded of women a gaggle of fathers, a parliament of dads. She twitched her skinny hips. The two fathers each, differently, nodded their paternal heads: Bill with his unspeakable compassion; Richard, a monarch with his subject.

Richard took up his shovel once again. I knew him to be
quickly bored and felt uneasy about his long stay with us that day. I wondered what he was after. Soon after, I discovered him out back, hiding behind the remains of the woodshed, being sick to his stomach.

“Can I get you something?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Funny smell,” he said, wincing and spitting phlegm.

“It is. You should quit. You’ve been a brick. A real Samaritan. I like your pants too.”

Richard, covered in the white cheese of waterlogged plaster, nodded; he never refused a compliment. I took his arm, and we walked towards his car.

“Richard!” I said. “A Cadillac!”

Richard retched again. He put his head down, looking at his putrid boots. “The Americans are miles ahead,” he said, and gagged. “That smell. It reminds me.”

We stood at his car. Shakily, he put the key in the lock and stood there, too sick to move. Then he said, “It was like that in the war. When we’d find a body. That’s how they smell coming out of the water. Very similar—consistency. Drownings.” Pause. “Now I’m talking like a real vet.”

I leaned up to pat his shoulder.

After a short while, he said, “Of course, my father stayed in the water. He would have been cleaned.”

“Richard,” I said, “the graves are everywhere.”

Something in my voice alerted him. “You never heard from her.”

“No.” Damn him. I hadn’t told anyone but Eli and Ida. Ida had looked at me with gently frustrated pity. “I know,” she
had said. “It was obvious. Finito died too. At the Ebro. Helen had false papers, so we never got told properly.”

Richard scanned the yard. Jack was washing down a chair for Eli to sit in. “Who is that fellow?” Richard asked.

“He… dropped in.”

“Is he foreign?”

“Aren’t we all?”

Richard shook his head with distaste. “What are you going to do?” he asked mildly.

He meant, how would we rebuild. Richard, as our private banker, knew very well we hadn’t any money. I’d had to borrow from him already the year before when we fell behind in our property taxes, and I hadn’t paid him back yet. I was light-headed, so I sat down on a dead tree fallen by the drive. I looked at my filthy old kilt, my skinny legs blotched with eczema, stuck in rubber boots.

Richard stood over me. “You’re going to need a loan to rebuild,” he said. “Almost no interest, just to cover my costs.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. He had been good to us. I suppose I was being perverse, but I decided then that I’d never tell him how Helen died. It was our private property, and I felt we needed something of our own just then.

With watery eyes, Richard sought Dianna. Dianna snapped to attention, as if he’d called her.

“D
ON’T WORRY
,” H
ELEN SAYS.
“The wind does not soothe, but the idea of wind soothes.” Helen’s hand strokes our hair. “Don’t worry any more.”

The memorials to the flood were a lot of new houses with plywood walls and teak veneer. But Bill (with Jack’s help and Richard’s money) built a graceful wood structure at the edge of their butterfly field. Marie’s grotto was nothing but four corner posts and an iron stove. But that is where Jack wanted to be, and he rebuilt the cabin much as Marie’s old place had been, following the logic of the stone base and the trees. Soon after, Marie returned. I saw her shadow walking in the woods. She looked content. Jack thought she was content too. “She keeps an eye on me,” he said.

Elsewhere on “our property,” because of Ida’s political affiliations, we were subject to a different kind of surveillance. The clicking phone, the occasional gleam of a camera lens. It was nutty, but the Canadian government saw Russian spies under every bush, and Ida was a sure candidate. While Ida and Bill, Eli and I protected ourselves with a level of duplicity thin as eggshell, Dianna was open to surveillance. She couldn’t possibly understand solitude, having never experienced it. She understood the world as a diagram or a formal plan upon which
our mad relationships ricocheted between points of observation. I guess she was a physicist. She saw the world as lines connected by force.

Her childhood was constructed out of wartime propaganda, but she was drawn into pubescence with the news of the Holocaust, its mechanisms conveyed to her by her godmother, Ida, who offered this information with heroic discretion. It was an era so sordid that everyone, even Stalin, wore pyjamas. My clear-sighted granddaughter told her best school friend and the RCMP that her periods had finally started. She was the true Canadian girl.

I never did tell Dianna about her mother’s death. Not in so many words. She saw it in the change of light, in the way time passed without mercy. But one day when I was cleaning her room, minding my own business, I came across a photograph of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, those rare birds, the discrete collection of Canadian lefties newly arrived in Spain back in ’36. The photo lay at the bottom of her drawer, hidden beneath her socks. My heart seized up, and I pulled it out. There were some handsome faces, but no one with Helen’s beauty. Then, one. A figure at the end of the line, must have been in some shadow thrown by a nearby building. A black cutout figure. Fist raised, palm forward. The optimistic, convivial group of men. And then this singular figure in the shade. I turned it over. On the back was written, “For Dianna, whose mother was brave. Jack.”

Dianna knew that her mother was dead. But that didn’t stop her from waiting, listening for the return. It spiked her resolve, and this is maybe peculiar to daughters; the errant
mother becomes a daughter’s burden, and a burden will make one hell of a loyal woman. Dianna’s loyalty would be to “our property,” the site of Helen’s abandonment and the scene of her eventual, infinitely deferred, return.

B
Y
THE TIME
D
IANNA WAS TWENTY
, in 1956, her virginity was nuclear. She stayed as far away as possible from Jack, clinging to the opposite end of his lazy attraction. Jack would disappear “up North” to work for a month or two, and then come back to live in Marie’s grotto. We gave him the bottom cup of the oxbow. We couldn’t see why not. We had more than enough space, and he paid his own expenses. He wore red flannel shirts in the summertime. He drank quite a bit and he smoked pot, which didn’t help our relationship with the Mounties. But he was free of the forthright, obvious, alert egoism of the 1950s.

Richard provided the money for Dianna to go to law school. Now her drawings were limited to the margins of law books. Buttercups bloomed over case law, the Bank Act, superior ovary, trust, sepals of calyx, inheritance tax, pistil. She wore sweater sets. She had lunch with Richard three times a week. I don’t know what they talked about, but knowing Richard, it would be free of substance and stuffed with bone-building bigotry against Indians, Jews, Communists and women. Subtle as fluoride, Richard distributed hatred as if it were in the best interests of those he hated. He was a most canny man, Richard, increasingly so with age. But Dianna, inured to speculation by her National Character, seemed unaware of Richard’s power over her. She liked his
style
.

It was on a Wednesday after lunch that Dianna entered our house, humming. “Gramma,” she said, and kissed my cheek. “Where’s Ida?” Seeing Eli: “Hey, Grandpa.” She put her cheek against his scarred head.

Eli, at ninety-something, had not lost his hand to diabetes, but his left leg was gone just under the knee. He was illegally blind, so he could still drive a car. His miraculous muscle tone was actually improved by these impairments. When Dianna came in, he was restitching the pommel of his Spanish saddle with a needle a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, pushing it through the leather with the knob of his lost thumb. I occupied a footstool beside Eli’s rocking chair. Above us, like stalactites, swung five small microphones. We looked up at Dianna. She hadn’t seen them. “What are you two smiling about?” she asked. And looked up. “Oh, my God.”

“We were cleaning the attic,” I said.

She walked between the mikes, waving her hand, making them sway, and started to speak but thought better of it. There was a dome of silence suspended from the rafters. For several moments, the three of us blinked at one another. The latch lifted. Bill walked in. He had dropped by when we found the first bug and was obviously surprised now to find so many. He came silently into the middle of the room and stood, his fingers pressed together in a sad sort of prayer, a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. He was so seldom compelled to speak, but this new reticence was a terrible satire.

When Dianna suddenly spoke, I thought I’d have a heart attack. “Jurisprudence,” she said, “coterminous with fiduciary care.” With her sweater set she wore a pleated skirt.
“Confidentiality,” she spoke into one mike, then another, “is intended to convey that extra quality in the relevant confidence that is implicit in the phrase ‘confidential relationship.’ ” She stopped and smiled at us, and then resumed. “Undue influence is commonly regarded as occasions when the will of one person has become so dominated by that of another that the person acts as the mere puppet of the dominator. Cf
Tate v Williams, Allard v Skinner
and
Morley v Lough.”
She made her way to the backroom—the room occupied by Ida ever since the death of Stalin and the marriage of JFK to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. Something in the concurrence of those two events had left Ida unhinged.

Years of police surveillance had made Ida intensely lonely. She was shadowed. We didn’t know how thin she had become until the muskrat coat finally fell apart, revealing a body ravaged by exegesis. We put her to bed, spooned honeyed milk between her lips. She whispered, “How kind,” and looked away, deliberating all possible interpretations of her words. The RCMP had decided a priori that she was a spy; their phone taps and observation were for the purposes of proving themselves right. Guilty till proven guilty, she became furtive and fraudulent. The police destroyed the integrity of her every action—brushing her teeth, mailing a letter—leaving her with chronic indecision.