When Alice Lay Down With Peter (46 page)

The bugs must have been put in our rafters when we were rebuilding after the flood, when we’d had to hire out some of the work. Ida’s depression grew more severe. We knew it might be terminal. The mikes were the idols of her spooky governance. She was one of those rare people who will fall in love with mankind. Communism had reached her on a beam of light. But now she shrivelled, dry as stone.

Even in her darkest depression, Ida never stopped reading the newspapers. Bedridden and emaciated, she renewed her subscriptions to
Vochenblatt, The New Republic, The New York Times
. Since Stalin’s death, information had been dribbling out about the purges. Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin, his “Secret Speech,” had reached her last summer—his long exposition of mass arrests, torture, false confessions, the purposes of terror. She had had to accept the fact that the Great Terror began not long after the time that she and Helen had ridden the rails, when Communism was still a campfire. Stalin had exterminated “Fascist” minorities, the Chechens, the Ingushes, the Karachins, the Balkars, the Tartars of the Crimea, the Kalmuks and the Germans of the Volga. Ida tried desperately to remember what she was doing on the twenty-third of February, 1944—the day the entire population of the Chechen-Ingush Republic, almost a million people, were arrested and removed to an unknown destination. Stalin turned his radiant eye upon the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Greeks and Jews. Ida gave herself the task of experiencing every death. It was torture tailor-made for an imaginative social democrat.

On the very same day we discovered the bugs in the rafters, Ida had learned that more than a hundred thousand people were fleeing the Soviets in Hungary. She understood that she had taken part in the biggest sting operation in human history.

Grief is lonely and often full of self-hatred. Ida sat in the tablet of sunlight by the window and stared down at the buttons of her dress, her sagging breasts, stockings the colour of Band-Aids. She took a Kleenex from her pocket, blew her nose,
returned it, like someone forced to care for an unpleasant relative. But she caught me looking at her from the doorway and beckoned to me. “Come in.”

Dianna joined us, chatting, leaving gaps in the dialogue that Ida would normally occupy. When Ida finally began to speak, the objects in the room flinched ever so slightly, no more than the shiver made in objects by our sudden perception, an almost invisible standing-to. “Do you see the days get a little longer?” she asked.

“The days are very long now!”

“Yes! And the snow is melting!”

“You don’t have to go overboard on my account,” said Ida. “A few minutes every day, a bit of colour in the dawn and a sunset bigger than a mackerel’s eye, that’s all I ask.”

Life
magazine saved I
DA’S LIFE
. Dianna brought the magazine to her to show her an ad for a movie called I
Married a Communist
. The Communist in question was a “Nameless, Shameless Woman! Trained in an art as old as time!” It starred Laraine Day. “Obviously,” said Ida, “I’m a blonde. With very big breasts.” She was really ill by then; perhaps she’d had a mild heart attack, I don’t know, but she was weakening. She laughed for Dianna’s benefit, and then began to cough. Dianna opened the window and the wind blew the pages of the magazine where it lay on the bed. It was the special VE day issue, full of wartime photographs. Ida stopped coughing. She went quiet. She didn’t touch the page but drew herself up till she was hovering over the magazine. The smoke from Churchill’s cigar hung in the air. Roosevelt sat in the middle and Stalin on the right. Roosevelt
wore a cape over a suit, looking long of limb, capable of dance, like an artist stuck between two generals, their chubby necks squeezed by wool collars. “The Big Three at Yalta, 1945,” the caption read, “where the shape of post-war Eastern and Central Europe was decided.” Just the three of them. Doing all that.

“The gods,” whispered Ida under her breath.

Churchill, Roosevelt, even Stalin, took the sickness from Ida’s body and gave her back a marvellous sense of personal futility. She was a pawn. From the disease of indiscriminate social responsibility, the lion that had nearly torn her limb from limb, Ida had been saved. She felt herself shrink-wrapped, a garlic sausage, a single item on the great shelf of history, just one irregular heartbeat.

I
see
no end of it, but the turning upside down of the entire world.        
—Erasmus

Only the gumbo is immortal.       
—Blondie McCormack

I
DA STARTED TO COLLECT PHOTOGRAPHS
of duets and trios caught in a moment, very particular, as moments are. Sometimes, but not necessarily,
deciding the shape of post-war Europe
. Sometimes just hanging around.

She was fond of one that was particularly offhand: Winston Churchill standing beside a fireplace with Canada’s secretary of state, Lester B. Pearson. Pearson, whom everybody called Mike, is smiling that toothy, wholesome smile, whereas Churchill looks dyspeptic and embarrassed. Maybe what’s embarrassing Churchill is the fact that Mike Pearson is wearing the exact same clothes as he is. Exact. The bow tie, the deep blue pinstripe suit, the watch chain; they’re doing the same thing with their hands, left hand in trouser pocket, right hand holding a cigar in front of a paunch in a vest. Ida loved that picture. They looked liked such nice men, just standing around after dinner. It helped her to start getting dressed in the morning.

She got out of bed mostly for Dianna’s benefit. Dianna
watched Ida like a baby hawk. If Ida hadn’t made it, she would have proved to Dianna that her mother had been afraid when she died. That may not be reasonable, but it’s true. So Ida rallied and tried her best to become reacquainted with the world.

Here we were, with the Second World War vets all grown up and running the show less than twenty years after yet another armistice, and it seemed
natural
to consider the circumstances in which we were about to experience an atomic war. It must have been all that war-jism. Dianna accepted the threat of nuclear war as if it were a birthmark on the face of reality. Bill, Ida, Eli and I were stumped. We wanted to protect Dianna from fear, but we didn’t know how to do that, short of giving her an anaesthetic, and we did think she should be awake, aware. It was a dilemma. I had to work a miracle. So—I made a casserole and set the table.

Soft food was just the thing. Here we were, trying to provide Dianna with a sense of terra firma in Canada, with nothing better to offer than a lunatic prime minister named John Diefenbaker, an overwrought prairie lawyer forced to play monkey in the middle between Russia and the States, two superpowers at high noon. Yes, I thought, in a pinch, make a shepherd’s pie. I sat Ida at the head of the table and passed her a quart of the casserole on a paper plate. “Worcester sauce?” I offered.

She took it reluctantly, saying, “Why are we doing this gravy stuff?” She added grumpily, “I don’t know if I can eat.” The pressure had been building up intensely with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ida spread the shepherd’s pie miserably about her soggy plate and put down her fork, bursting out, “Let’s face it. Diefenbaker’s nuts. We’re looking at a nuclear holocaust, and we’ve got a complete nutcase as our prime minister.”

A pause. Bill, tired, seated cross-legged on his dining-room chair and wearing his white cotton pyjamas, said, “It
is
a bit tricky.” We all stared into our mashed potatoes.

“We’ve got to keep things in, um, perspective,” I said brightly. “Diefenbaker makes this country seem… 
small.”

“Small,” said Bill.

I passed the creamed corn. “Eat what’s put before you.” And went on. “Our prime minister is a Saskatchewan man. He may be paranoid, yes. But he’s paranoid in such a
Canadian
way.”

“Paranoid about his Eaton’s card,” said Eli. I plucked his paw from his lap and kissed it.

“Paranoid about the air-defence agreement with the States,” I said, waving the margarine before Ida’s nose.

“Paranoid about being a nuclear ballboy,” said Eli.

“I’m proud of that,” I said. “I really am.”

Eli’s blood sugar took a sudden surge. “Diefenbaker hates being a serf to the Americans.”

“He hates it!” chimed Bill.

“For sure!” said Eli.

Ida peered at Eli and Bill,
through a glass darkly
. Suddenly she figured it out, turned to Dianna and chirped, “What a guy!” and bit into a slice of Wonder Bread.

Dianna watched Ida chew. “Paranoid about Kennedy,” she said, as if in her sleep.

Bill moved over to crouch at his daughter’s side. “Khrushchev’s not paranoid about Kennedy,” he said softly. “Khrushchev’s
worried
about Kennedy.” Bill ran his hand over Dianna’s forehead. “Nobody’s going to be paranoid any more, Dianna. The war is over. We’re at peace.” His lie sat on the
table. Ida cleared her throat, embarrassed.

“President Kennedy thinks Prime Minister Diefenbaker is an idiot,” said Dianna. “That’s what Richard says.” She yawned.

“Shhhhh,” said Bill.

“Dief doesn’t care,” I lullabied. “He’s
used
to that kind of thing. He’s a Western Canadian.”

We had strawberry cheesecake with whipped cream in the living room, with the TV on but the sound off. Ida kept shaking her head, saying, “What
is
this stuff?” I followed it up with a nice cup of Ovaltine, turning down the lights, speaking softly, “Diefenbaker wants
the North
, like a
frontier
. Imagine. An enormous landscape with a tiny ecosystem, huge and fragile as an obese little girl.” Ida yawned. Dianna laid her head upon her godmother’s shoulder. I removed their plates, softly, softly. “One sneeze with DDT and every gull’s egg falls to pieces.”

“That was rather
good,”
said Ida. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

We were stuffed into obeisance. Outside caromed the moonless night. The sky was a bulletproof ceiling, remote-controlled, ready to fall on our heads. Ida had come up. And the governments had bunkers
underground
, and the missiles were hidden in submarines in the surrounding seas and in thick lead silos buried deep in the deserts. Ida said she could hear the missiles whistling down under the earth. She always did have good hearing.

R
ICHARD FOUND
D
IANNA
a position in Winnipeg’s most limestone law firm—what he called “the old firm,” which meant no
Ukrainians or Jews. It made her an instant “spinster,” or what they’d soon call “a women’s libber.” She dressed the part, but you could see the heat build up in her, especially when Jack was around. Though she was only twenty-six, Dianna considered herself dry around the ears. She sustained a lonely life. She saw a lot of Richard.

Richard was the most static man. He absolutely would not let anything happen. Nervous people have a hard time with change.

Dianna was determined to remain lucid. Her mother had been a romantic. So Dianna was anti-romantic. She didn’t realize that Richard was a romantic too. A nervous romantic is a dangerous thing. Richard was especially nervous about Jack.

Among her many dads, Dianna’s real father, Bill of the butterfly garden was neither romantic nor entirely rational. Bill walked beneath the shattered sky as transitive as a new leaf. In his white pyjamas, he walked so much that he remained lithe and light. Somehow my dark daughter had given us this bright man full of grace.

With Helen gone, poor Dianna had no mother to kill. I did try to offer up myself; I criticized, drew inaccurate analogies from my own life, read her diary, felt hurt and anxious. I did what I could, but she didn’t take the bait. And she misunderstood her father’s scepticism. In her hungry mouth, his indifference tasted of bile. She might have avoided romanticism, but she sure got trapped by rage.

In the era of “mega-deaths,” of intercontinental ballistic missiles and all that bogus sanity, it was easy to mistake scepticism for cynicism. The poor kid started to believe in some kind of
anxiety she liked to call Man’s Freedom. (At the time, I guess she was a man.) Despite her position at the old firm, Dianna began to talk about “taking action against American imperialism.”

“What are you staring at?” I asked her. She was transfixed by the blank television set.

“Things as they are,” said she.

“Darling,” I said, and handed her an old sketch pad from her girlhood, “if I fetch you a dead squirrel, won’t you draw us a nice picture?”

She kissed my withered cheek. “Peace, Gramma. I’m going to kick butt.” Then she rubbed her lip. I’d discovered the energy to deliver a small jolt.

She rode off to deface an
American
flag at the Legislative Building. She was, she said, politically
involved
. Dianna was mad. So was the Hungarian refugee who took the placard reading “PIGS GET OUT OF CUBA” out of Dianna’s hands and broke it over her head. When she came to, she was in the back seat of my car, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, bleeding all over my leather seats, being driven home by the same Hungarian (weeping) who had rifled through her wallet till he found her address, who drove her all the way to St. Norbert, who backed out of the car apologizing, I think, in Hungarian, I guess, who was last seen walking north back to Winnipeg in a most abject state, of whom we have not heard since.