When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  When I’d finished with Helen, she went into the house. I listened, but they didn’t talk. I tossed out the water and took my things to the kitchen. Eli was releasing Helen from a hug, and as he did so, he placed his wounded paw against her face and looked at her with a strange, intense objectivity. She smiled, shy, almost apologetic, and slipped out of reach. Eli went back outside without speaking to either of us. Next thing I knew, he was in the corral, working with his horse, hour by hour.

  That was a Friday. By Saturday, Eli was a gun-slinging, cow-punching, bronc-breaking rodeo cowboy. Suddenly he could yodel and spit, and his legs grew more bent than ever and his eyes, which had widened into a farmer’s guileless gaze, narrowed with perpetual mirth and his voice, which had got higher, a breathy tenor as high-pitched as the wind in grass, burrowed deep into his barrel chest like he’d swallowed his own larynx. He suddenly knew the words to more than five hundred songs. By Sunday, Eli was stewing coffee over an open fire, and that night he took me to bed outside on a bedroll smelling of cow dung, and he leaned over me and looked down with those brand-new wrinkles and sang a sad ballad about his mother. Not Marie, but some old white kind of Ma. It was just a song.

  He grew reckless, restless, solitary, but I loved this version of my husband too. Eli could turn into a blue-eyed bat; love is permanent.

  We let the farm go that spring, much of it fallow, just a few acres of rye. For my part, I got hold of some cabbage seeds and radish, onion and garlic and turnip, anything that tasted hot or grew underground. Potatoes, carrots, a half-acre of gladioli. With the money I was making as John Anderson’s cook, I bought a trailer and hitched Peter’s black stallion to it, and we kicked and cantered back and forth from the river to my garden with water, for all the days of May and June were dry. Eli continued to sleep outside, so I did too, though it wasn’t my first choice. I found an old jib sail in the basement of the Andersons’ house and rigged up a tent to keep off the dew.

  I rose with Venus and rode to town in time to cook the Andersons’ breakfast. Helen was always with me. On one hand, she was indifferent to me, favouring the company of her cowboy dad. But she insisted on coming to the Andersons’, and I was very glad to have her. She was bewildering. She didn’t really like me much, and we were stilted in conversation. I was always stunned by her beauty. Maybe that’s what made her standoffish. I was forever staring at her, backing up for a better look, then zooming in on her flawless skin, the curve of her shoulders, the slim bone of the clavicle, her dark blue eyes, lush black eyelashes and brows.

  Helen liked to polish the silver, and she knew every serving spoon and ladle. She loved the mother-of-pearl fish cutlery, she said, palming them, the weight of them and how cool to touch. She liked to polish everything, glass chimneys, crystal, to oil the oak and walnut wainscotting of the Andersons’ dining room, though there were other servants for that. But Helen did not polish or oil like a servant. Hers was an act of ownership and intimacy and defence. She loved the swinging door between kitchen and dining room. Through it she passed to a richer world.

  She wandered freely through their house. She would be gone for hours, and then come back to the kitchen smelling of candle wax and gardenias and stand mystified beside me at the sink, watching potato peelings fall from my hands, their odour of earth, their mud eyes. I let her be. When she’d been quiet awhile, she would sigh and then talk in a desultory way. She said there were coloured balls of clay in the billiard room upstairs. She pinched a bit of raw pastry from a bowl that sat in a larger bowl full of cracked ice and put it in her mouth. Then she dipped into the pocket of her apron and produced a grey stone, holding it out to me, a petrified egg. “What is it?” she asked.

  “A piece of moon,” I said.

  “What’s it for?”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “At Mrs. Anderson’s bath. She’s got her own bathroom, Mama. Even Mr. Anderson doesn’t go in there.”

  I held the moon full of holes, a rough, hard product of Mrs. Anderson’s bath. “Throw it out, child,” I said. “Poor thing. No wonder she’s daft.”

  “Did she make it with her body?” Helen began to laugh.

  “She is a turtle, Helen. At night, she turns into a turtle and sleeps in the bath.”

  THEY GAVE HER CLOTHES. At first I thought it was patronizing and therefore quite safe. As long as they felt that Helen was beneath them, they couldn’t harm her, their weapons would be misdirected. Shawls and such, lace collars, a nearly new pair of shoes. Then she found a way of wearing them that was entirely her own. She would costume herself and walk from our backroom with her consciously distracted attitude, like a dragonfly clicking its wings in the kitchen, strangely exotic and purposeful. She didn’t sit; she hovered. She was still a child. A faint mauve vein ran over the petal flesh of her eyelid.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MR. AND MRS. JOHN ANDERSON, KC, and son were throwing a party: one hundred guests in the ballroom, an eight-piece orchestra, music so sentimental it made your teeth hurt, people dancing with their collective heart on their sleeve and their respective noses in the air.

  A respectable lady is led by her nose, neither too much nose nor too little. Her father’s, her husband’s, fortune will be the moat about her womanhood, should she be properly governed by her proboscis. Wearing silk with lambswool and horsehair brocade, the women seemed to sail on their slippers to the bathroom, as if their destination was a silly detour en route to a real throne.

  I’d spent three days preparing for that party. Helen and I stayed in town, rather than making the journey to and fro so early and so late. We slept in the little room off the kitchen. I missed Eli, but it was pleasant there, with only the work in the warmth from the stove and the dewy breath of my daughter asleep beside me.

  The night before, I’d woken up to an empty bed. Her pillow was cool. This was new. I had risen countless times in cold winter nights to care for her as a baby, but I’d never been forced out to search for a delinquent.

  The house was sleeping, snowlit. I walked a path of Persian wool through panelled walls and walnut beams and cornices. There was a fire burning in the west room. By its light I saw them sitting: Richard in a chair, Helen on a couch. I was struck by the complete absence of tension between them. Richard was draped catlike across the chair, his gold hair rather long, wavy, shining around his narrow face, his nearly feminine beauty. Helen leaned against pillows with her knees curled beneath a mohair throw, her head supported by her hand. By the fireglow, something gleamed on her throat. They were undistressed by my appearance; Richard hardly glanced at me while he completed some inane commentary. I walked close to my daughter and reached down to touch a string of pearls around her neck, a double strand, cream with pink shadows, cool as a breeze.

  “Who gave you this?” I asked her.

  Helen’s half-smile, a nod towards Richard, who remained blandly sitting, a hint of pride. “They’re pretty,” he said. “Father found them at Panama.”

  “They come from oysters, Mama.”

  Richard put his small hand over his mouth and smiled. He crossed his knees over the side of his chair. “We’re having oysters tonight,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find one inside. Put another log on, will you, Barbara?”

  “You realize Helen can’t accept your gift.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “No, of course not,” he said. “But I would like you to keep them for her until you feel she is old enough to accept them.”

  “If you hurt my daughter, I will kill you. You do know that.”

  He smiled again. A large mobile mouth with full lips. “I wouldn’t hurt Helen in a thousand years.”

  The effect upon Helen was palpable, though she barely moved. He felt it, and looked at her over his handsome little fingers. “I wouldn’t, honest to God.”

  He began and ended with pearls. Good taste was Richard’s only virtue. It is terrifying that style should wield such power.

  I was too busy to worry any more that day. Blue oysters lay in cr
ates of shaved ice. The local knife-sharpener spent hours shucking them, and the kitchen smelled of the sea and the icy air made me light-headed. We did find one small baroque pearl, as grey-blue as snow in the clouds. I told no one but gave it to the knife-sharpener, who said he had a little girl at home and it would make her very happy.

  John Anderson liked the kitchen. He’d bring one or two cronies in for a conversation without party noise. He always said, “Hello, Blondie,” and then leaned against the counter with his arms crossed while his guests stood uneasily looking into the servants’ territory, trying to keep clean. One thing about hanging out with rich people: you’ll always know what’s going to happen in the future. Rich people know more than others about what’s coming because they’re the ones pulling the strings.

  Thrice, he arrived through the red velvet, padded door: once with a thin gentleman wearing a monocle; once with a chubby gentleman smoking a cigar; once with a fat gentleman drinking a martini. From the thin man, I learned that the biggest, most unsinkable ship ever made was soon to be afloat off the coast of England. From the chubby man, I learned that the biggest canal ever dreamed of was being dug in the muck between North and South America and it would bring prosperity to all. And from the red-faced fat man, I learned that Germany was ambitious but she would never be foolhardy. All in all, it looked like the world was growing more glamorous, more powerful and much, much safer than ever before, and I was glad I’d brought a child into the cradle of humanity.

  THE ANDERSONS ENTERTAINED perpetually, though not on such a large scale. Mrs. Anderson’s errand of the day was to find her way to my kitchen. She did not stint in her duty but came right in, nearly to the stove. She looked directly at the top of my curly head and said, “Twelve for dinner, Barbara.” I made friends with the grocer, Buchanan, and told him to send the freshest and the best and make us first before anybody could even know about the sturgeon caviar or the Mediterranean artichokes.

  The maid fell in love with the delivery boy, a terrible cliché but she was kind of dumb. I knew that it was an infatuation, and that she’d need to keep her job, so I served dinner on the nights she was hiding in the garage kissing him in the back seat of John Anderson’s Model T. Thus I furthered my education. Those dinners were the equivalent of the evening news.

  Offering the Andersons’ guests a deceptively simple meal of asparagus and lamb with mint jelly, I learned that Austria would fend off the attack from Russia with just a little help from Germany (and at the edge of this discussion, the women dipped in and out like Labradors at a beach, “Sophia Phillips had a German butcher…”), and that the French wouldn’t get involved at all because the Morocco thing was a red herring and Lord knows it will go no further. (“Phillips? The kaiser had a cousin called Phillips, but a German way of saying it. Phillipmunster or like that, I think; Phillipvagner, something, I’m sure.”) Because the Germans wouldn’t touch Belgium when they knew the whole world would be at their throats (“Is Germany a real country? I mean, it was Napoleon, wasn’t it? Bismarck? My father always said, but I can’t quite recall…”), and the new king would never let Great Britain get involved in a continental argument, but if they did, by Jeezus, we had the navy, and that fellow Churchill had created a first rate Admiralty.

  “There’s going to be a war,” I said. I hadn’t realized that I was speaking my thoughts out loud. Everyone stopped talking. John Anderson leaned back, eased his trim belly and gracefully adjusted his trousers. “Well, we certainly hope that you are mistaken, Blondie,” he said.

  I was carrying two silver chafing dishes, the edges of which I rested upon the buffet. I was overcome. I somehow just knew there would be a war. You get a different idea of things when you’re the invisible cook in the kitchen, listening in from the edges. I had been filled with a reawakened grief for my friend Clark. I heard John Anderson’s voice as a swimmer will hear a call from shore. He was speaking with his guests. “Blondie is quite the political philosopher,” he said. Everyone laughed.

  His tone was not unkind, but I felt powerless and utterly sad. I did not let them see my face. Punishing myself, I looked under the rock of memory, where black beetles secrete puffy white eggs, and there I saw the severed shoulder, bulged eye of my friend, my lost Clark. Another war was coming. I felt it in my bones.

  “You are a very indulgent employer,” said one of the younger women at the table, putting her hand on John Anderson’s arm.

  I took up my dishes and made for the kitchen. John Anderson’s voice followed me. “I would like a word with you, Blondie, when our guests have gone.”

  My back to them so they would not see my pain. The velvet puckers of that stupid door like wounds on obesity. Clark had been dead for ten years. At the dinner table, the company laughed again. I turned towards the foolish guests, bumped open the swinging door with my backside and entered my domain.

  John Anderson did come to speak with me while I was cleaning up the last dishes, but it was not to reprimand me for speaking out before his guests. He wanted to talk about the possibility of war. We talked for a long time that night, and many times afterwards, in a rich season of friendship. He approached me always as a possibility distinct but unverifiable. Perhaps he treated everyone that way. He was a speculator, a habit of mind that found him friends in all walks of life, though he was thoroughly upper class, like a character actor or a lark in a glass cage. His place in the city’s establishment was both his strength and his weakness; it gave him the innate power to go wherever he chose while it denied him relevance. He was himself a luxury.

  His law practice had become for him a genteel hobby. He was preoccupied with real estate and racehorses. Outside the phlegmatic decorum of his shady mansion, and quite distinct from his dutiful friendship with Mrs. Anderson, John Anderson was chrome before the invention of chrome, a jet engine, a fax machine. Hearing the news of the great canal at Panama (and with his characteristic aerial view, he recognized at once that Winnipeg would no longer be the Chicago of the North, no longer the hub for transcontinental rail traffic), he travelled south in person to see it. He didn’t understand distance; he thought everywhere was here. He was never on time for business meetings because he never did figure out that everything in Winnipeg is and always has been twenty minutes away.

  Yes, he was a capitalist, and yes, he loaned me money (no interest, and I paid him back faithfully, for Eli’s new love of rodeo did not yet feed the farm), and yes, I was and will remain fond of him even when he appalls me, and it is a documented (by a photograph) fact that when he drove out to St. Norbert on speculation that the south bend of the Red might be worth development, and I introduced him to my mother and father, Peter turned his back and Alice raised her hands before her in the shape of a cross. Eli would have nothing to do with him. In fact, I guess Eli really hated him. But he didn’t say anything because it would have looked like he resented my liberty as a working woman.

  I was distracted by my friendship with John. Together we watched the gathering clouds of war. There was a thoroughness in Winston Churchill’s naval administration that put the lie to diplomacy. “Boys like to fight,” said John. And then he sobered. I knew he was thinking of his leonine son, Richard. “Surely there won’t be conscription.” He looked to me for confirmation.

  “Kitchener has no faith in Territorials,” I said slowly, for I was loath to make him anxious. “If Germany has 250,000 men, Britain will need a third more. There are surely that many in the reserves.”

  “Is he a strong general? Kitchener?” John Anderson looked like a boy when he asked questions like this. I felt like Rudyard Kipling, O best beloved. John Anderson did not treat me as an equal, but he approached me as a storyteller. He heard stories as parable, and understood that they are as false as they are true, in equal proportions, in equal tension; this is the nature of suspension.

  I could only shrug. “He is well-meaning,” I said. We laughed sadly. “He’ll kill as many of the enemy as he can. He’ll offer up the faithful British Islanders,
and then he’ll come looking in the colonies for more young men and offer them up too.”

  “I hear he’s awfully excited about the new rifle.”

  I nodded. “In the Boer War, more people died of disease than got shot.”

  We both sighed.

  Gently, I offered, “Maybe Richard would enjoy the navy.”

  John Anderson stood up nervously. “There won’t be a war.”

  “Maybe you’d better try him on the water. See if he’s got sea legs. He sailed that little wood boat when he was a boy, didn’t he? I’ll bet he’s a natural sea dog.”

  Mr. Anderson stopped. “Put Richard on a boat?”

  “Sure. Just a fun boat. For fun.”

  And so it was decided. And John Anderson knew just the boat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  RICHARD ACCEPTED HIS FATHER’S PLANS to see England and France as his right, scarcely nodding. “That would be nice,” he said, giving his father one quick look. “A very nice thing.” The cast-iron Mrs. Anderson granted permission to make the preparations on her behalf, and stood patient as a fence post while the dressmaker and the milliner stitched a new wardrobe.

  They would be gone six months. When he heard the news, Eli nodded, took his guitar outside for his own private celebration. At first, I was relieved too. We needed a sabbatical from the John Anderson family. We both wanted Helen out of Richard’s languorous reach.

  I planned to begin Helen’s education in earnest. My own scholarly pursuit of irrelevance had persuaded me of the absolute relevance of all things. My nerves were worn; I’d been working too hard, and that might account for the preternatural vividity of all things.

  Cabbage butterflies, for instance. I had to stop to think about it. Does their flight have a purpose? They eat. Do they have teeth? I didn’t have time to look. I was anxious to know. Are we sure they eat? White wings in updrafts of sunlight.