When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  We thought she was merely boarding a floating restaurant. What can we do with the occasion of our child’s pain?

  CHAPTER TEN

  ON ENTERING THE DINING ROOM at night aboard ship, it is the men’s white collars that you will see first, their black tuxedos invisible, the candles blown out by sea breezes. It’s dark. The pale flesh of their hands and faces, cigar smoke, and eventually, the nacreous glow upon the women’s tall necks, and dinner in the main salon may be observed.

  Richard has never been so handsome. His is the most fashionable attire. While the older men may have something interesting to say, Richard’s amused silence, like a secret enforced by his own small hand at his lips, holds for Helen all potency.

  American gentlemen, a senator named Remington and a banking something. The Remington senator reaches for an ashtray, touches Helen’s arm, turns with gruff Bourbon civility to apologize and really looks at her for the first time. He says nothing to Helen, but he draws on his cigar and then tips it at John Anderson. “Pretty girl,” he says, without much of the drawl of the second-class passengers, but with a boldness sufficient to cause John Anderson to lean privately to his ward’s beautiful ear and suggest it is time to say good night.

  She retires unwillingly. Does not undress or remove her strand of pearls. Does not scribble or read or fully think, but runs her hands down her satin gown. Up and down.

  Richard lingers with the men. He has, at the end of his line, a beautiful fish.

  In the chaos that follows, Helen retains several images. One of Richard climbing into a lifeboat with the women and children. Is it the terror of the night that has reduced him to childhood?

  Then the black, heaving back of the sea. Thirty-five people in the lifeboat. With the exception of the bosun and Richard, all of them are women with their children. Helen is colder than she has ever been. So cold when her small group of survivors pulls alongside the Carpathian, where ropes descend and arms reach to pull them up to safety, so cold that her hand has frozen to the gunnel and the sailor sent down to get her thinks she’s in shock. Her isolate calm spooks him, and he pries off each finger with a fearful viciousness disguised by the dark. He breaks three of Helen’s fingers. They haul her up by her arms because she can’t hold on to anything. Standing on the Carpathian, she looks at her hand. It is a dead bird; the pain shrills when she thaws and the swelling starts.

  Richard, as one of a collection of women and children. His handsome tuxedo a costume. Helen comes to know counterfeit.

  They disembark at New York, and at last we learn that she is alive. She is sent home to us, Richard too, with Mrs. Anderson, who does not walk, and they are collected by John Anderson’s lawyers while we take Helen away, and no one speaks. No baggage. No bodies in caskets, no corpses at all. Fifteen hundred people are drowned, their bodies consumed by tiny organisms, leaving behind jewels and many pairs of shoes. The ocean makes a clean sweep.

  After that there are debutantes. In various pockets around the world, there will always be debutantes and their boys in evening dress. There are always Titanics, with lovely people dancing over treacherous seas. Our thirst for glamour remains. It is the innocence that we must, at this juncture in our story, pronounce extinct. Three men and one boy from Winnipeg died when the Titanic went down, which tells us more about the bold aspirations of this town in those days than would any figures for grain sales. The Chicago of the North. The icy sea swallowed the entire Edwardian era in one gulp.

  Helen moved back into her little room. She’d finally grown taller than I was. I think I was afraid of her; I didn’t want to make her fly off.

  I miss John Anderson. For a long time after, I was careful to be chilly with everyone. Despite their goodwill and imagination, for all their beauty and charm and brilliance and nice suits and plans for the future, people have a tendency to die.

  I WENT BACK TO WORK for Mrs. Anderson. For several months, I drove to her house early and worked in the kitchen with a brittle sort of clarity. In the profound absence of John Anderson, KC, our relations in the house were altered. With Richard at the head of the family, Helen was no longer a girl. I went alone.

  John Anderson’s drowning plunged a hole in the painted canvas that once made our world seem absolute. There was a constant buzz in my ear. I proceeded from the premise that there would be a bookend for the encyclopedia of our grief.

  It was many weeks before I saw Richard; he was leaving by the summer doors leading from the sunroom. I said hello, and he froze for a few seconds before turning smoothly. He tried some unctuous chat and then dropped it. Looked at me with hurt, furtive eyes.

  I suppose people thought Richard had grown up, assumed responsibility. Must look after his mother now, be a better man at business than John, bless him, but a man can’t be too soft, and John… well, he’s gone now, and what an awful way to go, makes me shiver.

  Richard firmed up. The vague, casual boy became a series of taut muscles pinned to loose joints, a combination of soldier and ragtime dancer. No longer pensive or bored. Where once the house was calm with a thoughtless inheritance, a long measure without any expectation of change (which is uncanny, that an upper class can be invented out of homesteaders, truly, as if there had been countless generations of John Anderson, KCs, and their sons; in that house, built to emulate the British upper class, it was easily forgotten that the aristocratic lifespan of John Anderson’s lineage was about ten minutes), it seemed now to be a queer, chipper place, as if all the rugs had been removed. You couldn’t avoid the sound of shoes on the floor. The clocks chimed and the hours still equalled sixty minutes, but the big brass pendulum would surely swing loose on the quarter-hour and kill somebody. Richard was nervous.

  Mrs. Anderson would not get out of the bath. She lived in the porcelain tub, in a room white with steam. She called me, her voice like a lamb’s or a sea creature’s, sounding the foghorn of her fear. “Baarbaaraa!” I would fetch the kettle and go to her. Her skin was pulling away like butter in water, swelling up in the bath. She had a rather pleasant body, but for its gradual disintegration, and I was sorry to see her come apart. She was near-sighted and declined to wear her glasses while she “soaked,” as she liked to call it. I’d enter, quickly shutting the door behind me to keep the room hot, stunned by the conservatory humidity, and Mrs. Anderson would look up, blinking through the steam with the nocturnal defencelessness peculiar to near-sighted people, her pale, softening face above rather broad shoulders and plump breasts resting upon the folds of her stomach. “Oh, you brought me more hot,” she would say. “How kind you are.” She would turn her face away while I poured the water by her potato-like feet, and her eyelids would flutter in despair.

  So it went, while the real world grew ripe and green and hard and rooted and dried and snowed and froze and then melted and grew ripe again. Richard was somehow too old to go with his chums to the university. But he bought a seat at the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and began to make a lot of money trading futures. His youth and the circumstances of his father’s death isolated him from the others of his class, and he was declined a membership in the Manitoba Club, it was said, until he came of age.

  He liked to row in summer, and he grew strong. He played a good game of golf. His neck and chest were muscular, but his face remained narrow, a golden face framed by golden hair. As he got very rich, he became as porous as the pumice stone beside his mother’s bath. He never frowned, but he never fully smiled either; he always looked as if he’d tricked somebody and they must have liked it. He was pleased. And he was wounded.

  Living in a small city made it much worse. There was a moratorium on Richard’s respectability. He was haunted by an unspoken question; it hung in the air, made him jaunty with loneliness. Everyone needed to know, before fully gripping his hand, before opening their smiles to his eloquent mask: What saved Richard and what sank John? Everyone had liked John. Why was Richard here? A father without a grave. It made Richard an eternal son.

  And at home with her dad, Eli,
Helen shut herself in her room. Through her closed bedroom door, we heard her voice accompany her dead grandmother’s lament. Marie, inspired by our bereavement, had become an almost gladsome dirge, a marimba plunking, yet always with that vertiginous, descending atonality.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1914

  I don’t want a hyena in petticoats talking politics at me. I want a nice gentle creature to bring me my slippers.

  —Sir Rodmond Roblin, premier of Manitoba, to Nellie McClung, suffragist

  GERMANY ENTERED BELGIUM the day the United States opened the Panama Canal. Things had been fairly quiet on the home front. Mrs. John Anderson had been in the bath for more than two years. She looked like a parsnip.

  With John gone, Richard came downstairs. He worked in his father’s library, which was at the front of the house, in the northeast corner, lamp-lit even on the sunniest days and cool. Like his father, Richard worshipped telecommunications. He spent the day on the phone, and when he went downtown it was to send telegrams or play with the phones at the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. He had not made contact with Helen since April 1912, when the train had brought them home empty-handed from New York. He slipped into adulthood the way a soldier slips into uniform. His adolescent hideout had been a room beside the billiard room on the third floor. But now he had no time for billiards. A bulb had burnt out on the landing and no one bothered to replace it.

  The day the war started, my mother, Alice, got mad at a newcomer just moved in across the road, and she hitched Eli’s stallion to the harrow and ran over the man’s dog. It was partly an accident, but it upset her so badly she decided to resign from the Political Equality League (a group of social reformers and suffragists), which had been the secondary source of her distress. The League had been her hope and her life till then, but Alice was suffering from jealousy and shame.

  Alice had been aiming to destroy the man’s lawn. He had bought ten acres of MacDonald’s farm. MacDonald (what they called an original settler because we’d lost the record of the grottos beneath his homestead) had grown too old, and with the exception of one son, who was a rancher in Alberta, his offspring had moved to Winnipeg, where they’d bought half a dozen apartment blocks and established a rental agency. Nobody wanted the farm, so old MacDonald was selling it off, piece by piece. My mother was of the opinion that it was degenerate to sell anything less than 160 acres at a time. Then when the newcomer planted a neat tea towel of Kentucky bluegrass and a tiny flowerbed, Mum saw red. A family of burrowing owls had been living in that field, which had never been cultivated, and there were tentative pools of lady’s slippers that had bloomed just that spring after an invisible presence of nine years (Alice had counted the years; she thought the invisibility of the pouting blooms signified her own decline, and though Peter continued to be demonstrative and she continued to respond, she felt in her heart that she had lost her allure, that it had in a sense gone underground, forever, unlike the furtive chthonic nourishment in the roots of the lady’s slippers).

  It was a nice dog, a well-groomed collie dog that kept to his own territory. When Grandmother Alice ran over the dog, Helen was forced to come to her aid, because Grandpa Peter was at an Impossibilists’ meeting and Eli was back on the fall circuit, which had started early because everybody was having fairs where they could hoist the Union Jack and show off how British they were, even at Brunkild and Tolstoi.

  Helen hadn’t spoken since the Titanic went down. Not a word for more than two years. I tried sending her to the local school. The teacher came to see us, though, and suggested, looking carefully around our kitchen, that Helen, while a very pretty girl, appeared to be… um, that is… as some girls are… please understand, I’m not saying she’s dumb, but perhaps distracted… yes, distracted is the better word. From behind the closed door to Helen’s bedroom came a loud whumping.

  At Helen’s request, Eli had built her a loom. She wove woollen rugs, which remained piled in her little bedroom. Sometimes when she was sleeping, I would steal in and unroll them and admire the pearly tones she favoured, the blood red waves woven through.

  Her education was adjourned. Helen rarely left her room. She was thinking. But she was not thinking about. She inhabited a spot of time as precise as the quarter-inch scar on her hand, and that is where she lived: in the moments of John Anderson’s death, when wealth had proved no cure for the terrors of the body’s edge, the flesh that freezes, drowns, is cut and broken, and through that rupture Richard had fallen into the pantomime of outer space. Helen wove, and her broken hand ached when she wove. The loom banged, shuttled, interlaced warp with the filling threads of those moments when luxury had betrayed her.

  But when Alice harrowed the collie, the dog didn’t die right away, and its screams brought out the rather hysterical owner. Alice, who liked dogs and felt an awakening of her old guilt over Thomas Scott, nevertheless found the neighbour’s reaction ridiculous, and she climbed down and took the man’s hands and placed them on the stallion’s bridle and told him, “Hold tight, he’s going to rear.” Then she raced back to our shack, because she knew Eli kept his buffalo-hunting gun in good condition at all times.

  Helen saw her grandmother come in, her skinny old face fierce and determined. She couldn’t help following her back to the neighbour’s lawn, running to keep up. Things were pretty much as Alice had left them, though the dog had quieted a little because one lung had been punctured. The dog looked up gratefully at Alice. And Alice, tender, dry-eyed, shot him in the head. The pioneer suburbanite cried out, and Alice removed his hands from the bridle and climbed up, motioning to the stunned Helen to join her. Alice shifted over to sit on Helen’s lap.

  “You crazy woman!” The man wept as he stumbled beside the cart. “You killed my dog!”

  “I’m sorry about the dog,” said Alice. “I truly am.”

  Seated beneath her skinny grandmother, Helen sniffed at the scent of blood in the air. When she spoke, her voice had the sweet, oily timbre of pounded walnuts; she whispered, “May your lawn get leaf mould!” She had the reins. Louder, she called out, “May your grass be choked by knotweed, by black medick!” Her lungs full, her heart triggered by rage, galvanized by violence. “I hope you get dandelions! I hope you get plantains and fungus!” She circled the man, who stood over his dead dog. “May you suffer from creeping charlie, from shepherd’s purse! May you spend the days that remain in a war against cutgrass and chick-weed and bedstraw!”

  “Hush now,” said Grandmother Alice. “Take us home, girl.”

  Helen cut across the lawn and took the ditch up to the road. She was panting when they pulled up at the barn. Grandmother Alice trembled. They were unhitching the horse, either side of the traces, when Alice looked her granddaughter in the eye and stopped. “What is happening to the world?” she asked Helen.

  “Shhhh,” said Helen. “Hear that?” At the border of the yard, poplar leaves’ small slapping. “The outside edges are cracking.”

  “Wait,” said Alice. “Hitch him up again. I’m going into town. I resign from the human race. But first, I’m going to resign from the League.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Helen. “I’m joining up.”

  And so it came to pass that my mother, my daughter and I were running up the stairs towards the unlit boy’s den on the third floor of John Anderson’s mansion. Helen was ahead, tucking her skirts, her jaw set the way it had been when she was first learning to walk away from me. I chased after. “He’s not up there, you idiot!” I told her. “He’s in his father’s study! Wake up and smell the coffee! Everything has changed!”

  Grandmother Alice came last. She was stuck there because Helen insisted and she had no choice, which was perfect, because she had at last a chance to see the capitalist’s domicile against her own wishes. She didn’t even try to hide her curiosity, her delighted interest. Transparently happy, she stared at the velvet wallpaper and bevelled glass and voluminous drapery without avarice or disdain.

  “I’m just stopping on my wa
y to quit the League,” Mum said loudly. “I will not listen to that McClung woman a minute longer!”

  “Helen, stop rushing off and talk to me!” I said. “Richard is downstairs in the library!”

  But Helen had reached the landing. She stopped. Her hesitation was the first hint of shyness. Mum and I caught up with her. Though it was a sunny day, the landing was dark and smelled of mildewed books. We began to whisper.

  “He’s here,” she hissed. “He’s always here.”

  “Look at that!” Grandmother Alice pointed frantically at the billiard table in its abandoned, dusty room. She was waving her arms and jumping on her little feet. “I’m going to try it!”

  “Grandma, no!” With one hand fastened to Alice’s arm, Helen pushed open the door to Richard’s den. Richard was standing in his father’s posture, hands in pockets, in a slant-ceilinged room lit by an unlikely mixture of electricity and pungent afternoon sun. He barely flinched, but his very blood seemed to thicken and ripen in his veins. I wondered how he always came to be so amused.

  Helen, the instant lady, entered the room. “Hello, Richard,” she said.

  My mother stuck out her hand. “Alice McCormack.” Richard took it, I thought, gratefully.

  “Sorry to barge in,” I said.

  He seemed pleased, careful but pleased. He found Alice a chair. He would not look at Helen. We glanced about. “I come here now and then,” he said to me. “I can’t stand the telephone.”

  This was most likely true, as was his addiction to the instrument.

  “I’d hate the telephone too,” Alice confided, “given the chance.”

  “Those were John Anderson’s,” I said. I walked towards the framed plans for the Titanic, hung on the wall. The blueprints looked like a star chart. And beside it, also framed, a replica of the engineers’ drawings for the Panama Canal.