“It opens today,” Richard said. “Funny coincidence. Funny day.”
Helen put her finger on the speculative white line of the Titanic’s hull. Richard recoiled as if she’d touched him. You could have lit an entire town with the current that passed between them.
“Hot in here,” said Alice. “Reminds me of a judge I once knew. Only it was winter. He never really worked either. Oh! It’s a rocker!” She began to rock violently. “Pardon me,” she said. “It’s an awful affliction, being sensitive the way I am. Yes, this judge and you… All on paper, aren’t you.”
Richard took her literally. He searched for himself on the star chart, the drawings. “I imagine you’ve heard,” he said. He walked to a dark alcove and turned on a small brass lamp with a green shade, very Winston Churchill. There, behind him, a map of Europe with pins stuck into the border between Germany and Belgium. “The war has begun,” he said. He went to an old pine toy chest and opened the lid and removed a bottle of Scotch whisky and three glasses. “We’ll have to share,” he said. Then he stopped suddenly and said to Alice, “You’re probably a prohibitionist. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Lord God, no,” said Alice quietly. “What’s the world coming to? Prohibitionist. Pour me a drink. This is the saddest day of my life.”
We drank to our health. We drank to the dead. We drank to the future. And to the future dead.
Helen sat down on the floor and Richard took a chair opposite. Helen, refreshed by two years’ silence, gave herself over to reading the curve of Richard’s lip. He looked well. More fully formed, much more formed. As if it had never happened. She felt, briefly, light. To suspend, to lie upon the high pressure of Richard’s quick forward motion, never to look to the side, never to look inside. He was ever-more stylish, for the effect of a new subtlety in both his manner and his dress. She swayed. The whisky helped, a luscious passivity, a holiday. Yes, Richard had recovered, and more. He looked at her without embarrassment. Something in Richard’s way of laying his eyes on you, a blue looking that displaced you, did not take you in, but knocked you out of way, that he might take your place. But oh, Helen thought, it is an intelligence, as abstract as a hawk’s, yet charismatic. She would marry him. And when Richard next looked at her, she masked herself, as if she were fencing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MY MOTHER BEGAN TO QUIT, and once she got the hang of it, there was no stopping her. Quitting left spaces in her life that could be filled only by starting. She quit eating beef and started eating chicken. She quit smoking and started drinking (Scotch in the evening for one hour only; neat, four ounces and no more, quickly). She quit sleeping and started to walk at night.
She remained keen, grew increasingly generous. She said to me when I caught up with her on one of her sleepless jaunts, the two of us walking beside the woods with the sound of broken trees bowing, “The shadows are red. I never knew that before. I mean, they’re red in daylight, Blondie. During the night, they’re green.” She sighed and drew her coat around her, for there was a south wind, rich with fall. “I have reached a conclusion,” she said. “Things will go on without me. True. It doesn’t matter. Things were going on without me all this time.” She chuckled. “I didn’t even know. I’m very lucky I stayed alive long enough to find out.” My mother took my arm, a rare event between us. I tried not to touch her too strongly in case she disappeared.
Quitting is an act of protest only if the quitter sticks around and reminds the joinees of her quitter status. Alice went through a bad patch when she quit the Political Equality League just when the League was having so much fun. Nellie McClung and that brilliant group of suffragists, black cloaks thrown over their evening gowns, staged a mock Parliament at the Walker Theatre. McClung played the Conservative premier, Rodmond Roblin, a chivalric ass, and of course she stole the show. My mother didn’t have a mean bone in her bird-like body. But she had a lot of bones, and a few of them ached youthfully, like green willows divining the underground streams of envy.
The day Alice quit the League, she came home in a foul humour and poured herself a mug of Scotch and sat at the kitchen table with her cape on. My dad, Peter, was making cabbage rolls and singing one of Eli’s cowboy songs. When he saw his wife come in like that, he put his spoon down and pulled up a chair, wiping his hands, waiting. “They’re going to miss you, Alice,” Peter said.
“You’re just saying that because it’s impossible. It’s okay. I’m going to become the first female agricultural journalist and wear a man’s suit.”
“That’d be good,” said Peter thoughtfully. “Been done.”
Alice blinked. “I’m getting strange in my old age.” She offered him her mug. “Want some?”
Peter took a sip and gave it back. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You know what we become when we get old?” she asked. “Ourselves. It gets harder and harder to disguise ourselves.”
Peter moved his chair close to hers. He put his hands on her knees and looked into her face. “It would take a hundred years to know you.”
“I don’t really want to quit the League,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I just got petulant. Why’d they have to join up with that old fox? Why’d they have to put their cards in with the Liberals? I want the vote as much as anybody. But it’s half a cup equality and six cups bigotry. What am I going to do?”
“Stick around and make a lot of noise?”
She winced. “I’m tired, Peter.”
“Shhhhh.” He put his arms around her.
“They’re stuffing the vote in with conscription, did you know? Tobias Norris wants to be premier. Give the ladies the vote if we’ll vote for his damn-to-God Liberals. Conscription. The liberty to send young boys to war. I can hardly wait. And prohibition for God’s sake! Ha! Ha, ha and ha!”
“It’s always a funny mix,” said my dad.
Alice pulled away. “Here I am telling you,” she said. She straightened herself, but then shut her eyes against some fresh pain. “I’m afraid of the future. What if they shut down the school? Everybody’s so… so Ontario all of a sudden.”
“It’s not so different.”
“But now there’s a war.”
Peter took the mug and drank from it. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got no choice but to drink down the bad with the good.”
“McClung is pretty funny,” said Alice. “She even does voices. I just wish she’d been born French or something. Jewish. It’s the taste of tea gets stuck in my craw.”
“That’s the taste of power,” Peter said. “Very bland, so nobody will notice it’s working.”
“I like her a lot. That’s the honest truth. It’s just such a tea biscuit, a fur hat and muff, kid gloves… Ohhhh, what’s the use? I don’t want to quit. But I don’t want to belong.”
ONE MORNING, Alice went downtown to teach school. She had been walking much of the night, travelling like a beetle over a piece of amber. It was like that in her quitting phase, moving towards the border between darkness and light.
My mother had always enjoyed the arbitrary nature of her own opinions. Whatever role she played, she played with gusto and more; she loved the excess of her own characterizations. She was happiest teaching at the school by the CPR station, where the kids understood perfectly that their teacher was a ham.
Humming a fugue tune, Alice trotted up the broken sidewalk to the school wrapped in the wing-cases of her black wool cape, around her neck a red muffler and on her head a red tam-o’-shanter. She swept into the classroom saying, in German, “Brrrrr, it’s as cold as Grampa’s bare knees!” She removed her cape and scarf, and then realized that the class was standing stock still. She recognized the smell of fear. The children stood rigid beside their desks, staring at her, immobile but for their lips, bird beaks through which came a reedy song.
“Rule Britannia,” the children were singing in falsetto, “Britannia rule the waves. Brit-ons never, never, ne-ver shall be slaves.” Alice took this in with horro
r, looking at her joyful mix of wildflowers and learning that only the petunias might be permitted to thrive. Above them, hovering over the teacher’s desk and covering the enormous hand-drawn map of the world that had been Mr. Kolchella’s great achievement, was a Union Jack the size of a golf green, the biggest, reddest, bluest Union Jack on the face of the earth.
My mother took a look around and saw the victorious figure of a classic marm, a real old biddy in a brown suit, an orphan’s nightmare, standing in one corner, keeping time with a ruler to the children’s prison song and fixing Alice with the loaded blunderbuss of her righteous eye. The children finished the last verse and waited.
“You sound like escaping gas,” Alice said gently to the children.
She removed her things and opened the closet beside her desk, where she’d hung a mirror just a bit too high, and stood on tiptoe to adjust her hair. Out of the blue, she took a lipstick and put it on, something that she’d never done before, and the children were heard to twitter. It was an inside joke. She could make out the reflection of the class behind her. The children met her eye in the mirror. Alice winked. Fifty-nine children did their best to wink back. To the mirror, she spoke, “And where is our good friend Mr. Kolchella?” All eyes went to the stranger lady standing in the corner. Alice closed the cupboard. Then she smiled. “How do you do!” With open vowels, she rushed forward, offering her hand like a hostess on Millionaire Row. “So glad! Welcome! Do sit!” She put the Marm in an empty desk. “We have a visitor! Children!” Alice clapped her hands. The kids were all smiling by then. “We’re going to play Who’s Got Mr. Kolchella?”
The Marm had a voice as pretty as a blue jay. “Mr. Kolchella is in custody. All enemy aliens are in custody.”
“Well, that’s a shame because I need him here to teach the children the history of democracy. Class! Let’s show Miss… uh, Mrs.…”
The dried old biddy squinted. “Smith. Mrs. I am from the education department. And I have come to shut down the school.”
“Smithstein! Smithski! Let’s show Miss Smitzniuk what a good Canadian class we are.”
The class tumbled into action. The room was filled with the sound of thirty wooden tables and fifty-nine wooden chairs dragged over a hardwood floor to make an erratic barricade. They worked like patriots preparing for a rebellion, a good thing, too, because that’s what they were. The children looked as if they were in a silent film, mouthing words to each other with a rational clarity you see at times of crisis.
Ten of the most underfed kids came downstage and sat on the floor, and then suddenly the play was on in earnest and they clutched their stomachs, moaned and fell over unconscious and woke up and moaned and fell over again. “I’m hungry, I’m so hungry, I’m really, really hungry. No, I am, I am.” The huge kid, seventeen and smarter than he looked, leapt out from behind the chairs and said, in a bully’s voice, “Pay up!” He pulled an old potato out his pocket and pretended to eat it, waving it in front of the starving habitants (because that’s what they really were). “I said pay!”
“We don’t have money for tie-ethes,” the hungry kids whined. “We can’t pay the church the money, and we don’t have wheat because of the early frawest.” The big kid was at a loss for words, but with great significance, he waved the potato in their faces and stormed off. Everybody cheered.
“What is going on?” demanded Mrs. Smith.
“It’s the 1837 Rebellions. Well, we’re mostly doing the Lower Canada drama, with Louis-Joseph Papineau leading the French against the British colonizers, but next week we’ll do William Lyon Mackenzie’s tavern brawl against the oligarchy in Upper Canada,” said Alice modestly.
The Marm’s mouth opened and shut, like a dying cod, and Alice leaned towards her as she would to a slightly dense child. “You remember, dear, the anticlerical, anti-British revolts out East?” prompted Alice. “Papineau? Exiled to the States? Never came back to Canada? Yes? He gets the children excited, you see. There just aren’t that many good Canadian revolts, yes? For self-government? Freedom? And the children do like to see a good rebellion, don’t you find? How kids like justice?” But Mrs. Smith really looked lost now. In a stage whisper to the kids, Alice said, “Our visitor is confused! Chase the seigneur!”
The kids covered their mouths with embarrassment. “We forgot to chase the seigneur!” And the red-headed boy leapt up and ran right out of the room. “Good riddance,” said the starving habitants, who didn’t want to leave the stage.
Alice said to Mrs. Smith, “Being from the education department, you do know what the seigneur is. The powerful landowner, yes?” She slapped Mrs. Smith’s knee. “Of course you do! How I’d hate to patronize you!”
Twelve handsome boys swaggered out, swinging pretend walking sticks and smoking pretend cigarettes. Every once in a while, one of them would say, “Polo?” through his nose, and his colleague would answer, “Certainly! After we kill the rebels.” For clarity’s sake, one boy asked, “What are we called again?” and he was answered, “We’re the Montreal cavalry!” “And what do we do!” “PROTECT THE RICH!”
Mrs. Smith was making a peculiar movement with her hands, fidgety and weird. Her chalky little body began to shake. Alice wanted to rub lanolin onto the flaky skin, but instead she reached over and handed Mrs. Smith her umbrella, anything to stop that autistic thing with the hands. It worked. Mrs. Smith gavelled the umbrella and shrieked, “Stop it! Stop it this instant!”
Some of the children stopped, but some of them had no time for Mrs. Smith, and with one eye on Alice, they skipped a bit and rushed to the climax, when they got to have a shootout and die in flames.
Mrs. Smith’s shoes were anvils, twenty pounds apiece. She walked onstage like the Industrial Revolution. Even the patriots were cowed. Silently, the starving habitants stood up, and the seigneur, who had been watching through the murky glass in the door, re-entered and stood uncertainly with the rest.
“What year is it?” snapped Mrs. Smith.
“1837!” cried half the class. And the other half cried out, “1914!”
“Of course it’s 1914! Put down that potato!” The potato hit the floor and rolled a little; fifty-nine children watched it in misery. “And now… Sing!”
She might just as well have demanded they laugh. They looked at her. “You are going to sing a goodbye song to Mrs. McCormack. Mrs. McCormack has decided she will not teach here any more.”
They looked at my mother in panic. Alice stuck her tongue in one cheek and rolled her eyes. The relief was instant. “Sing!” said Mrs. Smith. “It is your duty to the king!”
The children began to sing “England, My England” with all their ironic hearts and a trace of an accent. French, was it? German? Maybe Strasbourg, a bit of both.
Alice went to the closet and put on her cape and red muffler and red hat. The children were singing. She stood and listened a moment, and then she walked out, closing the door behind her. The song came to an end. The kids stood stunned, sentenced to compulsory boredom. In less than ten seconds, they learned the prisoner’s fake submission. A sheet of ice mixed with manure hardened their hearts. And just when they were nearly lost, Alice stuck her head with its red tam through the door and said, “See you around, darlings.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GOODBYE, RICHARD. WRITE
RICHARD JOINED THE NAVY. His mother, Mrs. John Anderson, got out of the bath and organized a luncheon in his honour. So unhinged was she, I was ordered to invite “Helen’s grandparents,” Alice and Peter. Grandmother Alice brought with her the few students remaining in her school—seven children in all, the only kids permitted to associate with the agitator Mrs. McCormack and her School for Historical Drama (or as my mother herself liked to call it, the School for Histrionics). Alice wanted them to see the capitalists’ domicile up close. And she thought they might like the food.
Everyone at the luncheon seemed to be very old, but the oldest person of all was Richard’s great-aunt, Mrs. Crumb. Mrs. Crumb was deaf, but she did have
an ear for the voices of children. She was a Victorian dowager right out of Dickens, a black lace doily who was always awarded the best seat by the fireplace, but not too close because she believed that the flush from the heat made her “as red as an Indian.” My dad bent over to shout into the horn, “Or like an honest working man!”
Mrs. Crumb’s teeth shifted in her mouth when she smiled. She smelled of phosphate of lime. “Eh what? Say again?”
Dad’s back hurt. Reluctantly, he leaned over again and said, “The labourer is our only friend!”
“You haven’t any friends?” Mrs. Crumb patted his hand. “I can’t believe that.” She sucked on her dentures and looked expectantly at the children, awaiting some real conversation.
My mother’s smallest students ducked under the white tablecloth and reappeared with a piece of cake, a corner piece, thick with pink icing. Mrs. Crumb’s fireside chair sat directly beyond. She saw them and smiled flirtatiously. They approached, a scalloped dessert plate proffered to the crispy lady who looked like a stale piece of blueberry pie. “May we play with your horn?” they asked, standing three feet away. Mrs. Crumb heard them perfectly. “Of course, dears,” she said and handed it to them. They spoke to her in confidential tones through the horn. “Are you a suffragette?” asked one.
“What d’ye think I’d be? Stupid?”
“Have you ever been kissed?”
“A hundred thousand times,” said Mrs. Crumb. “I was married to Mr. Crumb, don’t you know? He was terribly handsome.”
“Is he dead then?”
“Dead as dead.” She sighed.
“Do you miss him a lot?”
“Oh.” It was all Mrs. Crumb could say. Her tiny skull, with its sparse grey pincurls, bobbed up and down, and tears filled her eyes and her face grew tender. The children saw this and handed over the cake. She sniffed and tilted the plate towards herself and began to eat the icing first, all the while nodding, oh yes.
When Alice Lay Down With Peter Page 20