When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  And then the new premier rose; he rose and rose with his powder white skin and his way of inhaling all the time so his head seemed suspended by his nose, and his chest and neck remained full of air which he spent through a reedy, well-bred voice, a chivalrous milking of every milky election issue, and he said exactly this:

  “If the women of the civilized countries had enjoyed the franchise ten years ago, then Mr. Kaiser Bill of Germany would not be doing what he is today, for he would have the privilege of being counselled and influenced by women as well as men. We hope the war will come soon to an end, but we must express our admiration of what the ladies of the Dominion are doing in this great crisis.”

  Prophecy? A Cassandra in a suit? How obvious it is to us today, with countless millions dead, when we may refer to Mrs. Einstein, Mrs. Bohr, Mrs. Goebbels, Mrs. Truman, Mrs. Eisenhower, to the silky legs and comely lisp of Mrs. Kennedy, in whose immortal words we find the sentiment that won the women of the twentieth century a frost-free fridge and a second car: “I go where Jack needs me and I try to stay out of the way.” How stunningly obvious it is if we rerun the entire history of the human race, ride that movie backwards past January 28, 1916, past August 1914, back through Victoria’s widowing war against the Boers, backwards down time’s road to the hanging court sentencing Riel, to the moment in the courtyard when a bloodthirsty and pregnant woman dressed in a buffalo robe aimed her rifle at the chest of a blindfolded man; how blatantly obvious it is that if women were in the driver’s seat, there’d be no war, there’d be no poverty, there’d be no injustice.

  It was obvious to Alice, anyway, in the chambers of the Manitoba Legislative Building in the winter of 1916, and she turned to the healthy apple face of the matron beside her, who smiled kindly, excited, and pinched my mother’s arm and said, “It’s the beginning of a brave new future full of peace!” And Alice uttered the only articulate curse of her lifetime: “Bullshit!” And looking past the crestfallen matron, Alice saw the barely discernible trace of a skinny rounder with wet shoes and before she fainted she saw that the sky had opened and through the gaping hole in the ceiling there descended a cloud of white feathers, falling falling falling falling.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  OUR SUMMERS OF WAR SEEMED to occur in every shade of brown. Green ferns, you see, or geraniums, succumbed. All, all was the colour of war.

  It was as Alice had predicted. We got really good at killing on a large scale. The musket that Alice had so proudly pointed at Thomas Scott could fire maybe three times in a minute. Now, a machine gun could fire six hundred rounds in sixty seconds, or ten shots a second.

  We get dressed up for efficient killing. The most stylish thing about the twentieth century is the uniform. The next most stylish thing is Helen in a three-quarter length wraparound with a mink collar and a greyhound on a leash. But that would come later; it was as yet a gleam in Richard’s eye.

  PETER AND ALICE intensified the last years of their long marriage with a torrid love affair with one another. Their passion was perhaps not fully apparent to the naked eye. Both my parents had become the colour and texture of fine sand, their eyes bleached by long looking and their bones so luminous you could see them at night. Walking by the woods in the dark, they glowed like a pair of old and skinny arctic wolves.

  During the war years, my mother began regularly to faint. There are goats that suffer from similar symptoms, in Australia, I think, a kind of sensitive goat that will fall down in a dead faint if you talk too loud. They don’t die, though; they just pass out. Alice would live many years like that. With a dry clicking sound she was always falling down, her sandstone bones as light as kindling. Once or twice, Peter would pass out too. But they didn’t die. That’s the good part.

  After the vote at the Legislative Building, Alice kept her eye out for Thomas Scott, but he hadn’t reappeared. She told us this during one of our nocturnal jaunts, Alice and Peter, Eli and Helen and me. On this occasion, it so happened that Mum fainted. We were accustomed to it by then, and we simply talked quietly in the night, waiting for her to wake up and continue our journey. I did, however, contribute a small shock to perk her. Mum, on waking, pushed away my hands and stood peevishly and said, “He’s deader than a doornail.”

  My dad pressed a lingering kiss to the bare white shell of her temple and said, “He croaked long ago, my loved one.” And then he let out a horse laugh. “Didn’t stop him, did it! He’s still croaking.”

  Mum was serious. “No, no, he’ll croak no more.” The tears in her eyes shone with phosphorous. “I think he might truly be gone.”

  We all sobered, stood silently, taking this in. The trees squealed, a crooked sound. We stood rigid, fearing the final absence of Thomas Scott. It takes more than mortality to make somebody dead. Since Scott’s brief appearance at the legislature, the rest of us hadn’t even given him a thought. We were becoming positive and absolute in our ways at home, and no one had considered our martyr of bigotry, our patron saint of Error. His final departure was a double strike against us, a second and perhaps more terrible murder. It could mean an end of a world.

  Helen laid her cheek against her grandmother’s hand. In the dark wooded night, the glow from Alice’s hand cast Helen’s beauty in silver.

  “Grandma?” asked Helen. “Why did he not kiss me? When I was a baby. Why didn’t I get the mark?”

  “Oh, you don’t want that devil’s kiss on you,” I said. Eli touched my shoulder, Shhhhhhh, Blondie.

  “It’s a defect you’ll just have to live with,” said her grandmother Alice, somewhat impatiently. Then, softening, she studied Helen’s glaucous features. “Never forget, darling, what’s right is also wrong. Don’t let that scoundrel’s death be in vain.”

  “I think we should go home,” I said. It was exceedingly creepy out there if we were no longer haunted. The woods were stark and vivid.

  Chastened, we began once more to walk. “Maybe we can get new ghosts,” Helen said.

  “Ghosts are not shoes,” said I, the unnecessary mother.

  Just then, we heard a cry. With what hope we turned back towards the forest. And listened. Then the owl’s hoot. The night, stiff and real.

  ALICE THREW HERSELF into materialism. By 1918, her School for Histrionics had gained such momentum that she had to develop a semi-professional arm, which she called the Histrionic Theatre Company. The company thrived. She was so busy that she was forced to move a cot into the green room, and there she stayed for the duration of the war and the duration of her life. Her lover, otherwise known as Peter, visited her every day, bringing breads and dainties from various delicatessens and bakeries around town.

  Every day a different dainty from a different country. When he ran out of countries, he began to research the tribal origins of dainties at the library on William Street, arriving daily in a brand new Model T and wearing a beautiful hat, which he removed at the door as he entered the tortoiseshell shadows. This coda in his relationship with Alice was a formal affair, and he began to dress in modest but handsome brown suits, set off by his luminous white hair.

  The Model T was mine. It cost me $725. I’d earned every second cent of it. John Anderson (bless him) had taught me to invest in the stock market, and I was without a doubt the most skilled investor in town, though I declined to flaunt it. I went by the name of B. McCormack and it was assumed that the B. stood for William, and so somebody in a big law firm sent me a letter inviting me to join the eminent Manitoba Club and the eminent St. Charles Country Club, but I just wrote them right back saying, “Shalom! Love to!” I never heard from them again.

  Peter was researching food, a fitting subject during the war. His specialty was grains, of course, with subsidiary interests in breads and pastries. He wasn’t a cook, or much of an eater, but he did adore recipes, and he tunnelled through the bulgur connections between pilafs and tabbouleh like a diviner seeking Mesopotamian streams beneath the Canadian Shield. It was perhaps one of his greatest thrills when he traced an unleavened kinship b
etween bannock and pita. In his eighties, he developed a subtle sensitivity. The young librarians were all in love with him, leaning close to whisper their perceptive questions, showing him their pure complexions, their shining hair, all to no avail.

  It might seem as if the Impossibilist had opted out. A war on, and here he was chasing Chinese dumplings, honeyed baklava, courting Alice with small boxes of cake. But it was more than an old man’s distraction, much more than a doddering hobby. He sat very straight at a wooden reading table at the William Street library, with a book set on its spine and the laugh lines like sun dogs around his radiant eyes. He was reading about cooking practices in Palestine, but he was thinking about Marquis wheat, about No. I Northern. As he read of stone pestles, cornmeal, rice flour (occasionally speaking aloud in his old man’s tenor; “barley,” he would say, or “legumes”), as he read about the ancient hands of women pounding grains and kneading dough, there dawned in another part of his soul a terrible regret, a chilling guilt. “Wheat,” said Peter. “We planted wheat and only wheat. My God. And the deep-tilling McCormack blade. What have I done?” The wind answered with a handful of overworked topsoil thrown against the tall windows of the library. One of the pretty librarians looked up and smiled hopefully at him.

  Alice was his taste tester. He arrived at her office-boudoir, where she was schooling her company of performers. She shooed them away. He sat upon a plain oak chair and offered her a bit of seed cake. Alice nibbled, then nodded and said, “Yes. I see exactly what you mean.”

  She responded by developing a type of theatre theretofore, and pretty well thereafter, unknown to Winnipeg audiences.

  Her friend Mr. Kolchella had resurfaced from the internment camp at Portage la Prairie. His wife had died of heart failure soon after they’d been imprisoned. The authorities had then let him go on compassionate grounds. I was saddened to see the hopeful part of him gone. I think he’d lost much of his love for the world. Still, he joined us, with a sharper, mordant wit, and with a certain disobedience that seemed somewhat dangerous despite his dancer’s stature.

  He brought with him several athletic German friends who went by the name of Smith, their European sensibilities rejuvenated by the yeasty nutrition of avant-garde prison aesthetics. The Ukrainian midwife found her way back to Alice too. She had lost a lot of weight in the camps, and her experiences had altered her from a good-natured chubby woman to a gristly skinny woman, not the same thing at all. Along with her body fat, she’d lost her songful speech; she became nasal and intellectual, and she began to talk about the future and the past in the same breathless gesture, an evacuation, a horrified refusal. The Histrionic Theatre Company made use of her revised physiognomy by writing new peasant roles for her—the kerchief, the apron, the fist.

  And Helen. Helen played the Beauty in such a way as almost to save her own life. It would be her last parodic moment for many years to come.

  After they got the vote, the ladies’ clubs went crazy for Greek drama, so Alice knew she could fill the house if she put Helen into a cream chiffon dress with a loose gold belt and loosened her black hair and set her upon a wine red chaise. One of the Smiths painted Helen’s portrait in this pose, and the company made up posters vaguely in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gashes of red paint, Helen’s raven hair and “Helen of Troy by Euripides” scrawled thickly, freehand, in white. Helen sat dutifully for the portrait, and when it was done, she stood up and laughed, a horse laugh.

  Helen played Helen with the fierce intuition only a very young actress can achieve. Helen’s (that is, the other Helen’s) infidelity, the treacherous selfishness of her desire for Paris (or was it simply the necessity of freedom?) and the inexplicable justice of scandal, all of this came naturally to our Helen. She was a choreographic actress and worked very well with the freshly impassioned Mr. Kolchella. Generally, our theatre troupe worked with humorous sorrow; under our camaraderie ran the information, unbidden, ineluctable, that among men, war truly is an expression of beauty. My daughter played this, and I think she was so successful in her role because she didn’t let this insane fact grab her ankles and drown her.

  The stage was lit by floodlights, the sets exposed, the flooring harsh and loud, and the scenes were announced in big printed placards. Despite my mother’s extraordinary direction, nothing could deter the audience from coming again and again.

  The Greeks were the company’s bread and butter, the commercial side of things. But Mum hadn’t forgotten her original mandate: to produce histrionic history. She felt bad about taking all that money from war widows. She had to give something back. On waking up from one of her fainting fits, she walked dizzily to her desk and composed the following:

  “The first battle of Ypres. 36.000 dead Germans. Get kids; they’ll like the uniforms. Smoke, agony, blood. Everybody dies. Except one. An Austrian. No, he’s German. Need A LOT OF SMOKE.

  “One weird German, falls, gets up, walks away.”

  Alice stopped. One German. One weird German walking away. She stood. She went to Peter. He was seated in the oak chair. Alice held her scene out to him and he read it. “What’s this character’s name?” he asked.

  Alice listened to the muses a moment and then she said, “Hitler.”

  “That’s good.” Peter handed the scene back to Alice. “Good name. I like the ‘hit’ part. It’s going to be huge success. How are you going to do the thirty-six thousand dead Germans?”

  “Oh,” said Alice. “The usual. Placards and circus music. We’ll improvise.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IT WOULD BE MY MOTHER’S LAST and greatest and least popular production.

  Everybody got involved, including the police magistrate, who would arrive to shut the place down. We worked at it for six weeks. We all took turns playing Prime Minister Borden. We made big puppets on sticks. It was messy and the midwife played the accordion and my dad, Peter, once again took up the fiddle. We called it Massacre of the Innocents. There was a lot of singing and fighting. Something for everyone. The audience might have liked it, but the timing was all wrong.

  The world premiere was November 10. A Sunday. Maybe we went too far, opening on a Sunday. It was an innocent mistake that we made on purpose, because that was our theme. We were my mother’s disciples. “Histrionics, Hyperbole, and How!” was our motto. “Push!” yelled Alice. “Push it till it falls over!” Each gesture and idea, pushed so hard, to such a crazy extreme, it became—if we were successful—its opposite.

  The press gave us a glowing preview and a nice photograph of the entire cast in costume. Alice kept telling the reporters we were putting on a play of social realism. They smiled and nodded and pretended they knew what she was talking about. It was true, though—social realism through a meat grinder, just like real life in 1918.

  We rented the Walker Theatre because it could accommodate the animals. We had a cast of two hundred people, one white horse and a dog of little consequence, a bald thing from Egypt. When the rioting began, somebody stepped on the dog and killed it. Alice wept openly. “Another dog! Why me and dogs?” One of the cast members, a wonderful little girl of eleven who understood everything, said, “It’s how it goes, Mrs. McCormack. You have to go the mile to win the inch.”

  November 10 came all too soon. The place was packed. The first act went okay because everybody thought we’d settle down and give them some nice Ben Hur. Another innocent mistake: the tickets said Ben Hur. The stage manager saw the white horse and thought that’s what we were putting on, so he printed tickets saying Ben Hur, and that’s what everybody thought they were seeing, so they enjoyed the first act, I think they did, I think we had them in our pocket. The chariot race came as a complete surprise to everyone. The stage manager took it on himself to hitch the horse to the chariot, and he took off his overalls and rode on stage in his undershirt.

  Dad knocked together a kind of tank out of an old boiler. A Smith played this fellow Hitler, but he was afraid to say anything with his strong German accent. I was Woodrow
Wilson, and Eli was a German general, which was upsetting because we were acting with an obsessive energy that transformed the world into a battlefield, which in some ways wasn’t at all what Alice wanted from us, but we just got lost inside that play.

  Woodrow Wilson was a nice enough character, saying things like “We will fashion world order based on self-determination without force or aggression!” Pleasant concepts, lousy theatre, and it took a lot of courage to get up and declaim them, like shouting Newtonian formulas, so I played him with a strong subtext that I discovered in an ambivalent relationship with his mother, though God knows I wouldn’t say this if Alice were still alive. She’d kill me.

  Eli was stunning, distressing, a tragic ironic character, and even now, when I think back on his terrible moment at the end of Act IV when he stood, ghastly in a German helmet, and removed his red mask and revealed his white painted face and struck his head and said, “They fought for ideas! I didn’t know! God help me! I didn’t know there were ideas in this war! I thought we were fighting for land!” Well, it still stops my heart and my hands grow numb. Eli. How much of the world lives in the soul of one man.

  Our audience was not possessed of a well-developed sense of irony. The German helmets upset them. The horse stepped on a Smith’s foot, and in pain he shouted, “Tante Gretchen, meine Knie!” It was part of Alice’s Freedom through Contradiction to have Helen dressed in sackcloth carrying the placards late in Act V, by which time people were throwing things on stage, their Histrionic program notes obviously unread, and later their own shoes. Backstage, the stage manager grabbed my arm and said, “They want Helen! Everybody’s dressed ugly! Please, can’t you give them something beautiful!” I was sorry for him, but this was my mother’s most important production ever and I would not interfere.

  Helen walked on stage into chaos. All two hundred cast members were ready for the final number. The horse was loose and the dog was dead. Helen’s job was to parade four placards downstage before the footlights, left to right, right to left. “600,000 YOUNG MEN!” “CANADA SACRIFICED HER YOUTH FOR NATIONHOOD!” “THE BRITS THINK WE’RE SERVANTS!” And the last one: “PEACE THROUGH FEAR!”