"It'll happen to you one day too," I said to Laura. "When you're my age. It's a thing that happens to girls."
Laura was indignant. She refused to believe it. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.
There's a studio portrait of Laura and me, taken at this time. I'm wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me: I have, noticeably, what used to be called bosoms. Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile, as if the two things are the same: it's a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father's. We were afraid of them, but did not know how to avoid them.
Ovid's Metamorphoses
Father had decided, correctly enough, that our education had been neglected. He wanted us taught French, but also Mathematics and Latin - brisk mental exercises that would act as a corrective for our excessive dreaminess. Geography too would be bracing. Although he'd barely noticed her during her tenure, he decreed that Miss Violence and her lax, musty, rose-tinted ways must be scrubbed away. He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core. He didn't understand why we liked what we liked. He wanted us turned into the semblances of boys, one way or another. Well, what do you expect? He'd never had sisters.
In the place of Miss Violence, he engaged a man called Mr. Erskine, who'd once taught at a boys' school in England but had been packed off to Canada, suddenly, for his health. He did not seem at all unhealthy to us: he never coughed, for instance. He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.
It was soon clear that inattentiveness and staring at Mr. Erskine's forehead would not rid us of him. First of all he gave us tests, to determine what we knew. Not much, it appeared, though more than we saw fit to divulge. He then told Father that we had the brains of insects or marmots. We were nothing short of deplorable, and it was a wonder we were not cretins. We had developed slothful mental habits - we had been allowed to develop them, he added reprovingly. Happily, it was not too late. My father said that in that case Mr. Erskine should work us up into shape.
To us, Mr. Erskine said that our laziness, our arrogance, our tendency to lollygag and daydream, and our sloppy sentimentality had all but ruined us for the serious business of life. No one expected us to be geniuses, and it would be conferring no favours if we were, but there was surely a minimum, even for girls: we would be nothing but encumbrances to any man foolish enough to marry us unless we were made to pull up our socks.
He ordered a large stack of school exercise books, the cheap kind with ruled lines and flimsy cardboard covers. He ordered a supply of plain lead pencils, with erasers. These were the magic wands, he said, by means of which we were about to transform ourselves, with his assistance.
He said assistance with a smirk.
He threw out Miss Goreham's tinsel stars.
The library was too distracting for us, he said. He asked for and received two school desks, which he installed in one of the extra bedrooms; he had the bed removed, along with all the other furniture, so there was just the bare room left. The door locked with a key, and he had the key. Now we would be able to roll up our sleeves and get down to it.
Mr. Erskine's methods were direct. He was a hair-puller, an ear-twister. He would whack the desks beside our fingers with his ruler, and the actual fingers too, or cuff us across the back of the head when exasperated, or, as a last resort, hurl books at us or hit us across the backs of our legs. His sarcasm was withering, at least to me: Laura frequently thought he meant exactly what he said, which angered him further. He was not moved by tears; in fact I believe he enjoyed them.
He was not like this every day. Things would go along on an even keel for a week at a time. He might display patience, even a sort of clumsy kindness. Then there would be an outburst, and he would go on the rampage. Never knowing what he might do, or when he might do it, was the worst.
We could not complain to Father, because wasn't Mr. Erskine acting under his orders? He said he was. But we complained to Reenie, of course. She was outraged. I was too old to be treated like that, she said, and Laura was too nervous, and both of us were - well, who did he think he was? Raised in a gutter and putting on airs, like all the English who ended up over here, thinking they could lord it, and if he took a bath once a month she'd eat her own shirt. When Laura came to Reenie with welts on the palms of her hands, Reenie confronted Mr. Erskine, but was told to mind her own business. She was the one who'd spoiled us, said Mr. Erskine. She'd spoiled us with overindulgence and babying - that much was obvious - and now it was up to him to repair the damage she had done.
Laura said that unless Mr. Erskine went away, she would go away herself. She would run away. She would jump out the window.
"Don't do that, my pet," said Reenie. "We'll put on our thinking caps. We'll fix his wagon!"
"He hasn't got a wagon," sobbed Laura.
Callista Fitzsimmons might have been some help, but she could see which way the wind was blowing: we weren't her children, we were Father's. He had chosen his course of action, and it would have been a tactical mistake for her to meddle. It was a case of sauve qui peut, an expression which, due to Mr. Erskine's diligence, I could now translate.
Mr. Erskine's idea of Mathematics was simple enough: we needed to know how to balance household accounts, which meant adding and subtracting and double-entry bookkeeping.
His idea of French was verb forms and Phaedra, with a reliance on pithy maxims from noted authors. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - Estienne; C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur - Montaigne; Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point - Pascal; L'histoire, cette vieille dame exaltee et menteuse - de Maupassant. Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains - Flaubert. Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme - Victor Hugo. And so forth.
His idea of Geography was the capital cities of Europe. His idea of Latin was Caesar subduing the Gauls and crossing the Rubicon, alea iacta est; and, after that, selections from Virgil's Aeneid - he was fond of the suicide of Dido - or from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the parts where unpleasant things were done by the gods to various young women. The rape of Europa by a large white bull, of Leda by a swan, of Danae by a shower of gold - these would at least hold our attention, he said, with his ironic smile. He was right about that. For a change, he would have us translate Latin love poems of a cynical kind. Odi et amo - that sort of thing. He got a kick out of watching us struggle with the poets' bad opinions of the kinds of girls we were apparently destined to be.
"Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum," said Mr. Erskine. "'To seize and carry off.' The English word rapture comes from the same root. Decline." Smack went the ruler.
We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks - well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up our translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather's library - old translations by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we'd done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our trans
lations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn't learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery. We also learned how to make our faces blank and stiff, as if they'd been starched. It was best not to react to Mr. Erskine in any visible way, especially not by flinching.
For a while Laura became alert to Mr. Erskine, but physical pain - her own pain, that is - did not have much of a hold over her. Her attention would wander away, even when he was shouting. He had such a limited range. She would gaze at the wallpaper - a design of rosebuds and ribbons - or out the window. She developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye - one minute she'd be focused on you, the next she'd be elsewhere. Or rather you would be elsewhere: she'd dismiss you, as if she'd waved an invisible wand; as if it was you yourself who'd been made to vanish.
Mr. Erskine could not stand being negated in this fashion. He took to shaking her - to snap her out of it, he said. You're not the Sleeping Beauty, he would yell. Sometimes he threw her against the wall, or shook her with his hands around her neck. When he shook her she'd close her eyes and go limp, which incensed him further. At first I tried to intervene, but it did no good. I would simply be pushed aside with one swipe of his tweedy, malodorous arm.
"Don't annoy him," I said to Laura.
"It doesn't matter whether I annoy him or not," said Laura. "Anyway, he's not annoyed. He only wants to put his hand up my blouse."
"I've never seen him do that," I said. "Why would he?"
"He does it when you're not looking," said Laura. "Or under my skirt. What he likes is panties." She said it so calmly I thought she must have made it up, or misunderstood. Misunderstood Mr. Erskine's hands, their intentions. What she'd described was so implausible. It didn't seem to me like the sort of thing a grown-up man would do, or be interested in doing at all, because wasn't Laura only a little girl?
"Shouldn't we tell Reenie?" I asked tentatively.
"She might not believe me," said Laura. "You don't."
But Reenie did believe her, or she elected to believe her, and that was the end of Mr. Erskine. She knew better than to take him on in single combat: he would just accuse Laura of telling dirty lies, and then things would be worse than ever. Four days later she marched into Father's office at the button factory with a handful of contraband photographs. They weren't the sort of thing that would raise more than an eyebrow today, but they were scandalous then - women in black stockings with pudding-shaped breasts spilling out over their gigantic brassieres, the same women with nothing on at all, in contorted, splay-legged positions. She said she'd found them under Mr. Erskine's bed when she'd been sweeping out his room, and was this the sort of man who ought to be trusted with Captain Chase's young daughters?
There was an interested audience, which included a group of factory workers and Father's lawyer and, incidentally, Reenie's future husband, Ron Hincks. The sight of Reenie, her dimpled cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing like an avenging Fury's, the black snail of her hair coming unpinned, brandishing a clutch of huge-boobed, bushy-tailed, bare-naked women, was too much for him. Mentally he fell on his knees before her, and from that day on he began his pursuit of her, which was in the end successful. But that is another story.
If there was one thing Port Ticonderoga would not stand for, said Father's lawyer in an advisory tone, it was this kind of smut in the hands of the teachers of innocent youth. Father realized he could not keep Mr. Erskine in the house after that without being considered an ogre.
(I have long suspected Reenie of having got hold of the photographs herself, from the brother who was in the magazine distribution business, and who could easily have managed it. I suspect Mr. Erskine was guiltless in respect of these photographs. If anything, his tastes ran to children, not to large brassieres. But by that time he could not expect fair play from Reenie.)
Mr. Erskine departed, protesting his innocence - indignant, but also shaken. Laura said that her prayers had been answered. She said she'd prayed to have Mr. Erskine expelled from our house, and that God had heard her. Reenie, she said, had been doing His will, filthy pictures and all. I wondered what God thought of that, supposing He existed - a thing I increasingly doubted.
Laura, on the other hand, had taken to religion in a serious way during Mr. Erskine's tenure: she was still frightened of God, but forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another, she'd chosen the one that was bigger, and also farther away.
Once the choice had been made she took it to extremes, as she took everything. "I'm going to become a nun," she announced placidly, while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches at the kitchen table.
"You can't," said Reenie. "They wouldn't have you. You're not a Catholic."
"I could become one," said Laura. "I could join up."
"Well," said Reenie, "you'll have to cut off your hair. Underneath those veils of theirs, a nun is bald as an egg."
This was a shrewd move of Reenie's. Laura hadn't known about that. If she had one vanity, it was her hair. "Why do they?" she said.
"They think God wants them to. They think God wants them to offer up their hair to him, which just goes to show how ignorant they are. What would he want with it?" said Reenie. "The idea! All that hair!"
"What do they do with the hair?" said Laura. "Once it's been cut off."
Reenie was snapping beans: snap, snap, snap. "It gets turned into wigs, for rich women," she said. She didn't miss a beat, but I knew this was a fib, like her earlier stories about babies being made from dough. "Snooty-nosed rich women. You wouldn't want to see your lovely hair walking around on someone else's big fat mucky-muck head."
Laura gave up the idea of being a nun, or so it seemed; but who could tell what she might fall for next? She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defence.
Several years had now gone by - wasted, as it were, on Mr. Erskine. Though I shouldn't say wasted: I'd learned many things from him, although not always the things he'd set out to teach. In addition to lying and cheating, I'd learned half-concealed insolence and silent resistance. I'd learned that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I'd learned not to get caught.
Meanwhile the Depression had set in. Father didn't lose much in the Crash, but he lost some. He also lost his margin of error. He ought to have shut down the factories in response to lessened demand; he ought to have banked his money - hoarded it, as others in his position were doing. That would have been the sensible thing. But he didn't do that. He couldn't bear to. He couldn't bear to throw his men out of work. He owed them allegiance, these men of his. Never mind that some of them were women.
A meagreness settled over Avilion. Our bedrooms became cold in winter, our sheets threadbare. Reenie cut them down the worn-out middles, then sewed the sides together. A number of the rooms were shut off; most of the servants were let go. There was no longer a gardener, and the weeds crept stealthily in. Father said he would need our cooperation to keep things going - to get through this bad patch. We could help Reenie in the house, he said, since we were so averse to Latin and mathematics. We could learn how to stretch a dollar. That meant, in practice, beans or salt cod or rabbits for dinner, and darning our own stockings.
Laura refused to eat the rabbits. They looked like skinned babies, she said. You'd have to be a cannibal to eat them.
Reenie said Father was too good for his own good. She also said he was too prideful. A man should admit when he was beat. She didn't know what things were coming to, but rack and ruin was the likeliest outcome.
I was now sixteen. My formal education, such as it was, had come to an end. I was hanging around, but for what? What would become of me next?
Reenie had her preferences. She'd taken to reading Mayfair magazine, with its descriptions of society festivities, and the social pages in the newspapers - the weddings, the charity balls, the luxury vacations. She me
morized lists of names - names of the prominent, of cruise ships, of good hotels. I ought to be given a debut, she said, with all the proper trimmings - teas to meet the important society mothers, receptions and fashionable outings, a formal dance with eligible young men invited. Avilion would be filled with well-dressed people again, as in the old days; there would be string quartets, and torches on the lawn. Our family was at least as good as the families whose daughters were provided for in this way - as good, or better. Father ought to have kept some money in the bank just for that. If only my mother had remained alive, Reenie said, everything would have been done up right.
I doubted that. From what I'd heard about Mother, she might have insisted I be sent to school - the Alma Ladies' College, or some such worthy, dreary institution - to learn something functional but equally dreary, like shorthand; but as for a debut, that would have been vanity. She'd never had one herself.
Grandmother Adelia was different, and far enough removed in time so that I could idealize her. She would have taken pains with me; she'd have spared no scheme or expense. I mooned around in the library, studying the pictures of her that still hung on the walls: the portrait in oils, done in 1900, in which she wore a sphinx-like smile and a dress the colour of dried red roses, with a plunging neckline from which her bare throat emerged abruptly, like an arm from behind a magician's curtain; the gilt-framed black-and-white photographs, showing her in picture hats, or with ostrich feathers, or in evening gowns with tiaras and white kid gloves, alone or with various now-forgotten dignitaries. She would have sat me down and given me the necessary advice: how to dress, what to say, how to behave on all occasions. How to avoid making myself ridiculous, for which I could already see there was ample scope. Despite her ferretings in the society pages, Reenie didn't know enough for that.
The button factory picnic
The Labour Day weekend has come and gone, leaving a detritus of plastic cups and floating bottles and gently withering balloons in the backwash of the river's eddies. Now September is asserting itself. Though at noon the sun is no less hot, morning by morning it rises later, trailing mist, and in the cooler evenings the crickets rasp and creak. Wild asters cluster in the garden, having rooted themselves there some time ago - tiny white ones, others bushier and sky-coloured, others with rusty stems, a deeper purple. Once, in my days of desultory gardening, I would have branded them weeds and pulled them out. Now I no longer make such distinctions.
The Blind Assassin Page 17