(She was a card player, I discovered later. Bridge, not poker - she would have been good at poker, good at bluffing, but it was too risky, too much a gamble; she liked to bid on known quantities. She played golf as well, but mostly for the social contacts; she wasn't as good at it as she made out. Tennis was too strenuous for her; she would not have wanted to be caught sweating. She "sailed," which meant, for her, sitting on a cushion on a boat, in a hat, with a drink.)
Winifred asked me what I would like to eat. I said anything at all. She called me "dear," and said that the Waldorf salad was marvellous. I said that would be fine.
I didn't see how I could ever work up to calling her Freddie : it seemed too familiar, disrespectful even. She was after all an adult - thirty, or twenty-nine at least. She was six or seven years younger than Richard, but they were pals:"Richard and I are such great pals," she said to me confidingly, for the first time but not for the last. It was a threat, of course, as was much of what she would say to me in this easy and confiding tone. It meant not only that she had claims that predated mine, and loyalties I could not hope to understand, but also that if I ever crossed Richard there would be the two of them to reckon with.
It was she who arranged things for Richard, she told me - social events, cocktail parties and dinners and so forth - because he was a bachelor, and, as she said (and would continue to say, year after year), "Us gals run that end of things." Then she said that she was just delighted that Richard had finally decided to settle down, and with a nice young girl like me. There'd been a couple of close things - some previous entanglements. (This was how Winifred always spoke of women in relation to Richard - entanglements, like nets, or webs, or snares, or merely like pieces of gummy string left lying around on the ground, that you might get caught on your shoe by mistake.)
Luckily Richard had escaped from these entanglements, not that women did not chase after him. They chased after him in droves, said Winifred, lowering her whisky voice, and I had an image of Richard, his clothing torn, his carefully arranged hair dishevelled, fleeing in panic while a pack of baying females coursed after him. But I could not believe in such an image. I couldn't imagine Richard running, or hurrying, or even being afraid. I couldn't imagine him in peril.
I nodded and smiled, unsure of where I myself was assumed to stand. Was I one of the sticky entanglers? Perhaps. On the surface of things however I was being led to understand that Richard had a high intrinsic value, and that I'd better mind my p's and q's if I was to live up to it. "But I'm sure you'll manage," said Winifred, smiling a little. "You're so young." If anything, this youthfulness of mine should have made managing less likely, which was what Winifred was counting on. She had no intention of giving up any managing, herself.
Our Waldorf salads came. Winifred watched me pick up my knife and fork - at least I didn't eat with my hands, her expression said - and gave a little sigh. I was hard slogging for her, I now realize. No doubt she thought I was sullen, or unforthcoming: I had no small talk, I was so ignorant, so rural. Or perhaps her sigh was a sigh of anticipation - of anticipated work, because I was a lump of unmoulded clay, and now she would have to roll up her sleeves and get down to moulding me.
No time like the present. She dug right in. Her method was one of hint, of suggestion. (She had another method - the bludgeon - but I didn't encounter it at this lunch.) She said she'd known my grandmother, or at least she'd known of her. The Montfort women of Montreal had been celebrated for their style, she said, but of course Adelia Montfort had died before I was born. This was her way of saying that despite my pedigree we were in effect starting from scratch.
My clothes were the least of it, she implied. Clothes could always be purchased, naturally, but I would have to learn to wear them to effect. "As if they're your skin, dear," she said. My hair was out of the question - long, unwaved, combed straight back, held with a clip. It was a clear case for a pair of scissors and a cold wave. Then there was the question of my fingernails. Nothing too brash, mind you; I was too young for brashness. "You could be charming," said Winifred. "Absolutely. With a little effort."
I listened humbly, resentfully. I knew I did not have charm. Neither Laura nor I had it. We were too secretive for charm, or else too blunt. We'd never learned it, because Reenie had spoiled us. She felt that who we were ought to be enough for anybody. We shouldn't have to lay ourselves out for people, court them with coaxings and wheedlings and eye-batting displays. I expect Father could see a point to charm in some quarters, but he hadn't instilled any of it in us. He'd wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.
Winifred watched me eat, a quizzical smile on her lips. Already I was becoming a string of adjectives in her head - a string of funny anecdotes she would retail to her chums, the Billies and Bobbies and Charlies. Dressed like a charity case. Ate as if they'd never fed her. And the shoes!
"Well," she said, once she'd poked at her salad - Winifred never finished a meal - "now we'll have to put our heads together."
I didn't know what she meant. She gave another little sigh. "Plan the wedding," she said. "We don't have very much time. I thought, St. Simon the Apostle, and then the Royal York ballroom, the centre one, for the reception."
I must have assumed I would simply be handed over to Richard, like a parcel; but no, there would have to be ceremonies - more than one of them. Cocktail parties, teas, bridal showers, portraits taken, for the papers. It would be like my own mother's wedding, in the stories told by Reenie, but backwards somehow and with pieces missing. Where was the romantic prelude, with the young man kneeling at my feet? I felt a wave of dismay travel up from my knees until it reached my face. Winifred saw it, but did nothing to reassure me. She didn't want me reassured.
"Don't worry, my dear," she said, in a tone that indicated scant hope. She patted my arm. "I'll take you in hand." I could feel my will seeping out of me - any power I still might have left, over my own actions. (Really! I think now. Really she was a sort of madame. Really she was a pimp.)
"My goodness, look at the time," she said. She had a watch that was silver and fluid, like a ribbon of poured metal; it had dots on it instead of numbers. "I have to dash. They'll bring you some tea, and a flan or something if you like. Young girls have such sweet tooths. Or is that sweet teeth?" She laughed, and stood up, and gave me a shrimp-coloured kiss, not on the cheek but on the forehead. That served to keep me in my place, which was - it seemed clear - to be that of a child.
I watched her move through the rippling pastel space of the Arcadian Court as if gliding, with little nods and tiny calibrated waves of the hand. The air parted before her like long grass; her legs did not appear to be attached to her hips, but directly to her waist; nothing joggled. I could feel parts of my own body bulging out, over the sides of straps and the tops of stockings. I longed to be able to duplicate that walk, so smooth and fleshless and invulnerable.
I was not married from Avilion, but from Winifred's half-timbered fake-Tudor barn in Rosedale. It was felt to be more convenient, as most of the guests would be from Toronto. It would also be less embarrassing for my father, who could no longer afford the kind of wedding Winifred felt was her due.
He could not even afford the clothes: Winifred took care of those. Stowed away in my luggage - in one of my several brand-new trunks - were a tennis skirt although I didn't play, a bathing suit although I couldn't swim, and several dancing frocks, although I didn't know how to dance. Where could I have studied such accomplishments? Not at Avilion; not even the swimming, because Reenie wouldn't let us go in. But Winifred had insisted on these outfits. She said I'd need to dress the part, no matter what my deficiencies, which should never be admitted by me. "Say you have a headache," she told me. "It's always an acceptable excuse."
She told me many other things as well. "It's all right to show boredom," she said. "Just never show fear. They'll smell it on you, like sharks, and come in for the kill. You can look at th
e edge of the table - it lowers your eyelids - but never look at the floor, it makes your neck look weak. Don't stand up straight, you're not a soldier. Never cringe. If someone makes a remark that's insulting to you, say Excuse me? as if you haven't heard; nine times out of ten they won't have the face to repeat it. Never raise your voice to a waiter, it's vulgar. Make them bend down, it's what they're for. Don't fidget with your gloves or your hair. Always look as if you have something better to do, but never show impatience. When in doubt, go to the powder room, but go slowly. Grace comes from indifference." Such were her sermons. I have to admit, despite my loathing of her, that they have proved to be of considerable value in my life.
The night before the wedding I spent in one of Winifred's best bedrooms. "Make yourself beautiful," said Winifred gaily, implying that I wasn't. She'd given me some cold cream and some cotton gloves - I was to put the cream on, then the gloves over it. This treatment was supposed to make your hands all white and soft - the texture of uncooked bacon fat. I stood in the ensuite bathroom, listening to the clatter of the water as it fell against the porcelain of the tub and probing at my face in the mirror. I seemed to myself erased, featureless, like an oval of used soap, or the moon on the wane.
Laura came in from her own bedroom through the connecting door and sat down on the closed toilet. She'd never made a habit of knocking, where I was concerned. She was wearing a plain white cotton nightgown, formerly mine, and had tied her hair back; the wheat-coloured coil of it hung over one shoulder. Her feet were bare.
"Where are your slippers?" I said. Her expression was doleful. With that, and the white gown and the bare feet, she looked like a penitent - like a heretic in an old painting, on her way to execution. She held her hands clasped in front of her, the fingers surrounding an O of space left open, as if she ought to be holding a lighted candle.
"I forgot them." When dressed up, she looked older than she was because of her height, but now she looked younger; she looked about twelve, and smelled like a baby. It was the shampoo she was using - she used baby shampoo because it was cheaper. She went in for small, futile economies. She gazed around the bathroom, then down at the tiled floor. "I don't want you to get married," she said.
"You've made that clear enough," I said. She'd been sullen throughout the proceedings - the receptions, the fittings, the rehearsals - barely civil towards Richard, towards Winifred blankly obedient, like a servant girl under indenture. Towards me, angry, as if this wedding was a malicious whim at best, at worst a rejection of her. At first I'd thought she might be envious of me, but it wasn't exactly that. "Why shouldn't I get married?"
"You're too young," she said.
"Mother was eighteen. Anyway I'm almost nineteen."
"But that was who she loved. She wanted to."
"How do you know I don't?" I said, exasperated.
That stopped her for a moment. "You can't want to," she said, looking up at me. Her eyes were damp and pink: she'd been crying. This annoyed me: what right had she to be doing the crying? It ought to have been me, if anyone.
"What I want isn't the point," I said harshly. "It's the only sensible thing. We don't have any money, or haven't you noticed? Would you like us to be thrown out on the street?"
"We could get jobs," she said. My cologne was on the window ledge beside her; she sprayed herself with it, absent-mindedly. It was Liu, by Guerlain, a present from Richard. (Chosen, as she'd let me know, by Winifred. Men get so confused at perfume counters, don't they? Scent goes right to their heads.)
"Don't be stupid," I said. "What would we do? Break that and your name is mud."
"Oh, we could do lots of things," she said vaguely, setting the cologne down. "We could be waitresses."
"We couldn't live on that. Waitresses make next to nothing. They have to grovel for tips. They all get flat feet. You don't know what anything costs," I said. It was like trying to explain arithmetic to a bird. "The factories are closed, Avilion is falling to pieces, they're going to sell it; the banks are out for blood. Haven't you looked at Father? Haven't you seen him? He's like an old man."
"It's for him, then," she said. "What you're doing. I guess that explains something. I guess it's brave."
"I'm doing what I think is right," I said.I felt so virtuous, and at the same time so hard done by, I almost wept. But that would have been game over.
"It's not right," she said. "It's not right at all. You could break it off, it's not too late. You could run away tonight and leave a note. I'd come with you."
"Stop pestering, Laura. I'm old enough to know what I'm doing."
"But you'll have to let him touch you, you know. It's not just kissing. You'll have to let him . . ."
"Don't worry about me," I said. "Leave me alone. I've got my eyes open."
"Like a sleepwalker," she said. She picked up a container of my dusting powder, opened it, sniffed it, and managed to spill a handful of it onto the floor. "Well, you'll have nice clothes, anyway," she said.
I could have hit her. It was, of course, my secret consolation.
After she'd gone, leaving a trail of dusty white footprints, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at my open steamer trunk. It was a very fashionable one, a pale yellow on the outside but dark blue on the inside, steel-bound, the nail-heads twinkling like hard metallic stars. It was tidily packed, with everything complete for the honeymoon voyage, but it seemed to me full of darkness - of emptiness, empty space.
That's my trousseau, I thought. All at once it was a threatening word - so foreign, so final. It sounded like trussed - what was done to raw turkeys with skewers and pieces of string.
Toothbrush, I thought.I will need that. My body sat there, inert.
Trousseau came from the French word for trunk. Trousseau. That's all it meant: things you put into a trunk. So there was no use in getting upset about it, because it just meant baggage. It meant all the things I was taking with me, packed away.
The tango
Here's the wedding picture:
A young woman in a white satin dress cut on the bias, the fabric sleek, with a train fanned around the feet like spilled molasses. There's something gangly about the stance, the placement of the hips, the feet, as if her spine is wrong for this dress - too straight. You'd need to have a shrug for such a dress, a slouch,a sinuous curve, a sort of tubercular hunch.
A veil falling straight down on either side of the head, a width of it over the brow, casting too dark a shadow across the eyes. No teeth shown in the smile. A chaplet of small white roses; a cascade of larger roses, pink and white ones mingled with stephanotis, in her white-gloved arms - arms with the elbows a little too far out. Chaplet, cascade - these were the terms used in the newspapers. An evocation of nuns, and of fresh, perilous water. "A Beautiful Bride," was the caption. They said such things then. In her case beauty was mandatory, with so much money involved.
(I say "her," because I don't recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.)
Richard stands beside me, admirable in the terms of that time and place, by which I mean young enough, not ugly, and well-to-do. He looks substantial, but at the same time quizzical: one eyebrow cocked, lower lip thrust a little out, mouth on the verge of a smile, as if at some secret, dubious joke. Carnation in the buttonhole, hair combed back like a shiny rubber bathing cap, stuck to his head with the goo they used to put on back then. But a handsome man despite it. I have to admit that. Debonaire. Man about town.
There are some posed group portraits, too - a background scrum of groomsmen in their formal attire, much the same for weddings as for funerals and headwaiters; a foreground of clean, gleaming bridesmaids, their bouquets foaming with blossom. Laura man
aged to ruin each of these pictures. In one she's resolutely scowling, in another she must have moved her head so that her face is a blur, like a pigeon smashing into glass. In a third she's gnawing on a finger, glancing sideways guiltily, as if surprised with her hand in the till. In a fourth there must have been a defect in the film, because there's an effect of dappled light, falling not down on her but up, as if she's standing on the edge of an illuminated swimming pool, at night.
After the ceremony Reenie was there, in respectable blue and a feather. She hugged me tightly, and said, "If only your mother was here." What did she mean? To applaud, or to call a halt to the proceedings? From her tone of voice, it could have been either. She cried then, I didn't. People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible. But I was beyond such childishness; I was breathing the high bleak air of disillusionment, or thought I was.
There was champagne, of course. There must have been: Winifred would not have omitted it. Others ate. Speeches were made, of which I remember nothing. Did we dance? I believe so. I didn't know how to dance, but I found myself on the dance floor, so some sort of stumbling-around must have occurred.
Then I changed into my going-away outfit. It was a two-piece suit, a light spring wool in pale green, with a demure hat to match. It cost a mint, said Winifred. I stood poised for departure, on the steps (what steps? The steps have vanished from memory), and threw my bouquet towards Laura. She didn't catch it. She stood there in her seashell-pink outfit, staring at me coldly, hands gripped together in front of her as if to restrain herself, and one of the bridesmaids - some Griffen cousin or other - grabbed it and made off with it greedily, as if it were food.
The Blind Assassin Page 25