He was besotted with me, he said. Besotted - as if he were drunk. As if he would never feel the way he did about me if he were sober and in his right mind.
I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
Richard said women could be divided into apples and pears, according to the shapes of their bottoms. I was a pear, he said, but an unripe one. That was what he liked about me - my greenness, my hardness. In the bottom department, I think he meant, but possibly all the way through.
After my showers, my removal of bristles, my brushings and combings, I was now careful to remove any hairs from the floor. I would lift the little wads of hair from the drains of tub or sink and flush them down the toilet, because Richard had casually remarked that women were always leaving hair around. Like shedding animals, was the implication.
How did he know? How did he know, about the pears and the apples and the shed hair? Who were these women, these other women? Aside from a surface curiosity, I did not much care.
I tried to avoid thinking about Father, and the way he had died, and what he might have been up to before that event, and about how he must have felt, and about everything Richard had not seen fit to tell me.
Winifred was a very busy bee. Despite the heat she looked cool, swathed in light and airy draperies like some parody of a fairy godmother. Richard kept saying how marvellous she was and how much work and bother she was sparing me, but she made me increasingly nervous. She was in and out of the house constantly; I never knew when she might appear, popping her head around the door with a brisk smile. My only refuge was the bathroom, because there I could turn the lock without seeming unduly rude. She was overseeing the rest of the decoration, ordering the furniture for Laura's room. (A dressing table with a frilled skirt, in a pink floral print, with curtains and bedspread to match. A mirror with a white curlicue frame, picked out in gold. It was just the thing for Laura, didn't I agree? I didn't, but there was no point in saying so.)
She was also planning the garden; she'd already sketched out several designs - just a few little ideas, she said, thrusting the pieces of paper at me, then withdrawing them, replacing them carefully in the folder already bulging with her other little ideas. A fountain would be lovely, she said - something French, but it would have to be authentic. Didn't I think?
I wished Laura would come. The date of her arrival had been postponed three times now - she wasn't packed yet, she'd had a cold, she'd lost the ticket. I talked to her on the white phone; her voice was restrained, remote.
The two servants had been installed, a grouchy cook-housekeeper and a large jowly man who was passed off as the gardener/chauffeur. Their name was Murgatroyd, and they were said to be husband and wife, but they looked like brother and sister. They regarded me with distrust, which I reciprocated. During the days, when Richard was at his office and Winifred was ubiquitous, I tried to get away from the house as much as I could. I would say I was going downtown - shopping, I'd say, which was an acceptable version of how I should be spending my time. I would have myself dropped off at Simpsons department store by the chauffeur, telling him I would take a taxi home. Then I would go inside, make a quick purchase: stockings and gloves were always convincing as evidence of my zeal. Then I would walk the length of the store and exit by the opposite door.
I resumed my former habits - the aimless wandering, the examination of display windows, of theatre posters. I even went to the movies, by myself; I was no longer susceptible to groping men, who had lost their aura of demonic magic, now that I knew what they had in mind. I wasn't interested in more of the same - the same obsessive clutching and fumbling. Keep your hands to yourself or I'll scream worked well enough as long as you were prepared to follow it up. They seemed to know I was. Joan Crawford was my favourite movie star at that time. Wounded eyes, lethal mouth.
Sometimes I went to the Royal Ontario Museum. I looked at suits of armour, stuffed animals, antique musical instruments. This did not take me very far. Or I would go to Diana Sweets for a soda or a cup of coffee: it was a genteel tea room across from the department stores, much patronized by ladies, and I was unlikely to be bothered by stray men there. Or I would walk through Queen's Park, quickly and with purpose. If too slowly, a man was bound to appear. Flypaper, Reenie used to call some young woman or other. She has to scrape them off. Once, a man exposed himself, right in front of me, at eye level. (I'd made the mistake of sitting on a secluded bench, on the grounds of the university.) He wasn't a tramp either, he was quite well dressed. "I'm sorry," I said to him. "I'm just not interested." He looked so disappointed. Most likely he'd wanted me to faint.
In theory I could go wherever I liked, in practice there were invisible barriers. I kept to the main streets, the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained. I watched other people - not the men so much, the women. Were they married? Where were they going? Did they have jobs? I couldn't tell much from looking at them, except the price of their shoes.
I felt as if I'd been picked up and set down in a foreign country, where everyone spoke a different language.
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm - laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt. I stared at them with rancour.
Then one day - it was a Thursday - I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear - he had on a blue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat - but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. Surely everyone else on the street was looking at him too - surely they all knew who he was! Any minute now they would recognize him, they'd shout, they'd give chase.
My first impulse was to warn him. But then I knew that the warning must be for both of us, because whatever trouble he was involved in, I was suddenly involved in it as well.
I could have paid no attention. I could have turned away. That would have been wise. But such wisdom was not available to me then.
I stepped down off the curb and began to cross towards him. The light changed again: I was stranded in the middle of the street. Cars honked their horns; there were shouts; the traffic surged. I didn't know whether to go back or forward.
He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.
Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.
Sunnyside
Three days after this, Laura was due to arrive. I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn't on it. She wasn't at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she'd always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She'd gone with Laura to the train, she'd shipped off the trunk and everything as instructed, she'd taken every precaution. She should have accompanied her all th
e way, and now look! Some white slaver had made off with her.
Laura's trunk turned up on schedule, but Laura herself appeared to have vanished. Richard was more upset than I would have predicted. He was afraid she'd been spirited away by unknown forces - people who had it in for him. It could be the Reds, or else an unscrupulous business rival: such twisted men existed. Criminals, he hinted, who were in cahoots with all sorts of folks - folks who'd stop at nothing to assert undue influence on him, because of his growing political connections. Next thing you knew we'd get a blackmail note.
He was suspicious of many elements, that August; he said we had to keep a sharp lookout. There had been a big march on Ottawa, in July - thousands, tens of thousands of men who claimed to be unemployed, and who were demanding jobs and fair pay, egged on by subversives bent on overthrowing the government.
"I bet young what's-his-name was mixed up in it," said Richard, looking at me narrowly.
"Young who?" I said, glancing out the window.
"Pay attention, darling. Laura's pal. The dark one. The young thug who burned down your father's factory."
"It didn't burn down," I said. "They put it out in time. Anyway, they never proved it."
"He skedaddled," said Richard. "Ran like a rabbit. That's proof enough for me."
The marchers on Ottawa had been trapped through a clever back-room stratagem suggested - or so he said - by Richard himself, who moved in high circles these days. The leaders of the march had been decoyed to Ottawa for "official talks," and the whole kit and kaboodle had been stalled in Regina. The talks came to nothing, as planned, but then there had been riots: the subversives had stirred things up, the crowd had gone out of control, men had been killed and injured. It was the Communists who were behind it, because they had a finger in every dubious pie, and who was to say that waylaying Laura was not one of the pies?
I thought Richard was working himself up unduly. I was upset too, but I believed Laura had merely wandered off - been distracted somehow. That would be more like her. She'd got off at the wrong station, forgotten our telephone number, lost her way.
Winifred said we should check the hospitals: Laura might have been taken ill, or had an accident. But she was not in a hospital.
After two days of worrying we informed the police, and soon after that, despite Richard's precautions, the story hit the papers. Reporters besieged the sidewalk outside our house. They took pictures, if only of our doors and windows; they telephoned; they begged for interviews. What they wanted was a scandal. "Prominent Socialite Schoolgirl in Love Nest." "Union Station Site of Grisly Remains." They wanted to be told that Laura had run away with a married man, or had been abducted by anarchists, or had been found dead in a checked suitcase in the baggage room. Sex or death, or both together - that was what they had in mind.
Richard said we should be gracious but uninformative. He said there was no point in antagonizing the newspapers unduly, because reporters were vindictive little vermin who would hold a grudge for years and pay you back later, when you were least expecting it. He said he would handle things.
First he put it about that I was on the brink of collapse, and asked that my privacy and my delicate health be respected. That made the reporters back off some; they assumed of course that I was pregnant, which still counted for something in those days, and was also thought to scramble a woman's brain. Then he let it be known that there would be a reward for information, though he did not say how much. On the eighth day there was an anonymous phone call: Laura was not dead, but was working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park. The caller claimed to have recognized her, from the description of her that was in all the papers.
It was decided that Richard and I would drive down together to reclaim her. Winifred said Laura was most likely in a state of delayed shock, considering Father's unseemly death and her discovery of the body. Anyone would be disturbed after such an ordeal, and Laura was a girl with a nervous temperament. Most likely she hardly knew what she was doing or saying. Once we got her back, she must be given a strong sedative and carted off to the doctor.
But the most important thing, said Winifred, was that not a word of all this must leak out. A fifteen-year-old running away from home like that - it would reflect badly on the family. People might think she'd been mistreated, and this could become a serious impediment. To Richard and his future political prospects, was what she meant.
Sunnyside was where people went in summer, then. Not people like Richard and Winifred - it was too rowdy for them, too sweaty. Merry-go-rounds, Red Hots, root beer, shooting galleries, beauty contests, public bathing: in a word, vulgar diversions. Richard and Winifred would not have wished to be in such close proximity to other people's armpits, or to those who counted their money in dimes. Though I don't know why I'm being so holier-than-thou, because I wouldn't have wanted it either.
It's all gone now, Sunnyside - swept away by twelve lanes of asphalt highway sometime in the fifties. Dismantled long ago, like so much else. But that August it was still in full swing. We drove down in Richard's coupe, but we had to leave the car at some distance because of the traffic, and the throngs jostling along the sidewalks and the dusty roads.
It was a foul day, torrid and hazy; hotter than the hinges of Hades, as Walter would say now. Above the lakeshore there was an invisible but almost palpable fog, composed of stale perfume and the oil from tanned bare shoulders, mixed with the steam from the cooking wieners and the burnt tang of spun sugar. Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew - you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour. Even Richard's forehead was damp, beneath the brim of his Panama.
From overhead came the squealing of metal on metal, and an ominous rumbling, and a chorus of female screams: the roller coaster. I had never been on one, and gaped up at it until Richard said, "Close your mouth, darling, you'll catch flies." I heard an odd story later - who from? Winifred, no doubt; it was the sort of thing she used to toss out to show she knew what really went on in life, in low life, behind the scenes. The story was that girls who'd got themselves in trouble - Winifred's term, as if these girls had managed the trouble all by themselves - that these troubled girls would go on the roller coaster at Sunnyside, hoping to start an abortion that way. Winifred laughed: Of course it didn't work , she said, and if it had, what would they have done? With all the blood, I mean? Way up in the air like that? Just imagine!
What I pictured when she said this was those red streamers they used to toss from ocean liners at the moment of sailing, cascading down over the spectators below; or a series of lines, long thick lines of red, scrolling out from the roller coaster and from the girls in it like paint thrown from a bucket. Like long scrawls of vermilion cloud. Like skywriting.
Now I think: but if writing, what kind of writing? Diaries, novels, autobiographies? Or simply graffiti: Mary Loves John. But John does not love Mary, or not enough. Not enough to save her from emptying herself out like that, scribbling all over everyone in such red, red letters.
An old story.
But on that August day in 1935 I had not yet heard about abortions. If the word had been said in my presence, which it was not, I would have had no idea what it meant. Not even Reenie had mentioned it: dark hints about kitchen-table butchers was about as far as she had gone, and Laura and I - hiding on the back stairs, eavesdropping - had thought she was talking about cannibalism, which we'd found intriguing.
The roller coaster screamed past, the shooting gallery made a noise like popcorn. Other people laughed. I found myself becoming hungry, but could not suggest a snack; it would not have been apropos right then, and the food was beyond the pale. Richard was frowning like destiny; he held me by the elbow, steering me through the crowd. He had his other hand in his pocket: this place, he said, was bound to be crawling with light-fingered thieves.
We made our way to the waffle booth. Laura was not in view, but Richard did not wish to speak with Laura first, he knew better than that. He liked to fix things fro
m the top down, always, if possible. So he asked to have a private word with the waffle-booth owner, a large darkchinned man who reeked of stale butter. The man knew at once why Richard was there. He stepped away from his booth, casting a furtive glance back over his shoulder.
Was the waffle-booth owner aware that he'd been harbouring a juvenile runaway? asked Richard. God forbid! said the man, in horror. Laura had got round him - said she was nineteen. She was a hard worker though, she'd worked like a horse, keeping the joint clean, lending a hand with the waffles when things got real busy. Where had she been sleeping? The man was vague about that. Someone around here had given her a bed, but it wasn't him. Nor was there any funny business, we had to believe it, or not that he knew about. She was a good girl and he was a happily married man, unlike some around here. He'd felt sorry for her - thought maybe she was in some kind of trouble. He had a soft spot for nice kids like her. Matter of fact, it was him who'd made the call, and not just for the reward either; he'd figured she'd be better off back with her family, right?
Here he looked at Richard expectantly. Money changed hands, though somehow - I gathered - not quite so much money as the man had expected. Then Laura was summoned. She didn't protest. She took one look at us and decided against it. "Thanks for everything, anyway," she said to the waffle man. She shook hands with him. She didn't realize he'd cashed her in.
Richard and I each held one of her elbows; we walked her back through Sunnyside. I felt like a traitor. Richard installed her in the car, between the two of us. I put a steadying arm around her shoulder. I was angry with her, but knew I had to be comforting. She smelled of vanilla, and of hot sweet syrup, and of unwashed hair.
Once we got her into the house, Richard summoned Mrs. Murgatroyd and ordered up a glass of iced tea for Laura. She didn't drink it though; she sat in the dead centre of the sofa, knees together, rigid, stony-faced, her eyes like slate.
Did she have any idea of how much anxiety and commotion she had caused? said Richard. No. Did she care? No answer. He certainly hoped she wouldn't try anything of the kind again. No answer. Because he now stood in loco parentis, so to speak, and he had a responsibility towards her, and he had every intention of fulfilling that responsibility, whatever it might cost him. And since nothing was a one-way street, he expected her to realize that she had a responsibility towards him as well - towards us, he added - which was to behave herself, and to do as required, within reason. Did she understand that?
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