Myra - how old were you, Myra? You must have been three or four, I've lost count - Myra was with her. Her cheeks were red with excitement, her eyes were round and slightly bulged out, as if she were being gently strangled.
"I've told her all about you," said Reenie fondly. "The both of you." Myra wasn't too interested in me, I have to say, but she was intrigued by the foxes around my neck. Children of that age usually like furry animals, even if dead.
"You've seen Laura," I said, "or talked with her?"
"Least said, soonest mended," said Reenie, glancing around her, as if even here the walls might have ears. I saw no need for such caution.
"I suppose it was you who organized the lawyer?" I said.
Reenie looked wise. "I did what was required," she said. "Anyways, that lawyer was your mother's second cousin's husband, he was family in a way. So he saw the point of it, once I knew what was going on, that is."
"How did you know?" I was saving what did you know for later.
"She wrote me," said Reenie. "Said she wrote you, but never got an answer. She wasn't allowed to be mailing any letters as such, but the cook helped her out. Laura sent her the money for it afterwards, and a little extra."
"I didn't get any letter," I said.
"That's what she figured. She figured they'd seen to that."
I knew who was meant by they. "I suppose she came here," I said.
"Where else would she go?" said Reenie. "The poor creature. After all she'd been through."
"What had she been through?" I very much wanted to know; at the same time I dreaded it. Laura could be fabricating, I told myself. Laura could be suffering from delusions. That couldn't be ruled out.
Reenie had ruled it out, however: no matter what story Laura had told her, she'd believed it. I doubted that it was the same story I'd heard. I doubted especially that there had been a baby in it, in any shape or form. "There's children present, so I won't go into it," she said. She nodded at Myra, who was gobbling up a slice of grisly pink cake and staring at me as if she wanted to lick me. "If I told you all of it you wouldn't sleep at night. The only comfort is that you had no part in it. That's what she said."
"She said that?" I was relieved to hear it. Richard and Winifred had been cast as the monsters then, and I'd been excused - on the grounds of moral feebleness, no doubt. Though I could tell Reenie hadn't entirely forgiven me for having been so careless as to let all of this happen. (Once Laura had gone off the bridge, she forgave me even less. In her view I must have had something to do with it. She was cool to me after that. She died begrudgingly.)
"She oughtn't to have been put in such a place at all, a young girl like her," said Reenie. "No matter what. Men walking around with their trousers undone, all kinds of goings-on. Shameful!"
"Will they bite?" said Myra, reaching for my foxes.
"Don't touch that," said Reenie. "With your sticky little fingers."
"No," I said. "They're not real. See, they have glass eyes. They only bite their own tails."
"She said, if only you'd known, you'd never have left her in there," said Reenie. "Supposing you'd known. She said whatever else, you weren't heartless." She frowned sideways, at the glass of water. She had her doubts on that score. "Potatoes was what they ate there, mostly," she said. "Mashed and boiled, she said. Skimped on the food, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor nutcases and loony birds in there. Lining their own pockets, is my guess."
"Where has she gone? Where is she now?"
"That's between you and me and the doorpost," said Reenie. "She said it was better for you not to know."
"Did she seem - was she ..." Was she visibly crazy, I wanted to ask.
"She was the same as she always was. No more, no less. She wasn't like a loony bird, if that's what you mean," said Reenie. "Thinner - she needs to get some meat back on her bones - and not so much talk about God. I only hope he stands by her now, for a change."
"Thank you, Reenie, for all you've done," I said.
"No need to thank me," said Reenie stiffly. "I only did what was right."
Meaning I hadn't. "Can I write to her?" I was fumbling for my handkerchief. I felt like crying. I felt like a criminal.
"She said best not. But she wanted me to say she left you a message."
"A message?"
"She left it before they took her off to that place. You'd know where to find it, she said."
"Is that your own hankie? Have you got a cold?" said Myra, noting my snifflings with interest.
"If you ask too many questions your tongue will fall out," said Reenie.
"No it won't," said Myra complacently. She began humming offkey, and kicking her fat legs against my knees, under the table. She had a cheerful confidence, it appeared, and was not easily frightened - qualities in her I've often found irritating, but have come to be grateful for. (Which may be news to you, Myra. Accept it as a compliment while you have the chance. They're thin on the ground.)
"I thought you might like to see a picture of Aimee," I said to Reenie. I had at least this one achievement I could show, to redeem myself in her eyes.
Reenie took the photo. "My, she's a dark little thing, isn't she?" she said. "You never know who a child will favour."
"I want to see too," said Myra, grabbing with her sugary paws.
"Quick then, and off we go. We're late for your Dad."
"No," said Myra.
"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home," Reenie sang, scrubbing pink icing off Myra's little snout with a paper napkin.
"I want to stay here," said Myra, but her coat was pulled on, her knitted wool hat was flumped down over her ears, and she was hauled sideways out of the booth.
"Take care of yourself," said Reenie. She didn't kiss me.
I wanted to throw my arms around her, and howl and howl. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted it to be me that was going with her.
"'There's no place like home,'" Laura said one day, when she was eleven or twelve. "Reenie sings that. I think it's stupid."
"How do you mean?" I said.
"Look." She wrote it out as an equation. No place = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist.
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.
I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.
The message
Yesterday I was too tired to do much more than lie on the sofa. As is becoming my no doubt slovenly habit, I watched a daytime talk show, the kind on which they spill the beans. It's the fashion now, bean-spilling: people spill their own beans and also those of other people, they spill every bean they have and even some they don't have. They do this out of guilt and anguish, and for their own pleasure, but mostly because they want to display themselves and other people want to watch them do it. I don't exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas. I enjoy the expectation with which the top is wrenched off the can of worms as if from some amazing birthday present, and then the sense of anticlimax in the watching faces: the forced tears and skimpy, gloating pity, the cued and dutiful applause. Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain?
I wonder which is preferable - to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spen
d the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
I carry no brief, for better or for worse.
Loose Lips Sink Ships, said the wartime poster. Of course the ships will all sink anyway, sooner or later.
After indulging myself in this way, I wandered into the kitchen, where I ate half of a blackening banana and two soda crackers. I wondered if something - food of some sort - had fallen down behind the garbage can - there was a meaty smell - but a quick check revealed nothing. Perhaps this odour was my own. I can't overcome the notion that my body smells like cat food, despite whatever stagnant scent I sprayed on myself this morning -Tosca, was it, or Ma Griffe, or perhaps Je Reviens? I still have a few odds and ends of that sort kicking around. Grist for the green garbage bags, Myra, when you get around to them.
Richard used to give me perfume, when he felt I needed mollifying. Perfume, silk scarves, small jewelled pins in the shapes of domestic animals, of caged birds, of goldfish. Winifred's tastes, not for herself but for me.
On the train coming back from Port Ticonderoga, and then for weeks afterwards, I pondered Laura's message, the one Reenie said she'd left for me. She must have known, then, that whatever she was planning to say to the strange doctor at the hospital might have repercussions. She must have known it was a risk, and so she'd taken precautions. Somehow, somewhere, she'd left some word, some clue for me, like a dropped handkerchief or a trail of white stones in the woods.
I pictured her writing this message, in the way she always set about writing. No doubt it would be in pencil, a pencil with a chewed end. She often chewed her pencils; as a child her mouth had smelled of cedar, and if it was a coloured pencil her lips would be blue or green or purple. She wrote slowly; her script was childish, with round vowels and closed o's, and long, wavery stems on her g's and her y's. The dots on the i's and j's were circular, placed far to the right, as if the dot were a small black balloon tethered to its stem by an invisible thread; the cross-strokes of the t's were one-sided. I sat beside her in spirit, to see what she would do next.
She'd have reached the end of her message, then put it into an envelope and sealed it, and then hidden it, the way she'd hidden her bundle of bits and scraps at Avilion. But where could she have put this envelope? Not at Avilion: she hadn't been anywhere near there, not just before she was taken away.
No, it must be in the house in Toronto. Somewhere no one else would look - not Richard, not Winifred, not any of the Murgatroyds. I searched in various places - the bottoms of drawers, the backs of cupboards, the pockets of my winter coats, my supply of handbags, my winter mittens even - but found nothing.
Then I remembered coming upon her once, in Grandfather's study, when she was ten or eleven. She'd had the family Bible spread out in front of her, a great leathery brute of a thing, and was snipping sections out of it with Mother's old sewing scissors.
"Laura, what are you doing?" I said. "That's the Bible!"
"I'm cutting out the parts I don't like."
I uncrumpled the pages she'd tossed into the wastebasket: swathes of Chronicles, pages and pages of Leviticus, the little snippet from St. Matthew in which Jesus curses the barren fig tree. I remembered now that Laura had been indignant about that fig tree, in her Sunday-school days. She'd been furious that Jesus had been so spiteful towards a tree. We all have our bad days, Reenie had commented, briskly whipping up egg whites in a yellow bowl.
"You shouldn't be doing this," I said.
"It's only paper," said Laura, continuing to snip. "Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important."
"You'll get in big trouble."
"No, I won't," she said. "No one ever opens it. They only look in the front, for the births, the marriages and the deaths."
She was right, too. She was never found out.
That memory was what led me to pull out my wedding album, where the photographs of that event were stored. Certainly this volume was of scant interest to Winifred, nor had Richard ever been found leafing fondly through it. Laura must have known that, she must have known it would be safe. But what - she must have thought - would lead me ever to look into it myself?
If I'd been searching for Laura, I would have. She'd know that. There were a lot of pictures of her in there, stuck to the brown pages with black triangles at the corners; pictures of her scowling and gazing at her feet, dressed in her bridesmaid's outfit.
I found the message, although it was not in words. Laura had gone to town on my wedding with the hand-tinting materials, the little tubes of paint she'd nicked from Elwood Murray's newspaper office back in Port Ticonderoga. She must have had them squirrelled away all this time. For a person who claimed such disdain for the material world, she was very bad at throwing things out.
She'd altered only two of the photographs. The first was a group shot of the wedding party. In this, the bridesmaids and groomsmen had been covered over with a thick coat of indigo - eliminated from the picture altogether. I had been left, and Richard, and Laura herself, and Winifred, who had been a matron of honour. Winifred had been coloured a lurid green, as had Richard. I had been given a wash of aqua blue. Laura herself was a brilliant yellow, not only her dress, but her face and hands as well. What did it mean, this radiance? For radiance it was, as if Laura was glowing from within, like a glass lamp or a girl made of phosphorus. She wasn't looking straight ahead, but sideways, as if the focus of her attention was not in the picture at all.
The second was the formal shot of bride and groom, taken in front of the church. Richard's face had been painted grey, such a dark grey that the features were all but obliterated. The hands were red, as were the flames that shot up from around and somehow from inside the head, as if the skull itself were burning. My wedding gown, the gloves, the veil, the flowers - these trappings Laura had not bothered with. She'd dealt with my face, however - bleached it so that the eyes and the nose and mouth looked fogged over, like a window on a cold, wet day. The background and even the church steps beneath our feet had been entirely blacked out, leaving our two figures floating as if in mid-air, in the deepest and darkest of nights.
XII
The Globe and Mail, October 7, 1938
GRIFFEN LAUDS MUNICH ACCORD
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
In a vigorous and hard-hitting speech entitled "Minding Our Own Business," delivered at the Wednesday meeting of the Empire Club in Toronto, Mr. Richard E. Griffen, President and Chairman of Griffen-Chase-Royal Consolidated Industries Ltd., praised the outstanding efforts of the British Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, which have resulted in last week's Munich Accord. It was significant, said Mr. Griffen, that all parties in the British House of Commons cheered the news, and he hoped that all parties in Canada would also cheer, as this accord would put paid to the Depression and would usher in a new "golden era" of peace and prosperity. It also went to show the value of statesmanship and diplomacy as well as positive thinking and plain old hard-headed business sense. "If everyone gives a little," he said, "then everyone stands to gain a lot."
In reply to questions about the status of Czecho-Slovakia under the Accord, he stated that in his opinion the citizens of that country had been guaranteed sufficient safe-guards. A strong, healthy Germany, he claimed, was in the interests of the West, and of business in particular, and would serve to "keep Bolshevism at bay, and away from Bay Street." The next thing to be desired was a bilateral trade treaty, and he was assured that this was in progress. Attention could now be turned away from sabre-rattling to the provision of goods for the consumer, thus creating jobs and prosperity where they are most needed - "in our own backyard." The seven lean years, he stated, would now be followed by seven fat ones, and golden vistas could be seen stretching all the way through the '40's.
Mr. Griffen is rumoured to be in consultation with leading members of the Conservative Party, and to be eyeing t
he position of helmsman. His speech was roundly applauded.
Mayfair, June 1939
ROYAL STYLE AT
ROYAL GARDEN PARTY
BY CYNTHIA FERVIS
Five thousand honoured guests of Their Excellencies, Lord and Lady Tweedsmuir, stood spellbound along the garden walks at His Majesty's birthday party at Government House in Ottawa, as Their Majesties made their gracious rounds.
At half-past four they emerged from Government House by the Chinese Gallery. The King was in morning dress; the Queen chose beige, with soft fur and pearls and a large slightly uptilted hat, her face delicately flushed, her warm blue eyes smiling. All were charmed by her entrancing manner.
Walking behind Their Majesties were the Governor General and Lady Tweedsmuir, His Excellency a gracious and genial host, Her Excellency poised and beautiful. Her all-white ensemble, enhanced by fox furs from Canada's Arctic, was set off by a splash of turquoise in her hat. Presented to Their Majesties were Colonel and Mrs. F. Phelan, of Montreal; she wore a printed silk, on which bloomed small vivid flowers, and her smart hat had a large clear brim of Cellophane. Brigadier General and Mrs. W. H. L. Elkins and Miss Joan Elkins, and Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone Murray were similarly honoured.
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Griffen were singled out; her cape was of silver fox, the furs placed on black chiffon in the form of rays, worn over an orchid costume. Mrs. Douglas Watts wore chartreuse chiffon with a brown velvet jacket, Mrs. F. Reid was trim and lovely in an organdie and Valenciennes lace gown.
No whisper of tea was heard until the King and Queen had waved farewell, and the cameras had clicked and flashed, and all voices had been raised in God Save the King. After that the birthday cakes held centre stage . . . enormous white cakes, with snowy icing. The cake served to the King indoors was ornamented not only with roses, shamrocks and thistles, but also with flocks of miniature sugar doves with white pennants in their beaks, the fitting symbols of peace and hope.
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