She has been thinking of her boy, Justin. He is only eighteen. Not ready. She has planned that he would have the university years, would come into the land, as her father had done, in his thirties: mature, seasoned, a man.
It is not for herself. She will never live here again among the trees. She has no illusions about what is required, physically, socially, to run an orchard, to take on the community roles that her father or Mr. Inglis played. But she had wanted that for Justin.
Perhaps it has been stupid to hold that idea, that Justin would want the estate. What were the chances, after all? She had wanted him to become educated, to get his university degree, to travel a little. To become more than a farmer. And then to return and live here, to manage the orchards intelligently — to use his brain, not just his muscle. She had envisioned him at her father’s old desk, looking at accounts, discussing plans with his foreman. She had imagined buying more property for him — forty acres, after all, could not support a family in very much comfort — setting him up in some style.
A daydream. Buddenbrooks, Clara had said scornfully, when she’d mentioned it once.
But the hills, the lake, the sky, the trees. The apples glowing red among the leaves. Her father walking through the orchard in his Panama hat, the sun on his shoulders. The dignity of his labour, of making with his hands and eyes and brain a little world.
Her mother with her garden, the jeweled jars of peaches and beets and pickles lining the larder. Herself and Alice running through the tall grass. Alice with her apron full of day-old Rhode Island reds. Alice stepping out to a school concert, often the star, in crinoline and shining pale pageboy. Herself climbing to the height of land, lifting her face, smelling the air, storing the molecular print of the landscape in her bones.
In his speech at her retirement dinner, her director Dr. Haephestes had said, inaccurately, that she was returning to the village in which she had grown up. “Sundrenched, pastoral, fruit-growing village,” he had said, actually. And not grown up, but “in which the fruits of her investigative genius had first been nurtured, as tiny seeds,” which was botanically inaccurate, as well.
She is not returning to this community, no. She has bought a little house, a townhouse, as they called row houses here, on the outskirts of the city, ten kilometres further south along the highway, near the airport. A much more practical idea. She will continue to write and give conference papers for several more years, with any luck.
But she had envisioned, also, Beauvoir continuing on, at arm’s length, under the husbandry of the Rilkes. Herself called in to vet big decisions. Beginning soon to bring Justin with her — he must be introduced to the orchards gradually, so they seemed appealing, not a millstone. At some point, she had planned to hire an architect to look at the house site — for the house itself would have to be bulldozed, likely; it was almost certainly damaged beyond retrieval — and have some discussions about a new place. Justin, of course, would have been part of that.
And yet, without the Rilkes. . . .
It has been an unfeasible dream, perhaps. Clara was right. She cannot practicably live here and run the orchard. She is too out of touch, not strong or young enough to manage it. She would have to work in the trees, and she is not up to that, no matter how fit she is for her age.
She has forfeited the land, perhaps, by her absence, by not having children of her own, by pursuing an intellectual life. By not being born a boy. She hadn’t even wanted the estate for many years. She had rejected ties, had given it to Alice. Though it had come back to her, or what was left of it had. She had not wanted it.
But she had not ever thought that it would cease to be, cease to be hers. Cosmic irony, of course. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell had sung.
She thinks that it might have been in those early days after Justin’s birth, the nights she walked him up and down the short path of her apartment’s breadth while Cynthia slept, that she had begun to think again of Beauvoir, of the slope of trees beside the shimmering lake, as something to which she belonged, something of value. Something to pass on to Alice’s grandson.
Though perhaps it was more truthful to say that she had seen, in Justin, something of value to Beauvoir. A caretaker for Beauvoir. She has not thought of that.
Something ties her to this place, she sees that. She has not lived here in more than forty years — closer to forty-five — but something in her bones has become magnetized, is pulling her towards the landscape itself. Is it the minerals, the iron and calcium in the well water, long ago laid down in her bones, pulling back to the earth from which they leached? Longing pulls her, lines up her neurons like iron filings. She cannot see how to hold the land. But she must.
HUSBAND
Hugh telephones: he’ll be back, he says, in June, with his daughter Ingrid. He seems to assume that he will stay with her again, that they will stay with her. It’s a trespass: she resents it, then gives in, weakly, shaking her head at herself.
And now she must get through the boxes somehow, because she’ll need space for Ingrid as well as Hugh. She must begin.
It takes her nearly a week before she acquires file folders, some labels, a package of paper dust masks, latex gloves, clear plastic boxes. Before she summons up enough will to descend the stairs to her daylight basement and to dive in, seizing a first box, sitting herself on a low stool beside it, slitting the packing tape.
She is ready to begin. She does not begin.
She turns on a lamp, angles it so the light shines directly into the box. She puts on a dust mask, tucking the elastic thread behind her ears, pinching the metal tab over the bridge of her nose. She puts on a pair of close-fitting latex gloves.
It is not dust she is worried about, or mouse droppings, even. It is the past, the underworld of memory.
About two-thirds of the boxes are labeled Alice: some in her mother’s copperplate writing, the rest in her own impatient scrawl. She wishes the labeling had been more explicit; then she’d have some idea of where to start. As it is, she must try to guess, by the exteriors alone, what is in the containers. Some boxes are significantly older and marked with pasted-on labels written in thick, browning fountain-pen ink. Those must have been packed or assembled when she and Alice were still girls.
She has no desire to root through all of these things. If they could only be given to Hugh and Cynthia as they are. But no; who knows what could have been slipped into a box. Only she can go in safely, extricate any live fuses.
That’s melodramatic. There may well be nothing. At most, only a few notes or letters to disturb the reader, and then only if he or she is alert and has sufficient background knowledge to be able to absorb the implications.
She will start with those that are not marked with Alice’s name.
A large carton next, containing two metal boxes, each a foot square by half a foot deep, each with a lid, which has been sealed with duct tape. The tape is brittle, but not broached; what’s in the tin boxes should be still intact.
Her mother’s work again. She finds two loose paper labels, which must have originally been stuck to the metal; the glue on these has long undergone whatever chemical changes glue does, and is neutralized. One reads “Keepsakes 1940 – 1953” and the other, “Keepsakes 1953 – 1973.”
Dating, then, from the year of her mother’s arrival in the valley to her death. Mother must have sorted and packed these tins during her last illness; they have been dealt with efficiently, with a view to long storage. They say, now, that Mother didn’t trust Alice and Sidonie to do the job properly. Had Mother expunged things as well? Who had she imagined breaking the seal as she taped the lids down? Or had she thought that the boxes might very well be destroyed without being opened?
She has seen the tin boxes before, of course: it comes to her now. They had lived in the attic, and Mother had brought them down on sentimental occasions to leaf through them. Here is the program from the war bond concert, when the operatic society did The Pirates of
Penzance, and Betty and Anne Protherow and I were the sisters. . . and look; the blue ribbon I got for my dahlias! And Father would sing a bit of the operetta, and they’d say do you remember, and be off for an hour or so, in a place that Alice and Sidonie couldn’t follow.
Even then, even in her childhood, Marshall’s Landing had seemed a place of past glories: exotic, paradisiacal. Her parents had reminisced: concerts and dances, flower shows and picnics on barges, of Father and Mr. Inglis playing polo, of Mother and Mrs. Inglis and Mrs. Clare and other women who were all now staid and grey dancing the cancan on stage in the community hall. Some of this world still existed, in remnants, in Sidonie’s and Alice’s childhood; more in Alice’s, perhaps, as Alice was five years older than Sidonie and could remember occasions that Sidonie couldn’t. But what remained seems a shadow, only, of a more luxurious, a more cultured time. There was always the sense that the best world had passed: only poor rags remained.
And what is this world to her, now? Or the realm of her childhood?
One of the boxes will be full of concert programs and dance cards and tea invitations: that will be interesting to Cynthia, perhaps. The other box will have — what? — school memorabilia, birthday cards, newspaper cuttings, largely featuring Alice. Also interesting to Cynthia, but preferably sorted first. But which is which? The boxes must have been purchased at the same time; they are identical.
She will have to open them.
Perhaps she should be thinking in terms of museum archives. The contents of the boxes will document a time long past and could be valuable. She wonders if she should worry about the age of the contents; perhaps they will crumble, disintegrate, as soon as air enters the container?
She remembers this particular box: this one with the Ogopogo Apples logo pasted on. She has seen it many times, in the attic of her parents’ house, and had once or twice rifled through it, removing — and, she hopes, replacing — contents. Borrowing. It appears to contain the bulk of Alice’s dozen or so years of schoolwork: her arithmetic and spelling sheets, her coloured maps and pages of numbered notes and exercises, as well as her essays and stories. All with grades of A or above 90%: that was Alice. Even the very early pieces distinguished by the very neat printing and conventional spelling.
She supposes that she could give the box to Cynthia as it is. Let Cynthia sort it out, and keep the more personal, the more expressive work, if she chooses. It’s not her duty to compensate, now, for Mother’s idolatrous archiving.
To be fair, there had been a similar box of her own infantile emanations, also kept by Mother in the attic. She has to admit that. Her mother had kept her work, too. She herself had burned it, in the late fall of 1973, driving out into a suburb of Montreal where she and Adam sometimes walked along the river. She had built a small, efficient bonfire, using newspaper, matches, fireplace kindling bought from a hardware store. Not easy for urban dwellers to burn things, she had realized. Nobody had real fireplaces anymore. But the fire had caught quickly, thanks to her training in the Girl Guides and Hugh’s Hiking Club, and she had burned that box, with its contents, down to grey ash before anyone had noticed the small fire on the river bank.
A satisfying personal ceremony, and one she has never regretted. The objects of the past are contaminated; they hold the dust of all mistakes. She would burn up the lot of this, if she hadn’t promised it to Cynthia and now Hugh.
She pages through relics, replaces them in their boxes. Moves on.
A trunkful of Alice’s dresses. These had not been packed by Sidonie, hurriedly, with most of Alice’s other things, in the days after Alice’s death, but by someone else, earlier. The dresses have been folded, meticulously, with twists of tissue in the folds, more tissue and plastic bags around the dresses. Mothballs in the trunk, at one time; there’s still a faint odour of naphtha. A professional job, almost museum quality; no evidence of mildew or vermin or even discolouration. Who had done this, archived the clothes so well? Mother, likely; Alice herself wouldn’t have been bothered.
She doesn’t unseal the bags, doubting that she’ll be able to repack them as well. Through the tissue, the plastic, she sees swatches of fabric, and with almost no hesitation, her memory fills in the rest. Blue broadcloth, mint-green poplin, white piqué. Candy-pink madras plaid, blue gingham, blue seersucker.
Dresses that Alice had made herself: the last years she was at home, the dining room table was perpetually covered with pattern tissue and fabric yardage, as if it were the back room of a dressmaker’s shop. And the dresses were lovely, were confections. All with fitted bodices, full skirts: that was the style. Only the necklines and sleeves and collars changed, and Alice drew and adapted these constantly. It was a serious business. Women’s magazines elaborated at length on the correct choice of neckline for face shape. The collars and necklines all had names: Peter Pan, portrait, sweetheart. A whole culture of neck openings.
And Alice’s clothes were so much a product of her imagination and labour that they might be justly seen as an extension of her. Though they were also the taste of that particular era. Art and packaging at once. Well, that might say something about a woman’s lot. She must remember to ask Clara about it. Clara will explain it to her.
She ought to just pass this trunk on to Cynthia, intact. Cynthia will be charmed to receive something so pretty, so benign, from Alice. She ought to have thought of the dresses before, ought to have searched them out and given them to Cynthia. That might have been enough to satisfy her, might have forestalled this whole quest.
Cynthia can have the trunk of dresses. Cynthia can take responsibility for letting in the destructive air.
But if she herself were to undo these sealed bags, preserved in the dry desert air for these fifty years, what would come out? Would they smell of Alice? Would she recognize that smell?
Pandora’s box: that was a story Father told her. The moral, he said, was that curiosity could get you into a lot of trouble. But Clara says the real moral of the story is that good and ill are inseparable in human experience. It’s not Greek at all, but probably Zoroastrian, by way of the Persians, Clara says.
If she opens any of these bags, she will be in trouble, Sidonie knows.
She takes her X-Acto knife, makes a swift incision across the brittle membrane.
Mrs. Inglis says that she has found a husband for Alice. This, Sidonie, straddling the tall wooden stool, her legs twisted around the stool’s legs, her skirt half up her thighs, overhears. Her mother and Mrs. Inglis are in the parlour with tea, Sidonie perched at the kitchen counter doing homework. The curtain between the kitchen and dining room is napped wine-purple flannel, through which anything can be heard.
Husband: this is a verb, Sidonie knows, and she imagines her mother and Mrs. Inglis do not know that. A verb meaning to cultivate or till, to manage prudently, to use or spend wisely. She sees that these meanings of the word are also apropos.
Sidonie’s mother makes a sound like a slow bubble rising in stew — a cross between a sigh and a sputter. Then her voice, high and pinched, as if she were letting it out carefully, the way you let the dog out without letting flies in: “Oh?”
Sidonie sways a little over her geography homework, hums randomly under her breath. Important to keep moving, to not set up a sound of stillness, of listening, that might trickle into the other room, where her mother, narrow, but somehow slack, in print rayon, and Mrs. Inglis, a taut bolster in her cotton shirt and gabardine skirt, sit on the sofa.
Mrs. Inglis says, “Cecil is bringing in a new manager. He’s from the States — went to agriculture college. He was overseas, but he hasn’t got family. He was engaged, apparently, though it was broken off. Cecil’s cousin knows the fellow’s aunt, so we don’t need to worry on those fronts.”
Sidonie wonders if any of Mrs. Inglis’s statements would qualify as non sequiturs. That is a term she has just learned. It’s a useful word. It sounds like what it means: something shadowy, gimpy, loitering on the edge of what is open and frank. The sequitu
rs standing in their group, casual, dressed in their clean uniforms — togas, maybe — with their spears all polished. Then the non sequiturs, lurking, spurned, for good reason. They make her uneasy, these unspoken connections between things. They are shifty, dangerous. They don’t play by the rules.
She hums, pencils in Skeena River on her map. As she writes, she hears the words pronounced in Mrs. Inglis’s fruity vowels, feels their stickiness, as if they are globs of preserves falling from a spoon.
“Respectable,” Sidonie’s mother says, and Sidonie can hear the sound of her mouth again opening so briefly to let the words out. Respectable is not a sticky word, from her mother’s mouth. It is a white wall, with a small stained-glass window, like at church. It means, Sidonie knows, going to church, but the right one, not the tiny Catholic one by the highway, nor the painted wooden one where the Lutherans meet and sing loudly and seriously, their somber German words spilling out when the doors are left open on hot Sundays in July. Though that is almost respectable.
Respectable is Mrs. Inglis and Mr. Inglis, who came from England and owned one of the big orchards, and hired workers, and their two sons, Graham and Hugh, and the Protherows and Wentworths, the Smithsons and the Elliots and Erskines. Respectable is also Sidonie’s family, though they live in a smaller house than the Inglises, and had a smaller orchard, and though Sidonie’s father is not English, because he comes from a titled family, and her mother’s parents are Scottish. Respectable is also Dr. MacKenzie, and Miss Thompson and Mrs. Clare, who runs the Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary, and the principal, Mr. Ramsay, who are all Scottish. To a certain extent, it is the German-speaking families that moved here after the war: the Knopfs and Kruegers, the Rilkes and Getzkes and Gormanns.
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