After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  Alice and Masao, Sidonie sees, both like the outcropping, with its astonishing vista. Once up there, they relax as if they are at home. Alice sometimes packs a picnic lunch: egg sandwiches, oatmeal biscuits, apples. Masao sometimes brings soda. That’s a treat: they don’t have it at home. Father says it rots the stomach; Mother says it is too expensive. Masao apologizes for it: he can’t bring food, he says, as he doesn’t have access to the kitchens. But Sidonie loves the soda: the bottles with their narrow necks, the fizziness, the sweetness, which she thinks of as Masao’s sweetness, a kind of honeyed lilting softness that spills over onto Alice and her and the trips themselves.

  Sidonie picks the chocolate lilies, with their deep glossy brown and green checkered bells, but only if they walk along the trestles on the way home. Out of water, the lilies don’t last half an hour. She picks the Indian Paint, too, for the flash of its orange flame in the shadowy parlour. But on their picnics, she gathers only a certain family of flower, which grows everywhere in a dozen or more varieties, so common and unprepossessing as to be nameless. No: some have names. Vetch, alfalfa, clover, locoweed. But the others are anonymous, overlooked short bushes, tangled vines, tall, hairy stalks. What makes them a family is that they all produce peablossom-shaped flowers. Some of the flowers are yellow, some, like those of the alfalfa, blue ranging through lilac and purple, some a striking violet-pink. Some of the blossoms are arranged in long spikes, others in ball-shaped clusters, and still others in single blooms.

  She can’t say what fascinated her first: that there were so many of these plants, or that there were such subtle variations among them. (That they were related, connected, was a premise a priori, apparently.) She has begun, unable to find out their names, to keep track of them in a notebook: drawing in the flowers, numbering them, making cryptic notes about where she has found them, what date. They are intricate to draw, and for some, she has borrowed her father’s magnifying glass and gazed at the blooms, nodding to herself, humming, as the familiar flattened trumpet shape, the inner and outer lobes, the furred throats, slip into focus. Some of the blossoms are flatter, some longer, some more pouched, some veined. But all share the base pattern of a flared tube — a tube with nectar at its foot, and the two pairs of symmetrical, fused, cleft lobes, the smaller hooded by the larger, outer — that reminds of her of something she can’t quite identify.

  Often, Sidonie brings her notebook along on the forays. She remembers now the intensely sweet scent of the little yellow bells. The dark mouth of the mine, the vertigo of the rock peak.

  How often had they gone? Had she always been invited, or had Alice and Masao made the excursion on their own?

  They had done that hike together for years: until Alice and Masao were in their late teens, maybe. And to her, Masao seemed a childhood friend, familiar as their own orchard, as Graham or Hugh Inglis, as shy tow-headed Walt.

  She remembers the lowing of cattle from Tiefendale’s dairy farm to the south and west of the picnic hill. Did Alice once or more than once send her down the rutted dirt road to ask Mary Tiefendale, in her droopy print dress, her hand covering missing teeth, smudging her words, for a pint of milk?

  She remembers how the light grew thick, and blue butterflies, the same purplish-dusk-fading-to-turquoise as the blossoms of the alfalfa that attracted then, clung to her page, their antennae exclamation points above her pea-flower drawings. The blue butterflies, the little Azures, resting their thread legs, their comma feet, on the page of her sketchbook. Did her eyes close in the heat of the afternoon, the buzz of the insects, and Alice’s and Masao’s voices fuse into one murmur, as if a clear small spring were trickling over the parched soil, the glittering, broken granite slope?

  Hugh returns, as promised, in late June, bringing his youngest daughter, a sturdy girl in her early twenties, with the thick blonde hair and short upper lip that Sidonie associates with the Dutch. She seems natural, wholesome, Sidonie thinks, dressed in khaki shorts and t-shirt. She looks very much like Hugh, and like Mrs. Inglis, whose presence is startlingly conjured up by Ingrid’s round hazel eyes and grin.

  Her neighbour calls to her over the railing as she’s watering her pots of geraniums: “I see you’ve got your boyfriend’s granddaughter visiting. She’s the spit of him, isn’t she!”

  “Hugh is not my boyfriend,” Sidonie says. “Ingrid is his daughter, not his granddaughter.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” the neighbour says.

  Sidonie invites Cynthia and Justin for the evening, in order to meet Hugh and Ingrid, and then also invites Alex and Tasha. The arrangements cause some confusion; Justin, who has been anxious to meet Ingrid, Cynthia says, had been put out to hear his cousins had been also invited. But Hugh had thought that Ingrid would like to meet more people her own age. There is much telephoning back and forth, with Justin a sulky go-between, and Sidonie feels annoyed: there must be simpler ways to arrange an evening. The plans expand: now Kevin, who’s going to be in town, is invited as well, and Stephen and Debbie. And then, when he arrives, Justin greets Ingrid with what Sidonie can only interpret as shock or great disappointment. Had he been expecting Ingrid to be somehow different? Sidonie can’t see that there is anything wrong with her looks.

  Hugh makes up for the awkwardness, becoming voluble, almost overbearing. “It’s time Ingrid saw a little of her other country,” Hugh says. Ingrid’s mother, also an engineer, has remarried and remained in Zimbabwe. But the farm on which her family has lived for several generations has been taken over. “Think of that,” Hugh says. “A hundred and fifty years, one family cultivated that piece of bush, made it profit, and it’s just taken away, snap.”

  This is out of Ingrid’s hearing. She and Alex are at the end of the living room, engrossed in Sidonie’s music collection.

  Justin says, “But they were colonists, exploiters. It’s the African people’s land. It should go back to them. The British and Dutch had no business there in the first place.”

  “But Europeans have lived there now for generations,” Cynthia says. “The people who lost it, Ingrid’s grandparents, weren’t colonizers. They had just been born into that life. Why should they lose everything?”

  “Anyway,” Hugh says, “they’ve made a mess of it now. The natives can’t or won’t farm it; this last trip, when I drove out there, everything was dead. Nothing was being cultivated. They’d cut down the trees for firewood. It was all dust blowing away.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t be farmed,” says Justin. “Let it return to its natural state.”

  “But the blacks there are starving,” Hugh says, impatience in his voice. “They are just sitting there, starving, begging their mealiemeal from the local warlords. Nobody grows anything but ganja weed.”

  Justin says, “If they are starving, it’s the white people’s fault. They kept the Africans from getting educated or learning to run their country, and made them dependent on Western things. It’s a known fact.”

  Tasha says, “I think it should all go back to the way it was before. The people can go back to living naturally off the land, the way they did before white people came.”

  “Well,” Hugh says, “That’s a nice idea, but they all have guns now, and all of the industrialized nations want their natural resources. And they’re killing off the game. White rhinos are gone. Elephants nearly gone. Your children will never see those animals.”

  Justin says, “But the Europeans hunted game. Look at all those movies from the 1950s.”

  Sidonie suddenly remembers: in 1953, she and Alice and Hugh and Graham had been taken by Mrs. Inglis to see Mogambo; she remembers Hugh putting his hand over her eyes just as Grace Kelly and Clark Gable — playing characters married to other people — had been about to kiss, and also when Clark Gable had shot the gorilla. And after, Graham arguing with his mother about the portrayal of the gorilla: humans were much more dangerous to gorillas than vice versa, Graham had insisted, angrily, costing them all a stop for ice cream. Does Hugh remember that?

 
“The Europeans have a lot to answer for,” Hugh says. “And yes, they probably shouldn’t have been in Africa at all. But more harm is being done now, and stupidly.”

  It is a serious discussion, tinged with anger. She wants to shake Hugh: he is too sure of himself, too knowing. Justin is very young. Perhaps he is naïve, but he is young. She remembers something Clara used to say: if you vote conservative when you are under twenty-five, you have no heart, and if you vote liberal after you are twenty-five, you have no head.

  Is that what it comes down to?

  Cynthia says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy. It’s like he’s suddenly become a sullen teenager. I thought we had skipped that stage.”

  Kevin is also there. Alice’s second son. He looks even more startling than Stephen did; he has arrived from the coast on a motorcycle, wearing a ripped and high-smelling leather jacket, and when he shrugs off his jacket and helmet, he reveals a shaved head, a preposterous reddish mustache, and forearms so thickly tattooed that he appears to be wearing printed sleeves. He is ebullient: he bearhugs Sidonie, disconcertingly. His nephews and niece obviously idolize him as a counter-culture figure. Shades of Buck Kleinholz. Sidonie tries not to purse her lips; she glances at Hugh, but Hugh is laughing, delighted.

  And she has to admit that Kevin is more likeable than his father. He lacks that permanent sense of grievance, or whatever it was, that Buck had. He seems, she has to admit, quite comfortable in his inscribed skin.

  Alex and Ingrid have drifted off to Sidonie’s patio and have to be called a second time for dinner, Sidonie notices. Cynthia gives her a raised-eyebrow glance. But Alex has a girlfriend, Jessica, who usually comes to family things, and is out of town now, working at a resort. And Ingrid will not be here in a week or two. It is nothing. She does not see how Alex is preferred, but though Justin seems to have recovered his politeness, and in fact is behaving with charm, Ingrid does not respond to his attention.

  Sidonie has contributed to the dinner only the use of her kitchen and what she could find at the German deli: prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, local cheese, wine, of course, and thick chewy bread from the very good local bakery. But now Cynthia serves up watercress soup with watercress picked from the creek, and cream and flecks of something light and smoky. “Nigella’s recipe,” Cynthia says. “I saw it on TV.” What is the smoky meat? “Guess,” she says, then tells them. Smoked pheasant, local, bought from a charcutier at the weekend market.

  A pan of lake trout: these were swimming this morning, Stephen says.

  And a cake for pudding, made by Tasha, with ground almonds and tiny, sweet, intensely flavourful strawberries.

  “Hundred-mile diet,” Kevin says, and then they are all off again, arguing, interrupting, changing sides. It is a new thing: she does not remember discussions like that happening at the von Täler table, nor at dinners with Adam’s family. But she notices how, with Kevin present, the rancor does not grow. He exudes a kind of bonhomie, an openness that is a matrix for all of their interchanges. A kind of confidence that comes, perhaps, from being on his own turf: he is a professional chef.

  When her opinion is elicited, she laughs and says that she does not cook at all.

  Later, Hugh says that Kevin reminds him of Sidonie’s father.

  “My father!” She is appalled. No, no.

  “Yes,’ Hugh says. “That quality of friendliness. Peter had that, I remember.”

  Possibly. But in her father it had been something of a different caliber, surely.

  Hugh is often busy with his work on the bridge, and she feels that she must find activities to occupy Ingrid. She’s a quiet girl, given to sleeping late, but otherwise easy to accommodate. She cooks, tidies up after herself, reads, goes for walks, does yoga in her basement room in the morning when the sun shines in. She is quite amiable. But she must not be made to sit in a suburban house for days, and Sidonie needs to work.

  It’s Alex who comes to the rescue, surprisingly, offering to take Ingrid out on days when he isn’t working, which seem numerous, given the time of year and the purported construction boom. But it’s a kindness; the girl must want to be with people her own age, and Tasha seems to have a full schedule, while Justin has proved a disappointment as an escort: he’s reverted to being surly around Hugh’s daughter, as if he has a grudge against her. Even Hugh and Cynthia have noticed this. Cynthia says that she’s bewildered by it.

  So unlike Justin, to not be a paragon of consideration, of good manners.

  So: Hugh drives into town, to oversee whatever it is he is overseeing on the new bridge construction, and Alex comes by most afternoons to take Ingrid out.

  In the evenings, Hugh and Ingrid, and often Alex, congregate at her house; they open the French doors, let in the lake breeze. Alex, she sees, is fascinated with her LP collection. Sometimes he’ll take Ingrid out again, to a bar, she supposes. It’s kind of him. One evening when they stay in, when Justin has come by as well, Hugh makes them look at the photo albums.

  Justin is able to pick Sidonie’s mother out of the crowd in the photo easily. You look just like her, Auntie Sid, he says. Alex, surprisingly, is the one to spot Hugh’s mother.

  Sidonie’s mother, in this photo, must be fifty, and Hugh’s mother is even older. They were old, for mothers of young children.

  Hugh says, “This was my parents’ second marriage. When they met in India, they were both married to other people. Mother had two children, who she lost custody of, when she ran off with my father.”

  Sidonie had not known that. She knows little of her own parents’ lives before their arrival in the valley, either.

  In the early 50s, Mother had taken Sidonie and Alice on the train to visit her family in northern Alberta; they’d visited only that once. Mother’s parents and grown brothers had lived in an unpainted wood house on a few acres of scrub land. They had seemed, even to Sidonie’s seven-year-old self, very poor. She remembers little of the visit: only Granny showing her a photograph album, which, like everything important in the house, was kept put away in a tin box, wrapped in newspaper. In a photo with “Hastings Photography Studio” written in the corner in white, Father was wearing a suit, and Mother a little skirt and jacket and hat. There was a backdrop of trees and an archway that did not look quite real.

  “I guess your ma always wanted to be high class,” Granny had said, suddenly. “I guess that’s why she went for your pa.”

  The summer that Mother is dying, Alice mentions that they must telephone Mother’s brother Don, let him know. Sidonie asks, “Why were they so poor? It was like the thirties, there, wasn’t it? Why were they so poor, still, in the fifties?”

  Alice says, “I don’t know exactly. There was one more brother, Howard, you know. He was killed in Europe, in the war. Mother always said he was her favourite brother.

  “And her parents had a bad start, Mother always said. They were more or less deported from Scotland, you know. Ma’s father did something — killed the laird’s deer, or something stupid like that. Probably starving. I think he was probably a delinquent of some kind from the start. Mother says he liked horses, but never could hold down a job or make the farm work, and they owed a lot of money. Grandma was supposedly from a more educated class — her father was a schoolteacher — but she never seemed to have it together, did she? Mother always complained that her mother didn’t have the sense to stop having children — she said that there’d have been money to put her and Don and Gordon through school, if it hadn’t been for the other two being born.”

  It was not to be answered, Sidonie’s question. By this time, both of Mother’s parents were long deceased; her brother Ken had moved to Edmonton, and was retired; her sister Mary already dead in a car accident. Don, who’d got the farm, had sold it when the tar sands were being explored, and now lived on Vancouver Island, purportedly a wealthy but miserly bachelor.

  When Alice had told her these things, she had thought: that explains a lot about Mother. Now she wonders, as she did not then, why Al
ice had been told and not her. Mother, confiding in Alice. What else had Alice known?

  On one side of the family, a down-at-the-heels, possibly depressive or alcoholic Scots. On the other, European bourgeoisie.

  One of the von Tälers had come looking for Sidonie in the late 1970s, had tracked her down in Montreal. Or, to be precise, had not come looking for Sidonie, but for von Tälers in general. This was an American one, from California or Nevada; she can’t remember precisely, now. A man younger than herself, looking, as people did then, for his roots. He’d found her in the phone book. He’d wanted to know about the rest of the family, but she hadn’t much information for him. Her father had been dead by then. The American was setting up a group, he said. They could all connect with each other. All of the offspring and relations of the old count. Sidonie had declined, but offered him Alice’s children. He had not, she thought, been particularly interested in the Kleinholzes.

  A patriarchal structure: only the name had mattered, really. Primogeniture, too. Her father, born into a medieval town, his father the Burgermeister, his close relatives titled. If his father had been the older son, he’d have had a different life. As it was, when he was eighteen, the Archduke, a distant relative, had been assassinated; his country had been plunged into war. At twenty-nine, without patrimony or profession, he’d decamped for Canada, had used a small legacy from his grandmother to buy an orchard. (A small legacy? the cousin had said. In my family, we say that he swiped grandmother’s jewel case.)

  Father hadn’t had any recent family photos. Her second cousin, though, has offered to share his collection with her. Come to think of it, he had said that they were available online, at the address he gave Sidonie. She must remember her password; that’s how it was set up, she thinks, with a password. Possibly Stephen or one of the children will be interested.