Clara’s brother, of course. The new Sidonie doesn’t grin in recognition, however, but makes a little inclination of her head, a small laugh at herself. “Out of context,” she says.
“Yes!” Clara’s brother says, “I always find that too.”
Sidonie has seen Clara twice at the pool since Saturday. She notices the resemblance between Clara and her brother. “Where are you off to?” he asks, and for a moment she can’t remember, so happy is she to be reminded of Clara.
So it is Clara who is her first friend, and Anita and Adam only Clara’s siblings, who often come along on outings, who are at the apartment when Clara takes Sidonie home. But Sidonie adapts to them all with delight. Her new self grows niches in which to absorb and respond to the St. Regis life: the food, the topics of conversation, the tone, the jokes, the habits of concerts and reading and walks on the mountain. All, she thinks, new experiences, though looking back, decades later, she can see that it was a only a slight adaptation she was making, that she had been bred very nearly for this life, even in that far-flung community of Marshall’s Landing. Father’s gramophone, Mother’s Royal Family scrapbook, the omnipresence of the orchard, the Inglises’ brand of Britishness, the prim dry Scottishness of Mr. Ramsay and Miss Dobie, the accents and cabbage-roll domesticity and serious Schubert addictions of the Schillers: all of these had been a sort of primordial soup in which she had become a suitable addition to a family like the St. Regises.
But at the time, it had seemed miraculous: her adaptability, their acceptance.
She is persuaded to bring her violin to Sunday dinners at the house on Clarke, and she and Adam play a duet, Clara accompanying them on the piano. Sidonie thinks about how much Mother would like to see this: how to Mother it would be the epitome of Culture. She writes about it in one of her brief, infrequent, laborious letters home, trying, for once, to choose the detail that will convey this image to Mother, both precisely and accurately. (Why does she feel the need to show off to Mother, to gain her approval, at this point of rebirth? She doesn’t know.)
Perhaps she is practicing her new voice.
Clara played the piano, while her brother and I attempted a violin duet. We were all very serious, until Clara’s mother mercifully interrupted us with the tea-tray.
Who is speaking in these letters? A different Sidonie, one who has transformed herself into the sort of magazine that Mother might like to read.
But there is another story, one that she doesn’t tell.
The day Adam ducks under her umbrella, he invites her to lunch at the faculty club. It is a dull, wet Friday in early October. Clara and Sidonie were supposed to go shopping after their morning classes, but Clara has a bad cold. She has suggested that Sidonie go look at the exhibit in the Redpath, instead. And that is where Adam finds her. Had Clara arranged this? Probably, though it wouldn’t have occurred to Sidonie, at the time, to wonder.
At lunch, Adam seems nervous. Sidonie has not yet formed much of an impression of him, except that he is quiet, that he listens to and trades witticisms with his sisters, especially with Clara, as if they were equals, something that in her experience boys or young men are not likely to do. She has learned that he plays the violin, as she does. She had thought at first that he was a musician, but, in fact, he is a professor of architecture. And driving home that Saturday night, she’d sat in the front, and they’d talked about turnover in lakes. He had that sort of detached politeness that reminded her of Graham and Hugh Inglis; a sort of suit through which it was hard to see.
Today, he stammers a little, seems to be sweating. Perhaps it’s because students aren’t really supposed to be in the faculty club, Sidonie surmises. She is also perhaps unsuitably dressed. She hasn’t had time yet to hunt down the sort of clothes she has envisioned for herself, and yet her old wardrobe seems unsupportable — and so she is wearing (and Adam wouldn’t have been able to see this until she took off her raincoat) a boy’s rugby jersey, striped in olive and cream, a short pleated skirt in rust-coloured Harris tweed, and marigold tights, all borrowed in a forage through her dormitory mates’ closets. She likes the abstract effect of the colours and lines of the clothes; up close, she has to admit, they might seem strange.
She says, “Should I keep my coat on? I’m afraid that I’m inappropriately dressed.” But Adam says, emphatically, that she isn’t.
She asks for eggs and bacon (she has missed breakfast, as usual). Adam orders soup and a clubhouse for himself, but hardly eats. It’s warm in the faculty club, and the leather chairs and oak tables gleam comfortingly, substantially. The food is a pleasant weight in her stomach. It is almost as nice as being with Clara. But the new Sidonie, self-aware, remembers to smile pleasantly at Adam and to ask him if he liked the Sibelius piece at the concert the evening before. She knows he goes to these — Clara has mentioned it — but Clara had been ill and Sidonie had not thought to look for Adam.
They discuss Sibelius.
Adam says, “Do you like Italian food?”
“I don’t know,” Sidonie says. “I’ve only ever eaten the Marshall Landing version of spaghetti, which has Campbell’s tomato soup in it. I doubt that’s the real thing.”
Adam laughs. He says he knows a little place off St. Denis that’s supposed to be good. Would she like to try it? What about tomorrow night?
“Do you think Clara will be up to it?” Sidonie asks.
“I thought just the two of us,” Adam says. His voice is odd. Skittish, she would say.
It isn’t until Sidonie is getting dressed the next evening that it occurs to her that she has been asked on a date. She has spent Saturday shopping for clothes — an annoying activity, she thinks, when she could have used the time to do homework — except for discovering the St. Laurent discount stores — and has come back with a sleeveless black shift and black tights, new leather boots with Cuban heels (she’ll have to go without new books for a month to pay for them) and a long string of improbable, large imitation pearls with a golden cast. One of the girls — Judy? Jenny? She can never tell them all apart — offers to help her with her hair. A chignon, says the girl. Think Audrey Hepburn. It requires a lot of pins, but the effect is correct, Sidonie sees.
“Is it a date?” the girl asks.
“I don’t think so,” Sidonie says. “Older brother of a friend.”
“Is he handsome? Single?”
“Those are irrelevant questions,” Sidonie says. She means it humorously, but the old, brusque Sidonie has emerged, and the girl is offended.
“Is he interested in you or not?” she snaps.
She did not know, but it became apparent quite quickly that the dinner was meant to steer their relationship down a specific path. When their engagement is announced in December, people keep remarking to Sidonie, “That was a quick courtship,” or some version of that idea. Sidonie thinks that if anyone knew really how quick it had been, they would have been quite shocked. It is a matter of minutes, from the moment she realizes that Adam has asked her on a date, to the time it takes her to finish getting dressed, gather her coat and handbag, and walk downstairs to the lobby to wait for the car, her mind opens to, accepts, embraces the idea of Adam as her lover.
She is perhaps not unusual in this quick decision. Women of her generation were, after all, prepared, not dissimilarly to Mother’s Christmas goose, for a certain role. They had to judge all eligible men, all encounters with eligible men, against their certain end of assuming this role. Why not Adam? He is handsome, in his fine-drawn way, funny, intelligent. They both play the violin, and she gets along with his sisters. A sensible choice.
What is different about Sidonie is that she thinks lover, not husband. Why is this? Possibly because she is still so young: only eighteen. Possibly because of Mrs. Inglis’s frequent stories about Alice Keppel, though those were meant for Alice: stories about her namesake. Probably because she has never believed that she is capable of the kind of joining that marriage is believed to embody. She has known, though not chosen, an
emotional autonomy, all her life. She cannot envision it changing.
For this reason a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife, and they two shall become one. She has heard this passage invoked — how many times? — by Mr. Erskine. She cannot see herself becoming one with anyone.
Sidonie is, at this time in her life, neither especially religious nor irreligious. She has not consciously adopted the atheistic or Bohemian attitude, the extolling of Free Love, that existed in echelons of Montreal society, though likely not in Marshall’s Landing, in the early 1960s.
She decides that she will sleep with Adam as soon as there is an opportunity. (And as soon as she decides this, she feels her body, her arms and legs, her breasts and belly and pubis, grow warm, polarized towards Adam.) She will possibly marry him, but only after they have discussed and agreed on every possible decision. (She will not be her Mother, trapped in a round of exhausting work. Will not be Alice, caught in the net.)
She does not know how, nor has the self-possession, to play coy, as young women of her time are supposed to do. And though Adam is thirty-one years old, an urban sophisticate for his time, he could not have expected Sidonie’s response to him: that instant, complete opening to him.
It is Sidonie who says, “I want to go home with you, after,” the second time they go out together. Adam has his own place, of course, a bachelor apartment. He doesn’t live with his parents and sisters. There is only one thing that statement can mean in their time. On Adam’s sofa, they kiss, and given the possibilities, she is nearly swooning. Adam asks, “Are you sure?” before he pulls out the sofa bed and they go further. This is what she would expect; this is gentlemanly. Adam has safes; that is also gentlemanly and mature. She is pleased, somewhere under her insistent drive; she has chosen correctly.
Afterward, she weeps a little; not at Adam’s house, but after he has driven her home (for she must be home; she must be in her dormitory, if not by the official curfew of midnight, at least by two in the morning, or she will be disciplined. Her dorm-mates will cover for each other up to a certain time, but will not vouchsafe the entire night. They have a social code to enforce.)
It is not the pain of deflowering, which her dorm-mates dread in hushed whispers, that has hurt her, for that was taken care of years ago. Neither is it the intrusion into her self, the loss of power that women will describe a decade later in group encounters, that upsets her. What is disappointing to her is that the experience is so mundane, over so quickly. That there is no intense, wild pleasure, but only something not too dissimilar from her first occasion. It is disappointing. She is almost transported back into her gangly fourteen-year-old self.
And then she accepts that this is all it is, this perfunctory penetration and bumping.
Another rebirth? No, just the final stages of the first one. Compromised, complicit with her own corruption, she feels that she has emerged into the human world, this time consciously, intentionally. She is an adult now: she fully understands the adult world. She has put away her innocence, which is to say her belief in her own incorruptibility, for good. She feels she is sophisticated, and she is aware of the word’s literal meaning.
So she thinks in those heady first weeks. When she is not completely engrossed in her very difficult courses in physics, which for some reason are required of any science student, and which cause her elation, rather than angst.
When Adam announces the engagement to his family, Clara claps her hands as if applauding a performance or the winner of a race. She says, “Oh, good! Now we will never lose you.”
Sidonie assumes at the time that Clara means her, Sidonie, but years later, thinking back, wonders if it wasn’t Adam that Clara was referring to. For what was Sidonie recruited? To fill a place, really; to ensure that whomever Adam married wouldn’t change him, wouldn’t change the St. Regis family strain. If so, the whole family must have felt that way. Adam’s father said, “Do you mean to tell me that young people are still getting married?” But smiling. And Adam’s mother said, “I’m very pleased; you’ll be a great asset to our family.” That is the main tenor, that she is joining their family, as if it’s a company or club. There was the implication that she had been vetted, an offer made.
Later, in her bitterness, she had wondered why he had bothered to marry, at all. But he must have had to: he must have wanted that social enfranchisement as much as she did.
From her own family, a different response: she has not brought in someone new, but has acquired a large, costly possession whose merits have yet to be proven: a bicycle, a horse. The occasion warrants an expensive, long-distance telephone call. Mother says, “Oh, my goodness! Are you sure?” And Father says, “Well, if it’s what you want, Liebchen.”
Sidonie doesn’t speak directly to Alice, who is already married, with two babies, and living in a rural place with no phone. Mother tells her that Alice wishes her the best of luck, which Sidonie takes to be a liberal translation.
She declines the offer of a loaned wedding dress (she remembers it: full-skirted, tight-waisted, encrusted like some marine beast with hard, scratchy tulle and lace), and wears, daringly, a little suit of raw silk, in an off-white like light cream. It has an open neckline with a flat, rounded collar, a boxy jacket, a narrow skirt. With it a pillbox hat and a mere reference to a veil.
Mother, seeing her, is disappointed, Sidonie can tell. “That’s so very — modern!” Mother says.
What did Sidonie think she was doing? And Adam? What was he thinking?
Those are questions Sidonie has time to gnaw on only much later in her life, and the answers she arrives at in 1983, when her marriage to Adam comes unraveled, are not the same answers that she finds in the decades after that.
In 1962, Sidonie is thinking that it will be a sensible thing to marry Adam, since he has asked her, and since they enjoy each other’s company. Marrying Adam will mean that she may move out of her dorm, where it is often too noisy to concentrate on her work, and where the girls — whose names she can never remember — are much too inclined to borrow her things, to leave the bathroom in disarray, and to tease.
And part of her thinks that it is sensible to settle the question of whom she will marry early, so she can get down to the serious business of her life, and not have to devote energy to the activities that comprise the search for a suitable mate.
The foolish virgins and the wise. Miss Erskine had told them it was about Choosing Sensibly. She had congratulated herself, marrying Adam, for choosing so much more sensibly than Alice had.
On her last night of her visit to Montreal, she and Anita and Clara go to a concert, Clara leading them through shining wet back streets. They go down some stairs leading off a side street, shake out their umbrellas, go through dim light and fragmented music: someone is tuning up a bass viol. They find seats in the small, dim room: Sidonie recognizes, and Clara is greeted by, some luminaries she remembers from Clara’s parties, or has seen pictures of in magazines. This is a select audience: a private fundraiser.
Everybody hushes, as for a religious ceremony.
The small elderly man, a well-known singer-poet, walks in with just a guitar. He is introduced; there is warm, quick applause, as for a family member; and then he begins, his familiar baritone growling monotonically through the familiar sly, sacrilegious lyrics. (How much had it cost Clara for tickets to this very intimate event, she wonders?)
She remembers that she has heard him sing decades before, in a small room, before his fame and the huge concert halls. She had not been particularly impressed with him, as a young woman; he was not musical, she thought: though his lyrics were sometimes funny, they didn’t make sense. And his voice was almost atonal, the music droning, punctuated uncomfortably with patches of nasal wailing, like klezmer music.
On this occasion, she hears the music and lyrics differently: hears the bleakness, the self-deprecation, the loneliness under the layers of wit and black humour.
It’s crowded and cold, in my secret life. . . he sings
, and it seems that he is looking right at her, into her. It is almost too much to hear; she wants to weep; a storm of regret, longing, despair rises in her chest. She wants to run outside in the rain, to beat her breast, but must sit on her little chair among the other listeners and politely clap.
After an hour the singer takes his break, and the audience stands around talking. They are all old friends of the singer; everyone touches him, Sidonie notices. He is very slight in his jacket. His cropped white head seems to be too large for his body. She retreats to the periphery of the room: Clara and Anita ought not to have brought her here.
The singer’s glance falls on her, and returns; he locks gazes with her and she has to fight the urge to look away. She has never learned to meet eyes with a stranger.
On the way home, Clara says, “If we weren’t all so old, I’d say he was trying to pick you up,” and Anita says, “He was just trying to remember if he’d slept with you.”
“He didn’t,” Sidonie says.
Anita and Clara laugh.
They are sirens; they find more and more to entertain her; they will not let her go.
MUSSOLINI
After her long visit with Clara and Anita, she flies from Montreal to Toronto to spend a weekend with Hugh (Ingrid is away, visiting her older half-siblings). She and Hugh go out for dinner, to a concert, to the new wing of the museum, shopping. Hugh is amiable, urbane. Toronto is interesting. She likes that there is something new to do every evening.
Hugh has got tickets to see the production of Götterdämmerung at the Four Seasons. She has seen the entire cycle, of course, at the Bayreuth Festival, but this is a maiden Canadian performance, not to be missed. She suspects Hugh has got tickets for her sake, not out of his own interest; before the four and a half hours are up, she catches him snoring gently at least twice.
After a late dinner, he says, “Do you remember the opera singer? No: you’d have been too young. That was the winter of 49.”
After Alice Page 17