After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  But she does remember.

  An opera singer is coming to Marshall’s Landing. He is a real opera singer, a tenor. But he is also Mrs. Inglis’s cousin. He will sing in the hall and anyone can go, and the ticket money is for war orphans, though Father says it had better be kept here — there will be lots of starving here, after this winter.

  The outside of the hall is partly brown-stained wood and partly shiny tin. Inside, the walls are cream, with wainscotting in a dense, heavy green, like moss, and the floor made of strips of wood, varnished and shiny. There is a stage at one end of the hall with an orange curtain, and along the adjacent side, a long narrow kitchen with pass-through windows.

  Sidonie feels anxious in this room; it feels like a copy of something much grander that she has never seen. It tells her that there are bigger halls in other places, where more important things go on: it tells her that she and her world don’t matter. But Alice loves it. Alice is always here, being the princess in the school play, singing in the Christmas concert. Alice is wearing a new winter dress: deep plum velvet, with a gathered skirt and little silver buttons up the front, and a small collar. She has pulled her hair up rather tightly, and her face is winter-pale. Against the velvety plum of her dress, Alice’s head looks, Sidonie thinks, as if it were made of frosted or translucent glass, like the vase Mrs. Inglis has with the woman’s head on the side of it.

  Alice has not wanted to sit with the family, but Mother bought tickets in a block, and the seats are numbered, so she has to. She sits on the very end of the row in the aisle seat, her face turned slightly, as if she has no relationship to the rest of them. Next to Alice sits Father in his best suit, then Mother, and last, Sidonie, who is worried that someone she doesn’t know will sit on her other side. But it’s only Mr. Inglis, so she has let herself slide back into her chair instead of being scrooched up against Mother. Mr. Inglis says to Mother that Alice looks very beautiful, and then takes Sidonie’s hand. “And here is our shy violet,” Mr. Inglis says. Sidonie knows she is not beautiful: she has skin that is brown in summer, sallow in winter. And she is wearing an old dress of Alice’s that’s too big still. The bright blue colour makes her feel awkward, as if she is too shiny. But she likes the way the dress droops on her, the thick heavy wool tent of it. It’s like a monk’s robe, she thinks: in it she is hidden, safe. It’s one of the dresses that had come from Europe in a box, before the boxes had stopped arriving. A hand-me-down from a second cousin, never seen, and too big even for Alice when it had arrived. But then Alice had worn it, and everyone had said Oh! Alice! Because it had matched her eyes exactly. It does not match Sidonie’s eyes, which are grey.

  You are not supposed to crane your neck around like a yokel, but Sidonie does a little, looking for people she knows. She sees her teacher, the infant teacher, Miss Cavendish, and Miss Erskine, her Sunday School teacher. And Hugh and Graham Inglis, and Mr. and Mrs. Clare with all of the red-haired Clare children in a row, and Dr. Stewart, who came to see her when she had the measles, and old Mr. and Mrs. Schiller, who are the only people in Marshall’s Landing whom Father can speak German with, although he says that they have a much different dialect, and are hard to understand.

  The hall lights dim. A spotlight shines on the stage. Mrs. Inglis swooshes out onto the stage in a long grey dress and pearls and a smaller hat than usual, and introduces the singer, and everyone applauds, and then the tenor comes out, and bows. Mrs. Inglis and the tenor must know each other quite well, Sidonie thinks, but they are pretending to be grand and formal: there are flourishes. The tenor is not tall, but is widest around the stomach, and has thin legs; he’s cone-shaped, like a fir tree. He is bald on top of his head, but has lots of fair curls along the side and back. He is wearing evening dress: a tailcoat with a waistcoat under and a starched shirt front and a little bow tie. He looks shiny, glistening.

  When the tenor begins to sing, he opens his mouth wide and his lips make a sort of humped shape, and a high, resonant sound, like nothing Sidonie has heard come from a man’s mouth before, soars out into the hall. Sidonie hears some of the children and even adults in the audience titter, and she wants to herself, not because the sound is funny, but because it’s so unexpected. But it would be rude to laugh. Instead, she moves the energy of her brain away from the top of her head, where the giggling is, down, down towards her shoulders. She lets her shoulders drop, opens her chest so the music can get inside.

  The tenor is singing in Italian: Father has told Sidonie this. She can’t understand the words. What does the song mean? Even with her chest and shoulders open, waiting, Sidonie feels perplexed. It is not just the words, but the music itself that seems foreign. What is the music saying? It is a different language than the music she has heard before. It’s not like the music of church, which mostly says Let’s be good people together, or the music Alice likes to listen to on the radio, which says Quick! Have a good time, or of Father’s gramophone records, which say Aren’t musical notes beautiful, or even the jazz music heard once at Inglis’s, which says It’s lovely to be so sad.

  Sidonie asks Father to read the program to her: the first song is “Questa donna conoscete” from La Traviata. Is the song a story, then, like a play? Sidonie thinks it must be. But how can people follow the story if they can’t understand Italian? The music, she thinks, is more like Father’s Mozart recordings than anything else, but the singing changes it. The piano accompaniment is not very pronounced. The singing is the music.

  And then she feels: that’s it. The singing is the music. The tenor’s voice is the instrument, and it doesn’t really matter that she can’t understand the words. He is making an instrument, like a cello or a horn, out of his lungs and throat and mouth. She glances back: Richard and other children are still looking at each other and giggling. Alice is holding her head at an angle that tells Sidonie she knows people are looking at her.

  And then there is intermission, with coffee and cake at the pass-through, and Alice standing a little apart with her friends Bonnie and Coralee, and the ladies complimenting each other on their clothes. Someone else comes up to Mother and says, isn’t Alice a pretty girl! But Sidonie thinks that there is something disturbing about Alice: she is too pale, and the plum velvet dress too rich. Something about the way she looks reminds Sidonie of the opera singing. She is too fragile, too beautiful: she is vulnerable. Some danger threatens her.

  After the program begins again, the tenor sings some Schubert Lieder, which Sidonie has heard before on Father’s gramophone, but not like this. The tenor sings the song about the little brook. Father has told Sidonie what the words mean, so she can recognize them: ever cooler and clearer, the brook rushes along; is this then my path? And Sidonie can see the little brook, and the young man with his walking stick following it down the mountainside. Is this my path? He is going to come down into the valley; he’s looking for his destiny. She can see his slim straight back in his green woolen waistcoat, his cap. He’s standing on the little crooked path, and the sun is shining on his shoulders through the pines, and he is happy and only a little bit scared, because he’s at the beginning of his life. He doesn’t know what his life will bring, but he has all sorts of hopes and ambitions. And he’s happy because he’s free. He’s free to follow any little brook he wants.

  This time Sidonie is listening so deep in her chest that she isn’t aware at first of the movements around her. It’s a bump on the back of her chair that makes her eyes fly open, so that she sees a very odd thing: people in the audience are leaving in the middle of the concert. Families and individuals and small clusters of people have risen, in the little space between the songs, and are silently filing out. What is happening? She looks around. Is it a fire? But no. Mrs. Inglis strikes the piano keys and the tenor begins again, after only a little hesitation: this time, “The Huntsman.” And people are still leaving. The Davidsons, the Bonds, the Robinsons. The Clares, the McCarthys, the Platts. Other people she doesn’t recognize. Alice’s friends Bonnie and Coralee get up too, a
nd Alice half-rises, but Father takes her elbow and pulls her back into her seat.

  Sidonie tries to hear the song: Leave your gun in the wood, your yelping dogs at home! but the bustling around deafens her with distress. She cannot tell what the people who are leaving are thinking; their faces are closed. Mother is rigid beside her: red spots burn on her cheeks, but she doesn’t turn her head. Father is intently composed, listening. Behind her, the Schillers stay in their seats. Alice is pale and removed, as if she’s left her shell there and gone away.

  What does it mean?

  Finally, only the Inglises, the Erskines, the Protherows, Mr. Ramsay, Dr. Stewart, the Nakamuras and Mr. Tanaka and Masao, and the Schillers, with their odd clothes and accents, and perhaps a few others remain. The hall is half-empty. The tenor keeps singing, though, and when he is finished, they all clap very loudly, as if to make up for the missing pairs of hands. Nobody says anything. Mrs. Schiller is crying, but whether because of the music or the exodus, Sidonie can’t tell. Mr. Inglis shakes Father’s hand. Mrs. Inglis brings the tenor from the little room beside the stage, and everyone shakes his hand.

  And then Mrs. Inglis says, “Much too early to go home! A party!” and Father says, “Well, why not?” and everyone is going to the Inglises. Sidonie and Alice and Hugh are all allowed a little bit of sherry from a cut-glass decanter (the sherry is the colour of a specific kind of grown-up sadness and confusing behaviour, Sidonie will think forever after), and cake, and then to go up to Hugh’s and Graham’s playroom and look at Graham’s encyclopedia set, while downstairs the adults move onto whiskey and pretend that the concert was not disrupted.

  Nobody explains to Sidonie what has happened; very late, she finds herself lifted off Graham’s shoulder onto her father’s, and then is in the cold winter night.

  How to make sense of that concert, now?

  It’s a story of ethnic tensions, obviously. This had been just after the war. But more: some other forces at work. She remembers Father and Mr. Inglis, Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Erskine — and perhaps Mr. Protherow?— all in white jackets (smelling of mothballs, which was a queer smell, interesting and bad at the same time): how they made a row of white jackets shaking the singer’s hand, like a scene from a movie. (How long has it been since she has seen a group of men in white dinner jackets? An unexpected thing in that countryside.)

  “It was the German songs,” Hugh says.

  “The Lieder.”

  “Yes. It was still too close to the end of the war. Mother’s cousin Harry didn’t think of that, I guess. And my mother — I think she believed that Art transcended all, you know.”

  “Some people stayed. Men with dinner jackets.”

  “Is that what you remember? For me, it was the low-cut dresses and satin bosoms. Yes; my parents and some of the other Brits trying to hold the class line. Of course, if Harry hadn’t been Mother’s cousin, if Mother hadn’t arranged the whole thing, they might have left, too.”

  Yes. That had been in 1949, when they had been Swiss. It was later in the fifties, when the other German people had come, the displaced persons from Poland and the other countries in Eastern Europe, that things had changed.

  The first day of fifth grade: a new teacher, whom she did not know. This was significant, because she had known all of the other teachers all of her life. But the school had expanded, suddenly: there had been a great influx of children.

  On the first day, Miss Beattie makes the children stand up beside their desks and state their names. When it is her turn, Sidonie stands up, says her name: Sidonie von Täler.

  “Sidney One Dollar?” Miss Beattie says. “Is your last name, ‘One Dollar?’ I don’t see you on the class list, Sidney. Do you have an English name that you go by, as well as your Indian name?”

  Several girls, quick on the uptake, are giggling. Vern Platt says, “One Dollar’s a squaw,” using his trick of not seeming to speak. Sidonie is utterly confused for a few moments, an odd feeling, as if the desks were swirling around her, sucking air from the room. What is the teacher saying? The giggling behind her spreads. Her legs tremble, and she looks around her quickly for help, but even normally friendly faces are contorted, suffused with some sort of mirth. Only Edith Henry is not grinning or laughing, but scowling darkly down at her desk.

  Then the penny drops. Sidonie opens her mouth to say her name again, but to her surprise and shame, tears and sobs suddenly burst out of her, choking out the words.

  “Sit down,” says Miss Beattie.

  Sidonie puts her face in her arms and feels tears and mucus slime her cheeks and mouth.

  Richard Clare says, “Excuse me, Miss Beattie?” and Sidonie knows, without turning around, that Richard’s arm is waving in the air, his red hair smoothed back, his blue shirt crisp and tidy.

  “Yes,” says Miss Beattie, her voice a little less impatient.

  “Her name is Sidonie von Täler,” Richard says, enunciating in an exaggerated way, speaking with a neutral politeness that verges somehow on insolence, but only so slightly that it could not be objected to.

  “Oh, I see,” says Miss Beattie. She gives a little laugh. “Well, there’s no need to cry about it, is there, Sidonie?”

  After that she has treats Sidonie as if she were mentally and morally defective, speaking to her in a high, unnatural voice, raising her eyebrows and holding the paper out with the tips of her fingers when she hands back Sidonie’s assignments. On the assignments she writes: You must check for spelling errors. This is atrocious! And: did you proofread this? She gives Sidonie C, always, on compositions.

  Sidonie knows that she can do better: she does not proofread, she forgets letters and even whole words, she scribbles madly. The ideas tumble out of her onto the page, her hand not fast enough to channel them out through the fountain pen. That is another thing: the blots Sidonie makes on the pages of her books and on herself. Miss Beattie says “You look as if you’ve been trying to dye yourself blue,” and also “How do you expect I will read something so untidy?”

  But Sidonie never fixes up her work: she can’t bear to read her own phrases and sentences. It is as if somebody else had written them, somebody who knows too much about her, whom she knows too much about. The unfamiliar and yet too-familiar voice on the page makes her squirm inside, is like a black gloved hand fossicking around in her gullet.

  And her mind is already on something else by the time she has finished a composition. She doesn’t want to linger.

  Miss Beattie tells the class to tidy their desks, then walks around the classroom, peering inside the desks. When she gets to Sidonie’s, she gives a large sigh, then tips the desk up so everything inside splashes out onto the floor: notebooks, textbooks, drawings Sidonie has done on scraps and then crumpled up, an old sandwich, chewed pencils, a broken shoelace.

  Humiliation. But it isn’t so bad once Sidonie has gotten over the shock, the exposure, and is on her hands and knees, picking things up. Walter Rilke, going by to sharpen a pencil, surreptitiously drops another crumpled scrap on the pile she is gathering. She looks up at him, but he winks, and she smooths it open to find a rough caricature of Miss Beattie wearing a peaked hat, with boots, general’s stars, a whip.

  Sidonie’s pen breaks during an in-class composition and she has no spare. Walter does, though, she knows: he keeps in his desk a little metal box of spare nibs. Quietly, trying for once not to bang into everything along the way, she creeps from her desk up the narrow aisle to Walt’s, whispers to Walt, takes the nib, heads back.

  Miss Beattie’s voice crackles through the scratching of dozens of pens. “Miss von Täler! Stop sneaking around like a dirty Nazi spy!”

  How she had burned. How Alice would blame her; how angry Alice would be again that she had shamed them.

  They had lost status, somehow, the von Tälers, with the influx of other Germans, with the sudden division of the community along ethnic lines. It had not been the fault of the new immigrants, of course. But she thinks she might have blamed them.

&n
bsp; Early spring, 1959: she is in tenth grade, though doing some eleventh-grade subjects; she should be in ninth, but has skipped a year.

  Now she must be nice to Lottie Kleinholz, who is as stupid as a Silkie hen, but is Buck’s sister. The Kleinholzes are invited to dinner: all of them still at home. Buck’s younger brother Gerry, who once pelted Sidonie with pieces of frozen horse manure. His brother John, who has a wall-eye and a lisp. His sister Lottie, who stares like a rabbit in headlights when anyone speaks to her. The parents: nasty Mr. Kleinholz, whose eyes run, and who is famous for trying to touch girls’ breasts; nobody will play at Lottie’s house. Mrs. Kleinholz, with her pale eyes and overbite, whom Sidonie does not actually dislike. She looks like a rabbit, but she is kind, speaks kindly to all children, in her accented voice.

  They all come to dinner. Mother cooks a large pork roast, but with an air of resignation rather than celebration. There is no cake: Mrs. Kleinholz has insisted on contributing some pies. And no garden salad or young peas, for it is too early in spring.

  Sidonie is told to take Lottie upstairs. In her room, which she shares with Alice, Sidonie sits on her bed while Lottie wanders around. Lottie seems confused by the pictures, the framed reproductions that hang on the walls: why are these here? Who painted them? Are they of one of your homes? It’s as if she’s never seen paintings hanging in a house before.

  When she bends to examine the rabbit lamp, Sidonie says “Don’t touch that,” sharply. Then Lottie sits on Alice’s bed and stares at Sidonie.

  Father has bought wine for the dinner, over Mother’s objections. “They’ll think it’s a party,” Mother had said. Father had been sheepish: “Only a little Gewürztraminer. It’s customary.”

  Mr. Kleinholz drinks three or four glasses quite quickly, and begins making lewd references, and Mother gives Father her dark look. But Mrs. Kleinholz’s cheeks become pink, and she seems less sad, and almost pretty. During dinner they talk about apples — Ja, the Gravenstein is a good producer, but hasty to get thrips — and after dinner Buck’s younger siblings and Sidonie are sent outside while the parents and Alice and Buck talk about the wedding arrangements.