After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  Strychnine is the sort of poison nobody would choose first. It is strongly bitter. It blocks the glycine receptors in the brain and spinal cord, causes muscle contractions, convulsions, slow asphyxia. As the poison shuts down the body’s organs, it bucks and heaves for air. The final unconsciousness is the cessation of long strangulation.

  Graham fell off the bed; his mother, who slept only lightly as when her children had been infants, heard, came into the room, switched on the light. It was too late to do anything for him, though an ambulance was called, and came out from town, a twenty-minute trip. Mrs. Inglis sat down in her nightgown on the floor, holding Graham’s head in her lap. He said, “I’m sorry, Mum.” At the hospital, they gave him morphine and pumped his stomach, but it was too late.

  She sits with Mrs. Inglis for an hour in silence; she thinks that perhaps the old woman has fallen asleep. But then Mrs. Inglis takes off the big red-framed sunglasses and closes her eyelids over her milky eyes. Her upper and lower lids are bruised or stained plum-brown, as if fallen leaves have lain on them over a winter.

  “My turn now,” she says.

  Cynthia has asked to arrive at the church early with her brothers. Paul and Kevin are standing up with Steve, and Debbie has invited Cynthia to be a bridesmaid, as is customary, but she has declined. I’m afraid,” Cynthia had said, “to be in front of a group of people.”

  Sidonie makes sure that they do arrive early, driving through the wet April streets, and just as they pull into the church parking lot, they see the boys getting out of Stephen’s car. Cynthia runs across to meet them without a backward look, careless of her new high heels and silky dress. Sidonie takes her time collecting her handbag, locking the car doors. She feels strange; out of her element. She knows nobody here, really. She has never seen this building before, though it’s in a familiar landscape; will likely never see it again. It is nominally the church of Debbie’s parents, though clearly they’ve never attended before, don’t know the pastor. She watches the four of them, Alice’s children, amalgamate into a kind of loose line. The three boys — men, really: Paul, the youngest, is twenty-two — almost all of a size, and Cynthia, who is smaller than they, tiny, but nearly an adult too. There they are. They are walking towards this unfamiliar church, which has nothing to do with them or Alice. They are nearly shoulder to shoulder; they keep pace, roughly, but do not touch. Strangers come out of the church to greet them, to draw them in, to prepare for the little ceremony. And Sidonie hangs back and watches them go in.

  The parking lot, beginning to fill with cars, the asphalt shining wet from the rain, little lakes at the corners, where the earth has subsided. She would choose not to go inside, except to do so would cause a commotion, would divert attention from the bride and groom and their highly-planned day. There is no connection for her here. There is nobody she knows except these four young adults, and she does not know three of them well. There is no connection with Alice or Buck or with her parents, only space where they ought to be. She is the only connection, and she can’t introduce this scene into her memories of her family; can’t summon her memories into this scene.

  Sitting in her pew during the ceremony, she thinks: I will put an end to it. I will wait until Sans Souci has been sold, and then I will sell Beauvoir. I will take Cynthia back to Montreal tomorrow, and I will write to Walter, and after Sans Souci has sold, I will instruct him to contact a real estate agent about selling Beauvoir. It is mine, but I don’t want it anymore. It is broken; it is emptied of what made it anything at all. I will relieve myself of it. I will cut these ties, because they are no ties at all. They only draw attention to what is lost.

  The visit does its mischief with Cynthia; she will not settle back into her life in Montreal. She has been a sensible, cooperative teenager, but now she rebels. She will not go to university there, though she has free tuition, a place to live, decent grades. She doesn’t want to apply to universities in Ottawa or Toronto or Quebec City. Nowhere. She doesn’t want to go to Europe for a year. This is Clara’s suggestion, and not Sidonie’s first or even third choice, but she would be happier with it than with what Cynthia has in mind.

  Cynthia wants to go back to the valley and live with her brother Paul. No, not even go to the college there. She will work in a restaurant or something. Paul thinks he can get her a job. Cynthia’s relationship with Adam, always sweet, respectful, symbiotic, comes apart. “You’re wasting your good brains,” Adam shouts at Cynthia, and Cynthia screeches back, so distraught that she’s unintelligible. She begins to retreat to her bedroom, to stay out late. She dyes her mouse-brown hair jet-black, speaks rudely, lets her unwashed clothes pile up on her floor. Mrs. Schwarz, the cleaning lady, announces that she can’t do Cynthia’s room with all of the mess. “Fine, then,” Cynthia says. “She can leave it.”

  One night she comes home from a party visibly drunk. Her grades start to slip, in this, her final term. “Who cares?” she says. “I’m not applying to go to university anyway.” A report is sent home enumerating her absences from classes.

  What can be done? There is nothing to be done.

  Sidonie sleeps poorly; she is frightened. “Do you think Cynthia’s depressed?” she asks Clara. “Or on drugs?”

  “No,” Clara says. “I think she’s trying to wear you down. To break the bond. She will break it. You will have to decide how to negotiate the break.”

  “Should we just give in?”

  “That’s not for me to say. But you’re not in a strong position. She is almost eighteen.”

  “We can refuse to give her money,” Adam says.

  “Of course. And that will give her permission to hitchhike and live in squats with strangers.”

  Sidonie says, “I don’t understand this. Children were not so rebellious when I was young.”

  “Are you so sure?” Clara asks. “Look at you, coming to Montreal as a teenager. Do you mean to tell me that wasn’t rebellion? I seem to remember you saying that you had run away from home.”

  Had she said that? Yes: when she was eighteen, Sidonie had taken delight in introducing herself as “the only person you’ll know who ran away from home to go to school.”

  “It’s different,” she says. “I was running toward something worthwhile. I had a plan. And I wasn’t rebellious; I just waited for a weak moment and exploited it.”

  A weak moment, when her parents had been exhausted, knocked out, by Alice’s choices.

  It was Alice, of course, who had wanted to go to Montreal. Both Mother and Father had been vehemently opposed.

  “No good can come of that,” Father had said. “It’s all jazz clubs and immigrants on the make. They have no morals. Not a place for a young girl.”

  And Mother had said, “It’s too expensive. A waste of time. Who’s to say that you’ll be successful? You’ll spend all of that money and then have nothing to show for it. Better get some practical training that you can have to fall back on.”

  “You don’t want me to do anything that you haven’t done,” Alice had said. “You can’t see beyond your own narrow life. You want me to stay here and get married and turn out just like you.”

  Alice had wanted to go to design school. It’s all she wanted to do, she said. But it was too risky. Sidonie couldn’t imagine it, even though Alice was so good at sewing her own designs, and at drawing. They had never known anyone who was a dress designer, or even a professional artist of any kind. It didn’t seem possible.

  “Schmatte trade,” Father had said, dismissively.

  When did Alice give up? Sidonie thinks now: even by being married to Buck, Alice was punishing Mother and Father, all of those years.

  Sidonie says, finally, to Adam: “We can’t win this. Let’s give her some money; let her go.”

  Even then, she hopes that giving in will cause Cynthia to change her mind; that the rebellion will have burnt itself out, or prove to have been rebellion for its own sake. But no; Cynthia coldly accepts Sidonie’s offer to subsidize her for three months and pay h
er return airfare, and continues to make her plans. Her grades do pick up; that’s one good result. And the good scholarship she receives can be postponed a year. But Sidonie is stiff with worry. How will Cynthia make a life for herself?

  Right up to the night before she leaves, Cynthia is sulky; she has wanted to go to a party with friends, has wanted to convert the airfare into cash and hitchhike, but Sidonie has insisted that she spend the evening with family. Adam is there; also Clara and her daughters, who are near Cynthia’s age, and Anita.

  We are not her family, though, Sidonie thinks. They are different, she sees that now. Portia and Ismene, Clara’s daughters, though they share some of that teen hubris, that self-absorption, are not like Cynthia. They have — what? — a sense of possession about them already. A sense of entitlement. It’s as if they have already been granted or taken a lien on their adult lives. They simply need to wait, to continue what they’re doing — immersing themselves in activities, social life, music, paying not quite enough attention to their school work — and everything will unfold naturally before them, their birthright. They will go to university (Portia is already in her first year) and then into jobs and marriage and continue to do pretty well the same things. They have no anxiety, because their lives are pleasant and will not change. They will not change.

  But for Cynthia, as for her older brothers, and for Sidonie and Alice as well, there has been too much gulf between their lives as children and what they want their lives to be as adults. Too much wanting, too much fear — of getting there, of not getting there. Of not choosing the right thing. Of whatever they choose costing too much.

  At their dinner two nights before Stephen’s wedding, Kevin had said, “I’d like to have my own restaurant. But I’d never have the start-up money. They say you need two years in the bank.” Paul had said, “I’d like to go back to school, maybe do engineering. I was good at math. But what’s the use of coming out with thirty thousand in student loans and no job?” And Stephen, after a few beers, had confessed, “I really wanted to travel. But I need to get married. If I don’t marry Debbie, she’ll find someone else.”

  I could bankroll one of them, Sidonie had thought. But which one would be the best bet? And it was not just the money, she knew. She probably could afford to invest — well, maybe — in a restaurant for Kevin, or to put Paul through at least four years of university. She could sacrifice some of her retirement savings. But she was quite certain it wouldn’t do any good. They would waste it, or turn it down, afraid of wasting it. There would be some excuse. She could hear it, in the vagueness of their plans, in their focus on the outcome, rather than the process, in their assumed, second-hand cynicism. (It’s who you know, anyway; they just beat the original ideas out of you; the government will just tax you till your business goes under.) It is wearying, how well she knows the barriers they will erect for themselves. And how well she knows the men they’ll be middle-aged: worn out, ungenerous, heavy-drinking or religious or both. Angry.

  What she wonders, the night before Cynthia is to turn her back on an assured and stable future, is whether it’s an issue of class or wealth or geography that separates her niece, Alice’s daughter, from Adam’s nieces.

  It’s not brains, or natural ability. She and Alice could both run rings around not only the other children they grew up with, but also just about anyone she’s met. And Alice’s children are clearly all bright, too.

  What is it?

  She and Adam have a disjointed, at-cross-purposes argument. Adam chides her: they’re all our nieces.

  “I think it must be ethno-geographic,” she says. “People from the West, especially the rural West; they don’t have the same certainty. They don’t have as much invested in certain social mores.”

  “She’s just finding herself,” Adam says. She is confused by his having changed sides; now he seems to be in favour of Cynthia taking time off. But she is always confused by this trait, this ability, in Adam, and others. She herself does not let go, once she has decided something. Does not forget. She is implacable once she turns her back.

  She does not sell Beauvoir in 1985: the prices have fallen, and she can’t get enough for it to make it worthwhile. After a year she takes it off the market. Walter Rilke manages the orchards for a while, then finds her other tenants.

  More than two decades ago. And Cynthia has turned out just fine, as Adam and Clara had known she would: she has meaningful, interesting, well-compensated work; she has friends (though she doesn’t appear to have a romantic life); she has Justin, who is also turning out to be an admirable human being. Sidonie thinks: she has succeeded without me. She has succeeded precisely because I’ve given her space, have not interfered.

  It is a small, lonely pride, that: to congratulate oneself on having had the sense to leave another person alone, to free another person from one’s own possibly damaging contact. But there it is. She had provided Cynthia with a family life of sorts; with an excellent education, a way of living in the world with a handicap; and with room to find her own way.

  Surely that has been enough compensation for anything she might have taken. Or lost.

  Cynthia has set her to sorting some boxes of papers: “I wouldn’t know what was useful to keep,” she says, as if this were Sidonie’s fault.

  A box of orchard records. Her father’s ledger books tell their own story: a tale of diminishing returns. Profits in the 1940s, mostly rising until the late 1950s. Such small amounts of cash: a dollar a day, plus the picker’s cabin to Mr. Tanaka in the mid-1950s. How had he and Masao stayed alive? Bad crops for a few years after the devastating winter of 1949. The prices of gas, pesticides, equipment, and especially labour, rise; the prices of apples, cherries, peaches, rise and fall. Sidonie looks for mistakes, extravagances, waste, but can’t find any. The balance simply changes.

  At Christmas she has half-finished sorting the ledgers. She reports her progress to Cynthia, feeling like a tardy grad student. Cynthia seems somewhat mollified.

  “I guess it’s all a long time ago,” she says. “I guess it doesn’t seem worth it, going through all of that old stuff.”

  Yes and no. Part of the past — before her leaving the valley in 1959 — deepens in her every year, part of her cellular makeup, it seems. The intervening years, except for some sharp, clear shards of memory, are grainy.

  Between her honeymoon visit in 1963 and Stephen’s wedding in 1985, Sidonie had returned to the valley three times: for her father’s funeral, her mother’s, and Alice’s.

  Father dies in late fall of 1970, suddenly and not suddenly. Suddenly, because there is no final illness: he sits up in bed, Mother says, clutches his chest, and keels over. A massive heart attack, Mother says. All the arteries blocked. She says this with some amazement, but also pride, with apparently no sense that her limited medical insight might be painful to others. It occurs to Sidonie that her mother has a habit of making bald, possibly inappropriate statements that is not unlike her own.

  Not suddenly, because Father is seventy-four, fond of his cigar and whiskey, not to mention Mother’s pies and her dairy-based cooking, and of working too hard and then not working, by turns, the way orchardmen do. Of working very hard physically in the extreme heat and cold for a few days at a time. It’s not a surprise for those reasons, Sidonie tells Adam. And it’s the death he would have chosen: quick, clean. No suffering.

  Adam regards Sidonie sorrowfully, buys the plane tickets, treats her as if she were fragile. He offers to call her secretary and ask her to cancel all of Sidonie’s appointments.

  “What for?” Sidonie asks. “I don’t want to fall behind with my research. I can go in tomorrow and Wednesday; I’ll just rebook for the days I’ll actually be away.”

  She believes that Adam is projecting his grief from his own father’s death onto her. That she has a free pass card, exempting her from feeling the loss of her father too deeply.

  But later, seeing Father’s polished shoes lined up in the back entrance, grief ambushes her l
ike a mountain lion; something ravenous, howling, implacable rips open her chest and crushes her heart and lungs. Father will never again look kindly at her over his spectacles, sing snatches of Lieder as she helps him lift pipes, put his hands on her shoulders in that way that situates her safely in her skin, when she feels about to come undone, when her self threatens to fly apart.

  And all earlier grief rises in her memory to augment this one, and she can only crouch on her bed and rock and moan, until Mother stands over her with a dour look and instructs her to pull herself together, to not be a baby. “Some good all of your schooling has done,” Mother says. “And you a psychologist! You of all people should know how to control yourself.”

  Psychology is not about controlling yourself, of course. But what has leapt upon her is something physical, something lurking in the world of her mind. It is wordless, without language or logic. It is not to be managed.

  But Mother has no time for carrying on; she has a funeral to plan. Sidonie must drive her around, so that she can take care of all the many things that need to be done. Mother has never learned to drive: unusual for a country woman. Mother needs to be driven into town, to the florists, the funeral home, the delicatessen, the lawyer’s office, the bank. All of this, Sidonie remonstrates, could be done over the telephone, but Mother says no, no, I get confused and forget things on the phone. People speak too quickly. And trailing her on her tour of stops, Sidonie realizes that Mother is making a sort of progress, a formal circle of visits, whose purpose is threefold: one, it buttresses Mother up, receiving the many courtesies and condolences. Two, it allows her to re-establish these social and professional relationships on a new footing: Mother as independent agent, not as part of a couple. Three, it gives Mother something to do, so she need not think too much.