After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  “What is his name?”

  “Greg Clare.”

  “I know the Clares,” Sidonie says. “I went to school with Richard Clare.”

  “He’s our grandfather,” Cashiel says. Then looks at her sideways, warily. “He doesn’t know us, though. He doesn’t like that our dad got together with our mom.”

  Fearon, next to him, scowls.

  “I see,” Sidonie says.

  Cashiel says, “He’s rich, though. Our dad says. He’s a property developer. He’s made, like, a billion dollars. But we don’t get any of it, eh.”

  Fearon says, “I wouldn’t take it anyhow.”

  Something is expected of her. But what? She gets up, dusts off the seat of her khaki walking shorts, smooths the legs down. An old woman’s shins, between the hem of the shorts and the tops of her grey socks and hiking boots. The skin translucent, the sharp bone shining through, the calves puckered and rope-veined. Whose old body?

  “There are no ghosts in this house,” she says. “Many happy things took place here, and the house has stood empty a long time. It’s not haunted, only empty.”

  “You can have it,” Sidonie says. “You can have Beauvoir. The land and the house.” She has made this offer before, when Father died, and Alice had rejected it. “I don’t want it,” Alice had said. But now Sidonie makes it again. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  “I want it,” Alice says.

  They have climbed up the granite outcropping to the north of the orchard, and are sitting on the sun-warmed rock. It’s June and the trees are ranged below them in their rows of green foliage: the cherries dark, large-leafed; the peaches a bright sharp glossy green, tinged with pink; the leaves of the apple trees matte, a more countrified light green.

  The lake below, a long pool of pale cool blue today — cornflower blue. Alice used to wear that colour. A glitter of wavelets drifts like a diamanté spray corsage. The mountains across the lake are a curtain of purple.

  Alice says, “I do want it. But how will it work? How can we do this?”

  “It’s simple,” Sidonie says. “We get a lawyer and I sign it over.”

  But Alice doesn’t answer. She must have meant something else by her question.

  It is 1973. Sidonie has come home to help Mother die. They do not say that: they say that she has come to help Mother. But Mother is dying. A nurse has come to stay with her so that she can die at home. Sidonie is paying for this. The hospital would be free, but on the day when it becomes apparent that Mother’s pain has increased to a point of unmanageability, Mother weeps, and says that she doesn’t want to be moved, doesn’t want to go into hospital where everything will be strange.

  “Mother has never been in the hospital,” Alice says. “She doesn’t want to spend her last few days in there.”

  Can this be true? But Alice is right; she and Sidonie were born at home, and none of them has ever gone to the hospital. Even Sidonie’s broken ankle, when she fell from the shed roof, was set by Dr. Stewart right on the kitchen table.

  “We were brought up in the nineteenth century,” she says to Alice.

  On that day, Mother moans and moans and Alice, coming outside to where Sidonie is hoeing the garden (for it has all gone suddenly to weeds, with the last stage of Mother’s illness), puts her face in her hands and rocks and moans as well, as if she were connected by strong but invisible threads to Mother. Dr. Stewart has been there earlier and given Mother a morphine shot, and there have been a few hours of respite. But it doesn’t last, and Mother needs another one quickly, and the sheets need changing and washing.

  “We need to call the ambulance,” Sidonie says sensibly. “Mother needs to be in the hospital now.”

  But Alice cries and bangs her head against the porch posts, and Sidonie says: “Alright. A nurse.”

  The nurse needs a hospital bed for Mother, and also an IV stand, various dressings and pads and disinfectants, which Sidonie brings home from town in the truck.

  So now Mother lies in a light doze, and Sidonie and Alice are able to escape from the house. Alice goes home to do her own housework and feed her children, and Sidonie continues to work in the garden. Peas, lettuce, strawberries, radishes all to be picked. Watering and hoeing.

  Alice comes up to Beauvoir every day, while the children are in school, and she and Sidonie clean and sort cupboards and take walks, long walks, through the orchard, to the lake, up through the bush, to the south, to the old gold mine, and to the old reservoir, which is shrinking: a new irrigation system has been constructed, one with underground pipes, and the reservoir, no longer in use, has diminished to a small pond, ringed with cattails and upstart poplars. The small ponds near the reservoir have already become dry marshes, and the water pipe, along with the glade of rainforest flora that ran alongside it, has completely disappeared.

  There is a deep, peaceable silence between Sidonie and Alice, now. It is as if, with Mother dying, they have been born fresh into new, less irritated skins. Sidonie doesn’t say this, doesn’t comment or speak much. What is there to say? She has stepped out of her life temporarily, and has slipped into this one with such ease that she is only aware a sort of surprised gratitude. She goes days without thinking of Adam or of her job. When she does think of them, it is as if they are faraway places, stories she has been reading and may return to or not.

  Alice, though, talks. She says, “Remember the year we had all that snow, and we made the big fort? And remember the storm, and the beach ball? Remember canning, all that work, and always so hot? Remember Hugh’s hiking club?”

  She says, “I am angry that it took so long to find out what was wrong with Cynthia. I got measles from the kids, you know, when I was pregnant with her. Her eardrums were damaged. The doctor up in Horsefly was practically useless, an old drunk. Dr. Stewart knew right away, when we moved back here. Cynthia’s quite bright, you know. She’s not retarded, like everyone says.”

  Alice says, “People don’t like Buck. He’s so difficult. But he’s a good man in some ways. He had a hard childhood — his father used to beat the crap out of him. But he tried to look after his brothers and Lottie, you know. And he’s really patient with Cynthia.”

  Alice and Sidonie pick and slice up the strawberries and put them in freezer bags in Mother’s freezer, which will be Alice’s freezer. Alice says, “You’ll visit, won’t you? You and Adam. You can come and stay with us any time.”

  She says, “It’ll be so good for the kids, to have this space. They’ll be able to roam in the hills like we did.”

  They climb Spion Kopje, and sit near the peak on the west slope, overlooking the range of mountains, the lake spread out below like a puddle of some rare liquid metal. Alice says, “I wasn’t very nice to you when we were children. I can’t explain why, but I regret it every day,” which is somehow horribly embarrassing for Sidonie to hear.

  Alice says, “I’m sorry for what I said about Gordon Defoe. I know what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

  She says, “I wanted to be an artist, you know. I wanted to go to art school. But Mother and Father didn’t think that was a good idea. They thought I’d be corrupted, become a Bohemian, get pregnant and have abortions and die of TB in some squalid ghetto. And I didn’t think I was good enough to make it.”

  Alice talks about her failed year at college, her 1957 year in the education program at Victoria College. She says, “I never had enough time. Mother had set up for me to board with these people who made me work as an au pair every afternoon and evening and weekend, as well as pay rent. She thought it was a good deal, that we were getting a reduction on the rent. I found out from the other girls that I was being exploited. But Mother thought it would be a great thing; the husband was an officer at Naden and they had a hyphenated last name. I never had any time to study or have a social life. Even then I didn’t do that badly. I failed my practicum because the examiner was an old biddy who took off points for me not drawing the window blinds to the same height, and my skirt being an inch too sh
ort.”

  She says, “I’m going to take some art classes at the new college. Did you know that? Some drawing and painting classes. This fall, now that Cynthia’s starting school. Do you think I’ll be good enough?”

  You’ve always been good enough, Sidonie thought.

  She does not remember if she said this. She hopes she said it, but she cannot be sure she did.

  One evening, that summer of 1973, Hugh, who is home for a visit, and his brother Graham come over with a pan of lemon bars that Mrs. Inglis has baked, and Masao and Walt drop by as well. The six of them sit on the porch in the long bright June evening, watching the bats and nighthawks, listening to the crickets, talking. Graham is in a good state. He makes his old dry elaborate jokes, and is gallant, mildly flirtatious towards Alice. Courtly, that’s the word. And Hugh has stories about Brazil, where he is working now. Masao talks about the store and music, and Walt about the orchards, and all of them about politics. (The NDP: a good thing, on the whole, though the older folks don’t think so.)

  They play music on Masao’s tape deck: BTO, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Stones, CCR, Cat Stevens. Masao sings along: And if I ever lose my hands, lose my power, lose my land/ Oh if I ever lose my hands — I won’t have to work no more.

  “I thought it was plow,” Alice says. “Lose my plow.”

  “No; power,” Hugh says with certainty.

  (Now, she thinks: Moonshadow. She had never made the connection with the Schubert song before.)

  The June air is like warm milk. When the light finally begins to wobble, at 10:30 or so, Alice brings out a tray of drinks: “Long Island Iced Tea,” she says. “Sort of. It’s all I could make with what was in the house.” But miraculously, a flask of rye appears out of Masao’s car, and Hugh produces a bottle of rum, three-quarters full. “The loaves and fishes,” Masao says.

  “It’s a good thing liquor doesn’t go off,” Graham says, reading the label of Alice’s bottle. “This is about twenty years old.”

  “I recently drank a bottle of one-hundred-year-old sherry,” Hugh says.

  “Was it a bribe?” Graham asks.

  “Yes,” says Hugh. “The Brazilian government is very generous with Canadian engineers. But I can tell you, that sherry had gone off.”

  “Maybe it’s hard liquor that doesn’t go off,” Alice says, mediating, and Hugh scoffs. “Who says hard liquor these days?”

  “I do,” says Sidonie. “I say it every day around five o’clock in the imperative mood.”

  Walt chuckles, a deep, liquid chuckle that reminds Sidonie of his father, Mr. Rilke, and that seems part of the summer night, like the crickets and the occasional call of the nighthawks.

  Lying back in the big wooden chairs on the porch (they are called Adirondack chairs, Sidonie knows now, though she never heard the term in her childhood), lying back in the dusk with their scavenged drinks, their light conversation, Sidonie thinks: we could be all teenagers again, or maybe young adults. It is a night out of time, an evening that we never had, that we’ll never have again.

  They have each gone back to their younger, essential selves. They have shed twenty years, and returned to an earlier time, but a time that didn’t exist. For the six of them, twenty years ago this dynamic wasn’t possible. Hugh and Graham were almost never home; Alice was aloof, burning; Sidonie still an awkward adolescent; Walt tongue-tied with anger and self-consciousness, and Masao wary and on edge. They couldn’t have managed it. And yet what they have made this evening, natural and sweet as it is, is only illusion. It’s an illusion because they do not meet like this, because each of them has had to shed a thick shell of everyday being to meet like this. It’s an illusion because they are not, as they appear, a witty, charming, affectionate group of young people, but rather a random meeting of middle-aged strangers. Graham, the oldest, is thirty-six; Sidonie and Walt, the youngest, are twenty-nine. They do not see each other often in their everyday lives. Though they played together hours on end, day after day, as children, though they are siblings and neighbours, they are still strangers.

  They are disconnected thoroughly from their earlier lives: only Walt still works the orchards. But this, this illusionary evening, has produced their essential selves. What does that then say?

  Graham says, “Are you still with us, young Sidonie?” And Hugh says, “She’s addled by the hard liquor.”

  Sidonie says, “I was wondering if we’ll ever all be together again,” and Graham says, “That is the one question you’re not allowed to ask,” while Alice simultaneously says, “We’re always together. None of us have really left.” Which was not true; which was only Alice being poetic, under the influence. But which Sidonie has always remembered.

  It is then that she realizes what Alice is planning. How Alice has delayed taking Beauvoir on, assuming the responsibility all this time, not because she has not wanted Beauvoir, but because she has not wanted to let it fall to Buck. How Alice has become stronger, how she is planning to remove Buck from the picture. She will ditch him, in the phrase used in Marshall’s Landing. Mother would not have countenanced this; Mother, tight-lipped, drawing herself in visibly when the subjects of divorce or remarriage were mentioned.

  In the milky half-darkness, she sees now Masao’s head on Alice’s lap, and something drops into place with geometric perfection, lucidity, beauty. She will move back: she and Alice and Masao will run Beauvoir. It is as simple as that.

  But the next morning, parking in front of the IGA in the plaza, having driven down for milk, bread, she sees a familiar-looking figure get out of the truck parked next to hers, walk into the store without glancing back at her. She is frozen to her seat: a little death. It’s Gordon Defoe.

  She flies back to Montreal two days later.

  Hugh on the telephone again: “Can’t you put a stop to this? It’s just not reasonable. It’s not what I intended at all. They just won’t listen to me. It’s a disaster.” And more of the same. She knows by now that Alex has absconded with Hugh’s daughter Ingrid; that Alex’s mysterious trip the month before had been to Toronto: he had driven there and brought Ingrid back. She knows that Ingrid is staying with Alex, refusing to enroll in the engineering program in Toronto, as Hugh had planned she would. That Alex and Ingrid are planning to live in Alex’s parents’ basement, to start looking for some land for an organic garden. Tasha has told her all this: Stephen and Debbie, apparently, are too annoyed to talk about it.

  “What can I do?” Hugh asks, plaintively.

  “Give them a dowry,” Sidonie says.

  They are all so angry. But what of it? Grown children are for letting go of. There is no binding or pruning them into shape without horrible consequences.

  In the fall of 1986, after Cynthia leaves, Sidonie asks Adam for a divorce, and moves, temporarily, into a hotel. He refuses for about six months, then asks her to meet him to discuss how they will proceed. He has fallen in love with someone else, he says. He tells her this in person at dinner: not at one of their usual haunts, but at a new hotel restaurant. It’s ostentatious with black marble and art nouveau décor. Around them women gleam in big-shouldered satin pleats, shiny mounds of hair. It is the Age of Shiny Things. Adam wants to partake. Why shouldn’t he? He has worked hard, has used his brains and charm and connections to move ahead in his career. Has not stinted at home, either. Has given Cynthia a decade of indulged, loved childhood. Has given Sidonie two decades of a comfortable home, of the most interesting of the culture and conversation that Montreal has to offer.

  And she has been perhaps too austere to receive it. It has all fallen on stony ground. The parched, baked landscape of her unyielding self. She has not intended harm, but harm has come from her.

  She refuses alimony: “I have my salary,” she says. “My own salary and pension.” Adam offers to let her have the apartment, but she knows that he wants to keep it, the apartment in the striking building that he helped design.

  She finds herself another place back in their old neighbourhood, where they h
ad first lived. And she is happy to have it, and what is left of their furnishings after Adam has claimed his piano, his van der Rohe chairs and Saarinen tables, the grotesque sculptural pieces he has acquired. “Marc likes them,” he says. He is half ashamed, half intoxicated with his freedom.

  With little furniture, with bare floors, her new-old apartment is pleasingly bleak. Sidonie comes home from her lab sometimes to lie full length on the wood floors, to listen to recordings of Bach and Sibelius in the dusk, in the almost empty space. And feels safe, free. She remembers how, before Alice’s death, she had determined to leave Adam; how she had scoured the city for an apartment. She hadn’t been able to find one; she had been, she suspects now, too attached to the one she was living in. Lucky, lucky, to have a place to herself now.

  “It’s a bit monastic,” says Clara. She shows her loyalty to Sidonie by not speaking to Adam for a year after their separation, as if she’s in mourning. Anita is more detached: it is better, she says, to be true to the body. To not live with lies.

  Sidonie is still young: forty. She is introduced to friends of friends, some of whom she agrees to have dinner with, or more. She doesn’t form any deep attachments. She works, gives papers, travels. She undergoes therapy, and smooths out some of her more noticeable social wrinkles.

  In 1993 Clara calls to say that Adam is dying: he has cancer. his liver is shutting down. He is conscious, but not expected to live more than a week. He is asking for her.

  When she finds him in his hospital room, she sees a mummy: his flesh has dried up, and he is deep yellow, gilded like a mummy.

  “Sidonie,” he says. “Ah, Sidonie. My beautiful lost girl.”

  It is only nostalgia: a sentimental longing to experience some real or imagined former pleasure.

  “Don’t, Adam,” she says.

  Arid, stony ground. Though she knows something about what can grow, what can bloom from the dry limestone earth.

  A strange sight, their cars all lined up in the driveway at Beauvoir as if the von Tälers were home and entertaining. As if they had never left, but were having a family celebration: Peter and Frances, Alice and Sidonie, their children and their children’s children. “So this is what your place was like, Dad?” Ingrid asks, and Hugh answers, “More or less, though I always thought Beauvoir has a better view. The land is steeper.”