After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

“Are we going to just lie here and argue about birds?” Hugh says.

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Justin tumbles off the roof of the restaurant addition and breaks his ankle. After a few days Cynthia drives him to Sidonie’s and dumps him off, unceremoniously.

  “I’ve had enough of him,” she says.

  Now Justin talks to Sidonie again, but his discourse is a long note of complaint. “I want to be out of here,” he says. “This terrible small town. I want to see something else.”

  “Well, go,” she says.

  “I can’t. I have to finish my degree. I have to take care of my mom.”

  She sees, for the first time, his grandfather Buck in him. A shiftiness, a snarl that has usurped his innocence.

  And then she sees Alice too. What is it? It is the look of an animal gnawing off its own trapped limb, that’s what it is.

  Driving him back home later, they pass, between the cemetery and the beginning of the industrial strip, a new billboard that reads Resist the New Fascism. Information 765-2321. “I’m going to call that number,” Justin says.

  “You are?”

  “Yes.” He turns his face, and she sees the fierce mischief in his expression.

  She thinks of Cynthia, of Alice, of their sullen, self-defeating gestures.

  “You can go anytime,” she says to Justin.

  “No,” he says. “I can’t.”

  She says, “You can. You will.” Imagining his absence, though: an amputation.

  Sidonie and Hugh go shopping among the stores of the sprawling plazas and strip malls for a crib for Alex’s and Ingrid’s expected child. “My grandchild is not going to sleep in a laundry basket on the floor of a Quonset hut,” Hugh says.

  “My great-grandnephew. Or niece,” Sidonie says. “You know they’re going to move into Steve’s basement for the winter.”

  “Still, bloody irresponsible.”

  “They seem happy, Hugh. They seem committed to this.”

  “Why do they choose to undertake such a hard life?”

  “Because they’ve never had to. Because they can.”

  “They seem,” Hugh says, “to be very much in love, anyway. Whatever that means.”

  Sidonie laughs. “I think that’s my line: whatever that means.”

  Hugh looks sideways at her. His mouth moves under his moustache.

  “We could have made it together, don’t you think? We jog along pretty well, you and I.”

  She says, not very gently, because she has noted his use of the past conditional, “Hugh, we’ll always be good friends.”

  He looks away, but nods.

  Sidonie comes upon Fearon and Cashiel shooting small birds with a pellet rifle. She is angry: frighteningly angry, must control an impulse to break the rifle over her knee or to smack them around the ears with it. Then she has a day of lying low in her townhouse, trying to breathe herself out of a pit into which she has fallen.

  A huge mistake, this undertaking. They will all be ruined. None of them has the moral or intellectual wherewithal to make it a success.

  She walks around the little muddy lake near her house. The spring flowers in their waves have come and gone; the grasses are already bone-coloured, rustling around her ankles. The heat of the late June sun has a force, like weight, on her head and shoulders. Like a hand emanating heat and light, anointing her.

  She finds binoculars, a field guide, drawing pads and pencils, drives back to Beauvoir, leaves the package with Celeste; the boys have been banished to their grandmother’s for the week.

  Sage and Plum opens in time for the tourist season. On the opening night, there is soup made with yogurt and watercress, tournedos of farmed wild boar wrapped around an asparagus-hazelnut pâté; breast of duck glazed with red currant wine and honey; squash and sunflower seed ravioli; trout with Oregon grape confit. Local wines; a chocolate and hazelnut torte from a recipe of Sidonie’s paternal grandmother’s that had been made only on birthdays; a tart of strawberries and marscapone. Nearly all of the ingredients come from within fifty kilometres of the restaurant: the cheeses, the fruit and berries, the meats.

  Alex says, “By fall we’ll have all your vegetables growing here. And your eggs and cheese, if you’ll have goat. Ingrid is afraid of cows.”

  Cashiel and Fearon drive the three-quarter ton over the lip of the gully. It is winched up, unharmed, and under it (cushioning its fall, somewhat) is Hugh’s mother’s old Anglia, which has hitherto been hidden by a tangle of feral blackberry bushes.

  The new bridge is opened in July of 2008. The hollow floating concrete tubes that supported the old bridge will be towed out and sunk into the lake, much to the heated discussion of the von Tälers and Kleinholzes. Hugh, it turns out, has been a consultant for the demolition of the old bridge, not the building of the new. He defends the plan: less environmental impact overall, he says, than trying to airlift or truck the huge cylinders to a landfill somewhere. There might be some leaching, he says, but it won’t be much. The lake can handle it. Cynthia and Steve are vehemently opposed, they say, to filling even the deep fissures of the lake with garbage. Sidonie finds herself torn between Hugh and her nephew and niece. Who is right? Both sides angrily mount arguments, facts, statistics.

  In August, Ingrid miscarries. The midwife says it’s common; one out of four pregnancies ends this way. But Alex believes that the trouble is with the soil floor of the Quonset hut, into which decades of pesticide drips must have seeped from the stored sprayers. Alex and Ingrid move temporarily into Alex’s parents’ house, and Alex has the soil floor of the Quonset hut dug out and replaced at a cost of two thousand dollars.

  Cashiel and Fearon’s father visits, and Sidonie, rashly, invites her old playmate and enemy Richard Clare to come by, to meet his grandsons. Richard’s hair has faded to a sort of peach colour from its original carrot. When he meets his grandsons, he cannot speak; Sidonie watches his chin wobble, his knees shake. She says to Fearon, show you grandfather your drawings. She leaves them on the porch, the three heads bent together. A scene of redemption, of tender reconciliation. But before Richard leaves, he and his son Greg, the boys’ father, somehow get into a shouting match in the parking lot that is only resolved when Kevin strides out of the kitchen, flexing his frescoed forearms. The von Tälers laugh and laugh.

  Ingrid’s mother visits from South Africa; Hugh brings her out from Toronto. Sidonie finds her completely unlikeable: high-handed, insensitive, narrow-minded. Watching them together, she is annoyed by Hugh as well; he defers to Ingrid’s mother unnecessarily, is unnecessarily friendly.

  After she’s put on the plane, Hugh stays a few days. He and Sidonie climb down into the gulley to see the Anglia. It’s camouflaged in patches of dull green, that particular green of very old cars that almost seems natural, and patches of rust. The doors hang open, and the windows have been shot out — diamonds of shattered glass littering the seats and the earth around. Squirrels or porcupines or some other animal — is that a whiff of skunk? — have colonized it, tearing the brittle, flaking seat leather, chewing the wooden knob of the gear shift. The sealed instruments of the dashboard, though, are intact, still showing their gauges and dials. The ivory-coloured plastic knob for opening the trunk says “Bonnet.” Hugh and Sidonie climb in the vehicle gingerly, because of the crumbled glass. Hugh takes the driver’s side, and they sit as if they’re driving somewhere. Hugh, Sidonie sees, has teared up; what is he remembering, what body-memory is flooding into him from this old wreck? He does not say. She does not ask. She puts her hand out, and he grasps it as a line.

  Clara visits, and buys a set of lounge chairs and tables for the patio; they are wicker and iron and glass, not at all like the old Adirondacks, which have long since disappeared. Everyone likes them very much. The seat cushions are a silvery blue-green, a paler shade of the spruce trees, and remind Sidonie of Alice.

  Justin drops out of school two weeks into classes in the fourth year of his degree. There is some warning that this is going to tak
e place: one night when Cynthia isn’t present, and a little drunk for the first time in his family’s presence, Justin demands, “Is anybody going to tell me who my father is? Because my mom won’t. But one of you has to know.”

  Nobody answers. It’s Debbie who asks, gently, if it matters.

  “Of course it fuckin’ matters,” Justin says. “I have a right to know. I have a right to choose who I am.”

  It’s a few days after the conversation that Justin disappears. He simply goes, carrying only a small bag (they surmise) of clothing. He does not answer his cell phone, and Cynthia finds it finally, turned off, stuffed in a drawer. She goes around with bruises under her eyes. Sidonie herself does not sleep. There are posters of missing young people at various gas stations and cafés; posters with very old dates. She does not want to think of Justin disappearing. It is not likely, she tells herself, and tells Cynthia, that Justin will not remain AWOL for very long. But they are both thinking of Paul, of course.

  Sidonie has never let herself wonder too much about Justin’s father. She remembers Cynthia returning to Montreal, after she had run away, to live with Adam, at first — she had grown up in that apartment over the river, after all — then turning up a few months later on Sidonie’s doorstep, sullen, pregnant. She had said nothing. Sidonie had asked nothing, had not remonstrated, only made up the spare room bed. It had been a silent winter — it was just after Sidonie had moved into her own apartment — but not a happy one, for herself. Cynthia had volunteered nothing, had grown larger, more withdrawn, in the warm red nest that Clara and Anita had made of Sidonie’s apartment. Sidonie had dreamed disturbing dreams, had felt she was choking.

  But when Justin had been born, Sidonie had walked with him night after night while Cynthia slept, her tiny nineteen-year-old body curled up, curled around what inner bruising and tearing Sidonie could not bring herself to contemplate.

  When she thinks of Justin, she can still feel the weight of his eight-pound body in her arms, the warm damp of his head in her palm, the rise and fall of his ribs against her wrist. The smell of him, which was the smell of sun on spring earth. His whorled hair, the tiny compact creases and folds of him, like the intricacies of a wild blossom.

  She does not speak of this.

  She must attend a meeting of the local residents one evening; the meeting, her neighbour has told her, delivering the flyer, is not only about the flood damage, but also about establishing a development plan. There is a rumour that the resort people are planning to build a large marina, and that’s not a good idea, given the narrowness of the access road which winds among their houses, not to mention the noise of the increased boat traffic, the pressure on the wildlife of the little lake. Everyone is to attend: the house owners and the mobile home owners as well. Strength in numbers, Sidonie’s neighbour says.

  Sidonie doubts that any development of the little lake, undesirable though it may be, can be inhibited — that there is really any recourse against planned development in this valley — but she attends the meeting. She is surprised to see the number of people present when she enters the large room — the meeting is being held in a community hall on the nearby reserve — and to see that they are not all the elderly residents that she sees on her walks or retrieving her mail, but younger people too, some with babies, and a large and articulate contingent of residents of the reserve itself.

  Surprised, too, that the group is very organized and wellinformed, and presents rational arguments and information. What had she expected? Something like the vociferous tenants’ meetings she had witnessed when she had lived in the apartment. She will tell Hugh: she is impressed and amused. And heartened; she will say that. It is a gleam of rationality.

  She does not speak during the meeting, but at its end, a short, ample woman with an untidy white bun and a small chin approaches her.

  “Sidonie? Sidonie von Täler?”

  It is Miss Erskine. Daphne Erskine. So she is still alive.

  Her old Sunday school teacher, Brown Owl, now lives in one of the trailers by the lake’s edge — one of the smaller, shabbier ones. She has never married. She has been a missionary for many years, she says, in Africa, but is not strong enough now to be useful. She keeps busy, though, with her work at Lazarus House — an addictions centre, Sidonie knows.

  “I saw your name on the owner’s association list,” Daphne Erskine says. “I wondered if it was really you, come back to the fold.”

  She says, “You know somebody who will be very pleased to hear that I’ve run into you? Father Mas!”

  Father Mas?

  Masao.

  “I was so pleased when he took ordination,” Miss Erskine says. “He had a special clarity and glow about him, when you were children in my little Sunday School group. A long time ago. Do you remember?”

  When had Masao become a priest? It’s surprising news.

  “He works with street people in Vancouver,” Miss Erskine says. “With the most forlorn and abandoned. He has a gift, I think. But I wish he would not work so hard.”

  “I was so sorry about your sister,” Miss Erskine says then, touching Sidonie’s arm. “Alice was a beautiful girl. It was a great loss.”

  She says it as if Alice’s death has happened recently, not over thirty years ago.

  “I will tell Masao that you are back here,” she says. “He comes for visits once or twice a year or so, you know. To see old friends. I’ll tell him that you are here.”

  Cashiel is suspended from school for fighting with his cousin, Gabe Clare.

  Ingrid becomes pregnant again.

  “Do they not know about birth control where she comes from?” Tasha asks, delighted.

  A coyote gets into the henhouse, and kills seven of Ingrid’s hens. Ingrid cries; Sidonie remembers Colette and the numbered hens of her childhood. Cashiel and Fearon make a marker for the mass grave, all of the hens’ names burned on with Fearon’s woodworking set.

  Alex and Ingrid net approximately twenty thousand dollars in the summer and fall in produce sold wholesale to the restaurant and at the farmer’s market. Alex says he needs to have the greenhouses by next spring, and a fruit and vegetable stand of his own. He and Hugh and Stephen begin to look at the bottom land to the east of the valley, where the vegetable farms have always been.

  Debbie starts her own business making artisanal jams and salsas for the restaurant and for sale in the gift stores up and down the valley. In her first two months, she clears five thousand dollars. Tasha works for her: she puts on a natty suit and sells to other restaurants. Sidonie, along for the ride, sees Tasha assume a kind of polish, charm, that she had not thought possible.

  “It’s a costume,” Tasha says. “I can do this but I’m really only me when I’m in my jeans, working in the trees.”

  She looks at Sidonie sideways, and Sidonie nods; something in her own body has loosened, opened. Her skin rearranges itself, slips more comfortably over her jaw and her shoulder joints. Yes.

  She is walking with Hugh; they’ve decided to attempt their old trail up the Kopje, retracing their childhood hiking route, but carrying a bottle of local plonk, as Hugh calls it, wine from right next door, but really quite good — an award-winner; some crackers and Camembert and grapes, instead of their old waxed-paper twists of jam or egg sandwiches. Sidonie climbs slowly, steadily, while Hugh makes little surges and then stops, panting. They do not comment on their modified pace.

  Sidonie tells Hugh that she has met up with Miss Erskine, thinking that Hugh will be surprised. But Hugh has already found her, visited her himself.

  “I am not a religious man,” Hugh says, “nor do I believe that churches should take up the job of governments in helping the poor. But it seems to me that she has got hold of the right idea of religion — she is extraordinarily aware and kind, you know. And she has taken on thankless work with the most despised of humans in our country.”

  “We all thought she was hopelessly sappy and embarrassing, as children,” Sidonie says.

 
“Yes,” Hugh says. “Of course. But I suppose she was extraordinary then, too. Her brother, the reverend — he was pretty run-ofthe-mill. A closeted queer, of course. An adequate clergyman. But Daphne — she had something unique, a kind of conviction.”

  “I suppose so,” Sidonie says, astonished at Hugh.

  “She stopped me from trying to kill someone,” Hugh says. “I probably wouldn’t have succeeded, but I’d have got myself into a lot of trouble, if I’d gone through with it. I was only nineteen or twenty. I’d have ruined my life.”

  An eclipse of astonishment. “You were going to try to kill someone? Who?”

  But Hugh is silent.

  Sidonie does the math. “No,” she says. Then: “How did you find out?”

  “Alice told me,” Hugh says. “Though my mother knew too, and I suppose your mother told her. I don’t think anybody else knew, though of course it shouldn’t have been a secret. He should have been arrested. But people thought differently then. And he was making so much money for Dad’s orchards.”

  A piece falling into place. There had been so little brouhaha, after Mother had found that note. Alice shouting, but not when Father was within earshot. The engagement broken off. But not much attention on herself. She had been left, for better or worse, to recover in privacy.

  “Of course,” Hugh says, “my mother wanted to make sure he was fired and never worked again in the valley. But that wasn’t practical: he was a good manager. My father couldn’t have done without him.”

  “What happened to him?” Sidonie asks.

  Hugh says slowly, “He bought the place, you know, when Mother died. I was overseas — I didn’t realize he was the buyer. The lawyers were handling it for me. It was Defoe who got the land out of the ALR and sold it for development. He must have made millions, even in the 80s.”

  So: the end of a story.

  Hugh says, “That was wrong, of course. For him not to be charged. He should have been charged. It shouldn’t have been hushed up. My — all of our — mistaken sense of gallantry was not the right thing, in hindsight.”