Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  Was this marriage? Slight as he was, he dragged her down. He was a dead weight that she was yoked to, her silent, disapproving Siamese twin. Indignant, frustrated, rebellious—she could have torn out her hair, if it weren’t already halfway across the room, a dark, brimming mass stuffed in one of his shirts like a submerged head. If she had had an intellectual acquaintance with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Susan B. Anthony, or even Emma Goldman, Avice might have burst out of her cozy cocoon at the Cadillac and stormed the streets as a fully realized New Woman. If she had stooped to pick up that trampled and spattered copy of Free Society she saw during the strike, instead of buying the Detroit Times, Mr. Hearst’s eye-popping, salacious rag, revolutionary and liberating ideas might now have been zinging like bullets through her head. She had often enough mocked the reformist and do-gooder clubs her friends joined—The Dominion Order of the King’s Daughters, The Girls’ Friendly Society, The Anti-Corset League—and yet she had more spunk and a greater independent nature than any of them; otherwise what was she doing here?

  Progressive? Of course she was. That’s why she had picked up a Vogue magazine along with the paper at the newsstand. Lounging on the bed in her silk robe, smoking, drinking, chewing gum, cramming as many liberating habits as she could into the afternoon, she began to flip through it, and was dazzled once again by American dash and ingenuity and style. Even the name of the magazine, Vogue, was chic and alluring. Arriving at the final pages, she sat briefly, absorbed in contemplation, then leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette in one of his shoes, for she had suddenly been taken with a desire to embark on a defining and advanced cultural activity. She decided to get dressed as the missus and go shopping.

  A gift, then, a honeymoon souvenir for Mr. Smolders. This is what she resolved to find while trolling the aisles of the Newcomb-Endicott Company, a department store she had discovered after following one of its red-and-gold delivery wagons to its source. What to choose? A moon calendar watch in a silver case? A solid gold vest chain? Or one made of braided hair? Perhaps a fob, an ebony cane, a gent’s charm—a tiny anvil, or a bicycle lamp set with a ruby for the light. How about collar studs, a stamp box, a hat mark, a moustache comb, an umbrella plate, an autoharp, a hunter’s suit made of marsh grass, an ear cleaner (spoon and sponge combined), an electric ring—or a castrating knife from the veterinary department? A book might be useful. One on the subject of faciology, or Dr. Hood’s Plain Talks and Common Sense Medical Adviser. Dipping into the latter, Avice was a little shocked at its author’s forthright modernity, addressing as he did the effects of sexual isolation on old maids, and the prevention of conception “for those who would enjoy a higher and better love.” Dr. Hood also tackled the problem of unhappy marriage and how it destroyed the tone of the nervous system. Certainly her husband could use such a book, but she found herself incapable of deciding whether or not to buy it, for the tone of her own nervous system had tightened to an almost painful pitch.

  The volume of choice in this compound store was overwhelming. Aisles and aisles of goods—stockings, vests, jewellery, dishes, trinkets—all gleaming and new and desirable. At first, dazzled and a bit greedy, her heart had pounded at the sight of so much; but then, after a short while, roaming up and down, touching, marvelling, only her head pounded. Everything seemed to crowd in upon her, exhorting her to purchase. She turned a jaded eye upon a pair of gorgeous kid gloves, a hatpin set with pearls and a large turquoise, and even stared blankly at a Princess Bust Developer (with Bust Food) that formerly would have made her snicker with delight. She tried to imagine the eventual destination of all these things, who on earth was going to buy them; and once they were gone, she supposed that even more of the same would appear in their place. More and more.

  Oh, don’t be such a nit, she upbraided herself. This is perfectly wonderful. The more ear cleaners there are in the world, the more there will be for everyone. Humanity will be better served, and better for it. Everyone’s hearing will improve. Maybe they’ll even begin to listen to one another.

  She couldn’t wait to write home and tell Cecile about this place. Poor old Cecile, who won’t want to know, who will only plough her head further into her bible so that she doesn’t have to hear anything about progress and business and filthy lucre. Yet, God the Father does not bring Cecile damask piano scarves and berry sets, Avice thought, as she ran a finger over the smooth, cool belly of a silver teapot. Father does, courtesy of the Merchant Bank and the stock market.

  That resolved, and her moment of consumer’s despair conquered, Avice thought she might as well get herself something instead. Or something that she and her husband could share—like, say, a gun. Perhaps that pearl-handled pistol her eye had lit upon and lingered over, entranced. It was displayed in a glass case with several other derringers and revolvers, and was an instrument of such compact beauty that even she, who knew nothing of guns, could appreciate the workmanship involved: a Colt House model with cloverleaf cylinder, four-shot, single action. It had a three-inch barrel, a bronze frame, and ivory grips inlaid with silver bands. Why, a tiny voice seemed to twist like a worm in her head, it might easily be concealed in a pocket, or in one’s palm, its fit snug as a child’s little hand.

  Death’s little hand.

  Avice longed to touch it, only fractionally as cold as what it promised to deliver. If she did, she knew she would have to buy it, the perfect souvenir from a nation that settled its problems so promptly and efficiently. Hearing that crack of gunfire earlier, during the strike, had sent an undeniable thrill up her retreating back; how many of her fellow marchers lay bleeding on the street, she had wondered. She recalled Kit Coleman’s piece in the Mail & Empire about international styles of murder and how stabbing was not a British habit, stilettoes and daggers being the favoured choice of Italians and Spaniards. The weapons of the Britisher were his fists, whereas the American used the revolver … But surely it could be customized to fit the colonial way of doing things. She imagined taking a more conservative approach to the exercise by shooting first one limb and then another. And this her real husband, not the surrogate she’d been trailing around. Put out an eye, blow off a finger, all the while apologizing to him, like a good Canadian, for the inconvenience. So sorry, Grif—BANG—do forgive me, dear—BANG—my fault entirely—BANG, BANG!

  While she was entertaining herself thus, happily and murderously musing, a salesman approached her from behind. It was an appreciative approach, too, for she cut a fine figure. He was accustomed to ladies stopping at this case, attracted by their own reflections in the glass. They adjusted their hats or patted their hair, fixing a stray lock, or simply made quick, satisfied assessments of their appearance. Women, all frills and vanity. Take this one—she was a peach, he thought, and she knew it, too. She was staring at herself with such rapt intensity that he could scarcely keep a chuckle out of his voice when he cleared his throat and asked, “May I be of some service to you, Madam?”

  “Yes,” she answered, without even turning around. She knew what she wanted, but out of the habit of deferring to masculine expertise, or perhaps only to follow a commercial ritual, she solicited his opinion. “I am going to kill my husband,” she said. “Slowly—he must be made to suffer. Please, which of these fine instruments would you recommend?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  fly

  All right, she’d keep her own counsel if she had to. She’d keep her secret, hard as a knot of gristle buried in her chest, a sliver driven deep where it could fester and leak a steady stream of poison into her system. Wherever Avice spent the night during her travels, from Windsor to Toronto to Barrie, in whatever hotel room or berth, she slept with her fingers pressed to her lips. Nothing was going to escape from her. Not a single word, not even one spiked and spiny that might tumble out of her mouth while she lay on some dark shoal of sleep. There’d be no gnawing admissions from her to bore like scarcely audible parasites through the walls and into the heads of the other sleepers, to shock them into wakefulness and
alarmed action.

  It’s not that she didn’t savour the gobsmacked expression on the face of that clerk at Newcomb-Endicott’s. How smug he had been, his face tight as a nut—cracked open once he fully comprehended what he had heard. And it’s not that she even had to say anything, really. For some reason that she herself didn’t quite fathom, she often inspired a frisson of alarm in the men she encountered—a shudder of disturbed certainties, a shadow of doubt passing, the ominous sensation of a grave disrespectfully trampled over.

  A man seated a few tables over from her in the Collingwood Inn had been observing her, quite openly, as was his right, he felt. He watched as she plucked an apple off her plate and stabbed it with her fruit knife, as if through its very heart. Such indelicacy he found abhorrent. He knew women—what they were like, what they were for, what they were capable of. Essentially, there were two kinds. This woman had the appearance of one but was obviously the other, and as he refused to dine in the same room as one of those, he tossed a coin onto the table and left.

  Avice hardly noticed. He was of no interest, a stout packet of stale opinion hustling through the door, a man dead and buried in his own body. He didn’t even have to open his mouth, for she knew the type from her many forays into male precincts—smoking cars, saloons, clubs—revelatory as a quick tour of Bluebeard’s forbidden room. She had come to understand that violence was often cleverly accomplished, disseminated as facts that circled and circled a woman like a pack of menacing guard dogs. For instance, it was well known that education damaged a woman’s reproductive system; it had been proven in the medical journals. The higher a woman ascended in learning, the more her womb withered in response. Also, only prostitutes were capable of sexual feeling. (Judith, the Drinkwaters’ maid, had neither the leisure nor the skill to read these journals and had informed Avice otherwise during their bartering session on the eve of her wedding.) The truth of the matter was that a woman’s cranium, like an overbred animal’s, was simply too cramped a space to entertain thoughts of any depth or proportion. It was a cavity as small and empty as the teacup Avice presently drained, although her own cranial reservoir overflowed with ideas—bloody and seditious. She now knew not to show her hand or they would have it off, cut at the wrist. In her own anthropological studies she had found civilized gentlemen not that much different from the labouring brute who sinks his fist into his wife’s face on a Saturday night—only in his methods, and at times not even in that.

  Avice stared into her teacup, turning it this way and that, trying to read the leaves, what pattern they formed on the bottom. This hardly qualified as brain work, she realized, but all the same was a prophetic game that she was good at. She used to read the leaves for her credulous sisters, and although she liked to tease them, she had more often than not—and weirdly—made accurate predictions of future events.

  “I see a tall dark stranger …”

  “Go on, do tell, Avice.”

  “He has a hooked nose.”

  “Oh!”

  “A club foot, a hump on his back.”

  “No, no, what’s he really like? You can see him, can’t you?”

  Yes indeed, and she had been the one to claim him, the handsome stranger, the envisioned man. And look where it had gotten her.

  The way the tea leaves were arranged, clumped wetly one upon another, reminded her of the expression on that clerk’s face—so gratifyingly dumbfounded when apprised of her unruly plans. She had gotten out of that store fast, hotfooted it before he had time to sound the madwoman alarm, or to call in the police. She had wanted none of their instant Yankee justice. What mischief had possessed her? What inspired garrulity had taken hold in that cathedral of commerce? Perhaps, she thought, it was only the confessional effect of the country itself, the looser, more voluble atmosphere in the land of the run-on sentence.

  She felt safer here, back home, where shames were kept secret, where crooks and killers at least had enough manners not to brag, and her countrymen had enough sense not to make heroes of them. Besides, she knew that he, Griffith, was here somewhere. The further north she travelled, and the deeper she ventured into this cold province, the warmer she got. So intent on her goal was she, so determined and clear, that she had developed a whole other sense that was trained on him alone. It was no use his dodging, his dissembling, for she would witch him out like a hidden spring that crawled through the earth. She’d gather intelligence of his passing, follow his scent no matter how faint, step on the very stones he had stepped on. She’d step down hard, too, as if upon his very face. She’d grind her heel into his stupid sightless eyes.

  It was too bad about that gun, though, which in her hasty retreat she had not been able to purchase. Her name had been practically inscribed on its hilt, and her husband’s name on one of its bullets. How perfectly, how flush the two of them fit together. A weapon made for marriage.

  No matter, she sighed (while another male customer fled the premises), there were enough materials in the world with which to do harm. Knives, axes, clubs, bombs, garrotting cords, poisons, acids … and those were just the obvious ones. Once a person began to take note, began to look about her, it was truly amazing how many lethal instruments there were, even in the most innocent and upstanding locations. In a church, you could brain someone with a crozier, run them through with a pastoral staff, strangle them with a rosary. (Catholics obviously enjoyed much more latitude for harm, with all their ecclesiastical props and clutter.) Or in this establishment itself. Her eye now swept the room like a scythe. A chair swung with enough force would knock a man down, then you could finish him off by smashing his head in with that crystal pitcher. You could slice him up like a roast with a broken bottle or a water glass. Cut a vein or, if you were very ambitious and domestically assertive, saw off his head with a carving knife. Smother him with a tablecloth, drown him in the soup tureen, gouge out his eyes with a spoon … Avice laid aside the cup she had been turning dreamily around and around and picked up the silver fork from her place setting. She ran a finger lightly over the tines, then absentmindedly used one to clean a fingernail. Was it possible to kill a man with a fork? She supposed he would look terribly stippled when done, like a baked potato too avidly pricked.

  Surveying the dining room once again for dangerous inventory, she was a bit taken aback to see that someone else was seated at the table that the other fat-headed gentleman had vacated. She must have been very deeply engrossed in her thoughts, for she had heard no one enter. This man’s face was obscured by a newspaper, a screen of words, that he held up before him. The fingers that held the paper were tapered and long as a pianist’s, and not at all like the blunt, bloated digits of the other man.

  A heading in large type on the front page of the paper caught her eye: ECHO LOST. ALL PASSENGERS AND CREW DROWNED.

  Avice shuddered as she conjured up the horrific scene, what those poor people must have experienced. All lost. She hoped that she would be able to avoid boat travel where she was going, wherever that might be. Terrible, a death like that … Of course, it was not to be discounted for someone else. Someone deserving.

  Lately, in her lonely rooms at night, tourism beginning to pall, she had taken to killing off the man she had made with her arts and craft. She was starving and fretting him away. And not because she didn’t like him; the trouble was she liked him overmuch. (Is it possible to fall romantically in love with oneself?) She was far too comfortable and easy in his skin. It was fun being him, and, as him, she felt herself to be more credible, more bearable, a better human being. Marriage had changed her. As the wife she was sharp-tongued and cruel, a harridan, a nag. As him she lounged and idled, whistled little tunes, snatches of popular song, incomplete as his very self, yet all the more carefree for that. When she was she, her eyes hardened and narrowed, letting in less light, and her mind darkened. She was full of anger and resentment, she steamed and whistled like a kettle boiling on a hob. It was just so tempting to be him. He was an intoxicating sweetness, an addiction. He d
rifted through his days aimless as smoke. He pissed them away—but, alas, not against the wall. Possibly the worst thing was that he had room for forgiveness and she did not. He ate away at her resolve, he was on his side—most treacherous self!

  Why would anyone want to be married to her, and be ruled by her? (In his kindness, he had not said this.)

  So Avice had begun to step far less often into the guise of her husband. She took some effort, mending the breaks in her identity through which she had let herself go. She attempted to wean herself from him as a personal form of temperance. As a mere woman, though, she felt unsafe. Not so much because she was travelling alone and searching in the disreputable places where she had to search for scum like him. It was not an outward threat so much as an inward one. At times, in her abandonment, she thought it possible that she might choke with rage—and she feared what that rage might lead her blindly into.

  He wasn’t perfect, her improvisational man, so maybe it wouldn’t be so troublesome to give him up. Self-sufficiency had its limits, especially in the bedroom. Here she was, married for weeks, and the union was still unconsummated. Virginity clung to her like a transparent, skin-tight garment that she could not for the life of her peel off. She would gladly divest herself of it, a woman’s most prized possession, and rip it to shreds. She was more than willing to toss it away in a tumble of arms and legs and slapping, pumping flesh—rend it utterly in a storm of effort, if not pleasure.