Blind Assassin (91 page)

“Who’s that with Father?” I said to Reenie.

Reenie looked without appearing to look, then gave a short laugh. “That’s Mr. Royal Classic, in the flesh. He certainly has the nerve.”

“I thought it must be him,” I said.

Mr. Royal Classic was Richard Griffen, of Royal Classic Knitwear in Toronto. Our workers—Father’s workers—referred to it derisively as Royal Classic Shitwear, because Mr. Griffen was not only Father’s chief competitor, he was also an adversary of sorts. He’d attacked Father in the press for being too soft on the unemployed, on Relief, and on pinkos generally. Also on unions, which was gratuitous because Port Ticonderoga did not have any unions in it and Father’s dim views on them were no secret. But now for some reason, Father had invited Richard Griffen to dinner at Avilion, following the picnic, and on very short notice as well. Only four days.

Reenie felt Mr. Griffen had been sprung on her. As everyone knew, you had to put on a better show for your enemies than for your friends, and four days was not long enough for her to prepare for such an event, especially considering that there hadn’t been any of what you’d call fine dining at Avilion since the days of Grandmother Adelia. True, Callie Fitzsimmons sometimes brought friends for the weekend, but that was different, because they were only artists and should be grateful for whatever they were given. They would sometimes be found in the kitchen at night, raiding the pantry, making their own sandwiches out of leftovers.
The bottomless pits,
Reenie called them.

“He’s new money, anyhow,” said Reenie scornfully, surveying Richard Griffen. “Look at the fancy pants.” She was unforgiving of anyone who criticized Father (anyone, that is, except herself), and scornful of those who rose in the world and then acted above their level, or what she considered their level; and it was a known fact that the Griffens were common as dirt, or at least their grandfather was. He’d got hold of his business through cheating the Jews, said Reenie in an ambiguous tone—was this something of a feat, in her books?—but exactly how he had done it she couldn’t say. (In fairness, Reenie may have invented these slurs on the Griffens. She sometimes attributed to people the histories she felt they ought to have had.)

Behind Father and Mr. Griffen, walking with Callie Fitzsimmons, was a woman I assumed was Richard Griffen’s wife—youngish, thin, stylish, trailing diaphanous orange-tinted muslin like the steam from a watery tomato soup. Her picture hat was green, as were her high-heeled slingbacks and a wispy scarf affair she’d draped around her neck. She was overdressed for the picnic. As I watched, she stopped and lifted one foot and peered back over her shoulder to see if there was something stuck on her heel. I hoped there was. Still, I thought how nice it would be to have such lovely clothes, such wicked new-money clothes, instead of the virtuous, dowdy, down-at-heels garments that were our mode of necessity these days.

“Where’s Laura?” said Reenie in sudden alarm.

“I have no idea,” I said. I had gotten into the habit of snapping at Reenie, especially when she bossed me around.
You’re not my mother
had become my most withering riposte.

“You should know better than to let her out of your sight,” said Reenie. “
Anybody
could be here.”
Anybody
was one of her bugbears. You never knew what intrusions, what thefts and gaffes
anybody
might commit.

I found Laura sitting on the grass under a tree, talking with a young man—a man, not a boy—a darkish man, with a light-coloured hat. His style was indeterminate—not a factory worker, but not anything else either, or nothing definite. No tie, but then it was a picnic. A blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges. An impromptu, a proletarian mode. A lot of young men were affecting it then—a lot of university students. In the winters they wore knitted vests, with horizontal stripes.

“Hello,” said Laura. “Where did you go off to? This is my sister Iris, this is Alex.”

“Mister…?” I said. How had Laura got on a first-name basis so quickly?

“Alex Thomas,” said the young man. He was polite but cautious. He scrambled to his feet and reached out his hand, and I took it. Then I found myself sitting down beside them. It seemed the best thing to do, in order to protect Laura.

“You’re from out of town, Mr. Thomas?”

“Yes. I’m visiting people here.” He sounded like what Reenie would call a
nice
young man, meaning
not poor.
But not rich either.

“He’s a friend of Callie’s,” said Laura. “She was just here, she introduced us. He came on the same train with her.” She was explaining a little too much.

“Did you meet Richard Griffen?” I said to Laura. “He was with Father. The one who’s coming to dinner?”

“Richard Griffen, the sweatshop tycoon?” said the young man.

“Alex—Mr. Thomas knows about ancient Egypt,” said Laura. “He was telling me about hieroglyphs.” She looked at him. I’d never seen her look at anyone else in quite the same way. Startled, dazzled? Hard to put a name to such a look.

“That sounds interesting,” I said. I could hear my voice pronouncing
interesting
in that sneering way people have. I needed some way of telling this Alex Thomas that Laura was only fourteen, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make her angry.

Alex Thomas produced a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket—Craven A’s, as I recall. He tapped one out for himself. I was a little surprised that he smoked ready-mades—it didn’t go with his shirt. Packaged cigarettes were a luxury: the factory workers rolled their own, some with one hand.

“Thank you, I will,” I said. I’d only smoked a few cigarettes before, and those on the sly, filched from the silver box of them kept on top of the piano. He looked hard at me, which I suppose was what I’d wanted, then offered the package. He lit a match with his thumb, held it for me.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.”

Elwood Murray appeared before us, upright and jaunty again. The front of his shirt was still damp and splashed with pink, from where the women with the wet handkerchiefs had tried to get out the blood; the insides of his nostrils were ringed in dark red.

“Hello, Mr. Murray,” said Laura. “Are you all right?”

“Some of the boys got a little carried away,” said Elwood Murray, as if shyly revealing that he’d won some sort of a prize. “It was all in good fun. May I?” Then he took our picture with his flash camera. He always said
May I
before taking a picture for the paper but he never waited for the answer. Alex Thomas raised his hand as if to fend him off.

“I know these two lovely ladies, of course,” Elwood Murray said to him, “but your name is?”

Reenie was suddenly there. Her hat was askew, and she was red in the face and breathless. “Your father’s been looking all over for you,” she said.

I knew this to be untrue. Nevertheless Laura and I had to get up from the shade of the tree and brush our skirts down and go with her, like ducklings being herded.

Alex Thomas waved us goodbye. It was a sardonic wave, or so I thought.

“Don’t you know any better?” Reenie said. “Sprawled on the grass with Lord knows who. And for heaven’s sakes, Iris, throw away that cigarette, you’re not a tramp. What if your father sees you?”

“Father smokes like a furnace,” I said, in what I hoped was an insolent tone.

“That’s different,” said Reenie.

“Mr. Thomas,” said Laura. “Mr. Alex Thomas. He is a student of divinity. Or he was until recently,” she added scrupulously. “He lost his faith. His conscience would not let him continue.”

Alex Thomas’s conscience had evidently made a big impression on Laura, but it cut no ice with Reenie. “What’s he working at now, then?” she said. “Something fishy, or I’m a Chinaman. He has a slippery look.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I said to Reenie. I hadn’t liked him, but surely he was now being judged without a hearing.

“What’s right with him, is more like it,” said Reenie. “Rolling around on the lawn in full view of everyone.” She was talking more to me than to Laura. “At least you had your skirt tucked in.” Reenie said a girl alone with a man should be able to hold a dime between her knees. She was always afraid that people—men—would see our legs, the part above the knee. Of women who allowed this to happen, she would say:
Curtain’s up, where’s the show?
Or,
Might as well hang out a sign.
Or, more balefully,
She’s asking for it, she’ll get what’s coming to her,
or, in the worst cases,
She’s an accident waiting to happen.

“We weren’t rolling,” Laura said. “There was no hill.”

“Rolling or not, you know what I mean,” said Reenie.

“We weren’t doing anything,” I said. “We were talking.”

“That’s beside the point,” said Reenie. “People could see you.”

“Next time we’re not doing anything we’ll hide in the bushes,” I said.

“Who is he anyway?” said Reenie, who usually ignored my head-on challenges, since by now there was nothing she could do about them.
Who is he
meant
Who are his parents.

“He’s an orphan,” said Laura. “He was adopted, from an orphanage. A Presbyterian minister and his wife adopted him.” She seemed to have winkled this information out of Alex Thomas in a very short time, but this was one of her skills, if it can be called that—she’d just keep on asking questions, of the personal kind we’d been taught were rude, until the other person, in shame or outrage, would be forced to stop answering.

“An orphan!” said Reenie. “He could be anybody!”

“What’s wrong with orphans?” I said. I knew what was wrong with them in Reenie’s books: they didn’t know who their fathers were, and that made them unreliable, if not downright degenerate.
Born in a ditch
was how Reenie would put it.
Born in a ditch, left on a doorstep.

“They can’t be trusted,” said Reenie. “They worm their way in. They don’t know where to draw the line.”

“Well anyway,” said Laura, “I’ve invited him to dinner.”

“Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread,” said Reenie.

Loaf givers

There’s a wild plum tree at the back of the garden, on the other side of the fence. It’s ancient, gnarled, the branches knuckled with black knot. Walter says it should come down, but I’ve pointed out that, technically speaking, it isn’t mine. In any case, I have a fondness for it. It blossoms every spring, unasked, untended; in the late summer it drops plums into my garden, small blue oval ones with a bloom on them like dust. Such generosity. I picked up the last windfalls this morning—those few the squirrels and raccoons and drunken yellow-jackets had left me—and ate them greedily, the juice of their bruised flesh bloodying my chin. I didn’t notice it until Myra dropped by with another of her tuna casseroles.
My goodness,
she said, with her breathless avian laugh.
Who’ve you been fighting?

I remember that Labour Day dinner in every detail, because it was the only time all of us were ever in the same room together.

The revels were still going on out at the Camp Grounds, but not in any form you’d want to witness close up, as the surreptitious consumption of cheap liquor was now in full swing. Laura and I had left early, to help Reenie with the dinner preparations.

These had been going on for some days. As soon as Reenie had been informed about the party, she’d dug out her one cookbook,
The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook,
by Fannie Merritt Farmer. It wasn’t hers really: it had belonged to Grandmother Adelia, who’d consulted it—along with her various cooks, of course—when planning her twelve-course dinners. Reenie had inherited it, although she didn’t use it for her daily cooking—all of that was in her head, according to her. But this was a question of the fancy stuff.

I had read this cookbook, or looked into it at least, in the days in which I’d been romanticizing my grandmother. (I’d given that up by now. I knew I would have been thwarted by her, just as I was thwarted by Reenie and my father, and would have been thwarted by my mother, if she hadn’t died. It was the purpose in life of all older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else.)

The cookbook had a plain cover, a no-nonsense mustard colour, and inside it there were plain doings as well. Fannie Merritt Farmer was relentlessly pragmatic—cut and dried, in a terse New England way. She assumed you knew nothing, and started from there: “A beverage is any drink. Water is the beverage provided for man by Nature. All beverages contain a large percentage of water, and therefore their uses should be considered: I. To quench thirst. II. To introduce water into the circulatory system. III. To regulate body temperature. IV. To assist in carrying off water. V. To nourish. VI. To stimulate the nervous system and various organs. VII. For medicinal purposes,” and so forth.

Taste and pleasure did not form part of her lists, but at the front of the book there was a curious epigraph by John Ruskin:

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bairns and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers.

I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour; and from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they’d ever cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or changing men into pigs. As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both. Still, it was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother’s time. They were to be sedate in bearing, unapproachable, regal even, but possessed of arcane and potentially lethal recipes, and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men. And on top of that, perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers. The distributors of gracious largesse.

Had anyone ever taken this sort of thing seriously? My grandmother had. All you needed to do was to look at her portraits—at that cat-ate-the-canary smile, those droopy eyelids. Who did she think she was, the Queen of Sheba? Without a doubt.

When we got back from the picnic, Reenie was rushing around in the kitchen. She didn’t look much like Helen of Troy: despite all the work she’d done in advance, she was flustered, and in a foul temper; she was sweating, and her hair was coming down. She said we would just have to take things as they came, because what else could we expect, since she could not do miracles and that included making silk purses out of sows’ ears. And an extra place too, at zero hour, for this Alex person, whatever he called himself. Smart Alex, by the look of him.

“He calls himself by his name,” said Laura. “The same as anyone.”

“He’s not the same as anyone,” said Reenie. “You can tell that at a glance. He’s most likely some half-breed Indian, or else a gypsy. He’s certainly not from the same pea patch as the rest of us.”

Laura said nothing. She was not given to compunction as a rule, but this time she did seem to feel a little contrite for having invited Alex Thomas on the spur of the moment. She couldn’t uninvite him however, as she pointed out—that would have been miles beyond mere rudeness. Invited was invited, no matter who it might be.

Father knew that too, although he was far from pleased: Laura had jumped the gun and usurped his own position as host, and next thing he knew she’d be inviting every orphan and bum and hard-luck case to his dinner table as if he was Good King Wenceslas. These saintly impulses of hers had to be curbed, he said; he wasn’t running an almshouse.

Callie Fitzsimmons had attempted to mollify him: Alex was not a hard-luck case, she’d assured him. True, the young man had no visible job, but he did seem to have a source of revenue, or at any rate he’d never been known to put the twist on anyone. What might that source of income be? said Father. Darned if Callie knew: Alex was close-mouthed on the subject. Maybe he robbed banks, said Father with heavy sarcasm. Not at all, said Callie; anyway, Alex was known to some of her friends. Father said the one thing did not preclude the other. He was turning sour on the artists by then. One too many of them had taken up Marxism and the workers, and accused him of grinding the peasants.

“Alex is all right. He’s just a youngster,” Callie said. “He just came along for the ride. He’s just a pal.” She didn’t want Father to get the wrong idea—that Alex Thomas might be a boyfriend of hers, in any competitive way.

“What can I do to help?” said Laura, in the kitchen.

“The last thing I need,” said Reenie, “is another fly in the ointment. All I ask is that you keep yourself out of the way and don’t knock anything over. Iris can help. At least she’s not all thumbs.” Reenie had the notion that helping her was a sign of favour: she was still annoyed with Laura, and was cutting her out. But this form of punishment was lost on Laura. She took her sun hat, and went out to wander around on the lawn.

Part of the job assigned me was to do the flowers for the table, and the seating arrangement as well. For the flowers I’d cut some zinnias from the borders—just about all there was at that time of year. For the seating arrangement I’d put Alex Thomas beside myself, with Callie on the other side and Laura at the far end. That way, I’d felt, he’d be insulated, or at least Laura would.

Laura and I did not have proper dinner dresses. We had dresses, however. They were the usual dark-blue velvet, left over from when we were younger, with the hems let down and a black ribbon sewn over the top of the worn hemline to conceal it. They’d once had white lace collars, and Laura’s still did; I’d taken the lace off mine, which gave it a lower neckline. These dresses were too tight, or mine was; Laura’s as well, come to think of it. Laura was not old enough by common standards to be attending a dinner party like this, but Callie said it would have been cruel to make her sit all alone in her room, especially since she, personally, had invited one of our guests. Father said he supposed that was right. Then he said that in any case, now that she’d shot up like a weed she looked as old as I did. It was hard to tell what age he thought that was. He could never keep track of our birthdays.

At the appointed time the guests foregathered in the drawing room for sherry, which was served by an unmarried cousin of Reenie’s impressed for this event. Laura and I were not allowed to have any sherry, or any
wine
at dinner. Laura did not seem to resent this exclusion, but I did. Reenie sided with Father on this, but then she was a tee-totaller anyway. “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,” she’d say, emptying the dregs of the wine glasses down the sink. (She was wrong about that, however—less than a year after this dinner party, she married Ron Hincks, a notable tippler in his day. Myra, take note if you’re reading this: in the days before he was hewn into a pillar of the community by Reenie, your father was a notable souse.)

Reenie’s cousin was older than Reenie, and dowdy to the point of pain. She wore a black dress and a white apron, as was proper, but her stockings were brown cotton and sagging, and her hands could have been cleaner. In the daytimes she worked at the grocer’s, where one of her jobs was bagging potatoes; it’s hard to scrub off that kind of grime. Reenie had made canapés featuring sliced olives, hard-boiled eggs, and tiny pickles; also some baked cheese pastry balls, which had not come out as expected. These were set on one of Grandmother Adelia’s best platters, hand-painted china from Germany, in a design of dark-red peonies with gold leaves and stems. On top of the platter was a doily, in the centre was a dish of salted nuts, with the canapés arranged like the petals of a flower, all bristling with toothpicks. The cousin thrust them at our guests abruptly, menacingly even, as if enacting a stick-up.

“This stuff looks pretty septic,” said Father in the ironic tone I’d come to recognize as his voice of disguised anger. “Better beg off or you’ll suffer later.” Callie laughed, but Winifred Griffen Prior graciously lifted a cheese ball and inserted it into her mouth in that way women have when they don’t want their lipstick to come off—lips pushed outward, into a sort of funnel—and said it was
interesting.
The cousin had forgotten the cocktail napkins, so Winifred was left with greasy fingers. I watched her curiously to see whether she would lick them or wipe them on her dress, or perhaps on our sofa, but I moved my eyes away at the wrong time, and so I missed it. My hunch was the sofa.

Winifred was not (as I’d thought) Richard Griffen’s wife, but his sister. (Was she married, widowed, or divorced? It wasn’t entirely clear. She used her given name after the Mrs., which would indicate some sort of damage to the erstwhile Mr. Prior, if indeed he was erstwhile. He was seldom mentioned and never seen, and was said to have a lot of money, and to be “travelling.” Later, when Winifred and I were no longer on speaking terms, I used to concoct stories for myself about this Mr. Prior: Winifred had got him stuffed and kept him in mothballs in a cardboard box, or she and the chauffeur had walled him up in the cellar in order to indulge in lascivious orgies. The orgies may not have been that far from the mark, although I have to say that whatever Winifred did in that direction was always done discreetly. She covered her tracks—a virtue of sorts, I suppose.)

That evening Winifred wore a black dress, simply cut but voraciously elegant, set off by a triple string of pearls. Her earrings were minute bunches of grapes, pearl also but with gold stems and leaves. Callie Fitzsimmons, by contrast, was pointedly underdressed. For a couple of years now she’d set aside her fuchsia and saffron draperies, her bold Russian-émigré designs, even her cigarette holder. Now she went in for slacks in the daytime, and V-neck sweaters, and rolled-up shirt sleeves; she’d cut her hair too, and shortened her name to Cal.

She’d given up the monuments to dead soldiers: there was no longer much of a demand for them. Now she did bas-reliefs of workers and farmers, and fishermen in oilskins, and Indian trappers, and aproned mothers toting babies on their hips and shielding their eyes while looking at the sun. The only patrons who could afford to commission these were insurance companies and banks, who would surely want to apply them to the outsides of their buildings in order to show they were in tune with the times. It was discouraging to be employed by such blatant capitalists, said Callie, but the main thing was the message, and at least anyone going past the banks and so forth on the street would be able to see these bas-reliefs, free of charge. It was art for the people, she said.

She’d had some idea that Father might help her out—get her some more bank jobs. But Father had said dryly that he and the banks were no longer what you’d call hand in glove.