When Alice Lay Down With Peter (24 page)

The effect upon Helen was palpable, though she barely moved. He felt it, and looked at her over his handsome little fingers. “I wouldn’t, honest to God.”

He began and ended with pearls. Good taste was Richard’s only virtue. It is terrifying that style should wield such power.

I was too busy to worry any more that day. Blue oysters lay in crates of shaved ice. The local knife-sharpener spent hours shucking them, and the kitchen smelled of the sea and the icy air made me light-headed. We did find one small baroque pearl, as grey-blue as snow in the clouds. I told no one but gave it to the knife-sharpener, who said he had a little girl at home and it would make her very happy.

John Anderson liked the kitchen. He’d bring one or two cronies in for a conversation without party noise. He always said, “Hello, Blondie,” and then leaned against the counter with his arms crossed while his guests stood uneasily looking into the servants’ territory, trying to keep clean. One thing about hanging out with rich people: you’ll always know what’s going to happen in the future. Rich people know more than others about what’s coming because they’re the ones pulling the strings.

Thrice, he arrived through the red velvet, padded door: once with a thin gentleman wearing a monocle; once with a chubby gentleman smoking a cigar; once with a fat gentleman drinking a martini. From the thin man, I learned that the biggest, most unsinkable ship ever made was soon to be afloat off the coast of England. From the chubby man, I learned that the biggest canal ever dreamed of was being dug in the muck between North and South America and it would bring prosperity
to all. And from the red-faced fat man, I learned that Germany was ambitious but she would never be foolhardy. All in all, it looked like the world was growing more glamorous, more powerful and much, much safer than ever before, and I was glad I’d brought a child into
the cradle of humanity
.

T
HE
A
NDERSONS ENTERTAINED
perpetually, though not on such a large scale. Mrs. Anderson’s errand of the day was to find her way to my kitchen. She did not stint in her duty but came right in, nearly to the stove. She looked directly at the top of my curly head and said, “Twelve for dinner, Barbara.” I made friends with the grocer, Buchanan, and told him to send the freshest and the best and make us first before anybody could even know about the sturgeon caviar or the Mediterranean artichokes.

The maid fell in love with the delivery boy, a terrible cliché but she was kind of dumb. I knew that it was an infatuation, and that she’d need to keep her job, so I served dinner on the nights she was hiding in the garage kissing him in the back seat of John Anderson’s Model T. Thus I furthered my education. Those dinners were the equivalent of the evening news.

Offering the Andersons’ guests a deceptively simple meal of asparagus and lamb with mint jelly, I learned that Austria would fend off the attack from Russia with just a little help from Germany (and at the edge of this discussion, the women dipped in and out like Labradors at a beach,
“Sophia Phillips had a German butcher
…”), and that the French wouldn’t get involved at all because the Morocco thing was a red herring and
Lord knows it will go no further.
(“Phillips? The kaiser had a cousin called Phillips, but a German way of saying it. Phillipmunster or like that, I think; Phillipvagner, something, I’m sure.”)
Because the Germans wouldn’t touch Belgium when they knew the whole world would be at their throats
(“Is Germany a
real
country? I mean, it was Napoleon, wasn’t it? Bismarck? My father always said, but I can’t quite recall
…”), and the new king would never let Great Britain get involved in a continental argument, but if they did, by Jeezus, we had the navy, and that fellow Churchill had created a first rate Admiralty.

“There’s going to be a war,” I said. I hadn’t realized that I was speaking my thoughts out loud. Everyone stopped talking. John Anderson leaned back, eased his trim belly and gracefully adjusted his trousers. “Well, we certainly hope that you are mistaken, Blondie,” he said.

I was carrying two silver chafing dishes, the edges of which I rested upon the buffet. I was overcome. I somehow just
knew
there would be a war. You get a different idea of things when you’re the invisible cook in the kitchen, listening in from the edges. I had been filled with a reawakened grief for my friend Clark. I heard John Anderson’s voice as a swimmer will hear a call from shore. He was speaking with his guests. “Blondie is quite the political philosopher,” he said. Everyone laughed.

His tone was not unkind, but I felt powerless and utterly sad. I did not let them see my face. Punishing myself, I looked under the rock of memory, where black beetles secrete puffy white eggs, and there I saw the severed shoulder, bulged eye of my friend, my lost Clark. Another war was coming. I felt it in my bones.

“You
are a very indulgent employer,” said one of the younger women at the table, putting her hand on John Anderson’s arm.

I took up my dishes and made for the kitchen. John Anderson’s voice followed me. “I would like a word with you, Blondie, when our guests have gone.”

My back to them so they would not see my pain. The velvet puckers of that stupid door like wounds on obesity. Clark had been dead for ten years. At the dinner table, the company laughed again. I turned towards the foolish guests, bumped open the swinging door with my backside and entered my domain.

John Anderson did come to speak with me while I was cleaning up the last dishes, but it was not to reprimand me for speaking out before his guests. He wanted to talk about the possibility of war. We talked for a long time that night, and many times afterwards, in a rich season of friendship. He approached me always as a possibility distinct but unverifiable. Perhaps he treated everyone that way. He was a speculator, a habit of mind that found him friends in all walks of life, though he was thoroughly upper class, like a character actor or a lark in a glass cage. His place in the city’s establishment was both his strength and his weakness; it gave him the innate power to go wherever he chose while it denied him relevance. He was himself a luxury.

His law practice had become for him a genteel hobby. He was preoccupied with real estate and racehorses. Outside the phlegmatic decorum of his shady mansion, and quite distinct from his dutiful friendship with Mrs. Anderson, John Anderson was chrome before the invention of chrome, a jet engine, a fax machine. Hearing the news of the great canal at
Panama (and with his characteristic aerial view, he recognized at once that Winnipeg would no longer be the Chicago of the North, no longer the hub for transcontinental rail traffic), he travelled south in person to see it. He didn’t understand distance; he thought everywhere was here. He was never on time for business meetings because he never did figure out that everything in Winnipeg is and always has been twenty minutes away.

Yes, he was a capitalist, and yes, he loaned me money (no interest, and I paid him back faithfully, for Eli’s new love of rodeo did not yet feed the farm), and yes, I was and will remain fond of him even when he appalls me, and it is a documented (by a photograph) fact that when he drove out to St. Norbert on speculation that the south bend of the Red might be worth development, and I introduced him to my mother and father, Peter turned his back and Alice raised her hands before her in the shape of a cross. Eli would have nothing to do with him. In fact, I guess Eli really hated him. But he didn’t say anything because it would have looked like he resented my liberty as a
working woman
.

I was distracted by my friendship with John. Together we watched the gathering clouds of war. There was a thoroughness in Winston Churchill’s naval administration that put the lie to diplomacy. “Boys like to fight,” said John. And then he sobered. I knew he was thinking of his leonine son, Richard. “Surely there won’t be conscription.” He looked to me for confirmation.

“Kitchener has no faith in Territorials,” I said slowly, for I was loath to make him anxious. “If Germany has 250,000 men, Britain will need a third more. There are surely that many in the reserves.”

“Is he a strong general? Kitchener?” John Anderson looked like a boy when he asked questions like this. I felt like
Rudyard Kipling, O best beloved. John Anderson did not treat me as an equal, but he approached me as a storyteller. He heard stories as parable, and understood that they are as false as they are true, in equal proportions, in equal tension; this is the nature of suspension.

I could only shrug. “He is well-meaning,” I said. We laughed sadly. “He’ll kill as many of the enemy as he can. He’ll offer up the faithful British Islanders, and then he’ll come looking in the colonies for more young men and offer them up too.”

“I hear he’s awfully excited about the new rifle.”

I nodded. “In the Boer War, more people died of disease than got shot.”

We both sighed.

Gently, I offered, “Maybe Richard would enjoy the navy.”

John Anderson stood up nervously. “There won’t be a war.”

“Maybe you’d better try him on the water. See if he’s got sea legs. He sailed that little wood boat when he was a boy, didn’t he? I’ll bet he’s a natural sea dog.”

Mr. Anderson stopped. “Put Richard on a boat?”

“Sure. Just a fun boat. For fun.”

And so it was decided. And John Anderson knew just the boat.

R
ICHARD ACCEPTED HIS FATHER’S PLANS
to see England and France as his right, scarcely nodding. “That would be nice,” he said, giving his father one quick look. “A very nice thing.” The cast-iron Mrs. Anderson granted permission to make the preparations on her behalf, and stood patient as a fence post while the dressmaker and the milliner stitched a new wardrobe.

They would be gone six months. When he heard the news, Eli nodded, took his guitar outside for his own private celebration. At first, I was relieved too. We needed a sabbatical from the John Anderson family. We both wanted Helen out of Richard’s languorous reach.

I planned to begin Helen’s education in earnest. My own scholarly pursuit of irrelevance had persuaded me of the absolute relevance of all things. My nerves were worn; I’d been working too hard, and that might account for the preternatural vividity of all things.

Cabbage butterflies, for instance. I had to stop to think about it. Does their flight have a purpose? They eat. Do they have teeth? I didn’t have time to look. I was anxious to know. Are we sure they eat? White wings in updrafts of sunlight.

On such a path I intended to take Helen. Our curriculum of improvisation required courage, alertness to the trembling motivations of the cabbage butterfly. Between one fact and its
sibling, gossamer wings, veins and arteries and chromosomes, information leaks and pulses, forever altering.

I wanted her to read what I’d read, especially the boring stuff, because that would strengthen her resolve. She would read Edmund Burke’s “Of Beauty.” It was my maternal contribution, more important than bread-making (which she scorned). She would read; further, she would stay awake while reading “The Sublime and the Beautiful Compared.”

I would update her studies to suit the modern age. Hydro electrical engineering. Automobile mechanics. And all kinds of political theory. Her grandfather Peter could help there. Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class
—a necessity for every young woman. Dad thought it soft. Gave her Engels and Marx. Helen resisted. Good, I thought. Give her rein. She could study the history of art, sure, if that’s what she wanted. Biographies. I suppose so. Biographies of great courtesans. Well, okay. Sure. Long as she’s reading. We were divergent, Helen and I. I thought history, she thought gossip. I believed in my method of lateral shift, but I also believed in the importance of the follow-through. Helen took my method ten steps to the side. She would remain mistress of her own republic. If something bored her (and everything did), the fault lay beyond her control, in the thing itself. The world, however relevant, proved unworthy.

Yet she was avid for Richard. She only pretended otherwise. He knew it. She betrayed herself by the way she hurried up the Andersons’ walk in the morning. Once, I looked up and saw Richard watching us from an upstairs window, his posture of amused arrogance, a sniper biding his time.

At home, she found all contact exceedingly painful. I bored her so badly, I took pity and stayed out of her way. With her father, she was as yet instinctively confident. Eli’s spurs woke her up early, ringing like tambourines on the floor. She opened her bedroom door and came out smelling of cookie dough, with her wild black hair waving on her cheek. Eli was spreading three-inch slices of bread with jam. She sat beside him and did likewise. Neither spoke. They solemnly chewed, and with her jam-sticky hand, she plucked at the silver buckle on his hatband.

I came in from the garden to rinse the carrots in her old baby bath on the porch. When Helen saw me she climbed from her chair, went back to her room and closed the door. Emerged twenty minutes later dressed in the second-hand clothes from the Anderson house, tucked in, transformed, an evening dress with a cotton shawl about her waist, three ivory bracelets at her elbow, black leather shoes with a buckle, sort of an Egyptian quality, suddenly tall, her hair in a rouleau, which I took down, standing over her, both of us in a rage, so quiet I heard the dripping at the new kitchen faucet, braiding her thick hair. Wrathful silence. She went to the wagon and waited there, bored with royal boredom, haute boredom, Aphrodite-at-a-flea-market boredom. Waiting for her mother-servant to hobble up, smelling of a cowboy-lover, of lye soap, of anxiety; an obsequious hag, her nag, her old mum.