When Alice Lay Down With Peter (41 page)

“In fact,” said Ida, “I imagine Richard thinks you’re
cured
. He was always talking about getting you
with child.”

“Why don’t you ever shut up?” asked Helen.

Ida would not accept personal prejudice. “Oh, come on,
Helen. It is too funny.
Kirche und Kinder
, all that. You’re the perfect wife now. Just not his. Don’t you have any sense of humour any more? Or do you just—what?—produce milk.” She nudged Helen’s arm. She missed Helen really: she wanted her buddy back. “Come on,” she said again, “there is a certain
divine
justice in it.”

Bill softened, tipped his head. You can hear a river, even on a windless day.

Helen had been more or less holding her breath ever since Ida hit her. So. Richard would leave her alone. And go his way, into the New World, like all the happily prosperous burghers in Winnipeg.

“I got a letter from Daniel’s uncle,” said Ida. She found it increasingly difficult to speak of personal matters.

“Does he know where Daniel is?” Helen asked.

Ida shook her head. “No, no, nothing like that.” She reached inside her coat for her tobacco. “He’s from the German side. There’s Zimmermans in Russia, Poland; this side stayed in Germany.” She withdrew two cigarettes already rolled. Lit Helen’s. “His son was killed by the Nazis. Some kind of street brawl. They said he was drunk.”

“Oh,” Helen breathed. “Ida.”

“Well, we have to do something. Obviously. So I thought we could bring Einstein here. He could give a talk or something. People just don’t know. Or they don’t care. Richard sure doesn’t give a shit. Pardon my German,” she added, to Bill.

“I could talk to him,” said Helen.

“You!” Ida laughed bitterly. She touched Helen’s belly. “I think you lost that vote, Mama.”

Helen took a deep drag of her cigarette. Ida was right. It was irrevocable. How he must hate her. Helen felt that old impulse to go towards the war zone. She nervously touched Bill, who sat quietly beside her. But she was pinned to her fear of Richard.

H
ELEN’S CHILD, MY GRANDDAUGHTER
, was born in May 1936, just as Italy occupied Ethiopia. Conceived in July, the baby took a full ten months to be born (there was a wild turkey for each month of gestation), abiding in utero the contrary gospels of the two religions: the dance of Summer (as well as the poignant agnosticism of Fall) and the no-dancing of Winter. A little girl. Stalled till mid-May. It would turn out to be a typical move, a natal pattern in which she would persist all her life. An innately a-theological child, deeply irreligious, and fixed to the cusp. They named her Dianna.

She was born with her eyes wide open, solemn and attentive, as if what she was seeing for the first time was a confirmation of some earlier appraisal. One of those refined babies, slender and long of digit, her narrow face dominated by discerning eyes. She almost never cried, but she rarely slept. Such a degree of consciousness filled her father with awe. She would lie for an hour in Bill’s arms while they stared at one another, Bill stroking the space between her eyebrows. He began to carry her around in a sling he strung at his chest.

Helen walked beside them. She was thoroughly baptized in love for Dianna, immersed in the extremity of such love. She
began to worry that the child wouldn’t love her back. Dianna had such a noncommittal gaze. Helen decided that she favoured her father. She felt, with increasing panic, that she was essentially invalid. Despite the love that seared itself to her bones, Helen yearned for her pre-baby days, when she knew her own edge. She was melting into a sea of milk.

Anarchy meant for Helen an active and prolonged extinction of her own counterfeit character. She was always at war with herself, and she could ask no one for confirmation. Her love for Bill was profoundly imbued with respect for his solitude. She felt that she too had to be solo, to be entirely responsible for her own life. In her days as a man, the pain of hunger, the occasional fear she’d felt aboard the trains, all that confirmed her passionate need for acts of individual courage. She was rushing away from her marriage to Richard, as if from an embarrassing reflection in the mirror, reinventing herself as her own opposite; yet always she looked back, compelled, because she could not extinguish her other side, her conservative impulse to fulfill her marital obligations. But Helen so hated to be told what to do. And her impulse towards anarchy, her hatred of governance, her fear of and distaste for easy agreement, and her idealism (that restless rejection of the kiss between the perfect and the imperfect)—all of this became unbearably acute with the birth of Dianna.

Bad timing.

How she missed being a man. Not a receptacle, not a passive fountain of milk, not a mirror, not an ornament. A man! The very opposite of early motherhood. She fiercely kissed Dianna. And handed her to Bill.

They traded times of solitude. Sometimes Bill would silently apologize and take himself away to the sunny inland spot he’d cleared, where he transplanted a selection of weeds and wildflowers, milkweed and grasses, an erratic patch desirable to mourning cloaks, monarchs, swallowtails. The world was too sweet to be tolerable. He needed silence, his listening form of prayer.

He was there, at the edge of grass and aspen, standing as if he’d just landed on earth, when Helen walked out of the woods wearing her blue dress, hovering like a spring azure, with Dianna in her arms. She spotted him, his white pyjamas, and called out. Ida had phoned. She wanted them to meet her at a picnic in town. She said it was important. Would he come? Bill thought he didn’t hear her right. He crossed the wild garden.

“It’s Ida,” Helen said, leading Bill to the car. “She was upset.”

Bill looked at Helen curiously. He got in the car. And they drove away. Bill in his white pyjamas, their judicious baby and Helen in blue.

T
HERE WAS A BIG CROWD
. Tents set up, picnic tables, lawn chairs, the men swilling steins of beer, the women with sausage and sauerkraut and the kids in their lederhosen, the hot air rich with smoke. At River Park, at the end of the Osborne Street car line, a modest area north of our home, on the banks of the Red. Wrapped around the telephone poles and the trees, around brown shirt sleeves, a swastika, thousands of swastikas.

As soon as they arrived, a man with a kindly face spotted them as strangers and asked Bill his name. Bill never did get into the habit of speaking. Questions intrigued him, but it seldom occurred to him to answer. Someone was singing, a handsome young man who rose on the balls of his feet, lifting his Adam’s apple to the air. Bill always preferred light rising things, in one way or another. The young man sensed him listening and stopped, and for a moment they listened to one another. The noise suddenly dropped away, and you could hear the mourning doves. Bill had the most pleasing blond head. His skin was as translucent as a slice of soap. He smiled. The singer went to Bill and embraced him. Everybody suddenly laughed, surprised; they slapped Bill on the back.

Women put plates of pickled beets in his hands, and he was offered beer with golden foam (he accepted). It was boisterous; there was loud singing, German folk songs, punchlines, teasing,
that hypersensitive aggression of successful people. The men drew Bill to a green bench. Helen stood uneasily between the kitchen and the beer keg, looking about for Ida. She and Dianna sweated against each other. Then Helen was subsumed by the crowd of women, who merrily pulled her to a circle of folding chairs littered with babies and little kids, where they cheerfully spoke a few words of English; she picked out “cute little undershirt” and “diarrhea” and “nap time.”

When their hosts realized that they were English-speaking, their laughter grew mischievous, a whiff of malice like meat just off. Yet there was, drifting through, the camaraderie of immigrants, a sort of hypothetical nationalism. A man with a swastika wrapped around his arm grandly entered the women’s area and asked Helen where she was from, her blood, originally, and she said Scotland-mother, father-not-too-sure, and he said, “That’s okay! You’re a pretty girl!” Then he looked at Dianna, solemn, grey-eyed, examining him coldly (even as an infant, my granddaughter could make people paranoid), and he said, “Not a big laugh, you Scots. Me! I am German! From Munich! The most beautiful city in the world!” He hooked his thumbs in his armpits. He waited for Helen to seduce him; it would hurt the feelings of his good wife, but “Yah,” he said, nodding, “such a pretty girl.” Then his face darkened. Helen looked back. Ida stood there.

Ida was wearing her fur coat. She had a bleeding nose. With one hand she held a bloody rag to her face, and with the other she thrust a bunch of pamphlets towards the man from Munich, who grabbed at them, intuitively offended. “PROTECT THE WORLD FROM FASCISM!” Photograph of Hitler, one of Goebbels. The German cocked his head, wounded.
“Tsk,” he said, and crumpled the pamphlet as if it were a soiled diaper. “Get out. Stupid.” He moved towards her.

The parade was a few blocks away. You could hear the tuba and the singing, sounds pushed out with heavy-heeled gaiety, with this kettledrum marking time for many choruses, because when they came into view, the crowd was organized into platoons, each with a flag and each with a different song, but always that big backswing: OOOM-pah, OOOM-pahpah. The parade ran for miles, overflowing the street and sidewalk, sweeping back and forth; there could have been ten thousand marchers, they just kept on coming. The picnickers ran from the park to wave at them, holding their kids up to see. The man shoved Ida, knocked the pamphlets all over the grass and pushed her ahead of him as if he were throwing a volleyball out into the street where the forward motion of the parade caught her up, a stick in the current, and swallowed her into its centre. Helen rushed after her, almost forgetting that she was holding Dianna. All three of them now moved with the crowd. With the baby in her arms, Helen was treated carefully, and she often felt someone’s guiding hand at her elbow as she pressed forward, trying to keep Ida in sight, the orangey-red smeared across the face, Ida bobbing on the surface of the crowd like an awful petunia.

Helen saw somebody’s elbow clip Ida’s ear, and in her fear she called out to that guiding angel of polyglots, her grandmother Alice. “Please! Grandmother Alice! Give my tongue German!” And then Helen was singing German lieder. “Excuse me!” she sang in High German. “Thank you! Let me by! Excuse me, you plump duck!” She got ahead, bumped over the cushions of fat arms, knocked down a little boy and picked him up
again; she lost sight of Ida and found her, called out, “Ida!” and at last Ida heard and turned to her, and then Helen saw that her rational, fearless, stubborn friend was scared, wild-eyed, her mouth opened in a gaping
O
, and Helen breathed out rancour and inhaled hatred.

She surged forward on a crest of hatred, pressing Dianna so firmly to her breast that to this day Dianna shows an addict’s attachment to her mother’s shade of blue. Helen pulled people roughly by the arm. “Out of the way!” she said in Low German. “Swine! Get out!” She clutched the baby with one arm and took hold of Ida, twice coming away with a handful of loose fur, and then, getting a good grip, she propelled them all on a traverse through the crowd, Helen singing in a weird baritone what could have been “The future belongs to me!” They popped out of that parade like empty whisky bottles at the river’s edge, on Jubilee Street behind a lilac hedge. Dianna’s second obsession would be the tight, grapey buds that occur on one afternoon in June. Helen held her baby over her shoulder and patted the baby bum till Dianna threw up all over her mother’s back.

Everything Helen did then she did with one hand, finding her handkerchief, spitting on it, wiping the blood off Ida’s face, spitting again (this time the sweet taste of blood). Ida pulled away. “Leave it!”

“Will you take off the goddamn coat!” yelled Helen. On the other side of the hedge, a brass band was marching past. People were laughing. Laughing not at them, but despite them, as if things would be
really
funny if
they
weren’t there.

Ida pulled the collar of the ancient muskrat coat around her throat. “Finito’s gone over,” she said in a low, grieving voice.

Helen gasped. She thought Ida was speaking Jewish folklore; she saw Finito in the stern of a gondola crossing a foggy river. She would really miss him. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Finito.”

Ida nodded. “Lucky bastard. He ships out of New York. God, I’d give anything to go.” Envy embarrassed her. She straightened her back. “Give me the baby.”

Helen handed Dianna to Ida. “Go where?” She winced. Distracted as she was, she didn’t like seeing her infant cling to muskrat fur. “Take off the damn coat or give her back.”

“Spain. Idiot.” Ida didn’t remove the coat. She did hold the baby away from her, cupping Dianna’s head in her hand, the two of them, baby and godmother (for such it would be), eyeing each other, solemn. “A boat to Le Havre.” Ida said this to Dianna. “Then trains to Paris, trucks, over the Pyrenees, maybe they walk, I don’t know. They go to Figueras, Albacete, Valencia.” She whispered these names to Dianna. “Quinto, Ebro, Saragossa.” She brought Dianna close to her and inhaled the warm, fat neck. “You smell like shit,” she said, inhaling, “I love that.”