When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  The first job was to feed the children. Not all the students of Alice’s school needed breakfast; in another hour, nearly forty others would arrive, warmly dressed and fed. But the first hour was the loveliest. Mr. Kolchella had lit the stove long before. They sat peaceably at the refectory tables, to sip porridge sweetened with lots of Grandfather Peter’s honey. Helen had a couple of friends among the children attending this early communal meal, two silent little boys with handsome, dirty faces who became her companions. Helen unconsciously took the seat at the head of the table. The two boys sat at either side. The friends spooned their porridge with darting efficiency and then sat mute, all three holding hands. These were Helen’s first suitors.

  The children were let out to the yard to play while Alice and Mr. Kolchella washed the dishes and replaced the porridge bowls with tattered books. My mother hated the school bell, but the kids loved it, as they loved flags and military medals. She had only to stand on the steps, holding it by its clapper like a dead animal, and the kids would stampede inside.

  Mr. Kolchella was Austrian-born. He was, like Alice, slight, and strong. He had a very wide mouth with long white teeth, a big, triangular nose and genial brown eyes framed by thick lashes. All of this eloquence was fit into a tiny face, just as his enormous energy was barely squeezed into his diminutive frame. Mr. Kolchella taught in German, Slavic and Bohemian. Alice somehow covered the others, with the help of the children themselves, who had little regard for their mother tongues and preferred bewilderment in English to knowledge in their own language.

  Classes proceeded through a relay, in which information was spoken in, perhaps, Polish and transformed into Yiddish by the recipient, who substituted half the words with Russian or Chinese and sent it forward through a cycle of perhaps twenty languages before it was returned, transmuted, to Alice in English. A game of Grandmother’s Whisper.

  The lessons had an athletic quality. Giddy children leapt up to pluck words out of the air. Knowledge was a fat man; the kids seized him roughly and tossed him around, shrieking with laughter. It was a boot camp for anarchists.

  The school day ended at two o’clock. The students had been fed once more, some soup and, on some days, bread. It made them drowsy. “Goodbye, old gentleman,” said Alice, shaking the sticky hand of one of Helen’s solemn suitors. The boy nodded and bowed to Helen, and then stopped at the door and said, “Here we are tomorrow.” “No,” said Alice. “Tomorrow is a holiday. We’ll see you in three days.” The suitor understood the word “no” but was confused by the rest and too proud to ask. Grief rippled through him. Helen went to him and kissed his cheek, murmuring something that seemed to fill him with painful admiration. Before my mother could stop him, the boy reached for a pair of scissors, and with his eyes upon Helen, his motion small and furtive, he stabbed the scissors into the palm of his hand. When Alice reached him, he was holding his bleeding hand up to Helen’s face; she wore that intent look again, awake. She drifted while Grandmother Alice bandaged the boy’s hand, but before he went off, he shyly came to her. Once more she kissed his cheek, and then she gently nudged him, Go home.

  When he was gone, my mother kneeled down before her granddaughter and looked at her for a long time, thinking. Then she said, “People—male people—will try to give you strange gifts, Helen. You do not need to accept them all.” Helen pulled away. Grandmother Alice held her. “Be careful what gifts you take.” But with a quick, resentful glance, Helen was gone.

  Every day on the way home from school, my mother and Helen stopped at a shop near by called the Evil Eye. Above the shop, Mr. Kolchella had two small rooms that he shared with his tiny wife.

  Mr. Kolchella was Mrs. Kolchella’s second husband. Mrs. Kolchella’s first husband had been executed in Russia only a year before. “It was a shock,” whispered Mr. Kolchella, taking Alice by the arm. “They made her watch.” He shook his head and looked back shyly at his wife, who was standing at the window looking down into the street. “There were other things,” confided Mr. Kolchella, “which I will not name in front of the child. The soldiers…” His eyes filled with tears, and he shrugged bitterly. “We are not far from the animals,” he said. Mrs. Kolchella turned from the window and smiled at them. Helen, who had been making pictures at the table near by, fiercely resumed her scribbling.

  The Evil Eye smelled of leather and polish. Its windows were full of glass jars piled on waxy furniture. The proprietor was a man named Mr. Cantor. They were good friends, and they always addressed one another as Mr. Cantor, Mrs. McCormack, Mr. and Mrs. Kolchella.

  They sat around a table at the back of the store, drinking coffee hot from the stove. The table was littered with newspapers in Russian and Ukrainian and Yiddish. Of the four adults, Mr. Cantor had the biggest lap, and though he often got furious, he never jumped up and down like Mr. Kolchella and Grandmother Alice did, and he wasn’t all bones like Mrs. Kolchella, and so Helen would go to Mr. Cantor. She climbed into his chair and put her head against his chest and listened to them argue the way she listened to the trains from her bed at night. Mrs. Kolchella sat beside Mr. Cantor, and when one of the adults would evoke too clearly the cruelty known only among such old people, she would reach her tiny hand to stroke Helen’s hair, humming an aimless lullaby to protect the child with a veil of white noise.

  They said it was a bad year. Mayor Sharpe (and Helen, hearing his name, thinking of a man with hands like scissors) had cut down a strike by the employees of the Electric Street Railway Company by bringing in the militia from the nearby Fort Osborne barracks. As the mayor read the Riot Act, the soldiers had arrived with bayonets and a loaded Lewis gun. Helen understood a riot as something grown-ups do, something with women and soldiers. She dozed against Mr. Cantor’s baritone chest and dreamed of soldiers. The mayor has a machine gun; the government executes old husbands; execute is electrocute, what the government was going to do soon in the city. It is safe only behind danger, inside its ribs, to go to the adults with the mad hearts and soft hands. Helen learned that war is inside people and we must go to the lap of the strongest man with the quietest body, and thus, at the centre of the storm, we will be safe.

  There was a marvellous bird at Mr. Cantor’s store. Two feet high and bright blue, with a beak the colour of raspberries. With its dragon’s claws, it gripped the bars of its cage and rocked back and forth. Helen thought it was an angel from the wilds of heaven.

  The bird spoke a language so strange that even Grandmother Alice couldn’t respond. Mr. Cantor said it was a parrot and it came from South America. It spoke sentences like the drummings of a partridge, softly percussive, wood on earth. A remarkably gentle voice, coming from the rapacious red beak. The parrot was, Mr. Cantor said, the sole living creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe. All the speaking people were gone, and they’d left behind only this creature. The parrot was older than Mr. Cantor, older than Grandmother Alice. When it died, it would take with it the last words of the lost people. Helen imagined her own forest growing over the blackened logs of her house, her little bed sinking under the trees and the dark bushes. She laid her ear against the man’s chest.

  Outside the light thrown by a wood stove, there is a constant riot going on, stirred by the sharp fingers of soldiers. But inside, behind the empty glass bottles at the Evil Eye, was a cadre, a place of peace. Helen listened. With vibrating voices, the adults invented a new medicine. They called it revolution.

  Everyone said “revolution” a different way. Mr. Cantor rolled the R in his chest, a low pneumatic rumble rising through the very back of his throat, with the N nicely flattened by his tongue. But Mr. Kolchella opened it up like one of those wooden dolls, and it became a sunny word full of A’s and generous U’s. But Grandmother Alice winced and spat, and the small-scale Mrs. Kolchella refrained from saying it altogether, and every time the word was spoken she looked anxiously at the door.

  When Helen asked what it meant, she received so many answers she came to know only that “revolu
tion” was the last word on the lips of the last angel. Helen saw a blue pinwheel spinning so fast it cut her beautiful face, and the light released from that lit up the world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON A GOLD, RAINY DAY my mother took Helen to school with her as usual, and when they arrived two things happened.

  Waiting for them at the door was an extremely anxious Mr. Kolchella and a stranger, a man in a heavy coat with a notepad sticking from his pocket.

  “Tribune,” said the man, sticking out his hand at Alice. “You don’t mind answering some questions.”

  “Are you really a curious kind of man?” Alice asked him.

  The reporter looked at her, balding, as bland as a job application. “You are Alice McCormack,” he said.

  “Mrs. Alice McCormack,” said Mr. Kolchella, dancing on his toes.

  “Alice,” said the man, “do you speak any English at all?”

  Alice was delighted. “Only when I’m forced into it by dreary monoglots such as yourself!”

  The reporter had four very long grey hairs draped across his head. Helen, who was not feeling well, winced and tugged at Alice’s hand. “Grandma!” she cried. “Grandma Alice, please!”

  The man focused on Helen. “That kid’s sick!” he said.

  “She is not!” cried Alice, an indignant grandmother. And then, “My God, child! You’re burning up!”

  She put her hand on Helen’s forehead, and Helen responded to that gesture as will any self-respecting McCormack woman: with a volcanic flow of vomit that splashed over the cobblestones, missing her new black shoes, for she was always careful with her clothing, but spraying the reporter’s trousers generously.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. He shielded his face with his hand.

  “She’s throwing up,” said Alice.

  “Typhoid!” cried the reporter, and then he fled.

  My mother bundled up Helen and held tight her hot little body and said, “Mr. Kolchella, please tell me the truth. Am I a destructive hag who imposes upon her offspring ideologies that will only bring them to ruin?”

  “He may be right,” responded Mr. Kolchella. “It could be typhoid. There’s been a fresh rash of the fever again this spring.” He turned Alice away. “Go to my home, and I’ll close the school. Wait for me there. And Mrs. McCormack…” he said. Alice turned to him, sobbing, holding Helen. “You’re wise in the ways of destruction. It’s what brings us to life.”

  IT WAS A RARE BIT OF LUCK for the Winnipeg Tribune that the news of yet another outbreak of Red River fever coincided with the news of the “seditious teachings of a north-end anarchist.” Their readers were greatly relieved to learn that the children dying of typhoid in the north end of town were attending school in thirteen languages, in a manner declared to be “subversive and destructive of Canadian citizenship and nationality.” Nobody to blame but themselves.

  Helen was too sick to travel back to St. Norbert, and so she was billeted at the Kolchellas’ home, above the Evil Eye. I was frantic for her. Her grandmother had decided that Helen was safer in the city because Eli and I drew our water from the Red.

  “It’s the Red River fever,” she shouted at me from the window of the Kolchellas’ flat.

  “But, Mama!” I said. “It came from school! It’s from the sewage in the city!”

  “Nonsense!” said Alice, and closed the window.

  When her fever subsided, Helen rested on Mr. Cantor’s chest. She was in the first stages of an addiction: forever after, she would hunger for the sound of a man’s heartbeat.

  And it was in this repose, in the peaceful backroom of the Evil Eye while Grandmother Alice and Mr. Cantor and Mr. and Mrs. Kolchella argued in voices softened for the benefit of the convalescent, that Helen developed one of her terminal contradictions.

  Mr. Cantor was reading from that radical rag, the Old Testament, and its incendiary passage, the Book of Isaiah. “And they shall build houses and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.”

  Helen asked him again and again for this “story.” She soothed herself with the warm rumble of his voice. Mr. Cantor imagined that the child yearned for virtue, that she listened to the story for its frisson of justice. How could he possibly know the sensuous quality of Helen’s imagination? How she dreamed of flowering vineyards with iron fences and marble fountains, a walled garden decorated with the engravings of fruits and flowers, a stone house with many windows and a veranda with pillars. And a carriage house. A very grand carriage house. With rooms above. Where all the servants live.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BY THE TIME I BROUGHT HER HOME, Helen had a vertical fracture running down the middle of her soul. She was an incendiary conservative, a desperado of luxury.

  She overcame the typhoid and the accompanying traces of pneumonia, and became as womanly as some unearthly aristocrat in the Middle Ages, with her thin shoulders, her extremely narrow ankles and her long white feet. I brought milk and marmalade, bouquets of dried corncobs, russet gold; laid them by her pillow and stared at the contrast with her black hair, white skin, in the slanted sunlight. I was her suitor too.

  Around us there continued the great debate over the nature of perfection. My father was disgusted by the efforts of the Liberal Party to, as he said, “stick a turkey in the fox den.”

  “It’s wrong!” said Peter. “They’re buying us off! Goddamn capitalists! Bunch of foxes! Goddamn SOBs!”

  My dad had taken up cursing the goddamn bourgeois bloodsuckers who thought they could buy up a couple of labour candidates and ride a white ass to the legislature. He lived in the eternal state of opposition. Bloody bastard leeches, parasitic buggers—damn them all to hell. His oath of allegiance to Impossibilism. If we reject, resist with all our cussing strength, the seduction of capitalism, damn it, then… then.

  Utopia. The sun shone full on the innocent face of the millennium.

  Nothing had been tried. Nothing had been found wanting. Peter’s Impossibilism suggested that nothing was impossible.

  There were only the sarcastic burps and spewings of the wretched Thomas Scott to suggest otherwise. A sporadic guest, all the worse because you didn’t know when he wasn’t there. Especially when my parents let themselves be hopeful, I’d wonder if we weren’t making him up. Just anticipating his detractions would conjure his drooling spirit.

  And naturally I had my own problems over at our grotto, preserving some independence from my dead mother-in-law’s influence, however soulful and benign. I hadn’t mentioned it to Eli, but when Marie heard our vows years before, when we saw each other to the door, I had hoped fervently that that would be our last, fond farewell. Then I could have told my husband that I missed his adoptive mother. It would have been a great non-relationship. But Marie had continued to live with us after all.

  The ice crystals were glittering. Eli and I rose before dawn and lit the fire and warmed ourselves standing by the stove, wrapped up in his old robe. I held his hand. Eli had lost the thumb of his right hand just that summer, when he’d pinched it in the steel fittings of the new sulky plough. Now when I touched him, pain ran from the back of my own throat and down to the tip of my spine, though his wound had long since healed. I liked to hold his imbalanced paw. We were quiet. Our few years of marriage had taught us that our lives retained their raw edge, that we could still hurt and bleed. We watched the wood burn through the open door to the stove.

  That morning, when dawn showed the blue rain puddles in the yard, Eli went out to get the horses ready. He’d hired out to build houses for a real-estate developer who’d bought up a bunch of river land south of Winnipeg. From the window, I watched him walking with vanishing purpose. Eli was surprised by the sky with its skim milk shine, the crisp manure, his garden of bleached corn stooks and icy green piles of tomato plants. He became quite lost, slowed, stopped, stared at the yellow wood chips that littered the ground. His face rippled w
ith memory or wishfulness or regret. The window was bevelled by a fine line of frost. He felt me looking and looked back. His forest-coloured eyes belonged to no one but him.

  Eli needed to be lost. It was cruel to expect him to remember where he was going. He was most at home adrift. His nomadic compass had no true north; his nomadic clock had no midnight. Everywhere was here, and it was always now. I saw him smile and nod his shaggy head at Alice, who was charging across the yard in her rubber boots and flannel nightgown. Alice burst in. “He can’t go off and work for that thieving developer!” she said. And then, “Thank God you’re here!” and I looked behind me to see that Marie’s form occupied the rocking chair. Just then, Helen walked sleepily into the kitchen and stood looking up at her grandmothers. Marie reached and touched Helen’s curls. “It is time for her journey to begin,” she intoned, and Helen shuddered.

  Alice handed me my coat and purse. “What did you marry?” she asked me.

  Marie interrupted with a laugh, a most curious, undomesticated laugh. “Eli is a buffalo hunter,” she said.

  “What buffalo?” I asked. “What buffalo now?”

  My mother pursed her lips. “You’re not too old to smack, you know!”

  “I’m just asking what buffalo.”

  Mum threw up her hands. “Honestly, girl!” She poured herself some coffee, offered some to Marie and then said, “Of course not.” And to Helen, “You’re too young.” Cranky, she blew steam, muttering, “One dead, one too young. And one too stupid. Who said anything about buffalo? We’re talking about Eli! You know? Eli?”