When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  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.

  Beside the wood stove at the Andersons’, she made herself a couch of pillows covered with some discarded drapes, plush velvet, royal purple. She curled up, chewed a strand of her hair and read the biography of Mrs. Vanderbilt. I worked and tried to ignore her. I have felt like a servant only in my daughter’s presence. If I hummed, she sniffed at me. If I murmured to myself, she would stop and look. I had neither solitude nor company. I had an adolescent daughter. A daughter more beautiful and more dangerous than Circe, more captivating than Calypso. The kitchen became a prison.

  She began to make her demands.

  She wore a garland in her hair, coneflowers, of all things, wild sunflower, small sprays of aster. It was September and Indian summer. The flowers were bearing fruit; their florets drew away from their receptacles, revealed stamen, pistil. Yellow with dark brown discs, set in her coiled braids. Still very young, she had the potency of an older girl, as if Richard’s presence had created a hothouse.

  She appeared at the swinging door with flushed cheeks, looking like a girl who has recently been kissed. In her distraction, she held the door open, her gaze unfocused, and I saw Richard in the dining room behind her, his small hands in his pockets, his look of excited satisfaction. The air was full of broken constraints. Through the open door, I caught Richard’s eye. His slight smile, his pride. He then dismissed us both and disappeared.

  “Come in or go home,” I told her. Our eyes met for one horrible, naked moment. We began to bustle. She dropped her shawl, rolled up her sleeves, and for once actually proved useful at the sink.

  “Good drying weather,” said she.

  “Yep,” said I, “sun and wind, wind and sun, that’s what it takes.”

  “How are the turnips coming?” she asked.

  I stopped and turned to her. “Who wants to know?”

  She blushed. “Just trying to be nice. Why bother?”

  Acrid silence.

  Never give up on your kids. I tried again. “Peter’s happy with the rye this year.”

  No response. A coal mine caved in. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Signs of life.

  Vipers hatch and breed in the silence of an adolescent, quickening in our children’s righteousness. The kitchen filled with them, asps and snakes. Helen’s set jaw. A lovely frown, crisp habit with the vegetables, scrubbing with a brown bristle brush, suddenly tall. “Are you taller than I am?” I feigned surprise. Helen, given the chance to top me, stopped and stood and let me stand proximate while we measured shoulders. Hers an inch below. “Not just yet.” The scraping of vegetable skin resumed. “But soon,” I said, yearning to give her something, a pint of blood, both aortas. “Give you another winter, and you’ll outgrow your mum. You’re becoming a woman, Helen.”

  “Then let me be.”

  “Don’t I? I think I do. You do as you need.”

  “Not what I really need.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Travel,” said she.

  “Certainly, my darling. I’ll sell some gold and you shall travel.”

  “What if you didn’t need to?” Then, “What gold?”

  “I was joking, dear. Mother was being funny, ha, ha.”

  She speared me with a look. “You’d say no.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Don’t be so hard on me, please, Helen. I’m not your enemy.”

  “You just want to make me work in the kitchen. You want to keep me home so I can be just like you, a bitter old lady with dried-up skin. Your hands are wrinkled. Your face is wrinkled. I’m never going to be like you.”

  “No, that’s true. You’ll be rich and beautiful and feel no pain and do no work and have many children who never cry, and you will never grow old because you’ll live in a glass casket and God help you.”

  “Bitch,” said Helen clear as ice.

  I swung round and slapped her before the word had quite left her lips.

  “Well,” said Helen, “that’s that.”

  “Get your things. I’m taking you home to your father.”

  “Go to hell.” Then she fled, of course, and I thought, Jeezus, children are vaudevillian.

  “Helen!” I shouted. My shout was a formal resignation from the employ of the house of John Anderson. “You will come here at once! You will do as I say!” Of course she didn’t, and wouldn’t, and Edith Anderson was in the bath and didn’t hear a thing, and Richard was playing pool on the third floor and stopped, just as he’d aligned his final shot and lifted his head, the light falling on his golden curls, and he looked up through the lead-paned window and smiled and aimed down the length of the cue and banked the eight ball into the corner pocket, winning yet again against himself.

  But John Anderson heard my cry, and he stepped across the carpet and pushed through the swinging door, knocking gently on the kitchen wall. “Hello?” he said. “I thought I heard you sneeze.” He smiled.

  “I was just about to murder my child.”

  “Ahhhh. B
ut she murdered you first.”

  “She is evil.” I untied my apron. “John Anderson, KC, it’s been very nice knowing you. But I am finished here, and will forthwith take my deceitful bitch-goddess back to her father.”

  “She could come with us, Blondie.”

  I stopped.

  He said, “Richard has asked me about it. They’re very young but—”

  “She’s a little girl!”

  He shrugged. “The world is changing.”

  “Don’t give me that ‘world is changing’ crap!” I was going to touch him, let him feel the cattle prod of my electric touch. “You disappoint me, John Anderson. You disappoint me more than I can say. You turn out to be the same as all your fat pals. Fin de siècle, my eyeball! The world’s been faint and sick for eons, and you’re just as decadent as the rest of your butt-lazy cronies.”

  “Yes, but it really is.” That ineffable generosity. What an ass of a class specimen; what a class act as a simple human being.

  I couldn’t tell him I distrusted his son. He saw me hesitate and pressed his advantage, running off to get the illustrations, the map of the Titanic. We stood at the pastry table, and he showed me the four smokestacks, told me the proportion and weight of the hull. He had the drawings from the shipwright. Typical of the man. Biting his pipe with excitement, pointing with its stem at the six air compartments that made the Titanic unsinkable.

  Richard walked in, leaned back and watched me as I squirmed.

  “Think about it,” said John. “What an education! She’ll see London. We’ll go to Paris, and I promise to stay away from Belgium. She’ll be in no danger.”

  “She’s too young.”

  “We’ll look after her. Won’t we, Richard.”

  Richard’s slight smile.

  “What will she go as?” I asked.

  John didn’t understand me. “As? Well… As?”

  “What will she go as?” I couldn’t find other words for it.

  “As… as Helen. She’ll go as Helen.”

  John Anderson was innocent. He clapped his hands. “There! It’s done!” He softly punched Richard’s shoulder. John Anderson’s innocence always won him vast returns.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELI BECAME A BIG RODEO STAR, making saddlebags of money. Not only bronc riding, but playing his guitar and singing those homeless cowboy songs in front of hundreds of fans, dressed with a black string tie and a silver knot at his throat, a silver buckle at his waist, long and lean, for he’d got taller in his black cowboy boots, and his black ten-gallon hat with the silver hatband set with turquoise added another six inches. Broncobusting kept him mellow, his voice burrowed into his leathery soul and his whole body said, I’m lonesome and I want it that way, ain’t no home for a cowboy. Helen and I were two gold pieces he kept in his chest pocket, right next to his homesick heart. I enjoyed the moonglow of Eli’s reflected fame, being the good woman in all those aching songs—my gal, rose of my heart.

  The money that came to Eli from the rodeo seemed like the kind of money to throw at a new wardrobe for Helen: easy money, glamour cash. She had to have travel clothes, walking shoes, a good wool coat with a cape because the ship would pass close to Newfoundland on its way to New York. She needed evening dresses with matching bags and stockings and dancing shoes. They were travelling first class. Two other families from town were going too, but they were only going second class. Hats and kid gloves, a shawl, and of course, the pearls. Seeing his money spent this way, Eli grew ever more reckless in the rodeos, which served only to make him richer.

  Richard watched us attire his prize. He brought her more gifts. Fastening drops of amber to her ears, he touched her face as if his fingers would leave an imprint on the soft surface. She blushed, modestly raised her eyes and kissed his cheek.

  My distaste for the young man grew more acute. He bought her a short lamb coat, breathtaking with her hair, her ivory complexion. We were pinning a dress when he carried it in. Surprised, I too exclaimed over it, “How lovely!” She danced about the room, smiling at us both and said, “Oh, thank you!” He looked at her with neither fondness nor friendship, but a custodial regard. His voice was smooth, having changed without becoming raspy, a manly tenor. He wore a coal grey wool jacket with a white collar.

  They were stylish. Their style was an end in itself, an activity, like racing.

  Eli took a gulp of cold coffee and put his mug on the porch step. He’d just come off the fall circuit, and he was stiff and sore all over. “Walk with me, Blondie,” he said and took my hand, and we went walking through the golden woods. It was a warm fall day. The leaves smelled of apples. We walked down to the riverside, the water brown and still. Dad had fixed up the dock last spring. Eli began by loosening his string tie and unbuttoning his pearl buttons. He wrenched off his boots and pulled off his pants, and wearing only his hat, he unbuttoned my dress and stripped me down. We held hands and jumped into the river. The freezing water ripped the air right out of our lungs.

  ALICE EYED HER GRANDDAUGHTER’S COSTUME. “YOU look like a girl,” she said sadly. “I never thought I’d see the day when a McCormack woman would go off wearing women’s clothing.” Young girls mimic women even better than women mimic women. The white kid gloves, the rouleau, tendrils on her throat. She’d brushed her eyebrows and fainted them with brown shadow.

  The moment of their departure. Raining. Grandmother Alice refused to come with us to the train station. Grandfather Peter had a bad back. He walked out painfully and stood beside the carriage that would take his granddaughter into the arms of the enemies of the revolution. He stared straight ahead. Helen’s desire to be off too urgent, she patted her grandfather’s crustaceous white hand. Dad nodded and hobbled back to the house, tears running down either side of his long nose.

  With my heart in my father’s shirt pocket, my conscience up my mother’s sleeve and my first loyalty wrapped around my daughter’s little finger, I climbed up beside my husband and we rode off, a rodeo champion, beautiful Helen and me.

  John Anderson greeted us at the station, to the merriment of loose pocket change, and took Eli’s hand in both of his. John Anderson found friends where Eli heard coyotes. Eli shook John’s hand. I’m not sure whether, in his innocence, John understood Eli’s subtle generosity. Then our strange Aphrodite sweeping past.

  There were twenty minutes before the train’s departure. Helen, hearing this, panicked, not at leaving her mother and father, but at the delay, for she did not want to be our child a minute longer. Eli and I gazed at her, ashamed for her, in love with her. Took pity on her and said we had errands to run, we must go. Everyone but John Anderson felt relieved. He had tears in his eyes and said he’d take care of her for us, that was a promise.

  We went back to the house. I stood in Helen’s room, looking. A messy child. I let things stay where they’d fallen. If tomorrow came, it would not come to her empty little room.

  “Does she know we are abandoned?” I asked Eli.

  He considered, then pretended he hadn’t heard me. Marie’s dirge, the clock, the rain.

  I MISSED HELEN while she was on her travels, but I didn’t envy her. I like it here. Inland, where the river flows up the middle of the continent. The sun will skin you alive. And in winter, we are so thoroughly bereft of heat and light, we can know cold for what it is: the end of ourselves. A message from dead stars: There’s nothing out here, lucky for you, so cheer yourselves with one another. The days are as broad and free as the wings on the heron swinging over the slough. And come winter, the days will be as crisp and short and dark as an eighth note.

  Eli and I received her belated postcards, which I would read to him, inconclusive things rather like the effusions of a lover who has already left you for somebody else. She began to use the word “dashing.”

  “What?” asked Eli, peering at her script.

  “She says Dover is dashing.”

  In dismay, he looked again at the yellow photograph: boats, a castle. We received postcards from
cafés on the Continent (she had learned to say “the Continent”), and from coffeehouses in London. From these scraps, we learned that it was really nice overseas. And she mentioned a lot of shoes. She was, it would appear, buying many pairs of shoes.

  I wrote her back, c/o a postbox in London. The anonymity of her address was a kind of sanction for intimacy. It was awkward at first, when she’d recently left and I still hadn’t hung up the clothes in her room and I still adopted the mother’s postponement, the politely maternal attitude of waiting, my first letters to her full of questions (which she never answered) and bits of information that had been carefully chewed till everything came out all grey. “Is your coat warm enough?” “Do you like overcooked beef?”

  Eli and I were parents in waiting, standing in a triangle with one side missing. For a time. And then, after several weeks, something shifted and we began to face each other. We had a marital affair. We ate at funny hours. Winter was as imperative as sleep. We were living off the remains of last year’s rodeo money.

  From this romantic cocoon, I wrote letters that gradually grew more reflective, chronicles of hibernation, snoozing notes about love and life, very effective emetics, I’m sure. Helen became a steady white porch light on the other side of an impassable field. Our correspondence never corresponded, my confessions to her deflections. During the cold months, our worry over her was numbed by our snowed-in helplessness, the pleasing darkness. Which, of course, must come to an end.

  We woke up in March. Helen was to board the Titanic in April. She’d walked a beach at Brighton, had luncheon in Piccadilly, shot ptarmigan at Dundee. It was her fate that her body would exceed her, like a social class, like an addiction or a disease.

  I blamed her for enjoying the banality of the age, the blond, blue-eyed world in evening dress, nibbling canapés behind the trelliswork of the Parisian Café, my raven-haired daughter presiding from the birdcage of the gilded age. From England to Newfoundland, from one island to another, fragment of the Old World to a rocky piece of the New.