When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  “Nobody will notice,” I told him.

  “No, I know.” He pulled his undershirt gingerly over the bandage. “When the hair grows back, I’ll look roughed up like always.”

  “You’re perfect. This”—I touched his wound—“just gets rid of anything that might’ve distracted us from your perfection.”

  That nod again. The more Eli disagreed, the more he nodded.

  He was resting when Richard came to call. The glamorous car looked like government itself in our yard. I met him at the door. He’d put on weight, strong weight. I could barely remember the slender boy, and I’m sure that Richard, in his self-assured, wilful clarity, had forgotten the origins of his own brokenness. When he came into our house, Marie set up a woeful, clattering ululation, so loud that Richard paused and looked about, and I shrugged, saying, “Those blessed frogs are mating again. Listen to all that lust. But come in, Dick. I’m sure Eli would like to have a word with you.”

  And Richard said, “I’d like to have a word with him too.” I followed him into our bedroom, where Eli lay. Helen was in her room; Marie’s keening and the clatter of the loom had prevented her from hearing Richard’s arrival.

  Eli had heard him, though, and he watched Richard enter our bedroom through narrow lids. Richard stopped a few feet from the bed. “I’ve come to apologize,” he said.

  Eli gave a short grunt of laughter, wincing but truly amused.

  Richard looked down at his hands, one hand holding its other, and smiled that particular smile, at the real joke beyond our understanding. “You should be more careful,” he said. And when Eli rose to protest, he added, “I don’t underestimate the necessity of my apology, nor do I wish to suggest less than my utmost sincerity in offering it to you.”

  “You’ve been reading, Dick!” I said.

  I saw the change to one of his eyes, a single black crescent in the otherwise perfectly blue iris, a tiny scar on his vision. A black sickle, there for good; it would always distract me when I looked at him.

  “I do apologize,” he said. His voice was lighter, purified. “And I do wish for your health and safety.”

  “You fucking little hypocrite.” Eli sat up in bed.

  It stunned Richard. His body let go of its stiff propriety. He rallied. “I am the hypocrite? I took action against something I felt was wrong. We can either protect what’s ours, or we can help destroy it. I took a stand.”

  “You almost murdered a man.”

  “Yes.” Richard thought about this with solemnity. “I felt I had to. He’s dangerous. Perhaps I was wrong. The damn strike has been almost a war. Perhaps I did get carried away. But he’s not dead. Thanks to you. He’s not even been charged with any crime, not yet. But I know what he is. Disaffected. Dissatisfied with his lot in life. But you’re right. That’s what I came here to say. I shouldn’t have shot at him. And I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Eli wearily. “I hope I like you better when you’re older.”

  “It’s like having our very own Orangeman,” I added.

  At that moment, Marie stopped her clatter and Helen, hearing our voices, came out of her room. She had taken to favouring shades of yellow and gold, deepening at times to burgundy, even cherry red. When she was weaving, she fell into a lazy physical aggression, much like someone riding a horse. And yes, her beauty brought with it its own tendencies, its change of direction. When she appeared, Richard forgot even the weight of his guilt. I was somewhat relieved to see in him a measure of affection for Helen, aside from his customary approbation. It suddenly occurred to me that he loved her.

  In her renewed association with Richard, since his father’s death, Helen seemed to have chosen to trust him, which of course is a decision few of us can make. She thought that since she had seen him broken, that night when his tuxedo didn’t fit him any more, then she must really know him. She had seen him at his worst. Surely, she thought, that must make this bond trustworthy. She came into the room with her lazy confidence and joined Richard, unsurprised; she lay her head against his chest just long enough to be reassured of his heartbeat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IN THE FALL, HELEN BECAME ENGAGED to Richard Anderson as a kite becomes engaged to the hand holding the string. Eggshell lacquer and Chinese silk. November, and the land as ugly as a frozen rat. Yet Helen soared above us in ether, the sun queen.

  I immersed myself in the strike trials. Helen sewed her own wedding dress. One night, I came home late from an evening session in court in the city. The Crown prosecutor had been going after Bobby Russell for days, wearing Bobby down. Enter the age of advertising. The prosecutor identified Bobby Russell; he named him nearly to death. He held up before him, in the eyes of the court, images of a revolutionary Marxist, a grinning, unshaved, dark-featured crazy man with an appetite for small children. An incendiary. The more he identified, the more Bobby took on the features of a traitor, perhaps a disaffection of his own. A family man, a gentle man, gradually R. B. Russell became an acolyte of a great international conspiracy to overthrow the world. This was not a time for subtlety. Helen sewed her wedding dress. Bobby Russell became more radical than Karl Marx.

  I came home very tired. I missed my mother and father. It was a cold night. Bare fields. No shroud of snow. I drove as fast as my Ford would carry me, singing, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired. Oh, Lord, I am so tired.” Pulled up with my auto’s lamps shining on the house, and through the window saw the black hair of my daughter bent over the treadle machine. Her determined back. Her humility to the task.

  I entered with some trepidation. I was embarrassed at how crabby I’d been with her. For a blissful moment, Richard was forgotten. I found her surrounded by frothy waves of white brocade. She didn’t look up but remained intent, with her own tired dignity. On the kitchen table there were fragments of wedding dress. I found the sleeves and sat down to baste the inside seam. We worked in silence like that, and gradually the air softened between us. Helen had become a statuesque woman, taller than I was, bigger boned, muscled as a trout. She relaxed. We worked like that for many hours without speaking. I could offer her only my presence. That was all that remained.

  BOBBY RUSSELL WENT to the penitentiary for two years (from where he was soon elected to the legislature).

  And Helen married Richard Anderson. In early March, three days after her eighteenth birthday.

  Three hundred guests in the pink of health and witty as balloons. Much gin, much gin and much champagne, and then much brandy and eloquence. There was love; it was in the air. A very cold day. Our breath escaped like thin white snakes. He placed the diamond on her finger. The white cake was a castle. Everyone applauded. The wedding guests drew away from her; they protected themselves from her beauty, which filled the rooms with the richness of strings and woodwinds. Helen’s white dress swayed around her, and when she moved quickly, it followed her, rustling. She kissed us goodbye, clear-eyed and regal. They left in the new yellow Packard, her crinolines filling the car and overflowing the pale cream leather seats. She smiled and waved and flew away.

  And on that day, nothing happened to anyone else in all the world.

  PART FIVE

  1921

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN STORIES WHERE THE WOLF dwells with the lamb, and the leopard lies down with the kid, the calf with the young lion, the cow with the bear, and their young ones all lie down with one another, and together they are led by a little child round and round on a gold chain thinner than a strand of hair, a lot depends on water. Or wisdom. Water being the wisdom of the earth.

  Ours would be a marine utopia, an ocean of air, which in its turn is occupied by our aging bodies, like sacs of ocean water, all of us muttering about love and pain as we swim here and there. In the realm of peace, as the weird old prophet Isaiah would tell us, the waters will cover the sea. This is pretty redundant, like rain becoming showers. And behind it, as in any utopia, lies an agreement that the large will also be the small (though the small will not necess
arily be the large). It’s an arrangement of totality.

  A utopia is somebody’s idea of a good time, that total agreement, the extreme familiarity, intimacy; the loss of distinction between wolf, lamb, leopard; the loss of distinction between the kid, the calf, the lion, cow, bear, child. The loss of distinction between the child and the utopia.

  Into this utopia, this intimacy, we lost Helen. Marriage with Richard could only be a totality, and of course, it could only be bliss.

  Bereft is a suitable word. It slides into place. Yes. We were bereft.

  RICHARD WEATHERED THE POST-WAR recession without a shudder. In those first years of their marriage, he proved to Helen that the Titanic had never sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. He did this by shopping for her. Richard knew the size of her gloves and how tightly the buttons will close at the wrist. He knew the shoes that would fit the high instep, the left heel that was slightly askew. He bought her backless evening dresses; they fell from narrow shoulder straps and clung to her hips, draped at her famous white ankles. He knew the shape of his wife. She was his. He did not suffer very badly from desperation at the beginning.

  In 1923, in Thebes, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened up King Tutankhamen’s tomb and discovered the mummified boy-king with all his beaten gold. It had a huge effect on Helen. She promptly ripped out the red velvet interior of John Anderson’s house (an exhumation that excluded Mrs. John Anderson’s porcelain bathtub, which remains to this day, a white-and-green tiled crypt occupied by Mrs. John Anderson herself, an old lump of butter, soaking).

  Helen made strange changes to the home of John Anderson, bless him. From pompous early prairie merchant to aggressive futurist supranational chic. The house seemed like a box of lozenges. The Persian carpet was replaced with a pastel floral, up the grand stairs, to the left of the mezzanine, a door, closed. Now and then, when I visited my daughter in the quiet of the afternoon, I heard the taps turn and the water flow, and I knew that Mrs. Anderson was adding hot. I wondered if she had anyone to help her. In addition to the remodelling, Helen had initiated a number of more practical changes in the Anderson mansion, copper wires and iron water pipes among the first innovations. Now her mother-in-law could add hot all by herself.

  I once asked Helen if Mrs. John Anderson had anyone to look after her, to keep the bathroom steamy and replace the face cloth when it got mouldy. Helen regarded me, imperious, and then nodded. She had thrown herself into marriage. It was a management position.

  She threw out the antimacassars, the red glass lamps with crystal teardrops, the photographs of bishops from Toronto. The new furniture would come from the catalogues of ateliers in Germany and France, with Morris’s pretty cyclamen wallpaper from London. The dining-room walls were painted a Delphic blue with gold trim, a cosmic vista that Helen ornamented with her sketchings of ospreys and monkeys, fawns and dachshunds, the plumage of pheasant, a hare, and combinatory creatures with squirrels’ feet, the body of a tiny horse with the tail of a fox. Stylized, libidinous cartoons. Even the birds looked like women.

  The oak and mahogany were replaced by low tables in the Chinese fashion. Pewter, beechwood, plate glass with metal hinges. Helen filled the bookshelves in her sitting room with books bound solely in yellow chamois. They entertained their wickedly funny friends, freed from Victorian restraint. Helen designed a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a glass roof. Their guests displayed a tendency to swim in their evening clothes. When the guests got wet, they stripped down in glass-and-marble change rooms where a maid would provide them with silk bathrobes that they could take home with them, compliments of the house.

  She felt herself married to the mummified boy; she would wrap the house in gold-plated weeds. Helen too seemed gold-plated, especially the liver, for she remained flawlessly beautiful, even after a night of cocktails and laughter.

  And with all this, Richard was well pleased. The cat had swallowed the canary.

  Helen abandoned the young flapper and became dangerous. The prolonged economy of the bride, her enforced uselessness, made her errant, distracted, impetuous. She began to attract suitors. Edward Pennyfeather for one. Harold Burnside for two. T. K. Giles (commonly, “the King”) for three. Her black hair cut blunt, a sharp chevron, the inevitable bandeaux, her eyes blackened with kohl, as Egyptian as any wife on Millionaire Row. Of course she was bored. It was her duty to be bored. The suitors bored her. Richard did not bore her because he wasn’t importunate; in fact, he slept in his own bedroom and rarely bothered her. She remained easily virtuous; she was married, and not the least interested in love.

  Helen and Richard were friends, especially when they drank champagne. They didn’t even need to talk. Helen’s beauty compelled Richard much more than champagne. He didn’t like addictions. He liked control. So he didn’t like his addiction to his wife.

  How did Richard love her?

  Desperately.

  At what temperature?

  Forty below. So cold it feels hot.

  Then the marriage was a success?

  RICHARD’S ROOMS WERE adjoined to Helen’s by a door that she wished she could lock. Not that she didn’t trust her husband, and she was not yet afraid of him, but she didn’t like surprises, at least not that kind of surprise. She needed to be assured that when she was alone, she was truly alone. Increasingly, she did not feel alone. She grew sensitive to the sound of the door opening from her husband’s bedroom, a sound more rare than a cat’s sneeze, interrupting the sound of the shuttle travelling the loom, for she continued to weave; she had become very skilled, very refined. She wore a gold velvet robe with a turquoise sash and she’d risen before daybreak, having been restless in her big bed upon its elevated dais beneath a short canopy of brocade. She had risen and lit the fire in the grate and turned on the fluted lamp beside her loom and worked with her thread till the sun rose and overcame the yellow lamplight and filled the room with thin windy shadows. She was a woman who would never grow old. That’s another form of ancient.

  Richard didn’t come. Solitude is a state of readiness, a small island prepared for war. The sunlight inched across the bedroom wall.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1929

  THEY HAD DINNER TOGETHER EVERY NIGHT, the governance of “a good marriage.” “How are things with Richard?” I might ask, as if I truly had a mother’s claim to Helen. “We had dinner together last night,” she’d say. “Veal. The vegetables are always overdone. I must speak to Cook.”

  “Does Cook have a name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Helen, distracted.

  I laughed. She didn’t. She looked out the window. A little girl was walking down the street. “There you are,” I said. Helen stared at the child, a pretty thing wearing boots trimmed with rabbit fur. She was her own Orpheus, looking back at herself. Turning herself to stone.

  But that night he didn’t come. Helen worked at her loom all day long and dressed only when night had fallen and dinner was served. They always dined at eight when they weren’t entertaining. The house was in darkness. Through the upper windows on the landing, iron black branches, plainly unhaunted. Helen walked down the broad, dark staircase from the mezzanine, and she heard the croon of the water pipes. Mrs. John Anderson was adding hot.

  Richard always came home for dinner if he wasn’t in New York or at the club, and he always called if he was going to be late. As Helen assumed her place at the dining-room table and looked down its expanse with the candlelight reflecting like lights from a dock at the lake, as the butler shook the linen napkin and placed it across her lap, she looked down the telescope of her husband’s dining room at her husband’s empty chair, the place setting that always included his crystal ashtray and lighter, and she asked for white wine. She took a drink and set the glass down and ran her hand along its stem. She drank again. Nerves, she thought, and straightened her back. Nerves.

  She had to acknowledge that she was not anxious for Richard’s safety. She thought hard about this. Her dinner was placed before her.

 
No, she felt no wifely concern on Richard’s behalf, none at all; nothing so friendly or intimate as that. She drank off several glasses of the French Sauternes without feeling any effect at all. When she tried to consider some danger to Richard—ill health, a car accident, an assassination—she came up cold. Surely this is intuition: she simply knows he’s fine. She’s just irritated that she’s been stood up; she’s in a snit to find herself on stage without her leading man, living this drawing-room farce alone.

  But really, what a posturing ass Richard is. A cold, tedious man with trivial interests, self-indulgent, always looking out for number one. How greedy, really; decadent, profligate! (She heard her grandfather’s voice, as haunting as the water pipes.) A dissolute, bloodsucking parasite, a goddamn son of a bitch, a useless leech upon the honest souls of the working class. She rang the butler’s bell. Where was that man, what was his name, when would he come!

  Helen was fixated on the revolution taking place within her and did not hear the butler’s polite inquiry, Madame has not enjoyed the veal? She slouched, draped one leg over the arm of her chair and took a cigarette from her sequined bag. The man rushed to fetch Richard’s lighter; Madame never smoked in the dining room. Helen held up her face with its cigarette and waited for a light. The butler was thin; he did not have a butler’s hands, but the fingers of a musician or something. He snapped closed the lighter. He didn’t even look like a butler.

  A terrible longing had opened in Helen. She had swallowed a leopard, so fierce was the thing caged inside her. She groaned and then waved the man away before he could utter his paid-for solicitations. “I’m fine,” she said, and waved her cigarette, go away. All around her, the impossible animals peaked out from art-deco foliage, wagging their smooth tails. The charm of the room curdled in her stomach.