When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  Then Richard arrived. He pulled back his chair, took his place and looked at her.

  “Hello, Hansel,” said Helen, and she realized that her voice was drunk, whereas she was perfectly, icily, sober.

  Richard seemed strangely innocent, in his elegant clothes, at the head of his big table. He looked surprised, as if he’d been injured out of the blue. He was all shiny and clear, like a tuning fork. He lit a cigarette and told the butler-person to bring him a Scotch and soda. Only then, inhaling, did he say hello.

  He watched her stand and swing down to his end of the table. She wore a light shawl loosely around her bare shoulders. It accentuated her height. “You look very beautiful tonight,” he said. A cool statement, somehow resenting.

  She stood beside his chair. “I’ve reached a conclusion,” she said.

  Richard leaned back to look at her. “I believe that is a first.”

  She thought about it. “It happens,” she said, “especially when you’re not here.” She touched his shoulder. And remembered that he inhabited a large space within her. So if he was a bloodsucking parasite, then she was a bloodsucking parasite’s wife. “I need to work,” she said.

  “Was your mother here today?” he asked.

  She tried to remember. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Won’t you sit down while I have my dinner?” he asked. He rose to pull out her chair so that she might sit. Then he kissed her once upon her throat before resuming his seat. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “Some things have come up.”

  “Wall Street?”

  “Wall Street. Yes.”

  “It’s worse than before?”

  “It will get much worse. But we’ll be all right. We’ve still got the local property.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “You’ll always be looked after,” he said.

  Oliver-Jenkins-Higgins brought him the veal. “Oh,” said Richard. “Veal.”

  “I will have wine,” said Helen. “A fresh glass.” Then, to Richard: “What does your broker say, your man in New York?”

  Richard stopped, his glass at his lips. He said, “Walkins died today.” Then he sipped.

  “Well, that’s a bit sudden.”

  “He jumped.”

  “Oh. He jumped. From Wall Street. Because of the big crash.”

  “It’s more of a leak than a crash. Like a boat hitting… something.”

  “In New York. He killed himself in New York.”

  “And here. It’s the same.”

  “Only smaller.”

  “Not the way we’ve been playing it.”

  “I’m sorry about Walker.”

  “Walkins. His name was Walkins.”

  “Yes. A nice man. His poor wife.” Then she remembered that she’d never met Walkins. The name was so familiar, one of Richard’s dramatis personae. “Or,” she said, “everyone.”

  “I’ve no doubt he was a very nice man. They are down there. Yes, he was. We met at meetings. Of course, then he was all business. A fast-thinking man. As they tend to be, you know, more than here. Quite different.”

  He began to cut his meat precisely. He said, “Prices are going to fall very fast. You may want to warn your mother. I’ll telephone her tomorrow if you like.”

  Helen gripped the wine glass in her fingers. Her hands were strong from weaving. The three broken fingers had healed, crooked. “I can’t bear this,” she said. She squeezed the glass until it broke in her hand. The blood was a glaze upon the cherrywood table, a crimson edge on Richard’s linen placemat.

  Richard’s fork hesitated midway to his mouth. He put it down with the same measured composure. He kneeled beside her and wiped her fingers with his napkin. It was a small cut, but when he pulled aside the skin to see how deep it went, he saw the pink bone. Beneath the small flap of flesh was a sliver of glass, which he removed, for his hands were small, womanly. The cook brought out a bowl of ice water, and without moving her from the dining room, Richard bandaged Helen’s hand and taped it closed. When he resumed his seat, she was as pale as ivory and his dinner was still warm. He made a polite show of eating, and then put down his cutlery and sat back with his arms extended to the table.

  So it was, between them. If there were no guests, it was always just the two of them, Hansel and Gretel. Childless. Helen had not yet used that word. Perhaps because a child cannot be childless, and there seemed to be a moratorium on her maturity, though indeed Hansel was thirty-five years old and Gretel was twenty-seven. They sat in the dining room for a long time, among the palm trees and ferns, monkey, possibly antelope, lemur, greens and yellows, that peacock in the lilac tree. Helen leaned forward and with her good hand she stroked Richard’s hair.

  He told her which stocks had failed, who had become insolvent, who hung on, who let go. Pulp and paper, gold, railway stocks, Winnipeg Electric, International Nickel. The man who jumped, jumped again and again. Walkins, she tried to remember; Walkins was his name. It surely matters. They were served coffee, and she asked him the questions she knew he could answer. She showed no judgment, and received his information as if it were written on her. When they left the dining room, everything would be different. But she would never fall out of love with Richard.

  They took each other’s hands (Richard holding her injury; Helen thinking of her father, how Eli played open chords on the guitar, the music of the lost thumb). They held hands, how gently Helen was held by Richard, and how elegant she was, wounded, pleasantly subdued. Together they climbed the stairs, and Richard entered Helen’s rooms and waited while she went to wash. Alone, she peeled away the bandage to see the white tear in her skin, the damp ridges of fingerprint; tomorrow it would be drier and then it would fall away, and under the lid of skin the blood vessels were throbbing.

  When she emerged from her washing room, he was standing before the loom. He’d removed his jacket and now he stood in his white shirt, the collar removed, his gold hair curling at the nape. He studied the screen she’d placed before the loom, the sketching from which she would copy her weaving. The sketch was full-scale cliché, a replica of the old Flemish tapestries: “The Lady and her Lover,” the unicorn, birds, laurel, the inscription “To my only desire.”

  She came out wearing a starched white nightgown, her arms bare and round, her black hair brushed back so that she looked less like a wife of the twentieth century. Richard walked around the loom to where she worked the treadles and shuttle. It was hard to decipher the picture because the weaver always works from the wrong side. But even so, it was clear the weaving bore no relationship to her sketching; none at all. Richard slowly walked around and removed the screen.

  “What have you done?” he asked in surprise.

  It was unmistakably an elm tree, and that would be caragana under it, the small yellow flowers of the honeysuckle, cumulus clouds; you knew that it was a hot day, that the wind blew. That those were Richard’s blond locks, that he’d turned his back to her, the Lady, whose face was obscured by a yellow fan. And a ship. And a sea in the sky. The sky becomes an ocean, and a red-tailed hawk with a string of pearls flies away.

  Richard stopped breathing. He would not look at her. He stared at his image, at the pearls flying off, as if staring would alter it or, better, make it disappear. Then he ran his fingers over the inchoate part, the new space that would scroll into view as she worked from left to right.

  She’d begun with green, the familiar bush from her childhood home. There were the first lines of a man’s face; a square-faced man emerged on the surface, a stolid brown-eyed man with a peaceful smile. Richard seemed to hum with pain. “Who is this?” he asked softly.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth. It was not Edward Pennyfeather, who had bony cheeks, or Harold Burnside, with the saggy eyes, and it was not “the King” because he was not drinking. This was a man from the world beyond. They both looked at him, wondering when he would come tr
ue.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT SO HAPPENED THAT ONE DAY IN 1933, a young Jewish composer of twelve-tone music was assigned to a boondoggle a few miles north of “our property,” in the bush near rich farmland cultivated by Trappist monks. A boondoggle was a make-work project devised to get men to work for their relief during the Depression. On this occasion, the foreman marched his crew three hundred yards into the bush, tied a red flag to an aspen and told the men to start clearing. “The government wants a road toot sweet,” the foreman said. Somebody asked, What for? The foreman raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “Oh, it’s the chairman of the board wants to know.” It was an imaginary road in the middle, it seemed then, of nowhere.

  The composer was as thin as a cadaver, six and a half feet tall and big with brain, his head like a heavy flower on a long stem. He had supported his wife in a refined, if modest, way by giving piano lessons, a service that proved dispensable in the Depression. He had no income. He’d never done manual labour. He looked up at the tops of the trees. Overhead, the wind was gritty with topsoil, but in the woods the mosquitoes swarmed in a moist green haze.

  They worked like dogs on that boondoggle, though that certainly wasn’t the custom. The work made them obsessive and spiteful—they needed to hurt somebody, but they had access only to themselves. They used a Swedish saw and ropes to haul down the trees, and their own backs to carry the boulders. The composer suffered from rheumatism. The pain was bearable, but the sense of futility was not. Reality had broken faith with him, so he had no choice but to break it right back.

  The road to nowhere was nightmared into shape, the most perfect road in Manitoba. On the last day, the composer helped roll the gravel and then he walked three miles in the wrong direction, south, directly through the brush, without noticing that his feet were bleeding. He was falling from the constellation of the boondoggle road.

  Eli and I were at home listening to CKY radio. I was sitting on Eli’s lap. Eli, at the time, was like an empty paper bag in the wind, and I sat on him often just to keep him from blowing away. The carcasses of grasshoppers made a clicking sound when they hit the house, and we turned up the cowboy songs on the radio to try to drown the noise, but it never worked. The afternoon was dark with dust, and we were sitting with the electric light on, all dressed up in our cowboy dancing clothes, me in my red dress with the white crinolines and Eli with his spurs and hat (and under the brim of his hat, his shadowed eyes). We still weren’t accustomed to electric lights, I guess, because we didn’t have them till we were already middle age, so we still had a vulgar relationship with, them. The lights and the radio ran our lives. With the garden in ruins and the rodeo no longer a paying option for Eli, we became employees of the light bulb, and we didn’t even figure out that we could turn the damn thing off and go back to candles. Anyway, there we were, dressed up for a circus in the ugly glare of the overhead lamp, when I thought I heard a knocking. “Did you hear that?” I asked Eli, who turned his good ear towards me and said, “Say again?”

  I slid off Eli’s knee and tentatively opened the door.

  “Could I trouble you?” said the tall, skinny man, leaning into the wind. “I am in need of a piece of paper and a pencil.”

  His mouth was very black and empty. Wordlessly, I fetched the things he wanted. Eli followed me to the door. With the blare of the yodel and guitar behind us, we watched his trembling hand draw five parallel horizontal lines. He looked up at us and nodded, as if encouraged by the function of pencil on paper. They were notes he wrote, all in a row, like bits of broken fence, like nowhere roads in the bush. Completely silent music. We stood on the front steps, Eli and the man and I, for almost an hour, not saying anything at all while we watched the notes come from his hand, though of course I heard nothing other than the click of the grasshoppers tossed in the wind. Later, Eli (who could read a chord chart, his only form of literacy) said that it was the strangest music he’d ever seen; he said it made him anxious, like he was under attack. I asked him, whispering, “So it’s not very good?” And Eli, startled, said, “No! It’s genius! It’s just not for people’s bodies, you know. More for their brains.” He sought the word. “Intellects.” It sounded funny coming through his long teeth.

  The composer stayed with us for nearly a week, hardly saying a word, though we learned that his name was Daniel Zimmerman, and that he normally lived on Agnes Street, near the library downtown. We gave him Helen’s old room. He never seemed to sleep. It was nerve-racking having him around. He seemed unbearably vulnerable. I have never met a human being with less animal in him. He filled page after page with those notes, and when I asked him to sing it, he gave me a look of such despair that I left off, only asked him, “Please eat something, then. Please, just this one sandwich, why don’t you?”

  Saturday morning found him at the kitchen table as usual, still putting notes on paper, when through the window I saw a deer-like creature enter the yard, a diminutive young woman dressed in a shabby fur coat, despite the heat. She was sizing up our house, checking the yard for dogs, and then she stuck out her chin and approached. I opened the door to her. She saw the composer in our kitchen and cried out. The composer lifted his sunken eyes from his task. They looked at one another for several moments. I invited her in. She seemed surprised at my presence, and entered, her eyes on Daniel’s, like she was entering his cage. A slight thing with brown eyes, straight brown hair, her apprehension not quite fearful. A clicking distance between the two of them. Daniel spoke. “This is my wife,” he said. She leapt towards the word as if he’d tossed her a biscuit. Wife. Somehow the name didn’t stick.

  It seemed she gained a certain stature when she wasn’t drained by her fascination with her objective husband. She offered her hand. She had that déclassé dignity you saw so often during the Depression. “Thank you for taking my husband into your home. I am Ida Zimmerman.”

  I said I’d make tea. Daniel at last stood up and went to take her coat, and he fumbled trying to hang it on the hook by the door and then absently flung it over the woodbox. When he pulled out her chair for her, her hand darted out to touch his and he smiled slightly at her, oddly paternal, though they were of the same age, in their twenties, and mawkishly serious. While Daniel was obviously not a mean man at all, his sadness was an idea, and as such, an exclusive part of him. Ida watched him admiringly, hungrily. She told us she’d taken the streetcar to the end of the line and then walked, walked for miles, each day going farther south, until she found our yard. While we talked, she leafed through the music, reading it apparently, because she looked up at him and murmured, “This would hurt the ears, Danny; so broken.”

  The house was too stuffy. I left them and went out to milk the cow. For the moment, there was no wind. It was overcast, the day as warm and smooth as the inside of a wood chest. I was returning with a pail of milk when I saw, with some surprise, Helen’s yellow car drive up. A train drummed by, stirring the milk. The door to our cabin breezed open and Ida walked out. Without her bewildering coat, she looked very thin. Her dress was a dreary brown. She had a brave way of standing. Helen emerged from her Packard wearing a yellow crepe tea dress. She and Ida stared at each other, as if each presented to the other an entirely novel concept. Rich! thought Ida. Oh, thought Helen, Poor! It was an immediate bond, firm as plywood.

  They were like two bristling young dogs in the kitchen. Helen was strangely covetous, watched Ida enviously. While we chatted, Ida stroked her husband’s hand. Helen must have smoked ten cigarettes. Eli couldn’t bear to look at her, so strained and artificial. She put another cigarette between her lips. Eli reached over and gently removed it. “There now,” he said. “There now.” Helen’s eyes filled up at her father’s reproach. She kept looking out the window. She was scared of something.

  I tried to get her talking. “How ’bout that Royal Bastard Bennett?” I said. R.B. Bennett had been elected prime minister three years earlier, and had proved to be a punitive overseer for the unemployed and the farmers blown of
f the land by drought.

  Eli groaned and said, “Not worth the tanning fee.”

  We winced at each other. Great way to calm down our daughter. But Helen had brightened. She seemed to shuck off an invisible golden cloak. She clasped her hands together in some ancient grieving act of prayer. “Goddamn bugger!” she cried out. “Bloody capitalist!” It stopped us all cold. The whole house shook. The rising wind battered the locusts into the walls of our wood shack.

  Helen’s early education in the biographies of rich courtesans and wives had led us to believe that she had no interest in politics beyond an appetite for wealth. But in our recent visits to the Anderson house, Eli and I had been surprised to see in her rooms pamphlets and books of political theory, the old library we had foisted upon her in her youth—my favourite marital tract, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, and her grandfather Peter’s dog-eared copy of Capital. I wondered how Richard would swallow his wife’s new interests. But more, I wondered what the salty winds of political criticism might do to the fractured soul of our beautiful daughter.

  We were startled then by the sound of a car braking in the dust, and then Richard entered, quick as cold gin. Helen instinctively reached out to her father and touched his missing ear, her good luck charm. She was truant, defiant and uncertain.

  Richard barely paused to register the existence of Ida and Daniel. He walked close to Helen, inches from her, and said hello as if it were a funny thing to say. Then he looked more carefully at our guests (Ida sliding her arm around Daniel’s shoulder). Back at Helen: “You came here, did you?” Strangely, his statement did more to call Helen’s presence into question than to confirm her, yes, here. The only one obviously present was Richard.

  “Dick!” I said. He stuck his hands in his pockets. Every chair was taken. He was as nervous as a propeller, spinning in tight circles. I wanted to hug the fear out of him, a sort of shuddering kindness—what people feel while they hold a bag of kittens under water. “You need a chair!” And we all scrambled to provide him with a place to sit, an ashtray, a cup of coffee, a little milk for his coffee.