When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THERE 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 r
iver’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.”

  “Barcelona,” said Helen. “Madrid. To fight the Fascists.”

  Ida knew at once. She looked up sharply. “You can’t go.”

  “Finito went.”

  “Finito is a boy.”

  “I’m a boy.” Helen stood, scratching at the grassy sting on the palms of her hands. She looked over the lilac hedge. The parade had passed. The swastikas remained, tacked to the trees. She was filled with hate. “Why is your face smeared with blood?” she asked Ida.

  “They came.” Ida shrugged. “They wrecked the press. Broke the glass.”

  Helen spat at the ground. It was her grandmother’s gesture but different, taller, elegant. As Ida watched, Helen became ever more statuesque, darker somehow. “Helen,” said Ida, “these were local Nazis. You don’t have to go on my account. We’re talking Spain here. Franco.”

  “It is the same. They are one. Fascists,” she hissed this word. “Fascists.” Helen raised both fists. She was claustrophobic. And so lonely. She had to fight with those who shared her love of freedom, or her hatred of confinement.

  She yearned to see Finito. Finito! Brother! How often they had talked of going to Spain. Of palm trees and yellow trams climbing pale green hills; of peasants fighting to overthrow their landowners, fighting in the streets and villages to rid themselves of priests. To fight for liberation.

  Finito never questioned Helen’s right to join the anarchist army. They had talked about it forever—during Helen’s pregnancy, while they stoked the stove—Finito never even noticing that Helen could no longer get out of her chair. They practised saying, “Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.” They said, “Federación Anarquista Ibérica.” It appealed to the latent Impossibilist in Helen that the Canadian government had made it illegal to fight Fascism in Spain. Helen, anarchist, celebrated the advent of the absurd. Not since the days of the Histrionic Theatre had she been tempted by irony. She would join the republican army!

  “Think of it!” Finito had said. “Madrid! Hand-to-hand against the Fascists!” Helen drank in the pure whites of Finito’s eyes, fondly watched the muscles work in his taut neck. On the Spanish highways! With Italian warplanes zinging over our heads! A people’s army, with rifles that were useless even in the First War! Badly equipped! Untrained! Against German machinery! It was Impossible!

  She was looking for Bill. Maybe he was still at the picnic grounds. She started to walk across Jubilee. Her blue skirt swayed against her legs. Like petals, like wings. Her arms moved gracefully at her sides, her long black hair curled around her neck and her breasts moved beneath the fabric. She was a woman. Her breasts were full of milk. She loved being a woman. She loved it. The ache seized her belly and cramped her thighs. In the months to follow, the need to hold her baby would squeeze her lungs; she would become asthmatic with longing for Dianna and ruthless with desire for Bill. She looked over her shoulder. Ida, godmother, cradled the baby, stopped at the curb and stared, incredulous. “No, Helen,” said Ida. “No.”

  Helen looked over her shoulder, but she kept walking. She met her daughter’s gaze, the terrible clarity of Dianna’s grey eyes. The baby did not cry. Perhaps it was Dianna’s proximity to the violence of birth that caused her to maintain a sense of proportion, for she was not surprised. And maybe she retained the intimate knowledge of her mother’s impossible body, for she was not accusing. But Helen looked into Dianna’s eyes and was knifed by commonplace immeasurable mother-love. The pain it made her know led to the only promise Helen ever made (next to her wedding vow, and that was another Helen).

  She promised to come back.

  “I’ll only be gone for a little while. A few weeks,” she said.

  “I promise I’ll be back. Very soon. I have to do this. Please.”

  She sobbed and turned away. She was looking for Bill. She was going to say goodbye.

  THE MCCORMACK LAND is surrounded by the Red, on an oxbow. The lowest part, at the end of the oxbow, like the bottom of a cup, flooded too often and we left it wooded, oak and aspen mostly, dogwood, wild rose and the like. Marie’s ancient house was near the bottom of the cup, in the stand of black spruce. We had fixed it up for Helen and Bill, and moved our things into the old house Peter had built. Helen had loved to be close to her grandmother Marie again. Both she and Bill had learned a lot about love from Marie’s boggy voice.

  When Helen left for Spain, Bill couldn’t bear to go back. He chose instead to put up a modest cabin for the baby and himself a short distance away. It was still on “our property,” the quarter-section “purchased” by my parents, Dianna’s great-grandparents, back in 1869. Bill moved their few belongings while he finished the inside, just in case Helen was late getting back. She had gone away for one month, six weeks at the most. It was only a little while, and then Helen would be here and they could all be home. Marie mourned for them, her loud croaking in the night, but Bill was firm in his instinct for transformation, knowing when to accommodate the changing face of fortune.

  Even within the circumference of our land, Bill and the child seemed nomadic, though when their yearning for Helen was most acute, such restlessness was more accurately fugitive. Bill breathed in her temporary absence. He would never judge Helen’s urgent flight towards war. It was something she needed to do, and such a passion must be honoured. Bill was definitively light. He was devoted to metamorphosis—hunter to running stag, bereaved lover to pool of water; it kept him looking ahead, sustained his abiding faith in the illusory shiver of things—loss, fear, doctrines, even faith itself. He survived Helen’s departure. He was a deep breather. In his lungs, Helen’s spirit would endure. Spirits do. Until our breath runs out.

  As for Dianna, deprived of her mother, she grew as cold as perfection itself. The kind of cold that slows decay while it sustains life, a brave accuracy. As if she’d been born exactly suited to endure the uncanny, ideal, formal logic of Helen’s fateful leave-taking.

  So we all waited, listening for Helen’s footstep, for the soldier’s return from war.

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER ONE

  I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just coul
dn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it.

  —Gertrude Stein, Reflection on the Atomic Bomb

  BILL GOES BACK TO WATCHING THE WOOD NYMPHS patrolling the grass in the meadow. His bare legs have bright yellow hair. He shines. The stubble presses against little Dianna’s back. The sky is not a blue bowl that shelters us from angels. It goes, she has just learned, straight up. Forever. If she goes up fast enough, faster than light, she’ll get so young she’ll disappear. This information will make her eventual understanding of the birds and the bees comparatively soothing. It is one thing to learn about babies. Quite another to think about before. After there is a carcass, lots of them, partial mice, bad meat in the woods, roadkill. Bodies. Being dead is one thing. But before. Dianna rubs her forehead. Where are we?

  Missing.

  It is 1941 Dianna is five. Her mother, Helen, is “missing” and her godmother, Ida, is “underground.” Not dead. Hiding from the government. The wild blue flax has not yet bloomed, and skinny little aspen spawn out from the witch-fingered oak. With her muscles made of child fat, Dianna raises both legs straight up and forms a V framing the blank blue sky washed with sun. Actually, the sky is black. She turns to look at the grass, the fresh leaves. It only looks blue, it only looks green, because of the air.

  Hitler attacked Russia last week. Godmother Ida isn’t going to be “underground” much longer. She’s coming up. Then they’ll go to town together. Ida is a Communist. The government didn’t like Communists in the winter or before. Now that Hitler is fighting in Russia, Communists can come up. And maybe, when the Russians beat Hitler, her mama will come home.