When Alice Lay Down With Peter

by Margaret Sweatman

  Her father, Bill, explains this to Dianna. Dianna gets so tired she lays her head on his lap. He strokes her hair and smiles. “It’s so complicated, it’s simple,” he says.

  She always has a dream. In her dream, her mother is home. Dianna can hear her fighting with Dad in the kitchen, both of them sad. It is her mother’s voice. “Where can I go?” her mother is asking. “Everywhere on earth is the same, and I cannot go to heaven.” Her mother cries, “I don’t want to go to heaven.” When Dianna has this dream, she wakes up crying.

  She has been worried. Her mother doesn’t want to go to heaven. So Bill tells Dianna about the sky, how it is really black. That it is not a blue bowl. That there are no angels behind it calling her mother’s name.

  Sometimes they imagine themselves healed. In the afternoon, when the soothsaying dreams are most forgotten. This is a happy land. Through the war and after, it will be increasingly, persistently, happy. Oh Canada. A big pie with a fly net over it sits on the kitchen counter in the mid-afternoon.

  AND SUDDENLY MY GRANDDAUGHTER was nine years old. Ida hadn’t been underground for a few years running. The Russians were winning the war for us, and everybody loved the recordings of the Soviet Army Chorus. Ida’s background was Polish/German /Russian Jew. Close enough! She cheerfully joined a local chapter of the Canadian—Soviet Friendship League. It was the spring of 1944, and Soviet troops had broken a German Panzer attack. All the good war news was from the Russian front. To celebrate, Ida cooked up a big Bolshie picnic with Russian-style borscht, coleslaw, fruit soup, cheese blintzes, potato knishes, gefilte fish with horseradish. We ate outside in icy sleet, a grey slush thrown at us from the north. We were all bundled up in our smelly old buffalo robes, stamping our feet under the picnic table while Ida served us with blue fingers sticking out of her gloves. Ida sang in fake Russian—Irving Berlin songs backwards. “Enil ni llaf ot emit eht si won.” And the prophetic “won snaciremA eh lla s’tel.”

  Dianna cradled in her grandfather Eli’s lap. Her grey eyes examined the infinite lines on Eli’s soft skin, the grainy old barn-wood face, while she played with his missing parts—the lost thumb, the smithereen of his ear. When the wind gusted, we all sighed together, Ahhhhh, Ahhhhh. And laughed like spies in the Arctic, irrelevant and naughty.

  Bill was quiet, as usual, listening. He wore a sky blue toque with earflaps tied under his chin. He looked like Khrushchev. Dianna, with one hand caressing her grandfather’s cheek, reached back to touch her father’s arm, to make sure he was still there. She sensed his distraction right away, pulled herself up and stared at him anxiously. Bill cocked his head at the crevice of the picnic table, where a moth was tucked headfirst, sheltered from the weather, a big black moth with cape-like wings. Bill smiled a small smile, like someone who has passed away in a dream of peace. His eyes were full of empathy for the living. “Oh,” he said to the black moth, “you have come very far.”

  Ida’s singing faded. The wind blew a frozen blueberry out of the bowl, onto the table; I picked it up, cold and seedy. Dianna said nothing, read her father’s face, as always noncommittal. The rest of us were uneasy. Bill’s neat frame was eloquent with compassion; you would envy the object of such kindness. He looked up. “It is Helen,” he said.

  Dianna began to cry. So did I. Weeping came up from the earth into the glands under our ears, into our throats. Helen.

  “Daddy…” Dianna tugged his sleeve.

  Bill was startled; he never forgot Dianna’s presence. Guiltily, he put his hands to her face and closed her eyes. “See?” he said. I closed my eyes. I could see her too. She had hidden her hair in a leather hat, wore a black flight jacket, and behind her was a sunny parade of men, their fists raised in the air. “La Luna,” said Bill. “Helen.”

  Helen turned to look at us. We were leafy shadows on the grass at Fuentes de Ebro and somehow it made her ache for home. She raised her fist. In the Spanish wind, the red-and-black anarchist flag slapped us from our reverie. When I opened my eyes, Dianna was on the ground under the picnic table, barely breathing.

  Bill was no ordinary Catholic seeing the devil in a bluebottle fly, nothing so guilt-stricken. He saw Helen.

  Helen became a black moth.

  The first time Helen appeared to us, Dianna was inconsolable. She lost weight while she grew tall, a svelte exoskeleton, a hard handsome nut with coarse brown hair around a narrow face, X-ray eyes. All that sullen spring she suffered. Her vulnerability frightened us and enraged her. She would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours and then go out walking with her sketch pad, wearing a big green raincoat. She made a one-person tent out in the bush, sketching inside her coat. Her drawings from that period include the skull of a red fox. She drew a hand without skin, an amazing accomplishment since she’d never, to our knowledge, done any dissection. A squirrel’s heart; the abdominal organs of birds, dogs, weasels. Reproductive organs; the wombs of a cat and a bear; eventually a woman’s anatomy, a beautiful sketch in pen and ink with chalk, architectural, like the anatomy of a cathedral, a spherical womb suspended by strong ligaments, warmly shaded and symmetrical. If these drawings were not scientific, they were in another sense true.

  Bill never tried to protect his child from his own imagination, which is a highly unusual parenting practice. Helen would appear to him and he would stop whatever he was doing and close his eyes. If Dianna saw this, she’d shut her eyes too. They called it “visiting Mama.”

  Helen had been missing for eight years when the Russians finally closed in on Berlin. From the McCormack perspective, the war had lasted nine years. (We were, according to the Canadian government, “premature anti-Fascists.”) For the last year, Dianna had shared visions with her father that would surely have caused an aneurysm in the brain of the toughest general. They had spent a morning (outwardly, walking down the frozen river on a winter afternoon) with a British soldier who had been captured by Spanish Fascists after a bomb blew off the fingers of his left hand and his entire left leg. Bill and Dianna—thanks to a beckoning motion from Helen, something perhaps of a crow landing on the snow beside them, blue crow, steel grey light—were witness to the man’s awakening in the Fascist hospital to find that his captors had removed his right hand and his right leg. They were there with him when he died of shock, their frozen fingers upon his dying pulse.

  The war focused on the Eastern Front. January 1945. The young Russian soldiers raped the German woman and nailed her hands to the family cart. Her children huddled in the watery ditch beside the road.

  War is about family, about mothers, Dianna thought. On the first of May, in the bunker at the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Mrs. Goebbels murdered all her six children. After that, neither Bill nor young Dianna said a word for many days. They just said they’d been visiting Helen. “Seeing Mama,” Dianna would say.

  Dianna sketched the bone structure of owls, raccoons, beavers. Formal. Classical. The premise of living without hunger, the remote premise. Please. When the bones stop wanting.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AFTER THE WAR, CANADA BECAME a tragedy-free zone. It was like watching puddles dry up on a parking lot after a hard rain. The vets migrated home. I read the Canadian Forum to Eli. The magazine was raising a fuss over low-cost housing and “the victory of capitalism.” Eli sighed. He was sitting in the same spot where Peter, my own dad, had lectured him (that fake Socratic catechism) on the spacious logic of Impossibilism.

  Yesterday, we had learned that Eli had developed diabetes. That was in the morning. In the afternoon, he’d had his last eight teeth removed. The old barn was caving in; his beauty was epic. He pointed at the open page with his good hand—his slightly livid hand; the diabetes was harming his circulation.

  “Only 37,964 this time?” he said. He shook his shaggy head and smiled daintily, not wishing to impose upon me a view of his strawberry gums.

  “When you get your new teeth, you’re going to look younger than me.”

  “Last time, they killed…” He squinted, his memory trained
by illiteracy. “62,817.”

  “Less this time.”

  “Less. But they sent more. A very efficient war.”

  “We never had it so good. Kiss me.”

  He did. With polite gallantry, with puckered lips, not letting me into that maw. This done, he sat back, opening and closing his fist.

  “Hand bothering you?” I asked.

  Eli shrugged. “The radicals want affordable housing.”

  “These are tempestuous times.”

  Eli’s sadness had softened into a sweet and enduring depression. It was the lucky outcome of Impossibilism, a unified field theory: the world is not to be trusted any more than a dream. In a lesser man, this might have made a nasty cynic. Not Eli, past eighty now, calmly bemused, reassured by scepticism. He cradled Helen’s absence in that place in his old heart where the world was infinitely possible and latent. His sorrow was of an eloquent pigment, a sort of violet hue. Though of course he was strong as an ox, and when he did get his teeth in, it was true, he looked younger than I did—damn all men for this—and he thought they were very funny, grinning for him, false as day.

  And me, I dreamed of giving Helen gifts. Every day, through many nights, I gathered stones and flowers for her. The war ended when the supple fields of wheat turned from green to gold. I looked for my lost daughter, and found her everywhere.

  IDA WAS FRESH FROM MOSCOW, where she’d spent a year and a half as a student in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. Now she was an agent of the Comintern. She bustled secretively. She had the manners of a hammer; her soul was the foundry for the utopia. Like many people in this country, even those with more timid left-leanings, Ida was under the constant surveillance of the RCMP.

  A deep cold calm covered the earth. That year’s cold “snap” lasted five months. On the third of April, 1950, the wind rose and it started to snow, sticky stuff added to snowdrifts that were even then as high as the eaves of a house, drifts at least ten feet high, so we lived in choppy seas. It was already flooding down in Minnesota. I slept in the afternoon, full of dread.

  Dianna, nearly fourteen years old, sensed approaching danger the way a dog knows its family is going to take a trip, becoming wary, clinging to the edges. Until that April snowfall, her father had steadily ignored the prospect of a flood, but that day Bill got on the phone, a rare event for a silent man, entering the real world as steady and alert as Eisenhower. Offended, Dianna stuffed her pencils into her drawing kit and stumbled off to their butterfly field, under six feet of snow. She was fascinated by the swellings on the branches of the rose bushes that pushed up like drowning hands. It was her intention to sketch the leaves’ development; she approved of the slow motion of that spring.

  She waded down the road and across the field, feeling for firm ground. The wind was from the northeast, so she figured the bush on the east side might be most revealing. A good spot, near the place where her father always put down salt and alfalfa for the surviving deer. By then, she had developed an economical way of sketching: quick, fluent lines that captured the essentials of the plant before her hands got numb.

  She is looking, as she likes to do, at the foreground. She hears deer in the woods, snow falling on snow. She looks up. The wind had switched to the west at twenty-five miles an hour. She hears the silent sound of flight. She stares into a white sky. A glider, delicate as a maple seed, flies in circles above her head.

  The glider spirals in diminishing rotations so close that she can see the amber glue that holds it together. Its bird-like wings are made of peeled willow wands and it is wrapped in waxed linen. The wind sighs as it sets its burden down before her, a big white snowbird. It settles. Then slowly, its left wing dips into a snowdrift. The pilot in his glass bubble removes his goggles and straps, then slides the lid off and looks about at the field of snow.

  He spies Dianna before climbing out of his plane. A big, handsome man with black hair. Despite the cold, he wears only a black leather flight jacket with fleece-lined gloves, warm-looking boots, a white scarf about his neck. He gives a casual salute.

  Dianna is waiting to see what language he’ll speak. Maybe Russian.

  He approaches her with some difficulty through the waist-high snow. He has dark shadows beneath his eyes and a blue chin. Not Russian. His jacket is nice. Dianna thinks that he must be a Fascist spy from Italy. She holds her ground, as her mother would. He comes right up to her, breathing heavily from the exertion of his walk. “Howdy,” he says. “Take me to your field commander.” Then he smiles. He has normal teeth.

  Dianna brought with her the fresh scent of snow, stamping her feet at the door, snow peeling off her leggings onto the floor. She said nothing, but silently removed her wet things and went to her table beneath the south window and placed her sketches there. Black branches, the bare suggestion of buds, white page. Bill was pacing between phone calls, wildly out of character, but he stopped briefly, ran his finger above her drawings. A wintering rose bush, like a map of the Red River. Everything was becoming river. I thought, with a lurch in my nervous system (my nerves, my veins, Christ, even my bloodshot eyes, were maps of the Red River), We have to pack her drawings carefully. I looked at all our belongings. We have to get everything up. Our house became an ark. Around us, the white sea of the yard. We were already floating, scarcely moored.

  Dianna kneeled on her chair and began to fill in the quick sketches she’d just made. “There’s a man outside,” she said. So distracted were we, no one paid much attention. Again, louder: “There’s a man outside, and he wants to come in.”

  Bill had the phone in his hand; he was just about to make another call to try to get sandbags. He stopped and put down the receiver and opened the front door. The pilot stood there, his back to us, but he turned towards Bill then. He didn’t smile. He looked Bill keenly in the eye. “Come in,” said Bill, without surprise, with solemnity, overcoming his dread.

  Dianna went to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  The man kicked the snow off his boots. He looked around the house, as if seeing a room that had already been described to him. “You can come all the way in,” I said. “Come on. Have a seat.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Are you from Toronto?” I asked him. I’ve always been good with accents.

  “Why, yes!”

  “You’ve got an Italian grandmother, though, am I right?” I guess I was showing off.

  “Amazing,” he said. Stuck forth his hand. “The name’s Jack.”

  Eli popped up. “Want some tea, Jack?” Eli had been sleeping under the afghan on the couch, despite the chaos. “I’d like some tea.” He filled the kettle.

  Jack took sugar in his tea. Dianna emerged from the bathroom and placed a kitchen chair where she could watch us at an oblique angle, staring through strands of hair. Her face was as white as bone, and her eyes had grown larger, almost purple.

  “So, Jack. Where’d you come from?” I asked. He had a slight overbite. Broad mouth; high, windburned cheekbones; a messy, flannel way with clothes. He was strong, stocky, square-shaped despite his height.

  “I was flying out of a club just east of here.” He sipped his tea as if he’d given a full answer. He nodded, looking handsome and pleasant, the confidence of a popular man.

  “This is nice land,” he said to Bill. Bill had the habit of sitting cross-legged on top of the coffee table. It didn’t occur to Bill to respond, but he was contemplating Jack’s assertion and in his mind he’d travelled back to the meadow by his and Dianna’s cabin. His house would soon be driftwood. Since Bill left the monastery, his innate generosity had found strange use, as if he was forever holding out the treasures of his heart to be swept away.

  We sipped our tea. Blue-green sunset.

  “Dark out,” said Eli, and turned on a small yellow lamp.

  “Stay for supper?” I asked Jack.

  “Thanks. I’d like that.” Then, “Can’t really fly tonight anyway.”

  Eli peered out the window. It was snowing a
gain. “You flew, did you?” he asked.

  “His airplane’s in our meadow,” Dianna complained to her father.

  “What kind of plane do you fly, Jack?” asked Eli.

  “She’s a glider,” said Jack.

  “A glider! Now that’s a pretty thing,” said Eli.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Pretty cold up there, I imagine.”

  “Yes, it sure was.”

  “Fly off course?”

  “Had no course. The wind blew me. I lost altitude. Had to land.”

  “Where’s Ida?” I asked. I felt a pang of anxiety. Ida wasn’t entirely well. I hoped this visitor wouldn’t upset her. “You’re not with the RCMP, are you? No offence.”

  He smiled. His deep voice. “No. But I was with the RAF.”

  “Germany?” asked Eli.

  “That’s right,” said Jack.

  “You’re older than I thought,” I said.

  “Old enough,” he said.

  We had a quiet dinner of steamed curiosity and fried frustration. Ida came in, late and tired, but revived herself by watching Jack eat. “You look so familiar,” she told him.

  Jack looked her straight in the eye. I grew more anxious.

  “You’re a pilot, are you?” Ida asked.

  “Yup,” said Jack. He picked up his spoon and tapped the edge of his plate. Over and over, till we all stopped eating and watched him. Tap-tap, tap-tap, a hypnotic rhythm; it went on a long time. When he stopped, we were all lulled and ready. He sought out each of us. His face was very sad.

  Bill said, “Come here, little girl,” and picked up Dianna, putting her in his lap.

  Dianna settled herself into her father’s arms. She looked at Jack with purple eyes. “Why aren’t you frozen?” she asked him.

  Jack didn’t answer.