The Blind Assassin:
The bronze bell

   It’s midnight. In the city of Sakiel-Norn, a single bronze bell tolls to mark the moment when the Broken God, nightly avatar of the God of Three Suns, reaches the lowermost point of his descent into the darkness and after a ferocious combat is torn apart by the Lord of the Underworld and his band of dead warriors who live down there. He will be gathered together by the Goddess, brought back to life, and nursed to renewed health and vigour, and will emerge at dawn as usual, regenerated, filled with light.
   Although the Broken God is a popular figure, nobody in the city really believes this tale about him any more. Still, the women in each household make his image out of clay and the men smash him to pieces on the darkest night of the year, and then the women make a new image of him the next day. For the children, there are small gods of sweetened bread for them to eat; for the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.
   The King sits alone in the highest tower of his lavish palace, from which he is observing the stars and interpreting the omens and auguries for the next week. He has laid aside his woven platinum face mask, as there is no one present from whom he needs to conceal his emotions: he may smile and frown at will, just like any common Ygnirod. It’s such a relief.
   Right now he’s smiling, a pensive smile: he’s considering his latest amour, with the plump wife of a minor civil servant. She’s stupid as a thulk, but she has a soft dense mouth like a waterlogged velvet cushion and tapered fingers deft as fish, and sly narrow eyes, and an educated knack. However, she’s becoming too demanding, and also indiscreet. She’s been nagging at him to compose a poem to the nape of her neck, or to some other part of her anatomy, as is the practice among the more foppish of the court lovers, but his talents do not lie in that direction. Why are women such trophy-hunters, why do they want mementoes? Or does she wish him to make a fool of himself, as a demonstration of her power?
   A shame, but he’ll have to get rid of her. He’ll ruin her husband financially—do him the honour of dining at his house, with all of his most trusted courtiers, until the poor idiot’s resources are exhausted. Then the woman will be sold into slavery to pay the debt. It might even do her good—firm up her muscles. It’s a definite pleasure to imagine her minus her veil, her face bared to every passing stare, toting her new mistress’s footstool or pet blue-billed wibular and scowling all the way. He could always have her assassinated, but that seems a little harsh: all she’s really guilty of is a lust for bad poetry. He’s not a tyrant.
   A disembowelled oorm lies before him. Idly he pokes at the feathers. He doesn’t care about the stars—he no longer believes all that gibberish—but he will have to squint at them for a while anyway and come up with some pronouncement. The multiplying of wealth and a bountiful harvest should do the trick in the short run, and people always forget about prophecies unless they come true.
   He wonders whether there’s any validity to the information he’s received, from a reliable private source—his barber—that there is yet another plot being hatched against him. Will he have to make arrests again, resort to torture and executions? No doubt. Perceived softness is as bad for public order as actual softness. A tight grip on the reins is desirable. If heads must roll, his will not be among them. He will be forced to act, to protect himself; yet he feels a strange inertia. Running a kingdom is a constant strain: if he relaxes his guard, even for a moment, they’ll be on him, whoever they are.
   Off to the north he thinks he sees a flickering, as if something is on fire there, but then it’s gone. Lightning, perhaps. He passes his hand over his eyes.

   I feel sorry for him. I think he’s only doing the best he can.
   I think we need another drink. How about it?
   I bet you’re going to kill him off. You have that glint.
   In all justice he’d deserve it. I think he’s a bastard, myself. But kings have to be, don’t they? Survival of the fittest and so forth. Weak to the wall.
   You don’t really believe that.
   Is there another? Squeeze the bottle, will you? Because really I’m very thirsty.
   I’ll see. She gets up, trailing the sheet. The bottle is on the desk. No need to wrap up, he says. I enjoy the view.
   She looks back at him over her shoulder. She says: It adds mystery. Toss over your glass. I wish you’d stop buying this rotgut.
   It’s all I can afford. Anyway I’ve got no taste. It’s because I’m an orphan. The Presbyterians ruined me, in the orphanage. It’s why I’m so gloomy and dismal.
   Don’t play that grubby old orphan card. My heart does not bleed.
   It does, though, he says. I count on it. Apart from your legs and your very fine ass, that’s what I admire most about you—the bloodiness of your heart.
   It’s not my heart that’s bloody, it’s my mind. I’m bloody-minded. Or so I’ve been told.
   He laughs. Here’s to your bloody mind then. Down the hatch.
   She drinks, makes a face.
   Comes out the same as it goes in, he says cheerfully. Speaking of which, I have to see a man about a dog. He gets up, goes to the window, raises the sash a little.
   You can’t do that!
   It’s a side driveway. I won’t hit anyone.
   At least keep behind the curtain! What about me?
   What about you? You’ve seen a naked man before. You don’t always close your eyes.
   I don’t mean that, I mean I can’t pee out a window. I’ll burst.
   My pal’s dressing gown, he says. See it? That plaid thing on the stand. Just check to make sure the hall’s clear. The landlady’s a nosy old bitch, but as long as you’re wearing plaid she won’t see you. You’ll blend in—this dump is plaid to the core.

   Well then, he says. Where was I?
   It’s midnight, she says. A single bronze bell tolls.
   Oh yes. It’s midnight. A single bronze bell tolls. As the sound dies away, the blind assassin turns the key in the door. His heart is beating hard, as it always does at such moments: moments of considerable danger to himself. If he is caught, the death that will be prepared for him will be prolonged and painful,
   He feels nothing about the death he is about to inflict, nor does he care to know the reasons for it. Who is to be assassinated and why is the business of the rich and powerful, and he hates them all equally. They are the ones who took away his eyesight and forced themselves into his body by the dozens when he was too young to do anything about it, and he would welcome the chance to butcher every single one of them—them, and anyone involved in their doings, as this girl is. It means nothing to him that she’s little more than a decorated and bejewelled prisoner. It means nothing to him that the same people who have made him blind have made her mute. He’ll do his job and take his pay and that will be the end of it.
   In any case she’ll be killed tomorrow if he doesn’t kill her himself tonight, and he’ll be quicker and not nearly so clumsy. He’s doing her a favour. There have been too many blundered sacrifices. None of these kings is any good with a knife.
   He hopes she won’t make too much fuss. He’s been told she can’t scream: about the loudest sound she can make, with her tongueless, wounded mouth, is a high, stifled mewing, like a cat in a sack. That’s fine. Nevertheless he’ll take precautions.
   He drags the corpse of the sentry inside the room so no one will stumble across it in the corridor. Then he moves inside as well, soundless in his bare feet, and locks the door.

Five

The fur coat

   This morning the tornado warnings were out, on the weather channel, and by mid-afternoon the sky had turned a baleful shade of green and the branches of the trees had begun to thrash around as if some huge, enraged animal was fighting its way through. The storm passed directly overhead: flicked snakes’ tongues of white light, stacks of tin pie plates tumbling. Count a thousand and one, Reenie used to tell us. If you can say that, it’s a mile away. She said never to use the telephone during a thunderstorm or the lightning would come right through into your ear and then you’d be deaf. She said never to take a bath then either, because the lightning could run out of the tap like water. She said if the hair stood up on the back of your neck you should jump into the air, because that was the only thing that could save you.
   The storm was gone by nightfall, but it was still dank as a drain. I roiled around in the muddle of my bed, listening to my heart limping against the bedsprings, trying to get comfortable. Finally I gave up on sleep and pulled a long sweater on over my nightgown, and negotiated the stairs. Then I put on my plastic raincoat with the hood and slipped my feet into my rubber boots, and went outside. The damp wood of the porch steps was treacherous. The paint’s worn off them, they may be rotting.
   In the faint light all was monochrome. The air was moist and still. The chrysanthemums on the front lawn sparkled with shining drops; a battalion of slugs was no doubt munching away at the few remaining leaves of the lupins. Slugs are said to like beer; I keep thinking I should put some out for them. Better them than me: it was never the form of alcohol I preferred. I wanted nervelessness quicker.
   I tapped and crept my way along the damp sidewalk. There was a full moon, ringed with a pale haze; under the street lights my foreshortened shadow slid before me like a goblin. I felt I was doing a daring thing: an older woman, solitary, walking by night. A stranger might have considered me defenceless. And indeed I was a little frightened, or at least apprehensive enough to make my heart beat harder. As Myra keeps telling me so kindly, old ladies are prime targets for muggers. They are said to come in from Toronto, these muggers, as all ills do. Probably they come in on the bus, their mugging tools disguised as umbrellas, or as golf clubs. There are no lengths to which they will not go, says Myra darkly.
   I went three blocks to the main route through town, then stopped to gaze across the satiny wet tarmac towards Walter’s garage. Walter was sitting in the lighthouse of the glass booth, in the middle of the inky, empty pool of flat asphalt. Leaning forward in his red cap, he looked like an aging jockey on an invisible horse, or like the captain of his fate, piloting an eerie ship through outer space. In point of fact he was watching The Sports Network on his miniature TV, as I happen to know from Myra. I did not go over to speak to him: he would have been alarmed by the sight of me, looming out of the darkness in my rubber boots and nightgown like some crazed octogenarian stalker. Still, it was comforting to know that there was at least one other human being awake at that time of night.
   On the way back I heard footsteps behind me. Now you’ve done it, I told myself, here comes the mugger. But it was only a young woman in a black raincoat, carrying a bag or small suitcase. She passed me at a fast clip, head craned forward.
   Sabrina, I thought. She’s come back after all. How forgiven I felt, for that instant—how blessed, how filled with grace, as if time had rolled backwards and my dry old wooden cane had burst operatically into flower. But on second glance—no, on third—it was not Sabrina at all; only some stranger. Who am I anyway, to deserve such a miraculous outcome? How can I expect it?
   I do expect it though. Against all reason.

   But enough of that. I take up the burden of my tale, as they used to say in poems. Back to Avilion.
   Mother was dead. Things would never be the same. I was told to keep a stiff upper lip. Who told me that? Reenie certainly, Father perhaps. Funny, they never say anything about the lower lip. That’s the one you’re supposed to bite, to substitute one kind of pain for another.
   At first Laura used to spend a lot of time inside Mother’s fur coat. It was made of sealskin, and still had Mother’s handkerchief in the pocket. Laura would get inside it and try to do up the buttons, until she hit on a way of doing them up first and then crawling in underneath. I think she must have been praying in there, or conjuring: conjuring Mother back. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. And then the coat was given away to charity.
   Soon Laura began to ask where the baby had gone, the one that did not look like a kitten. To Heaven no longer satisfied her—after it was in the basin, was what she meant. Reenie said the doctor took it away. But why wasn’t there a funeral? Because it was born too little, said Reenie. How could anything so little kill Mother? Reenie said, Never mind. She said, You’ll know when you’re older. She said, What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.
   In the nighttimes Laura would creep into my room and shake me awake, then climb into bed with me. She couldn’t sleep: it was because of God. Up until the funeral, she and God had been on good terms. God loves you, said the Sunday-school teacher at the Methodist church, where Mother had sent us, and where Reenie continued to send us on general principles, and Laura had believed it. But now she was no longer so sure.
   She began to fret about God’s exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher’s fault: God is everywhere, she’d said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the kitchen, the bathroom, was he under the bed? (“I’d like to wring that woman’s neck,” said Reenie.) Laura didn’t want God popping out at her unexpectedly, not hard to understand considering his recent behaviour. Open your mouth and dose your eyes and I’ll give you a big surprise, Reenie used to say, holding a cookie behind her back, but Laura would no longer do it. She wanted her eyes open. It wasn’t that she distrusted Reenie, only that she feared surprises.
   Probably God was in the broom closet. It seemed the most likely place. He was lurking in there like some eccentric and possibly dangerous uncle, but she couldn’t be certain whether he was there at any given moment because she was afraid to open the door. “God is in your heart,” said the Sunday-school teacher, and that was even worse. If in the broom closet, something might have been possible, such as locking the door.
   God never slept, it said in the hymn—No careless slumber shall His eyelids dose. Instead he roamed around the house at night, spying on people—seeing if they’d been good enough, or sending plagues to finish them off, or indulging in some other whim. Sooner or later he was bound to do something unpleasant, as he’d often done in the Bible. “Listen, that’s him,” Laura would say. The light footstep, the heavy footstep.
   “That’s not God. It’s only Father. He’s in the turret.”
   “What’s he doing?”
   “Smoking.” I didn’t want to say drinking. It seemed disloyal.

   I felt most tenderly towards Laura when she was asleep—her mouth a little open, her eyelashes still wet—but she was a restless sleeper; she groaned and kicked, and snored sometimes, and kept me from getting to sleep myself. I would climb down out of the bed and tiptoe across the floor, and hoist myself up to look out the bedroom window. When there was a moon the flower gardens would be silvery grey, as if all the colours had been sucked out of them. I could see the stone nymph, foreshortened; the moon was reflected in her lily pond, and she was dipping her toes into its cold light. Shivering, I would get back into bed, and lie watching the moving shadows of the curtains and listening to the gurglings and crackings of the house as it shifted itself. Wondering what I’d done wrong.
   Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault, and in this I was no exception; but they also believe in happy endings, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I was no exception in that either. I only wished the happy ending would hurry up, because—especially at night, when Laura was asleep and I did not have to cheer her up—I felt so desolate.
   In the mornings I would help Laura to dress—that had been my task even when Mother was alive—and make sure she brushed her teeth and washed her face. At lunchtime Reenie would sometimes let us have a picnic. We’d have buttered white bread spread with grape jelly translucent as cellophane, and raw carrots, and cut-up apples. We’d have corned beef turned out of the tin, the shape of it like an Aztec temple. We’d have hard-boiled eggs. We’d put these things on plates, and take them outside, and eat them here and there—by the pool, in the conservatory. If it was raining we’d eat them inside.
   “Remember the starving Armenians,” Laura would say, hands clasped, eyes closed, bowing over the crusts of her jelly sandwich. I knew she was saying it because Mother used to, and it made me want to cry. “There are no starving Armenians, they’re just made up,” I told her once, but she wouldn’t have it.

   We were left on our own a lot at that time. We learned Avilion inside out: its crevices, its caves, its tunnels. We peered into the hiding place under the back stairs, which contained a jumble of discarded overshoes and single mittens, and an umbrella with broken ribs. We explored the various branches of the cellar—me coal cellar for the coal; the root cellar for the cabbages and squashes laid out on a board, and the beets and carrots growing whiskery in their box of sand, and the potatoes with their blind albino tentacles, like the legs of crabs; the cold cellar for the apples in their barrels, and for the shelves of preserves—dusty jams and jellies glinting like uncut gems, chutneys and pickles and strawberries and peeled tomatoes and applesauce, all in Crown sealing jars. There was a wine cellar too, but it was kept locked; only Father had the key.
   We found the damp dirt-floored grotto beneath the verandah, reached by crawling between the hollyhocks, where only spidery dandelions tried to grow, and creeping Charlie, its crushed-mint smell mingling with cat spray and (once) the hot, sick stink of an alarmed garter snake. We found the attic, with boxes of old books and stored quilts and three empty trunks, and a broken harmonium, and Grandmother Adelia’s headless dress form, a pallid, musty torso.
   Holding our breaths, we would make our way stealthily through our labyrinths of shadow. We took solace in this—in our secrecy, our knowledge of hidden pathways, our belief that we could not be seen.
   Listen to the dock ticking, I said. It was a pendulum clock—an antique, white and gold china; it had been Grandfather’s; it stood on the mantelpiece in the library. Laura thought I’d said licking. And it was true, the brass pendulum swinging back and forth did look like a tongue, licking the lips of an invisible mouth. Eating up the time.

   It became autumn. Laura and I picked milkweed pods and opened them, to feel the scale-shaped seeds overlapping like the skin of a dragon. We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving the leathery brownish-yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow. Then we went to the Jubilee Bridge and threw the pods into the river to see how long they’d sail, before they capsized or were swept away. Did we think about them as holding people, or a person? I’m not sure. But there was a certain satisfaction in watching them go under.
   It became winter. The sky was a hazy grey, the sun low in the sky, a wan pinkish colour, like fish blood. Icicles, heavy and opaque and thick as a wrist, hung dripping from the roof and windowsills as if suspended in the act of falling. We broke them off and sucked the ends. Reenie told us that if we did that our tongues would turn black and drop off, but I knew this was false, having done it before.
   Avilion had a boathouse then, and an icehouse, down by the jetty. In the boathouse was Grandfather’s elderly sailboat, now Father’s—the Water Nixie, high and dry and put to bed for the winter. In the icehouse was the ice, cut from the Jogues River and hauled up in blocks by horses, and stored there covered in sawdust, waiting for the summer when it would be rare.
   Laura and I went out onto the slippery jetty, which we were forbidden to do. Reenie said that if we fell off and went through, we wouldn’t last an instant, because the water was cold as death. Our boots would fill, we’d sink like stones. We threw some real stones out to see what would happen to them; they skittered across the ice, rested there, remained in view. Our breath made a white smoke; we blew it out in puffs, like trains, and shifted from one cold foot to the other. Under our boot-soles the snow creaked. We held hands and our mittens froze stuck together, so that when we took them off there were two woollen hands holding on to each other, empty and blue.
   At the bottom of the Louveteau’s rapids, jagged chunks of ice had piled up against one another. The ice was white at noon, light green in the twilight; the smaller pieces made a tinkling sound, like bells. In the centre of the river the water ran open and black. Children called from the hill on the other side, hidden by trees, their voices high and thin and happy in the cold air. They were tobogganing, which we were not allowed to do. I thought of walking out onto the jagged shore ice, to see how solid it was.
   It became spring. The willow branches turned yellow, the dogwoods red. The Louveteau River was in spate; bushes and trees torn up by their roots eddied and snagged. A woman jumped off the Jubilee Bridge above the rapids and the body wasn’t found for two days. It was fished out downstream, and was far from a pretty sight because going down those rapids was like being run through a meat grinder. Not the best way to depart this earth, said Reenie—not if you were interested in your looks, though most likely you wouldn’t be at such a time.
   Mrs. Hillcoate knew of half a dozen such jumpers, over the years. You’d read about them in the paper. One was a girl she’d gone to school with who’d married a railroad worker. He was away a lot, she said, so what did he expect? “Up the spout,” she said. “And no excuse.” Reenie nodded, as if this explained everything.
   “No matter how stupid the man may be, most of them can count,” she said, “at least on their fingers. I expect there was knuckle sandwiches. But no sense in shutting the barn door with the horse gone.”
   “What horse?” said Laura.
   “She must have been in some other kind of trouble too,” said Mrs. Hillcoate. “If you’ve got trouble, you’ve most likely got more than the one kind.”
   “What is the spout?” Laura whispered to me. “What spout?” But I didn’t know.
   As well as jumping, said Reenie, women like that might walk into the river upstream and then be sucked under the surface by the weight of their wet clothing, so they couldn’t swim to safety even if they’d wanted to. A man would be more deliberate. They would hang themselves from the crossbeams of their barns, or blow their heads off with their shotguns; or if intending to drown, they would attach rocks, or other heavy objects—axe-heads, bags of nails. They didn’t like to take any chances on a serious thing like that. But it was a woman’s way just to walk in and resign herself, and let the water take her. It was hard to tell from Reenie’s tone whether she approved of these differences or not.
   I turned ten in June. Reenie made a cake, though she said maybe we shouldn’t be having one, it was too soon after Mother’s death, but then, life had to go on, so maybe the cake wouldn’t hurt. Hurt what? said Laura. Mother’s feelings, I said. Was Mother watching us, then, from Heaven? But I became obstinate and smug, and wouldn’t tell. Laura wouldn’t eat any of the cake, not after she’d heard that about Mother’s feelings, so I ate both our pieces.
   It was an effort for me now to recall the details of my grief—the exact forms it had taken—although at will I could summon up an echo of it, like a small whining dog locked in the cellar. What had I done on the day Mother died? I could hardly remember that, or what she’d really looked like: now she looked only like her photographs. I did remember the wrongness of her bed when she was suddenly no longer in it: how empty it had seemed. The way the afternoon light came slantwise in through the window and fell so silently across the hardwood floor, the dust motes floating in it like mist. The smell of beeswax furniture polish, and of wilted chrysanthemums, and the lingering aroma of bedpan and disinfectant. I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.
   Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate that although nobody could ever take the place of Mrs. Chase, who’d been a saint on earth if there could be such a thing, she herself had done what she could, and she’d kept up a cheerful front for our sakes because least said, soonest mended, and luckily we did seem to be getting over it, though still waters ran deep and I was too quiet for my own good. I was the brooding type, she said; it was bound to come out somehow. As for Laura, who could tell, because she’d always been an odd child anyway.
   Reenie said we were together too much. She said Laura was learning ways that were too old for her, and I was being kept back. We should each of us be with children our own age, but the few children in town who might have been suitable for us had already been sent away to school—to private schools like the ones we should be sent off to by rights, but Captain Chase could never seem to get around to arranging it, and anyway it would be too many changes all at once, and although I was cool as a cucumber and would certainly be able to manage it, Laura was young for her age, and, come to that, too young altogether. Also she was too nervous. She was the type to panic and thrash around and drown in six inches of water, through not keeping her head.
   Laura and I sat on the back stairs with the door open a crack, hands over our mouths to keep from laughing. We enjoyed the delights of espionage. But it did neither of us much good to overhear such things about ourselves.

The Weary Soldier

   Today I walked to the bank—early, to avoid the worst heat, but also to be there when it opened. That way I could be sure of getting someone’s attention, a thing I needed since they’d made yet another mistake on my statement. I can still add and subtract, I tell them, unlike those machines of yours, and they smile at me like waiters, the kind who spit in your soup in the kitchen. I always ask to see the manager, the manager is always “in a meeting,” I always get shifted off to some smirking, patronizing elf just out of short pants who sees himself as a future plutocrat.
   I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who’ve simply been present at them.
   The bank has Roman pillars, to remind us to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, such as those ridiculous service charges. For two cents I’d keep my money in a sock under the mattress just to spite them. But word would get around, I suppose—word that I’d become a loony old eccentric of the kind found dead in a hovel crammed with hundreds of empty cat food tins and a couple of million bucks stashed in five-dollar bills between the pages of yellowing newspapers. I have no desire to become an object of attention to the local hopheads and amateur second-storey men, with their bloodshot eyes and twitchy fingers.
   On the way back from the bank I walked around by the Town Hall, with its Italianate bell tower and its Florentine two-tone brickwork, its flagpole that needs painting, its field gun present at the Somme. Also its two bronze statues, both commissioned by the Chase family. The right-hand one, commissioned by my Grandmother Adelia, is of Colonel Parkman, a veteran of the last decisive battle fought in the American Revolution, that of Fort Ticonderoga, now in New York State. Once in a while we’ll get some confused Germans or Englishmen or even Americans wandering through town, looking for the Fort Ticonderoga battlefield. Wrong town, they’re told. Come to think of it, wrong country. You want the next one over.
   It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he’d lost. (Though perhaps that’s not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He’s shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and a pointed beard, every sculptor’s idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn’t erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.
   On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman’s axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.
   The Weary Soldier was a project of my father’s. The sculptress was Callista Fitzsimmons, who’d come highly recommended by Frances Loring, convenor of the War Memorial Committee of the Ontario Society of Artists. There was some local objection to Miss Fitzsimmons—a woman wasn’t considered appropriate for the subject—but Father steamrollered the meeting of potential sponsors: wasn’t Miss Loring herself a woman, he asked? Thus inspiring several irreverent comments, How can you tell being the cleanest of them. In private, he said that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and since the rest of them were such cheapskates they’d better either dig deep or knuckle under.
   Miss Callista Fitzsimmons was not only a woman, she was also twenty-eight years old and a redhead. She began coming to Avilion frequently, to confer with Father on the proposed design. These sessions would take place in the library, with the door open at first and then not. She was put up in one of the guest rooms, the second-best one at first and then the best. Soon she was there almost every weekend, and her room became known as “her” room.
   Father seemed happier; certainly he was drinking less. He had the grounds tidied up, at least enough to be presentable; he had the drive regravelled; he had the Water Nixie scraped and painted and refitted. Sometimes there were informal weekend house parties, the guests being artistic friends of Callista’s from Toronto. These artists, among whom there were no names that might currently be recognized, did not wear dinner jackets or even suits to dinner, but V-necked sweaters; they ate scratch meals on the lawn, and discussed the finer points of Art, and smoked and drank and argued. The girl artists used too many towels in the bathrooms, no doubt because they’d never seen the inside of a proper bathtub before, was Reenie’s theory. Also they had grubby fingernails, which they bit.
   When there were no house parties Father and Callista would go off on picnics, in one of the cars—the roadster, not the sedan—with a basket packed grudgingly by Reenie. Or they’d go sailing, Callista in slacks with her hands in the pockets, like Coco Chanel, and one of Father’s old crew-neck jerseys. Sometimes they would drive all the way to Windsor, and stop at roadhouses that featured cocktails and ferocious piano-playing and raffish dancing—roadhouses frequented by gangsters involved in the rum-running, who would come up from Chicago and Detroit to make their deals with the law-abiding distillers on the Canadian side. (It was Prohibition in the United States then; liquor flowed across the border like very expensive water; dead bodies with the ends of their fingers cut off and nothing in their pockets were tossed into the Detroit River and ended up on the beaches of Lake Erie, causing debate as to who was to incur the expense of burying them.) On these trips Father and Callista would stay away all night, and sometimes for several nights. Once they went to Niagara Falls, which made Reenie envious, and once to Buffalo; but they went to Buffalo on a train.
   We got these details from Callista, who was not stingy with details. She told us that Father needed “pepping up,” and that this pepping-up was good for him. She said he needed to kick up his heels, to mingle more in life. She said she and Father were “great pals.” She took to calling us “the kids;” she said we could call her “Callie.”
   (Laura wanted to know if Father danced too, at the roadhouses: it was hard to imagine, because of his ruined leg. Callista said no, but that it was fun for him to watch. I have come to doubt that. It is never much fun to watch other people dance when you can’t do it yourself.)
   I was in awe of Callista because she was an artist, and was consulted like a man, and strode around and shook hands like one as well, and smoked cigarettes in a short black holder, and knew about Coco Chanel. She had pierced ears, and her red hair (done with henna, I now realize) was wound around with scarves. She wore flowing robe-like garments in bold swirling prints: fuchsia, heliotrope, and saffron were the names of the colours. She told me these designs were from Paris, and were inspired by White Russian émigrés. She explained what those were. She was full of explanations.
   “One of his floozies,” said Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate. “Just one more of them on the string, which Lord knows was as long as your arm already, but you’d think he’d have the decency not to bring her in under the same roof, with her not cold in the grave he might as well have dug his very own self.”
   “What’s a floozie?” said Laura.
   “Mind your own beeswax,” said Reenie. It was a sign of her anger that she kept on talking even though Laura and I were in the kitchen. (Later I told Laura what a floozie was: it was a girl who chewed gum. But Callie Fitzsimmons didn’t do that.)
   “Little pitchers have big ears,” said Mrs. Hillcoate warningly, but Reenie went on.
   “As for those outlandish get-ups she wears, she might as well go to church in her scanties. Against the light you can see the sun, the moon and the stars, and everything in between. Not that she’s got much to show, she’s one of those flappers, she’s flat as a boy.”
   “I’d never have the nerve,” said Mrs. Hillcoate.
   “You can’t call it nerve,” said Reenie. “She don’t give a rat’s ass.” (When Reenie got worked up her grammar slipped.) “There’s something missing, if you ask me; she’s two bricks short of a load. She went skinny-dipping in the lily pond, with all the frogs and goldfish—I met her coming back across the lawn, with only a towel and what God gave Eve. She just nodded and smiled, she didn’t bat an eye.”
   “I did hear about that,” said Mrs. Hillcoate. “I thought it was only gossip. It sounded far-fetched.”
   “She’s a gold-digger,” said Reenie. “She only wants to get her hooks into him, then clean him out.”
   “What’s a gold-digger? What are hooks?” said Laura.
   Flapper made me think of limp, wet washing on the line, in the wind. Callista Fitzsimmons was nothing like that.

   There was a squabble over the War Memorial, and not only because of the rumours about Father and Callista Fitzsimmons. Some people in town thought the Weary Soldier statue was too dejected-looking, and also too slovenly: they objected to the unbuttoned shirt. They wanted something more triumphant, like the Goddess of Victory on the memorial two towns over, which had angel’s wings and wind-swept robes and was holding a three-pronged implement that looked like a toasting fork. They also wanted “For Those Who Willingly Made the Supreme Sacrifice” to be written on the front.
   Father refused to back down on the sculpture, saying they could consider themselves lucky the Weary Soldier had two arms and two legs, not to mention a head, and that if they didn’t watch out he’d go in for bare-naked realism all the way and the statue would be made of rotting body fragments, of which he had stepped on a good many in his day. As for the inscription, there was nothing willing about the sacrifice, as it had not been the intention of the dead to get themselves blown to Kingdom come. He himself favoured “Lest We Forget,” which put the onus where it should be: on our own forgetfulness. He said a damn sight too many people had been a damn sight too forgetful. He rarely swore in public, so it made an impression. He got his way, of course, since he was paying.
   The Chamber of Commerce stumped up for the four bronze plaques, with the honour rolls of the fallen and the names of the battles. They wanted their own name printed at the bottom, but Father shamed them out of it. The War Memorial was for the dead, he told them—not for those who’d remained alive, much less reaped the benefits. This kind of talk got him resented by some.
   The memorial was unveiled in the November of 1928, on Remembrance Day. There was a large crowd, despite the chill drizzle. The Weary Soldier had been mounted on a four-sided pyramid of rounded river stones, like the stones of Avilion, and the bronze plaques were bordered with lilies and poppies, intertwined with maple leaves. There had been some argument about this too. Callie Fitzsimmons said the design was old-fashioned and banal, with all those droopy flowers and leaves—Victorian, the artists’ worst insult in those days. She wanted something starker, more modern. But the people in town liked it, and Father said you had to compromise sometimes.
   At the ceremony, bagpipes were played. (“Better outdoors than in,” said Reenie.) Then there was the main sermon, by the Presbyterian minister, who talked about those who had willingly made the Supreme Sacrifice —the town’s dig at Father, to show he couldn’t hog the proceedings and money couldn’t buy everything, and they’d got that phrase in despite him. Then more speeches were made, and prayers were said—many speeches and many prayers, because the ministers of every kind of church in town had to be represented. Though there were no Catholics on the organizing committee, even the Catholic priest was allowed to say a piece. My father pushed for this, on the grounds that a dead Catholic soldier was just as dead as a dead Protestant one.
   Reenie said that was one way of looking at it.
   “What is the other way?” said Laura.

   My father laid the first wreath. Laura and I watched, hand in hand; Reenie cried. The Royal Canadian Regiment had sent a delegation, all the way from Wolseley Barracks in London, and Major M. K. Greene laid a wreath. Wreaths were then laid by just about everyone you could think of—the Legion, followed by the Lions, the Kinsmen, the Rotary Club, the Oddfellows, the Orange Order, the Knights of Columbus, the Chamber of Commerce, and the I.O.D.E. among others—with the last one being Mrs. Wilmer Sullivan for Mothers of the Fallen, who had lost three sons. “Abide with Me” was sung, then “Last Post” was played, a little shakily, by a bugler from the Scouts band, followed by two minutes of silence and a rifle volley fired by the Militia. Then we had “Reveille.”
   Father stood with head bowed, but he was visibly shaking, whether from grief or rage it is hard to say. He wore his uniform under a greatcoat, and leaned with his two leather-gloved hands on his cane.
   Callie Fitzsimmons was there, but she kept in the background. It was not the sort of occasion on which the artist should step forward and make a bow, she’d told us. She wore a decorous black coat and a regular skirt instead of a robe, and a hat that concealed most of her face, but was whispered about all the same.

   Afterwards Reenie made cocoa, for Laura and me, in the kitchen, to warm us up because we’d got chilled in the drizzle. A cup was offered as well to Mrs. Hillcoate, who said she wouldn’t say no to it.
   “Why is it called a memorial?” said Laura.
   “It’s for us to remember the dead,” said Reenie.
   “Why?” said Laura. “What for? Do they like it?”
   “It’s not for them, it’s more for us,” said Reenie. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Laura was always being told this, and discounted it. She wanted to understand now. She upended her cocoa.
   “Can I have more? What is the Supreme Sacrifice?”
   “The soldiers gave their lives for the rest of us. I certainly hope your eyes aren’t bigger than your stomach, because if I make this I’ll expect you to finish it.”
   “Why did they give their lives? Did they want to?”
   “No, but they did it anyway. That’s why it’s a sacrifice,” said Reenie. “Now that’s enough of that. Here’s your cocoa.”
   “They gave their lives to God, because that’s what God wants. It’s like Jesus, who died for all of our sins,” said Mrs. Hillcoate, who was a Baptist, and considered herself the ultimate authority.

   A week later Laura and I were walking along the path beside the Louveteau, below the Gorge. There was mist that day, rising from the river, swirling like skim milk in the air, dripping from the bare twigs of the bushes. The stones of the path were slippery.
   All of a sudden Laura was in the river. Luckily we weren’t right beside the main current, so she wasn’t swept away. I screamed and ran downstream and got hold of her by the coat; her clothes weren’t waterlogged yet, but still she was very heavy, and I almost fell in myself. I managed to pull her along to where there was a flat ledge; then I hauled her out. She was sopping like a wet sheep, and I was pretty wet myself. Then I shook her. By that time she was shivering and crying.
   “You did it on purpose!” I said. “I saw you! You could’ve drowned!” Laura gulped and sobbed. I hugged her. “Why did you?”
   “So God would let Mother be alive again,” she wailed.
   “God doesn’t want you to be dead,” I said. “That would make him very mad! If he wanted Mother to be alive, he could do it anyway, without you drowning yourself.” This was the only way to talk to Laura when she got into such moods: you had to pretend you knew something about God that she didn’t.
   She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “How do you know?”
   “Because look—he let me save you! See? If he wanted you to be dead, then I’d have fallen in too. We’d both be dead! Now come on, you have to get dry. I won’t tell Reenie. I’ll say it was an accident, I’ll say you slipped. But don’t do anything like that again. Okay?”
   Laura said nothing, but she allowed me to lead her home. There was a lot of frightened clucking and dithering and scolding, and a cup of beef broth and a warm bath and a hot-water bottle for Laura, whose mishap was put down to her well-known clumsiness; she was told to watch where she was going. Father said Well done to me; I wondered what he would have said if I’d lost her. Reenie said it was a good thing we had at least half a wit between the two of us, but what had we been doing down there in the first place? And in the mist, at that. She said I should have known better.
   I lay awake for hours that night, arms wrapped around myself, hugging myself tight. My feet were stone cold, my teeth were chattering. I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of Laura, in the icy black water of the Louveteau—how her hair had spread out like smoke in a swirling wind, how her wet face had gleamed silvery, how she had glared at me when I’d grabbed her by the coat. How hard it had been to hold on to her. How close I had come to letting go.

Miss Violence

   Instead of school, Laura and I were provided with a succession of tutors, men and women both. We didn’t think they were necessary, and did our best to discourage them. We would fix them with our light-blue stares, or pretend to be deaf or stupid; we’d never look them in the eye, only in the forehead. It often took longer than you’d think to get rid of them: as a rule they’d put up with quite a lot from us, because they were browbeaten by life and needed the pay. We had nothing against them as individuals; we simply didn’t want to be burdened with them.
   When we weren’t with these tutors we were supposed to stay at Avilion, either inside the house or on the grounds. But who was there to police us? The tutors were easy to elude, they didn’t know our secret pathways, and Reenie couldn’t keep track of us every minute, as she herself often pointed out. Whenever we could, we would steal away from Avilion and roam the town, despite Reenie’s belief that the world was full of criminals and anarchists and sinister Orientals with opium pipes, thin moustaches like twisted rope and long pointed fingernails, and dope fiends and white slavers, waiting to snatch us away and hold us to ransom for Father’s money.
   One of Reenie’s many brothers had something to do with cheap magazines, the pulpy, trashy kind you could buy in drugstores, and the worse ones you could get only under the counter. What was his job? Distribution, Reenie called it. Smuggling them into the country, I now believe. In any case he would sometimes give the leftovers to Reenie, and despite her efforts to conceal them from us we would get our hands on them sooner or later. Some of them were about romance, and although Reenie devoured these we had little use for them. We preferred—or I preferred, and Laura tagged along—those with stories about other lands or even other planets. Spaceships from the future, where women would wear very short skirts made of shiny fabric and everything would gleam; asteroids where the plants could talk, roamed by monsters with enormous eyes and fangs; long-ago countries inhabited by lithe girls with topaz eyes and opaline skin, dressed in cheesecloth trousers and little metal brassieres like two funnels joined by a chain. Heroes in harsh costumes, their winged helmets bristling with spikes.
   Silly, Reenie called these. Like nothing on earth. But that’s what I liked about them.
   The criminals and white, slavers were in the detective magazines, with their pistol-strewn, blood-drenched covers. In these, the wide-eyed heiresses to great fortunes were always being conked out with ether and tied up with clothesline—much more than was needed—and locked into yacht cabins or abandoned church crypts, or the dank cellars of castles. Laura and I believed in the existence of such men, but we weren’t too afraid of them, because we knew what to expect. They would have large, dark motor cars, and would be wearing overcoats and thick gloves and black fedoras, and we would be able to spot them immediately and run away.
   But we never saw any. The only hostile forces we encountered were the factory workers’ children, the younger ones, who didn’t yet know that we were supposed to be untouchable. They would follow us in twos and threes, silent and curious or calling names; once in a while they’d throw stones, although they never hit us. We were most vulner able to them when poking along the narrow path down beside the Louveteau, with the cliff overhead—things could be dropped on us there—or in back alleyways, which we learned to avoid.
   We would go along Erie Street, examining the store windows: the five and dime was our favourite. Or we would peer in through the chain-link fence at the primary school, which was for ordinary children—workers’ children—with its cinder playground and its high carved doorways marked Boys and Girls. At recess there was a lot of screaming, and the children were not clean, especially after they’d been fighting or had been pushed down onto the cinders. We were thankful that we didn’t have to attend this school. (Were we indeed thankful? Or, on the other hand, did we feel excluded? Perhaps both.)
   We wore hats for these excursions. We had the idea that they were a protection; that they made us, in a way, invisible. A lady never went out without her hat, said Reenie. She also said gloves, but we didn’t always bother with those. Straw hats are what I remember, from that time: not pale straw, a burnt colour. And the damp heat of June, the air drowsy with pollen. The blue glare of the sky. The indolence, the loitering.
   How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons—the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. And I do have them back, in a way; except now there won’t be much of whatever happens next.

   The tutor we had by this time had lasted longer than most. She was a forty-year-old woman with a wardrobe of faded cashmere cardigans that hinted at an earlier, more prosperous existence, and a roll of mouse-hair pinned to the back of her head. Her name was Miss Goreham—Miss Violet Goreham. I nicknamed her Miss Violence behind her back, because I thought it was such an unlikely combination, and after that I could scarcely look at her without giggling. The name stuck, though; I taught it to Laura, and then of course Reenie found out about it. She told us we were naughty to make fun of Miss Goreham in this way; the poor thing had come down in the world and deserved our pity, because she was an old maid. What was that? A woman with no husband. Miss Goreham had been doomed to a life of single blessedness, said Reenie with a trace of contempt.
   “But you don’t have a husband either,” said Laura.
   “That’s different,” said Reenie. “I never yet saw a man I’d stoop to blow my nose on, but I’ve turned away my share. I’ve had my offers.”
   “Maybe Miss Violence has too,” I said, just to be contradictory. I was approaching that age.
   “No,” said Reenie, “she hasn’t.”
   “How do you know?” said Laura.
   “You can tell by the look of her,” said Reenie. “Anyway if she’d had any offer at all, even if the man had three heads and a tail, she’d of grabbed him quick as a snake.”

   We got along with Miss Violence because she let us do what we liked. She realized early on that she lacked the forcefulness to control us, and had wisely decided not to bother trying. We took our lessons in the mornings, in the library, which had once been Grandfather Benjamin’s and was now Father’s, and Miss Violence simply gave us the run of it. The shelves were full of heavy leather-backed books with the titles stamped in dim gold, and I doubt that Grandfather Benjamin ever read them: they were only Grandmother Adelia’s idea of what he ought to have read.
   I’d pick out books that interested me: A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens; Macaulay’s histories; The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, illustrated. I read poetry, as well, and Miss Violence occasionally made a half-hearted attempt at teaching by having me read it out loud. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree. In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.
   “Don’t jog along,” said Miss Violence. “The lines should flow, dear. Pretend you’re a fountain.” Although she herself was lumpy and inelegant, she had high standards of delicacy and a long list of things she wanted us to pretend to be: flowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes. Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.
   “Don’t chew your coloured pencils, dear,” said Miss Violence to Laura. “You aren’t a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It’s bad for your teeth.”
   I read Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. “Beautiful,” sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.


And oh, the river runs swifter now;
The eddies circle about my bow.
Swirl, swirl!
How the ripples curl
In many a dangerous pool awhirl!


   “Stirring, dear,” said Miss Violence.
   Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God’s, in the opinion of Miss Violence.


With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall…
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”


   “Why did she wish that?” said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations.
   “It was love, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It was boundless love. But it was unrequited.”
   “Why?”
   Miss Violence sighed. “It’s a poem, dear,” she said. “Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”
   Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I’d already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.


Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.


   “Lovely, dear,” said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.
   There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia: The Rubåiyåt of Omar Khayyåm, by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn’t really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn’t try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced:


A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!


   She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they’d had on the bread. “Of course it wasn’t real wine, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It refers to the Communion Service.”


Would but some wingèd Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!



Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s Desire!


   “So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well—into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.
   Laura didn’t read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she’d colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she’d make a tree blue or red, she’d make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she’d do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.
   She liked to draw the pyramids, from a book on Egypt; she liked to colour in the Egyptian idols. Also Assyrian statues with the bodies of winged lions and the heads of eagles or men. That was from a book by Sir Henry Layard, who’d discovered the statues in the ruins of Nineveh and had them shipped to England; they were said to be illustrations of the angels described in the Book of Ezekiel. Miss Violence did not consider these pictures very nice—the statues looked pagan, and also bloodthirsty—but Laura was not to be deterred. In the face of criticism she would just crouch farther over the page and colour away as if her life depended on it.
   “Back straight, dear,” Miss Violence would say. “Pretend your spine is a tree, growing up towards the sun.” But Laura was not interested in this kind of pretending.
   “I don’t want to be a tree,” she would say.
   “Better a tree than a hunchback, dear,” Miss Violence would sigh, “and if you don’t pay attention to your posture, that’s what you’ll turn into.”

   Much of the time Miss Violence sat by the window and read romantic novels from the lending library. She also liked to leaf through my Grandmother Adelia’s tooled-leather scrapbooks, with their dainty embossed invitations carefully glued in, their menus printed up at the newspaper office, and the subsequent newspaper clippings—the charity teas, the improving lectures illustrated by lantern slides—the hardy, amiable travellers to Paris and Greece and even India, the Sweden-borgians, the Fabians, the Vegetarians, all the various promoters of self-improvement, with once in a while something truly outré—a missionary to Africa, or the Sahara, or New Guinea, describing how the natives practised witchcraft or hid their women behind elaborate wooden masks or decorated the skulls of their ancestors with red paint and cowrie shells. All the yellowing paper evidence of that luxurious, ambitious, relentless vanished life, which Miss Violence pored over inch by inch, as if remembering it, smiling with gentle vicarious pleasure.
   She had a packet of tinsel stars, gold and silver, which she would stick onto things we’d done. Sometimes she took us out to collect wildflowers, which we pressed between two sheets of blotting paper, with a heavy book on top. We grew fond of her, although we didn’t cry when she left. She cried, however—wetly, inelegantly, the way she did everything.

   I became thirteen. I’d been growing, in ways that were not my fault, although they seemed to annoy Father as much as if they had been. He began to take an interest in my posture, in my speech, in my deportment generally. My clothing should be simple and plain, with white blouses and dark pleated skirts, and dark velvet dresses for church. Clothes that looked like uniforms—that looked like sailor suits, but were not. My shoulders should be straight, with no slouching. I should not sprawl, chew gum, fidget, or chatter. The values he required were those of the army: neatness, obedience, silence, and no evident sexuality. Sexuality, although it was never spoken of, was to be nipped in the bud. He had let me run wild for too long. It was time for me to be taken in hand.
   Laura came in for some of this hectoring too, although she had not yet reached the age for it. (What was the age for it? The pubescent age, it’s clear to me now. But then I was merely confused. What crime had I committed? Why was I being treated like the inmate of some curious reform school?)
   “You’re being too hard on the kiddies,” said Callista. “They’re not boys.”
   “Unfortunately,” said Father.

   It was Callista I went to on the day I found I had developed a horrible disease, because blood was seeping out from between my legs: surely I was dying! Callista laughed. Then she explained. “It’s just a nuisance,” she said. She said I should refer to it as “my friend,” or else “a visitor.” Reenie had more Presbyterian ideas. “It’s the curse,” she said. She stopped short of saying that it was yet one more peculiar arrangement of God’s, devised to make life disagreeable: it was just the way things were, she said. As for the blood, you tore up rags. (She did not say blood, she said mess. ) She made me a cup of chamomile tea, which tasted the way spoiled lettuce smelled; also a hot-water bottle, for the cramps. Neither one helped.
   Laura found a splotch of blood on my bedsheets and began to weep. She concluded that I was dying. I would die like Mother, she sobbed, without telling her first. I would have a little grey baby like a kitten and then I would die.
   I told her not to be an idiot. I said this blood had nothing to do with babies. (Callista hadn’t gone into that part, having no doubt decided that too much of this kind of information at once might warp my psyche.)
   “It’ll happen to you one day too,” I said to Laura. “When you’re my age. It’s a thing that happens to girls.”
   Laura was indignant. She refused to believe it. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.

   There’s a studio portrait of Laura and me, taken at this time. I’m wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me: I have, noticeably, what used to be called bosoms. Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile, as if the two things are the same: it’s a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father’s. We were afraid of them, but did not know how to avoid them.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

   Father had decided, correctly enough, that our education had been neglected. He wanted us taught French, but also Mathematics and Latin—brisk mental exercises that would act as a corrective for our excessive dreaminess. Geography too would be bracing. Although he’d barely noticed her during her tenure, he decreed that Miss Violence and her lax, musty, rose-tinted ways must be scrubbed away. He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core. He didn’t understand why we liked what we liked. He wanted us turned into the semblances of boys, one way or another. Well, what do you expect? He’d never had sisters.
   In the place of Miss Violence, he engaged a man called Mr. Erskine, who’d once taught at a boys’ school in England but had been packed off to Canada, suddenly, for his health. He did not seem at all unhealthy to us: he never coughed, for instance. He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.
   It was soon clear that inattentiveness and staring at Mr. Erskine’s forehead would not rid us of him. First of all he gave us tests, to determine what we knew. Not much, it appeared, though more than we saw fit to divulge. He then told Father that we had the brains of insects or marmots. We were nothing short of deplorable, and it was a wonder we were not cretins. We had developed slothful mental habits—we had been allowed to develop them, he added reprovingly. Happily, it was not too late. My father said that in that case Mr. Erskine should work us up into shape.
   To us, Mr. Erskine said that our laziness, our arrogance, our tendency to lollygag and daydream, and our sloppy sentimentality had all but ruined us for the serious business of life. No one expected us to be geniuses, and it would be conferring no favours if we were, but there was surely a minimum, even for girls: we would be nothing but encumbrances to any man foolish enough to marry us unless we were made to pull up our socks.
   He ordered a large stack of school exercise books, the cheap kind with ruled lines and flimsy cardboard covers. He ordered a supply of plain lead pencils, with erasers. These were the magic wands, he said, by means of which we were about to transform ourselves, with his assistance.
   He said assistance with a smirk.
   He threw out Miss Goreham’s tinsel stars.
   The library was too distracting for us, he said. He asked for and received two school desks, which he installed in one of the extra bedrooms; he had the bed removed, along with all the other furniture, so there was just the bare room left. The door locked with a key, and he had the key. Now we would be able to roll up our sleeves and get down to it.
   Mr. Erskine’s methods were direct. He was a hair-puller, an ear-twister. He would whack the desks beside our fingers with his ruler, and the actual fingers too, or cuff us across the back of the head when exasperated, or, as a last resort, hurl books at us or hit us across the backs of our legs. His sarcasm was withering, at least to me: Laura frequently thought he meant exactly what he said, which angered him further. He was not moved by tears; in fact I believe he enjoyed them.
   He was not like this every day. Things would go along on an even keel for a week at a time. He might display patience, even a sort of clumsy kindness. Then there would be an outburst, and he would go on the rampage. Never knowing what he might do, or when he might do it, was the worst.
   We could not complain to Father, because wasn’t Mr. Erskine acting under his orders? He said he was. But we complained to Reenie, of course. She was outraged. I was too old to be treated like that, she said, and Laura was too nervous, and both of us were—well, who did he think he was? Raised in a gutter and putting on airs, like all the English who ended up over here, thinking they could lord it, and if he took a bath once a month she’d eat her own shirt. When Laura came to Reenie with welts on the palms of her hands, Reenie confronted Mr. Erskine, but was told to mind her own business. She was the one who’d spoiled us, said Mr. Erskine. She’d spoiled us with overindulgence and babying—that much was obvious—and now it was up to him to repair the damage she had done.
   Laura said that unless Mr. Erskine went away, she would go away herself. She would run away. She would jump out the window.
   “Don’t do that, my pet,” said Reenie. “We’ll put on our thinking caps. We’ll fix his wagon!”
   “He hasn’t got a wagon,” sobbed Laura.
   Callista Fitzsimmons might have been some help, but she could see which way the wind was blowing: we weren’t her children, we were Father’s. He had chosen his course of action, and it would have been a tactical mistake for her to meddle. It was a case of sauve qui peut, an expression which, due to Mr. Erskine’s diligence, I could now translate.
   Mr. Erskine’s idea of Mathematics was simple enough: we needed to know how to balance household accounts, which meant adding and subtracting and double-entry bookkeeping.
   His idea of French was verb forms and Phaedra, with a reliance on pithy maxims from noted authors. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait —Estienne; C’est de quoi j’ ai le plus de peur que la peur —Montaigne; Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point —Pascal; L’histoire, cette vieille dame exaltée et menteuse —de Maupassant. Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains —Flaubert. Dieu s’est fait homme; soit. Le diable s’ est fait femme —Victor Hugo. And so forth.
   His idea of Geography was the capital cities of Europe. His idea of Latin was Caesar subduing the Gauls and crossing the Rubicon, alea iacta est; and, after that, selections from Virgil’s Aeneid —he was fond of the suicide of Dido—or from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the parts where unpleasant things were done by the gods to various young women. The rape of Europa by a large white bull, of Leda by a swan, of Danae by a shower of gold—these would at least hold our attention, he said, with his ironic smile. He was right about that. For a change, he would have us translate Latin love poems of a cynical kind. Odi et amo —that sort of thing. He got a kick out of watching us struggle with the poets’ bad opinions of the kinds of girls we were apparently destined to be.
   “Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum,” said Mr. Erskine. “‘To seize and carry off.’ The English word rapture comes from the same root. Decline.” Smack went the ruler.
   We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks—well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up our translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather’s library—old translations by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we’d done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our translations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn’t learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery. We also learned how to make our faces blank and stiff, as if they’d been starched. It was best not to react to Mr. Erskine in any visible way, especially not by flinching.
   For a while Laura became alert to Mr. Erskine, but physical pain—her own pain, that is—did not have much of a hold over her. Her attention would wander away, even when he was shouting. He had such a limited range. She would gaze at the wallpaper—a design of rosebuds and ribbons—or out the window. She developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye—one minute she’d be focused on you, the next she’d be elsewhere. Or rather you would be elsewhere: she’d dismiss you, as if she’d waved an invisible wand; as if it was you yourself who’d been made to vanish.
   Mr. Erskine could not stand being negated in this fashion. He took to shaking her—to snap her out of it, he said. You’re not the Sleeping Beauty, he would yell. Sometimes he threw her against the wall, or shook her with his hands around her neck. When he shook her she’d close her eyes and go limp, which incensed him further. At first I tried to intervene, but it did no good. I would simply be pushed aside with one swipe of his tweedy, malodorous arm.
   “Don’t annoy him,” I said to Laura.
   “It doesn’t matter whether I annoy him or not,” said Laura. “Anyway, he’s not annoyed. He only wants to put his hand up my blouse.”
   “I’ve never seen him do that,” I said. “Why would he?”
   “He does it when you’re not looking,” said Laura. “Or under my skirt. What he likes is panties.” She said it so calmly I thought she must have made it up, or misunderstood. Misunderstood Mr. Erskine’s hands, their intentions. What she’d described was so implausible. It didn’t seem to me like the sort of thing a grown-up man would do, or be interested in doing at all, because wasn’t Laura only a little girl?
   “Shouldn’t we tell Reenie?” I asked tentatively.
   “She might not believe me,” said Laura. “You don’t.”

   But Reenie did believe her, or she elected to believe her, and that was the end of Mr. Erskine. She knew better than to take him on in single combat: he would just accuse Laura of telling dirty lies, and then things would be worse than ever. Four days later she marched into Father’s office at the button factory with a handful of contraband photographs. They weren’t the sort of thing that would raise more than an eyebrow today, but they were scandalous then—women in black stockings with pudding-shaped breasts spilling out over their gigantic brassières, the same women with nothing on at all, in contorted, splay-legged positions. She said she’d found them under Mr. Erskine’s bed when she’d been sweeping out his room, and was this the sort of man who ought to be trusted with Captain Chase’s young daughters?
   There was an interested audience, which included a group of factory workers and Father’s lawyer and, incidentally, Reenie’s future husband, Ron Hincks. The sight of Reenie, her dimpled cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing like an avenging Fury’s, the black snail of her hair coming unpinned, brandishing a clutch of huge-boobed, bushy-tailed, bare-naked women, was too much for him. Mentally he fell on his knees before her, and from that day on he began his pursuit of her, which was in the end successful. But that is another story.
   If there was one thing Port Ticonderoga would not stand for, said Father’s lawyer in an advisory tone, it was this kind of smut in the hands of the teachers of innocent youth. Father realized he could not keep Mr. Erskine in the house after that without being considered an ogre.
   (I have long suspected Reenie of having got hold of the photographs herself, from the brother who was in the magazine distribution business, and who could easily have managed it. I suspect Mr. Erskine was guiltless in respect of these photographs. If anything, his tastes ran to children, not to large brassieres. But by that time he could not expect fair play from Reenie.)
   Mr. Erskine departed, protesting his innocence—indignant, but also shaken. Laura said that her prayers had been answered. She said she’d prayed to have Mr. Erskine expelled from our house, and that God had heard her. Reenie, she said, had been doing His will, filthy pictures and all. I wondered what God thought of that, supposing He existed—a thing I increasingly doubted.
   Laura, on the other hand, had taken to religion in a serious way during Mr. Erskine’s tenure: she was still frightened of God, but forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another, she’d chosen the one that was bigger, and also farther away.
   Once the choice had been made she took it to extremes, as she took everything. “I’m going to become a nun,” she announced placidly, while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches at the kitchen table.
   “You can’t,” said Reenie. “They wouldn’t have you. You’re not a Catholic.”
   “I could become one,” said Laura. “I could join up.”
   “Well,” said Reenie, “you’ll have to cut off your hair. Underneath those veils of theirs, a nun is bald as an egg.”
   This was a shrewd move of Reenie’s. Laura hadn’t known about that. If she had one vanity, it was her hair. “Why do they?” she said.
   “They think God wants them to. They think God wants them to offer up their hair to him, which just goes to show how ignorant they are. What would he want with it?” said Reenie. “The idea! All that hair!”
   “What do they do with the hair?” said Laura. “Once it’s been cut off.”
   Reenie was snapping beans: snap, snap, snap. “It gets turned into wigs, for, rich women,” she said. She didn’t miss a beat, but I knew this was a fib, like her earlier stories about babies being made from dough. “Snooty-nosed rich women. You wouldn’t want to see your lovely hair walking around on someone else’s big fat mucky-muck head.”
   Laura gave up the idea of being a nun, or so it seemed; but who could tell what she might fall for next? She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defence.

   Several years had now gone by—wasted, as it were, on Mr. Erskine. Though I shouldn’t say wasted: I’d learned many things from him, although not always the things he’d set out to teach. In addition to lying and cheating, I’d learned half-concealed insolence and silent resistance. I’d learned that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I’d learned not to get caught.
   Meanwhile the Depression had set in. Father didn’t lose much in the Crash, but he lost some. He also lost his margin of error. He ought to have shut down the factories in response to lessened demand; he ought to have banked his money—hoarded it, as others in his position were doing. That would have been the sensible thing. But he didn’t do that. He couldn’t bear to. He couldn’t bear to throw his men out of work. He owed them allegiance, these men of his. Never mind that some of them were women.
   A meagreness settled over Avilion. Our bedrooms became cold in winter, our sheets threadbare. Reenie cut them down the worn-out middles, then sewed the sides together. A number of the rooms were shut off; most of the servants were let go. There was no longer a gardener, and the weeds crept stealthily in. Father said he would need our cooperation to keep things going—to get through this bad patch. We could help Reenie in the house, he said, since we were so averse to Latin and mathematics. We could learn how to stretch a dollar. That meant, in practice, beans or salt cod or rabbits for dinner, and darning our own stockings.
   Laura refused to eat the rabbits. They looked like skinned babies, she said. You’d have to be a cannibal to eat them.
   Reenie said Father was too good for his own good. She also said he was too prideful. A man should admit when he was beat. She didn’t know what things were coming to, but rack and ruin was the likeliest outcome.

   I was now sixteen. My formal education, such as it was, had come to an end. I was hanging around, but for what? What would become of me next?
   Reenie had her preferences. She’d taken to reading Mayfair magazine, with its descriptions of society festivities, and the social pages in the newspapers—the weddings, the charity balls, the luxury vacations. She memorized lists of names—names of the prominent, of cruise ships, of good hotels. I ought to be given a début, she said, with all the proper trimmings—teas to meet the important society mothers, receptions and fashionable outings, a formal dance with eligible young men invited. Avilion would be filled with well-dressed people again, as in the old days; there would be string quartets, and torches on the lawn. Our family was at least as good as the families whose daughters were provided for in this way—as good, or better. Father ought to have kept some money in the bank just for that. If only my mother had remained alive, Reenie said, everything would have been done up right.
   I doubted that. From what I’d heard about Mother, she might have insisted I be sent to school—the Alma Ladies’ College, or some such worthy, dreary institution—to learn something functional but equally dreary, like shorthand; but as for a début, that would have been vanity. She’d never had one herself.
   Grandmother Adelia was different, and far enough removed in time so that I could idealize her. She would have taken pains with me; she’d have spared no scheme or expense. I mooned around in the library, studying the pictures of her that still hung on the walls: the portrait in oils, done in 1900, in which she wore a sphinx-like smile and a dress the colour of dried red roses, with a plunging neckline from which her bare throat emerged abruptly, like an arm from behind a magician’s curtain; the gilt-framed black-and-white photographs, showing her in picture hats, or with ostrich feathers, or in evening gowns with tiaras and white kid gloves, alone or with various now-forgotten dignitaries. She would have sat me down and given me the necessary advice: how to dress, what to say, how to behave on all occasions. How to avoid making myself ridiculous, for which I could already see there was ample scope. Despite her ferretings in the society pages, Reenie didn’t know enough for that.

The button factory picnic

   The Labour Day weekend has come and gone, leaving a detritus of plastic cups and floating bottles and gently withering balloons in the backwash of the river’s eddies. Now September is asserting itself. Though at noon the sun is no less hot, morning by morning it rises later, trailing mist, and in the cooler evenings the crickets rasp and creak. Wild asters cluster in the garden, having rooted themselves there some time ago—tiny white ones, others bushier and sky-coloured, others with rusty stems, a deeper purple. Once, in my days of desultory gardening, I would have branded them weeds and pulled them out. Now I no longer make such distinctions.
   It’s better weather for walking now, not so much glare and shimmer. The tourists are thinning out, and those remaining are at least decently covered: no more giant shorts and bulging sun-dresses, no more poached red legs.
   Today I set out for the Camp Grounds. I set out, but when I was halfway there Myra came by in her car and offered me a lift, and I’m ashamed to say I accepted it: I was out of breath, I’d already realized it was too far. Myra wanted to know where I was going, and why—she must have inherited the sheep-herding instinct, from Reenie. I told her where; as for the why, I said I just wanted to see the place again, for old times’ sake. Too dangerous, she said: you never knew what might be crawling through the undergrowth out there. She made me promise to sit down on a park bench, out in plain view, and wait for her. She said she’d come back in an hour to collect me.
   More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
   The Camp Grounds isn’t much to look at. It’s a stretch of land between the road and the Jogues River—an acre or two—with trees and scrubby brushwood on it, and mosquitoes in spring, from the swampy patch in the middle. Herons hunt there; you can sometimes hear their hoarse cries, like a stick scraped on rough tin. Now and then a few bird-watchers poke about in the woebegone way they have, as if looking for something they’ve lost.
   In the shadows there are glints of silver, from cigarette packs, and the pallid, deflated tubers of tossed condoms, and discarded squares of Kleenex lacy with rain. Dogs and cats stake their claims, avid couples sneak in among the trees, though less than they used to—there are so many other options now. Drunks sleep under the denser bushes in summer, and teenaged kids sometimes go there to smoke and sniff whatever they smoke and sniff. Candle stubs have been found, and burned spoons, and the odd throwaway needle. I hear all this from Myra, who thinks it’s a disgrace. She knows what the candle stubs and spoons are for: they are drug paraphernalia. Vice is everywhere, it seems. Et in Arcadia ego.
   A decade or two ago there was an attempt to clean this area up. A sign was erected—The Colonel Parkman Park, which sounded inane—and three rustic picnic tables and a plastic waste bin and a couple of portable toilet cubicles were placed there, for the convenience of out-of-town visitors it was said, though these preferred to guzzle their beer and strew their trash somewhere with a clearer view of the river. Then a few trigger-happy lads used the sign for shotgun practice, and the tables and toilets were removed by the provincial government—something to do with budgets—and the waste bin never got emptied, although it was frequently pillaged by raccoons; so they took that away as well, and now the place is reverting.
   It’s called the Camp Grounds because that was where the religious camp meetings used to be held, with big tents like a circus and fervent, imported preachers. In those days the space was better tended, or else more trampled down. Small travelling fairs pitched their booths and rides and tethered their ponies and donkeys, parades wound themselves up there, and dispersed into picnics. It was a place for gatherings of any outdoor kind.
   This was where the Chase and Sons Labour Day Celebration used to be held. That was the formal name, though people just called it the button factory picnic. It was always the Saturday before the official Monday Labour Day, with its earnest rhetoric and marching bands and homemade banners. There were balloons and a merry-go-round, and harmless, foolish games—sack races, egg-and-spoon, relay races in which the baton was a carrot. Barbershop quartets would sing, not too badly; the Scouts bugle corps would honk its way through a number or two; squads of children performed Highland flings and Irish step-dances on a raised wooden platform like a boxing ring, the music provided by a wind-up gramophone. There was a Best-Dressed Pet contest, and also one for babies. The food was corn on the cob, potato salad, hot dogs. Ladies’ Auxiliaries put on bake sales in aid of this or that, offering pies and cookies and cakes, and jars of jam and chutney and pickles, each with a first-name label: Rhoda’s Chow-chow, Pearl’s Plum Compote.
   There was horsing around—hijinks. Nothing stronger than lemonade was served over the counter, but the men brought flasks and mickeys, and as dusk came on there might be scuffles, or shouting and raucous laughter through the trees, followed by splashes along the shore as some man or youth was thrown in fully dressed, or else minus his pants. The Jogues was shallow enough along there so almost nobody drowned. After dark there were fireworks. In the heyday of this picnic, or what I recall as its heyday, there was also square dancing, with fiddles. But by the year I’m remembering now, which is 1934, that sort of excess gaiety had been curtailed.
   About three in the afternoon Father would make a speech, from the step-dancing platform. It was always a short speech, but it was listened to attentively by the older men; also by the women, since they either worked for the company themselves or were married to someone who did. As times got harder, even the younger men began to listen to the speech; even the girls, in their summer dresses and semi-bared arms. The speech never said much, but you could read between the lines. “Reason to be pleased” was good; “grounds for optimism” was bad.
   That year the weather was hot and dry, as it had been for too long. There hadn’t been as many balloons as usual; there was no merry-go-round. The corn on the cob was too old, the kernels wrinkled like knuckles; the lemonade was watery, the hot dogs ran out early. Still, there had been no layoffs at Chase Industries, not yet. Slowdowns, but no layoffs.
   Father said “grounds for optimism” four times, but “reason to be pleased” not once. There were anxious looks.
   When Laura and I were younger we’d enjoyed this picnic; now we didn’t, but our presence was a duty. We had to show the flag. That had been drummed into us from an early age: Mother had always made a point of going, no matter how unwell she might have been feeling.
   After Mother had died and Reenie had taken over the running of us, she’d paid scrupulous attention to our outfits for this day: not too casual, because this would be contemptuous, as if we didn’t care what the townspeople thought of us; but not too dressed-up either, because that would be lording it over. By now we were old enough to pick out our own clothes—I’d just turned eighteen, Laura was fourteen and a half—though we no longer had as many options to choose from. The overblown display of luxury had always been discouraged in our household, though we’d had what Reenie called good things, but recently the definition of luxury had narrowed down so it had come to mean anything new. For the picnic we both wore our blue dirndl skirts and white blouses from the summer before. Laura had my hat from three seasons ago; I myself had last year’s hat, with the ribbon changed.
   Laura didn’t seem to mind. I did though. I said so, and Laura said I was worldly.
   We listened to the speech. (Or I listened. Laura had the attitude of listening—eyes wide, head cocked attentively to one side—but you could never tell what she was listening to.) Father had always managed to carry off this speech, no matter what he might have been drinking, but this time he stumbled over the text. He moved the typed page closer to his good eye, then farther away, with a perplexed stare, as if it Was a bill for something he hadn’t ordered. His clothes used to be elegant, then they’d become elegant but well worn, but by that day they verged on the seedy. His hair was ragged around the ears, in need of a trim; he seemed harried—ferocious even, like a highwayman cornered. After the speech, for which there was no more than dutiful applause, some of the men gathered in close groups, talking among themselves in lowered voices. Others sat under the trees, on outspread jackets or blankets, or lay down with handkerchiefs over their faces and dozed off. Only men did this; the women remained awake, watchful. Mothers herded their young children down to the river, to paddle at the gritty little beach there. Off to the side a dusty baseball game had started up; an eddy of spectators watched it groggily.
   I went to help Reenie at her bake sale. What was it in aid of? I can’t recall. But I did this helping every year now—it was expected. I told Laura she ought to come too, but she acted as though she hadn’t heard me and strolled off, dangling her hat by its floppy brim.
   I let her go. I was supposed to keep an eye on her: Reenie didn’t waste any sleep on my account, but Laura in her opinion was altogether too confiding, too cozy with strangers. The white slavers were always on the prowl, and Laura was their natural target. She’d get into a strange car, open an unfamiliar door, cross the wrong street, and that would be that, because she didn’t draw lines, or not where other people drew them, and you couldn’t warn her because she didn’t understand such warnings. It wasn’t that she flouted rules: she simply forgot about them.
   I was tired of keeping an eye on Laura, who didn’t appreciate it. I was tired of being held accountable for her lapses, her failures to comply. I was tired of being held accountable, period. I wanted to go to Europe, or to New York, or even to Montreal—to nightclubs, to soirees, to all the exciting places mentioned in Reenie’s social magazines—but I was needed at home. Needed at home, needed at home —it sounded like a life sentence. Worse, like a dirge. I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden-variety button and of lower-priced long Johns for budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen to me, I would end up an old maid like Miss Violence, pitied and derided. This at bottom was my fear. I wanted to be elsewhere, but I saw no way to get there. Once in a while I found myself hoping that I would be abducted by white slavers, even though I didn’t believe in them. At least it would be a change.
   The bake-sale table had an awning over it, and tea towels or pieces of waxed paper shielding the goods from flies. Reenie had contributed pies, not a form of baking she ever truly mastered. Her pies had gluey, underdone fillings, and crusts that were tough but flexible, like beige kelp or huge leathery mushrooms. In better times they sold well enough—it was understood that they were ceremonial objects, not food as such—but they weren’t moving briskly today. Money was in short supply, and in exchange for it people wanted something they could actually eat.
   As I stood behind the table, Reenie in an undertone retailed the latest news. Four men had been thrown into the river already, with the sky still blazing white, and not altogether in fun. There had been arguments, having to do with politics, said Reenie; voices had been raised. Apart from the usual river shenanigans, there had been scuffles. Elwood Murray had been knocked down. He was the editor of the weekly paper, having inherited it from two generations of newspaper Murrays: he wrote most of it, and took the pictures for it as well. Luckily he hadn’t been ducked, as that would have damaged his camera, which had cost a good deal of money even second-hand, as Reenie happened to know. He had a nosebleed, and was sitting under a tree with a glass of lemonade and two women fussing around him with dampened handkerchiefs; I could see him from where I was standing.
   Was it political, this knocking-down? Reenie didn’t know, but people didn’t like him listening in on what they were saying. In prosperous times Elwood Murray was considered a fool, and maybe what Reenie called a pansy—well, he wasn’t married, and at his age that had to mean something—but he was tolerated and even appreciated, within decent limits, as long as he put in all the names for social events and got them spelled right. But these were not prosperous times, and Elwood Murray was too nosy for his own good. You don’t want every little thing about you written up, said Reenie. Nobody in their right mind would want that.
   I caught sight of Father, walking among the picnicking workers with his lopsided gait. He was nodding in his abrupt way at this man and that, a nod in which his head appeared to move back on his neck rather than forward. His black eye-patch turned from side to side; from a distance it looked like a hole in his head. His moustache curved like a single dark sideways tusk above his mouth, which clenched now and then into something he must have intended for a smile. His hands were hidden in his pockets.
   Beside him was a younger man, a little taller than Father, though unlike Father he had no rumples, no angles. Sleek was the word you thought of. He was wearing a natty Panama and a linen suit that appeared to emit light, it was so fresh and clean. He was very obviously from out of town.
   “Who’s that with Father?” I said to Reenie.
   Reenie looked without appearing to look, then gave a short laugh. “That’s Mr. Royal Classic, in the flesh. He certainly has the nerve.”
   “I thought it must be him,” I said.
   Mr. Royal Classic was Richard Griffen, of Royal Classic Knitwear in Toronto. Our workers—Father’s workers—referred to it derisively as Royal Classic Shitwear, because Mr. Griffen was not only Father’s chief competitor, he was also an adversary of sorts. He’d attacked Father in the press for being too soft on the unemployed, on Relief, and on pinkos generally. Also on unions, which was gratuitous because Port Ticonderoga did not have any unions in it and Father’s dim views on them were no secret. But now for some reason, Father had invited Richard Griffen to dinner at Avilion, following the picnic, and on very short notice as well. Only four days.
   Reenie felt Mr. Griffen had been sprung on her. As everyone knew, you had to put on a better show for your enemies than for your friends, and four days was not long enough for her to prepare for such an event, especially considering that there hadn’t been any of what you’d call fine dining at Avilion since the days of Grandmother Adelia. True, Callie Fitzsimmons sometimes brought friends for the weekend, but that was different, because they were only artists and should be grateful for whatever they were given. They would sometimes be found in the kitchen at night, raiding the pantry, making their own sandwiches out of leftovers. The bottomless pits, Reenie called them.
   “He’s new money, anyhow,” said Reenie scornfully, surveying Richard Griffen. “Look at the fancy pants.” She was unforgiving of anyone who criticized Father (anyone, that is, except herself), and scornful of those who rose in the world and then acted above their level, or what she considered their level; and it was a known fact that the Griffens were common as dirt, or at least their grandfather was. He’d got hold of his business through cheating the Jews, said Reenie in an ambiguous tone—was this something of a feat, in her books?—but exactly how he had done it she couldn’t say. (In fairness, Reenie may have invented these slurs on the Griffens. She sometimes attributed to people the histories she felt they ought to have had.)
   Behind Father and Mr. Griffen, walking with Callie Fitzsimmons, was a woman I assumed was Richard Griffen’s wife—youngish, thin, stylish, trailing diaphanous orange-tinted muslin like the steam from a watery tomato soup. Her picture hat was green, as were her high-heeled slingbacks and a wispy scarf affair she’d draped around her neck. She was overdressed for the picnic. As I watched, she stopped and lifted one foot and peered back over her shoulder to see if there was something stuck on her heel. I hoped there was. Still, I thought how nice it would be to have such lovely clothes, such wicked new-money clothes, instead of the virtuous, dowdy, down-at-heels garments that were our mode of necessity these days.
   “Where’s Laura?” said Reenie in sudden alarm.
   “I have no idea,” I said. I had gotten into the habit of snapping at Reenie, especially when she bossed me around. You’re not my mother had become my most withering riposte.
   “You should know better than to let her out of your sight,” said Reenie. “ Anybody could be here.” Anybody was one of her bugbears. You never knew what intrusions, what thefts and gaffes anybody might commit.
   I found Laura sitting on the grass under a tree, talking with a young man—a man, not a boy—a darkish man, with a light-coloured hat. His style was indeterminate—not a factory worker, but not anything else either, or nothing definite. No tie, but then it was a picnic. A blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges. An impromptu, a proletarian mode. A lot of young men were affecting it then—a lot of university students. In the winters they wore knitted vests, with horizontal stripes.
   “Hello,” said Laura. “Where did you go off to? This is my sister Iris, this is Alex.”
   “Mister…?” I said. How had Laura got on a first-name basis so quickly?
   “Alex Thomas,” said the young man. He was polite but cautious. He scrambled to his feet and reached out his hand, and I took it. Then I found myself sitting down beside them. It seemed the best thing to do, in order to protect Laura.
   “You’re from out of town, Mr. Thomas?”
   “Yes. I’m visiting people here.” He sounded like what Reenie would call a nice young man, meaning not poor. But not rich either.
   “He’s a friend of Callie’s,” said Laura. “She was just here, she introduced us. He came on the same train with her.” She was explaining a little too much.
   “Did you meet Richard Griffen?” I said to Laura. “He was with Father. The one who’s coming to dinner?”
   “Richard Griffen, the sweatshop tycoon?” said the young man.
   “Alex—Mr. Thomas knows about ancient Egypt,” said Laura. “He was telling me about hieroglyphs.” She looked at him. I’d never seen her look at anyone else in quite the same way. Startled, dazzled? Hard to put a name to such a look.
   “That sounds interesting,” I said. I could hear my voice pronouncing interesting in that sneering way people have. I needed some way of telling this Alex Thomas that Laura was only fourteen, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make her angry.
   Alex Thomas produced a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket—Craven A’s, as I recall. He tapped one out for himself. I was a little surprised that he smoked ready-mades—it didn’t go with his shirt. Packaged cigarettes were a luxury: the factory workers rolled their own, some with one hand.
   “Thank you, I will,” I said. I’d only smoked a few cigarettes before, and those on the sly, filched from the silver box of them kept on top of the piano. He looked hard at me, which I suppose was what I’d wanted, then offered the package. He lit a match with his thumb, held it for me.
   “You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.”
   Elwood Murray appeared before us, upright and jaunty again. The front of his shirt was still damp and splashed with pink, from where the women with the wet handkerchiefs had tried to get out the blood; the insides of his nostrils were ringed in dark red.
   “Hello, Mr. Murray,” said Laura. “Are you all right?”
   “Some of the boys got a little carried away,” said Elwood Murray, as if shyly revealing that he’d won some sort of a prize. “It was all in good fun. May I?” Then he took our picture with his flash camera. He always said May I before taking a picture for the paper but he never waited for the answer. Alex Thomas raised his hand as if to fend him off.
   “I know these two lovely ladies, of course,” Elwood Murray said to him, “but your name is?”
   Reenie was suddenly there. Her hat was askew, and she was red in the face and breathless. “Your father’s been looking all over for you,” she said.
   I knew this to be untrue. Nevertheless Laura and I had to get up from the shade of the tree and brush our skirts down and go with her, like ducklings being herded.
   Alex Thomas waved us goodbye. It was a sardonic wave, or so I thought.
   “Don’t you know any better?” Reenie said. “Sprawled on the grass with Lord knows who. And for heaven’s sakes, Iris, throw away that cigarette, you’re not a tramp. What if your father sees you?”
   “Father smokes like a furnace,” I said, in what I hoped was an insolent tone.
   “That’s different,” said Reenie.
   “Mr. Thomas,” said Laura. “Mr. Alex Thomas. He is a student of divinity. Or he was until recently,” she added scrupulously. “He lost his faith. His conscience would not let him continue.”
   Alex Thomas’s conscience had evidently made a big impression on Laura, but it cut no ice with Reenie. “What’s he working at now, then?” she said. “Something fishy, or I’m a Chinaman. He has a slippery look.”
   “What’s wrong with him?” I said to Reenie. I hadn’t liked him, but surely he was now being judged without a hearing.
   “What’s right with him, is more like it,” said Reenie. “Rolling around on the lawn in full view of everyone.” She was talking more to me than to Laura. “At least you had your skirt tucked in.” Reenie said a girl alone with a man should be able to hold a dime between her knees. She was always afraid that people—men—would see our legs, the part above the knee. Of women who allowed this to happen, she would say: Curtain’s up, where’s the show? Or, Might as well hang out a sign. Or, more balefully, She’s asking for it, she’ll get what’s coming to her, or, in the worst cases, She’s an accident waiting to happen.
   “We weren’t rolling,” Laura said. “There was no hill.”
   “Rolling or not, you know what I mean,” said Reenie.
   “We weren’t doing anything,” I said. “We were talking.”
   “That’s beside the point,” said Reenie. “People could see you.”
   “Next time we’re not doing anything we’ll hide in the bushes,” I said.
   “Who is he anyway?” said Reenie, who usually ignored my head-on challenges, since by now there was nothing she could do about them. Who is he meant Who are his parents.
   “He’s an orphan,” said Laura. “He was adopted, from an orphanage. A Presbyterian minister and his wife adopted him.” She seemed to have winkled this information out of Alex Thomas in a very short time, but this was one of her skills, if it can be called that—she’d just keep on asking questions, of the personal kind we’d been taught were rude, until the other person, in shame or outrage, would be forced to stop answering.
   “An orphan!” said Reenie. “He could be anybody!”
   “What’s wrong with orphans?” I said. I knew what was wrong with them in Reenie’s books: they didn’t know who their fathers were, and that made them unreliable, if not downright degenerate. Born in a ditch was how Reenie would put it. Born in a ditch, left on a doorstep.
   “They can’t be trusted,” said Reenie. “They worm their way in. They don’t know where to draw the line.”
   “Well anyway,” said Laura, “I’ve invited him to dinner.”
   “Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread,” said Reenie.

Loaf givers

   There’s a wild plum tree at the back of the garden, on the other side of the fence. It’s ancient, gnarled, the branches knuckled with black knot. Walter says it should come down, but I’ve pointed out that, technically speaking, it isn’t mine. In any case, I have a fondness for it. It blossoms every spring, unasked, untended; in the late summer it drops plums into my garden, small blue oval ones with a bloom on them like dust. Such generosity. I picked up the last windfalls this morning—those few the squirrels and raccoons and drunken yellow-jackets had left me—and ate them greedily, the juice of their bruised flesh bloodying my chin. I didn’t notice it until Myra dropped by with another of her tuna casseroles. My goodness, she said, with her breathless avian laugh. Who’ve you been fighting?

   I remember that Labour Day dinner in every detail, because it was the only time all of us were ever in the same room together.
   The revels were still going on out at the Camp Grounds, but not in any form you’d want to witness close up, as the surreptitious consumption of cheap liquor was now in full swing. Laura and I had left early, to help Reenie with the dinner preparations.
   These had been going on for some days. As soon as Reenie had been informed about the party, she’d dug out her one cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. It wasn’t hers really: it had belonged to Grandmother Adelia, who’d consulted it—along with her various cooks, of course—when planning her twelve-course dinners. Reenie had inherited it, although she didn’t use it for her daily cooking—all of that was in her head, according to her. But this was a question of the fancy stuff.
   I had read this cookbook, or looked into it at least, in the days in which I’d been romanticizing my grandmother. (I’d given that up by now. I knew I would have been thwarted by her, just as I was thwarted by Reenie and my father, and would have been thwarted by my mother, if she hadn’t died. It was the purpose in life of all older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else.)
   The cookbook had a plain cover, a no-nonsense mustard colour, and inside it there were plain doings as well. Fannie Merritt Farmer was relentlessly pragmatic—cut and dried, in a terse New England way. She assumed you knew nothing, and started from there: “A beverage is any drink. Water is the beverage provided for man by Nature. All beverages contain a large percentage of water, and therefore their uses should be considered: I. To quench thirst. II. To introduce water into the circulatory system. III. To regulate body temperature. IV. To assist in carrying off water. V. To nourish. VI. To stimulate the nervous system and various organs. VII. For medicinal purposes,” and so forth.
   Taste and pleasure did not form part of her lists, but at the front of the book there was a curious epigraph by John Ruskin:
   Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bairns and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers.
   I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour; and from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they’d ever cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or changing men into pigs. As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both. Still, it was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother’s time. They were to be sedate in bearing, unapproachable, regal even, but possessed of arcane and potentially lethal recipes, and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men. And on top of that, perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers. The distributors of gracious largesse.
   Had anyone ever taken this sort of thing seriously? My grandmother had. All you needed to do was to look at her portraits—at that cat-ate-the-canary smile, those droopy eyelids. Who did she think she was, the Queen of Sheba? Without a doubt.
   When we got back from the picnic, Reenie was rushing around in the kitchen. She didn’t look much like Helen of Troy: despite all the work she’d done in advance, she was flustered, and in a foul temper; she was sweating, and her hair was coming down. She said we would just have to take things as they came, because what else could we expect, since she could not do miracles and that included making silk purses out of sows’ ears. And an extra place too, at zero hour, for this Alex person, whatever he called himself. Smart Alex, by the look of him.
   “He calls himself by his name,” said Laura. “The same as anyone.”
   “He’s not the same as anyone,” said Reenie. “You can tell that at a glance. He’s most likely some half-breed Indian, or else a gypsy. He’s certainly not from the same pea patch as the rest of us.”
   Laura said nothing. She was not given to compunction as a rule, but this time she did seem to feel a little contrite for having invited Alex Thomas on the spur of the moment. She couldn’t uninvite him however, as she pointed out—that would have been miles beyond mere rudeness. Invited was invited, no matter who it might be.
   Father knew that too, although he was far from pleased: Laura had jumped the gun and usurped his own position as host, and next thing he knew she’d be inviting every orphan and bum and hard-luck case to his dinner table as if he was Good King Wenceslas. These saintly impulses of hers had to be curbed, he said; he wasn’t running an almshouse.
   Callie Fitzsimmons had attempted to mollify him: Alex was not a hard-luck case, she’d assured him. True, the young man had no visible job, but he did seem to have a source of revenue, or at any rate he’d never been known to put the twist on anyone. What might that source of income be? said Father. Darned if Callie knew: Alex was close-mouthed on the subject. Maybe he robbed banks, said Father with heavy sarcasm. Not at all, said Callie; anyway, Alex was known to some of her friends. Father said the one thing did not preclude the other. He was turning sour on the artists by then. One too many of them had taken up Marxism and the workers, and accused him of grinding the peasants.
   “Alex is all right. He’s just a youngster,” Callie said. “He just came along for the ride. He’s just a pal.” She didn’t want Father to get the wrong idea—that Alex Thomas might be a boyfriend of hers, in any competitive way.

   “What can I do to help?” said Laura, in the kitchen.
   “The last thing I need,” said Reenie, “is another fly in the ointment. All I ask is that you keep yourself out of the way and don’t knock anything over. Iris can help. At least she’s not all thumbs.” Reenie had the notion that helping her was a sign of favour: she was still annoyed with Laura, and was cutting her out. But this form of punishment was lost on Laura. She took her sun hat, and went out to wander around on the lawn.
   Part of the job assigned me was to do the flowers for the table, and the seating arrangement as well. For the flowers I’d cut some zinnias from the borders—just about all there was at that time of year. For the seating arrangement I’d put Alex Thomas beside myself, with Callie on the other side and Laura at the far end. That way, I’d felt, he’d be insulated, or at least Laura would.
   Laura and I did not have proper dinner dresses. We had dresses, however. They were the usual dark-blue velvet, left over from when we were younger, with the hems let down and a black ribbon sewn over the top of the worn hemline to conceal it. They’d once had white lace collars, and Laura’s still did; I’d taken the lace off mine, which gave it a lower neckline. These dresses were too tight, or mine was; Laura’s as well, come to think of it. Laura was not old enough by common standards to be attending a dinner party like this, but Callie said it would have been cruel to make her sit all alone in her room, especially since she, personally, had invited one of our guests. Father said he supposed that was right. Then he said that in any case, now that she’d shot up like a weed she looked as old as I did. It was hard to tell what age he thought that was. He could never keep track of our birthdays.
   At the appointed time the guests foregathered in the drawing room for sherry, which was served by an unmarried cousin of Reenie’s impressed for this event. Laura and I were not allowed to have any sherry, or any wine at dinner. Laura did not seem to resent this exclusion, but I did. Reenie sided with Father on this, but then she was a tee-totaller anyway. “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine,” she’d say, emptying the dregs of the wine glasses down the sink. (She was wrong about that, however—less than a year after this dinner party, she married Ron Hincks, a notable tippler in his day. Myra, take note if you’re reading this: in the days before he was hewn into a pillar of the community by Reenie, your father was a notable souse.)
   Reenie’s cousin was older than Reenie, and dowdy to the point of pain. She wore a black dress and a white apron, as was proper, but her stockings were brown cotton and sagging, and her hands could have been cleaner. In the daytimes she worked at the grocer’s, where one of her jobs was bagging potatoes; it’s hard to scrub off that kind of grime. Reenie had made canapés featuring sliced olives, hard-boiled eggs, and tiny pickles; also some baked cheese pastry balls, which had not come out as expected. These were set on one of Grandmother Adelia’s best platters, hand-painted china from Germany, in a design of dark-red peonies with gold leaves and stems. On top of the platter was a doily, in the centre was a dish of salted nuts, with the canapés arranged like the petals of a flower, all bristling with toothpicks. The cousin thrust them at our guests abruptly, menacingly even, as if enacting a stick-up.
   “This stuff looks pretty septic,” said Father in the ironic tone I’d come to recognize as his voice of disguised anger. “Better beg off or you’ll suffer later.” Callie laughed, but Winifred Griffen Prior graciously lifted a cheese ball and inserted it into her mouth in that way women have when they don’t want their lipstick to come off—lips pushed outward, into a sort of funnel—and said it was interesting. The cousin had forgotten the cocktail napkins, so Winifred was left with greasy fingers. I watched her curiously to see whether she would lick them or wipe them on her dress, or perhaps on our sofa, but I moved my eyes away at the wrong time, and so I missed it. My hunch was the sofa.
   Winifred was not (as I’d thought) Richard Griffen’s wife, but his sister. (Was she married, widowed, or divorced? It wasn’t entirely clear. She used her given name after the Mrs., which would indicate some sort of damage to the erstwhile Mr. Prior, if indeed he was erstwhile. He was seldom mentioned and never seen, and was said to have a lot of money, and to be “travelling.” Later, when Winifred and I were no longer on speaking terms, I used to concoct stories for myself about this Mr. Prior: Winifred had got him stuffed and kept him in mothballs in a cardboard box, or she and the chauffeur had walled him up in the cellar in order to indulge in lascivious orgies. The orgies may not have been that far from the mark, although I have to say that whatever Winifred did in that direction was always done discreetly. She covered her tracks—a virtue of sorts, I suppose.)
   That evening Winifred wore a black dress, simply cut but voraciously elegant, set off by a triple string of pearls. Her earrings were minute bunches of grapes, pearl also but with gold stems and leaves. Callie Fitzsimmons, by contrast, was pointedly underdressed. For a couple of years now she’d set aside her fuchsia and saffron draperies, her bold Russian-émigré designs, even her cigarette holder. Now she went in for slacks in the daytime, and V-neck sweaters, and rolled-up shirt sleeves; she’d cut her hair too, and shortened her name to Cal.
   She’d given up the monuments to dead soldiers: there was no longer much of a demand for them. Now she did bas-reliefs of workers and farmers, and fishermen in oilskins, and Indian trappers, and aproned mothers toting babies on their hips and shielding their eyes while looking at the sun. The only patrons who could afford to commission these were insurance companies and banks, who would surely want to apply them to the outsides of their buildings in order to show they were in tune with the times. It was discouraging to be employed by such blatant capitalists, said Callie, but the main thing was the message, and at least anyone going past the banks and so forth on the street would be able to see these bas-reliefs, free of charge. It was art for the people, she said.
   She’d had some idea that Father might help her out—get her some more bank jobs. But Father had said dryly that he and the banks were no longer what you’d call hand in glove.
   For this evening she wore a jersey dress the colour of a duster—taupe was the name of this colour, she’d told us; it was French for mole. On anyone else it would have looked like a droopy bag with sleeves and a belt, but Callie managed to make it seem the height, not of fashion or chic exactly—this dress implied that such things were beneath notice—but rather of something easy to overlook but sharp, like a common kitchen implement—an ice pick, say—just before the murder. As a dress, it was a raised fist, but in a silent crowd.
   Father wore his dinner jacket, which was in need of pressing. Richard Griffen wore his, which wasn’t. Alex Thomas wore a brown jacket and grey flannels, too heavy for the weather; also a tie, red spots on a blue ground. His shirt was white, the collar too roomy. His clothes looked as if he’d borrowed them. Well, he hadn’t expected to be invited to dinner.
   “What a charming house,” said Winifred Griffen Prior with an arranged smile, as we walked into the dining room. “It’s so—so well preserved! What amazing stained-glass windows—how fin de siècle! It must be like living in a museum!”
   What she meant was outmoded. I felt humiliated: I’d always thought those windows were quite fine. But I could see that Winifred’s judgment was the judgment of the outside world—the world that knew such things and passed sentence accordingly, that world I’d been so desperately longing to join. I could see now how unfit I was for it. How countrified, how raw.
   “They are particularly fine examples,” said Richard, “of a certain period. The panelling is also of high quality.” Despite his pedantry and his condescending tone, I felt grateful to him: it didn’t occur to me that he was taking inventory. He knew a tottering regime when he saw one: he knew we were up for auction, or soon would be.
   “By museum, do you mean dusty?” said Alex Thomas. “Or perhaps you meant obsolete.”
   Father scowled. Winifred, to do her justice, blushed.
   “You shouldn’t pick on those weaker than yourself,” said Callie in a pleased undertone.
   “Why not?” said Alex. “Everyone else does.”
   Reenie had gone the whole hog on the menu, or as much of that hog as we could by that time afford. But she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Mock Bisque, Perch a la Provençale, Chicken a la Providence—on it came, one course after another, unrolling in an inevitable procession, like a tidal wave, or doom. There was a tinny taste to the bisque, a floury taste to the chicken, which had been treated too roughly and had shrunk and toughened. It was not quite decent to see so many people in one room together, chewing with such thoughtfulness and vigour. Mastication was the right name for it—not eating.
   Winifred Prior was pushing things around on her plate as if playing dominoes. I felt a rage against her: I was determined to eat up everything, even the bones. I would not let Reenie down. In the old days, I thought, she’d never have been stuck like this—caught short, exposed, and thereby exposing us. In the old days they’d have brought in experts.
   Beside me, Alex Thomas too was doing his duty. He was sawing away as if life depended on it; the chicken squeaked under his knife. (Not that Reenie was grateful to him for his dedication. She kept tabs on who had eaten what, you may be sure. That Alex What’s-his-name certainly had an appetite on hint, was her comment. You’d think he’d been starved in a cellar. )
   Under the circumstances, conversation was sporadic. There was a lull after the cheese course, however—the cheddar too young and bouncy, the cream too old, the bleu too high—during which we could pause and take stock, and look around us.
   Father turned his one blue eye on Alex Thomas. “So, young man,” he said, in what he may have thought was a friendly tone, “what brings you to our fair city?” He sounded like a paterfamilias in a stodgy Victorian play. I looked down at the table.
   “I’m visiting friends, sir,” Alex said, politely enough. (We would hear Reenie, later, on the subject of his politeness. Orphans were well mannered because good manners had been beaten into them, in the orphanages. Only an orphan could be so self-assured, but this aplomb of theirs concealed a vengeful nature—underneath, they were jeering at everyone. Well, of course they’d be vengeful, considering how they’d been fobbed off. Most anarchists and kidnappers were orphans.)
   “My daughter tells me you are preparing for the ministry,” said Father. (Neither Laura nor I had said anything about this—it must have been Reenie, and predictably, or perhaps maliciously, she’d got it a little wrong.)
   “I was, sir,” said Alex. “But I had to give it up. We came to a parting of the ways.”
   “And now?” said Father, who was used to getting concrete answers.
   “Now I live by my wits,” said Alex. He smiled, to show self-deprecation.
   “Must be hard for you,” Richard murmured and Winifred laughed. I was surprised: I hadn’t credited him with that kind of wit.
   “He must mean he’s a newspaper reporter,” she said. “A spy in our midst!”
   Alex smiled again, and said nothing. Father scowled. As far as he was concerned, newspaper reporters were vermin. Not only did they lie, they preyed on the misery of others– corpse flies was his term for them. He did make an exception for Elwood Murray, because he’d known the family. Drivel-monger was the worst he would say about Elwood.
   After that the conversation turned to the general state of affairs—politics, economics—as it was likely to in those days. Worse and worse, was Father’s opinion; about to turn the corner, was Richard’s. It was hard to know what to think, said Winifred, but she certainly hoped they’d be able to keep the lid on.
   “The lid on what?” said Laura, who hadn’t said anything so far. It was as if a chair had spoken.
   “On the possibility of social turmoil,” said Father, in his reprimanding tone that meant she was not to say any more.
   Alex said he doubted it. He’d just come back from the camps, he said.
   “The camps?” said Father, puzzled. “What camps?”
   “The relief camps, sir,” said Alex. “Bennett’s labour camps, for the unemployed. Ten hours a day and slim pickings. The boys aren’t too keen on it—I’d say they’re getting restless.”
   “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Richard. “It’s better than riding the rails. They get three square meals, which is more than a workman with a family to support may get, and I’m told the food’s not bad. You’d think they’d be grateful, but that sort never are.”
   “They’re not any particular sort,” said Alex.
   “My God, an armchair pinko,” said Richard. Alex looked down at his plate.
   “If he’s one, so am I,” said Callie. “But I don’t think you have to be a pinko in order to realize…”
   “What were you doing out there?” said Father, cutting her off. (He and Callie had been arguing quite a lot lately. Callie wanted him to embrace the union movement. He said Callie wanted two and two to make five.)
   Just then the bombe glacée made an entrance. We had an electric refrigerator by then—we’d got it just before the Crash—and Reenie, although suspicious of its freezing compartment, had made good use of it for this evening. The bombe was shaped like a football, and was bright green and hard as flint, and took all our attention for a while.

   While the coffee was being served the fireworks display began, down at the Camp Grounds. We all went out on the dock to watch. It was a lovely view, as you could see not only the fireworks themselves but their reflections in the Jogues River. Fountains of red and yellow and blue were cascading into the air—exploding stars, chrysanthemums, willow trees made of light.
   “The Chinese invented gunpowder,” said Alex, “but they never used it for guns. Only fireworks. I can’t say I really enjoy them, though. They’re too much like heavy artillery.”
   “Are you a pacifist?” I said. It seemed like the sort of thing he might be. If he said yes, I intended to disagree with him, because I wanted his attention. He was talking mostly to Laura.
   “Not a pacifist,” said Alex. “But my parents were both killed in the war. Or I assume they must have been killed.”
   Now we’ll get the orphan story, I thought. After all the fuss Reenie’s been making, I hope it’s a good one.
   “You don’t know for sure?” said Laura.
   “No,” said Alex. “I’m told that I was found sitting on a mound of charred rubble, in a burned-out house. Everyone else there was dead. Apparently I’d been hiding under a washtub or a cooking pot—a metal container of some kind.”
   “Where was this? Who found you?” Laura whispered.
   “It’s not clear,” said Alex. “They don’t really know. It wasn’t France or Germany. East of that—one of those little countries. I must have been passed from hand to hand; then the Red Cross got hold of me one way or another.”
   “Do you remember it?” I said.
   “Not really. A few details were misplaced along the way—my name and so forth—and then I ended up with the missionaries, who felt that forgetfulness would be the best thing for me, all things considered. They were Presbyterians, a tidy bunch. We all had our heads shaved, for the lice. I can recall the feeling of suddenly having no hair—how cool it was. That’s when my memories really begin.”
   Although I was beginning to like him better, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more than a little skeptical about this story. There was too much melodrama in it—too much luck, both bad and good. I was still too young to be a believer in coincidence. And if he’d been trying to make an impression on Laura—was he trying?—he couldn’t have chosen a better way.
   “It must be terrible,” I said, “not to know who you really are.”
   “I used to think that,” said Alex. “But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn’t need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway—family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I’m free of the temptation, that’s all. I’m free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.” He said something else, but there was an explosion in the sky and I couldn’t hear. Laura heard though; she nodded gravely.
   (What was it he said? I found out later. He said, At least you’re never homesick. )
   A dandelion of light burst above us. We all looked up. It’s hard not to, at such times. It’s hard not to stand there with your mouth open.

   Was that the beginning, that evening—on the dock at Avilion, with the fireworks dazzling the sky? It’s hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Hand-tinting

   Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woollen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
   Season of chrysanthemums, the funeral flower; white ones, that is. The dead must get so tired of them.
   The morning was brisk and fair. I picked a small bunch of yellow and pink snapdragons from the front garden and took them to the cemetery, to place them at the family tomb for the two pensive angels on their white cube: it would be something different for them, I thought. Once there I performed my small ritual—the circumlocution of the monument, the reading of the names. I think I do it silently, but once in a while I catch the sound of my own voice, muttering away like some Jesuit saying a breviary.
   To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.
   When I’d been all the way around the monument, I found a girl—a young woman—kneeling before the tomb, or before Laura’s place on it. Her head was bowed. She was wearing black: black jeans, black T-shirt and jacket, a small black knapsack of the kind they carry now instead of purses. She had long dark hair—like Sabrina’s, I thought with a sudden lurching of the heart: Sabrina has come back, from India or wherever she’s been. She’s come back without warning. She’s changed her mind about me. She was intending to surprise me, and now I’ve spoiled it.
   But when I peered more closely, I saw this girl was a stranger: some overwrought graduate student, no doubt. At first I’d thought she was praying, but no, she was placing a flower: a single white carnation, the stem wrapped in tinfoil. As she stood up, I saw that she was crying.
   Laura touches people. I do not.

   After the button factory picnic, there was the usual sort of account of it in the Herald and Banner—which baby had won the Most Beautiful Baby contest, who’d got Best Dog. Also what Father had said in his speech, much abbreviated: Elwood Murray put an optimistic gloss on everything, so it sounded like business as usual. There were also some photos—the winning dog, a dark mop-shaped silhouette; the winning baby, fat as a pincushion, in a frilled bonnet; the step-dancers holding up a giant cardboard shamrock; Father at the podium. It wasn’t a good picture of him: he had his mouth half-open, and looked as if he were yawning.
   One of the pictures was of Alex Thomas, with the two of us—me to the left of him, Laura to the right, like bookends. Both of us were looking at him and smiling; he was smiling too, but he’d thrust his hand up in front of him, as gangland criminals did to shield themselves from the flashbulbs when they were being arrested. He’d only managed to blot out half of his face, however. The caption was, “Miss Chase and Miss Laura Chase Entertain an Out-of-Town Visitor.”
   Elwood Murray hadn’t managed to track us down that afternoon, in order to find out Alex’s name, and when he’d called at the house he’d got Reenie, who’d said our names should not be bandied about with God knows who, and had refused to tell him. He’d printed the picture anyway, and Reenie was affronted, as much by us as by Elwood Murray. She thought this photo verged in the immodest, even though our legs weren’t showing. She thought we both had silly leers on our faces, like lovelorn geese; with our mouths gaping open like that we might as well have been drooling. We’d made a sorry spectacle of ourselves: everyone in town would laugh at us behind our backs, for mooning over some young thug who looked like an Indian—or, worse, a Jew—and with his sleeves rolled up like that, a Communist into the bargain.
   “That Elwood Murray ought to be spanked,” she said. “Thinks he’s so all-fired cute.” She tore the paper up and stuffed it into the kindling box, so Father wouldn’t see it. He must have seen it anyway, down at the factory, but if so he made no comment.
   Laura paid a call on Elwood Murray. She did not reproach him or repeat any of what Reenie had said about him. Instead she told him she wanted to become a photographer, like him. No: she wouldn’t have told such a lie. That was only what he inferred. What she really said was that she wanted to learn how to make photographic prints from negatives. This was the literal truth.
   Elwood Murray was flattered by this mark of favour from the heights of Avilion—although mischievous, he was a fearful snob—and agreed to let her help him in the darkroom three afternoons a week. She could watch him print the portraits he did on the side, of weddings and children’s graduations and so forth. Although the type was set and the newspaper run off by a couple of men in the back room, Elwood did almost everything else around the weekly paper, including his own developing.
   Perhaps he might teach her how to do hand-tinting, as well, he said: it was the coming thing. People would bring in their old black-and-white prints to have them rendered more vivid by the addition of living colour. This was done by bleaching out the darkest areas with a brush, then treating the print with sepia toner to give a pink underglow. After that came the tinting. The colours came in little tubes and bottles, and had to be very carefully applied with tiny brushes, the excess fastidiously blotted off. You needed taste and the ability to blend, so the cheeks wouldn’t look like circles of rouge or the flesh like beige cloth. You needed good eyesight and a steady hand. It was an art, said Elwood—one he was quite proud to have mastered, if he did say so himself. He kept a revolving selection of these hand-tinted photos in one corner of the newspaper-office window, as a sort of advertisement. Enhance Your Memories, said the hand-lettered sign he’d placed beside them.
   Young men in the now-outdated uniforms of the Great War were the most frequent subjects; also brides and grooms. Then there were graduation portraits, First Communions, solemn family groups, infants in christening gear, girls in formal gowns, children in party outfits, cats and dogs. There was the occasional eccentric pet—a tortoise, a macaw—and, infrequently, a baby in a coffin, waxen-faced, surrounded by ruffles.
   The colours never came out clear, the way they would on a piece of white paper: there was a misty look to them, as if they were seen through cheesecloth. They didn’t make the people seem more real; rather they became ultra-real: citizens of an odd half-country, lurid yet muted, where realism was beside the point.

   Laura told me what she was doing vis-a-vis Elwood Murray; she also told Reenie. I expected a protest, an uproar; I expected Reenie to say that Laura was lowering herself, or acting in a tawdry, compromising fashion. Who could tell what might go on in a darkroom, with a young girl and a man and the lights off? But Reenie took the view that it wasn’t as if Elwood was paying Laura to work for him: rather he was teaching her, and that was quite different. It put him on a level with the hired help. As for Laura being in a darkroom with him, no one would think any harm of it, because Elwood was such a pansy. I suspect Reenie was secretly relieved to have Laura showing an interest in something other than God.
   Laura certainly showed an interest, but as usual she went overboard. She nicked some of Elwood’s hand-tinting materials and brought them home with her. I found this out by accident: I was in the library, dipping into the books at random, when I noticed the framed photographs of Grandfather Benjamin, each with a different prime minister. Sir John Sparrow Thompson’s face was now a delicate mauve, Sir Mackenzie Bowell’s a bilious green, Sir Charles Tupper’s a pale orange. Grandfather Benjamin’s beard and whiskers had been done in light crimson.
   That evening I caught her in the act. There on her dressing table were the little tubes, the tiny brushes. Also the formal portrait of Laura and me in our velvet dresses and Mary Janes. Laura had removed the print from its frame, and was tinting me a light blue. “Laura,” I said, “what in heaven’s name are you up to? Why did you colour those pictures? The ones in the library. Father will be livid.”
   “I was just practising,” said Laura. “Anyway, those men needed some enhancing. I think they look better.”
   “They look bizarre,” I said. “Or very ill. Nobody’s face is green! Or mauve.”
   Laura was unperturbed. “It’s the colours of their souls,” she said. “It’s the colours they ought to have been.”
   “You’ll get in big trouble! They’ll know who did it.”
   “Nobody ever looks at those,” she said. “Nobody cares.”
   “Well, you’d better not lay a finger on Grandmother Adelia,” I said. “Nor the dead uncles! Father would have your hide!”
   “I wanted to do them in gold, to show they’re in glory,” she said. “But there isn’t any gold. The uncles, not Grandmother. I’d do her a steel grey.”
   “Don’t you dare! Father doesn’t believe in glory. And you’d better take those paints back before you’re accused of theft.”
   “I haven’t used much,” said Laura. “Anyway, I brought Elwood a jar of jam. It’s a fair trade.”
   “Reenie’s jam, I suppose. “Out of the cold cellar—did you ask her? She counts that jam, you know.” I picked up the photograph of the two of us. “Why am I blue?”
   “Because you’re asleep,” said Laura.

   The tinting materials weren’t the only things she nicked. One of Laura’s jobs was filing. Elwood liked his office kept very neatly, and his darkroom as well. His negatives were placed in glassine envelopes, filed according to the date on which they’d been taken, so it was easy for Laura to locate the negative of the picnic shot. She made two black-and-white prints of it, one day when Elwood had gone out and she had the run of the place to herself. She didn’t tell anybody about this, not even me—not until later. After she’d made the prints, she slipped the negative into her handbag and took it home with her. She did not consider it stealing: Elwood had stolen the picture in the first place by not asking permission of us, and she was only taking away from him something that had never really belonged to him anyway.
   After she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do, Laura stopped going to Elwood Murray’s office. She gave him no reason, and no warning. I felt this was clumsy of her, and indeed it was, because Elwood felt slighted. He tried to find out from Reenie if Laura was ill, but all Reenie would say was that Laura must have changed her mind about photography. She was full of ideas, that girl; she always had some bee in her bonnet, and now she must have a different one.
   This aroused Elwood’s curiosity. He began to keep an eye on Laura, above and beyond his usual nosiness. I wouldn’t call it spying exactly—it wasn’t as if he lurked behind bushes. He just noticed her more. (He hadn’t found out about the purloined negative yet, however. It didn’t occur to him that Laura might have had an ulterior motive in seeking him out. Laura had such a direct gaze, such blankly open eyes, such a pure, rounded forehead, that few ever suspected her of duplicity.)
   At first Elwood found nothing much to notice. Laura was to be observed walking along the main street, making her way to church on Sunday mornings, where she taught Sunday school to the five-year-olds. On three other mornings of the week, she helped out at the United Church soup kitchen, which had been set up beside the train station. Its mission was to dish out bowls of cabbagy soup to the hungry, dirty men and boys who were riding the rails: a worthy effort, but one that was not viewed with approval by everyone in town. Some felt these men were seditious conspirators, or worse, Communists; others, that there should be no free meals, because they themselves had to work for every mouthful. Shouts of “Get a job!” were heard. (The insults were by no means one way, though the ones from the itinerant men were more muted. Of course they resented Laura and all the churchy do-gooders like her. Of course they had ways of letting their feelings be known. A joke, a sneer, a jostle, a sullen leer. There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.)
   The local police stood by to make sure that these men did not get any smart ideas into their heads, such as remaining in Port Ticonderoga. They were to be shuffled along, moved elsewhere. But they weren’t allowed to hop the boxcars right in the train station, because the railway company wouldn’t put up with that. There were scuffles and fist fights, and—as Elwood Murray put it, in print—nightsticks were freely employed.
   So these men would trudge along the railway tracks and try to hop farther down the line, but that was more difficult because by then the trains would have gathered speed. There were several accidents, and one death—a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen fell under the wheels and was virtually cut in two. (Laura locked herself in her room for three days after that, and would eat nothing: she’d served a bowl of soup to this boy.) Elwood Murray wrote an editorial in which he said that the mishap was regrettable but not the fault of the railway, and certainly not that of the town: if you took foolhardy risks, what could you expect?
   Laura begged bones from Reenie, for the church soup pot. Reenie said she was not made of bones; bones did not grow on trees. She needed most of the bones for herself—for Avilion, for us. She said a penny saved was a penny earned, and didn’t Laura see that during these hard times Father needed all the pennies he could get? But she couldn’t ever resist Laura for long, and a bone or two or three would be forthcoming. Laura didn’t want to touch the bones, or even see them—she was squeamish that way—so Reenie would wrap them up for her. “There you are. Those bums will eat us out of house and home,” she would sigh. “I’ve put in an onion.” She didn’t think Laura should be working at the soup kitchen—it was too rough for a young girl like her.
   “It’s wrong to call them bums,” said Laura. “Everyone turns them away. They only want work. All they want is a job.”
   “I daresay,” said Reenie in a skeptical, maddening voice. To me, privately, she would say, “She’s the spitting image of her mother.”

   I didn’t go to the soup kitchen with Laura. She didn’t ask me to, and in any case I wouldn’t have had the time: Father had now taken it into his head that I must learn the ins and outs of the button business, as was my duty. Faute de mieux, I was to be the son in Chase and Sons, and if I was ever going to run the show I needed to get my hands dirty.
   I knew I had no business abilities, but I was too cowed to object. I accompanied Father to the factory every morning, to see (he said) how things worked in the real world. If I’d been a boy he would have started me working at the assembly line, on the military analogy that an officer should not expect his men to perform any job he could not perform himself. As it was, he set me to taking inventory and balancing shipping accounts—raw materials in, finished product out.
   I was bad at it, more or less intentionally. I was bored, and also intimidated. When I arrived at the factory every morning in my convent-like skirts and blouses, walking at Father’s heels like a dog, I would have to pass the lines of workers. I felt scorned by the women and stared at by the men. I knew they were making jokes about me behind my back—jokes that had to do with my deportment (the women) and my body (the men), and that this was their way of getting even. In some ways I didn’t blame them—in their place I would have done the same—but I felt affronted by them nonetheless.


La-di-da. Thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba.
A good shagging would take her down a peg.


   Father noticed none of this. Or he chose not to notice.
   One afternoon Elwood Murray arrived at Reenie’s back door with the inflated chest and self-important manner of the bearer of unpleasant news. I was helping Reenie with the canning: it was late September, and we were doing up the last of the tomatoes from the kitchen garden. Reenie had always been frugal, but in these times waste was a sin. She must have realized how thin the thread was becoming—the thread of excess dollars that attached her to her job.
   There was something we should know, said Elwood Murray, for our own good. Reenie took a look at him, him and his puffed-up stance, evaluating the gravity of his news, and judged it serious enough to invite him in. She even offered him a cup of tea. Then she asked him to wait until she’d lifted the last jars out of the boiling water with the tongs and had the tops screwed on. Then she sat down.
   Here was the news. Miss Laura Chase had been seen around town—said Elwood—in the company of a young man, the very same young man she’d been photographed with at the button factory picnic. They’d first been spotted down by the soup kitchen; then, later, sitting on a park bench—on more than one park bench—and smoking cigarettes. Or the man had been smoking; as to Laura, he couldn’t swear to it, he said, pursing his mouth. They’d been seen beside the War Memorial by the Town Hall, and leaning on the railings of the Jubilee Bridge, looking down at the rapids—a traditional spot for courtship. They may even have been glimpsed out by the Camp Grounds, which was an almost certain sign of dubious behaviour, or the prelude to it—though he couldn’t vouch for this, as he hadn’t witnessed it himself.
   Anyway, he thought we should know. The man was a grown man, and wasn’t Miss Laura only fourteen? Such a shame, him taking advantage of her like that. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head in sorrow, smug as a woodchuck, his eyes glittering with malicious pleasure.
   Reenie was furious. She hated anyone getting the jump on her in the gossip department. “We certainly thank you for informing us,” she said with stiff politeness. “A stitch in time saves nine. “This was her way of defending Laura’s honour: nothing had happened, yet, that couldn’t be forestalled.
   “What did I tell you,” said Reenie, after Elwood Murray had gone. “He’s got no shame.” She did not mean Elwood, of course, but Alex Thomas.
   When confronted, Laura denied nothing, except the Camp Grounds sighting. The park benches and so forth—yes, she had sat on them, though not for very long. Nor could she understand why Reenie was making all this fuss. Alex Thomas wasn’t a two-bit sweetheart (the expression Reenie had used). Nor was he a lounge lizard (the other expression). She denied ever having smoked a cigarette in her life. As for “spooning”—also from Reenie—she thought that was disgusting. What had she done to inspire such low suspicions? She evidently didn’t know.
   Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.
   According to Laura, on all of these occasions—and there had been only three of them—she and Alex Thomas had been engaged in serious discussion. What about? About God. Alex Thomas had lost his faith, and Laura was trying to help him regain it. It was hard work because he was very cynical, or maybe skeptical was what she meant. He thought that the modern age would be an age of this world rather than the next—of man, for mankind—and he was all for it. He claimed not to have a soul, and said he didn’t give a hang what might happen to him after he was dead. Still, she meant to keep on with her efforts, however difficult the task might appear.
   I coughed into my hand. I didn’t dare laugh. I’d seen Laura use that virtuous expression on Mr. Erskine often enough, and I thought that was what she was doing now: pulling the wool over. Reenie, hands on hips, legs apart, mouth open, looked like a hen at bay.
   “Why’s he still in town, is what I’d like to know,” said Reenie, baffled, shifting her ground. “I thought he was just visiting.”
   “Oh, he has some business here,” said Laura mildly. “But he can be where he wants to be. It’s not a slave state. Except for the wage slaves, of course.” I guessed that the attempt at conversion hadn’t been all one way: Alex Thomas had been getting his own oar in. If things went on in this fashion we’d have a little Bolshevik on our hands.
   “Isn’t he too old?” I said.
   Laura gave me a fierce look—too old for what? —daring me to butt in. “The soul has no age,” she said.
   “People are talking,” said Reenie: always her clinching argument.
   “That is their own concern,” said Laura. Her tone was one of lofty irritation: other people were her cross to bear.
   Reenie and I were both at a loss. What could be done? We could have told Father, who might then have forbidden Laura to see Alex Thomas. But she wouldn’t have obeyed, not with a soul at stake. Telling Father would have caused more trouble than it would be worth, we decided; and after all, what had actually taken place? Nothing you could put your finger on. (Reenie and I were confidants by then, on this matter; we’d put our heads together.)
   As the days passed I came to feel that Laura was making a fool of me, though I couldn’t specify how, exactly. I didn’t think she was lying as such, but neither was she telling the entire truth. Once I saw her with Alex Thomas, deep in conversation, ambling along past the War Memorial; once at the Jubilee Bridge, once idling outside Betty’s Luncheonette, oblivious to turning heads, mine included. It was sheer defiance.
   “You have to talk sense to her,” Reenie said to me. But I couldn’t talk sense to Laura. Increasingly, I couldn’t talk to her at all; or I could talk, but did she listen? It was like talking to a sheet of white blotting paper: the words went out of my mouth and disappeared behind her face as if into a wall of falling snow.
   When I wasn’t spending time at the button factory—an exercise that was daily appearing more futile, even to Father—I began to wander around by myself. I would march along by the riverbank, trying to pretend I had a destination, or stand on the Jubilee Bridge as if waiting for someone, gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves into it. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it—in love—you would be swept away, regardless. Or so the books had it.
   Or I would walk along the main street, giving serious attention to what was in the shop windows—the pairs of socks and shoes, the hats and gloves, the screwdrivers and wrenches. I would study the posters of movie stars in the glass cases outside the Bijou Theatre and compare them with how I myself looked, or might look if I combed my hair down over one eye and had the proper clothes. I wasn’t allowed to go inside; I didn’t enter a movie theatre until after I was married, because Reenie said the Bijou was cheapening, for young girls by themselves at any rate. Men went there on the prowl, dirty-minded men. They would take the seat next to you and stick their hands onto you like flypaper, and before you knew it they’d be climbing all over you.
   In Reenie’s descriptions the girl or woman would always be inert, but with many handholds on her, like a jungle gym. She would be magically deprived of the ability to scream or move. She would be transfixed, she would be paralyzed—with shock, or outrage, or shame. She would have no recourse.

The cold cellar

   A nip in the air; the clouds high and windblown. Sheaves of dried Indian corn have appeared on the choicer front doors; on the porches the jack-o’-lanterns have taken up their grinning vigils. A week from now the candy-minded children will take to the streets, dressed as ballerinas and zombies and space aliens and skeletons and gypsy fortunetellers and dead rock stars, and as usual I will turn out the lights and pretend not to be home. It’s not dislike of them as such, but self-defence—should any of the wee ones disappear, I don’t want to be accused of having lured them in and eaten them.
   I told this to Myra, who is doing a brisk trade in squat orange candles and black ceramic cats and sateen bats, and in decorative stuffed-cloth witches, their heads made of dried-out apples. She laughed. She thought I was making a joke.
   I had a sluggish day yesterday—my heart was pinching me, I could barely move off the sofa—but this morning, after taking my pill, I felt oddly energetic. I walked quite briskly as far as the doughnut shop. There I inspected the washroom wall, on which the latest entry is: If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all, followed by: If you can’t suck anything nice don’t suck anything at all. It’s good to know that freedom of speech is still in full swing in this country.
   Then I bought a coffee and a chocolate-glazed doughnut, and took them outside to one of the benches provided by the management, placed handily right beside the garbage bin. There I sat, in the still-warm sunlight, basking like a turtle. People strolled by—two overfed women with a baby carriage, a younger, thinner woman in a black leather coat with silver studs in it like nail-heads and another one in her nose, three old geezers in windbreakers. I got the feeling they were staring at me. Am I still that notorious, or that paranoid? Or perhaps I’d merely been talking to myself out loud. It’s hard to know. Does my voice simply flow out of me like air when I’m not paying attention? A shrivelled whispering, winter vines rustling, the sibilance of autumn wind in dry grass.
   Who cares what people think, I told myself. If they want to listen in, they’re welcome.
   Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.
   A dog came over; I gave it half of the doughnut. “Be my guest,” I said to it. That’s what Reenie would say when she caught you eavesdropping.

   All through October—the October of 1934—there had been talk of what was going on at the button factory. Outside agitators were hanging around, it was said; they were stirring things up, especially among the young hotheads. There was talk of collective bargaining, of workers’ rights, of unions. Unions were surely illegal, or closed-shop unions were—weren’t they? No one seemed quite to know. In any case they had a whiff of brimstone about them.
   The people doing the stirring up were ruffians and hired criminals (according to Mrs. Hillcoate). Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money—any money at all—or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.
   It was also said that Father’s factories were in trouble.
   Both rumours—the outside agitators, the trouble—were publicly denied. Both were believed.
   Father had laid off some of his workers in September—some of the younger ones, better able to fend for themselves, according to his theories—and had asked the remainder to accept shorter hours. There just wasn’t enough business, he’d explained, to keep all the factories going at full production capacity. The customers weren’t buying buttons, or not the kind of buttons made by Chase and Sons, which depended on high volumes to be profitable. Nor were they buying cheap, serviceable undergarments: they were mending instead, they were making do. Not everyone in the country was out of work, of course, but those with jobs did not feel very secure about holding on to them. Naturally they were saving their money up, rather than spending it. You couldn’t blame them. You’d do the same in their place.
   Arithmetic had entered the picture, with its many legs, its many spines and heads, its pitiless eyes made of zeroes. Two and two made four, was its message. But what if you didn’t have two and two? Then things wouldn’t add up. And they didn’t add up, I couldn’t get them to; I couldn’t get the red numbers in the inventory books to turn black. This worried me horribly; it was as if it were my own personal fault. When I closed my eyes at night I could see the numbers on the page before me, laid out in rows on my square oak desk at the button factory—those rows of red numbers like so many mechanical caterpillars, munching away at what was left of the money. When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it—which was what had been going on at Chase and Sons for some time—this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour—without love, without justice, without mercy—but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter.
   In the first week of December, Father announced a shutdown. It was temporary, he said. He hoped it would be very temporary. He talked about retreating and retrenching in order to regroup. He asked for understanding and patience, and was greeted with a watchful silence by the assembled workers. After the announcement he went back to Avilion and shut himself up in his turret and drank himself blind. Things were broken up there—glass objects. Bottles, no doubt. Laura and I sat in my room, on my bed, holding hands tightly and listening to the fury and grief rampaging around up there, right above our heads, like an interior thunderstorm. Father hadn’t done anything on that grand a scale for some time.
   He must have felt he’d let his men down. That he’d failed. That nothing he could do had been enough.
   “I will pray for him,” said Laura.
   “Does God care?” I said. “I don’t think he gives a tinker’s damn, actually. If there is a God.”
   “You can’t know that,” said Laura, “until after.”
   After what? I knew well enough, we’d had this conversation before. After we’re dead.

   Several days after Father’s announcement, the union revealed its power. There was already a core group of members, and now they wanted everyone in. A meeting was held outside the locked button factory and a call issued to all the workers to join up, because when Father reopened the factories, it was said, he would cut to the bone and they’d all be expected to take starvation wages. He was just like all the rest of them, he’d stuff his money into a bank in hard times like these, then sit on his hands until people were beaten down and driven right into the ground; then he’d seize the opportunity to grow fat off the backs of the workers. Him and his big house and fancy daughters—those frivolous parasites who lived off the sweat of the masses.
   You could tell these so-called organizers were from out of town, said Reenie, who was telling us about all this as we sat at the kitchen table. (We’d stopped having meals in the dining room, because Father had stopped eating there. He was barricaded in his turret; Reenie took a tray up.) Those roughnecks had no sense of what was decent, bringing the two of us into it like that, when everyone knew we had nothing to do with anything. She told us to pay no attention, which was easier said than done.
   There were still some who were loyal to Father. At the meeting, we heard, there had been disagreements, then voices raised, then scuffling. Tempers were set loose. One man was kicked in the head, and carted off to the hospital with concussion. It was one of the strikers—they were calling themselves the strikers, now—but this injury was blamed on the strikers themselves, because once you started that sort of disruption, who could tell where it would end?
   Better not to start. Better to keep your mouth shut. Much better.
   Callie Fitzsimmons came to see Father. She was very worried about him, she said. She was worried that he was going down the drain. Morally, is what she meant. How could he treat his workers in this cavalier and also cheapskate fashion? Father told her to face reality. He called her a Job’s comforter. He also said, Who put you up to this, one of your pinko pals? She said she had come on her own hook, out of love, because although a capitalist he’d always been a decent man, but now she found he’d turned into a heartless plutocrat. He said you couldn’t be a plutocrat if you were broke. She said he could liquidate his assets. He said his assets weren’t worth much more than her ass, which as far as he could tell she’d been giving away for nothing to anybody who’d asked. She said he hadn’t scorned the free handouts. He said yes, but the hidden costs had been too high—first all the food in his house for her artistic pals, then his blood and now his soul. She called him a bourgeois reactionary. He called her a corpse fly. By that time they were shouting at each other. Then there was a slamming of doors, and a car skidded away down the gravel, and that was the end of that.
   Was Reenie glad or sorry? Sorry. She hadn’t liked Callie, but she’d got used to her, and Callie had been good for Father once upon a time. Who would replace her? Some other floozie, and better the devil you know.

   The next week there was a call for a general strike, to show solidarity with the Chase and Sons workers. All stores and businesses must close, was the edict. All public services must be shut down. The telephones, the mail delivery. No milk, no bread, no ice. (Who was issuing these edicts? No one thought they were really coming from the man who actually spoke the words of them. This man claimed to be local, right from our own town, and was once thought to be—he was a Morton, a Morgan, something like that—but surely it had become clear that he was not local, not underneath it. He couldn’t have been, to behave like that. Who was his grandfather, anyway?)
   So it was not this man. He was not the brains behind it, said Reenie, because he did not have any brains to begin with. Dark forces were at work.
   Laura was worried about Alex Thomas. He was mixed up in it somehow, she said. She knew he was. He was bound to be, according to his lights.
   In the early afternoon of that same day, Richard Griffen arrived at Avilion in a car, with two other cars accompanying him. They were large cars, sleek and low-slung. There were five other men altogether, four of them quite big, in dark overcoats and grey fedoras. Richard Griffen and one of the men went into Father’s study, along with Father. Two of the others posted themselves at the house doors, front and back, and two went off somewhere in one of the expensive cars. Laura and I watched the comings and goings of the cars from Laura’s bedroom window. We’d been told to keep out of the way, which meant out of earshot as well. When we asked Reenie what was going on, she looked worried, and said our guess was as good as hers, but she was keeping her ear to the track.
   Richard Griffen did not stay to dinner. When he left, two of the cars went with him. The third one stayed behind, and three of the big men stayed with it. They took up unobtrusive residence in the former chauffeur’s quarters, over the garage.
   They were detectives, said Reenie. They must be. That was why they always had their overcoats on: it hid the guns, which they kept in their armpits. The guns were revolvers. She knew this from her various magazines. She said they were there to protect us, and if we saw anyone out of the ordinary creeping around the garden at night—besides these three men, of course—we were to scream.
   The next day there was rioting, along the main streets of the town. Many men present at it had never been seen before, or if they had been seen, they hadn’t been remembered. Who’d remember a tramp? But some of them hadn’t been tramps, they’d been international agitators in disguise. They’d been spying, all along. How had they got here so quickly? On the tops of trains, it was said. That was how men like them travelled around.
   The rioting started at a rally outside the town hall. First there were speeches in which goons and company thugs were mentioned; then Father, rendered in cardboard and wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar—not things he ever did—was burned in effigy, to loud cheering. Two rag dolls in frilly pink dresses were soaked in kerosene and tossed onto the flames as well. They were supposed to be us—Laura and me, said Reenie. Jokes had been made about them being hot little dollies. (Laura’s strolls around town with Alex had not gone unremarked.) It was Ron Hincks who’d told her this, said Reenie, thinking she should know. He said the two of us shouldn’t go downtown right now because feelings were running high and you never knew. He said we should stay at Avilion, where we would be safe. He said it was a crying shame about the dolls, and he’d like to get his hands on whoever had cooked that one up.
   Those main-street stores and businesses that had refused to close down had their windows broken. Then the ones that had closed also had their windows broken. After that, looting took place, and matters got severely out of hand. The newspaper was invaded and the offices wrecked; Elwood Murray was roughed up, and the machines in the printing shop at the back were smashed. His darkroom escaped, but his camera did not. It was a mournful time for him, which we heard all about, many times, afterwards.
   That night the button factory caught on fire. Flames shot out the windows on the lower floor: I couldn’t see them from my room, but the fire truck clanged past, going to the rescue. I was dismayed and frightened, of course, but I have to admit there was something exciting about this as well. As I was listening to the clanging, and to the distant shouts from the same direction, I heard someone coming up the back stairs. I thought it might be Reenie, but it wasn’t. It was Laura; she had her outdoor coat on.
   “Where have you been?” I asked her. “We’re supposed to stay put. Father has enough worries without you wandering off.”
   “I was only in the conservatory,” she said. “I was praying. I needed a quiet place.”
   They did manage to put out the fire, but a lot of damage had been done to the building. That was the first report. Then Mrs. Hillcoate arrived, out of breath and bearing clean laundry, and was allowed in past the guards. Arson, she said: they’d found the cans of gasoline. The night watchman was lying dead on the floor. He had a bump on his head.
   Two men had been seen running away. Had they been recognized? Not conclusively, but it was being rumoured that one of them was Miss Laura’s young man. Reenie said he wasn’t her young man, Laura didn’t have a young man, he was only an acquaintance. Well, whatever he was, said Mrs. Hillcoate, he’d most likely burnt down the button factory and conked poor Al Davidson on the head and killed him dead as a rat, and he’d better make himself scarce around this town if he knew what was good for him.
   At dinner Laura said she wasn’t hungry. She said she couldn’t eat right then: she would make up a tray for herself, to have later. I watched her carrying it up the back stairs to her room. It had double helpings of everything—rabbit, squash, boiled potatoes. Usually she treated eating as a kind of fidgeting—something to do with your hands at the dinner table, while other people were talking—or else as a chore she had to get through, like polishing the silver. A sort of tedious maintenance routine. I wondered when she had suddenly developed such optimism about food.
   The next day, troops from the Royal Canadian Regiment arrived to restore order. This was Father’s old regiment, from the war. He took it very hard, to see these soldiers turned against their own people—his own people, or the people he’d thought were his. That they no longer shared his view of them did not require any great genius to figure out, but he took that hard as well. Had they loved him, then, only for his money? It appeared so.
   After the Royal Canadian Regiment had got things under control, the Mounties arrived. Three of them appeared outside our front door. They knocked politely, then stood in the hall, their shiny boots creaking against the waxed parquet, their stiff brown hats in their hands. They wanted to talk to Laura.
   “Come with me, please, Iris,” Laura whispered when summoned. “I can’t see them alone.” She looked very young, very white.
   The two of us sat together on the settee in the morning room, beside the old gramophone. The Mounties sat in chairs. They did not look like my idea of a Mountie, being too old, too thick around the waist. One of them was younger, but he was not in charge. The middle one did the talking. He said that they apologized for disturbing us at what must be a difficult time, but the matter was of some urgency. What they wanted to talk about was Mr. Alex Thomas. Was Laura aware that this man was a known subversive and radical, and had been in the relief camps, causing agitation and stirring up trouble?
   Laura said that as far as she knew he had just been teaching the men how to read.
   That was one way of looking at it, said the Mountie. And if he was innocent, then he naturally had nothing to hide, and would come forward if required, didn’t she agree? Where might he be keeping himself these days?
   Laura said she couldn’t say.
   The question was repeated in a different way. This man was under suspicion: didn’t Laura want to help locate the criminal who might well have set fire to her father’s factory and may have been the cause of death of a loyal employee? If eyewitnesses were to be trusted, that is.
   I said that eyewitnesses were not to be trusted, because whoever was seen running away had been viewed only from the back, and besides it had been dark.
   “Miss Laura?” said the Mountie, ignoring me.
   Laura said that even if she could say, she wouldn’t. She said you were innocent until proven guilty. Also it was against her Christian principles to throw a man to the lions. She said she was sorry about the dead watchman, but it was not Alex Thomas’s fault, because Alex Thomas would never have done such a thing. But she could not say anything more.
   She was holding on to my arm, down near the wrist; I could feel the tremors coming from her, like a train track vibrating.
   The chief Mountie said something about obstructing justice.
   At this point I said that Laura was only just fifteen, and could not be held responsible in the way an adult would be. I said that what she had told them was of course confidential, and if it went any farther than this room—to the newspapers, for instance—then Father would know who to thank.
   The Mounties smiled, and stood up, and took their leave; they were decorous and reassuring. They may have seen the impropriety of pursuing this line of investigation. Although on the ropes, Father still had friends.

   “All right,” I said to Laura, once they were gone. “I know you’ve got him in this house. You’d better tell me where.”
   “I put him in the cold cellar,” said Laura, her bottom lip trembling.
   “The cold cellar!” I said. “What a stupid place! Why there?”
   “So he would have enough to eat, in an emergency,” said Laura, and burst into tears. I wrapped my arms around her, and she snuffled against my shoulder.
   “Enough to eat?” I said. “Enough jam and jelly and pickles? Really Laura, you take the cake.” Then we both began to laugh, and after we had laughed and Laura had wiped her eyes, I said, “We’ve got to get him out of there. What if Reenie goes down for a jar of jam or something and comes across him by mistake? She’d have a heart attack.”
   We laughed some more. We were very on edge. Then I said the attic would be better, because nobody ever went up there. I would arrange it all, I said. She’d better go up to bed: it was obvious that the strain was telling on her and she was all worn out. She sighed a little, like a tired child, then did as I’d suggested. She’d been living on her nerves, carrying around this immense weight of knowledge like some evil packsack, and now she’d handed it over to me she was free to sleep.
   Was it my belief that I was doing this only to spare her—to help her, to take care of her, as I had always done?
   Yes. That is what I did believe.

   I waited until Reenie had cleared up in the kitchen and turned in for the night. Then I went down the cellar stairs, into the chill, the dimness, the smell of spidery dampness. I went past the door to the coal cellar, the locked wine cellar door. The door to the cold cellar closed with a latch. I knocked, lifted it, went in. There was a scuttling noise. It was dark, of course; just the light from the corridor. The top of the apple barrel held the remains of Laura’s dinner—the rabbit bones. It looked like some primitive altar.
   I didn’t see him at first; he was behind the apple barrel. Then I could make him out. A knee, a foot. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s only me.”
   “Ah,” he said in his normal voice. “The devoted sister.”
   “Shh,” I said. The light switch was a chain hanging from the bulb. I pulled it, the light went on. Alex Thomas was unwinding himself, scrambling out from behind the barrel. He crouched, blinking, sheepish, like a man caught with his pants undone.
   “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said.
   “You’ve come to kick me out, or turn me over to the proper authorities, I assume,” he said with a smile.
   “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t want you to be discovered here. Father couldn’t stand the scandal.”
   “Capitalist’s Daughter Aids Bolshevik Murderer?” he said. “Love Nest Among the Jelly Jars Revealed? That sort of scandal?”
   I frowned at him. This was not a joking matter.
   “Rest easy. Laura and I aren’t up to anything,” he said. “She’s a great kid, but she’s a saint in training, and I’m not a baby snatcher.” He’d stood up by now and was dusting himself off.
   “Then why is she hiding you?” I asked.
   “Matter of principle. Once I asked, she had to accept. I fall into the right category for her.”
   “What category?”
   “‘The least of these,’ I guess,” he said. “To quote Jesus.” I found that quite cynical. Then he said that bumping into Laura had been a sort of accident. He’d run into her in the conservatory. What had he been doing there? Hiding, obviously. He’d hoped also, he said, to be able to talk to me.
   “Me?” I said. “Why on earth, me?”
   “I thought you’d know what to do. You seem like the practical type. Your sister is less…”
   “Laura seems to have managed well enough,” I said shortly. I didn’t like it when other people criticized Laura—her vagueness, her simplicity, her fecklessness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me. “How did she get you past those men at the doors?” I said. “Into the house? The ones in overcoats.”
   “Even men in overcoats have to take a leak sometimes,” he said.
   I was taken aback by this vulgarity—it was at odds with his dinner-party politeness—but perhaps it was a sample of the orphanish jeering Reenie had predicted. I decided to ignore it. “You didn’t set the fire, I take it,” I said. I meant to sound sarcastic, but it wasn’t received that way.
   “I’m not that stupid,” he said. “I wouldn’t set a fire for no reason.”
   “Everyone thinks it was you.”
   “It wasn’t, though,” he said. “But it would be very convenient for certain people to take that view.”
   “What certain people? Why?” I wasn’t pushing him this time; I was baffled.
   “Use your head,” he said. But he wouldn’t say any more.

The attic

   I got a candle from the stash of them in the kitchen, on hand for power blackouts, and lit it, and led Alex Thomas out of the cellar and through the kitchen and up the back stairs, then up the narrower stairs to the attic, where I installed him behind the three empty trunks. There were some old quilts stored in a cedar chest up there, and I hauled them out for bedding.
   “No one will come,” I said. “If they do, get underneath the quilts. Don’t walk around, they might hear the footsteps. Don’t turn on the light.” (There was a single bulb with a pull chain in the attic, just as in the cold cellar.) “We’ll bring you something to eat in the morning,” I added, not knowing how I would make good on this promise.
   I went downstairs, then came back up again with a chamber pot, which I set down without a word. It was a detail that had always worried me, in Reenie’s stories about kidnappers—what about the facilities? It would be one thing to be locked into a crypt, quite another to be reduced to squatting in a corner with your skirt hauled up.
   Alex Thomas nodded, and said, “Good girl. You’re a pal. I knew you were practical.”
   In the morning Laura and I held a whispered conference in her bedroom. The subjects discussed were the procuring of food and drink, the need for watchfulness, and the emptying of the chamber pot. One of us—pretending to be reading—would stand guard in my room, with the door open: we could see the door to the attic stairs from there. The other would fetch and carry. We agreed to take these tasks in rotation. The big hurdle would be Reenie, who was sure to smell a rat if we acted too furtive.
   We hadn’t worked out any plan for what we would do if we were found out. We never did work out such a plan. It was all improvisation.
   Alex Thomas’s first breakfast was our toast crusts. As a rule, we did not eat our crusts until nagged—it was still Reenie’s habit to say Remember the starving Armenians —but this time, when Reenie looked, the crusts were gone. They were actually in Laura’s navy-blue skirt pocket.
   “Alex Thomas must be the starving Armenians,” I whispered, as we hurried up the stairs. But Laura didn’t think this was funny. She thought it was accurate.
   Mornings and evenings were the times of our visits. We raided the pantry, salvaged the leftovers. We smuggled up raw carrots, bacon rinds, half-eaten boiled eggs, pieces of bread folded over, with butter and jam inside. Once a leg of fricasseed chicken—a daring coup. Also glasses of water, cups of milk, cold coffee. We carted away the empty dishes, stashed them under our beds until the coast was clear, then washed them in our bathroom sink before replacing them in the kitchen cupboard. (I did this: Laura was too clumsy.) We didn’t use the good china. What if something got broken? Even an everyday plate might have been noticed: Reenie kept track. So we were very cautious with the tableware.
   Was Reenie suspicious of us? I expect so. She could usually tell when we were up to something. But she could also tell when it was more politic not to know exactly what that something might be. I expect she was preparing herself to say she’d had no idea, in case we were caught. She did tell us, once, not to go filching the raisins; she said we were acting like bottomless pits, and where did we get such hollow legs all of a sudden? And she was annoyed about the quarter of a pumpkin pie that went missing. Laura said she’d eaten it; she’d had a sudden fit of hunger, she said.
   “Crust and all?” said Reenie sharply. Laura never ate the pie crusts from Reenie’s pies. Nobody did. Nor did Alex Thomas.
   “I fed it to the birds,” said Laura. True enough: that’s what she had done, afterwards.
   Alex Thomas was at first appreciative of our efforts. He said we were good pals, and that without us his goose would have been cooked. Then he wanted cigarettes—he was dying for a smoke. We brought him some from the silver box on the piano, but warned him to limit himself to one a day—the fumes might be detected. (He ignored this stricture.)
   Then he said the worst thing about the attic was not being able to keep clean. He said his mouth felt like a drain. We stole the old toothbrush Reenie used for cleaning the silver, and scrubbed it off for him as best we could; he said it was better than nothing. One day we brought him a wash basin and a towel, and a jug with warm water. Afterwards he waited till nobody was underneath and threw the dirty water out the attic window. It had been raining, so the ground was wet anyway and the splash was not noticed. A little later, when the coast seemed clear, we allowed him down the attic stairs and shut him up in the bathroom the two of us shared, so he could have a proper wash. (We’d told Reenie we’d help out by taking over the cleaning of this bathroom, on which her comment was: Wonders never cease. )
   While Alex Thomas’s washing-up was going forward Laura sat in her bedroom, I sat in mine, each guarding a bathroom door. I tried not to think about what was going on in there. The image of him with all his clothes off was painful to me, in some way that did not bear contemplating.
   Alex Thomas was featured in newspaper editorials, not only in our own paper. He was an arsonist and murderer, it was said, and of the worst kind—one who killed from cold-blooded fanaticism. He had come to Port Ticonderoga to infiltrate the working force, and to sow seeds of dissension, in which he had succeeded, as witness the general strike and the rioting. He was an example of the evils of a university education—a smart boy, too smart for his own good, whose wits had been turned through bad company and worse books. His adoptive father, a Presbyterian minister, was quoted as saying that he prayed every night for Alex’s soul, but that this was a generation of vipers. His rescue of Alex as a child from the horrors of war was not passed over: Alex was a brand snatched from the burning, he said, but it was always a risk to take a stranger into your home. The implication was that such brands were better left unsnatched.
   In addition to all of that, the police had printed a Wanted poster of Alex, and had stuck it up in the post office, and in other public places as well. Luckily it wasn’t a very clear picture: Alex had his hand in front of him, which partly obscured his face. It was the photo from the newspaper, the one Elwood Murray had taken of the three of us, at the button factory picnic. (Laura and I were cut off at the sides, naturally.) Elwood Murray had let it be known that he could have printed a better picture from the negative, but when he went to look, the negative was gone. Well, that was no surprise: a number of things had been destroyed when the newspaper office was wrecked.
   We brought Alex the newspaper clippings, and one of the Wanted posters too—Laura had purloined it from a telephone pole. He read about himself with rueful dismay. “They want my head on a platter,” was what he said.
   After a few days, he asked if we could bring him some paper—writing paper. There was a stack of school exercise books left over from Mr. Erskine: we brought him those, and a pencil as well.
   “What do you think he’s writing?” Laura asked. We couldn’t decide. A prisoner’s journal, a vindication of himself? Perhaps a letter, to someone who might rescue him. But he didn’t ask us to mail anything, so it couldn’t have been a letter.
   Tending Alex Thomas brought Laura and me closer together than we had been for a while. He was our guilty secret, and also our virtuous project—one we could finally share. We were two good little Samaritans, lifting out of the ditch the man fallen among thieves. We were Mary and Martha, ministering to—well, not Jesus, even Laura did not go that far, but it was obvious which of us she had cast in these roles. I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex’s feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)
   Laura carried the food scraps up the attic stairs as if they were a temple offering. She carried the chamber pot down as if it were a reliquary, or a precious candle on the verge of flickering out.
   At night, after Alex Thomas had been fed and watered, we would talk him over—how he’d looked that day, whether he was too thin, whether he’d coughed—we didn’t want him to get sick. What he might need, what we should try to steal for him the next day. Then we would climb into our respective beds. I don’t know about Laura, but I would picture him up there in the attic, directly above me. He too would be trying to sleep, tossing and turning in his bed of musty quilts. Then he would be sleeping. Then he would be dreaming, long dreams of war and fire, and of disintegrating villages, their fragments strewn about.
   I don’t know at what point these dreams of his changed to dreams of pursuit and escape; I don’t know at what point I joined him in these dreams, fleeing with him hand in hand, at dusk, away from a burning building, across the furrowed December fields, the stubbled earth in which the frost was now beginning to set in, towards the dark line of the distant woods.
   But it wasn’t his dream really, I did know that. It was my own. It was Avilion that was burning, its broken pieces that were scattered over the ground—the good china, the Sèvers bowl with rose petals, the silver cigarette box from the top of the piano. The piano itself, the stained-glass windows from the dining room—the blood-red cup, Iseult’s cracked harp—everything I’d been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. I’d wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

   One day, when Laura was out—it was no longer dangerous for her, the men in overcoats had gone away and the Mounties as well, the streets were orderly again—I decided to make a solo trip to the attic. I had an offering to make—a pocketful of currants and dried figs, snatched from the makings for the Christmas pudding. I scouted—Reenie was safely occupied with Mrs. Hillcoate, in the kitchen—then went to the attic door and knocked. We had a special knock by then, one knock followed by three more in quick succession. Then I tiptoed up the narrow attic stairs.
   Alex Thomas was crouched beside the small oval window, trying to take advantage of what daylight there was. Evidently he hadn’t heard my knock: his back was turned towards me, and he had one of the quilts around his shoulders. He seemed to be writing. I could smell cigarette smoke—yes, he was smoking, there was his hand with the cigarette in it. I didn’t think he should be doing this so near a quilt.
   I did not quite know how to announce my presence. “I’m here,” I said.
   He jumped, and dropped the cigarette. It fell onto the quilt. I gasped, and dropped to my knees to put it out—I had the now-familiar vision of Avilion going up in flames. “It’s all right,” he said. He was kneeling too, both of us searching for any remaining sparks. Then the next thing I knew we were on the floor, and he had hold of me and was kissing me on the mouth.
   I hadn’t expected this.
   Had I expected this? Was it so sudden, or were there preliminaries: a touch, a gaze? Did I do anything to provoke him? Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?
   It is now: I am the only survivor.
   In any case, it was just as Reenie had said, about the men in movie theatres, except that what I felt was not outrage. But the rest of it was true enough: I was transfixed, I could not move, I had no recourse. My bones had turned to melting wax. He got almost all of my buttons undone before I was able to rouse myself, to pull myself away, to flee.
   I did this wordlessly. As I scrambled down the attic stairs, pushing back my hair, tucking in my blouse, I had the impression that—behind my back—he was laughing at me.

   I didn’t know exactly what might occur if I let such a thing happen again, but whatever it was would be dangerous, at least for me. I would be asking for it, I would get what was coming to me, I would be an accident waiting to happen. I couldn’t afford to be alone in the attic with Alex Thomas again, nor could I confide in Laura the reason why. It would be too hurtful to her: she would never be able to understand it. (There was another possibility—he might have been doing a similar kind of thing with Laura. But no, I couldn’t believe that. She never would have allowed it. Would she?)
   “We have to get him out of town,” I said to Laura. “We can’t keep this up. They’re sure to notice.”
   “Not yet,” said Laura. “They’re still watching the train tracks.” She was in a position to know this, as she was still doing her work with the church soup kitchen.
   “Well, somewhere else in town then,” I said.
   “Where? There isn’t anywhere else. And this is the best place—this is the one place they’d never think to look.”
   Alex Thomas said he didn’t want to get snowed in. He said a winter in the attic would drive him buggy. He said he was going stir-crazy. He said he would walk a couple of miles down the tracks, and hop a freight—there was a high bank there that made it easier. He said that if only he could get as far as Toronto, he could hide out—he had friends there, and they had friends. Then he’d get across to the States, one way or another, where he’d be safer. From what he’d read in the papers, the authorities suspected he might be there already. They certainly weren’t still looking for him in Port Ticonderoga.
   By the first week in January, we decided it was safe enough for him to leave. We filched an old coat of Father’s from the back corner of the cloak room for him, and packed him a lunch—bread and cheese, an apple—and sent him away on his travels. (Father later missed the coat and Laura said she’d given it to a tramp, which was a partial truth. As this act was entirely in character for her it wasn’t questioned, only grumbled about.)
   On the night of his departure we let Alex out the back door. He said he owed a lot to us; he said he wouldn’t forget it. He gave each of us a hug, a brotherly hug of equal duration for each. It was obvious he wanted to be quit of us. Apart from the fact that it was night, it was oddly as if he were going off to school. Afterwards we cried, like mothers. It was also the relief—that he’d gone away, that he was off our hands—but that is like mothers too.

   He left behind one of the cheap exercise books we’d given him. Of course we opened it immediately to see if he’d written anything in it. What were we hoping for? A farewell note, expressing undying gratitude? Kind sentiments about ourselves? Something of that sort.
   This is what we found:

   anchoryne = nacrod
   berel = onyxor
   carchineal = porphyrial
   diamite = quartzephyr
   ebonort = rhint
   fulgor = sapphyrion
   glutz = tristok
   hortz = ulinth
   iridis = vorver
   jocynth = wotanite
   kalkil = xenor
   lazaris = yorula
   malachont = zycron

   “Precious stones?” said Laura.
   “No. They don’t sound right,” I said.
   “Is it a foreign language?”
   I didn’t know. I thought this list looked suspiciously like a code. Perhaps Alex Thomas was (after all) what other people accused him of being: a spy of some kind.
   “I think we should get rid of this,” I said.
   “I will,” said Laura quickly. “I’ll burn it in my fireplace.” She folded it up, and slid it into her pocket.

   A week after Alex Thomas’s departure, Laura came to my room. “I think you should have this,” she said. It was a print of the photograph of the three of us, the one Elwood Murray had taken at the picnic. But she’d cut herself out of it—only her hand remained. She couldn’t have got rid of this hand without making a wobbly margin. She hadn’t coloured this picture at all, except for her own cut-off hand. This had been tinted a very pale yellow.
   “For goodness’ sake, Laura!” I said. “Where did you get this?”
   “I made some prints,” she said. “When I was working at Elwood Murray’s. I’ve got the negative too.”
   I didn’t know whether to be angry or alarmed. Cutting up the picture like that was a very strange thing to have done. The sight of Laura’s light-yellow hand, creeping towards Alex across the grass like an incandescent crab, gave me a chill down the back of my spine. “Why on earth did you do that?”
   “Because that’s what you want to remember,” she said. This was so audacious that I gasped. She gave me a direct look, which in anyone else would have been a challenge. But this was Laura: her tone was neither sulky nor jealous. As far as she was concerned she was simply stating a fact.
   “It’s all right,” she said. “I have another one, for me.”
   “And I’m not in yours?”
   “No,” she said. “You’re not. None of you but your hand. “This was the closest she ever came, in my hearing, to a confession of love for Alex Thomas. Except for the day before her death, that is. Not that she used the word love, even then.
   I ought to have thrown this mutilated picture away, but I didn’t.

   Things settled back into their accustomed, monotonous order. By unspoken consent, Laura and I did not mention Alex Thomas between us any more. There was too much that could not be said, on either side. At first I used to go up to the attic—a faint odour of smoke was still detectable there—but I stopped doing that after a while, as it served no good purpose.
   We busied ourselves with daily life again, insofar as that was possible. There was a little more money now, because Father would get the insurance after all, for the burned factory building. It wasn’t enough, but we had been given—he said—a breathing space.