The Blind Assassin Page 7

  When I was the age for it - thirteen, fourteen - I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered beds of ornamentals, and see her trailing wistfully through the grounds in a white lace tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile. Soon I added a lover. She would meet this lover outside the conservatory, which by that time was neglected - my father had no interest in steam-heated orange trees - but I restored it in my mind, and supplied it with hothouse flowers. Orchids, I thought, or camellias. (I didn't know what a camellia was, but I'd read about them.) My grandmother and the lover would disappear inside, and do what? I wasn't sure.

  In reality the chances of Adelia having had a lover were nil. The town was too small, its morals were too provincial, she had too far to fall. She wasn't a fool. Also she had no money of her own.

  As hostess and household manager, Adelia did well by Benjamin Chase. She prided herself on her taste, and my grandfather deferred to her in this because her taste was one of the things he'd married her for. He was forty by then; he'd worked hard at making his fortune, and now he intended to get his money's worth, which meant being patronized by his new bride about his wardrobe and bullied about his table manners. In his own way he also wanted Culture, or at least the concrete evidence of it. He wanted the right china.

  He got that, and the twelve-course dinners that went along with it: celery and salted nuts first, chocolates at the end. Consomme, rissoles, timbales, the fish, the roast, the cheese, the fruit, hothouse grapes draped over the etched-glass epergne. Railway-hotel food, I think of it now; ocean-liner food. Prime ministers came to Port Ticonderoga - by that time the town had several prominent manufacturers, whose support for political parties was valued - and Avilion was where they stayed. There were photographs of Grandfather Benjamin with three prime ministers in turn, framed in gold and hung in the library - Sir John Sparrow Thompson, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, Sir Charles Tupper. They must have preferred the food there to anything else on offer.

  Adelia's task would have been to design and order these dinners, then to avoid being seen to devour them. Custom would have dictated that she only pick at her food while in company: chewing and swallowing were such blatantly carnal activities. I expect she had a tray sent up to her room, afterwards. Ate with ten fingers.

  Avilion was completed in 1889, and christened by Adelia. She took the name from Tennyson:

  The island-valley of Avilion;

  Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

  Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns

  And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, . . .

  She had this quotation printed on the left-hand inner side of her Christmas cards. (Tennyson was somewhat out of date, by English standards - Oscar Wilde was in the ascendant then, at least among the younger set - but then, everything in Port Ticonderoga was somewhat out of date.)

  People - people in town - must have laughed at her for this quotation: even those with social pretensions referred to her as Her Ladyship or the Duchess, though they were wounded if left off her invitation lists. About her Christmas cards they must have said, Well, she's out of luck about the hail and snow. Maybe she'll have a word with God about that. Or perhaps, down at the factories: Seen any of them bowery hollows around here, anywheres but down the front of her dress ? I know their style and I doubt that it's changed a lot.

  Adelia was showing off with her Christmas card, but I believe there was more to it. Avilion was where King Arthur went to die. Surely Adelia's choice of name signifies how hopelessly in exile she considered herself to be: she might be able to call into being by sheer force of will some shoddy facsimile of a happy isle, but it would never be the real thing. She wanted a salon; she wanted artistic people, poets and composers and scientific thinkers and the like, as she had seen while visiting her English third cousins, when her family still had money. A golden life, with wide lawns.

  But such people were not to be found in Port Ticonderoga, and Benjamin refused to travel. He needed to be near his factories, he said. Most likely he didn't want to be dragged into a crowd that would sneer at him for his button manufacturing, and where there might be unknown pieces of cutlery lying in wait, and where Adelia would feel ashamed because of him.

  Adelia declined to travel without him, to Europe or anywhere else. It might have been too tempting - not to come back. To drift away, shedding money gradually like a deflating blimp, a prey to cads and delectable bounders, sinking down into the unmentionable. With a neckline like hers, she would have been susceptible.

  Among other things, Adelia went in for sculpture. There were two stone sphinxes flanking the conservatory - Laura and I used to climb up on their backs - and a capering faun leering from behind a stone bench, with pointed ears and a huge grape leaf scrolled across his private parts like a badge of office; and seated beside the lily pond there was a nymph, a modest girl with small adolescent breasts and a rope of marble hair over one shoulder, one foot dipping tentatively into the water. We used to eat apples beside her, and watch the goldfish nibbling at her toes.

  (These pieces of statuary were said to be "authentic," but authentic what? And how had Adelia come by them? I suspect a chain of pilfering - some shady European go-between picking them up for a song, forging their provenance, then fobbing them off long-distance on Adelia and pocketing the difference, judging correctly that a rich American - for so he would have tagged her - wouldn't cotton on.)

  Adelia designed the family graveyard monument as well, with its two angels. She wanted my grandfather to dig up his forbears and have them relocated there, in order to give the impression of a dynasty, but he never got around to it. As it turned out, she herself was the first to be buried there.

  Did Grandfather Benjamin breathe a sigh of relief when Adelia was gone? He may have grown tired of knowing he could never measure up to her exacting standards, though it's clear he admired her to the point of awe. Nothing about Avilion was to be changed, for instance: no picture in it moved, none of its furniture replaced. Perhaps he considered the house itself her true monument.

  And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren't. As she was dead by then, we couldn't argue.

  My father was the eldest of three sons, each of whom was given Adelia's idea of a high-toned name: Norval and Edgar and Percival, Arthurian revival with a hint of Wagner. I suppose they should have been thankful they weren't called Uther or Sigmund or Ulric. Grandfather Benjamin doted on his sons, and wanted them to learn the button business, but Adelia had loftier aims. She packed them off to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where Benjamin and his machinery couldn't coarsen them. She appreciated the uses of Benjamin's wealth, but preferred to gloss over the sources of it.

  The sons came home for the summer holidays. At boarding school and then at university they'd learned a genial contempt for their father, who couldn't read Latin, not even badly, as they did. They would talk about people he didn't know, sing songs he'd never heard of, tell jokes he couldn't understand. They'd go sailing by moonlight in his little yacht, the Water Nixie, named by Adelia - another of her wistful Gothicisms. They'd play the mandolin (Edgar) and banjo (Percival), and furtively drink beer, and foul up the tackle, and leave it for him to unscramble. They'd drive around in one of his two new motor cars, even though the roads around town were so bad half the year - snow, then mud, then dust - that there wasn't much of anywhere to drive. There were rumours of loose girls, at least for the two younger boys, and of money changing hands - well, it was only decent to pay these ladies off so they could get themselves fixed up, and who wanted a lot of unauthorized Chase babies crawling around? - but they were not girls from our town, and so it was not held against the sons; rather the reverse, among men at least. People laughed at them a little, but not too much: they were
said to be solid enough, and to have the common touch. Edgar and Percival were known as Eddie and Percy, though my father, being shyer and more dignified, was always Norval. They were pleasant-looking boys, a little wild, as boys were expected to be. What did "wild" mean, exactly?

  "They were rascals," Reenie told me, "but they were never scoundrels."

  "What's the difference?" I asked.

  She sighed. "I only hope you'll never find out," she said.

  Adelia died in 1913, of cancer - an unnamed and therefore most likely gynecological variety. During the last month of Adelia's illness, Reenie's mother was brought in as extra help in the kitchen, and Reenie along with her; she was thirteen by then, and the whole thing made a deep impression on her. "The pain was so bad they'd have to give her morphine, every four hours, they had the nurses around the clock. But she wouldn't stay in bed, she'd bite the bullet, she was always up and beautifully dressed as usual, even though you could tell she was half out of her mind. I used to see her walking around the grounds, in her pale colours and a big hat with a veil. She had lovely posture and more backbone than most men, that one. At the end they had to tie her into her bed, for her own good. Your grandfather was heartbroken, you could see it took the starch right out of him." As time went on and I became harder to impress, Reenie added stifled screams and moans and deathbed vows to this story, though I was never sure of her intent. Was she telling me that I too should display such fortitude - such defiance of pain, such bullet-biting - or was she merely revelling in the harrowing details? Both, no doubt.

  By the time Adelia died, the three boys were mostly grown up. Did they miss their mother, did they mourn her? Of course they did. How could they fail to be grateful for her dedication to them? Still, she'd kept them on a tight leash, or as tight a one as she could manage. There must have been some loosening of the ties and collars after she'd been properly dug under.

  None of the three sons wanted to go into buttons, for which they had inherited their mother's disdain, though they had not also inherited her realism. They knew money didn't grow on trees, but they had few bright ideas about where it did grow instead. Norval - my father - thought he might go into law and then eventually take up politics, as he had plans for improving the country. The other two wanted to travel: once Percy had finished college, they intended to make a prospecting expedition to South America, in search of gold. The open road beckoned.

  Who then was to take charge of the Chase industries? Would there be no Chase and Sons? If not, why had Benjamin worked his fingers to the bone? By this time he'd convinced himself he'd done it for some reason apart from his own ambitions, his own desires - some noble end. He'd built up a legacy, he wanted to pass it on, from generation to generation.

  This must have been the reproachful undertone of more than one discussion, around the dinner table, over the port. But the boys dug in their heels. You can't force a young man to devote his life to button-making if he doesn't want to. They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.

  The trousseau

  The new fan has now been purchased. The parts of it came in a large cardboard box, and were assembled by Walter, who carted his toolbox over and screwed it all together. When he'd finished, he said, "That should fix her."

  Boats are female for Walter, as are busted car engines and broken lamps and radios - items of any kind that can be fiddled with by men adroit with gadgetry, and restored to a condition as good as new. Why do I find this reassuring? Perhaps I believe, in some childish, faith-filled corner of myself, that Walter might yet take out his pliers and his ratchet set and do the same for me.

  The tall fan is installed in the bedroom. I've hauled the old one downstairs to the porch, where it's aimed at the back of my neck. The sensation is pleasant but unnerving, as if a hand of cool air lies gently on my shoulder. Thus aerated, I sit at my wooden table, scratching away with my pen. No, not scratching - pens no longer scratch. The words roll smoothly and soundlessly enough across the page; it's getting them to flow down the arm, it's squeezing them out through the fingers, that is so difficult.

  It's almost dusk now. There's no wind; the sound of the rapids washing up through the garden is like one long breath. The blue flowers blend into the air, the red ones are black, the white ones shine, phosphorescent. The tulips have shed their petals, leaving the pistils bare - black, snout-like, sexual. The peonies are almost finished, bedraggled and limp as damp tissue, but the lilies have come out; also the phlox. The last of the mock oranges have dropped their blossoms, leaving the grass strewn with white confetti.

  In July of 1914, my mother married my father. This called for an explanation, I felt, considering everything.

  My best hope was Reenie. When I was at the age to take an interest in such things - ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen - I used to sit at the kitchen table and pick her like a lock.

  She'd been less than seventeen when she'd come to Avilion full-time, from a row house on the southeast bank of the Jogues, where the factory workers lived. She said she was Scotch and Irish, not the Catholic Irish, of course, meaning her grandmothers were. She'd started out as a nursemaid for me, but as a result of turnovers and attrition she was now our mainstay. How old was she? None of your beeswax. Old enough to know better. And that's enough of that. If prodded about her own life, she would clam up. I keep myself to myself, she'd say. How prudent that seemed to me once. How miserly, now.

  But she knew the family histories, or at least something about them. What she would tell me varied in relation to my age, and also in relation to how distracted she was at the time. Nevertheless, in this way I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original. I didn't want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.

  My father had proposed (said Reenie) at a skating party. There was an inlet - an old mill pond - upstream from the falls, where the water moved more slowly. When the winters were cold enough, a sheet of ice would form there that was thick enough to skate on. Here the young peoples' church group would hold its skating parties, which were not called parties but outings.

  My mother was a Methodist, but my father was Anglican: thus my mother was below my father's level socially, as such things were accounted then. (If she'd lived, my Grandmother Adelia would never have allowed the marriage, or so I decided later. My mother would have been too far down the ladder for her - also too prudish, too earnest, too provincial. Adelia would have dragged my father off to Montreal - hooked him up to a debutante, at the very least. Someone with better clothes.)

  My mother had been young, only eighteen, but she was not a silly, flighty girl, said Reenie. She'd been teaching school; you could be a teacher then when you were under twenty. She didn't have to teach: her father was the senior lawyer for Chase Industries, and they were "comfortably off." But, like her own mother, who'd died when she was nine, my mother took her religion seriously. She believed you should help those less fortunate than yourself. She'd taken up teaching the poor as a sort of missionary work, said Reenie admiringly. (Reenie often admired acts of my mother's that she would have thought it stupid to perform herself. As for the poor, she'd grown up among them and considered them feckless. You could teach them till you were blue in the face, but with most you'd just be beating your head against a brick wall, she'd say. But your mother, bless her good heart, she could never see it.)

  There's a snapshot of my mother at the Normal School, in London, Ontario, taken with two other girls; all three are standing on the front steps of their boarding house, laughing, their arms entwined. The winter snow lies heaped to either side; icicles drip from the roof. My mother is wearing a sealskin coat; from underneath her hat the ends of her fine hair crackle. She must
already have acquired the pince-nez that preceded the owlish glasses I remember - she was near-sighted early - but in this picture she doesn't have them on. One of her feet in its fur-topped boot is visible, the ankle turned coquettishly. She looks courageous, dashing even, like a boyish buccaneer.

  After graduating, she'd accepted a position at a one-room school, farther west and north, in what was then the back country. She'd been shocked by the experience - by the poverty, the ignorance, the lice. The children there had been sewn into their underwear in the fall and not unsewn until the spring, a detail that has remained in my mind as particularly squalid. Of course, said Reenie, it was no place for a lady like your mother.

  But my mother felt she was accomplishing something - doing something- for at least a few of those unfortunate children, or she hoped she was; and then she'd come home for the Christmas holidays. Her pallor and thinness were commented upon: roses were required in her cheeks. So there she was at the skating party, on the frozen mill pond, in company with my father. He'd laced up her skates for her first, kneeling on one knee.

  They'd known each other for some time through their respective fathers. There had been previous, decorous encounters. They'd acted together, in the last of Adelia's garden theatricals - he'd been Ferdinand, she Miranda, in a bowdlerized version of The Tempest in which both sex and Caliban had been minimized. In a dress of shell pink, said Reenie, with a wreath of roses; and she spoke the words out perfect, just like an angel. O brave new world, that has such people in't! And the unfocused gaze of her dazzled, limpid, myopic eyes. You could see how it all came about.

  My father could have looked elsewhere, for a wife with more money, but he must have wanted the tried and true: someone he could depend on. Despite his high spirits - he'd had high spirits once, apparently - he was a serious young man, said Reenie, implying that otherwise my mother would have rejected him. They were both in their own ways earnest; they both wanted to achieve some worthy end or other, change the world for the better. Such alluring, such perilous ideals!