Blind Assassin (120 page)

I
say flint,
not
stone:
a flint has a heart of fire.

“Laura, I wanted to tell you,” I said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

She turned towards me, her face smooth and white as a porcelain plate, the expression sealed inside it. But she didn’t seem surprised. Nor did she congratulate me. Instead she said, “Remember the kitten?”

“What kitten?” I said.

“The kitten Mother had. The one that killed her.”

“Laura, it wasn’t a kitten.”

“I know,” said Laura.

Beautiful view

Reenie is back. She’s none too pleased with me.
Well, young lady. What do you have to say for yourself? What did you do to Laura? Don’t you ever learn?

There is no answer to such questions. The answers are so entangled with the questions, so knotted and many-stranded, that they aren’t really answers at all.

I’m on trial here. I know it. I know what you’ll soon be thinking. It will be much the same as what I myself am thinking: Should I have behaved differently? You’ll no doubt believe so, but did I have any other choices? I’d have such choices now, but now is not then.

Should I have been able to read Laura’s mind? Should I have known what was going on? Should I have seen what was coming next? Was I my sister’s keeper?

Should
is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

On a Wednesday in February, I made my way downstairs after my mid-afternoon nap. I was napping a lot by then: I was seven months’ pregnant, and having trouble sleeping through the night. There was some concern too about my blood pressure; my ankles were puffy, and I’d been told to lie with my feet up for as much as I could. I felt like a huge grape, swollen to bursting with sugar and purple juice; I felt ugly and cumbersome.

It was snowing that day, I remember, great soft wet flakes: I’d looked out the window after I’d levered myself to my feet, and seen the chestnut tree, all white, like a giant coral.

Winifred was there, in the cloud-coloured living room. That wasn’t unheard of—she came and went as if she owned the place—but Richard was there too. Usually at that time of day he was at his office. Each of them had a drink in hand. Each looked morose.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Sit down,” said Richard. “Over here, beside me.” He patted the sofa.

“This is going to be a shock,” said Winifred. “I’m sorry it had to happen at such a delicate time.”

She did the talking. Richard held my hand and looked at the floor. Every now and then he would shake his head, as if he found her story either unbelievable or all too true.

Here is the essence of what she said:

Laura had finally snapped. Snapped, she said, as if Laura was a bean. “We ought to have got help sooner for the poor girl, but we did think she was settling down,” she said. However, today at the hospital where she’d been doing her charity visiting, she had gone out of control. Luckily there was a doctor present, and another one—a specialist—had been summoned. The upshot of it was that Laura had been declared a danger to herself and to others, and unfortunately Richard had been forced to commit her to the care of an institution.

“What are you telling me? What did she do?”

Winifred had on her pitying look. “She threatened to harm herself. She also said some things that were—well, she’s clearly suffering from delusions.”

“What did she say?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“Laura is my sister,” I said. “I’m entitled to know.”

“She accused Richard of trying to kill you.”

“In those words?”

“It was clear what she meant,” said Winifred.

“No, please tell me exactly.”

“She called him a lying, treacherous slave-trader, and a degenerate Mammon-worshipping monster.”

“I know she has extreme views at times, and she does tend to express herself in a direct manner. But you can’t put someone in the loony bin just for saying something like that.”

“There was more,” said Winifred darkly.

Richard, by way of soothing me, said that it wasn’t a standard institution—not a Victorian norm. It was a private clinic, a very good one, one of the best. The Bella Vista Clinic. They would take excellent care of her there.

“What is the view?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Bella Vista. It means
beautiful view.
So what is the view? What will Laura see when she looks out the window?”

“I hope this isn’t your idea of a joke,” said Winifred.

“No. It’s very important. Is it a lawn, a garden, a fountain, or what? Or some sort of squalid alleyway?”

Neither of them could tell me. Richard said he was sure it would be natural surroundings of one kind or another. Bella Vista, he said, was outside the city. There were landscaped grounds.

“Have you been there?”

“I know you’re upset, darling,” he said. “Maybe you should have a nap.”

“I just had a nap. Please tell me.”

“No, I haven’t been there. Of course I haven’t.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Now really, Iris,” said Winifred. “What does it matter?”

“I want to see her.” I had a hard time believing that Laura had suddenly fallen to pieces, but then I was so used to Laura’s quirks that I no longer found them strange. It would have been easy for me to have overlooked the slippage—the telltale signs of mental frailty, whatever they might have been.

According to Winifred, the doctors had advised us that seeing Laura was out of the question for the time being. They’d been most emphatic about it. She was too deranged, not only that, she was violent. Also there was my own condition to be considered.

I started to cry. Richard handed me his handkerchief. It was lightly starched, and smelled of cologne.

“There’s something else you should know,” said Winifred. “This is most distressing.”

“Perhaps we should leave that item till later,” said Richard in a subdued voice.

“It’s very painful,” said Winifred, with false reluctance. So of course I insisted on knowing right then and there.

“The poor girl claims she’s pregnant,” said Winifred. “Just like you.”

I stopped crying. “Well? Is she?”

“Of course not,” said Winifred. “How could she be?”

“Who is the father?” I couldn’t quite picture Laura making up such a thing, out of whole cloth. I mean, who does she imagine it is?

“She refuses to say,” said Richard.

“Of course she was hysterical,” said Winifred, “so it was all jumbled up. She appeared to believe that the baby you’re going to have is actually hers, in some way she was unable to explain. Of course she was raving.”

Richard shook his head. “Very sad,” he murmured, in the hushed and solemn tone of an undertaker: muffled, like a thick maroon carpet.

“The specialist—the
mental
specialist—said that Laura must be insanely jealous of you,” said Winifred. “Jealous of everything about you—she wants to be living your life, she wants to be you, and this is the form it’s taken. He said you ought to be kept out of harm’s way.” She took a tiny sip of her drink. “Haven’t you had your own suspicions?”

You can see what a clever woman she was.

Aimee was born in early April. In those days they used ether, and so I was not conscious during the birth. I breathed in and blacked out, and woke up to find myself weaker and flatter. The baby was not there. It was in the nursery, with the rest of them. It was a girl.

“There’s nothing wrong with it, is there?” I said. I was very anxious about this.

“Ten fingers, ten toes,” said the nurse briskly, “and no more of anything else than there ought to be.”

The baby was brought in later in the afternoon, wrapped in a pink blanket. I’d already named her, in my head. Aimee meant
one who was loved,
and I certainly hoped she would be loved, by someone. I had doubts about my own capacity to love her, or to love her as much as she’d need. I was spread too thin as it was: I did not think there would be enough of me left over.

Aimee looked like any newborn baby—she had that squashed face, as if she’d hit a wall at high speed. The hair on her head was long and dark. She squinted up at me through her almost-shut eyes, a distrustful squint. What a beating we take when we get born, I thought; what a bad surprise it must be, that first, harsh encounter with the outside air. I did feel sorry for the little creature; I vowed to do the best for her that I could.

While we were examining each other, Winifred and Richard arrived. The nurse at first mistook them for my parents. “No, this is the proud papa,” said Winifred, and they all had a laugh. The two of them were toting flowers, and an elaborate layette, all fancy crocheting and white satin bows.

“Adorable!” said Winifred. “But my goodness, we were expecting a blonde. She’s awfully dark. Look at that hair!”

“I’m sorry,” I said to Richard. “I know you wanted a boy.”

“Next time, darling,” said Richard. He did not seem at all perturbed.

“That’s only the birth hair,” said the nurse to Winifred. “A lot of them have that, sometimes it’s all down their back. It falls out and the real hair grows in. You can thank your stars she doesn’t have teeth or a tail, the way some of them do.”

“Grandfather Benjamin was dark,” I said, “before his hair turned white, and Grandmother Adelia as well, and Father, of course, though I don’t know about his two brothers. The blonde side of the family was my mother’s.” I said this in my usual conversational tone, and was relieved to see that Richard was paying no attention.

Was I grateful that Laura wasn’t there? That she was shut up somewhere far away, where I couldn’t reach her? Also where she couldn’t reach me; where she couldn’t stand beside my bed like the uninvited fairy at the christening, and say,
What are you talking about?

She would have known, of course. She would have known right away.

Brightly shone the moon

Last night I watched a young woman set fire to herself: a slim young woman, dressed in gauzy flammable robes. She was doing it as a protest against some injustice or other; but why did she think this bonfire she was making of herself would solve anything?
Oh, don’t do that,
I wanted to say to her.
Don’t burn up your life. Whatever it’s for, it’s not worth it.
But it was worth it to her, obviously.

What possesses them, these young girls with a talent for self-immolation? Is it what they do to show that girls too have courage, that they can do more than weep and moan, that they too can face death with panache? And where does the urge come from? Does it begin with defiance, and if so, of what? Of the great leaden suffocating order of things, the great spike-wheeled chariot, the blind tyrants, the blind gods? Are these girls reckless enough or arrogant enough to think that they can stop such things in their tracks by offering themselves up on some theoretical altar, or is it a kind of testifying? Admirable enough, if you admire obsession. Courageous enough, too. But completely useless.

I worry about Sabrina, that way. What is she up to, over there at the ends of the earth? Has she been bitten by the Christians, or the Buddhists, or is there some other variety of bat inhabiting her belfry?
Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these, ye do it unto Me.
Are those the words on her passport to futility? Does she want to atone for the sins of her money-ridden, wrecked, deplorable family? I certainly hope not.

Even Aimee had a bit of that in her, but in her it took a slower, more devious form. Laura went over the bridge when Aimee was eight, Richard died when she was ten. These events can’t help but have affected her. Then, between Winifred and myself, she was pulled to pieces. Winifred wouldn’t have won that battle now, but she did then. She stole Aimee away from me, and try as I might, I could never get her back.

No wonder that when Aimee came of age and got her hands on the money Richard had left her she jumped ship, and turned to various chemical forms of comfort, and flayed herself with one man after another. (Who, for instance, was Sabrina’s father? Hard to say, and Aimee never did. Spin the wheel, she’d say, and take your pick.)

I tried to keep in touch with her. I kept hoping for a reconciliation—she was my daughter after all, and I felt guilty about her, and I wanted to make it up to her—to make up for the morass her childhood had become. But by then she’d turned against me—against Winifred too, which was some consolation at least. She wouldn’t let either of us near her, or near Sabrina—especially not Sabrina. She didn’t want Sabrina polluted by us.

She moved house frequently, restlessly. A couple of times she was tossed out on the street, for non-payment of rent; she was arrested for causing a disturbance. She was hospitalized on several occasions. I suppose you’d have to say she became a confirmed alcoholic, although I hate that term. She had enough money so she never had to get a job, which was just as well because she couldn’t have held one down. Or maybe it wasn’t just as well. Things might have been different if she hadn’t been able to drift; if she’d had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we’d done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

The last time I went to see Aimee, she was living in a shimmy row house near Parliament Street, in Toronto. A child I guessed must be Sabrina was squatting in the square of dirt beside the front walk—a grubby mop-headed ragamuffin wearing shorts but no T-shirt. She had an old tin cup and was shovelling grit into it with a bent spoon. She was a resourceful little creature: she asked me for a quarter. Did I give her one? Most likely. “I am your grandmother,” I said to her, and she stared up at me as if I was crazy. Doubtless she’d never been told of the existence of such a person.

I got an earful from one of the neighbours, that time. They seemed like decent people, or decent enough to feed Sabrina when Aimee would forget to come home. Kelly was their last name, as I recall. They were the ones who called the police when Aimee was found at the bottom of the stairs with her neck broken. Fallen or pushed or jumped, we’ll never know.

I should have snatched Sabrina up, that day, and made off with her. Headed for Mexico. I would have done so if I’d known what was going to happen—that Winifred would snaffle her and lock her away from me, just as she’d done with Aimee.

Would Sabrina have been better off with me than with Winifred? What must it have been like for her, growing up with a rich, vindictive, festering old woman? Instead of a poor vindictive festering one, namely myself. I would have loved her, though. I doubt Winifred ever did. She just hung on to Sabrina to spite me; to punish me; to show she’d won.

But I did no baby-snatching that day. I knocked on the door, and when there was no answer I opened it and walked in, then climbed the steep, dark, narrow stairs to Aimee’s second-floor apartment. Aimee was in the kitchen, sitting at the small round table, looking at her hands, which were holding a coffee mug with a smile button on it. She had the cup right up close to her eyes and was turning it this way and that. Her face was pallid, her hair straggly. I can’t say I found her very attractive. She was smoking a cigarette. Most likely she was under the influence of some drug or other, mixed with alcohol; I could smell it in the room, along with the old smoke, the dirty sink, the unscrubbed garbage pail.

I tried to talk to her. I began gently, but she wasn’t in the mood for listening. She said she was tired of it, of all of us. Most of all she was tired of the feeling that things were being hidden from her. The family had covered it up; no one would tell her the truth; our mouths opened and closed and words came out, but they were not words that led to anything.

She’d figured it out anyway, though. She’d been robbed, she’d been deprived of her heritage, because I wasn’t her real mother and Richard hadn’t been her real father. It was all there in Laura’s book, she said.

I asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in
The Blind Assassin.
Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we’d thwarted her—disposed of this unknown lover somehow. Scared him off, bought him off, run him off, whatever; she’d lived in Winifred’s house long enough to see how things were done by people like us. Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we’d sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we’d stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own.

She was not at all coherent, but this was the gist of it. You can see how appealing it must have been for her, this fantasy: who wouldn’t want to have a mythical being for a mother, instead of the shop-soiled real kind? Given the chance.

I said she was quite wrong, she’d got things all mixed up, but she didn’t listen. No wonder she’d never felt happy with Richard and me, she said. We’d never behaved like her real parents, because in fact we weren’t her real parents. And no wonder Aunt Laura had thrown herself off a bridge—it was because we’d broken her heart. Laura had probably left a note for Aimee explaining all of this, for her to read when she was older, but Richard and I must have destroyed it.

No wonder I’d been such a terrible mother, she continued. I’d never really loved her. If I had, I would have put her before everything else. I would have considered her feelings. I wouldn’t have left Richard.

“I may not have been a perfect mother,” I said. “I’m willing to admit that, but I did the best I could under the circumstances—circumstances about which you actually know very little.” What was she doing with Sabrina? I went on. Letting her run around like that outside the house with no clothes on, filthy as a beggar; it was neglect, the child could disappear at any moment, children disappeared all the time. I was Sabrina’s grandmother, I would be more than willing to take her in, and…

“You aren’t her grandmother,” said Aimee. She was crying by now. “Aunt Laura is. Or she was. She’s dead, and you killed her!”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. This was the wrong response: the more vehemently you deny such things, the more they are believed. But you often give the wrong response when you’re frightened, and Aimee had frightened me.

When I said the word
stupid,
she began to scream at me. I was the stupid one, she said. I was dangerously stupid, I was so stupid I didn’t even know how stupid I was. She used a number of words I won’t repeat here, then picked up the smile-button coffee mug and threw it at me. Then she came at me, unsteadily; she was howling, great heart-rending sobs. Her arms were outstretched, in a threatening manner, I believed. I was upset, shaken. I retreated backwards, clutching the banister, dodging other items—a shoe, a saucer. When I got to the front door I fled.

Perhaps I should have stretched out my own arms. I should have hugged her. I should have cried. Then I should have sat down with her and told her this story I’m now telling you. But I didn’t do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly.

It was only three weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs. I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she’d been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.

After Aimee was dead, Winifred got her claws into Sabrina. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and she was on the scene first. She whisked Sabrina off to her tarted-up mansionette in Rosedale, and faster than you could blink she’d had herself declared the official guardian. I considered fighting, but it would just have been the battle over Aimee all over again—one I was doomed to lose.

When Winifred took charge of Sabrina I wasn’t yet sixty; I could still drive then. From time to time I would make the trip into Toronto and shadow Sabrina, like a private eye in an old detective story. I’d hang around outside her primary school—her new primary school, her new exclusive primary school—just to catch a glimpse of her, and to assure myself that, despite everything, she was all right.

I was in the department store, for instance, the morning Winifred took her to Eaton’s to get her some party shoes, a few months after she’d acquired her. No doubt she bought Sabrina’s other clothes without consulting her—that would have been her way—but shoes do need to be tried on, and for some reason Winifred had not entrusted this chore to the hired help.

It was the Christmas season—the pillars in the store were twined with fake holly, wreaths of gold-sprayed pine cones and red velvet ribbon hung over the doorways like prickly haloes—and Winifred got trapped in the carol singing, much to her annoyance. I was in the next aisle over. My wardrobe wasn’t what it used to be—I was wearing an old tweed coat and a kerchief pulled down over my forehead—and although she looked right at me, she didn’t see me. She probably saw a cleaning lady, or an immigrant bargain-hunter.

She was done up to the nines as usual, but despite this she was looking quite tatty. Well, she must have been pushing seventy, and after a certain age her style of maquillage does tend to make you look mummified. She shouldn’t have stuck to the orange lipstick, it was too harsh for her.

I could see the powdery furrows of exasperation between her eyebrows, the clamped muscles of her rouged jaw. She was hauling Sabrina along by one arm, trying to push her way through the chorus of bulky, winter-coated shoppers; she must have hated the enthusiastic, uncooked quality of the singing.

Sabrina on the other hand wanted to hear the music. She was dragging down, making herself a dead weight in the way children do—resistance without the appearance of it. Her arm was straight up, as if she was a good girl answering a question in school, but she was scowling like an imp. It must have hurt, what she was doing. Taking a stance, making a declaration. Holding out.

The song was “Good King Wenceslas.” Sabrina knew the words: I could see her little mouth moving. “‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel,’” she sang. “‘When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fu-u-el.’”

It’s a song about hunger. I could tell Sabrina understood it—she must still have remembered that, being hungry. Winifred gave her arm a jerk, and looked around nervously. She didn’t see me, but she sensed me, the way a cow in a well-fenced field will sense a wolf. Even so, cows aren’t like wild animals; they’re used to being protected. Winifred was skittish, but she wasn’t frightened. If I crossed her mind at all, she doubtless thought of me as being somewhere far away, mercifully out of sight, in the outer darkness to which she had consigned me.

I had an overpowering urge then to snatch Sabrina up in my arms and run away with her. I could imagine Winifred’s quavering wail as I barged my way through the stolid carollers, yelling so comfortably about the bitter weather.