Blind Assassin (128 page)

The golden lock

I have to hurry now. I can see the end, glimmering far up ahead of me, as if it’s a roadside motel, on a dark night, in the rain. A last-chance postwar motel, where no questions are, asked and none of the names in the front-desk register are real and it’s cash in advance. The office is strung with old Christmas-tree lights; behind it a clump of murky cabins, the pillows fragrant with mildew. A moon-faced gas pump out front. No gas though, it’s run out many decades ago. Here’s where you stop.

The end,
a warm safe haven. A place to rest. But I haven’t reached it yet, and I’m old and tired, and on foot, and limping. Lost in the woods, and no white stones to mark the way, and treacherous ground to cover.

Wolves, I invoke you! Dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits, I summon you! Stand by me now, as we near the end! Guide my shaking arthritic fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen; keep my leaking heart afloat for just a few more days, until I can set things in order. Be my companions, my helpers and my friends;
once more,
I add, for haven’t we been well-acquainted in the past?

All things have their place, as Reenie used to say; or, in a fouler mood, to Mrs. Hillcoate,
No flowers without shit.
Mr. Erskine did teach me a few useful tricks. A well-wrought invocation to the Furies can come in handy, in case of need. When it’s primarily a question of revenge.

I did believe, at first, that I wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.

You’ll want of course to know what was in Laura’s notebooks. They’re as she herself left them, tied up with their grubby brown string, left for you in my steamer trunk along with everything else. I haven’t changed anything. You can see for yourself. The pages torn out of them were not torn out by me.

What was I expecting, on that dread-filled May day in 1945? Confessions, reproaches? Or else a diary, detailing the lovers’ meetings between Laura and Alex Thomas? No doubt, no doubt. I was prepared for laceration. And I received it, though not in the way I’d imagined.

I cut the string, fanned out the notebooks. There were five of them:
Mathematics, Geography, French, History,
and
Latin.
The books of knowledge.

She writes like an angel,
it says of Laura, on the back of one of the editions of
The Blind Assassin.
An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact, angels don’t write much. They record sins and the names of the damned and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news:
God be with you
is not an unmixed blessing.

Keeping all this in mind, yes: Laura wrote like an angel. In other words, not very much. But to the point.

Latin
was the notebook I opened first. Most of the remaining pages in it were blank; there were jagged edges where Laura must have ripped out her old homework. She left one passage, a translation she’d made—with my help, and also with the help of the library at Avilion—of the concluding lines of Book IV of Virgil’s
Aeneid.
Dido has stabbed herself on the burning pyre or altar she’s made of all the objects connected to her vanished lover, Aeneas, who has sailed away to fulfill his destiny through warfare. Although bleeding like a stuck pig, Dido is having a hard time dying. She was doing a lot of writhing. Mr. Erskine, as I recall, enjoyed that part.

I remembered the day she wrote it. The late sunlight was coming in through my bedroom window. Laura was lying on the floor, kicking her sock feet in the air, laboriously transcribing our scribbled-over collaboration into her book. She smelled of Ivory soap, and of pencil shavings.

Then powerful Juno felt sorry for her long-time sufferings and uneasy journey, and sent Iris from Olympus to cut the agonizing soul from the body that still held onto it. This had to be done because Dido was not dying a natural death or one caused by other people, but in despair, driven to it by a crazy impulse. Anyway Proserpine hadn’t yet cut off the golden lock from her head or sent her down to the Underworld.

So now, all misty, her wings yellow as a crocus, trailing a thousand rainbow colours that sparkled in the sunlight, Iris flew down, and hovering over Dido, she said:

As I was told to do, I take this sacred thing which belongs to the God of Death; and I release you from your body.

Then all warmth stopped at once, and her life vanished into the air.

“Why did she have to cut off a piece of the hair?” said Laura. “That Iris?”

I had no idea. “It was just a thing she had to do,” I said. “Sort of like an offering.” I’d been pleased to discover that I had the same name as a person in a story, and wasn’t just named after some flower, as I’d always thought. The botanical motif, for girls, had been strong in my mother’s family.

“It helped Dido get out of her body,” said Laura. “She didn’t want to be alive any more. It put her out of her misery, so it was the right thing to do. Wasn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t much interested in such fine ethical points. Peculiar things happened in poems. There was no point in trying to make sense of them. I did wonder though whether Dido had been a blonde; she’d seemed more like a brunette to me, in the rest of the story.

“Who is the God of Death? Why does he want the hair?”

“That’s enough about hair,” I said. “We’ve done the Latin. Now let’s finish the French. Mr. Erskine gave us too much, as usual. Now:
Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.”

“How about, don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands?”

“There’s nothing about paint.”

“But that’s what it really means.”

“You know Mr. Erskine. He doesn’t care what it means.”

“I hate Mr. Erskine. I wish we had Miss Violence back.”

“So do I. I wish we had Mother back.”

“So do I.”

Mr. Erskine hadn’t thought much of this Latin translation of Laura’s. It had his red pencil slashes all over it.

How can I describe the pool of grief into which I was now falling? I can’t describe it, and so I won’t try.

I riffled through the other notebooks.
History
was blank, except for the photograph Laura had glued into it—herself and Alex Thomas at the button factory picnic, both of them now coloured light yellow, with my detached blue hand crawling towards them across the lawn.
Geography
contained nothing but a short description of Port Ticonderoga that Mr. Erskine had assigned. “This middle-sized town is situated at the junction of the Louveteau River and the Jogues River and is noted for stones and other things,” was Laura’s first sentence.
French
had had all the French removed from it. Instead it held the list of odd words Alex Thomas had left behind him in our attic, and that—I now discovered—Laura had not burned, after all.
Anchoryne, berel, carchineal, diamite, ebonort
…A foreign language, true, but one I’d learned to understand, better than I ever understood French.

Mathematics
had a long column of numbers, with words opposite some of them. It took me a few minutes to realize what kinds of numbers they were. They were dates. The first date coincided with my return from Europe, the last was three months or so before Laura’s departure for Bella Vista. The words were these:

Avilion, no. No. No. Sunnyside. No. Xanadu, no. No. Queen Mary, no no. New York, no. Avilion. No at first.

Water Nixie, X. “Besotted.”

Toronto again. X.

X. X. X. X.

O.

That was the whole story. Everything was known. It had been there all along, right before my very eyes. How could I have been so blind?

Not Alex Thomas, then. Not ever Alex. Alex belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space.

Victory comes and goes

After looking through Laura’s notebooks, I put them back into my stocking drawer. Everything was known, but nothing could be proven. That much was clear.

But there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, as Reenie used to say. If you can’t go through, go around.

I waited until after the funeral, and then I waited another week. I didn’t want to act too precipitously. Better to be safe than sorry, Reenie also used to say. A questionable axiom: so often it’s both.

Richard went off on a trip to Ottawa, an important trip to Ottawa. Men in high places might pop the question, he hinted; or if not now, then soon. I told him, and Winifred as well, that I would take this opportunity to go to Port Ticonderoga with Laura’s ashes in their silver-coloured box. I needed to sprinkle these ashes, I said, and to see to the inscription on the monumental Chase family cube. All right and proper.

“Don’t blame yourself,” said Winifred, hoping I’d do just that—if I blamed myself enough, I wouldn’t get around to blaming anyone else. “Some things don’t bear dwelling on.” We dwell on them anyway, though. We can’t help ourselves.

Having seen Richard off on his travels, I gave the help a free evening. I would hold down the fort, I said. I’d been doing more of this lately—I liked being alone in the house, with just Aimee, when she was asleep so even Mrs. Murgatroyd was not suspicious. When the coast was clear I acted quickly. I’d already done some preliminary, surreptitious packing—my jewel box, my photographs,
Perennials for the Rack Garden
—and now I did the rest. My clothes, though by no means all of them; some things for Aimee, though by no means all of those either. I got what I could into the steamer trunk, the same one that had once held my trousseau, and into the matching suitcase. The men from the railway arrived to collect the luggage, as I’d arranged. Then, the next day, it was easy for me to go off to Union Station in a taxi with Aimee, each of us with only an overnight case, and none the wiser.

I left a letter for Richard. I said that in view of what he’d done—what I now knew he’d done—I never wanted to see him again. In consideration of his political ambitions I would not request a divorce, although I had ample proof of his scurrilous behaviour in the form of Laura’s notebooks, which—I said untruthfully—were locked away in a safe-deposit box. If he had any ideas about getting his filthy hands on Aimee, I added, he should discard them, because I would then create a very, very large scandal, as I would also do should he fail to meet my financial requests. These were not large: all I wanted was enough money to buy a small house in Port Ticonderoga, and to assure maintenance for Aimee. My own needs I could supply in other ways.

I signed this letter
Yours sincerely,
and, while licking the envelope flap, wondered whether I’d spelled
scurrilous
correctly.

Several days before leaving Toronto, I’d sought out Callista Fitzsimmons. She’d given up sculpture, and was now a mural painter. I found her at an insurance company—the head office—where she’d landed a commission. Women’s contributions to the war effort, was the theme—outdated, now that the war was over (and, though neither of us knew it yet, soon to be painted over in a reassuringly bland shade of taupe).

They’d given her the length of one wall. Three women factory workers, in overalls and brave smiles, turning out the bombs; a girl driving an ambulance; two farm helpers with hoes and a basket of tomatoes; a woman in uniform, wielding a typewriter; down in the corner, shoved to one side, a mother in an apron removing a loaf of bread from the oven, with two approving children looking on.

Callie was surprised to see me. I hadn’t given her any warning of my visit: I had no wish to be evaded. She was supervising the painters, with her hair up in a bandanna, wearing khaki slacks and tennis shoes, and striding around with her hands in her pockets and a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.

She’d heard of Laura’s death, she’d read about it in the papers—such a lovely girl, so unusual as a child, such a shame. After these preliminaries, I explained what Laura had told me, and asked if it were true.

Callie was indignant. She used the word
bullshit,
quite a lot. True, Richard had been helpful to her when she’d been nabbed by the Red Squad for agitating, but she’d thought that was just old-times’-sake family stuff on his part. She denied she’d ever told Richard anything, about Alex or any other pinko or fellow-traveller. What bullshit! These were her friends! As for Alex, yes, she’d helped him out at first, when he’d been in such a jam, but then he’d disappeared, owing her some money as a matter of fact, and next thing she’d heard he was in Spain. How could she have snitched about where he was when she didn’t even know it herself?

Nothing gained. Perhaps Richard had lied about this to Laura, as he had lied to me about much else. On the other hand, perhaps it was Callie who was lying. But then, what else had I expected her to say?

Aimee didn’t like it in Port Ticonderoga. She wanted her father. She wanted what was familiar to her, as children do. She wanted her own room back. Oh, don’t we all.

I explained that we had to stay here for a little while. I shouldn’t say
explained,
because no explanation was involved. What could I have said that would have made any sense at all, to a child of eight?

Port Ticonderoga was different now; the war had made inroads. Several of the factories had been reopened, during the conflict—women in overalls had turned out fuses—but now they were closing again. Perhaps they’d be converted to peacetime production, once it was determined what exactly the returning servicemen would want to buy, for the homes and families they would now doubtless acquire. Meanwhile there were many out of work, and it was wait and see.

There were vacancies. Elwood Murray was no longer running the newspaper: he was soon to be a new, shiny name on the War Memorial, having joined the navy and got himself blown up. Interesting, which of the town’s men were said to have been killed and which were said to have got themselves killed, as if it was a piece of clumsiness or even a deliberate though somewhat minor act—almost a purchase, like getting yourself a haircut.
Bought the biscuit
was a recent local term for this, used as a rule by men. You had to wonder whose baking they had in mind.

Reenie’s husband Ron Hincks was not classed among these casual shoppers for death. He was solemnly said to have been killed in Sicily, along with a bunch of other fellows from Port Ticonderoga who’d joined the Royal Canadian Regiment. Reenie had the pension, but not much else, and she was letting out a room in her tiny house; also she was still working at Betty’s Luncheonette, although she said her back was killing her.

It wasn’t her back that was killing her, as I would soon discover. It was her kidneys, and they finished the job six months after I moved back. If you’re reading this, Myra, I would like you to know what a severe blow this was. I’d been counting on her to be there—hadn’t she always been?—and now, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.

And then increasingly she was, for whose voice did I hear when I wanted a running commentary?

I went to Avilion, of course. It was a difficult visit. The grounds were derelict, the gardens overgrown; the conservatory was a wreck, with broken panes of glass and desiccated plants, still in their pots. Well, there’d been some of those, even in our time. The guardian sphinxes had several inscriptions of the
John Loves Mary
variety on them; one had been overturned. The pond of the stone nymph was choked with dead grass and weeds. The nymph herself was still standing, though missing some fingers. Her smile was the same, though: remote, secret, unconcerned.

I didn’t have to break into the house itself: Reenie was still alive then, she still had her clandestine key. The house was in a sad state: dust and mouse doings everywhere, stains on the now-dull parquet floors where something had leaked. Tristan and Iseult were still there, presiding over the empty dining room, though Iseult had suffered an injury to her harp, and a barn swallow or two had built over the middle window. No vandalism inside the place, however: the wind of the Chase name blew round the house, however faintly, and there must have been a fading aura of power and money lingering in the air.

I walked all over the house. The smell of mildew was pervasive. I looked through the library, where Medusa’s head still held sway over the fireplace. Grandmother Adelia too was still in place, though she’d begun to sag: her face now wore an expression of repressed but joyful cunning. I bet you were alleycatting around, after all, I thought at her. I bet you had a secret life. I bet it kept you going.

I poked around among the books, I opened the desk drawers. In one of them there was a box of sample buttons from the days of Grandfather Benjamin: the circles of white bone that had turned to gold in his hands, and that had stayed gold for so many years, but had now turned back into bone again.

In the attic I found the nest Laura must have made for herself up there, after she’d left Bella Vista: the quilts from the storage trunks, the blankets from her bed downstairs—a dead giveaway if anyone had been searching the house for her. There were a few dried orange peels, an apple core. As usual she hadn’t thought to tidy anything away. Hidden in the wainscot cupboard was the bag of odds and ends she’d stashed there, that summer of the
Water Nixie:
the silver teapot, the china cups and saucers, the monogrammed spoons. The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, a lone mother-of pearl cuff link, the broken lighter, the cruet stand minus the vinegar.

I’d come back later, I told myself, and get more.

Richard did not appear in person, which was a sign (to me) of his guilt. Instead, he sent Winifred. “Are you out of your mind?” was her opening salvo. (This, in a booth at Betty’s Luncheonette: I didn’t want her in my little rented house, I didn’t want her anywhere near Aimee.)

“No,” I said, “and neither was Laura. Or not so far out of it as you both pretended. I know what Richard did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Winifred. She had on a mink stole composed of lustrous tails, and was extricating herself from her gloves.

“I suppose when he married me he figured he’d got a bargain—two for the price of one. He picked us up for a song.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Winifred, though she looked shaken. “Richard’s hands are absolutely clean, whatever Laura said. He is pure as the driven. You’ve made a serious error in judgment. He wants me to say he’s prepared to overlook this—this aberration of yours. If you’ll come back, he’s fully willing to forgive and forget.”

“But I’m not,” I said. “He may be pure as the driven, but it’s not the driven snow. It’s another substance entirely.”

“Keep your voice down,” she hissed. “People are looking.”

“They’ll look anyway,” I said, “with you dressed up like Lady Astor’s horse. You know, that colour of green doesn’t suit you one bit, especially at your present age. It never has, really. It makes you look bilious.”

This hit home. Winifred was finding it hard going: she wasn’t used to this new, viperish aspect of me. “What do you want,
exactly
?” she said. “Not that Richard did anything at all. But he doesn’t want an uproar.”

“I told him,
exactly,”
I said. “I spelled it out. And now I’d like the cheque.”

“He wants to see Aimee.”

“There is no way in Hell,” I said, “that I will permit such a thing. He has a yen for young girls. You knew that, you’ve always known it. Even at eighteen I was pushing the upper limit. Having Laura in the same house was just too much temptation for him, I see that now. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. But he’s not getting his mitts on Aimee.”

“Don’t be disgusting,” Winifred said. She was very angry by now: she’d gone blotchy under her makeup. “Aimee is his own daughter.”

I was on the verge of saying, “No, she’s not,” but I knew that would be a tactical mistake. Legally, she was his daughter; I had no way of proving otherwise, they hadn’t invented all those genes and so forth, not yet. If Richard knew the truth, he’d be even more eager to snatch Aimee away from me. He’d hold her hostage, and I’d lose all the advantage I’d gained so far. It was a game of nasty chess. “He’d stop at nothing,” I said, “not even at Aimee. Then he’d pack her off to some under-the-counter abortion farm, the way he did with Laura.”

“I can see there’s no point in continuing this discussion further,” said Winifred, gathering up her gloves and her stole and her reptilian purse.

After the war, things changed. They changed the way we looked. After a time the grainy muted greys and half-tones were gone. Instead there was the full glare of noon—gaudy, primary, shadowless. Hot pinks, violent blues, red and white beach balls, the fluorescent green of plastic, the sun blazing down like a spotlight.

Around the outskirts of towns and cities, bulldozers rampaged and trees were toppled; great holes were scooped in the ground as if bombs had been dropped there. The streets were gravel and mud. Lawns of bare earth appeared, with spindly saplings planted on them: weeping birches were popular. There was far too much sky.