Blind Assassin (20 page)

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.

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 theWater 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.

Flappermade 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 aboutthose 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.