Blind Assassin (24 page)

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 aredrug 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 calledgood 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 beachthere. 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.