Blind Assassin (25 page)

“Where’s Laura?” said Reenie in sudden alarm.

“I have no idea,” I said. I had gotten into the habit of snapping at Reenie, especially when she bossed me around.You’re not my mother had become my most withering riposte.

“You should know better than to let her out of your sight,” said Reenie. “Anybodycould be here.”Anybody was one of her bugbears. You never knew what intrusions, what thefts and gaffesanybody might commit.

I found Laura sitting on the grass under a tree, talking with a young man—a man, not a boy—a darkish man, with a light-coloured hat. His style was indeterminate—not a factory worker, but not anything else either, or nothing definite. No tie, but then it was a picnic. A blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges. An impromptu, a proletarian mode. A lot of young men were affecting it then—a lot of university students. In the winters they wore knitted vests, with horizontal stripes.

“Hello,” said Laura. “Where did you go off to? This is my sister Iris, this is Alex.”

“Mister…?” I said. How had Laura got on a first-name basis so quickly?

“Alex Thomas,” said the young man. He was polite but cautious. He scrambled to his feet and reached out his hand, and I took it. Then I found myself sitting down beside them. It seemed the best thing to do, in order to protect Laura.

“You’re from out of town, Mr. Thomas?”

“Yes. I’m visiting people here.” He sounded like what Reenie would call anice young man, meaningnot poor. But not rich either.

“He’s a friend of Callie’s,” said Laura. “She was just here, she introduced us. He came on the same train with her.” She was explaining a little too much.

“Did you meet Richard Griffen?” I said to Laura. “He was with Father. The one who’s coming to dinner?”

“Richard Griffen, the sweatshop tycoon?” said the young man.

“Alex—Mr. Thomas knows about ancient Egypt,” said Laura. “He was telling me about hieroglyphs.” She looked at him. I’d never seen her look at anyone else in quite the same way. Startled, dazzled? Hard to put a name to such a look.

“That sounds interesting,” I said. I could hear my voice pronouncinginteresting in that sneering way people have. I needed some way of telling this Alex Thomas that Laura was only fourteen, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make her angry.

Alex Thomas produced a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket—Craven A’s, as I recall. He tapped one out for himself. I was a little surprised that he smoked ready-mades—it didn’t go with his shirt. Packaged cigarettes were a luxury: the factory workers rolled their own, some with one hand.

“Thank you, I will,” I said. I’d only smoked a few cigarettes before, and those on the sly, filched from the silver box of them kept on top of the piano. He looked hard at me, which I suppose was what I’d wanted, then offered the package. He lit a match with his thumb, held it for me.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Laura. “You could set yourself on fire.”

Elwood Murray appeared before us, upright and jaunty again. The front of his shirt was still damp and splashed with pink, from where the women with the wet handkerchiefs had tried to get out the blood; the insides of his nostrils were ringed in dark red.

“Hello, Mr. Murray,” said Laura. “Are you all right?”

“Some of the boys got a little carried away,” said Elwood Murray, as if shyly revealing that he’d won some sort of a prize. “It was all in good fun. May I?” Then he took our picture with his flash camera. He always saidMay I before taking a picture for the paper but he never waited for the answer. Alex Thomas raised his hand as if to fend him off.

“I know these two lovely ladies, of course,” Elwood Murray said to him, “but your name is?”

Reenie was suddenly there. Her hat was askew, and she was red in the face and breathless. “Your father’s been looking all over for you,” she said.

I knew this to be untrue. Nevertheless Laura and I had to get up from the shade of the tree and brush our skirts down and go with her, like ducklings being herded.

Alex Thomas waved us goodbye. It was a sardonic wave, or so I thought.

“Don’t you know any better?” Reenie said. “Sprawled on the grass with Lord knows who. And for heaven’s sakes, Iris, throw away that cigarette, you’re not a tramp. What if your father sees you?”

“Father smokes like a furnace,” I said, in what I hoped was an insolent tone.

“That’s different,” said Reenie.

“Mr. Thomas,” said Laura. “Mr. Alex Thomas. He is a student of divinity. Or he was until recently,” she added scrupulously. “He lost his faith. His conscience would not let him continue.”

Alex Thomas’s conscience had evidently made a big impression on Laura, but it cut no ice with Reenie. “What’s he working at now, then?” she said. “Something fishy, or I’m a Chinaman. He has a slippery look.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I said to Reenie. I hadn’t liked him, but surely he was now being judged without a hearing.

“What’s right with him, is more like it,” said Reenie. “Rolling around on the lawn in full view of everyone.” She was talking more to me than to Laura. “At least you had your skirt tucked in.” Reenie said a girl alone with a man should be able to hold a dime between her knees. She was always afraid that people—men—would see our legs, the part above the knee. Of women who allowed this to happen, she would say:Curtain’s up, where’s the show? Or,Might as well hang out a sign. Or, more balefully,She’s asking for it, she’ll get what’s coming to her, or, in the worst cases,She’s an accident waiting to happen.

“We weren’t rolling,” Laura said. “There was no hill.”

“Rolling or not, you know what I mean,” said Reenie.

“We weren’t doing anything,” I said. “We were talking.”

“That’s beside the point,” said Reenie. “People could see you.”

“Next time we’re not doing anything we’ll hide in the bushes,” I said.

“Who is he anyway?” said Reenie, who usually ignored my head-on challenges, since by now there was nothing she could do about them.Who is he meantWho are his parents.

“He’s an orphan,” said Laura. “He was adopted, from an orphanage. A Presbyterian minister and his wife adopted him.” She seemed to have winkled this information out of Alex Thomas in a very short time, but this was one of her skills, if it can be called that—she’d just keep on asking questions, of the personal kind we’d been taught were rude, until the other person, in shame or outrage, would be forced to stop answering.

“An orphan!” said Reenie. “He could be anybody!”

“What’s wrong with orphans?” I said. I knew what was wrong with them in Reenie’s books: they didn’t know who their fathers were, and that made them unreliable, if not downright degenerate.Born in a ditch was how Reenie would put it.Born in a ditch, left on a doorstep.

“They can’t be trusted,” said Reenie. “They worm their way in. They don’t know where to draw the line.”

“Well anyway,” said Laura, “I’ve invited him to dinner.”

“Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread,” said Reenie.

There’s a wild plum tree at the back of the garden, on the other side of the fence. It’s ancient, gnarled, the branches knuckled with black knot. Walter says it should come down, but I’ve pointed out that, technically speaking, it isn’t mine. In any case, I have a fondness for it. It blossoms every spring, unasked, untended; in the late summer it drops plums into my garden, small blue oval ones with a bloom on them like dust. Such generosity. I picked up the last windfalls this morning—those few the squirrels and raccoons and drunken yellow-jackets had left me—and ate them greedily, the juice of their bruised flesh bloodying my chin. I didn’t notice it until Myra dropped by with another of her tuna casseroles.My goodness, she said, with her breathless avian laugh.Who’ve you been fighting?

I remember that Labour Day dinner in every detail, because it was the only time all of us were ever in the same room together.

The revels were still going on out at the Camp Grounds, but not in any form you’d want to witness close up, as the surreptitious consumption of cheap liquor was now in full swing. Laura and I had left early, to help Reenie with the dinner preparations.

These had been going on for some days. As soon as Reenie had been informed about the party, she’d dug out her one cookbook,The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. It wasn’t hers really: it had belonged to Grandmother Adelia, who’d consulted it—along with her various cooks, of course—when planning her twelve-course dinners. Reenie had inherited it, although she didn’t use it for her daily cooking—all of that was in her head, according to her. But this was a question of the fancy stuff.

I had read this cookbook, or looked into it at least, in the days in which I’d been romanticizing my grandmother. (I’d given that up by now. I knew I would have been thwarted by her, just as I was thwarted by Reenie and my father, and would have been thwarted by my mother, if she hadn’t died. It was the purpose in life of all older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else.)

The cookbook had a plain cover, a no-nonsense mustard colour, and inside it there were plain doings as well. Fannie Merritt Farmer was relentlessly pragmatic—cut and dried, in a terse New England way. She assumed you knew nothing, and started from there: “A beverage is any drink. Water is the beverage provided for man by Nature. All beverages contain a large percentage of water, and therefore their uses should be considered: I. To quench thirst. II. To introduce water into the circulatory system. III. To regulate body temperature. IV. To assist in carrying off water. V. To nourish. VI. To stimulate the nervous system and various organs. VII. For medicinal purposes,” and so forth.

Taste and pleasure did not form part of her lists, but at the front of the book there was a curious epigraph by John Ruskin:

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bairns and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers.

I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour; and from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they’d ever cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or changing men into pigs. As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both. Still, it was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother’s time. They were to be sedate in bearing, unapproachable, regal even, but possessed of arcane and potentially lethal recipes, and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men. And on top of that, perfectly and always ladies—loaf givers. The distributors of gracious largesse.

Had anyone ever taken this sort of thing seriously? My grandmother had. All you needed to do was to look at her portraits—at that cat-ate-the-canary smile, those droopy eyelids. Who did she think she was, the Queen of Sheba? Without a doubt.

When we got back from the picnic, Reenie was rushing around in the kitchen. She didn’t look much like Helen of Troy: despite all the work she’d done in advance, she was flustered, and in a foul temper; she was sweating, and her hair was coming down. She said we would just have to take things as they came, because what else could we expect, since she could not do miracles and that included making silk purses out of sows’ ears. And an extra place too, at zero hour, for this Alex person, whatever he called himself. Smart Alex, by the look of him.

“He calls himself by his name,” said Laura. “The same as anyone.”

“He’s not the same as anyone,” said Reenie. “You can tell that at a glance. He’s most likely some half-breed Indian, or else a gypsy. He’s certainly not from the same pea patch as the rest of us.”

Laura said nothing. She was not given to compunction as a rule, but this time she did seem to feel a little contrite for having invited Alex Thomas on the spur of the moment. She couldn’t uninvite him however, as she pointed out—that would have been miles beyond mere rudeness. Invited was invited, no matter who it might be.

Father knew that too, although he was far from pleased: Laura had jumped the gun and usurped his own position as host, and next thing he knew she’d be inviting every orphan and bum and hard-luck case to his dinner table as if he was Good King Wenceslas. These saintly impulses of hers had to be curbed, he said; he wasn’t running an almshouse.

Callie Fitzsimmons had attempted to mollify him: Alex was not a hard-luck case, she’d assured him. True, the young man had no visible job, but he did seem to have a source of revenue, or at any rate he’d never been known to put the twist on anyone. What might that source of income be? said Father. Darned if Callie knew: Alex was close-mouthed on the subject. Maybe he robbed banks, said Father with heavy sarcasm. Not at all, said Callie; anyway, Alex was known to some of her friends. Father said the one thing did not preclude the other. He was turning sour on the artists by then. One too many of them had taken up Marxism and the workers, and accused him of grinding the peasants.