Blind Assassin (46 page)

I thought I could cope with Richard, with Winifred. I thought I could live like a mouse in the castle of the tigers, by creeping around out of sight inside the walls; by staying quiet, by keeping my head down. No: I give myself too much credit. I didn’t see the danger. I didn’t even know they were tigers. Worse: I didn’t know I might become a tiger myself. I didn’t know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. Anyone might, for that matter.

“Look on the bright side,” I said to Laura in my best soothing tone. I patted her back. “I’ll get you a cup of warm milk and then you can have a good long sleep. You’ll feel better tomorrow.” But she cried and cried, and would not be comforted.

Last night I dreamt I was wearing my costume from the Xanadu ball. I was supposed to be an Abyssinian maiden—the damsel with the dulcimer. It was green satin, that costume: a little bolero jacket with gold spangle trim, showing a lot of cleavage and midriff; green satin undershorts, translucent pantaloons. Lots of fake gold coins, worn as necklaces and looped over the forehead. A small, jaunty turban with a crescent pin. A nose veil. Some tawdry circus designer’s idea of the East.

I thought I looked pretty nifty in it, until I realized, looking down at my drooping belly, my enlarged blue-veined knuckles, my shrivelled arms, that I was not the age I was then, but the age I am now.

I wasn’t at the ball, however. I was all alone, or so it seemed at first, in the ruined glass conservatory at Avilion. Empty pots were strewn here and there; others, not empty, filled with dry earth and dead plants. One of the stone sphinxes was lying on the floor, tipped on its side, defaced with Magic Marker—names, initials, crude drawings. There was a hole in the glass roof. The place stank of cat.

The main house behind me was dark, deserted, everyone in it gone away. I’d been left behind in this ridiculous fancy dress. It was night, with a fingernail moon. By its light I could see that there was indeed a single plant left alive: a glossy sort of bush, with one white flower.Laura, I said. From over in the shadows, a man laughed.

Not much of a nightmare, you’d say. Wait till you try it. I woke up desolate.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same.

Nonsense. It’s all chemicals. I need to take steps, about these dreams. There must be a pill.

More snow today. Just looking out the window at it makes my fingers ache. I write at the kitchen table, as slowly as if engraving. The pen is heavy, hard to push, like a nail scratching on cement.

Autumn, 1935. The heat receded, the cold advanced. Frost on fallen leaves, then on leaves that were not fallen. Then on windows. I took joy in such details then. I liked breathing in. The space inside my lungs was all my own.

Meanwhile, things continued.

What was now referred to by Winifred as “Laura’s little escapade” was covered up as much as possible. Richard told Laura if she talked about it to anyone else, especially anyone at her school, he would be bound to hear about it and would consider it a personal affront, as well as an attempt at sabotage. He’d fixed things up with the press: an alibi had been provided by the Newton-Dobbses, a couple of his highly placed pals—the Mr. was something in one of the railroads—who were prepared to swear that Laura had been with them at their place in Muskoka the whole time. It had been a last-minute holiday arrangement, and Laura thought the Newton-Dobbses had telephoned us and the Newton-Dobbses thought Laura had, and it was all a simple misunderstanding, and they hadn’t realized Laura had been considered missing because while on vacation they never paid any attention to the news.

A likely story. But people believed it, or had to pretend they did. I suppose the Newton-Dobbses were spreading the real story around among their twenty closest friends, hush-hush and for your ears only, which was what Winifred would have done in their place, gossip being a commodity like any other. But at least it never hit the papers.

Laura was bundled up in an itchy kilt and a plaid tie and sent off to St. Cecilia’s. She made no secret of detesting it. She said she didn’t have to go there; she said that now she’d got one job she could get another one. She said these things to me, when Richard was present. She would not speak directly to him.

She was chewing her fingers, she was not eating enough, she was too thin. I became very worried about her, as I was expected to become, and, in fairness, as I should have been. But Richard said he was tired of this hysterical nonsense, and as for a job, he didn’t want to hear anything more about it. Laura was far too young to be out on her own; she would get involved in something unsavoury, because the woods were full of those who made a business of preying on silly young girls like her. If she didn’t like her school, she could be sent to another one, far away, in a different city, and if she ran away from that one he would put her into a Home for Wayward Girls along with all the other moral delinquents, and if that didn’t do the trick there was always a clinic. A private clinic, with bars on the windows: if it was sackcloth and ashes she wanted, that would certainly fill the bill. She was a minor, he was in authority, and make no mistake about it, he would do exactly as he said. As she knew—as everyone knew—he was a man of his word.

His eyes tended to bulge out when he was angry, and they were bulging out now, but he said all of this in a calm, believable tone, and Laura believed him, and was intimidated. I tried to intervene—these threats were too harsh, he didn’t understand about Laura and the way she took things literally—but he told me to keep out of it. What was needed was a firm hand. Laura had been mollycoddled enough. It was time for her to shape up.

Over the weeks, an uneasy truce was established. I tried to arrange things in the house so that the two of them never collided. Ships in the night, was what I hoped for.

Winifred had put in her oar over this, of course. She must have told Richard to take a stand, because Laura was the kind of girl who would bite the hand that fed her unless a muzzle was applied.

Richard consulted Winifred about everything, because she was the one who sympathized with him, propped him up, encouraged him generally. She was the one who propped him up socially, who promoted his interests in what she considered the right quarters. When would he make his bid for Parliament? Not quite yet, she’d whisper into whatever ear she was bending—the time was not yet ripe—but soon. They’d both decided that Richard was the man of the future, and that the woman standing behind him—didn’t every successful man have one of those?—was her.

It certainly wasn’t me. Our relative positions were now clear, hers and mine; or they’d always been clear to her, but they were now becoming clear to me as well. She was necessary to Richard, I on the other hand could always be replaced. My job was to open my legs and shut my mouth.

If that sounds brutal, it was. But it wasn’t out of the ordinary.

Winifred had to keep me busy during daylight hours: she didn’t want me loopy with boredom, she didn’t want me going off the deep end. She put a good deal of thought into cooking up meaningless tasks for me, then rearranging my time and space so I would be at liberty to perform them. These tasks were never too exacting, because she made no secret of her opinion that I was a bit of a dumb bunny. I in my turn did nothing to discourage this view.

Thus the Downtown Foundlings’ Crèche charity ball, of which she was the convenor. She put me on the list of organizers, not only to keep me hopping but because it would reflect well on Richard. “Organizers” was a joke, she didn’t think I was capable of organizing my own shoelaces, so what cinder-sweeping chore could I be given? Envelope-addressing, she decided. She was right, I could do that. I was even good at it. I didn’t have to think about it, and could spend the mental time elsewhere. (“Thank the Lord she hasone talent,” I could hear her telling the Billies and Charlies, at bridge. “Oh, I forgot—two!” Gales of laughter.)

The Downtown Foundlings’ Crèche, in aid of slum children, was Winifred’s best thing, or at least the charity ball was. It was a costume ball—such functions mostly were, because people at that time liked costumes. They liked them almost as much as they liked uniforms. Both served the same end: to avoid being who you were, you could pretend to be someone else. You could become bigger and more powerful, or more alluring and mysterious, just by putting on exotic clothes. Well, there was something to it.

Winifred had a committee for the ball, but everyone knew she made all the big decisions herself. She held the hoops, others jumped through them. It was she who’d picked the theme for 1936—“Xanadu.” The rival Beaux Arts Ball had recently done “Tamurlane in Samarkand,” and it had been a great success. Eastern themes couldn’t miss, and surely everyone had been made to memorize “Kubla Khan” at school, so even lawyers—even doctors—evenbankers would know what Xanadu was. Their wives would know as a matter of course.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

    Down to a sunless sea.

Winifred had the entire poem typed out and mimeographed and distributed to our committee—to get the ideas percolating, she said—and any suggestions from us were more than welcome, though we knew she had the entire thing mapped out in her head already. The poem would appear on the engraved invitation as well—gold lettering, with a gold-and-cerulean border of Arabic writing. Did anyone understand such writing? No, but it looked just lovely.

These functions were by invitation only. You were invited and then you paid through the nose, but the circle was very tight. Who was on the list became a matter of anxious anticipation, though only for those in doubt about their status. To expect an invitation and then not to receive one was a foretaste of Purgatory. I expect many tears were shed over such things, but in secret—in that world, you could never let it appear that you cared.

The beauty of Xanadu was (said Winifred, after she had read out the poem in her whisky voice—read it excellently, I’ll give her that)—thebeauty of it was that with such a theme you could be as revealing or concealing as you might wish. The corpulent could swathe themselves in rich brocades, the svelte could come as slave girls or Persian dancers and show off everything but the kitchen sink. Gauzy skirts, bangles, tinkling ankle chains—the scope was practically infinite, and of course men loved to dress up as pashas and pretend they had harems. Though she doubted that she could talk anyone into playing the eunuchs, she added, to appreciative tittering.

Laura was too young for this ball. Winifred was planning a début for her, a rite of passage that had not yet taken place, and until it did she was not considered eligible. However, she took quite an interest in the proceedings. I was very relieved to have her once more taking an interest in something. Certainly she was not taking an interest in her schoolwork: her marks had been abysmal.

Correction: it wasn’t the proceedings she took an interest in, it was the poem. I knew it already, from Miss Violence, from Avilion, but Laura hadn’t bothered much about it then. Now she read it over and over.

What was a demon-lover, she wanted to know? Why was the sea sunless, why was the ocean lifeless? Why did the sunny pleasure-dome have caves of ice? What was Mount Abora, and why was the Abyssinian maid singing about it? Why were the ancestral voices prophesying war?

I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. I know all of them now. Not the answers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge—I’m not sure he had any answers, since he was hopped up on drugs at the time—but my own answers. Here they are, for what they’re worth.

The sacred river is alive. It flows to the lifeless ocean, because that’s where all things that are alive end up. The lover is a demon-lover because he isn’t there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that’s what pleasure-domes have—after a while they become very cold, and after that they melt, and then where are you? All wet. Mount Abora was the Abyssinian maid’s home, and she was singing about it because she couldn’t get back to it. The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

The snow fell, softly at first, then in hard pellets that stung the skin like needles. The sun set in the afternoon, the sky changed from washed blood to skim milk. Smoke poured from the chimneys, from the furnaces stoked with coal. The bread-wagon horses left piles of steaming brown buns on the street which then froze solid. Children threw them at one another. The clocks struck midnight, over and over, every midnight a deep blue-black riddled with icy stars, the moon white bone. I looked out the bedroom window, down to the sidewalk, through the branches of the chestnut tree. Then I turned out the light.

The Xanadu ball was the second Saturday in January. My costume had come that morning, in a box with armfuls of tissue paper. The smart thing to do was to rent your costume from Malabar’s, because to have one specially made would be displaying too much of an effort. Now it was almost six o’clock and I was trying it on. Laura was in my room: she would often do her homework there, or make a show of doing it. “What are you supposed to be?” she said.