Blind Assassin (80 page)

Across from her is my father, on a settee. He leans back against the cushions, but he’s restless. He has his hand on the knee of his bad leg; the leg jiggles up and down. (
The good leg, the bad leg
—these terms are of interest to me. What has the bad leg done, to be called bad? Is its hidden, mutilated state a punishment?)

I sit beside him, though not too close. His arm lies along the sofa back behind me, but does not touch. I have my alphabet book; I’m reading to him from it, to show that I can read. I can’t though, I’ve only memorized the shapes of the letters, and the words that go with the pictures. On an end table there’s a gramophone, with a speaker rising up out of it like a huge metal flower. My own voice sounds to me like the voice that sometimes comes out of it: small and thin and faraway; something you could turn off with a finger.

A is for Apple Pie,

Baked fresh and hot:

Some have a little,

And others a lot.

I glance up at my father to see if he’s paying any attention. Sometimes when you speak to him he doesn’t hear. He catches me looking, smiles faintly down at me.

B is for Baby,

So pink and so sweet,

With two tiny hands

And two tiny feet.

My father has gone back to gazing out the window. (Did he place himself outside this window, looking in? An orphan, forever excluded—a night wanderer? This is what he was supposed to have been fighting for—this fireside idyll, this comfortable scene out of a Shredded Wheat advertisement: the rounded, rosy-cheeked wife, so kind and good, the obedient, worshipful child. This flatness, this boredom. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?)

F is for Fire,

Good servant, bad master.

When left to itself

It burns faster and faster.

The picture in the book is of a leaping man covered in flames—wings of fire coming from his heels and shoulders, little fiery horns sprouting from his head. He’s looking over his shoulder with a mischievous, enticing smile, and he has no clothes on. The fire can’t hurt him, nothing can hurt him. I am in love with him for this reason. I’ve added extra flames with my crayons.

My mother jabs her needle through the button, cuts the thread. I read on in a voice of increasing anxiety, through suave M and N, through quirky Q and hard R and the sibilant menaces of S. My father stares into the flames, watching the fields and woods and houses and towns and men and brothers go up in smoke, his bad leg moving by itself like a dog’s running in dreams. This is his home, this besieged castle; he is its werewolf. The chilly lemon-coloured sunset outside the window fades to grey. I don’t know it yet, but Laura is about to be born.

Bread day

Not enough rain, say the farmers. The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves; on the sidewalk my shadow crackles.

I walk early, before the full blare of the sun. The doctor eggs me on: I’m making progress, he tells me; but towards what? I think of my heart as my companion on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling conspirators in some plot or tactic we’ve got no handle on. Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn’t escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it’s like love, or a certain kind of it.

Today I went again to the cemetery. Someone had left a bunch of orange and red zinnias on Laura’s grave; hot-coloured flowers, far from soothing. They were withering by the time I got to them, though they still gave off their peppery smell. I suspect they’d been stolen from the flower beds in front of The Button Factory, by a cheapskate devotee or else a mildly crazy one; but then, it’s the sort of thing Laura herself would have done. She had only the haziest notions of ownership.

On my way back I stopped in at the doughnut shop: it was heating up outside, and I wanted some shade. The place is far from new; indeed it’s almost seedy, despite its jaunty modernity—the pale-yellow tiles, the white plastic tables bolted to the floor, their moulded chairs attached. It reminds me of some institution or other; a kindergarten in a poorer neighbourhood perhaps, or a drop-in centre for the mentally challenged. Not too many things you could throw around or use for stabbing: even the cutlery is plastic. The odour is of deep-fat-frying oil blended with pine-scented disinfectant, with a wash of tepid coffee over all.

I purchased a small iced tea and an Old-fashioned Glazed, which squeaked between my teeth like Styrofoam. After I’d consumed half of it, which was all I could get down, I picked my way across the slippery floor to the women’s washroom. In the course of my walks I’ve been compiling a map in my head of all the easily accessible washrooms in Port Ticonderoga—so useful if you’re caught short—and the one in the doughnut shop is my current favourite. Not that it’s cleaner than the rest, or more likely to have toilet paper, but it offers inscriptions. They all do, but in most locales these are painted over frequently, whereas in the doughnut shop they remain on view much longer. Thus you have not only the text, but the commentary on it as well.

The best sequence at the moment is the one in the middle cubicle. The first sentence is in pencil, in rounded lettering like those on Roman tombs, engraved deeply in the paint:
Don’t Eat Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Kill.

Then, in green marker:
Don’t Kill Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Eat.

Under that, in ballpoint,
Don’t Kill.

Under that, in purple marker:
Don’t Eat.

And under that, the last word to date, in bold black lettering:
Fuck Vegetarians—“All Gods Are Carnivorous”—Laura Chase.

Thus Laura lives on.

It took Laura a long time to get herself born into this world,
said Reenie.
It was like she couldn’t decide whether or not it was really such a smart idea. Then she was sickly at fast, and we almost lost her—I guess she was still making up her mind. But in the end she decided to give it a try, and so she took ahold of life, and got some better.

Reenie believed that people decided when it was their time to die; similarly, they had a voice in whether or not they would be born. Once I’d reached the talking-back age, I used to say,
I never asked to be born,
as if that were a clinching argument; and Reenie would retort,
Of course you did. Just like everyone else.
Once alive you were on the hook for it, as far as Reenie was concerned.

After Laura’s birth my mother was more tired than usual. She lost altitude; she lost resilience. Her will faltered; her days took on a quality of trudging. She had to rest more, said the doctor. She was not a well woman, said Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate, who came in to help with the laundry. It was as if my former mother had been stolen away by the elves, and this other mother—this older and greyer and saggier and more discouraged one—had been left behind in her place. I was only four then, and was frightened by the change in her, and wanted to be held and reassured; but my mother no longer had the energy for this. (Why do I say
no longer?
Her comportment as a mother had always been instructive rather than cherishing. At heart she remained a schoolteacher.)

I soon found that if I could keep quiet, without clamouring for attention, and above all if I could be helpful—especially with the baby, with Laura, watching beside her and rocking her cradle so she would sleep, not a thing she did easily or for long—I would be permitted to remain in the same room with my mother. If not, I would be sent away. So that was the accommodation I made: silence, helpfulness.

I should have screamed. I should have thrown tantrums. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, as Reenie used to say.

(There I sat on Mother’s night table, in a silver frame, in a dark dress with a white lace collar, visible hand clutching the baby’s crocheted white blanket in an awkward, ferocious grip, eyes accusing the camera or whoever was wielding it. Laura herself is almost out of sight, in this picture. Nothing can be seen of her but the top of her downy head, and one tiny hand, fingers curled around my thumb. Was I angry because I’d been told to hold the baby, or was I in fact defending it? Shielding it—reluctant to let it go?)

Laura was an uneasy baby, though more anxious than fractious. She was an uneasy small child as well. Closet doors worried her, and bureau drawers. It was as if she were always listening, to something in the distance or under the floor—something that was coming closer soundlessly, like a train made of wind. She had unaccountable crises—a dead crow would start her weeping, a cat smashed by a car, a dark cloud in a clear sky. On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn’t cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.

She was particularly alarmed by the maimed veterans on the street corners—the loungers, the pencil-sellers, the panhandlers, too shattered to work at anything. One glaring red-faced man with no legs who pushed himself around on a flat cart would always set her off. Perhaps it was the fury in his eyes.

As most small children do, Laura believed words meant what they said, but she carried it to extremes. You couldn’t say
Get lost
or
Go jump in the lake
and expect no consequences.
What did you say to Laura? Don’t you ever learn?
Reenie would scold. But even Reenie herself didn’t learn altogether. She once told Laura to bite her tongue because that would keep the questions from coming out, and after that Laura couldn’t chew for days.

Now I am coming to my mother’s death. It would be trite to say that this event changed everything, but it would also be true, and so I will write it down:

This event changed everything.

It happened on a Tuesday. A bread day. All of our bread—enough in a batch for the entire week—was made in the kitchen at Avilion. Although there was a small bakery in Port Ticonderoga by then, Reenie said store bread was for the lazy, and the baker added chalk to it to stretch out the flour and also extra yeast to swell the loaves up with air so you’d think you were getting more. And so she made the bread herself.

The kitchen of Avilion wasn’t dark, like the sooty Victorian cavern it must once have been, thirty years before. Instead it was white—white walls, white enamelled table, white wood-burning range, black-and-white tiled floor—with daffodil-yellow curtains at the new, enlarged windows. (It had been redone after the war as one of my father’s sheepish, propitiatory gifts to my mother.) Reenie considered this kitchen the latest thing, and as a result of my mother’s having taught her about germs and their nasty ways and their hiding places, she kept it faultlessly clean.

On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for the eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura’s top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenie said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.

Reenie dug the hole. It was the gardener’s day off; she used his spade, which was off-limits to anyone else, but this was an emergency. “God pity her husband,” said Reenie, as Laura laid her bread men out in a neat row. “She’s stubborn as a pig.”

“I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.”

“I’m not going to have one either,” I said, not to be outdone.

“Fat chance of that,” said Reenie. “You like your nice soft bed. You’d have to sleep on the cement and get all covered in grease and oil.”

“I’m going to live in the conservatory,” I said.

“It’s not heated any more,” said Reenie. “You’d freeze to death in the winters.”

“I’ll sleep in one of the motor cars,” said Laura.

On that horrible Tuesday we’d had breakfast in the kitchen, with Reenie. It was oatmeal porridge and toast with marmalade. Sometimes we had it with Mother, but that day she was too tired. Mother was stricter, and made us sit up straight and eat the crusts. “Remember the starving Armenians,” she would say.

Perhaps the Armenians were no longer starving by then. The war was long over, order had been restored. But their plight must have remained in Mother’s mind as a kind of slogan. A slogan, an invocation, a prayer, a charm. Toast crusts must be eaten in memory of these Armenians, whoever they may have been; not to eat them was a sacrilege. Laura and I must have understood the weight of this charm, because it never failed to work.

Mother didn’t eat her crusts that day. I remember that. Laura went on at her about it—
What about the crusts, what about the starving Armenians?
—until finally Mother admitted that she didn’t feel well. When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I’d known it all along.

Reenie said God made people the way she herself made bread, and that was why the mothers’ tummies got fat when they were going to have a baby: it was the dough rising. She said her dimples were God’s thumb-prints. She said she had three dimples and some people had none, because God didn’t make everyone the same, otherwise he would just get bored of it all, and so he dished things out unevenly. It didn’t seem fair, but it would come out fair at the end.

Laura was six, by the time I’m remembering. I was nine. I knew that babies weren’t made out of bread dough—that was a story for little kids like Laura. Still, no detailed explanation had been offered.

In the afternoons Mother had been sitting in the gazebo, knitting. She was knitting a tiny sweater, like the ones she still knitted for the Overseas Refugees. Was this one for a refugee too? I wanted to know.
Perhaps,
she’d say, and smile. After a while she would doze off, her eyes sliding heavily shut, her round glasses slipping down. She told us she had eyes in the back of her head, and that was how she knew when we’d done something wrong. I pictured these eyes as flat and shiny and without colour, like the glasses.

It wasn’t like her to sleep so much in the afternoons. There were a lot of things that weren’t like her. Laura wasn’t worried, but I was. I was putting two and two together, out of what I’d been told and what I’d overheard. What I’d been told: “Your mother needs her rest, so you’ll have to keep Laura out of her hair.” What I’d overheard (Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate): “The doctor’s not pleased. It might be nip and tuck. Of course she’d never say a word, but she’s not a well woman. Some men can never leave well enough alone.” So I knew my mother was in danger of some kind, something to do with her health and something to do with Father, though I was unsure what this danger might be.

I’ve said Laura wasn’t worried, but she was clinging to Mother more than usual. She sat cross-legged in the cool space beneath the gazebo when Mother was resting, or behind her chair when she was writing letters. When Mother was in the kitchen, Laura liked to be under the kitchen table. She’d drag a cushion in there, and her alphabet book, the one that used to be mine. She had a lot of things that used to be mine.

Laura could read by now, or at least she could read the alphabet book. Her favourite letter was L, because it was her own letter, the one that began her name,
L is for Laura.
I never had a favourite letter that began my name—
I is for Iris
—because
I
was everybody’s letter.