After Alice (23 page)

She is perhaps not unusual in this quick decision. Women of her generation were, after all, prepared, not dissimilarly to Mother's Christmas goose, for a certain role. They had to judge all eligible men, all encounters with eligible men, against their certain end of assuming this role. Why not Adam? He is handsome, in his fine-drawn way, funny, intelligent. They both play the violin, and she gets along with his sisters. A sensible choice.

What is different about Sidonie is that she thinks
lover
, not
husband
. Why is this? Possibly because she is still so young: only eighteen. Possibly because of Mrs. Inglis's frequent stories about Alice Keppel, though those were meant for Alice: stories about her namesake. Probably because she has never believed that she is capable of the kind of joining that marriage is believed to embody. She has known, though not chosen, an emotional autonomy, all her life. She cannot envision it changing.

For this reason a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife,
and they two shall become one
. She has heard this passage invoked — how many times? — by Mr. Erskine. She cannot see herself becoming one with anyone.

Sidonie is, at this time in her life, neither especially religious nor irreligious. She has not consciously adopted the atheistic or Bohemian attitude, the extolling of Free Love, that existed in echelons of Montreal society, though likely not in Marshall's Landing, in the early 1960s.

She decides that she will sleep with Adam as soon as there is an opportunity. (And as soon as she decides this, she feels her body, her arms and legs, her breasts and belly and pubis, grow warm, polarized towards Adam.) She will possibly marry him, but only after they have discussed and agreed on every possible decision. (She will not be her Mother, trapped in a round of exhausting work. Will not be Alice, caught in the net.)

She does not know how, nor has the self-possession, to play coy, as young women of her time are supposed to do. And though Adam is thirty-one years old, an urban sophisticate for his time, he could not have expected Sidonie's response to him: that instant, complete opening to him.

It is Sidonie who says, “I want to go home with you, after,” the second time they go out together. Adam has his own place, of course, a bachelor apartment. He doesn't live with his parents and sisters. There is only one thing that statement can mean in their time. On Adam's sofa, they kiss, and given the possibilities, she is nearly swooning. Adam asks, “Are you sure?” before he pulls out the sofa bed and they go further. This is what she would expect; this is gentlemanly. Adam has safes; that is also gentlemanly and mature. She is pleased, somewhere under her insistent drive; she has chosen correctly.

Afterward, she weeps a little; not at Adam's house, but after he has driven her home (for she must be home; she must be in her dormitory, if not by the official curfew of midnight, at least by two in the morning, or she will be disciplined. Her dorm-mates will cover for each other up to a certain time, but will not vouchsafe the entire night. They have a social code to enforce.)

It is not the pain of deflowering, which her dorm-mates dread in hushed whispers, that has hurt her, for that was taken care of years ago. Neither is it the intrusion into her self, the loss of power that women will describe a decade later in group encounters, that upsets her. What is disappointing to her is that the experience is so mundane, over so quickly. That there is no intense, wild pleasure, but only something not too dissimilar from her first occasion. It is disappointing. She is almost transported back into her gangly fourteen-year-old self.

And then she accepts that this is all it is, this perfunctory penetration and bumping.

Another rebirth? No, just the final stages of the first one. Compromised, complicit with her own corruption, she feels that she has emerged into the human world, this time consciously, intentionally. She is an adult now: she fully understands the adult world. She has put away her innocence, which is to say her belief in her own incorruptibility, for good. She feels she is sophisticated, and she is aware of the word's literal meaning.

So she thinks in those heady first weeks. When she is not completely engrossed in her very difficult courses in physics, which for some reason are required of any science student, and which cause her elation, rather than angst.

When Adam announces the engagement to his family, Clara claps her hands as if applauding a performance or the winner of a race. She says, “Oh, good! Now we will never lose you.”

Sidonie assumes at the time that Clara means her, Sidonie, but years later, thinking back, wonders if it wasn't Adam that Clara was referring to. For what was Sidonie recruited? To fill a place, really; to ensure that whomever Adam married wouldn't change him, wouldn't change the St. Regis family strain. If so, the whole family must have felt that way. Adam's father said, “Do you mean to tell me that young people are still getting married?” But smiling. And Adam's mother said, “I'm very pleased; you'll be a great asset to our family.” That is the main tenor, that she is joining their family, as if it's a company or club. There was the implication that she had been vetted, an offer made.

Later, in her bitterness, she had wondered why he had bothered to marry, at all. But he must have had to: he must have wanted that social enfranchisement as much as she did.

From her own family, a different response: she has not brought in someone new, but has acquired a large, costly possession whose merits have yet to be proven: a bicycle, a horse. The occasion warrants an expensive, long-distance telephone call. Mother says, “Oh, my goodness! Are you sure?” And Father says, “Well, if it's what you want,
Liebchen
.”

Sidonie doesn't speak directly to Alice, who is already married, with two babies, and living in a rural place with no phone. Mother tells her that Alice wishes her the best of luck, which Sidonie takes to be a liberal translation.

She declines the offer of a loaned wedding dress (she remembers it: full-skirted, tight-waisted, encrusted like some marine beast with hard, scratchy tulle and lace), and wears, daringly, a little suit of raw silk, in an off-white like light cream. It has an open neckline with a flat, rounded collar, a boxy jacket, a narrow skirt. With it a pillbox hat and a mere reference to a veil.

Mother, seeing her, is disappointed, Sidonie can tell. “That's so very — modern!” Mother says.

What did Sidonie think she was doing? And Adam? What was he thinking?

Those are questions Sidonie has time to gnaw on only much later in her life, and the answers she arrives at in 1983, when her marriage to Adam comes unraveled, are not the same answers that she finds in the decades after that.

In 1962, Sidonie is thinking that it will be a sensible thing to marry Adam, since he has asked her, and since they enjoy each other's company. Marrying Adam will mean that she may move out of her dorm, where it is often too noisy to concentrate on her work, and where the girls — whose names she can never remember — are much too inclined to borrow her things, to leave the bathroom in disarray, and to tease.

And part of her thinks that it is sensible to settle the question of whom she will marry early, so she can get down to the serious business of her life, and not have to devote energy to the activities that comprise the search for a suitable mate.

The foolish virgins and the wise. Miss Erskine had told them it was about Choosing Sensibly. She had congratulated herself, marrying Adam, for choosing so much more sensibly than Alice had.

On her last night
of her visit to Montreal, she and Anita and Clara go to a concert, Clara leading them through shining wet back streets. They go down some stairs leading off a side street, shake out their umbrellas, go through dim light and fragmented music: someone is tuning up a bass viol. They find seats in the small, dim room: Sidonie recognizes, and Clara is greeted by, some luminaries she remembers from Clara's parties, or has seen pictures of in magazines. This is a select audience: a private fundraiser.

Everybody hushes, as for a religious ceremony.

The small elderly man, a well-known singer-poet, walks in with just a guitar. He is introduced; there is warm, quick applause, as for a family member; and then he begins, his familiar baritone growling monotonically through the familiar sly, sacrilegious lyrics. (How much had it cost Clara for tickets to this very intimate event, she wonders?)

She remembers that she has heard him sing decades before, in a small room, before his fame and the huge concert halls. She had not been particularly impressed with him, as a young woman; he was not musical, she thought: though his lyrics were sometimes funny, they didn't make sense. And his voice was almost atonal, the music droning, punctuated uncomfortably with patches of nasal wailing, like klezmer music.

On this occasion, she hears the music and lyrics differently: hears the bleakness, the self-deprecation, the loneliness under the layers of wit and black humour.

It's crowded and cold, in my secret life
. . . he sings, and it seems that he is looking right at her, into her. It is almost too much to hear; she wants to weep; a storm of regret, longing, despair rises in her chest. She wants to run outside in the rain, to beat her breast, but must sit on her little chair among the other listeners and politely clap.

After an hour the singer takes his break, and the audience stands around talking. They are all old friends of the singer; everyone touches him, Sidonie notices. He is very slight in his jacket. His cropped white head seems to be too large for his body. She retreats to the periphery of the room: Clara and Anita ought not to have brought her here.

The singer's glance falls on her, and returns; he locks gazes with her and she has to fight the urge to look away. She has never learned to meet eyes with a stranger.

On the way home, Clara says, “If we weren't all so old, I'd say he was trying to pick you up,” and Anita says, “He was just trying to remember if he'd slept with you.”

“He didn't,” Sidonie says.

Anita and Clara laugh.

They are sirens; they find more and more to entertain her; they will not let her go.

MUSSOLINI

After her long visit with Clara and Anita,
she flies from Montreal to Toronto to spend a weekend with Hugh (Ingrid is away, visiting her older half-siblings). She and Hugh go out for dinner, to a concert, to the new wing of the museum, shopping. Hugh is amiable, urbane. Toronto is interesting. She likes that there is something new to do every evening.

Hugh has got tickets to see the production of
Götterdämmerung
at the Four Seasons. She has seen the entire cycle, of course, at the Bayreuth Festival, but this is a maiden Canadian performance, not to be missed. She suspects Hugh has got tickets for her sake, not out of his own interest; before the four and a half hours are up, she catches him snoring gently at least twice.

After a late dinner, he says, “Do you remember the opera singer? No: you'd have been too young. That was the winter of 49.”

But she does remember.

An opera singer is coming to Marshall's Landing. He is a real opera singer, a tenor. But he is also Mrs. Inglis's cousin. He will sing in the hall and anyone can go, and the ticket money is for war orphans, though Father says it had better be kept here — there will be lots of starving here, after this winter.

The outside of the hall is partly brown-stained wood and partly shiny tin. Inside, the walls are cream, with wainscotting in a dense, heavy green, like moss, and the floor made of strips of wood, varnished and shiny. There is a stage at one end of the hall with an orange curtain, and along the adjacent side, a long narrow kitchen with pass-through windows.

Sidonie feels anxious in this room; it feels like a copy of something much grander that she has never seen. It tells her that there are bigger halls in other places, where more important things go on: it tells her that she and her world don't matter. But Alice loves it. Alice is always here, being the princess in the school play, singing in the Christmas concert. Alice is wearing a new winter dress: deep plum velvet, with a gathered skirt and little silver buttons up the front, and a small collar. She has pulled her hair up rather tightly, and her face is winter-pale. Against the velvety plum of her dress, Alice's head looks, Sidonie thinks, as if it were made of frosted or translucent glass, like the vase Mrs. Inglis has with the woman's head on the side of it.

Alice has not wanted to sit with the family, but Mother bought tickets in a block, and the seats are numbered, so she has to. She sits on the very end of the row in the aisle seat, her face turned slightly, as if she has no relationship to the rest of them. Next to Alice sits Father in his best suit, then Mother, and last, Sidonie, who is worried that someone she doesn't know will sit on her other side. But it's only Mr. Inglis, so she has let herself slide back into her chair instead of being scrooched up against Mother. Mr. Inglis says to Mother that Alice looks very beautiful, and then takes Sidonie's hand. “And here is our shy violet,” Mr. Inglis says. Sidonie knows she is not beautiful: she has skin that is brown in summer, sallow in winter. And she is wearing an old dress of Alice's that's too big still. The bright blue colour makes her feel awkward, as if she is too shiny. But she likes the way the dress droops on her, the thick heavy wool tent of it. It's like a monk's robe, she thinks: in it she is hidden, safe. It's one of the dresses that had come from Europe in a box, before the boxes had stopped arriving. A hand-me-down from a second cousin, never seen, and too big even for Alice when it had arrived. But then Alice had worn it, and everyone had said Oh! Alice! Because it had matched her eyes exactly. It does not match Sidonie's eyes, which are grey.