After Alice (30 page)

She goes to visit Masao, but finds him gone, the shop sold, now a hardware store.

Up and down the hills of the lake country, the cherries and peaches are in bloom. But in some of the orchards, she can see that the trees are badly overgrown, unpruned. In others, the trees are dying, and have been left to gnarl and choke, instead of being bulldozed to make room for new; in others still, a battlefield of stumps lies rotting in the glittering April sun, nobody having burned them or replanted.

She visits the Red and White, and finds the shelves stocked with dusty, sun-faded cans. Mrs. Gable is not there, only a young woman who must be one of the McCartneys or Platts, given her blank, small-mouthed face and whitish hair.

All of the stores and houses seem abandoned, even if they are inhabited. There is a general look of disrepair.

She drives up over the rainbow hill and sees, first, the Sans Souci driveway with a “For Sale” sign, and then Beauvoir with half its west slope lying fallow, so that it looks like it has forgotten to get dressed.

Walt is apologetic. “The prices,” he says. Sidonie says she knows. Walt's son has gone to Fort McMurray to try his luck there. Walt is operating his own orchards and Beauvoir on a skeleton crew: old drunks, he says, and the Quebecois kids who hitchhike out here in the summer.

“Are you paying too much for the lease?” Sidonie asks. That is the deal she set up with Walt, ten years ago: he'd continue to run the Beauvoir orchards, but rather than being paid, would lease them and keep the profits. She had wanted to set up a fixed income for her nephews, and so had asked for a flat rate, instead of twenty-five percent, the usual arrangement. Now Sidonie wonders if Walter has come off worse in the deal.

“Not too much, but if you adjusted the price for inflation, I wouldn't be able to pay,” he says.

The land is worth too much. But also, in 1983, too little: prices have dropped.

Sidonie wonders if it would be a good time to withdraw something from their savings and put in into Beauvoir. It is disturbing to see the land lying bare, unplanted. Even in tight times, the orchards were replanted, because it took a decade for a tree to mature enough to become productive. There was always the future. If the price of apples went up, you did not want to be waiting for your trees to mature.

Walt is apologetic about the house, too. “I have to warn you,” he says, turning the key in the lock. The house is vacant, Sidonie knows. Walt had to evict the last tenants, forcibly, and hasn't put any in since. “It's a bit of a mess,” Walt says, but she still isn't prepared for the interior.

A desecration. Sidonie has to will herself not to faint or vomit. She had known it would be bad; Walter had telephoned her, described some of the damage, long distance. But she had not pictured anything like this.

It is irredeemable, she thinks. Lock it up and abandon it. Set fire to it.

Walt says, “The roof is still good, the one we put on five years ago. And the frame and foundations still solid. It will keep.”

She makes one more visit, to Mrs. Inglis, who's in a nursing home in town.

“Graham died too, you know,” Mrs. Inglis says.

“Yes,' Sidonie says. “I heard.”

Mrs. Inglis is blind. She wears dark glasses, but fancy ones, with large red frames, as if she were at the beach. She has put on lipstick, and is wearing a summer frock in a peach and jade print, and holds out her hand to Sidonie as if she's come over for tea; as if she'll come the next week, and the next.

“Did you ever go to Italy?” she asks Sidonie, and Sidonie confesses that she has not.

“I would have liked to have seen Alice's children growing up,” Mrs. Inglis says, but she refuses Sidonie's invitation to Stephen's wedding. “But thank you, my darling,” she says, and holds Sidonie's hand.

Into Sidonie's head, a rush of images: Mrs. Inglis's exquisitely flamboyant hats, her fruity laughing voice, her generous waist. She has been like a warm plum cake, a fire in the grate. But now Mr. Inglis is dead, and Graham. Sidonie's parents, Alice, Mr. Ramsay. Dr. Stewart. The Erskines and the Rilkes, Walt's parents. Mr. Tanaka.

All of those people who knew her and remember her gone now. And who is she then? For a person's life, Sidonie thinks suddenly, is a kind of bubble, given shape by other bubbles around it. Too fragile to survive more than an instant after the others have burst their walls and disappeared.

That is what it is like to be Mrs. Inglis.

In March of 1980, at the age of forty-three, Graham Inglis had, while apparently in one of his lucid periods, his medications working for once, unearthed a very old package of gopher bait — strychnine — in one of the orchard sheds. Hugh had told her this, over the telephone: it had been too late to come back for the funeral. It appeared that Graham had come upon the gopher bait accidentally, while looking for some kittens. The kittens had been birthed in the shed, and had fallen or crawled through a hole in the floorboards to the crawlspace. Graham and Mrs. Inglis had heard them mewing, seen the mother cat running back and forth and around the shed, calling. You know how my mother is about cats, Hugh had said. Sidonie had known: the Inglises had kept, at one time, more than thirty cats, most of the orchard or barn cats, Mrs. Inglis being notoriously unable to drown a kitten or turn away a litter left in a box on her porch.

Graham, acting as his mother's eyes and hands, had moved the rust-streaked ladders out of the shed, one by one, had pried up the trap door, and crawled down into the dry, sandy storage space beneath the shed and carried out the kittens — four of them — in the front of his sweater.

He must have found the strychnine in the crawlspace. Mrs. Inglis remembered that they had used to keep the more dangerous pesticides in there, years before. Of course, every sharp implement or poisonous substance had been removed from the house and outbuildings when Graham had become ill. But the crawlspace had somehow been forgotten, overlooked.

Graham had probably secreted it in his pocket; Mrs. Inglis hadn't been able to see much, then, but she'd have been able to see the suspicious box in his hand. Graham had said nothing. Had gone to see a movie with Mrs. Inglis:
Being There
, with Peter Sellers. He had described what was happening on the screen to his mother.

In his room later, Graham had written a short note that said only “I'm sorry. I do know this is best.” He had put a rolled blanket against the bottom of the door connecting his room and his mother's — she slept between him and the rest of the house — and put his radio on, as he always did to fall asleep.

Strychnine is the sort of poison nobody would choose first. It is strongly bitter. It blocks the glycine receptors in the brain and spinal cord, causes muscle contractions, convulsions, slow asphyxia. As the poison shuts down the body's organs, it bucks and heaves for air. The final unconsciousness is the cessation of long strangulation.

Graham fell off the bed; his mother, who slept only lightly as when her children had been infants, heard, came into the room, switched on the light. It was too late to do anything for him, though an ambulance was called, and came out from town, a twenty-minute trip. Mrs. Inglis sat down in her nightgown on the floor, holding Graham's head in her lap. He said, “I'm sorry, Mum.” At the hospital, they gave him morphine and pumped his stomach, but it was too late.

She sits with
Mrs. Inglis for an hour in silence; she thinks that perhaps the old woman has fallen asleep. But then Mrs. Inglis takes off the big red-framed sunglasses and closes her eyelids over her milky eyes. Her upper and lower lids are bruised or stained plum-brown, as if fallen leaves have lain on them over a winter.

“My turn now,” she says.

Cynthia has asked to arrive
at the church early with her brothers. Paul and Kevin are standing up with Steve, and Debbie has invited Cynthia to be a bridesmaid, as is customary, but she has declined. I'm afraid,” Cynthia had said, “to be in front of a group of people.”

Sidonie makes sure that they do arrive early, driving through the wet April streets, and just as they pull into the church parking lot, they see the boys getting out of Stephen's car. Cynthia runs across to meet them without a backward look, careless of her new high heels and silky dress. Sidonie takes her time collecting her handbag, locking the car doors. She feels strange; out of her element. She knows nobody here, really. She has never seen this building before, though it's in a familiar landscape; will likely never see it again. It is nominally the church of Debbie's parents, though clearly they've never attended before, don't know the pastor. She watches the four of them, Alice's children, amalgamate into a kind of loose line. The three boys — men, really: Paul, the youngest, is twenty-two — almost all of a size, and Cynthia, who is smaller than they, tiny, but nearly an adult too. There they are. They are walking towards this unfamiliar church, which has nothing to do with them or Alice. They are nearly shoulder to shoulder; they keep pace, roughly, but do not touch. Strangers come out of the church to greet them, to draw them in, to prepare for the little ceremony. And Sidonie hangs back and watches them go in.

The parking lot, beginning to fill with cars, the asphalt shining wet from the rain, little lakes at the corners, where the earth has subsided. She would choose not to go inside, except to do so would cause a commotion, would divert attention from the bride and groom and their highly-planned day. There is no connection for her here. There is nobody she knows except these four young adults, and she does not know three of them well. There is no connection with Alice or Buck or with her parents, only space where they ought to be. She is the only connection, and she can't introduce this scene into her memories of her family; can't summon her memories into this scene.

Sitting in her pew during the ceremony, she thinks: I will put an end to it. I will wait until Sans Souci has been sold, and then I will sell Beauvoir. I will take Cynthia back to Montreal tomorrow, and I will write to Walter, and after Sans Souci has sold, I will instruct him to contact a real estate agent about selling Beauvoir. It is mine, but I don't want it anymore. It is broken; it is emptied of what made it anything at all. I will relieve myself of it. I will cut these ties, because they are no ties at all. They only draw attention to what is lost.

The visit does its mischief with Cynthia; she will not settle back into her life in Montreal. She has been a sensible, cooperative teenager, but now she rebels. She will not go to university there, though she has free tuition, a place to live, decent grades. She doesn't want to apply to universities in Ottawa or Toronto or Quebec City. Nowhere. She doesn't want to go to Europe for a year. This is Clara's suggestion, and not Sidonie's first or even third choice, but she would be happier with it than with what Cynthia has in mind.

Cynthia wants to go back to the valley and live with her brother Paul. No, not even go to the college there. She will work in a restaurant or something. Paul thinks he can get her a job. Cynthia's relationship with Adam, always sweet, respectful, symbiotic, comes apart. “You're wasting your good brains,” Adam shouts at Cynthia, and Cynthia screeches back, so distraught that she's unintelligible. She begins to retreat to her bedroom, to stay out late. She dyes her mouse-brown hair jet-black, speaks rudely, lets her unwashed clothes pile up on her floor. Mrs. Schwarz, the cleaning lady, announces that she can't do Cynthia's room with all of the mess. “Fine, then,” Cynthia says. “She can leave it.”

One night she comes home from a party visibly drunk. Her grades start to slip, in this, her final term. “Who cares?” she says. “I'm not applying to go to university anyway.” A report is sent home enumerating her absences from classes.

What can be done? There is nothing to be done.

Sidonie sleeps poorly; she is frightened. “Do you think Cynthia's depressed?” she asks Clara. “Or on drugs?”

“No,” Clara says. “I think she's trying to wear you down. To break the bond. She
will
break it. You will have to decide how to negotiate the break.”

“Should we just give in?”

“That's not for me to say. But you're not in a strong position. She is almost eighteen.”

“We can refuse to give her money,” Adam says.

“Of course. And that will give her permission to hitchhike and live in squats with strangers.”

Sidonie says, “I don't understand this. Children were not so rebellious when I was young.”

“Are you so sure?” Clara asks. “Look at you, coming to Montreal as a teenager. Do you mean to tell me that wasn't rebellion? I seem to remember you saying that you had run away from home.”

Had she said that? Yes: when she was eighteen, Sidonie had taken delight in introducing herself as “the only person you'll know who ran away from home to go to school.”

“It's different,” she says. “I was running toward something worthwhile. I had a plan. And I wasn't rebellious; I just waited for a weak moment and exploited it.”

A weak moment, when her parents had been exhausted, knocked out, by Alice's choices.

It was Alice, of course, who had wanted to go to Montreal. Both Mother and Father had been vehemently opposed.

“No good can come of that,” Father had said. “It's all jazz clubs and immigrants on the make. They have no morals. Not a place for a young girl.”

And Mother had said, “It's too expensive. A waste of time. Who's to say that you'll be successful? You'll spend all of that money and then have nothing to show for it. Better get some practical training that you can have to fall back on.”

“You don't want me to do anything that you haven't done,” Alice had said. “You can't see beyond your own narrow life. You want me to stay here and get married and turn out just like you.”

Alice had wanted to go to design school. It's all she wanted to do, she said. But it was too risky. Sidonie couldn't imagine it, even though Alice was so good at sewing her own designs, and at drawing. They had never known anyone who was a dress designer, or even a professional artist of any kind. It didn't seem possible.