They play music on Masao's tape deck: BTO, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Stones, CCR, Cat Stevens. Masao sings along:
And if I
ever lose my hands, lose my power, lose my land/ Oh if I ever lose my
hands
â
I won't have to work no more
.
“I thought it was
plow
,” Alice says. “Lose my
plow
.”
“No;
power
,” Hugh says with certainty.
(Now, she thinks:
Moonshadow
. She had never made the connection with the Schubert song before.)
The June air is like warm milk. When the light finally begins to wobble, at 10:30 or so, Alice brings out a tray of drinks: “Long Island Iced Tea,” she says. “Sort of. It's all I could make with what was in the house.” But miraculously, a flask of rye appears out of Masao's car, and Hugh produces a bottle of rum, three-quarters full. “The loaves and fishes,” Masao says.
“It's a good thing liquor doesn't go off,” Graham says, reading the label of Alice's bottle. “This is about twenty years old.”
“I recently drank a bottle of one-hundred-year-old sherry,” Hugh says.
“Was it a bribe?” Graham asks.
“Yes,” says Hugh. “The Brazilian government is very generous with Canadian engineers. But I can tell you, that sherry had gone off.”
“Maybe it's hard liquor that doesn't go off,” Alice says, mediating, and Hugh scoffs. “Who says
hard liquor
these days?”
“I do,” says Sidonie. “I say it every day around five o'clock in the imperative mood.”
Walt chuckles, a deep, liquid chuckle that reminds Sidonie of his father, Mr. Rilke, and that seems part of the summer night, like the crickets and the occasional call of the nighthawks.
Lying back in the big wooden chairs on the porch (they are called Adirondack chairs, Sidonie knows now, though she never heard the term in her childhood), lying back in the dusk with their scavenged drinks, their light conversation, Sidonie thinks: we could be all teenagers again, or maybe young adults. It is a night out of time, an evening that we never had, that we'll never have again.
They have each gone back to their younger, essential selves. They have shed twenty years, and returned to an earlier time, but a time that didn't exist. For the six of them, twenty years ago this dynamic wasn't possible. Hugh and Graham were almost never home; Alice was aloof, burning; Sidonie still an awkward adolescent; Walt tongue-tied with anger and self-consciousness, and Masao wary and on edge. They couldn't have managed it. And yet what they have made this evening, natural and sweet as it is, is only illusion. It's an illusion because they do not meet like this, because each of them has had to shed a thick shell of everyday being to meet like this. It's an illusion because they are not, as they appear, a witty, charming, affectionate group of young people, but rather a random meeting of middle-aged strangers. Graham, the oldest, is thirty-six; Sidonie and Walt, the youngest, are twenty-nine. They do not see each other often in their everyday lives. Though they played together hours on end, day after day, as children, though they are siblings and neighbours, they are still strangers.
They are disconnected thoroughly from their earlier lives: only Walt still works the orchards. But this, this illusionary evening, has produced their essential selves. What does that then say?
Graham says, “Are you still with us, young Sidonie?” And Hugh says, “She's addled by the hard liquor.”
Sidonie says, “I was wondering if we'll ever all be together again,” and Graham says, “That is the one question you're not allowed to ask,” while Alice simultaneously says, “We're always together. None of us have really left.” Which was not true; which was only Alice being poetic, under the influence. But which Sidonie has always remembered.
It is then that she realizes what Alice is planning. How Alice has delayed taking Beauvoir on, assuming the responsibility all this time, not because she has not wanted Beauvoir, but because she has not wanted to let it fall to Buck. How Alice has become stronger, how she is planning to remove Buck from the picture. She will ditch him, in the phrase used in Marshall's Landing. Mother would not have countenanced this; Mother, tight-lipped, drawing herself in visibly when the subjects of divorce or remarriage were mentioned.
In the milky half-darkness, she sees now Masao's head on Alice's lap, and something drops into place with geometric perfection, lucidity, beauty. She will move back: she and Alice and Masao will run Beauvoir. It is as simple as that.
But the next morning, parking in front of the IGA in the plaza, having driven down for milk, bread, she sees a familiar-looking figure get out of the truck parked next to hers, walk into the store without glancing back at her. She is frozen to her seat: a little death. It's Gordon Defoe.
She flies back to Montreal two days later.
Hugh on the telephone again:
“Can't you put a stop to this? It's just not reasonable. It's not what I intended at all. They just won't listen to me. It's a disaster.” And more of the same. She knows by now that Alex has absconded with Hugh's daughter Ingrid; that Alex's mysterious trip the month before had been to Toronto: he had driven there and brought Ingrid back. She knows that Ingrid is staying with Alex, refusing to enroll in the engineering program in Toronto, as Hugh had planned she would. That Alex and Ingrid are planning to live in Alex's parents' basement, to start looking for some land for an organic garden. Tasha has told her all this: Stephen and Debbie, apparently, are too annoyed to talk about it.
“What can I do?” Hugh asks, plaintively.
“Give them a dowry,” Sidonie says.
They are all so angry. But what of it? Grown children are for letting go of. There is no binding or pruning them into shape without horrible consequences.
In the fall of 1986, after Cynthia leaves, Sidonie asks Adam for a divorce, and moves, temporarily, into a hotel. He refuses for about six months, then asks her to meet him to discuss how they will proceed. He has fallen in love with someone else, he says. He tells her this in person at dinner: not at one of their usual haunts, but at a new hotel restaurant. It's ostentatious with black marble and art nouveau décor. Around them women gleam in big-shouldered satin pleats, shiny mounds of hair. It is the Age of Shiny Things. Adam wants to partake. Why shouldn't he? He has worked hard, has used his brains and charm and connections to move ahead in his career. Has not stinted at home, either. Has given Cynthia a decade of indulged, loved childhood. Has given Sidonie two decades of a comfortable home, of the most interesting of the culture and conversation that Montreal has to offer.
And she has been perhaps too austere to receive it. It has all fallen on stony ground. The parched, baked landscape of her unyielding self. She has not intended harm, but harm has come from her.
She refuses alimony: “I have my salary,” she says. “My own salary and pension.” Adam offers to let her have the apartment, but she knows that he wants to keep it, the apartment in the striking building that he helped design.
She finds herself another place back in their old neighbourhood, where they had first lived. And she is happy to have it, and what is left of their furnishings after Adam has claimed his piano, his van der Rohe chairs and Saarinen tables, the grotesque sculptural pieces he has acquired. “Marc likes them,” he says. He is half ashamed, half intoxicated with his freedom.
With little furniture, with bare floors, her new-old apartment is pleasingly bleak. Sidonie comes home from her lab sometimes to lie full length on the wood floors, to listen to recordings of Bach and Sibelius in the dusk, in the almost empty space. And feels safe, free. She remembers how, before Alice's death, she had determined to leave Adam; how she had scoured the city for an apartment. She hadn't been able to find one; she had been, she suspects now, too attached to the one she was living in. Lucky, lucky, to have a place to herself now.
“It's a bit monastic,” says Clara. She shows her loyalty to Sidonie by not speaking to Adam for a year after their separation, as if she's in mourning. Anita is more detached: it is better, she says, to be true to the body. To not live with lies.
Sidonie is still young: forty. She is introduced to friends of friends, some of whom she agrees to have dinner with, or more. She doesn't form any deep attachments. She works, gives papers, travels. She undergoes therapy, and smooths out some of her more noticeable social wrinkles.
In 1993 Clara calls to say that Adam is dying: he has cancer. his liver is shutting down. He is conscious, but not expected to live more than a week. He is asking for her.
When she finds him in his hospital room, she sees a mummy: his flesh has dried up, and he is deep yellow, gilded like a mummy.
“Sidonie,” he says. “Ah, Sidonie. My beautiful lost girl.”
It is only nostalgia: a sentimental longing to experience some real or imagined former pleasure.
“Don't, Adam,” she says.
Arid, stony ground. Though she knows something about what can grow, what can bloom from the dry limestone earth.
A strange sight,
their cars all lined up in the driveway at Beauvoir as if the von Tälers were home and entertaining. As if they had never left, but were having a family celebration: Peter and Frances, Alice and Sidonie, their children and their children's children. “So this is what your place was like, Dad?” Ingrid asks, and Hugh answers, “More or less, though I always thought Beauvoir has a better view. The land is steeper.”
They all stand on the verandah, looking down at the lake.
“You can smell the fruit growing,” Alex says, inhaling.
“Do you want to go inside?” Sidonie asks, though she hopes that nobody will. But they all do want to, so she produces the key and opens the front door.
A rush of stale but cool air; already the land outside has absorbed the morning sun and warmed the air, but the house is shaded by the stand of spruce, now massive, at its southwest end. She had always known that she wouldn't live here, that she would be the one to leave. The uselessness of nostalgia: shut the door on it.
Hugh and Cynthia stand at the dining room window, looking out, but the others move from room to room, and climb the stairs to the second storey. What do they want to see it for? They all look inward, speculative, as if trying to see this as a home. Debbie is studying the big tile stove and mantle. Justin and Tasha are, like children, trying out the old switches. (They don't work, of course; the electricity has been off for years.) Steve taps on walls, sniffs.
Sidonie, mounting the stairs, glimpses, through the open doorway of her parents' old bedroom, Alex and Ingrid simply standing by the window, embracing.
Alice and Sidonie's room. It had always seemed luminous to Sidonie. But now, with the spruce grown up outside the window, the room is less bright; instead, aqueous, glimmering blue-green.
Justin and Tasha have come in to investigate Alice's old room, and Sidonie moves back out into the hallway. Steve comes up the stairs â she hears him also pause for an instant and then resume his tread, as he passes her parents' bedroom â and coming down the hall, says, “By the shape of the ceiling downstairs, there was a leak in the bathroom. Can I take a look?”
Sidonie moves aside to let him enter, and then looks in herself. The honeycombed tile, with its pattern of white and aqua, has been torn up, and the stained floorboards are exposed. Steve squats, reaches out, taps the wood.
“Not so bad,” he says. “No rot.”
Is he thinking that it can be saved?
Downstairs, Hugh says to Ingrid, “Well. Enjoy the tour?” and she raises an eyebrow at him, doesn't answer. Alex and Debbie have gone into the old garden. Alex is poking at the soil with a ballpoint pen, crouched, intent, very like Stephen had been upstairs. Then he puts his hands into the soil, scoops up a double handful, lets it fall. Surprisingly, touches his loamy finger to his tongue, tastes it. All around him the pigweed, knapweed, thistles sending up their determined little shoots among the dry stalks of last year's weeds.
A mess. Mother would be heartbroken. But no: a foolish thought. Mother is dead. She has no thought for this.
Alex, sitting in the garden, running the dry soil through his hands. “This is good soil,” he says. “It's been built up.”
Forty years of digging in compost.
Steve says, “What happened to all of the flowers? I remember flower beds, perennials, around the house,” and kicks through the dried weeds to reveal the stalks of peonies, upthrust clogged corms of iris, the rampant unkempt tentacles of the roses.
“All still here,” Sidonie says, in wonder.
Then Debbie comes over with a cry of triumph: in her fist a dozen red raspberries. There is a clamour as they all gather to take one. They are a little small: not enough water. But the sun in them fizzes on the tongue.
Where needs must, needs will,
Sidonie's mother had been fond of saying. Now Sidonie thinks this, surveying the drawings Kevin has unrolled on her dining room table. The others are coming later for dinner, but Kevin had something to show Sidonie first. He leans over the table, beefy, shaven, tattooed; she notices his straight, thin mouth and eyebrows for the first time as familiar. He has gone to some trouble, using full-sized drafting paper, proper scale, a neat draughtsman's printing. She's seen enough of Adam's work to read the plans. It's Beauvoir, with an addition to the northeast angling off the kitchen: a large open room, glassed on two sides, with a fireplace at one end, tables, washrooms. A wide verandah. And here, plans for a refit of the kitchen: two long work areas extend the entire span, with oversized rectangles for ovens and refrigerators. Or rather, it's not Beauvoir, but a new version of it. The old house re-envisioned as a house and restaurant.
Kevin turns over another sheet, and there's the whole upper part of Beauvoir, the bench with additional buildings labeled “greenhouses,” “storage,” “market.” Garden areas are marked off. The symbols architects use for deciduous trees indicate a small orchard, and other symbols denote a perimeter of conifers.