I asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in The Blind Assassin. Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we'd thwarted her - disposed of this unknown lover somehow. Scared him off, bought him off, run him off, whatever; she'd lived in Winifred's house long enough to see how things were done by people like us. Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we'd sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we'd stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own.
She was not at all coherent, but this was the gist of it. You can see how appealing it must have been for her, this fantasy: who wouldn't want to have a mythical being for a mother, instead of the shop-soiled real kind? Given the chance.
I said she was quite wrong, she'd got things all mixed up, but she didn't listen. No wonder she'd never felt happy with Richard and me, she said. We'd never behaved like her real parents, because in fact we weren't her real parents. And no wonder Aunt Laura had thrown herself off a bridge - it was because we'd broken her heart. Laura had probably left a note for Aimee explaining all of this, for her to read when she was older, but Richard and I must have destroyed it.
No wonder I'd been such a terrible mother, she continued. I'd never really loved her. If I had, I would have put her before everything else. I would have considered her feelings. I wouldn't have left Richard.
"I may not have been a perfect mother," I said. "I'm willing to admit that, but I did the best I could under the circumstances - circumstances about which you actually know very little." What was she doing with Sabrina? I went on. Letting her run around like that outside the house with no clothes on, filthy as a beggar; it was neglect, the child could disappear at any moment, children disappeared all the time. I was Sabrina's grandmother, I would be more than willing to take her in, and . . .
"You aren't her grandmother," said Aimee. She was crying by now. "Aunt Laura is. Or she was. She's dead, and you killed her!"
"Don't be stupid," I said. This was the wrong response: the more vehemently you deny such things, the more they are believed. But you often give the wrong response when you're frightened, and Aimee had frightened me.
When I said the word stupid, she began to scream at me. I was the stupid one, she said. I was dangerously stupid, I was so stupid I didn't even know how stupid I was. She used a number of words I won't repeat here, then picked up the smile-button coffee mug and threw it at me. Then she came at me, unsteadily; she was howling, great heart-rending sobs. Her arms were outstretched, in a threatening manner, I believed. I was upset, shaken. I retreated backwards, clutching the banister, dodging other items - a shoe, a saucer. When I got to the front door I fled.
Perhaps I should have stretched out my own arms. I should have hugged her. I should have cried. Then I should have sat down with her and told her this story I'm now telling you. But I didn't do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly.
It was only three weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs. I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she'd been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.
After Aimee was dead, Winifred got her claws into Sabrina. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and she was on the scene first. She whisked Sabrina off to her tarted-up mansionette in Rosedale, and faster than you could blink she'd had herself declared the official guardian. I considered fighting, but it would just have been the battle over Aimee all over again - one I was doomed to lose.
When Winifred took charge of Sabrina I wasn't yet sixty; I could still drive then. From time to time I would make the trip into Toronto and shadow Sabrina, like a private eye in an old detective story. I'd hang around outside her primary school - her new primary school, her new exclusive primary school - just to catch a glimpse of her, and to assure myself that, despite everything, she was all right.
I was in the department store, for instance, the morning Winifred took her to Eaton's to get her some party shoes, a few months after she'd acquired her. No doubt she bought Sabrina's other clothes without consulting her - that would have been her way - but shoes do need to be tried on, and for some reason Winifred had not entrusted this chore to the hired help.
It was the Christmas season - the pillars in the store were twined with fake holly, wreaths of gold-sprayed pine cones and red velvet ribbon hung over the doorways like prickly haloes - and Winifred got trapped in the carol singing, much to her annoyance. I was in the next aisle over. My wardrobe wasn't what it used to be - I was wearing an old tweed coat and a kerchief pulled down over my forehead - and although she looked right at me, she didn't see me. She probably saw a cleaning lady, or an immigrant bargain-hunter.
She was done up to the nines as usual, but despite this she was looking quite tatty. Well, she must have been pushing seventy, and after a certain age her style of maquillage does tend to make you look mummified. She shouldn't have stuck to the orange lipstick, it was too harsh for her.
I could see the powdery furrows of exasperation between her eyebrows, the clamped muscles of her rouged jaw. She was hauling Sabrina along by one arm, trying to push her way through the chorus of bulky, winter-coated shoppers; she must have hated the enthusiastic, uncooked quality of the singing.
Sabrina on the other hand wanted to hear the music. She was dragging down, making herself a dead weight in the way children do - resistance without the appearance of it. Her arm was straight up, as if she was a good girl answering a question in school, but she was scowling like an imp. It must have hurt, what she was doing. Taking a stance, making a declaration. Holding out.
The song was "Good King Wenceslas." Sabrina knew the words: I could see her little mouth moving. "'Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel,'" she sang. "'When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fu-u-el.'"
It's a song about hunger. I could tell Sabrina understood it - she must still have remembered that, being hungry. Winifred gave her arm a jerk, and looked around nervously. She didn't see me, but she sensed me, the way a cow in a well-fenced field will sense a wolf. Even so, cows aren't like wild animals; they're used to being protected. Winifred was skittish, but she wasn't frightened. If I crossed her mind at all, she doubtless thought of me as being somewhere far away, mercifully out of sight, in the outer darkness to which she had consigned me.
I had an overpowering urge then to snatch Sabrina up in my arms and run away with her. I could imagine Winifred's quavering wail as I barged my way through the stolid carollers, yelling so comfortably about the bitter weather.
I would have held on to her tightly, I wouldn't have stumbled, I wouldn't have let her fall. But also I wouldn't have got far. They'd have been after me in a shot.
I went out onto the street by myself then, and walked and walked, head down, collar up, along the downtown sidewalks. The wind was coming in off the lake and the snow was whirling down. It was daytime, but because of the low clouds and the snow the light was dim; the cars were churning slowly past along the unploughed streets, their red tail lights receding from me like the eyes of hunchbacked beasts running backwards.
I was clutching a package - I've forgotten what I'd bought - and I had no gloves. I must have dropped them in the store, among the feet of the crowd. I hardly missed them. Once I could walk through blizzards with my hands bare and never feel it. It's love or hate or terror, or just plain rage, that can do that for you.
I used to have a daydream about myself - still have it, come to that. A ridiculous-enough daydream, though it's often through such images that we shape our destinies. (You'll notice how easily I slip into inflated language like shape our destinies, once I wander off in this direction. But never mind.)
In this daydream, Winifred and her friends, wreaths of money on their heads, are gathered around Sabrina's frilly white bed while she sleeps, discuss
ing what they will bestow upon her. She's already been given the engraved silver cup from Birks, the nursery wallpaper with the frieze of domesticated bears, the starter pearls for her single-strand pearl necklace, and all the other golden gifts, perfectly comme il faut, that will turn to coal when the sun rises. Now they're planning the orthodontist and the tennis lessons and the piano lessons and the dancing lessons and the exclusive summer camp. What hope has she got?
At this moment, I appear in a flash of sulphurous light and a puff of smoke and a flapping of sooty leather wings, the uninvited black-sheep godmother. I too wish to bestow a gift, I cry. I have the right!
Winifred and her crew laugh and point. You? You were banished long ago! Have you looked in a mirror lately? You've let yourself go, you look a hundred and two. Go back to your dingy old cave! What can you possibly have to offer?
I offer the truth, I say. I'm the last one who can. It's the only thing in this room that will still be here in the morning.
Betty's Luncheonette
Weeks went by, and Laura did not return. I wanted to write to her, telephone her, but Richard said that would be bad for her. She did not need to be interrupted, he said, by a voice from the past. She needed to concentrate her attention on her immediate situation - on the treatment at hand. That is what he'd been told. As for the nature of this treatment, he wasn't a doctor, he didn't pretend to understand such things. Surely they were best left to the experts.
I tortured myself with visions of her, imprisoned, struggling, trapped in a painful fantasy of her own making, or trapped in another fantasy, equally painful, which was not hers at all but those of the people around her. And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar - I say, you say, he and she say, it, on the other hand, does not say - paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.
But even as a child, Laura never quite agreed. Was this the problem? That she held firm for no when yes was the thing required? And vice versa, and vice versa.
Laura was doing well, I was told: she was making progress. Then she was not doing so well, she'd had a relapse. Progress in what, a relapse to what? It should not be gone into, it would disturb me, it was important for me to conserve my energies, as a young mother should do. "We'll have you well again in no time flat," said Richard, patting my arm.
"But I'm not really sick," I said.
"You know what I mean," he said. "Back to normal." He gave a fond smile, a leer almost. His eyes were getting smaller, or the flesh around them was moving in, which gave him a cunning expression. He was thinking about the time when he could be back where he belonged: on top. I was thinking that he would squeeze the breath out of me. He was putting on weight; he was eating out a lot; he was making speeches, at clubs, at weighty gatherings, substantial gatherings. Ponderous gatherings, at which weighty, substantial men met and pondered, because - everyone suspected it - there was heavy weather ahead.
All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I've watched the process, many times now. It's those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts - the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.
I decided to be as sickly as I could for as long as possible.
I fretted and fretted about Laura. I turned Winifred's story about her this way and that, looking at it from every angle. I couldn't quite believe it, but I couldn't disbelieve it either.
Laura had always had one enormous power: the power to break things without meaning to. Nor had she ever been a respecter of territories. What was mine was hers: my fountain pen, my cologne, my summer dress, my hat, my hairbrush. Had this catalogue expanded to include my unborn baby? However, if she was suffering from delusions - if she'd only been inventing things - why was it she'd invented precisely that?
But suppose on the other hand that Winifred was lying. Suppose Laura was as sane as she ever was. In that case, Laura had been telling the truth. And if Laura had been telling the truth, then Laura was pregnant. If there really was going to be a baby, what would become of it? And why hadn't she told me about it, instead of telling some doctor, some stranger? Why hadn't she asked me for help? I thought that over for some time. There could have been a good many reasons. My delicate condition would just have been one of them.
As for the father, whether imagined or real, there was only one man who was at all possible. It must be Alex Thomas.
But it couldn't be. How could it?
I no longer knew how Laura would have answered these questions. She had become unknown to me, as unknown as the inside of your own glove is unknown when your hand is inside it. She was with me all the time, but I couldn't look at her. I could only feel the shape of her presence: a hollow shape, filled with my own imaginings.
Months went by. It was June, then July, then August. Winifred said I was looking white and drained. I should spend more time outside, she said. If I would not take up tennis or golf, as she'd repeatedly suggested - it might do something about that little tummy of mine, which ought to be seen to before it became chronic - I could at least work on my rock garden. It was an occupation that accorded well with motherhood.
I was not fond of my rock garden, which was mine in name only, like so much else. (Like "my" baby, come to think of it: surely a changeling, surely something left by the gypsies; surely my real baby - one that cried less and smiled more, and was not so pungent - had been spirited away.) The rock garden was similarly resistant to my ministrations; nothing I did to it pleased it at all. Its rocks made a good show - there was a lot of pink granite, along with the limestone - but I couldn't get anything to grow in it.
I contented myself with books - Perennials for the Rock Garden, Desert Succulents for Northern Climes, and the like. I went through such books, making lists - lists of what I might plant, or else lists of what I had indeed already planted; what ought to have been growing, but was not. Dragon's blood, snow-on-the-mountain, hen-and-chickens. I liked the names, but didn't care much for the plants themselves.
"I don't have a green thumb," I said to Winifred. "Not like you." My pretense of incompetence had now become second nature to me, I scarcely had to think about it. Winifred on her part had ceased to find my fecklessness altogether convenient.
"Well, of course you have to make some effort," she would say. At which I would produce my dutiful lists of dead plants.
"The rocks are pretty," I said. "Can't we just call it a sculpture?"
I thought of setting off on my own to see Laura. I could leave Aimee with the new nursemaid, whom I thought of as Miss Murgatroyd - all our servants were Murgatroyds to my mind, they were all in cahoots. But no, the nursemaid would alert Winifred. I could defy them all; I could sneak off one morning, take Aimee with me; we could go on the train. But the train to where? I didn't know where Laura was - where she had been stashed away. The BellaVista Clinic was said to be up north somewhere, but up north covered a lot of territory. I rummaged around in Richard's desk, the one in his study at the house, but found no letters from this clinic. He must have been keeping them at the office.
One day Richard came home early. He seemed quite disturbed. Laura was no longer at BellaVista, he said.
How could that be? I asked.
A man had arrived, he said. This man claimed to be Laura's lawyer, or acting on her behalf. He was a trustee, he said - a trustee of Miss Chase's trust fund. He'd challenged the authority by which she had been placed in BellaVista. He had threatened legal action. Did I know anything about these proceedings?
No, I did not. (I kept my hands folded in my lap. I expressed surprise, and mild interest. I did not express glee.) And then what happened? I asked.
The director of BellaVista had been absent, the staff had been confused. They had let her go, in custody of this man. They had judged that
the family would wish to avoid undue publicity. (The lawyer had threatened some of this.)
Well, I said, I guess they did the right thing.
Yes, said Richard, no doubt; but was Laura compos mentis? For her own good, for her own safety, we should at least determine that. Although on the surface of things she'd appeared calmer, the staff at BellaVista had their doubts. Who knew what danger to herself or others she might pose if allowed to run around at large?
I didn't happen by any chance to know where she was?
I did not.
I hadn't heard from her?
I had not.
I wouldn't hesitate to inform him, in that eventuality?
I would not hesitate. Those were my very words. It was a sentence without an object, and therefore not technically a lie.
I let a judicious amount of time go past, and then I set off to Port Ticonderoga, on the train, to consult Reenie. I invented a telephone call: Reenie was not in good health, I explained to Richard, and she wanted to see me again before something happened. I gave the impression that she was at death's door. She'd appreciate a photograph of Aimee, I said; she'd want to have a chat about old times. It was the least I could do. After all, she'd practically brought us up. Brought me up, I corrected, to divert Richard's attention away from the thought of Laura.
I arranged to see Reenie at Betty's Luncheonette. (She had a telephone by then, she was holding her own in the world.) That would be best, she said. She was still working there, part-time, but we could meet after her hours were up. Betty's had new owners, she said; the old owners wouldn't have liked her sitting out front like a paying customer, even if she was paying, but the new ones had figured out that they needed all the paying customers they could get.
Betty's had gone severely downhill. The striped awning was gone, the dark booths looked scratched and tawdry. The smell was no longer of fresh vanilla, but of rancid grease. I was overdressed, I realized. I shouldn't have worn my white fox neckpiece. What had been the point of showing off, under the circumstances?
I didn't like the look of Reenie: she was too puffy, too yellow, she was breathing a little too heavily. Perhaps she really wasn't in good health: I wondered if I should ask. "Good to take the weight off my feet," she said as she subsided into the booth across from me.