“No,” Alice’s mother says firmly, this—she pauses—this business has nothing to do with urine. The fluid in question contains seeds which are necessary if the mother is going to grow a baby inside her.
The mechanics of the exchange seem impossible to Alice.
“The mother and father lie on a bed,” her mother tells her, sighing it out, “with their arms around each other.”
“When?” Alice asks. Her own voice feels harsh to her ears.
Mrs. Flett’s expression turns cross at this question, those three little lines between her eyes shooting up like a fan, but she clears her throat and says, “Well, usually at night.”
“At night? Right here? In our house?”
“Really, Alice.” Now her mother is staring down at her cuticles.
The little teapot clock over the stove says half-past three. A coconut chiffon cake, freshly iced, sits on a pink glass plate.
“Well?” Alice is waiting for an answer. She will not let the issue drop.
“I don’t know what to say, Alice. And I don’t like the way you’re speaking, your attitude, that scowl on your face.”
This is becoming worse and worse. But Alice can’t stop herself.
“It’s so icky. Why does anyone have to do such an icky thing?”
“Really, Alice.”
“It’s so awful.”
“No, it’s not awful. It’s a beautiful thing between a man and woman.”
“It makes me sick at my stomach.”
“Well, you’ll just have to believe me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
Alice can feel her insides whimpering but she manages to keep the sound confined. The cloudless summer day is spoiled. Nothing will ever be the same. The house is defiled, especially her parents’ upstairs bedroom with its stale powdery mysterious smell and the big hard-mattressed bed with its tufted headboard. Men and women are unclean, it was all grotesque, her mother who dresses herself each morning in her closet, the door left open a crack to let in the light, pulling on her underpants and girdle with her back turned, and hooking up her nylon stockings. Her mother actually opens her body at night to that dark hairy part of her father—Alice has glimpsed this darkness from time to time—and she allows this unspeakable thing to happen. It’s like a dirty joke, the dirtiest joke she’s ever heard.
Beautiful, her mother calls it, but then she’d gone on and on about the naked statues in the art gallery, saying they were beautiful too.
And other people must do it—Mrs. Raabe, Mrs. Hassel, her teacher Mrs. Strong. What about Esther Williams or Deborah Kerr or the king and queen of England? Maybe even Grandma Goodwill in Indiana. She and Grandpa.
“Do ladies,” she asks her mother carefully, “still do it even when they don’t want to have any more babies?”
“Well”—there was a swelling pause—”well, some do and some don’t.”
Alice feels a shift in the balance of the room. She and her mother have sat down at the table with willingness between them; they were going to get to the bottom of what Billy Raabe was spreading around the neighborhood. But now the discussion seems to be drawing to a close. Her mother is picking at her thumbnail, pulling a sliver of loose skin away, then glancing up at the window where the curtains are blowing inward. Alice senses that only one more question will be permitted.
“And do you—and Daddy—still do it?”
“Well—”
Alice holds her breath and waits.
“Well, yes,” she hears, and then her mother adds a brave, tight addendum that seems pulled together like the drawstring of a bag, “Sometimes.”
Alice is going to throw up the cream of asparagus soup she had for lunch, she knows it. She wonders if she should go stand by the kitchen sink so as not to make a mess.
“But, Alice, you must promise not to say anything to Warren and Joanie about what we’ve been discussing. Not until they’re old enough to understand.”
Warren and Joan are playing kings and queens in the backyard.
Alice can hear Warren through the screen door yelling at Joan to bring him his crown and she hears Joan shouting, “Yes, your royal highness, here it is, your royal highness.”
It is Alice’s day to be queen, but she doesn’t feel like going outside this afternoon. Let them play what they want to play.
Oh, she loves them, her brother and sister, she’s never understood before how much she loves them. They are healthy, beautiful, perfect, and unbruised by this terrible knowledge. They will be able to go on looking into the faces of their mother and father, look right into their faces and smile and talk and carry on as if nothing has happened.
Warren “How old are you?” Warren asks his mother.
She is folding sheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Well, what year were you born in?”
She considers, then says, “1905.”
“And now it’s 1947.”
“Yes.”
He thinks about this for a while. “What year was I born in?”
He’s asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer.
“You were born in 1940. In the early days of the war.”
Now he remembers why he keeps pestering his mother with the same question. So he can hear that shivery phrase—in the early days of the war. The image of a rising sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the Japanese flag Billy Raabe’s got tacked up on his bedroom wall. He, imagines, too, a tense startled night silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fragmented noise is backed by a deeper, thunderous growling of guns. The War. The Second World War.
“Was that when Pearl Harbor was?” He loves the words Pearl Harbor. He loves himself for remembering them, for getting them right.
“This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before.”
“Why was I born then?” he asks.
“Because you were.”
“Alice was born before the war.”
“Yes.”
“And Joan, what about Joan?”
His mother’s head is shrunk tight today by rows of pincurls.
The bobby pins catch winks of light from the bay window. She is counting pillowcases. He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack—one, two, three, four, five. “Joan?” she says absentmindedly, “Joan was born in the middle of the war.”
The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world’s been swimming along in, only now, ever since Victory, there’s nothing. Peace doesn’t feel all that different to Warren. His body is the same body he’s always had, his scraped shins and knees and bony feet, and his face in the hall mirror has the same round look of surprise. But sometimes at night he wakes up with a stomach ache and calls out to his mother, who gives him a glass of something fizzy to drink and tells him he’s suffering from indigestion, that he’d be fine if only he didn’t wolf down his food so fast. But he knows it’s the war that gives him a stomach ache, the fact that the war is over and there’s nothing to hold him up and keep him buoyant.
He and Alice and Joan are joined together like the little dolls Alice cuts out of newspaper, that’s how he thinks of himself and his sisters. He’s located there in the middle, always in the middle, the one who was born in the early days of the war, which is the thought he must try to hang on to. There’s something thrilling in this knowledge. And there’s tribute too, a place reserved for him, for Warren Magnus Flett, born in the blood-red dawn of the war.
He almost never thinks of the future, though he understands in an unformulated way that he will eventually grow up, will comb his hair back with water, and join the big boys in the back lane playing Piggy Move Up. And it occurs to him suddenly that there might be another baby born to his family, an after-the-war baby. He can’t imagine why he’s never thought of this possibility before, and he feels sick the way he does at the beginning of one of
his stomach aches. He considers asking his mother about a new baby, but the question seems foolish. He can’t think how he would broach the subject, what words he could employ. She might laugh at him or else she might put down the towel she was folding and say, well yes, of course there will be a new baby, what did he expect!
A new baby would spoil things. Where would it sleep? What name could be given to it? It would be born weak, without muscles, too weak and sick and lost to survive.
His mother seems to be reading his mind. She’s done it before and today on this drowsy summer afternoon she’s doing it again.
“Your father and I are too old to have any more babies,” she says.
Hearing this, he feels himself seized by happiness, not because of her assurance that there will be no after-the war baby, but because his mother has offered up this information in a quiet and serious manner he’s not heard from her before. Gone is her teasing voice, her usual scolding and cajoling, her singing and murmuring and chirruping tones. This new voice bursts through the others, an aberration, and yet he understands at once that he is hearing, perhaps for the first time, her real self speaking. “What?” he says.
“You mean ‘pardon?’ “
“Pardon.”
She looks at him carefully, recognizes him, and says it again.
“Your father and I are too old to have any more babies.”
Joan
Joan is so full of secrets that sometimes she thinks she’s going to burst. Her mother, putting her to bed at night, leans down and kisses her on each cheek and says, “My sweetie pie,” and never dreams of all the secrets that lie packed in her little girl’s head.
Already, at the age of five, Joan understands that she is destined to live two lives, one existence that is visible to those around her and another that blooms secretly inside her head.
There are all kinds of facts she knows, facts that no one else can imagine.
The radio for one thing. She managed one day to squeeze into that narrow dusty place behind the Northern Electric console in the living room, a radio her father describes as pre-war, and glimpsed through the mesh backing the red humming lights of a hillside village. Naturally she has told nobody about this, except perhaps a whisper or two dropped to her mother.
She has discovered how she can fill up an empty moment should one occur. When there is nothing else to do she can always walk down to the corner where Torrington Crescent meets The Driveway and there in front of Mrs. Bregman’s big brown house she can roll down the grassy banked hill that runs across the front lawn. No one has said not to do this, no one seems to have thought of it. As it happens, she hardly ever goes down to the corner to roll down the hill, but she likes to keep the possibility in reserve. Or she can skip along the sidewalk in front of her own house. Learning to skip has brought control into her life. Whenever she feels at all sad she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts. Does anyone else in the world know this trick, she wonders. Probably not, though her mother sometimes waves at her from the window, waves and smiles.
There’s a Decal transfer—a black swan swimming through green reeds—stuck to the top of the clothes hamper in the bathroom. She remembers watching her mother apply this decoration, first soaking the Decal in a sinkful of water, then peeling the transparent backing neatly away, centering the swan in the very middle of the hinged lid, and wiping it smooth with a wet cloth. Joan had thought the moment beautiful. Nevertheless, whenever she finds herself alone in the bathroom she scrapes away at the swan with her thumbnail. So far she’s managed to loosen the edges all the way around, and she expects any minute to be accused, though at the same time she knows herself to be full of power, able to slip out from under any danger.
Mrs. Flett’s Niece
Mrs. Flett’s three children always seem to be quarreling—that’s the impression she has anyway. It breaks her heart, she says, she who grew up without any brothers and sisters to play with.
But, in fact, Alice, Warren, and Joanie go through long harmonious periods, especially in the summertime when the other children in the neighborhood are away on vacation. The three of them engage in elaborate games and building projects—only last week they curtained the grape arbor with blankets and furnished the tented space with cardboard cartons and orange crates and lengths of old material from their mother’s sewing cupboard. Here, in the dim filtered light with the three of them kneeling around an orange-crate table, they consume graham crackers and cups of ice water and lapse into an amicable nostalgia.
This nostalgia of theirs is extraordinary, each of them feels the richness of it. On and on they’ll talk; a whole afternoon will disappear while they take turns comparing and repeating their separate and shared memories and shivering with pleasure every time a fresh fragment from the past is unearthed. Living among these old adventures is beautiful, they think. Remember swimming in Buffalo Lake, how sandy the bottom was and how the water was warm as bathtub water and how afterwards we went to a soda fountain for a root beer float. Remember going on the ferris wheel at the Exhibition, how Joanie turned green. (“Did I really?” she marvels, blissful at the thought.) Remember the time we went to visit Mr. Wrightman who was in the iron lung, the drool coming out of his mouth and he didn’t even notice. Remember Billy Raabe falling off his bike in the back lane and knocking out his front tooth and his mother driving him to the hospital, how he got blood all over the back seat of the car and they never got the stains out. Remember when we had a burr war with the Jacksons, and Jeannie Jackson’s mother had to cut the burrs out of her hair, her beautiful long golden hair, like a princess.
At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection, snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror.
Alice, bossy, excited, takes the lead in these acts of retrieval, and Warren and Joan fill in, confirming, reinforcing, inventing too. They shudder with the heat of their own dramas, awestruck by the doubleness of memory, the hold it has on them, as mysterious as telephone wires or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus.
Memory could be poked with a stick, savored in the mouth like a popsicle, you could never get enough of it.
And remember when Cousin Beverly came to visit? In the end they always come around to Cousin Beverly’s visit, a visit that occurred in the distant past, a year ago, perhaps even two years ago.
No one knew she was coming. She just arrived one autumn afternoon wearing her WREN uniform, just rang the doorbell, the front door, and said, “Well, hello there, I’m your Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan.”
Of course they’d heard of Beverly, one of six girl cousins—Juanita, Rosalie, Arleen, Lillian, and Daphne were the others. They lived in a place called Climax, Saskatchewan. Their mother was Aunt Fan who was married to Uncle Andrew who was their father’s brother, a pastor in the Baptist Church. Every year Mrs. Flett, the children’s mother, makes up a big Christmas parcel for the Saskatchewan cousins—a new board game, flannelette nightgowns, wool gloves, a large round fruitcake—and always, when she’s attaching the little name cards she shakes her head and says, “That family, they never seem to get ahead.”
And now here was Beverley, all grown up—the Flett children hadn’t expected that. She perched in the middle of the chesterfield and drank a cup of tea. “This is delicious,” she said to her aunt in a cheerful forthcoming voice, as though they knew each other well and often sat together drinking tea like this. Alice and Warren perched on either side of her. (Where was their father that afternoon? In Toronto probably, or Montreal—he was always, it seemed, stepping aboard a train and disappearing for a few days.)
Cousin Beverly’s WREN hat sat neatly on her hair, but they could see that she had short curls all over her head, probably a permanent wave or else naturally curly like Shirley Temple. She’d just come back from England where she’d been “right in the thick of things.” She
laughed loudly when she said that, about being in the thick of things. “Oh boy,” she said, still laughing, “did we ever get our eyes opened up.”
She let Alice try on her hat. It had to be put on with bobby pins, but she didn’t mind a bit, going to the bother. “Hey, you look pretty cute,” she told her, “a real living doll.”
“Did you save any lives?” Warren asked her. He whispered it the first time and then had to say it again, louder.
Right away she laughed. “Well, I guess I saved my own skin a couple of times.” Was this a wisecrack? Alice wasn’t sure.
But Cousin Beverly’s face suddenly lost its wisecracking look.
She went sad for a few minutes, telling them about the soldiers on D-Day, flying missions in the darkness, dropping bombs on the enemy. Then she told them about an airman shot down over the English Channel. “The poor fellow,” she said, “he couldn’t find his parachute cord for some reason, and when they found his body they saw he’d bored a hole right through his leather jacket, he was looking so hard for it.”
A human hand boring a hole through a leather jacket! In that desperate minute or two while he was falling through the sky! How do you explain a thing like that? Well, it was kind of a miracle, Cousin Beverly said, though not happy like most miracles are. Another man got both his legs blown off, but at least he was alive, at least he hadn’t got his head mashed to porridge like another chap she knew—They could have listened to Cousin Beverly talk about the war all day, but their mother interrupted. “Tell me how your parents are doing,” she said. “And your sisters back home.” And then she said, “Now when exactly does your train leave? We want to make sure you get down to the station in plenty of time.”
Afterwards Alice couldn’t stop thinking about Cousin Beverly.
Cousin Beverly’s visit kept running through her mind like a movie.
Her beauty. Her curls. Her red mouth. Her tan hose and polished shoes. Her short-skirted WREN uniform, her quick yelp of laughter, the way she shrugged her neat little shoulders when she talked about the airman falling through the sky and boring a hole through his leather jacket. Cousin Beverly was someone in possession of terrible stories, but still she managed to walk around in the world and be cheerful and smart. She’d arrived unannounced, just marched down their street and rang their doorbell and said: here I am. But in no time at all—an hour or two—she was gone. (“So long, kids. See ya in the movies.”) How far away was Saskatchewan?