The Blind Assassin

The steamer trunk

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page.

Yesterday a package arrived for me: a fresh edition of The Blind Assassin. This copy is merely a courtesy: no money will result, or not for me. The book is now in the public domain and anyone at all can publish it, so Laura's estate won't be seeing any of the proceeds. That's what happens a set number of years after the death of the author: you lose control. The thing is out there in the world, replicating itself in God knows how many forms, without any say-so from me.

Artemesia Press, this outfit's called; it's English. I think they're the ones who wanted me to write an introduction, which I refused to do, of course. Probably run by a bunch of women, with a name like that. I wonder which Artemesia they have in mind-the Persian lady general from Herodotus who turned tail when the battle was going against her, or the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulchre? Probably the raped Renaissance painter: that's the only one of them that gets remembered now.

The book is on my kitchen table. Neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century, it says in italic script under the tide. Laura was a "modernist," we are told on the inside flap. She was "influenced" by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart, Carson Mc Cullers-authors I know for a fact that Laura never read. The cover design isn't too bad, however. Shades of washed-out brownish purple, a photographic look: a woman in a slip, at a window, seen through a net curtain, her face in shadow. Behind her, a segment of a man-the arm, the hand, the back of the head. Appropriate enough, I suppose.

I decided it was time for me to phone my lawyer. Or not my real lawyer. The one I used to consider mine, the one who handled that business with Richard, who battled Winifred so heroically, though in vain-that one died several decades ago. Ever since then I have been passed from hand to hand within the firm, like some ornate silver teapot fobbed off on each new generation as a wedding gift, but that nobody ever uses.

"Mr. Sykes, please," I said to the girl who answered. Some receptionist or other, I suppose. I imagined her fingernails, long and maroon and pointed. But perhaps these are the wrong kind of fingernails for a receptionist of today. Perhaps they are ice blue.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sykes is in a meeting. Who may I say is calling?"

They might as well use robots. "Mrs. Iris Griffen," I said, in my best diamond-cutting voice. "I'm one of his oldest clients."

This did not open any doors. Mr. Sykes was still in a meeting. He is a busy lad, it appears. But why do I think of him as a lad? He must be in his mid-fifties-born, perhaps, in the same year Laura died. Has she really been dead that long, the time it's taken to grow and ripen a lawyer? Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

"May I tell Mr. Sykes what it concerns?" said the receptionist.

"My will," I said. "I'm considering writing one. He's often told me that I should." (A lie, but I wanted to establish in her easily distracted brain the fact that Mr. Sykes and I were as close as two peas in a pod.) "That, and some other matters. I ought to come into Toronto soon, to consult him. Perhaps he could give me a call, when he can spare a minute."

I imagined Mr. Sykes receiving the message; I imagined the tiny chill that would run down the back of his neck as he tried to place my name, and then succeeded. Goose feet on his grave. It's what you feel-even I feel-when coming across those small items in the paper concerning folks once famous or glamorous or notorious, and long thought dead. Yet it appears they continue to live on, in some shrivelled, darkened form, encrusted with years, like beetles under a stone.

"Of course, Mrs. Griffen," said the receptionist. "I'll make sure he gets back to you." They must take lessons-elocution lessons-to achieve just the right blend of consideration and contempt. But why am I complaining? It's a skill I perfected, once, myself.

I set down the phone. No doubt there will be some eyebrow-raising among Mr. Sykes and his youthful, balding, Mercedes-driving, tubby-bellied cronies: What can the old bat possibly have to leave? What, that is, worth mentioning?

In one corner of my kitchen there's a steamer trunk, stuck with tattered labels. It's part of the matched luggage set from my trousseau-clear yellow calfskin once, dingy now, the steel bindings marred and grimy. I keep it locked, the key sunk deep in a sealer jar filled with bran cereal. Coffee and sugar tins would be too obvious.

I wrestled with the jar lid-I must think of some better, easier hiding place-and finally got it open, and extracted the key. I knelt with some difficulty, turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid.

I hadn't opened this trunk for some time. The singed, autumn-leaf smell of old paper rose to greet me. There were all of the notebooks with their cheap cardboard covers, like pressed sawdust. Also the typescript, held together by a crisscross of ancient kitchen string. Also the letters to the publishers-from me, of course, not from Laura, she was dead by then-and the corrected proofs. Also the hate mail, until I stopped saving it.

Also five copies of the first edition, with the dust jackets still in mint condition-tawdry, but dust jackets were then, in the years just after the war. The colours are a garish orange, a flat purple, a lime green, printed on flimsy paper, with an awful drawing-a faux Cleopatra type with bulbous green breasts and kohl-rimmed eyes and purple necklaces from navel to chin and an enormous, pouting orange mouth, rising up like a genie from the writhing smoke of a purple cigarette. Acid is eating into the pages, the virulent cover fading like the feathers of a stuffed tropical bird.

(I received six free copies-the author's copies, they were called-but I gave one of them to Richard. I don't know what became of it. I expect he tore it up, which was what he always did with pieces of paper he didn't want. No-I remember now. It was found on the boat with him, on the galley table, beside his head. Winifred sent it back to me with a note: Now look what you've done! I threw it out. I didn't want anything near me that had ever touched Richard.)

I've often wondered what to do with all of this-this cache of odds and ends, this tiny archive. I can't bring myself to sell it, but I can't bring myself to discard it either. If I do nothing, the choice will be left to Myra, tidying up after me. After her first moments of shock-supposing she begins to read-there will no doubt be some ripping and shredding. Then a struck match and none the wiser. She'd interpret that as loyalty: it's what Reenie would have done. In the old days trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

Perhaps I should leave this trunk and its contents to a university, or else to a library. It would at least be appreciated there, in a ghoulish way. There are more than a few scholars who'd like to get their claws into all this waste paper. Material, they'd call it-their name for loot. They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard-some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.

For years they've bombarded me with letters, wanting Laura's own letters-wanting manuscripts, mementoes, interviews, anecdotes-all the grisly details. To these importunate missives I used to compose tersely worded replies: "Dear Miss W., In my view your plan for a ‘Commemoration Ceremony' at the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase's tragic death is both tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema."

"Dear Ms. X., I acknowledge your letter concerning your proposed thesis, though I can't say that its tide makes a great deal of sense to me. Doubtless it does to you or you would not have come up with it. I cannot give you any help. Also you do not deserve any. ‘Deconstruction' implies the wrecking ball, and ‘problematize' is not a verb."

"Dear Dr. Y, Concerning your study of the theological implications ofmy sister's religious beliefs were strongly held but were scarcely what is called conventional. She did not like God or approve of God or claim to understand God. She said she loved God, and as with human beings that was a different thing. No, she was not a Buddhist. Don't be fatuous. I suggest you learn to read."

"Dear Professor Z: I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long overdue. She may well be, as you say, ‘among our most important female mid-century writers.' I wouldn't know. But my cooperation in what you call ‘your project' is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried blood and the severed fingers of saints.

Laura Chase is not your ‘project.' She was my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that."

"Dear Miss W: This is your fourth letter on the same subject. Stop pestering me. You are a drone."

For decades I took a grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling. I enjoyed licking the stamps, then dropping the letters like so many hand grenades into the shiny red box, with the sense of having settled the hash of some earnest, greedy snoop. But lately I've stopped answering. Why needle strangers? They don't give a hoot what I think of them. For them I'm only an appendage: Laura's odd, extra hand, attached to no body-the hand that passed her on, to the world, to them. They see me as a repository-a living mausoleum, aresource, as they term it. Why should I do them any favours? As far as I'm concerned they're scavengers-hyenas, the lot of them; jackals on the scent of carrion, ravens hunting for roadkill; corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I'm a boneheap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery, for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus, for curios, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspected what I've got stashed away here, they'd jimmy the locks, they'd break and enter, they'd knock me over the head and make off with the boodle, and feel more than justified.

No. Not a university then. Why give them the satisfaction?

Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite -this is where it festers-her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. These things are hers by right. You might even say they are her inheritance: she is, after all, my granddaughter. She is also Laura's grandniece. Surely she will want to inform herself about her origins, once she gets around to it.

But no doubt Sabrina would reject such a gift. She's an adult now, I keep reminding myself. If she has anything to ask me, anything to say to me at all, she'll let me know.

But why doesn't she? What can be taking her so long? Is her silence a form of revenge, for something or someone? Not for Richard, surely. She never knew him. Not for Winifred, from whom she ran away. For her mother then-for poor Aimee?

How much can she possibly remember? She was only four.

Aimee's death was not my fault.

Where is Sabrina now, and what can she be seeking? I picture her as a thinnish girl, with a hesitant smile, a little ascetic; lovely though, with her grave eyes blue as Laura's, her long dark hair coiled like sleeping serpents around her head. She won't have a veil, though; she'll have sensible sandals, or even boots, the soles worn down. Or has she assumed a sari? Girls of her sort do.

She's on some mission or other-feeding the Third World poor, soothing the dying; expiating the sins of the rest of us. A fruitless task-our sins are a bottomless pit, and there's lots more where they came from. But that's God's point, she'd doubtless argue-the fruitlessness. He's always liked futility. He thinks it's noble.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.

The Fire Pit

The weather remains unseasonably warm. Balmy, kindly, dry and bright; even the sun, so pale and thin usually at this time of year, is full and mellow, the sunsets lush. The brisk, smiley-face folks on the weather channel say it's due to some distant, dusty catastrophe-an earthquake, a volcano? Some new, murderous Act of God. Nocloud without a silver lining, is their motto. And no silver lining without a cloud.

Yesterday Walter drove me into Toronto for the appointment with the lawyer. It's a place he never goes if he can help it, but Myra put him up to it. That was after I said I'd be taking the bus. Myra wouldn't hear of it. As everyone knows, there's only one bus, and it leaves in the dark and returns in it. She said that when I got off the bus at night, the motorists would never see me and I'd be squashed like a bug. Anyway, I shouldn't be going to Toronto by myself, because, as everyone also knows, it's populated entirely by crooks and thugs. Walter, she said, would take care of me.

Walter wore a red baseball cap for the trip; between the back of it and the top of his jacket collar his bristly neck bulged out like a biceps. His eyelids were creased as knees. "I would of took the pickup," he said, "built like a brick shithouse, give the buggers something to think about before ramming into me. Only there's a few springs gone, so it's not such a smooth ride." According to him, the drivers in Toronto were all crazy. "Well, you'd have to be crazy to go there, eh?" he said.

"We're going there," I pointed out.

"But only the once. Like we used to tell the girls, once don't count."

"And did they believe you, Walter?" I said, stringing him along as he likes to be strung.

"Sure. Dumb as a stump. Specially the blondes." I could feel him grinning.

Built like a brick shithouse. That used to be said about women. It was meant as a compliment, in the days when not everyone had a brick shit-house: only wooden ones, flimsy and smelly and easy to push over.

As soon as he'd got me into the car and buckled me up, Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the foursquare beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. I leaned back against the pillow provided by Myra. (She'd provisioned us as if for an ocean voyage-she'd packed a lap rug, tuna sandwiches, brownies, a thermos of coffee.) Out the window was the Jogues River, pursuing its sluggish course. We crossed it and turned north, past streets of what used to be workers' cottages and are now what is known as "starter homes," then a few small businesses: an auto wrecker, a foundering health-food emporium, an orthopaedic shoe outlet with a green neon foot flashing on and off as if walking all by itself in one place. Then a miniature shopping mall, five stores, of which only one had managed to get the Christmas tinsel up yet. Then Myra's beauty parlour, The Hair Port. There was a picture of a crop-headed person in the window, whether male or female I really couldn't say.

Then a motel that used to be called Journeys End. I suppose they were thinking of "Journeys end in lovers meeting," but not everyone could be expected to get the reference: it might have come across as too sinister, a building all entrances but no exits, reeking of aneurysms and thromboses and emptied bottles of sleeping pills and gun wounds to the head. Now it's called simply Journeys. How wise to have changed it. So much more inconclusive, so much less terminal. So much better to travel than to arrive.

We passed a few more franchises-smiling chickens offering platters of their own fried body parts, a grinning Mexican wielding tacos. The town water tank loomed up ahead, one of those huge bubbles of cement that dot the rural landscape like comic-strip voice balloons emptied of words. Now we'd hit open country. A metal silo lifted out of a field like a conning tower; by the roadside, three crows pecked at a furry burst lump of groundhog. Fences, more silos, a huddle of damp cows; a stand of dark cedar, then a patch of swamp, the summer's bulrushes already ragged and balding.

It began to drizzle. Walter turned the windscreen wipers on. To their soothing lullaby, I went to sleep.

When I woke up, my first thought was, Did I snore? If so, had my mouth been open? How unsightly, and therefore how humiliating. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. In case you're wondering, vanity never ends.

We were on the eight-lane freeway, close to Toronto. That was according to Walter: I couldn't see, because we were stuck behind a swaying farm truck top-heavy with crates of white geese, bound no doubt for market. Their long, doomed necks and frantic heads poked out here and there through the slats, their beaks opened and closed, uttering their tragic and ludicrous cries, drowned out by the racket of wheels. Feathers stuck to the windscreen, the car filled with the smell of goose shit and gas fumes.

The truck had a sign on it that said, If You're Close Enough To Read This You're Too Close. When it finally turned off, there was Toronto up ahead, an artificial mountain of glass and concrete rising from the flat lakeside plain, all crystals and spires and giant shining slabs and sharpedged obelisks, floating in an orange-brown haze of smog. It looked like something I'd never seen before-something that had grown up overnight, or that wasn't really there at all, like a mirage.

Black flakes flew past as if a mound of paper up ahead were smouldering. Anger vibrated in the air like heat. I thought of drive-by shootings.

The lawyer's office was near King and Bay. Walter got lost, then couldn't find parking. We had to walk five blocks, Walter propelling me by the elbow. I didn't know where we were, because everything has changed so much. It changes every time I go there, which is not often, and the cumulative effect is devastating-as if the city's been bombed level, then built again from scratch.

The downtown I remember-drab, Calvinistic, with white men in dark overcoats marching in lockstep on the sidewalks, interspersed with the occasional woman, in regulation high heels, gloves and hat, clutch purse under the arm, eyes front-is simply gone, but then it's been gone for some time. Toronto is no longer a Protestant city, it's a mediaeval one: the crowds clogging the street are many-hued, the clothing vivid. Hot-dog stands with yellow umbrellas, pretzel-sellers, hawkers of earrings and woven bags and leather belts, beggars hung with crayoned Out of Work signs: among them they've staked out the territory. I passed a flute player, a trio with electric guitars, a man with a kilt and bagpipes. At any moment I expected jugglers or fire-eaters, lepers in procession, with hoods and iron bells. There was a blare of noise; an iridescent film clung to my glasses like oil.

At last we made it as far as the lawyer's. When I first consulted this firm, back in the 1940s, it was located in one of those sooty red-brick Manchester-shaped office buildings, with a mosaic-tiled lobby and stone lions, and gold lettering on the wooden doors with their pebble-glass inserts. The elevator was the kind that had a crisscross grille of metal bars within the cage itself; stepping into it was like going briefly to jail. A woman in a navy-blue uniform and white gloves ran it, calling out the numbers, which reached only to ten.

Now the law firm is housed in a plate-glass tower, in an office suite fifty floors up. Walter and I ascended in the gleaming elevator, with its plastic marble interior and its smell of car upholstery and its crush of suited people, men and women both, all with the averted eyes and vacant faces of lifelong servants. People who see only what they're paid to see. The law office itself had a reception area that might as well have been that of a five-star hotel: a flower arrangement of eighteenth-century density and ostentation, thick mushroom-coloured wall-to-wall, an abstract painting composed of pricey smudges.

The lawyer arrived, shook hands, murmured, gestured: I was to accompany him. Walter said he would wait for me, right where he was. He stared with some alarm at the young, polished receptionist, with her black suit, mauve scarf and nacreous fingernails; she stared, not at him, but at his checked shirt and his immense, pod-like rubber-soled boots. Then he sat down on the two-bum sofa, into which he sank immediately as if into a pile of marshmallows; his knees jack-knifed, his pant legs shot up, revealing thick red loggers' socks. In front of him, on a suave coffee table, was an array of business magazines, advising him on how to maximise his investment dollar. He picked up the issue on mutual funds: in his vast paw it looked like a Kleenex. His eyes were rolling around in his head like a steer's at a stampede.

"I won't be long," I said, to calm him. I was in fact somewhat longer than I'd thought. Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores. I kept expecting to hear a knock on the door, and an irritated voice: Hey in there. Whatcha waiting for? Get it up, get it in and get it out!

When I'd finished my business with the lawyer, we made our way back to the car and Walter said he'd take me to lunch. He knew a place, he said. I expect Myra had put him up to this: For Heaven's sakes make sure she eats something, at that age they eat like a bird, they don't even know when they're running out of steam, she could die of starvation in the car. Also he may have been hungry: he'd devoured all of Myra's carefully packed sandwiches while I was sleeping, and the brownies into the bargain.

The place he knew was called The Fire Pit, he said. He'd eaten there the last time, maybe two-three years ago, and it had been more or less decent, considering. Considering what? Considering that it was in Toronto. He'd had the double cheeseburger with all the trimmings. They did barbecued ribs there, and specialised in grilled things generally.

I remembered this eatery myself, from over a decade ago-back in the days when I'd been keeping an eye on Sabrina, after that first time she'd run away. I used to hang around her school at day's end, positioning myself on park benches, in spots where I might waylay her-no, where I might have been recognised by her, though there was scant chance of that. I'd hide behind an opened newspaper, like some obsessed, pathetic flasher, filled similarly with hopeless yearning for a girl who'd doubtless flee me as if I were a troll.

I wanted only to let Sabrina know I was there; that I existed; that I wasn't what she'd been told. That I could be a refuge for her. I knew she would need one, already needed one, because I knew Winifred. Nothing ever came of it though. She never spotted me, I never revealed myself. When it came to the point, I was too cowardly.

One day I tracked her to The Fire Pit. It appeared to be a place where the girls-the girls of that age, from that school-hung out at lunchtime, or when they were skipping classes. The sign outside its door was red, the window edges decorated with scallops of yellow plastic meant to be flames. I was alarmed by the Miltonic audacity of the name: could they possibly have known what they were invoking?

Hurl'd headlong flaming from th'Ethereal Sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down.

… A fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd.

No. They didn't know. The Fire Pit was Hell only for the meat.

The interior had hanging lamps with stained-glass shades, and mottled, fibrous plants in earthen pots-a sixties feel. I took the booth next to the one where Sabrina was sitting with two school friends, all of them wearing the same lumpy boyish uniforms, those blanket-like kilts with matching ties that Winifred always found so prestigious. The three girls had done their best to spoil the effect-drooping socks, shirts partly untucked, ties askew. They were chewing gum as if it were a religious duty, and talking in that bored, too-loud way girls of that age seem always to have mastered.

The three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn't blame them, having done the same once myself.

I sat there peering at Sabrina from under the brim of my floppy sun hat and eavesdropping on their trivial chatter, which they threw up in front of themselves like camouflage. None was saying what was on her mind, none trusted the others-quite rightly, as casual treachery is a daily affair at that age. The other two were blondes; Sabrina alone was dark and glossy as a mulberry. She wasn't really listening to her friends, or looking at them either. Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognised that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected. Watch your back, Winifred, I thought with satisfaction.

Sabrina didn't notice me. Or she did notice me, but she didn't know who I was. There was some glancing from the three of them, some whispering and giggling; I remember the sort of thing. Shrivelled-up frump, or the modern version of it. I expect my hat was the object of it. It was a long way from being fashionable, that hat. For Sabrina that day I was merely an old woman-an older woman-a nondescript older woman, not yet decrepit enough to be remarkable.

After the three of them had left, I went to the washroom. On the cubicle wall was a poem: I love Darren yes I do Meant for me not for you If you try to take my place I swear to God I'll smash your face.

Young girls have become more forthright than they used to be, although no better at punctuation.

When Walter and I finally located The Fire Pit, which wasn't (he said) where he'd left it, there was plywood nailed across the windows, an official notice of some kind stapled to it. Walter snuffled around the locked-up door like a dog that's misplaced a bone. "Looks like it's closed," he said. He stood for a long moment, hands in his pockets. "They're always changing things," he said. "You can't keep up with it."

After some casting about and a few false leads, we settled for a greasy spoon of sorts on Davenport, with vinyl seats and jukeboxes at the tables, stocked with country music and a sprinkling of old Beatles and Elvis Presley songs. Walter put on "Heartbreak Hotel," and we listened to it while we ate our hamburgers and drank our coffee. Walter insisted on paying-Myra again, without a doubt. She must have slipped him a twenty.

I ate only half of my hamburger. I couldn't manage the whole thing. Walter ate the other half, slotting it into his mouth in one bite as if mailing it.

On the way out of the city, I asked Walter to drive me past my old house-the house where I'd once lived with Richard. I remembered the way perfectly, but when I reached the house itself I didn't at first recognise it. It was still angular and graceless, squinty-windowed, ponderous, a dense brown like stewed tea, but ivy had grown up over the walls. The fake-chalet half-timbering, once cream-coloured, had been painted apple green, and the heavy front door as well.

Richard was against ivy. There had been some when we'd first moved in, but he'd pulled it down. It ate away at the brickwork, he said; it got into the chimneys, it encouraged rodents. This was when he was still coming up with reasons for what he thought and did, and was still presenting them as reasons for what I myself should think and do. It was before he'd thrown reasons to the wind.

I caught a glimpse of myself back then, in a straw hat, a pale-yellow dress, cotton because of the heat. It was late summer, the year after my marriage; the ground was like brick. At Winifred's instigation I had taken up gardening: I needed to have a hobby, she said. She'd decided I should start with a rock garden, because even if I killed the plants the rocks would still be there. Not much you can do to kill a rock, she'd joked. She'd sent over what she called three reliable men, who were to do the digging and the arranging of the rocks, so that I could then plant things.

There were already some rocks in the garden, ordered by Winifred: small ones, larger ones like slabs, strewn at random or piled like fallen dominoes. We were all standing there, the three reliable men and myself, looking at this jumbled heap of stone. They had their caps on, their jackets off, their shirt sleeves rolled up, their braces in plain view; they were waiting for my instructions, but I didn't know what to tell them.

I'd still wanted to change something back then-do something myself, make something, from whatever unpromising materials. I still thought I might. But I'd known nothing whatsoever about gardening. I'd felt like crying, but cry once and it's all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.

Walter levered me out of the car, then waited silently, a little behind me, ready to catch me if I should topple. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house. The rock garden was still there, though much neglected. Of course it was winter, so therefore hard to tell, but I doubted that anything grew in it any more, except perhaps some dragon's blood, which will grow anywhere.

There was a large dumpster standing in the driveway, full of shattered wood, slabs of plaster: renovations were going on. Either that or there had been a fire: an upstairs window was smashed. Street people camp out in such houses, according to Myra: leave a house untenanted, in Toronto anyway, and they're into it like a shot, having their drug parties or whatever. Satanic cults, she's heard. They'll make bonfires on the hardwood floors, they'll plug up the toilets and crap in the sinks, they'll steal the faucets, the fancy doorknobs, anything they can sell. Though sometimes it's only kids who do the smashing-up, for fun. The young have a talent for it.

The house looked unowned, transient, like a picture in a realestate flyer. It no longer seemed connected with me in any way. I tried to recall the sound of my footsteps, in winter boots on the dry creaking snow, walking quickly home, late, concocting excuses; the inky portcullis of the doorway; the way the light from the street lamps fell on the snowbanks, ice blue at the edges and spotted with the yellow Braille of dog pee. The shadows were different back then. My uncalm heart, my breath unscrolling, white smoke in the freezing air. The hectic warmth of my fingers; the rawness of my mouth under my fresh lipstick.

There was a fireplace in the living room. I used to sit in front of it, with Richard, the light flickering on us, and on our glasses, each with its coaster to protect the veneer. Six in the evening, martini time. Richard liked to sum up the day: that's what he called it. He'd had a habit of putting his hand on the back of my neck-resting it there, just keeping it there lightly while he conducted the summing up. Summing up was what judges did before a case went to the jury. Is that how he saw himself? Perhaps. But his inner thoughts, his motives, were frequently obscure to me.

This was one source of the tension between us: my failure to understand him, to anticipate his wishes, which he set down to my wilful and even aggressive lack of attention. In reality it was also bafflement, and later, fear. As we went on, he became less and less like a man for me, with a skin and working parts, and more and more like a gigantic tangle of string, which I was doomed as if by enchantment to try every day to unravel. I never did succeed.

I stood outside my house, my former house, waiting to have an emotion of any kind at all. None came. Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

From the chestnut tree on the lawn a pair of legs was dangling, a woman's legs. I thought for a moment they were real legs, clambering down, escaping, until I looked more closely. It was a pair of pantyhose, stuffed with something-toilet paper, no doubt, or underwear-and thrown out of the upstairs window during some Satanic rite or adolescent prank or homeless revel. Caught in the branches.

It must have been my own window these disembodied legs had been thrown from. My former window. I pictured myself gazing out of that window, long ago. Plotting how I might slip out that way, unnoticed, and climb down through the tree-easing my shoes off, swinging myself over the sill, reaching one stockinged foot down and then the next, clinging on to the handholds. I hadn't done it though.

Gazing out the window. Hesitating. Thinking, How lost to myself I have become.

Postcards from Europe

The days darken, the trees turn glum, the sun rolls downhill towards the winter solstice, but still it isn't winter. No snow, no sleet, no howling winds. It's ominous, this delay. A dun-coloured hush pervades us.

Yesterday I walked as far as the Jubilee Bridge. There's been talk of rust, of corrosion, of structural weaknesses, there's been talk of tearing it down. Some nameless, faceless developer lusts to put condos on the public property adjoining it, says Myra -it's prime land because of the view. Views are worth more than potatoes these days, not that there were ever any potatoes in that exact spot. Rumour has it that a wad of dirty money has changed hands under the table to facilitate the deal, which I'm sure is what happened too when this bridge was first erected, ostensibly to honour Queen Victoria. Some contractor or other must have paid off Her Majesty's elected representatives in order to get the job, and we continue to respect the old ways in this town: Make a buck no matter what Those are the old ways.

Strange to think that ladies in ruffles and bustles once strolled over this bridge and leaned on this filigreed railing, to take in the now-costly, soon-to-be-private view: the tumult of the water below, the picturesque limestone cliffs to the west, the factories alongside going full tilt fourteen hours a day, filled with subservient cap-tugging yokels and twinkling in the dusk like gas-lit gambling casinos.

I stood on the bridge and stared over the side, at the water upstream, smooth as taffy, dark and silent, all menacing potential. On the other side were the cascades, the whirlpools, the white noise It's a fair distance down I became conscious of my heart, and of dizziness. Also of breathlessness, as if I were in over my head. But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

For instance: Richard and myself, sixty-four years ago, coming down the gangway of the Berengeria on the far shore of the Atlantic Ocean, his hat at a jaunty angle, my gloved hand resting lightly on his arm-the newly wedded couple on their honeymoon.

Why is a honeymoon called that? Lune de miel, moon of honey-as if the moon itself is not a cold and airless and barren sphere of pockmarked rock, but soft, golden, luscious-a luminous candied plum, the yellow kind, melting in the mouth and sticky as desire, so achingly sweet it makes your teeth hurt. A warm floodlight floating, not in the sky, but inside your own body.

I know about all of that. I remember it very well. But not from my honeymoon.

The emotion I recall most clearly from that eight weeks-could it have been only eight?-was anxiety. I was worried that Richard was finding the experience of our marriage-by which I meant the part of it that took place in the dark and could not be spoken about-as disappointing as I did. Although this did not appear to be the case: he was affable enough to me at first, at least in daylight. I concealed this anxiety of mine as well as I could, and took frequent baths: 1 felt I was becoming addled inside, like an egg.

After we'd docked at Southampton, Richard and I travelled to London by train, where we stayed at Brown's Hotel. We had breakfast served in the suite, for which I would put on a negligee, one of the three selected for me by Winifred: ashes of roses, bone with dove-grey lace, lilac with aquamarine-pale, watery colours that were easy on the morning face. Each had the satin mules to match, trimmed with dyed fur or swan's-down. I assumed this was what grown-up women wore in the mornings. I'd seen pictures of such ensembles (but where? Could they have been advertisements, for a brand of coffee perhaps?)-the man in suit and tie, his hair combed slickly back, the woman in her negligee looking just as groomed, one hand lifted, holding the silver coffee pot with its curved spout, the two of them smiling woozily at each other across the butter dish.

Laura would have sneered at these outfits. She'd already sneered when she'd seen them being packed. Though it wasn't sneering exactly: Laura was incapable of true sneering. She lacked the necessary cruelty. (The necessary deliberate cruelty, that is. Her cruelties were accidental-by-products of whatever lofty notions may have been going through her head.) Her reaction had been more like amazement-like disbelief. She'd run her hand over the satin with a little shiver, and I'd felt the cold oiliness, the slipperiness of the fabric, in the ends of my own fingers. Like lizard skin. "You're going towear these?" she'd said.

On those summer mornings in London-for it was summer by then-we would eat our breakfasts with the curtains half-drawn against the clarity of the sun. Richard would have two boiled eggs, two thick rashers of bacon and a grilled tomato, with toast and marmalade, the toast brittle, cooled in a toast rack. I would have half a grapefruit. The tea would be dark, tannic, like swamp water. This was the correct, the English way to serve it, said Richard.

Not much would be said, apart from the obligatory "Sleep well, darling?" and "Mmm-you?" Richard would have the newspapers delivered, along with the telegrams. There were always several of these. He would scan the papers, then open the telegrams, read them, fold them carefully once and then again, place them in a pocket. Or else he would rip them into shreds. He never crumpled them up and tossed them into a wastebasket, and if he had done that I might not have dug them out and read them, or not at that period of my life.

I supposed all of them were for him: I had never been sent a telegram, and could think of no reason why I might receive one.

Richard had various engagements during the day. I assumed they were with business associates. He hired a car and driver for me, and. I was taken out to see what in his view ought to be seen. Most of the things I inspected were buildings, others were parks. Others were statues, erected outside the buildings or inside the parks: statesmen with their tummies sucked in and their chests stuck out, the front leg bent, clutching scrolls of paper; military men on horseback. Nelson on his column, Prince Albert on his throne with a quartet of exotic women roiling and wallowing around his feet, spewing out fruit and wheat. These were supposed to be the Continents, over which Prince Albert, though dead, still held sway, but he paid no attention to them; he sat stern and silent under his ornate, gilded cupola, gazing into the distance, his mind on higher things.

"What did you see today?" Richard would ask at dinner, and I would dutifully recite, ticking off one building or park or statue after another: the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Kensington, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament. He did not encourage the visiting of museums, apart from the Natural History Museum. I wonder, now, why it was that he thought the sight of so many large stuffed animals would be conducive to my education? For it had become evident that this is what all of these visits were aimed at-my education. Why should the stuffed animals have been better for me, or better for his idea of what I should become, than a roomful of paintings, for instance? I think I know, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the stuffed animals were more or less like a zoo-something you'd take a child to, for an outing.

I did go to the National Gallery, though. The conci ¨rge at the hotel suggested it, once I'd run out of buildings. It wore me out-it was like a department store, so many bodies crowded against the walls, so much dazzle-but at the same time it was exhilarating. I had never seen so many naked women in one place. There were naked men as well, but they were not quite so naked. There was also a lot of fancy dress. Perhaps these are primary categories, like women and men: naked and clothed. Well, God thought so. (Laura, as a child: What does God wear?)

At all of these places the car and driver would wait, and I would walk briskly in, through whatever gate or door, trying to look purposeful; trying not to look so lonely and empty. Then I would stare and stare, so I would have something to say later. But I could not really make sense out of what I was seeing. Buildings are only buildings. There's nothing much to them unless you know about architecture, or else about what once happened there, and I did not know. I lacked the talent for overviews; it was as if my eyes were right up against whatever I was supposed to be looking at, and I would come away only with textures: roughness of brick or stone, smoothness of waxed wooden bannisters, harshness of mangy fur. The striations of horn, the warm gleam of ivory. Glass eyes.

In addition to these educational excursions, Richard encouraged me to go shopping. I found the shop clerks intimidating, and bought little. On other occasions I had my hair done. He did not want me to get it cut or marcelled, and so I didn't. A simple style was best for me, he said. It suited my youth.

Sometimes I would just amble around, or sit on park benches, waiting until it was time to go back. Sometimes a man would sit down beside me, and try to begin a conversation. Then I would leave.

I spent a lot of time changing my costumes. Diddling with straps, with buckles, with the tilt of hats, the seams on stockings. Worrying about the appropriateness of this or that, for this or that hour of the day. No one to hook me up at the neckline or tell me what I looked like from the back and whether I was all tucked in. Reenie used to do that, or Laura. I missed them, and tried not to.

Filing my nails, soaking my feet. Yanking out hairs, or shaving them off: it was necessary to be sleek, devoid of bristles. A topography like wet clay, a surface the hands would glide over.

Honeymoons were said to allow the new couple the time to get to know each other better, but as the days went by I felt I knew Richard less and less. He was effacing himself, or was it concealment? Withdrawal to a vantage point. I myself however was taking shape-the shape intended for me, by him. Each time I looked in the mirror a little more of me had been coloured in.

After London we went to Paris, by channel boat and then by train. The shape of the days in Paris was much the same as those in London, although the breakfasts were different: a hard roll, strawberry jam, coffee with hot milk. The meals were succulent; Richard made quite a fuss over them, and especially over the wines. He kept saying we weren't in Toronto, a fact that was self-evident to me.

I saw the Eiffel Tower but did not go up it, having a dislike of heights. I saw the Pantheon, and Napoleon's tomb. I did not see Notre Dame, because Richard did not favour churches, or at least not Catholic ones, which he considered enervating. Incense in particular he considered stultifying to the brain.

The French hotel had a bidet, which Richard explained to me with the trace of a smirk after he caught me washing my feet in it. I thought, They do understand something the others don't, the French. They understand the anxiety of the body. At least they admit it exists.

We stayed at the Lutetia, which was to become the Nazi headquarters during the war, but how were we to know that? I would sit in the hotel caf © for morning coffee, because I was afraid to go anywhere else. I had the idea that if I lost sight of the hotel I would never be able to get back to it. I knew by then that whatever French I had been taught by Mr. Erskine was next to useless: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna ®t point would not get me any more hot milk.

An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me-he had some English-"Why are you sad?"

"I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

"You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse."

The effect was a little spoiled the next day, when he propositioned me, or I think that is what it was: my French wasn't good enough to tell. He wasn't so old after all-forty-five, perhaps. I should have accepted. He was wrong about the sadness, though: far better to have it while you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone. But never mind that part.

Then we went to Rome. Rome seemed familiar to me-at least I had a context for it, provided long ago by Mr. Erskine and his Latin lessons. I saw the Forum, or what was left of it, and the Appian Way, and the Coliseum, looking like a mouse-eaten cheese. Various bridges, various well-worn angels, grave and pensive. I saw the Tiber flowing along, yellow as jaundice. I saw St. Peter's, though only from the outside. It was very big. I suppose I ought to have seen Mussolini's Fascist troops in their black uniforms, marching around and roughing people up-were they doing that yet?-but I did not see them. That sort of thing tends to be invisible at the time unless you yourself happen to be the object of it. Otherwise you see it only later, in newsreels, or else in films made long after the event.

In the afternoons I would order a cup of tea-I was getting the hang of ordering things, I was figuring out what tone to use with waiters, how to keep them at a safe distance. While drinking the tea I would write postcards. My postcards were to Laura and to Reenie, and several to Father. They had photographs on them of the buildings I had been taken to visit-picturing, in tiny sepia detail, what I ought to have seen. The messages I wrote on them were fatuous. To Reenie: The weather is wonderful. I am enjoying it. To Laura: Today I saw the Coliseum, where they used to throw the Christians to the lions. You would have been interested. To Father: I hope you are in good health. Richard sends his regards. (This last was not true, but I was learning which lies, as a wife, I was automatically expected to tell.)

Towards the end of the time allotted for our honeymoon we spent a week in Berlin. Richard had some business there, which had to do with the handles of shovels. One of Richard's firms made shovel handles, and the Germans were short of wood. There was a lot of digging to be done, and more projected, and Richard could supply the shovel handles at a price that undercut his competitors.

As Reenie used to say, Every little bit helps. As she also used to say, Business is business and then there's funny business. But I knew nothing about business. My task was to smile.

I have to admit I enjoyed Berlin. Nowhere had I been so blonde. The men were exceptionally polite, although they did not look behind themselves when striding through swinging doors. Hand-kissing covered a multitude of sins. It was in Berlin that I learned to perfume my wrists.

I memorised the cities through their hotels, the hotels through their bathrooms. Dressing, undressing, lying in the water. But enough of these travel notes.

We returned to Toronto via New York, in mid-August, in a heat wave. After Europe and New York, Toronto seemed squat and cramped. Outside Union Station there was a mist of bituminous fumes, from where they were fixing the potholes. A hired car met us and took us past the streetcars and their dust and clanging, then past the ornate banks and the department stores, then up the slant of land into Rosedale and the shade of chestnuts and maples.

We stopped in front of the house Richard had bought for us by telegram. He'd picked it up for a song, he said, after the previous owner had managed to bankrupt himself. Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.

The house was dark on the outside, festooned with ivy, its tall, narrow windows turned inward. The key was under the mat, the front hall smelled of chemicals. Winifred had been redecorating during our absence, and the work was not quite finished: there were painters' cloths down still in the front rooms, where they'd stripped off the old Victorian wallpaper. The new colours were pearly, pale-the colours of luxurious indifference, of cool detachment. Cirrus clouds tinged by a faint sunset, drifting high above the vulgar intensities of birds and flowers and such. This was the setting proposed for me, the rarefied air I was to waft around in.

Reenie would be scornful of this interior-of its gleaming emptiness, its pallor. This whole place looks like a bathroom. But at the same time she'd be frightened by it, as I was. I called up Grandmother Adelia: she'd know what to do. She'd recognise the new-money attempt to make an impression; she'd be polite, but dismissive. My, it's certainly modern, she might say. She'd make short work of Winifred, I thought, but it brought me no solace: I was now of the tribe of Winifred myself. Or I was partly.

And Laura? Laura would smuggle in her coloured pencils, her tubes of pigment. She'd spill something on this house, break something, deface at least a small corner of it. She'd make her mark.

A note from Winifred was propped against the telephone in the front hall. "Hi kids! Welcome home! I got them to finish the bedroom first! I hope you love it-so snazzy! Freddie."

"I didn't know Winifred was doing this," I said.

"We wanted it to be a surprise," said Richard. "We didn't want you to get bogged down in details." Not for the first time, I felt like a child excluded by its parents. Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion, determined on the rightness of their choices, in everything. I could tell already that my birthday presents from Richard would always be something I didn't want.

I went upstairs to freshen up, at Richard's suggestion. I must have looked as if I needed it. Certainly I felt sticky and wilted. ("Dew's off the rose," was his comment.) My hat was a wreck; I flung it onto the vanity. I splashed my face with water, and blotted it on one of the white monogrammed towels Winifred had set out. The bedroom looked out over the back garden, where nothing had been done. I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-coloured bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it-the bed I hadn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat.

The telephone beside the bed was white. It rang. I picked it up. It was Laura, in tears. "Where have you been?" she sobbed. "Why didn't you come back?"

"What do you mean?" I said. "This is when we were supposed to come back! Calm down, I can't hear you."

"You never answered!" she wailed.

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Father's dead! He's dead, he's dead-we sent five telegrams! Reenie sent them!"

"Just a minute. Slow down. When did this happen?"

"A week after you left. We tried to phone, we phoned all the hotels. They said they'd tell you, they promised! Didn't they tell you?"

"I'll be there tomorrow," I said. "I didn't know. Nobody told me anything. I didn't get any telegrams. I never got them."

I couldn't take it in. What had happened, what had gone wrong, why had Father died, why hadn't I been notified? I found myself on the floor, on the bone-grey carpet, crouching down over the telephone, curled around it as if it were something precious and fragile. I thought of my postcards from Europe, arriving at Avilion with their cheerful, trivial messages. They were probably still on the table in the front hall. I hope you are in good health.

"But it was in the papers!" Laura said.

"Not where I was," I said. "Not those papers." I didn't add that I'd never bothered with the papers anyway. I'd been too stupefied.

It was Richard who'd collected the telegrams, on the ship and at all our hotels. I could see his meticulous fingers, opening the envelopes, reading, folding the telegrams into quarters, stowing them away. I couldn't accuse him of lying-he'd never said anything about them, these telegrams-but it was the same as lying. Wasn't it?

He must have told them at the hotels not to put through any calls. Not to me, and not while I was there. He'd been keeping me in the dark, deliberately.

I thought I might be sick, but I wasn't. After a time I went downstairs. Lose your temper and you lose the fight, Reenie used to say. Richard was sitting on the back verandah with a gin and tonic. So thoughtful of Winifred to lay in a supply of gin, he'd already said, twice. Another gin was poured ready, waiting for me on the low white glass-topped wrought-iron table. I picked it up. Ice chimed against the crystal. That was how my voice needed to sound.

"Good lord," said Richard, looking at me. "I thought you were freshening up. What happened to your eyes?" They must have been red.

"Father's dead," I said. "They sent five telegrams. You didn't tell me."

"Mea culpa,"said Richard. "I know I ought to have, but I wanted to spare you the worry, darling. There was nothing to be done, and no way we could get back in time for the funeral, and I didn't want things to be ruined for you. I guess I was selfish, too-I wanted you all to myself, if only for a little while. Now sit down and buck up, and have your drink, and forgive me. We'll deal with all this in the morning."

The heat was dizzying; where the sun hit the lawn it was a blinding green. The shadows under the trees were thick as tar. Richard's voice came through to me in staccato bursts, like Morse code: I heard only certain words.

Worry. Time. Ruined. Selfish. Forgive me.

What could I say to that?

The eggshell hat

Christmas has come and gone. I tried not to notice it. Myra, however, would not be denied. She gave me a little plum pudding she'd boiled herself, made of molasses and caulking compound and decorated with halved maraschino rubber cherries, bright red, like the pasties on an old-style stripper, and a two-dimensional painted wooden cat with a halo and angel wings. She said these cats had been all the rage at The Gingerbread House, and she thought they were pretty cute, and she had one left over, and it was just a hairline crack that you could hardly see at all, and it would sure look nice on the wall over my stove.

Good position, I told her. Angel above, and a carnivorous angel too-high time they came clean on that subject! Oven below, as in all the most reliable accounts. Then there's the rest of us in between, stuck in Middle Earth, on the level of the frying pan. Poor Myra was baffled, as she always is by theological discourse. She likes her God plain-plain and raw, like a radish.

The winter we'd been waiting for arrived on New Year's Eve-a hard freeze, followed by an enormous fall of snow the next day. Outside the window it swirled down, bucket after bucket of it, as if God were dumping laundry flakes in the finale of a children's pageant. I turned on the weather channel to get the full panorama-roads closed, cars buried, power lines down, merchandising brought to a standstill, workmen in bulky suits waddling around like outsized children bundled up for play. Throughout their presentation of what they euphemistically termed "current conditions," the young anchorfolk kept their perky optimism, as they habitually do through every disaster imaginable. They have the footloose insouciance of troubadours or fun-fair gipsies, or insurance salesmen, or stock-market gurus-making overblown predictions in the full knowledge that none of what they're telling us may actually come true.

Myra called to ask if I was all right. She said Walter would be over as soon as the snow stopped, to dig me out.

"Don't be silly, Myra," I said. "I'm quite capable of digging myself out." (A lie-I had no intention of lifting a finger. I was well supplied with peanut butter, I could wait it out. But I felt like company, and threats of action on my part usually speeded up the arrival of Walter.)

"Don't you touch that shovel!" said Myra. "Hundreds of old-of people your age die of heart attacks from snow shovelling every year! And if the electricity goes off, watch where you put the candles!"

"I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose."

Walter appeared, Walter shovelled. He'd brought a paper sack of doughnut holes; we ate them at the kitchen table, me cautiously, Walter wholesale, but contemplatively. He's a man for whom chewing is a form of thinking.

What came back to me then was the sign that used to be in the window of the Downyflake Doughnut stand, at the Sunnyside Amusement Park, in-what was it?-the summer of 1935: As you ramble on through life, Brother, Whatever be your goal, Keep your eye upon the doughnut, And not upon the hole.

A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

The next day I ventured out, among the cold, splendid dunes. Folly, but I wanted to participate-snow is so attractive, until it gets porous and sooty. My front lawn was a lustrous avalanche, with an Alpine tunnel cut through it. I made it out to the sidewalk, so far so good, but a few houses further north of me the neighbours had not been so assiduous as Walter about their shovelling, and I got trapped in a drift, and floundered, slipped, and fell. Nothing was broken or sprained-I didn't think it was-but I couldn't get up. I lay there in the snow, pawing with my arms and legs, like a turtle on its back. Children do that, but deliberately-flapping like birds, making angels. For them it's joy.

I was beginning to fret about hypothermia when two strange men levered me up and carted me back to my door. I hobbled into the front room and collapsed onto the sofa, my overshoes and coat still on. Scenting disaster from afar as is her habit, Myra arrived, bearing half-a-dozen turgid cupcakes left over from some family starch-fest. She made me a hot-water bottle and some tea, and the doctor was summoned, and both of them fussed around, giving out a stream of helpful advice and hearty, hectoring tut-tuts, and mightily pleased with themselves.

Now I'm grounded. Also enraged at myself. Or not at myself-at this bad turn my body has done me. After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.

It's an affront, all of that. Weak knees, arthritic knuckles, varicose veins, infirmities, indignities-they aren't ours, we never wanted or claimed them. Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected-ourselves at the best age, and in the best light as well: never caught awkwardly, one leg out of a car, one still in, or picking our teeth, or slouching, or scratching our noses or bums. If naked, seen gracefully reclining through a gauzy mist, which is where movie stars come in: they assume such poses for us. They are our younger selves as they recede from us, glow, turn mythical.

As a child, Laura would say: In Heaven, what age will I be?

Laura was standing on the front steps of Avilion, between the two stone urns where no flowers had been planted, waiting for us. Despite her tallness, she looked very young, very fragile and alone. Also peasantlike, pauperish. She was wearing a pale-blue housedress printed with faded mauve butterflies-mine, three summers before-and no shoes whatsoever. (Was this some new mortification of the flesh, or was it simple eccentricity, or had she simply forgotten?) Her hair was in a single braid, coming down over her shoulder, like the stone nymph's at our lily pool.

God knows how long she'd been there. We hadn't been able to say exactly when we'd arrive, because we'd come down by car, which was possible at that time of year: the roads were not flooded or axle-deep in mud, and some were even paved by then.

I saywe, because Richard came with me. He said he wouldn't think of sending me off to face such a thing alone, not at a time like this. He was more than solicitous.

He drove us himself, in his blue coupe-one of his newest toys. In the trunk behind us were our two suitcases, the small ones, just for overnight-his maroon leather, mine lemon-sherbet yellow. I was wearing an eggshell linen suit-frivolous to mention it, no doubt, but it was from Paris and I was very keen on it-and I knew it would be wrinkled at the back once we arrived. Linen shoes, with stiff fabric bows and peek-a-boo toes. My matching eggshell hat rode on my knees like a delicate gift box.

Richard was a jumpy driver. He didn't like to be interrupted-he said it ruined his concentration-and so we made the trip in silence, more or less. The trip took over four hours, which now takes less than two. The sky was clear, and bright and depthless as metal; the sun poured down like lava. The heat wavered up off the asphalt; the small towns were closed against the sun, their curtains drawn. I remember their singed lawns and white-pillared porches, and the lone gas stations, the pumps like cylindrical one-armed robots, their glass tops like brimless bowler hats, and the cemeteries that looked as if no one else would ever be buried in them. Once in a while we'd hit a lake, with a smell of dead minnows and warm waterweed coming off it.

As we drove up, Laura did not wave. She stood waiting while Richard brought the car to a stop and clambered out and walked around to open the door on my side. I was swinging my legs sideways, both knees together as I'd been taught, and reaching for Richard's proffered hand, when Laura suddenly came to life. She ran down the steps and took hold of my other arm and hauled me out of the car, ignoring Richard completely, and threw her arms around me and clutched on to me as if she were drowning. No tears, just that spine-cracking embrace.

My eggshell hat fell out onto the gravel and Laura stepped on it. There was a crackling sound, an intake of breath from Richard. I said nothing. In that instant I no longer cared about the hat.

Arms around each other's waists, Laura and I went up the steps into the house. Reenie loomed in the kitchen door at the far end of the hall, but she knew enough to leave us alone right then. I expect she turned her attention to Richard-distracted him with a drink or something. Well, he would have wanted to look over the premises and have a stroll around the grounds, now that he'd effectively inherited them.

We went straight up to Laura's room and sat down on her bed. We held on tightly to each other's hands -left in right, right in left. Laura wasn't weeping, as on the telephone. Instead she was calm as wood.

"He was in the turret," said Laura. "He'd locked himself in."

"He always did that," I said.

"But this time he didn't come out. Reenie left the trays with his meals on them outside the door as usual, but he wasn't eating anything, or drinking anything either-or not that we could tell. So then we had to kick down the door."

"You and Reenie?"

"Reenie's boyfriend came-Ron Hincks-the one she's going to marry. He kicked it down. And Father was lying on the floor. He must have been there for at least two days, the doctor said. He looked awful."

I hadn't realised that Ron Hincks was Reenie's boyfriend-indeed her fianc ©. How long had that been going on, and how had I missed it?

"Was he dead, is that what you're saying?"

"I didn't think so at first, because his eyes were open. But he was dead all right. He looked… I can't tell you how he looked. As if he was listening, to something that had startled him. He lookedwatchful."

"Was he shot?" I don't know why I asked this.

"No. He was just dead. It was put in the paper as natural causes-suddenly, of natural causes, is what it said-and Reenie told Mrs. Hillcoate that it was natural causes all right, because drinking certainly was like second nature to Father, and judging from all the empty bottles he'd downed enough booze to choke a horse."

"He drank himself to death," I said. It wasn't a question. "When was this?"

"It was right after they announced the permanent closing of the factories. That's what killed him. I know it was!"

"What?" I said. "What permanent closing? Which factories?"

"All of them," said Laura. "All of ours. Everything of ours in town. I thought you must have known about it."

"I didn't know," I said.

"Ours have been merged in with Richard's. Everything's been moved to Toronto. It's all Griffen-Chase Royal Consolidated, now." No more Sons, in other words. Richard had made a clean sweep of them.

"So that means no jobs," I said. "None here. It's finished. Wiped out."

"They said it was a matter of costs. After the button factory was burned-they said it would take too much to rebuild it."

"Who isthey?"

"I don't know," said Laura. "Wasn't it Richard?"

"That wasn't the deal," I said. Poor Father-trusting to handshakes and words of honour and unspoken assumptions. It was becoming clear to me that this was not the way things worked any more. Maybe it never had been.

"What deal?" said Laura.

"Never mind."

I'd married Richard for nothing, then-I hadn't saved the factories, and I certainly hadn't saved Father.

But there was Laura, still; she wasn't out on the street. I had to think of that. "Did he leave anything-any letter, any note?"

"No."

"Did you look?"

"Reenie looked," said Laura in a small voice; which meant that she herself hadn't been up to it.

Of course, I thought. Reenie would have looked. And if she had in fact found anything like that, she would have burned it.

Father wouldn't have left a note though. He would have been aware of the implications. He wouldn't have wanted a verdict of suicide, because, as it turned out, he'd had some life insurance: he'd been paying into it for years, so no one could accuse him of having fixed it up at the last minute. He'd tied up the money-it was to go straight into a trust, so that only Laura could touch it, and only after she was twenty-one. He must already have distrusted Richard by then, and concluded that leaving any of it to me would have done no good. I was still a minor, and I was Richard's wife. The laws were different then. What was mine was his, to all intents and purposes.

As I've said, I got Father's medals. What were they for? Courage. Bravery under fire. Noble gestures of self-sacrifice. I suppose I was expected to live up to them.

Everyone in town came to the funeral, said Reenie. Well, almost everyone, because there was considerable bitterness in some quarters; but still, he'd been well respected, and by that time they'd known it wasn't him shut down the factories for good like that. They'd known he'd had no part in it-he couldn't stop it, that was all. It was the big interests did him in.

Everyone in town felt sorry for Laura, said Reenie. (But not for mewas left unspoken. In their view, I'd ended up with the spoils. Such as they were.)

Here are the arrangements Richard made: Laura would come to live with us. Well, of course she would have to: she couldn't remain at Avilion all by herself, she was only fifteen.

"I could stay with Reenie," said Laura, but Richard said that was out of the question. Reenie was getting married; she wouldn't have time to look after Laura. Laura said she didn't need to be looked after, but Richard only smiled.

"Reenie could come to Toronto," said Laura, but Richard said she didn't want to. (Richard didn't want her to. He and Winifred had already engaged what they considered to be a suitable staff for the running of his household-people who knew the ropes, he said. Which meant they knew Richard's ropes, and Winifred's ropes as well.)

Richard said he had already discussed things with Reenie, and had come to a satisfactory arrangement. Reenie and her new husband would act as custodians for us, he said, and would oversee the repairs-Avilion was falling to pieces, so there were a lot of repairs to be done, beginning with the roof-and that way they would be on hand to prepare the house for us whenever requested, because it was to serve as a summer abode. We would come down to Avilion to go boating and so forth, he said, in the tone of an indulgent uncle. That way, Laura and I would not be deprived of our ancestral home. He saidancestral home with a smile. Wouldn't we like that?

Laura did not thank him. She stared at his forehead, with the cultivated blankness she had once used on Mr. Erskine, and I saw we were in for trouble.

Richard and I would return to Toronto by car, he continued, once things were in place. First he needed to meet with Father's lawyers, an occasion at which we need not be present: it would be too harrowing for us, considering recent events, and he wanted to spare us as much as possible. One of these lawyers was a connection by marriage on our mother's side, said Reenie privately-a second cousin's husband-so he'd surely keep an eye out.

Laura would remain at Avilion until she and Reenie had packed up her things; then she would come in to the city on the train, and would be met at the station. She would live with us in our house-there was a spare bedroom that would suit her perfectly, once it had been redecorated. And she would attend-at last-a proper school. St. Cecilia's was the one he had picked, in consultation with Winifred, who knew about such things. Laura might need some extra lessons, but he was sure all of that would work out as time went by. In this way she would be able to gain the benefits, the advantages…

"The advantages of what?" said Laura.

"Of your position," said Richard.

"I don't see that I have any position," said Laura.

"What exactly do you mean by that?" said Richard, less indulgently.

"It's Iris who has the position," said Laura. "She's the Mrs. Griffen. I'm just extra."

"I realise you are understandably upset," said Richard stiffly, "considering the unfortunate circumstances, which have been difficult for everyone, but there's no need to be unpleasant. It isn't easy for Iris and myself, either. I am only trying to do the best for you that I can."

"He thinks I'll be in the way," Laura said to me that evening, in the kitchen, where we had gone to seek refuge from Richard. It was upsetting for us to watch him making his lists-what was to be discarded, what repaired, what replaced. To watch, and to be silent. He acts like he owns the place, Reenie had said indignantly. But he does, I'd replied.

"In the way of what?" I said. "I'm sure that isn't what he meant."

"In the way of him," said Laura. "In the way of the two of you."

"It will all work out for the best," said Reenie. She said this as if by rote. Her voice was exhausted, devoid of conviction, and I saw that there was no further help to be expected from her. In the kitchen that night she looked old, and rather fat, and also defeated. As would presently appear, she was already pregnant with Myra. She'd allowed herself to be swept off her feet. It's dirt that gets swept, and it's into the dustbin, she used to say, but she'd violated her own maxims. Her mind must have been on other things, such as whether she would make it to the altar, and if not, what then? Bad times, without a doubt. There were no walls then between sufficiency and disaster: if you slipped you fell, and if you fell you flailed and thrashed and went under. She'd be hard put to make another chance for herself, because even if she went away to have the baby and then gave it up, word would get around and people in town would never forget a thing like that. She might as well hang out a sign: there'd be a lineup around the block. Once a woman was loose, it was seen to that she stayed that way. Why buy a cow when milk's free, she must have been thinking.

So she'd given up on us, she'd given us over. For years she'd done what she could, and now she had no more power.

Back in Toronto, I waited for Laura to arrive. The heat wave continued. Sultry weather, damp foreheads, a shower before gin and tonics on the back verandah, overlooking the sere garden. The air like wet fire; everything limp or yellow. There was a fan in the bedroom that sounded like an old man with a wooden foot climbing the stairs: a breathless wheezing, a clunk, a wheezing. In the heavy, starless nights I stared up at the ceiling while Richard went on with what he was doing.

He was besotted with me, he said. Besotted -as if he were drunk. As if he would never feel the way he did about me if he were sober and in his right mind.

I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else-to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know-because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint-Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?

Richard said women could be divided into apples and pears, according to the shapes of their bottoms. I was a pear, he said, but an unripe one. That was what he liked about me-my greenness, my hardness. In the bottom department, I think he meant, but possibly all the way through.

After my showers, my removal of bristles, my brushings and combings, I was now careful to remove any hairs from the floor. I would lift the little wads of hair from the drains of tub or sink and flush them down the toilet, because Richard had casually remarked that women were always leaving hair around. Like shedding animals, was the implication.

How did he know? How did he know, about the pears and the apples and the shed hair? Who were these women, these other women? Aside from a surface curiosity, I did not much care.

I tried to avoid thinking about Father, and the way he had died, and what he might have been up to before that event, and about how he must have felt, and about everything Richard had not seen fit to tell me.

Winifred was a very busy bee. Despite the heat she looked cool, swathed in light and airy draperies like some parody of a fairy godmother. Richard kept saying how marvellous she was and how much work and bother she was sparing me, but she made me increasingly nervous. She was in and out of the house constantly; I never knew when she might appear, popping her head around the door with a brisk smile. My only refuge was the bathroom, because there I could turn the lock without seeming unduly rude. She was overseeing the rest of the decoration, ordering the furniture for Laura's room. (A dressing table with a frilled skirt, in a pink floral print, with curtains and bedspread to match. A mirror with a white curlicue frame, picked out in gold. It was just the thing for Laura, didn't I agree? I didn't, but there was no point in saying so.)

She was also planning the garden; she'd already sketched out several designs-just a few little ideas, she said, thrusting the pieces of paper at me, then withdrawing them, replacing them carefully in the folder already bulging with her other little ideas. A fountain would be lovely, she said-something French, but it would have to be authentic. Didn't I think?

I wished Laura would come. The date of her arrival had been postponed three times now-she wasn't packed yet, she'd had a cold, she'd lost the ticket. I talked to her on the white phone; her voice was restrained, remote.

The two servants had been installed, a grouchy cook-housekeeper and a large jowly man who was passed off as the gardener/chauffeur. Their name was Murgatroyd, and they were said to be husband and wife, but they looked like brother and sister. They regarded me with distrust, which I reciprocated. During the days, when Richard was at his office and Winifred was ubiquitous, I tried to get away from the house as much as I could. I would say I was going downtown-shopping, I'd say, which was an acceptable version of how I should be spending my time. I would have myself dropped off at Simpsons department store by the chauffeur, telling him I would take a taxi home. Then I would go inside, make a quick purchase: stockings and gloves were always convincing as evidence of my zeal. Then I would walk the length of the store and exit by the opposite door.

I resumed my former habits-the aimless wandering, the examination of display windows, of theatre posters. I even went to the movies, by myself; I was no longer susceptible to groping men, who had lost their aura of demonic magic, now that I knew what they had in mind. I wasn't interested in more of the same-the same obsessive clutching and fumbling. Keep your hands to yourself or I'll scream worked well enough as long as you were prepared to follow it up. They seemed to know I was. Joan Crawford was my favourite movie star at that time. Wounded eyes, lethal mouth.

Sometimes I went to the Royal Ontario Museum. I looked at suits of armour, stuffed animals, antique musical instruments. This did not take me very far. Or I would go to Diana Sweets for a soda or a cup of coffee: it was a genteel tea room across from the department stores, much patronised by ladies, and I was unlikely to be bothered by stray men there. Or I would walk through Queen's Park, quickly and with purpose. If too slowly, a man was bound to appear. Flypaper, Reenie used to call some young woman or other. She has to scrape them off. Once, a man exposed himself, right in front of me, at eye level. (I'd made the mistake of sitting on a secluded bench, on the grounds of the university.) He wasn't a tramp either, he was quite well dressed. "I'm sorry," I said to him. "I'm just not interested." He looked so disappointed. Most likely he'd wanted me to faint.

In theory I could go wherever I liked, in practice, there were invisible barriers. I kept to the main streets, the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained. I watched other people-not the men so much, the women. Were they married? Where were they going? Did they have jobs? I couldn't tell much from looking at them, except the price of their shoes.

I felt as if I'd been picked up and set down in a foreign country, where everyone spoke a different language.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm-laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt. I stared at them with rancour.

Then one day-it was a Thursday-I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear-he had on a blue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat-but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. Surely everyone else on the street was looking at him too-surely they all knew who he was! Any minute now they would recognise him, they'd shout, they'd give chase.

My first impulse was to warn him. But then I knew that the warning must be for both of us, because whatever trouble he was involved in, I was suddenly involved in it as well.

I could have paid no attention. I could have turned away. That would have been wise. But such wisdom was not available to me then.

I stepped down off the curb and began to cross towards him. The light changed again: I was stranded in the middle of the street. Cars honked their horns; there were shouts; the traffic surged. I didn't know whether to go back or forward.

He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Three days after this, Laura was due to arrive. I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn't on it. She wasn't at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she'd always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She'd gone with Laura to the train, she'd shipped off the trunk and everything as instructed, she'd taken every precaution. She should have accompanied her all the way, and now look! Some white slaver had made off with her.

Laura's trunk turned up on schedule, but Laura herself appeared to have vanished. Richard was more upset than I would have predicted. He was afraid she'd been spirited away by unknown forces-people who had it in for him. It could be the Reds, or else an unscrupulous business rival: such twisted men existed. Criminals, he hinted, who were in cahoots with all sorts of folks-folks who'd stop at nothing to assert undue influence on him, because of his growing political connections. Next thing you knew we'd get a blackmail note.

He was suspicious of many elements, that August; he said we had to keep a sharp lookout. There had been a big march on Ottawa, in July-thousands, tens of thousands of men who claimed to be unemployed, and who were demanding jobs and fair pay, egged on by subversives bent on overthrowing the government.

"I bet young what's-his-name was mixed up in it," said Richard, looking at me narrowly.

"Young who?" I said, glancing out the window.

"Pay attention, darling. Laura's pal. The dark one. The young thug who burned down your father's factory."

"It didn't burn down," I said. "They put it out in time. Anyway, they never proved it."

"He skedaddled," said Richard. "Ran like a rabbit. That's proof enough for me."

The marchers on Ottawa had been trapped through a clever back-room stratagem suggested-or so he said-by Richard himself, who moved in high circles these days. The leaders of the march had been decoyed to Ottawa for "official talks," and the whole kit and kaboodle had been stalled in Regina. The talks came to nothing, as planned, but then there had been riots: the subversives had stirred things up, the crowd had gone out of control, men had been killed and injured. It was the Communists who were behind it, because they had a finger in every dubious pie, and who was to say that waylaying Laura was not one of the pies?

I thought Richard was working himself up unduly. I was upset too, but I believed Laura had merely wandered off-been distracted somehow. That would be more like her. She'd got off at the wrong station, forgotten our telephone number, lost her way.

Winifred said we should check the hospitals: Laura might have been taken ill, or had an accident. But she was not in a hospital.

After two days of worrying we informed the police, and soon after that, despite Richard's precautions, the story hit the papers. Reporters besieged the sidewalk outside our house. They took pictures, if only of our doors and windows; they telephoned; they begged for interviews. What they wanted was a scandal. "Prominent Socialite Schoolgirl in Love Nest."

"Union Station Site of Grisly Remains." They wanted to be told that Laura had run away with a married man, or had been abducted by anarchists, or had been found dead in a checked suitcase in the baggage room. Sex or death, or both together-that was what they had in mind.

Richard said we should be gracious but uninformative. He said there was no point in antagonising the newspapers unduly, because reporters were vindictive little vermin who would hold a grudge for years and pay you back later, when you were least expecting it. He said he would handle things.

First he put it about that I was on the brink of collapse, and asked that my privacy and my delicate health be respected. That made the reporters back off some; they assumed of course that I was pregnant, which still counted for something in those days, and was also thought to scramble a woman's brain. Then he let it be known that there would be a reward for information, though he did not say how much. On the eighth day there was an anonymous phone call: Laura was not dead, but was working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park. The caller claimed to have recognised her, from the description of her that was in all the papers.

It was decided that Richard and I would drive down together to reclaim her. Winifred said Laura was most likely in a state of delayed shock, considering Father's unseemly death and her discovery of the body. Anyone would be disturbed after such an ordeal, and Laura was a girl with a nervous temperament. Most likely she hardly knew what she was doing or saying. Once we got her back, she must be given a strong sedative and carted off to the doctor.

But the most important thing, said Winifred, was that not a word of all this must leak out. A fifteen-year-old running away from home like that-it would reflect badly on the family. People might think she'd been mistreated, and this could become a serious impediment. To Richard and his future political prospects, was what she meant.

Sunnyside was where people went in summer, then. Not people like Richard and Winifred-it was too rowdy for them, too sweaty. Merry-go-rounds, Red Hots, root beer, shooting galleries, beauty contests, public bathing: in a word, vulgar diversions. Richard and Winifred would not have wished to be in such close proximity to other people's armpits, or to those who counted their money in dimes. Though I don't know why I'm being so holier-than-thou, because I wouldn't have wanted it either.

It's all gone now, Sunnyside-swept away by twelve lanes of asphalt highway sometime in the fifties. Dismantled long ago, like so much else. But that August it was still in full swing. We drove down in Richard's coupe, but we had to leave the car at some distance because of the traffic, and the throngs jostling along the sidewalks and the dusty roads.

It was a foul day, torrid and hazy; hotter than the hinges of Hades, as Walter would say now. Above the lakeshore there was an invisible but almost palpable fog, composed of stale perfume and the oil from tanned bare shoulders, mixed with the steam from the cooking wieners and the burnt tang of spun sugar. Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew-you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour. Even Richard's forehead was damp, beneath the brim of his Panama.

From overhead came the squealing of metal on metal, and an ominous rumbling, and a chorus of female screams: the roller coaster. I had never been on one, and gaped up at it until Richard said, "Close your mouth, darling, you'll catch flies." I heard an odd story later-who from? Winifred, no doubt; it was the sort of thing she used to toss out to show she knew what really went on in life, in low life, behind the scenes. The story was that girls who'd got themselves in trouble-Winifred's term, as if these girls had managed the trouble all by themselves-that these troubled girls would go on the roller coaster at Sunnyside, hoping to start an abortion that way. Winifred laughed: Of course it didn't work, she said, and if it had, what would they have done? With all the blood, I mean? Way up in the air like that? Just imagine!

What I pictured when she said this was those red streamers they used to toss from ocean liners at the moment of sailing, cascading down over the spectators below; or a series of lines, long thick lines of red, scrolling out from the roller coaster and from the girls in it like paint thrown from a bucket. Like long scrawls of vermilion cloud. Like skywriting.

Now I think: but if writing, what kind of writing? Diaries, novels, autobiographies? Or simply graffiti: Mary Loves John. But John does not love Mary, or not enough. Not enough to save her from emptying herself out like that, scribbling all over everyone in such red, red letters.

An old story.

But on that August day in 1935 I had not yet heard about abortions. If the word had been said in my presence, which it was not, I would have had no idea what it meant. Not even Reenie had mentioned it: dark hints about kitchen-table butchers was about as far as she had gone, and Laura and I-hiding on the back stairs, eavesdropping-had thought she was talking about cannibalism, which we'd found intriguing.

The roller coaster screamed past, the shooting gallery made a noise like popcorn. Other people laughed. I found myself becoming hungry, but could not suggest a snack; it would not have been apropos right then, and the food was beyond the pale. Richard was frowning like destiny; he held me by the elbow, steering me through the crowd. He had his other hand in his pocket: this place, he said, was bound to be crawling with light-fingered thieves.

We made our way to the waffle booth. Laura was not in view, but Richard did not wish to speak with Laura first, he knew better than that. He liked to fix things from the top down, always, if possible. So he asked to have a private word with the waffle-booth owner, a large dark-chinned man who reeked of stale butter. The man knew at once why Richard was there. He stepped away from his booth, casting a furtive glance back over his shoulder.

Was the waffle-booth owner aware that he'd been harbouring a juvenile runaway? asked Richard. God forbid! said the man, in horror. Laura had got round him-said she was nineteen. She was a hard worker though, she'd worked like a horse, keeping the joint clean, lending a hand with the waffles when things got real busy. Where had she been sleeping? The man was vague about that. Someone around here had given her a bed, but it wasn't him. Nor was there any funny business, we had to believe it, or not that he knew about. She was a good girl and he was a happily married man, unlike some around here. He'd felt sorry for her-thought maybe she was in some kind of trouble. He had a soft spot for nice kids like her. Matter of fact, it was him who'd made the call, and not just for the reward either; he'd figured she'd be better off back with her family, right?

Here he looked at Richard expectantly. Money changed hands, though somehow-I gathered-not quite so much money as the man had expected. Then Laura was summoned. She didn't protest. She took one look at us and decided against it. "Thanks for everything, anyway," she said to the waffle man. She shook hands with him. She didn't realise he'd cashed her in.

Richard and I each held one of her elbows; we walked her back through Sunnyside. I felt like a traitor. Richard installed her in the car, between the two of us. I put a steadying arm around her shoulder. I was angry with her, but knew I had to be comforting. She smelled of vanilla, and of hot sweet syrup, and of unwashed hair.

Once we got her into the house, Richard summoned Mrs. Murgatroyd and ordered up a glass of iced tea for Laura. She didn't drink it though; she sat in the dead centre of the sofa, knees together, rigid, stony-faced, her eyes like slate.

Did she have any idea of how much anxiety and commotion she had caused? said Richard. No. Did she care? No answer. He certainly hoped she wouldn't try anything of the kind again. No answer. Because he now stoodin loco parentis, so to speak, and he had a responsibility towards her, and he had every intention of fulfilling that responsibility, whatever it might cost him. And since nothing was a one-way street, he expected her to realise that she had a responsibility towards him as well-towardsus, he added -which was to behave herself, and to do as required, within reason. Did she understand that?

"Yes," said Laura. "I understand what you mean."

"I certainly hope so," said Richard. "I certainly hope you do, young lady."

Theyoung lady made me nervous. It was a reproach, as if there were something wrong with being young, and also with being a lady. If so, it was a reproach that included me. "What did you eat?" I said, for a distraction.

"Candy apples," said Laura. "Doughnuts from the Downyflake Doughnuts, they were cheaper the second day. The people there were really nice. Red Hots."

"Oh dear," I said, with a weak, deprecating little smile at Richard.

"That's what other people eat," said Laura, "in real life," and I began to see, a little, what the attraction of Sunnyside must have been for her. It wasother people -those people who had always been and who would continue to beother, insofar as Laura was concerned. She longed to serve them, these other people. She longed, in some way, to join them. But she never could. It was the soup kitchen in Port Ticonderoga all over again.

"Laura, why did you do it? " I said as soon as we were alone. (How did you do it? had a simple answer: she'd got off the train in London and changed her ticket for a later train. At least she hadn't gone to some other city: we might never have found her then.)

"Richard killed Father," she said. "I can't live in his house. It's wrong."

"That's not really fair," I said. "Father died because of an unfortunate combination of circumstances." I felt ashamed of myself for saying that: it sounded like Richard.

"It may not be fair but it's true. Underneath, it's true," she said. "Anyway, I wanted a job."

"But why?"

"To show that we-to show that I could. That I, that we didn't have to…" She looked away from me, chewed on her finger.

"Have to what?"

"You know," she said. "All of this." She waved her hand at the frilled dressing table, the matching floral curtains. "I went to the nuns first. I went to the Star of the Sea Convent."

Oh God, I thought, not the nuns again. I thought we'd put paid to the nuns. "And what did they say?" I asked, in a kindly, disinterested manner.

"It was no good," said Laura. "They were very nice to me, but they said no. It wasn't just not being a Catholic. They said I didn't have a true vocation, I was just evading my duties. They said if I wanted to serve God, I should do it in the life to which he has called me." A pause. "But what life?" she said. "I have no life!"

She cried then, and I put my arms around her, the time-worn gesture from when she was little. Just stop howling. If I'd had a lump of brown sugar I would have given it to her, but we were well past the brown-sugar stage by then. Sugar was not going to help.

"How can we ever get out of here?" she wailed. "Before it's too late?" At least she had the sense to be frightened; she had more sense than I did. But I thought it was just adolescent melodrama. "Too late for what?" I asked her gently. A deep breath was all that was called for; a deep breath, some calm, some stocktaking. There was no need to panic.

I thought I could cope with Richard, with Winifred. I thought I could live like a mouse in the castle of the tigers, by creeping around out of sight inside the walls; by staying quiet, by keeping my head down. No: I give myself too much credit. I didn't see the danger. I didn't even know they were tigers. Worse: I didn't know I might become a tiger myself. I didn't know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. Anyone might, for that matter.

"Look on the bright side," I said to Laura in my best soothing tone. I patted her back. "I'll get you a cup of warm milk and then you can have a good long sleep. You'll feel better tomorrow." But she cried and cried, and would not be comforted.

Last night I dreamt I was wearing my costume from the Xanadu ball. I was supposed to be an Abyssinian maiden-the damsel with the dulcimer. It was green satin, that costume: a little bolero jacket with gold spangle trim, showing a lot of cleavage and midriff; green satin undershorts, translucent pantaloons. Lots of fake gold coins, worn as necklaces and looped over the forehead. A small, jaunty turban with a crescent pin. A nose veil. Some tawdry circus designer's idea of the East.

I thought I looked pretty nifty in it, until I realised, looking down at my drooping belly, my enlarged blue-veined knuckles, my shrivelled arms, that I was not the age I was then, but the age I am now.

I wasn't at the ball, however. I was all alone, or so it seemed at first, in the ruined glass conservatory at Avilion. Empty pots were strewn here and there; others, not empty, filled with dry earth and dead plants. One of the stone sphinxes was lying on the floor, tipped on its side, defaced with Magic Marker-names, initials, crude drawings. There was a hole in the glass roof. The place stank of cat.

The main house behind me was dark, deserted, everyone in it gone away. I'd been left behind in this ridiculous fancy dress. It was night, with a fingernail moon. By its light I could see that there was indeed a single plant left alive: a glossy sort of bush, with one white flower. Laura, I said. From over in the shadows, a man laughed.

Not much of a nightmare, you'd say. Wait till you try it. I woke up desolate.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Nonsense. It's all chemicals. I need to take steps, about these dreams. There must be a pill.

More snow today. Just looking out the window at it makes my fingers ache. I write at the kitchen table, as slowly as if engraving. The pen is heavy, hard to push, like a nail scratching on cement.

Autumn, 1935. The heat receded, the cold advanced. Frost on fallen leaves, then on leaves that were not fallen. Then on windows. I took joy in such details then. I liked breathing in. The space inside my lungs was all my own.

Meanwhile, things continued.

What was now referred to by Winifred as "Laura's little escapade" was covered up as much as possible. Richard told Laura if she talked about it to anyone else, especially anyone at her school, he would be bound to hear about it and would consider it a personal affront, as well as an attempt at sabotage. He'd fixed things up with the press: an alibi had been provided by the Newton-Dobbses, a couple of his highly placed pals-the Mr. was something in one of the railroads-who were prepared to swear that Laura had been with them at their place in Muskoka the whole time. It had been a last-minute holiday arrangement, and Laura thought the Newton-Dobbses had telephoned us and the Newton-Dobbses thought Laura had, and it was all a simple misunderstanding, and they hadn't realised Laura had been considered missing because while on vacation they never paid any attention to the news.

A likely story. But people believed it, or had to pretend they did. I suppose the Newton-Dobbses were spreading the real story around among their twenty closest friends, hush-hush and for your ears only, which was what Winifred would have done in their place, gossip being a commodity like any other. But at least it never hit the papers.

Laura was bundled up in an itchy kilt and a plaid tie and sent off to St. Cecilia's. She made no secret of detesting it. She said she didn't have to go there; she said that now she'd got one job she could get another one. She said these things to me, when Richard was present. She would not speak directly to him.

She was chewing her fingers, she was not eating enough, she was too thin. I became very worried about her, as I was expected to become, and, in fairness, as I should have been. But Richard said he was tired of this hysterical nonsense, and as for a job, he didn't want to hear anything more about it. Laura was far too young to be out on her own; she would get involved in something unsavoury, because the woods were full of those who made a business of preying on silly young girls like her. If she didn't like her school, she could be sent to another one, far away, in a different city, and if she ran away from that one he would put her into a Home for Wayward Girls along with all the other moral delinquents, and if that didn't do the trick there was always a clinic. A private clinic, with bars on the windows: if it was sackcloth and ashes she wanted, that would certainly fill the bill. She was a minor, he was in authority, and make no mistake about it, he would do exactly as he said. As she knew-as everyone knew-he was a man of his word.

His eyes tended to bulge out when he was angry, and they were bulging out now, but he said all of this in a calm, believable tone, and Laura believed him, and was intimidated. I tried to intervene-these threats were too harsh, he didn't understand about Laura and the way she took things literally-but he told me to keep out of it. What was needed was a firm hand. Laura had been mollycoddled enough. It was time for her to shape up.

Over the weeks, an uneasy truce was established. I tried to arrange things in the house so that the two of them never collided. Ships in the night, was what I hoped for.

Winifred had put in her oar over this, of course. She must have told Richard to take a stand, because Laura was the kind of girl who would bite the hand that fed her unless a muzzle was applied.

Richard consulted Winifred about everything, because she was the one who sympathised with him, propped him up, encouraged him generally. She was the one who propped him up socially, who promoted his interests in what she considered the right quarters. When would he make his bid for Parliament? Not quite yet, she'd whisper into whatever ear she was bending-the time was not yet ripe-but soon. They'd both decided that Richard was the man of the future, and that the woman standing behind him-didn't every successful man have one of those?-was her.

It certainly wasn't me. Our relative positions were now clear, hers and mine; or they'd always been clear to her, but they were now becoming clear to me as well. She was necessary to Richard, I on the other hand could always be replaced. My job was to open my legs and shut my mouth.

If that sounds brutal, it was. But it wasn't out of the ordinary.

Winifred had to keep me busy during daylight hours: she didn't want me loopy with boredom, she didn't want me going off the deep end. She put a good deal of thought into cooking up meaningless tasks for me, then rearranging my time and space so I would be at liberty to perform them. These tasks were never too exacting, because she made no secret of her opinion that I was a bit of a dumb bunny. I in my turn did nothing to discourage this view.

Thus the Downtown Foundlings' Cr ¨che charity ball, of which she was the convenor. She put me on the list of organisers, not only to keep me hopping but because it would reflect well on Richard. "Organisers" was a joke, she didn't think I was capable of organising my own shoelaces, so what cinder-sweeping chore could I be given? Envelope-addressing, she decided. She was right, I could do that. I was even good at it. I didn't have to think about it, and could spend the mental time elsewhere. ("Thank the Lord she hasone talent," I could hear her telling the Billies and Charlies, at bridge. "Oh, I forgot-two!" Gales of laughter.)

The Downtown Foundlings' Cr ¨che, in aid of slum children, was Winifred's best thing, or at least the charity ball was. It was a costume ball-such functions mostly were, because people at that time liked costumes. They liked them almost as much as they liked uniforms. Both served the same end: to avoid being who you were, you could pretend to be someone else. You could become bigger and more powerful, or more alluring and mysterious, just by putting on exotic clothes. Well, there was something to it.

Winifred had a committee for the ball, but everyone knew she made all the big decisions herself. She held the hoops, others jumped through them. It was she who'd picked the theme for 1936-"Xanadu." The rival Beaux Arts Ball had recently done "Tamurlane in Samarkand," and it had been a great success. Eastern themes couldn't miss, and surely everyone had been made to memorise "Kubla Khan" at school, so even lawyers-even doctors-evenbankers would know what Xanadu was. Their wives would know as a matter of course.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Winifred had the entire poem typed out and mimeographed and distributed to our committee-to get the ideas percolating, she said-and any suggestions from us were more than welcome, though we knew she had the entire thing mapped out in her head already. The poem would appear on the engraved invitation as well-gold lettering, with a gold-and-cerulean border of Arabic writing. Did anyone understand such writing? No, but it looked just lovely.

These functions were by invitation only. You were invited and then you paid through the nose, but the circle was very tight. Who was on the list became a matter of anxious anticipation, though only for those in doubt about their status. To expect an invitation and then not to receive one was a foretaste of Purgatory. I expect many tears were shed over such things, but in secret-in that world, you could never let it appear that you cared.

The beauty of Xanadu was (said Winifred, after she had read out the poem in her whisky voice-read it excellently, I'll give her that)-thebeauty of it was that with such a theme you could be as revealing or concealing as you might wish. The corpulent could swathe themselves in rich brocades, the svelte could come as slave girls or Persian dancers and show off everything but the kitchen sink. Gauzy skirts, bangles, tinkling ankle chains-the scope was practically infinite, and of course men loved to dress up as pashas and pretend they had harems. Though she doubted that she could talk anyone into playing the eunuchs, she added, to appreciative tittering.

Laura was too young for this ball. Winifred was planning a d ©but for her, a rite of passage that had not yet taken place, and until it did she was not considered eligible. However, she took quite an interest in the proceedings. I was very relieved to have her once more taking an interest in something. Certainly she was not taking an interest in her schoolwork: her marks had been abysmal.

Correction: it wasn't the proceedings she took an interest in, it was the poem. I knew it already, from Miss Violence, from Avilion, but Laura hadn't bothered much about it then. Now she read it over and over.

What was a demon-lover, she wanted to know? Why was the sea sunless, why was the ocean lifeless? Why did the sunny pleasure-dome have caves of ice? What was Mount Abora, and why was the Abyssinian maid singing about it? Why were the ancestral voices prophesying war?

I didn't know the answers to any of these questions. I know all of them now. Not the answers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge-I'm not sure he had any answers, since he was hopped up on drugs at the time-but my own answers. Here they are, for what they're worth.

The sacred river is alive. It flows to the lifeless ocean, because that's where all things that are alive end up. The lover is a demon-lover because he isn't there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that's what pleasure-domes have-after a while they become very cold, and after that they melt, and then where are you? All wet. Mount Abora was the Abyssinian maid's home, and she was singing about it because she couldn't get back to it. The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The snow fell, softly at first, then in hard pellets that stung the skin like needles. The sun set in the afternoon, the sky changed from washed blood to skim milk. Smoke poured from the chimneys, from the furnaces stoked with coal. The bread-wagon horses left piles of steaming brown buns on the street which then froze solid. Children threw them at one another. The clocks struck midnight, over and over, every midnight a deep blue-black riddled with icy stars, the moon white bone. I looked out the bedroom window, down to the sidewalk, through the branches of the chestnut tree. Then I turned out the light.

The Xanadu ball was the second Saturday in January. My costume had come that morning, in a box with armfuls of tissue paper. The smart thing to do was to rent your costume from Malabar's, because to have one specially made would be displaying too much of an effort. Now it was almost six o'clock and I was trying it on. Laura was in my room: she would often do her homework there, or make a show of doing it. "What are you supposed to be?" she said.

"The Abyssinian Maid," I said. What I would do for a dulcimer I wasn't yet sure. Perhaps a banjo, with ribbons added. Then I remembered that the only banjo I knew about was back at Avilion, in the attic, left over from my dead uncles. I would have to skip the dulcimer.

I didn't expect Laura to tell me I looked pretty, or nice even. She never did that: pretty andnice were not categories of thought for her. This time she said, "You aren't very Abyssinian. Abyssinians aren't supposed to be blonde."

"I can't help the colour of my hair," I said. "It's Winifred's fault. She should have chosen Vikings or something."

"Why are they all afraid of him?" said Laura.

"Afraid of who?" I said. (I hadn't considered the fear in this poem, only the pleasure. Thepleasure-dome. The pleasure-dome was where I really lived now-where I had my true being, unknown to those around me. With walls and towers girdled round, so nobody else could get in.)

"Listen," she said. She recited, with her eyes closed: Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"See, they're afraid of him," she said, "but why? Why Beware?"

"Really, Laura, I have no idea," I said. "It's just a poem. You can't always tell what poems mean. Maybe they think he's crazy."

"It's because he's too happy," said Laura. "He's drunk the milk of Paradise. It frightens people when you're too happy, in that way. Isn't that why?"

"Laura, don't keepat me," I said. "I don't know everything, I'm not a professor."

Laura was sitting on the floor, in her school kilt. She sucked on her knuckle, staring up at me, disappointed. I was disappointing her frequently of late. "I saw Alex Thomas the other day," she said.

I turned away quickly, adjusted my veil in the mirror. It was a fairly poor effect, the green satin: some Hollywood vamp in a desert movie. I comforted myself with the thought that everyone else would look equally faux. "Alex Thomas? Really?" I said. I should have displayed more surprise.

"Well, aren't you glad?"

"Glad about what?"

"Glad he's alive," she said. "Glad they haven't caught him."

"Of course I'm glad," I said. "But don't say anything to anyone. You wouldn't want them to track him down."

"You don't need to tell me that. I'm not a baby. That's why I didn't wave at him."

"Did he see you?" I said.

"No. He was just walking along the street. He had his coat collar up and his scarf over his chin, but I knew it was him. He had his hands in his pockets."

At the mention of hands, of pockets, a sharp pang went through me. "What street was this?"

"Our street," she said. "He was on the other side, looking at the houses. I think he was looking for us. He must know we live around here."

"Laura," I said, "have you still got a crush on Alex Thomas? Because if you do, you should try to get over it."

"I don't have a crush on him," she said with scorn. "I never had a crush. Crush is a horrible word. It really stinks. " She'd become less pious since going to school, and her language had become a good deal stronger. Stinks was in the ascendant.

"Whatever you want to call it, you should give it up. It's just not possible," I said gently. "It will only make you unhappy."

Laura put her arms around her knees. "Unhappy," she said. "What on earth do you know aboutunhappy?"