Postcards from Europe 1 page

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.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 544