The Love Of A Good Woman

My Mother’s Dream

During the night-or during the time she had been asleep- there had been a heavy fall of snow.

My mother looked out from a big arched window such as you find in a mansion or an old-fashioned public building. She looked down on lawns and shrubs, hedges, flower gardens, trees, all covered by snow that lay in heaps and cushions, not levelled or disturbed by wind. The white of it did not hurt your eyes as it does in sunlight. The white was the white of snow under a clear sky just before dawn. Everything was still; it was like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” except that the stars had gone out.

Yet something was wrong. There was a mistake in this scene. All the trees, all the shrubs and plants, were out in full summer leaf. The grass that showed underneath them, in spots sheltered from the snow, was fresh and green. Snow had settled overnight on the luxury of summer. A change of season unexplainable, unexpected. Also, everybody had gone away-though she couldn’t think who “everybody” was-and my mother was alone in the high spacious house amongst its rather formal trees and gardens.

She thought that whatever had happened would soon be made known to her. Nobody came, however. The telephone did not ring; the latch of the garden gate was not lifted. She could not hear any traffic, and she did not even know which way the street was- or the road, if she was out in the country. She had to get out of the house, where the air was so heavy and settled.

When she got outside she remembered. She remembered that she had left a baby out there somewhere, before the snow had fallen. Quite a while before the snow had fallen. This memory, this certainty, came over her with horror. It was as if she was awakening from a dream. Within her dream she awakened from a dream, to a knowledge of her responsibility and mistake. She had left her baby out overnight, she had forgotten about it. Left it exposed somewhere as if it was a doll she tired of. And perhaps it was not last night but a week or a month ago that she had done this. For a whole season or for many seasons she had left her baby out. She had been occupied in other ways. She might even have travelled away from here and just returned, forgetting what she was returning to.

She went around looking under hedges and broad-leaved plants. She foresaw how the baby would be shrivelled up. It would be dead, shrivelled and brown, its head like a nut, and on its tiny shut-up face there would be an expression not of distress but of bereavement, an old patient grief. There would not be any accusation of her, its mother-just the look of patience and helplessness with which it waited for its rescue or its fate.

The sorrow that came to my mother was the sorrow of the baby’s waiting and not knowing it waited for her, its only hope, when she had forgotten all about it. So small and new a baby that could not even turn away from the snow. She could hardly breathe for her sorrow. There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

What a reprieve, then, to find her baby lying in its crib. Lying on its stomach, its head turned to one side, its skin pale and sweet as snowdrops and the down on its head reddish like the dawn. Red hair like her own, on her perfectly safe and unmistakable baby. The joy to find herself forgiven.

The snow and the leafy gardens and the strange house had all withdrawn. The only remnant of the whiteness was the blanket in the crib. A baby blanket of light white wool, crumpled halfway down the baby’s back. In the heat, the real summer heat, the baby was wearing only a diaper and a pair of plastic pants to keep the sheet dry. The plastic pants had a pattern of butterflies.

My mother, still thinking no doubt about the snow and the cold that usually accompanies snow, pulled the blanket up to cover the baby’s bare back and shoulders, its red-downed head.

It is early morning when this happens in the real world. The world of July 1945. At a time when, on any other morning, it would be demanding its first feeding of the day, the baby sleeps on. The mother, though standing on her feet and with her eyes open, is still too far deep in sleep in her head to wonder about this. Baby and mother are worn out by a long battle, and the mother has forgotten even that at the moment. Some circuits are closed down; the most unrelenting quiet has settled on her brain and her baby’s. The mother-my mother-makes no sense of the daylight which is increasing every moment. She doesn’t understand that the sun is coming up as she stands there. No memory of the day before, or of what happened around midnight, comes up to jolt her. She pulls the blanket up over her baby’s head, over its mild, satisfied, sleeping profile. She pads back to her own room and falls down on the bed and is again, at once, unconscious.

The house in which this happens is nothing like the house in the dream. It is a one-and-a-half-story white wooden house, cramped but respectable, with a porch that comes to within a few feet of the sidewalk, and a bay window in the dining room looking out on a small hedged yard. It is on a backstreet in a small town that is indistinguishable-to an outsider-from a lot of other small towns to be found ten or fifteen miles apart in the once thickly populated farmland near Lake Huron. My father and his sisters grew up in this house, and the sisters and mother were still living here when my mother joined them-and I joined them too, being large and lively inside her-after my father was killed in the final weeks of the war in Europe.

My mother-Jill-is standing beside the dining-room table in the bright late afternoon. The house is full of people who have been invited back there after the memorial service in the church. They are drinking tea or coffee and managing to hold in their fingers the dinky sandwiches, or slices of banana bread, nut loaf, pound cake. The custard tarts or raisin tarts with their crumbly pastry are supposed to be eaten with a dessert fork off one of the small china plates that were painted with violets by Jill’s mother-in-law when she was a bride. Jill picks everything up with her fingers. Pastry crumbs have fallen, a raisin has fallen, and been smeared into the green velvet of her dress. It’s too hot a dress for the day, and it’s not a maternity dress at all but a loose sort of robe made for recitals, occasions when she plays her violin in public. The hem rides up in front, due to me. But it’s the only thing she owns that is large enough and good enough for her to wear at her husband’s memorial service.

What is this eating all about? People can’t help but notice. “Eating for two,” Ailsa says to a group of her guests, so that they won’t get the better of her by anything they say or don’t say about her sister-in-law.

Jill has been queasy all day, until suddenly in the church, when she was thinking how bad the organ was, she realized that she was, all of a sudden, as hungry as a wolf. All through “O Valiant Hearts” she was thinking of a fat hamburger dripping with meat juice and melted mayonnaise, and now she is trying to find what concoction of walnuts and raisins and brown sugar, what tooth-jabbing sweetness of coconut icing or soothing mouthful of banana bread or dollop of custard, will do as a substitute. Nothing will, of course, but she keeps on going. When her real hunger is satisfied her imaginary hunger is still working, and even more an irritability amounting almost to panic that makes her stuff into her mouth what she can hardly taste any longer. She couldn’t describe this irritability except to say it has something to do with furriness and tightness. The barberry hedge outside the window, thick and bristling in the sunlight, the feel of the velvet dress clinging to her damp armpits, the nosegays of curls-the same color as the raisins in the tarts-bunched on her sister-in-law Ailsa’s head, even the painted violets that look like scabs you could pick off the plate, all these things seem particularly horrid and oppressive to her though she knows they are quite ordinary. They seem to carry some message about her new and unexpected life.

Why unexpected? She has known for some time about me and she also knew that George Kirkham might be killed. He was in the air force, after all. (And around her in the Kirkhams’ house this afternoon people are saying-though not to her, his widow, or to his sisters-that he was just the sort you always knew would be killed. They mean because he was good-looking and high-spirited and the pride of his family, the one on whom all the hopes had been pinned.) She knew this, but she went ahead with her ordinary life, lugging her violin onto the streetcar on dark winter mornings, riding to the Conservatory where she practiced hour after hour within sound of others but alone in a dingy room with the radiator racket for company, the skin of her hands blotchy at first with the cold, then parched in the dry indoor heat. She went on living in a rented room with an ill-fitting window that let in flies in summer and a windowsill sprinkle of snow in winter, and dreaming- when she wasn’t sick-of sausages and meat pies and dark chunks of chocolate. At the Conservatory people treated her pregnancy tactfully, as if it was a tumor. It didn’t show for a long time anyway, as first pregnancies generally don’t on a big girl with a broad pelvis. Even with me turning somersaults she played in public. Majestically thickened, with her long red hair lying in a bush around her shoulders, her face broad and glowing, her expression full of somber concentration, she played a solo in her most important recital so far. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

She paid some attention to the world-she knew the war was ending. She thought that George might be back soon after I was born. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to go on living in her room then-she’d have to live somewhere with him. And she knew that I’d be there, but she thought of my birth as bringing something to an end rather than starting something. It would bring an end to the kicking in the permanent sore spot on one side of her belly and the ache in her genitals when she stands up and the blood rushes into them (as if she’d had a burning poultice laid there). Her nipples will no longer be large and dark and nubbly, and she won’t have to wind bandages around her legs with their swollen veins before she gets out of bed every morning. She won’t have to urinate every half hour or so, and her feet will shrink back into their ordinary shoes. She thinks that once I’m out I won’t give her so much trouble.

After she knew that George would not be coming back she thought about keeping me for a while in that same room. She got a book about babies. She bought the basic things that I would need. There was an old woman in the building who could look after me while she practiced. She would get a war widow’s pension and in six more months she would graduate from the Conservatory.

Then Ailsa came down on the train and collected her. Ailsa said, “We couldn’t leave you stuck down here all by yourself. Everybody wonders why you didn’t come up when George went overseas. It’s time you came now.”

“My family’s crackers,” George had told Jill. “Iona’s a nervous wreck and Ailsa should have been a sergeant major. And my mother’s senile.”

He also said, “Ailsa got the brains, but she had to quit school and go and work in the Post Office when my dad died. I got the looks and there wasn’t anything left for poor old Iona but the bad skin and the bad nerves.”

Jill met his sisters for the first time when they came to Toronto to see George off. They hadn’t been at the wedding, which had taken place two weeks before. Nobody was there but George and Jill and the minister and the minister’s wife and a neighbor called in to be the second witness. I was there as well, already tucked up inside Jill, but I was not the reason for the wedding and at the time nobody knew of my existence. Afterwards George insisted that he and Jill take some poker-faced wedding pictures of themselves in one of those do-it-yourself picture booths. He was in relentless high spirits. “That’ll fix them,” he said, when he looked at the pictures. Jill wondered if there was anybody special he meant to fix. Ailsa? Or the pretty girls, the cute and perky girls, who had run after him, writing him sentimental letters and knitting him argyle socks? He wore the socks when he could, he pocketed the presents, and he read the letters out in bars for a joke.

Jill had not had any breakfast before the wedding, and in the midst of it she was thinking of pancakes and bacon.

The two sisters were more normal-looking than she had expected. Though it was true about George getting the looks. He had a silky wave to his dark-blond hair and a hard gleeful glint in his eyes and a clean-cut enviable set of features. His only drawback was that he was not very tall. Just tall enough to look Jill in the eye. And to be an air force pilot.

“They don’t want tall guys for pilots,” he said. “I beat them out there. The beanpole bastards. Lots of guys in the movies are short. They stand on boxes for the kissing.”

(At the movies, George could be boisterous. He might hiss the kissing. He didn’t go in for it much in real life either. Let’s get to the action, he said.)

The sisters were short, too. They were named after places in Scotland, where their parents had gone on their honeymoon before the family lost its money. Ailsa was twelve years older than George, and Iona was nine years older. In the crowd at Union Station they looked dumpy and bewildered. Both of them wore new hats and suits, as if they were the ones who had recently been married. And both were upset because Iona had left her good gloves on the train. It was true that Iona had bad skin, though it wasn’t broken out at present and perhaps her acne days were over. It was lumpy with old scars and dingy under the pink powder. Her hair slipped out in droopy tendrils from under her hat and her eyes were teary, either because of Ailsa’s scolding or because her brother was going away to war. Ailsa’s hair was arranged in bunches of tight permanented curls, with her hat riding on top. She had shrewd pale eyes behind sparkle-rimmed glasses, and round pink cheeks, and a dimpled chin. Both she and Iona had tidy figures-high breasts and small waists and flaring hips-but on Iona this figure looked like something she had picked up by mistake and was trying to hide by stooping her shoulders and crossing her arms. Ailsa managed her curves assertively not provocatively, as if she was made of some sturdy ceramic. And both of them had George’s dark-blond coloring, but without his gleam. They didn’t seem to share his sense of humor either.

“Well I’m off,” George said. “I’m off to die a hero on the field at Passchendaele.” And Iona said, “Oh don’t say that. Don’t talk like that.” Ailsa twitched her raspberry mouth.

“I can see the lost-and-found sign from here,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s just for things you lose in the station or is it for things that they find in the trains? Passchendaele was in the First World War.”

“Was it? You sure? I’m too late?” said George, beating his hand on his chest.

And he was burned up a few months later in a training flight over the Irish Sea.

Ailsa smiles all the time. She says, “Well of course I am proud. I am. But I’m not the only one to lose somebody. He did what he had to do.” Some people find her briskness a bit shocking. But others say, “Poor Ailsa.” All that concentrating on George, and saving to send him to law school, and then he flouted her-he signed up; he went off and got himself killed. He couldn’t wait.

His sisters sacrificed their own schooling. Even getting their teeth straightened-they sacrificed that. Iona did go to nursing school, but as it turned out getting her teeth fixed would have served her better. Now she and Ailsa have ended up with a hero. Everybody grants it-a hero. The younger people present think it’s something to have a hero in the family. They think the importance of this moment will last, that it will stay with Ailsa and Iona forever. “O Valiant Hearts” will soar around them forever. Older people, those who remember the previous war, know that all they’ve ended up with is a name on the cenotaph. Because the widow, the girl feeding her face, will get the pension.

Ailsa is in a hectic mood partly because she has been up two nights in a row, cleaning. Not that the house wasn’t decently clean before. Nevertheless she felt the need to wash every dish, pot, and ornament, polish the glass on every picture, pull out the fridge and scrub behind it, wash the cellar steps off, and pour bleach in the garbage can. The very lighting fixture overhead, over the dining-room table, had to be taken apart, and every piece on it dunked in soapy water, rinsed, and rubbed dry and reassembled. And because of her work at the Post Office Ailsa couldn’t start this till after supper. She is the postmistress now, she could have given herself a day off, but being Ailsa she would never do that.

Now she’s hot under her rouge, twitchy in her dark-blue lace-collared crepe dress. She can’t stay still. She refills the serving plates and passes them around, deplores the fact that people’s tea may have got cold, hurries to make a fresh pot. Mindful of her guests’ comfort, asking after their rheumatism or minor ailments, smiling in the face of her tragedy, repeating over and over again that hers is a common loss, that she must not complain when so many others are in the same boat, that George would not want his friends to grieve but to be thankful that all together we have ended the war. All in a high and emphatic voice of cheerful reproof that people are used to from the Post Office. So that they are left with an uncertain feeling of perhaps having said the wrong thing, just as in the Post Office they may be made to understand that their handwriting cannot help but be a trial or their packages are done up sloppily.

Ailsa is aware that her voice is too high and that she is smiling too much and that she has poured out tea for people who said they didn’t want any more. In the kitchen, while warming the teapot, she says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m all wound up.”

The person she says this to is Dr. Shantz, her neighbor across the backyard.

“It’ll soon be over,” he says. “Would you like a bromide?”

His voice undergoes a change as the door from the dining room opens. The word “bromide” comes out firm and professional.

Ailsa’s voice changes too, from forlorn to valiant. She says, “Oh, no thank you. I’ll just try and keep going on my own.”

Iona’s job is supposed to be to watch over their mother, to see that she doesn’t spill her tea-which she may do not out of clumsiness but forgetfulness-and that she is taken away if she starts to sniffle and cry. But in fact Mrs. Kirkham’s manners are gracious most of the time and she puts people at ease more readily than Ailsa does. For a quarter of an hour at a time she understands the situation-or she seems to-and she speaks bravely and cogently about how she will always miss her son but is grateful she still has her daughters: Ailsa so efficient and reliable, a wonder as she’s always been, and Iona the soul of kindness. She even remembers to speak of her new daughter-in-law but perhaps gives a hint of being out of line when she mentions what most women of her age don’t mention at a social gathering, and with men listening. Looking at Jill and me, she says, “And we all have a comfort to come.”

Then passing from room to room or guest to guest, she forgets entirely, she looks around her own house and says, “Why are we here? What a lot of people-what are we celebrating? “And catching on to the fact that it all has something to do with George, she says, “Is it George’s wedding?” Along with her up-to-date information she has lost some of her mild discretion. “It’s not your wedding, is it?” she says to Iona. “No. I didn’t think so. You never had a boyfriend, did you?” A let’s-face-facts, devil-take-the-hindmost note has come into her voice. When she spots Jill she laughs.

“That’s not the bride, is it? Oh-oh. Now we understand.”

But the truth comes back to her as suddenly as it went away.

“Is there news?” she says. “News about George?” And it’s then that the weeping starts that Ailsa was afraid of.

“Get her out of the way if she starts making a spectacle,” Ailsa had said.

Iona isn’t able to get her mother out of the way-she has never been able to exert authority over anybody in her life-but Dr. Shantz’s wife catches the old woman’s arm.

“George is dead?” says Mrs. Kirkham fearfully, and Mrs. Shantz says, “Yes he is. But you know his wife is having a baby.”

Mrs. Kirkham leans against her; she crumples and says softly, “Could I have my tea?”

Everywhere my mother turns in that house, it seems she sees a picture of my father. The last and official one, of him in his uniform, sits on an embroidered runner on the closed sewing machine in the bay of the dining-room window. Iona put flowers around it, but Ailsa took them away. She said it made him look too much like a Catholic saint. Hanging above the stairs there is one of him at six years old, out on the sidewalk, with his knee in his wagon, and in the room where Jill sleeps there’s one of him beside his bicycle, with his Free Press newspaper sack. Mrs. Kirkham’s room has the one of him dressed for the grade-eight operetta, with a gold cardboard crown on his head. Being unable to carry a tune, he couldn’t have a leading role, but he was of course picked for the best background role, that of the king.

The hand-tinted studio photo over the buffet shows him at the age of three, a blurred blond tot dragging a rag doll by one leg. Ailsa thought of taking that down because it might seem tear-jerking, but she left it up rather than show a bright patch on the wallpaper. And no one said anything about it but Mrs. Shantz, who paused and said what she had said sometimes before, and not tearfully but with a faintly amused appreciation.

“Ah-Christopher Robin.”

People were used to not paying much attention to what Mrs. Shantz said.

In all of his pictures George looks bright as a dollar. There’s always a sunny dip of hair over his brow, unless he’s wearing his officer’s hat or his crown. And even when he was little more than an infant he looked as if he knew himself to be a capering, calculating, charming sort of fellow. The sort who never let people alone, who whipped them up to laugh. At his own expense occasionally, but usually at other people’s. Jill recalls when she looks at him how he drank but never seemed drunk and how he occupied himself getting other drunk people to confess to him their fears, prevarications, virginity, or two-timing, which he would then turn into jokes or humiliating nicknames that his victims pretended to enjoy. For he had legions of followers and friends, who maybe latched on to him out of fear-or maybe just because, as was always said of him, he livened things up. Wherever he was was the center of the room, and the air around him crackled with risk and merriment.

What was Jill to make of such a lover? She was nineteen when she met him, and nobody had ever claimed her before. She couldn’t understand what attracted him, and she could see that nobody else could understand it, either. She was a puzzle to most people of her own age, but a dull puzzle. A girl whose life was given over to the study of the violin and who had no other interests.

That was not quite true. She would snuggle under her shabby quilts and imagine a lover. But he was never a shining cutup like George. She thought of some warm and bearlike fellow, or of a musician a decade older than herself and already legendary, with a fierce potency. Her notions of love were operatic, though that was not the sort of music she most admired. But George made jokes when he made love; he pranced around her room when he had finished; he made rude and infantile noises. His brisk performances brought her little of the pleasure she knew from her assaults on herself, but she was not exactly disappointed.

Dazed at the speed of things was more like it. And expecting to be happy-grateful and happy-when her mind caught up with physical and social reality. George’s attentions, and her marriage-those were all like a brilliant extension of her life. Lighted rooms showing up full of a bewildering sort of splendor. Then came the bomb or the hurricane, the not unlikely stroke of disaster, and the whole extension was gone. Blown up and vanished, leaving her with the same space and options she’d had before. She had lost something, certainly. But not something she had really got hold of, or understood as more than a hypothetical layout of the future.

She has had enough to eat, now. Her legs ache from standing so long. Mrs. Shantz is beside her, saying, “Have you had a chance to meet any of George’s local friends?”

She means the young people keeping to themselves in the hall doorway. A couple of nice-looking girls, a young man still wearing a naval uniform, others. Looking at them, Jill thinks clearly that no one is really sorry. Ailsa perhaps, but Ailsa has her own reasons. No one is really sorry George is dead. Not even the girl who was crying in church and looks as if she will cry some more. Now that girl can remember that she was in love with George and think that he was in love with her-in spite of all-and never be afraid of what he may do or say to prove her wrong. And none of them will have to wonder, when a group of people clustered around George has started laughing, whom they are laughing at or what George is telling them. Nobody will have to strain to keep up with him or figure out how to stay in his good graces anymore.

It doesn’t occur to her that if he had lived George might have become a different person, because she doesn’t think of becoming a different person herself.

She says, “No,” with a lack of enthusiasm that causes Mrs. Shantz to say, “I know. It’s hard meeting new people. Particularly-if I was you I would rather go and lie down.”

Jill was almost sure she was going to say “go and have a drink.” But there’s nothing being offered here, only tea and coffee. Jill hardly drinks anyway. She can recognize the smell on someone’s breath, though, and she thought she smelled it on Mrs. Shantz.

“Why don’t you?” says Mrs. Shantz. “These things are a great strain. I’ll tell Ailsa. Go on now.”

Mrs. Shantz is a small woman with fine gray hair, bright eyes, and a wrinkled, pointed face. Every winter she spends a month by herself in Florida. She has money. The house that she and her husband built for themselves, behind the Kirkhams’ house, is long and low and blindingly white, with curved corners and expanses of glass bricks. Dr. Shantz is twenty or twenty-five years younger than she is-a thickset, fresh, and amiable-looking man with a high smooth forehead and fair curly hair. They have no children. It is believed that she has some, from a first marriage, but they don’t come to visit her. In fact the story is that Dr. Shantz was her son’s friend, brought home from college, and that he fell in love with his friend’s mother, she fell in love with her son’s friend, there was a divorce, and here they are married, living in luxurious, closemouthed exile.

Jill did smell whiskey. Mrs. Shantz carries a flask whenever she goes to a gathering of which-as she says-she can have no reasonable hopes. Drink does not make her fall about or garble her words or pick fights or throw her arms about people. The truth may be that she’s always a little bit drunk but never really drunk. She is used to letting the alcohol enter her body in a reasonable, reassuring way, so that her brain cells never get soaked or quite dried out. The only giveaway is the smell (which many people in this dry town attribute to some medicine she has to take or even to an ointment that she has to rub on her chest). That, and perhaps a deliberateness about her speech, the way she seems to clear a space around each word. She says things of course which a woman brought up around here would not say. She tells things on herself. She tells about being mistaken every once in a while for her husband’s mother. She says most people go into a tailspin when they discover their mistake, they’re so embarrassed. But some women-a waitress, maybe-will fasten on Mrs. Shantz quite a dirty look, as if to say, “What’s he doing wasted on you?”

And Mrs. Shantz just says to them, “I know. It isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair and you might as well get used to it.”

There isn’t any way this afternoon that she can space her sips properly. The kitchen and even the poky pantry behind it are places where women can be coming and going at any time. She has to go upstairs to the bathroom, and that not too often. When she does that late in the afternoon, a little while after Jill has disappeared, she finds the bathroom door locked. She thinks of nipping into one of the bedrooms and is wondering which one is empty, which occupied by Jill. Then she hears Jill’s voice coming from the bathroom, saying, “Just a minute,” or something like that. Something quite ordinary, but the tone of voice is strained and frightened.

Mrs. Shantz takes a quick swallow right there in the hall, seizing the excuse of emergency.

“Jill? Are you all right? Can you let me in?”

Jill is on her hands and knees, trying to mop up the puddle on the bathroom floor. She has read about the water breaking-just as she has read about contractions, show, transition stage, placenta-but just the same the escape of warm fluid surprised her. She has to use toilet paper, because Ailsa took all the regular towels away and put out the smooth scraps of embroidered linen called guest towels.

She holds on to the rim of the tub to pull herself up. She unbolts the door and that’s when the first pain astonishes her. She is not to have a single mild pain, or any harbingers or orchestrated first stage of labor; it’s all to be an unsparing onslaught and ripping headlong delivery.

“Easy,” says Mrs. Shantz, supporting her as well as she can. “Just tell me which room is yours, we’ll get you lying down.”

Before they even reach the bed Jill’s fingers dig into Mrs. Shantz’s thin arm to leave it black and blue.

“Oh, this is fast,” Mrs. Shantz says. “This is a real mover and shaker for a first baby. I’m going to get my husband.”

In that way I was born right in the house, about ten days early if Jill’s calculations were to be relied on. Ailsa had barely time to get the company cleared out before the place was filled with Jill’s noise, her disbelieving cries and the great shameless grunts that followed.

Even if a mother had been taken by surprise and had given birth at home, it was usual by that time to move her and the baby into the hospital afterwards. But there was some sort of summer flu in town, and the hospital had filled up with the worst cases, so Dr. Shantz decided that Jill and I would be better off at home. Iona after all had finished part of her nurse’s training, and she could take her two-week holiday now, to look after us.

Jill really knew nothing about living in a family. She had grown up in an orphanage. From the age of six to sixteen she had slept in a dormitory. Lights turned on and off at a specified time, furnace never operating before or beyond a specified date. A long oilcloth-covered table where they ate and did their homework, a factory across the street. George had liked the sound of that. It would make a girl tough, he said. It would make her self-possessed, hard and solitary. It would make her the sort who would not expect any romantic nonsense. But the place had not been run in such a heartless way as perhaps he thought, and the people who ran it had not been ungenerous. Jill was taken to a concert, with some others, when she was twelve years old, and there she decided that she must learn to play the violin. She had already fooled around with the piano at the orphanage. Somebody took enough interest to get her a secondhand, very second-rate violin, and a few lessons, and this led, finally, to a scholarship at the Conservatory. There was a recital for patrons and directors, a party with best dresses, fruit punch, speeches, and cakes. Jill had to make a little speech herself, expressing gratitude, but the truth was that she took all this pretty much for granted. She was sure that she and some violin were naturally, fatefully connected, and would have come together without human help.

In the dormitory she had friends, but they went off early to factories and offices and she forgot about them. At the high school that the orphans were sent to, a teacher had a talk with her. The words “normal” and “well rounded” came up in the talk. The teacher seemed to think that music was an escape from something or a substitute for something. For sisters and brothers and friends and dates. She suggested that Jill spread her energy around instead of concentrating on one thing. Loosen up, play volleyball, join the school orchestra if music was what she wanted.

Jill started to avoid that particular teacher, climbing the stairs or going round the block so as not to have to speak to her. Just as she stopped reading any page from which the words “well rounded” or the word “popular” leapt out at her.

At the Conservatory it was easier. There she met people quite as un-well rounded, as hard driven, as herself. She formed a few rather absentminded and competitive friendships. One of her friends had an older brother who was in the air force, and this brother happened to be a victim and worshipper of George Kirkham’s. He and George dropped in on a family Sunday-night supper, at which Jill was a guest. They were on their way to get drunk somewhere else. And that was how George met Jill. My father met my mother.

There had to be somebody at home all the time, to watch Mrs. Kirkham. So Iona worked the night shift at the bakery. She decorated cakes-even the fanciest wedding cakes-and she got the first round of bread loaves in the oven at five o’clock. Her hands, which shook so badly that she could not serve anybody a teacup, were strong and clever and patient, even inspired, at any solitary job.

One morning after Ailsa had gone off to work-this was during the short time that Jill was in the house before I was born-Iona hissed from the bedroom as Jill was going by. As if there was a secret. But who was there now in the house to keep a secret from? It couldn’t be Mrs. Kirkham.

Iona had to struggle to get a stuck drawer of her bureau open. “Darn,” she said, and giggled. “Darn it. There.”

The drawer was full of baby clothes-not plain necessary shirts and nightgowns such as Jill had bought at a shop that sold seconds, factory rejects, in Toronto, but knitted bonnets, sweaters and bootees and soakers, handmade tiny gowns. All possible pastel colors or combinations of colors-no blue or pink prejudice- with crocheted trimming and minute embroidered flowers and birds and lambs. The sort of stuff that Jill had barely known existed. She would have known, if she had done any thorough research in baby departments or peering into baby carriages, but she hadn’t.

“Of course I don’t know what you’ve got,” Iona said. “You may have got so many things already, or maybe you don’t like homemade, I don’t know-” Her giggling was a kind of punctuation of speech and it was also an extension of her tone of apology. Everything she said, every look and gesture, seemed to be clogged up, overlaid with a sticky honey or snuffled mucus of apology, and Jill did not know how to deal with this.

“It’s really nice,” she said flatly.

“Oh no, I didn’t know if you’d even want it. I didn’t know if you’d like it at all.” “It’s lovely.”

“I didn’t do it all, I bought some of it. I went to the church bazaar and the Hospital Auxiliary, their bazaar, I just thought it would be nice, but if you don’t like it or maybe you don’t need it I can just put it in the Missionary Bale.”

“I do need it,” Jill said. “I haven’t got anything like this at all.”

“Haven’t you really? What I did isn’t so good, but maybe what the church ladies did or the Auxiliary, maybe you’d think that was all right.”

Was this what George had meant about Iona’s being a nervous wreck? (According to Ailsa, her breakdown at the nursing school had been caused by her being a bit too thin-skinned and the supervisor’s being a bit too hard on her.) You might think she was clamoring for reassurance, but whatever reassurance you tried seemed to be not enough, or not to get through to her. Jill felt as if Iona’s words and giggles and sniffles and damp looks (no doubt she had damp hands as well) were things crawling on her-on Jill-mites trying to get under her skin.

But this was something she got used to, in time. Or Iona toned it down. Both she and Iona felt relief-it was as if a teacher had gone out of the room-when the door closed behind Ailsa in the morning. They took to having a second cup of coffee, while Mrs. Kirkham washed the dishes. She did this job very slowly- looking around for the drawer or shelf where each item should go-and with some lapses. But with rituals, too, which she never omitted, such as scattering the coffee grounds on a bush by the kitchen door.

“She thinks the coffee makes it grow,” Iona whispered. “Even if she puts it on the leaves not the ground. Every day we have to take the hose and rinse it off.”

Jill thought that Iona sounded like the girls who were most picked on at the orphanage. They were always eager to pick on somebody else. But once you got Iona past her strung-out apologies or barricades of humble accusations (“Of course I’m the last person they’d consult about anything down at the shop,” “Of course Ailsa wouldn’t listen to my opinion,” “Of course George never made any secret about how he despised me”) you might get her to talk about fairly interesting things. She told Jill about the house that had been their grandfather’s and was now the center wing of the hospital, about the specific shady deals that had lost their father his job, and about a romance that was going on between two married people at the bakery. She also mentioned the supposed previous history of the Shantzes, and even the fact that Ailsa was soft on Dr. Shantz. The shock treatment Iona had had after her nervous breakdown seemed perhaps to have blown a hole in her discretion, and the voice that came through this hole-once all the disguising rubbish had been cleared away-was baleful and sly.

And Jill might as well spend her time chatting-her fingers had got too puffy now to try to play the violin.

And then I was born and everything changed, especially for Iona.

Jill had to stay in bed for a week, and even after she got up she moved like a stiff old woman and breathed warily each time she lowered herself into a chair. She was all painfully stitched together, and her stomach and breasts were bound tight as a mummy’s-that was the custom then. Her milk came in plentifully; it was leaking through the binding and onto the sheets. Iona loosened the binding and tried to connect the nipple to my mouth. But I would not take it. I refused to take my mother’s breast. I screamed blue murder. The big stiff breast might just as well have been a snouted beast rummaging in my face. Iona held me, she gave me a little warm boiled water, and I quieted down. I was losing weight, though. I couldn’t live on water. So Iona mixed up a formula and took me out of Jill’s arms where I stiffened and wailed. Iona rocked and soothed me and touched my cheek with the rubber nipple and that turned out to be what I preferred. I drank the formula greedily and kept it down. Iona’s arms and the nipple that she was in charge of became my chosen home. Jill’s breasts had to be bound even tighter, and she had to forgo liquids

(remember, this was in the hot weather) and endure the ache until her milk dried up.

“What a monkey, what a monkey,” crooned Iona. “You are a monkey, you don’t want your mommy’s good milk.”

I soon got fatter and stronger. I could cry louder. I cried if anybody but Iona tried to hold me. I rejected Ailsa and Dr. Shantz with his thoughtfully warmed hands, but of course it was my aversion to Jill that got the most attention.

Once Jill was out of bed Iona got her sitting in the chair where she herself usually sat to feed me; she put her own blouse around Jill’s shoulders and the bottle in Jill’s hand.

No use, I was not fooled. I batted my cheek against the bottle and straightened my legs and hardened my abdomen into a ball. I would not accept the substitution. I cried. I would not give in.

My cries were still thin new-baby cries, but they were a disturbance in the house, and Iona was the only person who had the power to stop them. Touched or spoken to by a non-Iona, I cried. Put down to sleep, not rocked by Iona, I cried myself into exhaustion and slept for ten minutes and woke ready to go at it again. I had no good times or fussy times. I had the Iona-times and the Iona-desertion-times, which might become-oh, worse and worse-the other-people-times, mostly Jill-times.

How could Iona go back to work, then, once her two weeks were up? She couldn’t. There wasn’t any question of it. The bakery had to get someone else. Iona had gone from being the most negligible to being the most important person in the house; she was the one who stood between those who lived there and constant discordance, unanswerable complaint. She had to be up at all hours to keep the household in any sort of ease. Dr. Shantz was concerned; even Ailsa was concerned.

“Iona, don’t wear yourself out.”

And yet a wonderful change had taken place. Iona was pale but her skin glowed, as if she had finally passed out of adolescence. She could look anybody in the eye. And there was no more trembling, hardly any giggling, no sly cringing in her voice, which had grown as bossy as Ailsa’s and more joyful. (Never more joyful than when she was scolding me for my attitude to Jill.)

“Iona’s in seventh heaven-she just adores that baby,” Ailsa told people. But in fact Iona’s behavior seemed too brisk for adoration. She did not care how much noise she made, quelling mine. She tore up the stairs calling breathlessly, “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold your horses.” She would walk around with me carelessly plastered to her shoulder, held with one hand, while the other hand accomplished some task connected with my maintenance. She ruled in the kitchen, commandeering the stove for the sterilizer, the table for the mixing of the formula, the sink for the baby wash. She swore cheerfully, even in Ailsa’s presence, when she had misplaced or spilled something.

She knew herself to be the only person who didn’t wince, who didn’t feel the distant threat of annihilation, when I sent up my first signal wail. Instead, she was the one whose heart jumped into double time, who felt like dancing, just from the sense of power she had, and gratitude.

Once her bindings were off and she’d seen the flatness of her stomach, Jill took a look at her hands. The puffiness seemed to be all gone. She went downstairs and got her violin out of the closet and took off its cover. She was ready to try some scales.

This was on a Sunday afternoon. Iona had lain down for a nap, one ear always open to hear my cry. Mrs. Kirkham too was lying down. Ailsa was painting her fingernails in the kitchen. Jill began to tune the violin.

My father and my father’s family had no real interest in music. They didn’t quite know this. They thought that the intolerance or even hostility they felt towards a certain type of music (this showed even in the way they pronounced the word “classical”) was based on a simple strength of character, an integrity and a determination not to be fooled. As if music that departed from a simple tune was trying to put something over on you, and everybody knew this, deep down, but some people-out of pretentiousness, from want of simplicity and honesty-would never admit that it was so. And out of this artificiality and spineless tolerance came the whole world of symphony orchestras, opera, and ballet, concerts that put people to sleep.

Most of the people in this town felt the same way. But because she hadn’t grown up here Jill did not understand the depth of this feeling, the taken-for-granted extent of it. My father had never made a parade of it, or a virtue of it, because he didn’t go in for virtues. He had liked the idea of Jill’s being a musician-not because of the music but because it made her an odd choice, as did her clothes and her way of living and her wild hair. Choosing her, he showed people what he thought of them. Showed those girls who had hoped to get their hooks in him. Showed Ailsa.

Jill had closed the curtained glass doors of the living room and she tuned up quite softly. Perhaps no sound escaped. Or if Ailsa heard something in the kitchen, she might have thought it was a sound from outdoors, a radio in the neighborhood.

Now Jill began to play her scales. It was true that her fingers were no longer puffy, but they felt stiff. Her whole body felt stiff, her stance was not quite natural, she felt the instrument clamped onto her in a distrustful way. But no matter, she would get into her scales. She was sure that she had felt this way before, after she’d had flu, or when she was very tired, having overstrained herself practicing, or even for no reason at all.

I woke without a whimper of discontent. No warning, no buildup. Just a shriek, a waterfall of shrieks descended on the house, a cry unlike any cry I’d managed before. The letting loose of a new flood of unsuspected anguish, a grief that punished the world with its waves full of stones, the volley of woe sent down from the windows of the torture chamber.

Iona was up at once, alarmed for the first time at any noise made by me, crying, “What is it, what is it?”

And Ailsa, rushing around to shut the windows, was calling out, “It’s the fiddle, it’s the fiddle.” She threw open the doors of the living room.

“Jill. Jill. This is awful. This is just awful. Don’t you hear your baby?”

She had to wrench out the screen under the living-room window, so that she could get it down. She had been sitting in her kimono to do her nails, and now a boy going by on a bicycle looked in and saw her kimono open over her slip.

“My God,” she said. She hardly ever lost control of herself to this extent. “Will you put that thing away.”

Jill set her violin down.

Ailsa ran out into the hall and called up to Iona. “It’s Sunday. Can’t you get it to stop?”

Jill walked speechlessly and deliberately out to the kitchen, and there was Mrs. Kirkham in her stocking feet, clinging to the counter.

“What’s the matter with Ailsa?” she said. “What did Iona do?”

Jill went out and sat down on the back step. She looked across at the glaring, sunlit back wall of the Shantzes’ white house. All around were other hot backyards and hot walls of other houses. Inside them people well known to each other by sight and by name and by history. And if you walked three blocks east from here or five blocks west, six blocks south or ten blocks north, you would come to walls of summer crops already sprung high out of the earth, fenced fields of hay and wheat and corn. The fullness of the country. Nowhere to breathe for the reek of thrusting crops and barnyards and jostling munching animals. Woodlots at a distance beckoning like pools of shade, of peace and shelter, but in reality they were boiling up with bugs.

How can I describe what music is to Jill? Forget about landscapes and visions and dialogues. It is more of a problem, I would say, that she has to work out strictly and daringly, and that she has taken on as her responsibility in life. Suppose then that the tools that serve her for working on this problem are taken away. The problem is still there in its grandeur and other people sustain it, but it is removed from her. For her, just the back step and the glaring wall and my crying. My crying is a knife to cut out of her life all that isn’t useful. To me.

“Come in,” says Ailsa through the screen door. “Come on in. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. Come in, people will see.”

By evening the whole episode could be passed off lightly. “You must’ve heard the caterwauling over here today,” said Ailsa to the Shantzes. They had asked her over to sit on their patio, while Iona settled me to sleep.

“Baby isn’t a fan of the fiddle apparently. Doesn’t take after Mommy.”

Even Mrs. Shantz laughed.

“An acquired taste.”

Jill heard them. At least she heard the laughing, and guessed what it was about. She was lying on her bed reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which she had helped herself to from the bookcase, without understanding that she should ask Ailsa’s permission. Every so often the story blanked out on her and she heard those laughing voices over in the Shantzes’ yard, then the next-door patter of Iona’s adoration, and she broke out in a sullen sweat. In a fairy tale she would have risen off the bed with the strength of a young giantess and gone through the house breaking furniture and necks.

When I was almost six weeks old, Ailsa and Iona were supposed to take their mother on an annual overnight visit to Guelph, to stay with some cousins. Iona wanted to take me along. But Ailsa brought in Dr. Shantz to convince her that it was not a good idea to take a small baby on such a trip in hot weather. Then Iona wanted to stay at home.

“I can’t drive and look after Mother both,” said Ailsa.

She said that Iona was getting too wrapped up in me, and that a day and a half looking after her own baby was not going to be too much for Jill.

“Is it, Jill?”

Jill said no.

Iona tried to pretend it wasn’t that she wanted to stay with me. She said that driving on a hot day made her carsick.

“You don’t drive, you just have to sit there,” Ailsa said. “What about me? I’m not doing it for fun. I’m doing it because they expect us.”

Iona had to sit in the back, which she said made her carsickness worse. Ailsa said it wouldn’t look right to put their mother there. Mrs. Kirkham said she didn’t mind. Ailsa said no. Iona rolled down the window as Ailsa started the car. She fixed her eyes on the window of the upstairs room where she had put me down to sleep after my morning bath and bottle. Ailsa waved to Jill, who stood at the front door.

“Goodbye little mother,” she called, in a cheerful, challenging voice that reminded Jill somehow of George. The prospect of getting away from the house and the new threat of disruption that was lodged in it seemed to have lifted Ailsa’s spirits. And perhaps it also felt good to her-felt reassuring-to have Iona back in her proper place.

It was about ten o’clock in the morning when they left, and the day ahead was to be the longest and the worst in Jill’s experience. Not even the day of my birth, her nightmare labor, could compare to it. Before the car could have reached the next town, I woke in distress, as if I could feel Iona’s being removed from me. Iona had fed me such a short time before that Jill did not think I could possibly be hungry. But she discovered that I was wet, and though she had read that babies did not need to be changed every time they were found wet and that wasn’t usually what made them cry, she decided to change me. It wasn’t the first time she had done this, but she had never done it easily, and in fact Iona had taken over more often than not and got the job finished. I made it as hard as I could-I flailed my arms and legs, arched my back, tried my best to turn over, and of course kept up my noise. Jill’s hands shook, she had trouble driving the pins through the cloth. She pretended to be calm, she tried talking to me, trying to imitate Iona’s baby talk and fond cajoling, but it was no use, such stumbling insincerity enraged me further. She picked me up once she had my diaper pinned, she tried to mold me to her chest and shoulder, but I stiffened as if her body was made of red-hot needles. She sat down, she rocked me. She stood up, she bounced me. She sang to me the sweet words of a lullaby that were filled and trembling with her exasperation, her anger, and something that could readily define itself as loathing.

We were monsters to each other. Jill and I.

At last she put me down, more gently than she would have liked to do, and I quieted, in my relief it seemed at getting away from her. She tiptoed from the room. And it wasn’t long before I started up again.

So it continued. I didn’t cry nonstop. I would take breaks of two or five or ten or twenty minutes. When the time came for her to offer me the bottle I accepted it, I lay in her arm stiffly and snuffled warningly as I drank. Once half the milk was down I returned to the assault. I finished the bottle eventually, almost absent-mindedly, between wails. I dropped off to sleep and she put me down. She crept down the stairs; she stood in the hall as if she had to judge a safe way to go. She was sweating from her ordeal and from the heat of the day. She moved through the precious brittle silence into the kitchen and dared to put the coffeepot on the stove.

Before the coffee was perked I sent a meat cleaver cry down on her head.

She realized that she had forgotten something. She hadn’t burped me after the bottle. She went determinedly upstairs and picked me up and walked with me patting and rubbing my angry back, and in a while I burped, but I didn’t stop crying and she gave up; she laid me down.

What is it about an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm-insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating-it comes out of a rage that can’t be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.

All Jill can do is walk around. Up and down the living-room rug, round and round the dining-room table, out to the kitchen where the clock tells her how slowly, slowly time is passing. She can’t stay still to take more than a sip of her coffee. When she gets hungry she can’t stop to make a sandwich but eats cornflakes out of her hands, leaving a trail all over the house. Eating and drinking, doing any ordinary thing at all, seem as risky as doing such things in a little boat out in the middle of a tempest or in a house whose beams are buckling in an awful wind. You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries-my cries-are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass. I don’t allow escape.

The house is shut up like a box. Some of Ailsa’s sense of shame has rubbed off on Jill, or else she’s been able to manufacture some shame of her own. A mother who can’t appease her own baby- what is more shameful? She keeps the doors and windows shut. And she doesn’t turn the portable floor fan on because in fact she’s forgotten about it. She doesn’t think anymore in terms of practical relief. She doesn’t think that this Sunday is one of the hottest days of the summer and maybe that is what is the matter with me. An experienced or instinctive mother would surely have given me an airing instead of granting me the powers of a demon. Prickly heat would have been what came to her mind, instead of rank despair.

Sometime in the afternoon, Jill makes a stupid or just desperate decision. She doesn’t walk out of the house and leave me. Stuck in the prison of my making, she thinks of a space of her own, an escape within. She gets out her violin, which she has not touched since the day of the scales, the attempt that Ailsa and Iona have turned into a family joke. Her playing can’t wake me up because I’m wide awake already, and how can it make me any angrier than I am?

In a way she does me honor. No more counterfeit soothing, no more pretend lullabies or concern for tummy-ache, no petsy-wetsy whatsamatter. Instead she will play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the piece she played at her recital and must play again at her examination to get her graduating diploma.

The Mendelssohn is her choice-rather than the Beethoven Violin Concerto which she more passionately admires-because she believes the Mendelssohn will get her higher marks. She thinks she can master-has mastered-it more fully; she is confident that she can show off and impress the examiners without the least fear of catastrophe. This is not a work that will trouble her all her life, she has decided; it is not something she will struggle with and try to prove herself at forever.

She will just play it.

She tunes up, she does a few scales, she attempts to banish me from her hearing. She knows she’s stiff, but this time she’s prepared for that. She expects her problems to lessen as she gets into the music.

She starts to play it, she goes on playing, she goes on and on, she plays right through to the end. And her playing is terrible. It’s a torment. She hangs on, she thinks this must change, she can change it, but she can’t. Everything is off, she plays as badly as Jack Benny does in one of his resolute parodies. The violin is bewitched, it hates her. It gives her back a stubborn distortion of everything she intends. Nothing could be worse than this-it’s worse than if she looked in the mirror and saw her reliable face caved in, sick and leering. A trick played on her that she couldn’t believe, and would try to disprove by looking away and looking back, away and back, over and over again. That is how she goes on playing, trying to undo the trick. But not succeeding. She gets worse, if anything; sweat pours down her face and arms and the sides of her body, and her hand slips-there is simply no bottom to how badly she can play.

Finished. She is finished altogether. The piece that she mastered months ago and perfected since, so that nothing in it remained formidable or even tricky, has completely defeated her.

It has shown her to herself as somebody emptied out, vandalized. Robbed overnight.

She doesn’t give up. She does the worst thing. In this state of desperation she starts in again; she will try the Beethoven. And of course it’s no good, it’s worse and worse, and she seems to be howling, heaving inside. She sets the bow and the violin down on the living-room sofa, then picks them up and shoves them underneath it, getting them out of sight because she has a picture of herself smashing and wrecking them against a chair back, in a sickening dramatic display.

I haven’t given up in all this time. Naturally I wouldn’t, against such competition.

Jill lies down on the hard sky-blue brocade sofa where nobody ever lies or even sits, unless there’s company, and she actually falls asleep. She wakes up after who knows how long with her hot face pushed down into the brocade, its pattern marked on her cheek, her mouth drooling a little and staining the sky-blue material. My racket still or again going on rising and falling like a hammering headache. And she has got a headache, too. She gets up and pushes her way-that’s what it feels like-through the hot air to the kitchen cupboard where Ailsa keeps the 222’s. The thick air makes her think of sewage. And why not? While she slept I dirtied my diaper, and its ripe smell has had time to fill the house.

222’s. Warm another bottle. Climb the stairs. She changes the diaper without lifting me from the crib. The sheet as well as the diaper is a mess. The 222’s are not working yet and her headache increases in fierceness as she bends over. Haul the mess out, wash off my scalded parts, pin on a clean diaper, and take the dirty diaper and sheet into the bathroom to be scrubbed off in the toilet. Put them in the pail of disinfectant which is already full to the brim because the usual baby wash has not been done today. Then get to me with the bottle. I quiet again enough to suck. It’s a wonder I have the energy left to do that, but I do. The feeding is more than an hour late, and I have real hunger to add to-but maybe also subvert-my store of grievance. I suck away, I finish the bottle, and then worn out I go to sleep, and this time actually stay asleep.

Jill’s headache dulls. Groggily, she washes out my diapers and shirts and gowns and sheets. Scrubs them and rinses them and even boils the diapers to defeat the diaper rash to which I am prone. She wrings them all out by hand. She hangs them up indoors because the next day is Sunday, and Ailsa, when she returns, will not want to see anything hanging outdoors on Sunday. Jill would just as soon not have to appear outside, anyway, especially now with evening thickening and people sitting out, taking advantage of the cool. She dreads being seen by the neighbors-even being greeted by the friendly Shantzes-after what they must have listened to today.

And such a long time it takes for today to be over. For the long reach of sunlight and stretched shadows to give out and the monumental heat to stir a. little, opening sweet cool cracks. Then all of a sudden the stars are out in clusters and the trees are enlarging themselves like clouds, shaking down peace. But not for long and not for Jill. Well before midnight comes a thin cry-you could not call it tentative, but thin at least, experimental, as if in spite of the day’s practice I have lost the knack. Or as if I actually wonder if it’s worth it. A little rest then, a false respite or giving up. But after that a thoroughgoing, an anguished, unforgiving resumption. Just when Jill had started to make more coffee, to deal with the remnants of her headache. Thinking that this time she might sit by the table and drink it.

Now she turns the burner off.

It’s almost time for the last bottle of the day. If the feeding before had not been delayed, I’d be ready now. Perhaps I am ready? While it’s warming, Jill thinks she’ll dose herself with a couple more 222’s. Then she thinks maybe that won’t do; she needs something stronger. In the bathroom cupboard she finds only Pepto-Bismol, laxatives, foot powder, prescriptions she wouldn’t touch. But she knows that Ailsa takes something strong for her menstrual cramps, and she goes into Ailsa’s room and looks through her bureau drawers until she finds a bottle of pain pills lying, logically, on top of a pile of sanitary pads. These are prescriptions pills, too, but the label says clearly what they’re for. She removes two of them and goes back to the kitchen and finds the water in the pan around the milk boiling, the milk too hot.

She holds the bottle under the tap to cool it-my cries coming down at her like the clamor of birds of prey over a gurgling river-and she looks at the pills waiting on the counter and she thinks, Yes. She gets out a knife and shaves a few grains off one of the pills, takes the nipple off the bottle, picks up the shaved grains on the blade of the knife, and sprinkles them-just a sprinkle of white dust-over the milk. Then she swallows one and seven-eighths or maybe one and eleven-twelfths or even one and fifteen-sixteenths of a pill herself, and takes the bottle upstairs. She lifts up my immediately rigid body and gets the nipple into my accusing mouth. The milk is still a little too warm for my liking and at first I spit it back at her. Then in a while I decide that it will do, and I swallow it all down.

Iona is screaming. Jill wakes up to a house full of hurtful sunlight and Iona’s screaming.

The plan was that Ailsa and Iona and their mother would visit with their relatives in Guelph until the late afternoon, avoiding driving during the hot part of the day. But after breakfast Iona began to make a fuss. She wanted to get home to the baby, she said she had hardly slept all night for worrying. It was embarrassing to keep on arguing with her in front of the relatives, so Ailsa gave in and they arrived home late in the morning and opened the door of the still house.

Ailsa said, “Phew. Is this what it always smells like in here, only we’re so used to it we don’t notice?”

Iona ducked past her and ran up the stairs. Now she’s screaming. Dead. Dead. Murderer.

She knows nothing about the pills. So why does she scream “Murderer”? It’s the blanket. She sees the blanket pulled up right over my head. Suffocation. Not poison. It has not taken her any time, not half a second, to get from “dead” to “murderer.” It’s an immediate flying leap. She grabs me from the crib, with the death blanket twisted round me, and holding the blanketed bundle squeezed against her body she runs screaming out of the room and into Jill’s room.

Jill is struggling up, dopily, after twelve or thirteen hours of sleep.

“You’ve killed my baby,” Iona is screaming at her.

Jill doesn’t correct her-she doesn’t say, Mine. Iona holds me out accusingly to show me to Jill, but before Jill can get any kind of a look at me I have been snatched back. Iona groans and doubles up as if she’s been shot in the stomach. Still holding on to me she stumbles down the stairs, bumping into Ailsa who is on her way up. Ailsa is almost knocked off her feet; she hangs on to the banister and Iona takes no notice; she seems to be trying to squeeze the bundle of me into a new terrifying hole in the middle of her body. Words come out of her between fresh groans of recognition.

Baby. Love my. Darling. Ooh. Oh. Get the. Suffocated. Blanket. Baby. Police.

Jill has slept with no covers over her and without changing into a nightdress. She is still in yesterday’s shorts and halter, and she’s not sure if she’s waking from a night’s sleep or a nap. She isn’t sure where she is or what day it is. And what did Iona say? Groping her way up out of a vat of warm wool, Jill sees rather than hears Iona’s cries, and they’re like red flashes, hot veins in the inside of her eyelids. She clings to the luxury of not having to understand, but then she knows she has understood. She knows it’s about me.

But Jill thinks that Iona has made a mistake. Iona has got into the wrong part of the dream. That part is all over.

The baby is all right. Jill took care of the baby. She went out and found the baby and covered it up. All right.

In the downstairs hall, Iona makes an effort and shouts some words all together. “She pulled the blanket all the way over its head, she smothered it.”

Ailsa comes downstairs hanging on to the banister.

“Put it down,” she says. “Put it down.”

Iona squeezes me and groans. Then she holds me out to Ailsa and says, “Look. Look.”

Ailsa whips her head aside. “I won’t,” she says. “I won’t look.” Iona comes close to push me into her face-I am still all wrapped up in my blanket, but Ailsa doesn’t know that and Iona doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

Now it’s Ailsa screaming. She runs to the other side of the dining-room table screaming, “Put it down. Put it down. I’m not going to look at a corpse.”

Mrs. Kirkham comes in from the kitchen, saying, “Girls. Oh, girls. What’s the trouble between you? I can’t have this, you know.”

“Look,” says Iona, forgetting Ailsa and coming around the table to show me to her mother.

Ailsa gets to the hall phone and gives the operator Dr. Shantz’s number.

“Oh, a baby,” says Mrs. Kirkham, twitching the blanket aside. “She smothered it,” Iona says. “Oh, no,” says Mrs. Kirkham.

Ailsa is talking to Dr. Shantz on the phone, telling him in a shaky voice to get over here at once. She turns from the phone and looks at Iona, gulps to steady herself, and says, “Now you. You pipe down.”

Iona gives a high-pitched defiant yelp and runs away from her, across the hall into the living room. She is still hanging on to me. Jill has come to the top of the stairs. Ailsa spots her. She says, “Come on down here.”

She has no idea what she’s going to do to Jill, or say to her, once she gets her down. She looks as if she wants to slap her. “It’s no good now getting hysterical,” she says.

Jill’s halter is twisted partway round so that most of one breast has got loose.

“Fix yourself up,” says Ailsa. “Did you sleep in your clothes? You look drunk.”

Jill seems to herself to be walking still in the snowy light of her dream. But the dream has been invaded by these frantic people.

Ailsa is able to think now about some things that have to be done. Whatever has happened, there has got to be no question of such a thing as a murder. Babies do die, for no reason, in their sleep. She has heard of that. No question of the police. No autopsy-a sad quiet little funeral. The obstacle to this is Iona. Dr. Shantz can give Iona a needle now; the needle will put her to sleep. But he can’t go on giving her a needle every day.

The thing is to get Iona into Morrisville. This is the Hospital for the Insane, which used to be called the Asylum and in the future will be called the Psychiatric Hospital, then the Mental Health Unit. But most people just call it Morrisville, after the village nearby.

Going to Morrisville, they say. They took her off to Morrisville. Carry on like that and you’re going to end up in Morrisville.

Iona has been there before and she can go there again. Dr. Shantz can get her in and keep her in until it’s judged she’s ready to come out. Affected by the baby’s death. Delusions. Once that is established she won’t pose a threat. Nobody will pay any attention to what she says. She will have had a breakdown. In fact it looks as if that may be the truth-it looks as if she might be halfway to a breakdown already, with that yelping and running around. It might be permanent. But probably not. There’s all kinds of treatment nowadays. Drugs to calm her down, and shock if it’s better to blot out some memories, and an operation they do, if they have to, on people who are obstinately confused and miserable. They don’t do that at Morrisville-they have to send you to the city.

For all this-which has gone through her mind in an instant- Ailsa will have to count on Dr. Shantz. Some obliging lack of curiosity on his part and a willingness to see things her way. But that should not be hard for anybody who knows what she has been through. The investment she has made in this family’s respectability and the blows she’s had to take, from her father’s shabby career and her mother’s mixed-up wits to Iona’s collapse at nursing school and George’s going off to get killed. Does Ailsa deserve a public scandal on top of this-a story in the papers, a trial, maybe even a sister-in-law in jail?

Dr. Shantz would not think so. And not just because he can tote up these reasons from what he has observed as a friendly neighbor.

Not just because he can appreciate that people who have to do without respectability must sooner or later feel the cold.

The reasons he has for helping Ailsa are all in his voice as he comes running in the back door now, through the kitchen, calling her name.

Jill at the bottom of the stairs has just said, “The baby’s all right.”

And Ailsa has said, “You keep quiet until I tell you what to say.

Mrs. Kirkham stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, square in Dr. Shantz’s path.

“Oh, I’m glad to see you,” she says. “Ailsa and Iona are all upset with each other. Iona found a baby at the door and now she says it’s dead.”

Dr. Shantz picks Mrs. Kirkham up and puts her aside. He says again, “Ailsa?” and reaches out his arms, but ends up just setting his hands down hard on her shoulders.

Iona comes out of the living room empty-handed.

Jill says, “What did you do with the baby?”

“Hid it,” Iona says saucily, and makes a face at her-the kind of face a terminally frightened person can make, pretending to be vicious.

“Dr. Shantz is going to give you a needle,” Ailsa says. “That’ll put paid to you.”

Now there is an absurd scene of Iona running around, throwing herself at the front door-Ailsa jumps to block her-and then at the stairs, which is where Dr. Shantz gets hold of her and straddles her, pinning her arms and saying, “Now, now, now, Iona. Take it easy. You’ll be okay in a little while.” And Iona yells and whimpers and subsides. The noises she makes, and her darting about, her efforts at escape, all seem like playacting. As if-in spite of being quite literally at her wit’s end-she finds the effort of standing up to Ailsa and Dr. Shantz so nearly impossible that she can only try to manage it by this sort of parody. Which makes it clear-and maybe this is what she really intends-that she is not standing up to them at all but falling apart. Falling apart as embarrassingly and inconveniently as possible with Ailsa shouting at her, “You ought to be disgusted with yourself.”

Administering the needle, Dr. Shantz says, “That-a-girl Iona. There now.”

Over his shoulder he says to Ailsa, “Look after your mother. Get her to sit down.”

Mrs. Kirkham is wiping tears with her fingers. “I’m all right dear,” she says to Ailsa. “I just wish you girls wouldn’t fight. You should have told me Iona had a baby. You should have let her keep it.”

Mrs. Shantz, wearing a Japanese kimono over her summer pajamas, comes into the house by the kitchen door. “Is everybody all right?” she calls.

She sees the knife lying on the kitchen counter and thinks it prudent to pick it up and put it in a drawer. When people are making a scene the last thing you want is a knife ready to hand.

In the midst of this Jill thinks she has heard a faint cry. She has climbed clumsily over the banister to get around Iona and Dr. Shantz-she ran partway up the stairs again when Iona came running in that direction-and has lowered herself to the floor. She goes through the double doors into the living room where at first she sees no sign of me. But the faint cry comes again and she follows the sound to the sofa and looks underneath it.

That’s where I am, pushed in beside the violin.

During that short trip from the hall to the living room, Jill has remembered everything, and it seems as if her breath stops and horror crowds in at her mouth, then a flash of joy sets her life going again, when just as in the dream she comes upon a live baby, not a little desiccated nutmeg-headed corpse. She holds me. I don’t stiffen or kick or arch my back. I am still pretty sleepy from the sedative in my milk which knocked me out for the night and half a day and which, in a larger quantity-maybe not so much larger, at that-would have really finished me off.

I t wasn’t the blanket at all. Anybody who took a serious look at that blanket could see that it was so light and loosely woven that it could not prevent my getting all the air I needed. You could breathe through it just as easily as through a fishnet.

Exhaustion might have played a part. A whole day’s howling, such a furious feat of self-expression, might have worn me out. That, and the white dust that fell on my milk, had knocked me into a deep and steadfast sleep with breathing so slight that Iona had not been able to detect it. You would think she would notice that I was not cold and you would think that all that moaning and crying out and running around would have brought me up to consciousness in a hurry. I don’t know why that didn’t happen. I think she didn’t notice because of her panic and the state she was in even before she found me, but I don’t know why I didn’t cry sooner. Or maybe I did cry and in the commotion nobody heard me. Or maybe Iona did hear me and took a look at me and stuffed me under the sofa because by that time everything had been spoiled.

Then Jill heard. Jill was the one.

Iona was carried to that same sofa. Ailsa slipped off her shoes to save the brocade, and Mrs. Shantz went upstairs to get a light quilt to put over her.

“I know she doesn’t need it for warmth,” she said. “But I think when she wakes up she’ll feel better to have a quilt over her.”

Before this, of course, everybody had gathered round to take note of my being alive. Ailsa was blaming herself for not having discovered that right away. She hated to admit that she had been afraid to look at a dead baby.

“Iona’s nerves must be contagious,” she said. “I absolutely should have known.”

She looked at Jill as if she was going to tell her to go and put a blouse on over her halter. Then she recalled how roughly she had spoken to her, and for no reason as it turned out, so she didn’t say anything. She did not even try to convince her mother that Iona had not had a baby, though she said in an undertone, to Mrs. Shantz, “Well, that could start the rumor of the century.”

“I’m so glad nothing terrible happened,” Mrs. Kirkham said. “I thought for a minute Iona had done away with it. Ailsa, you must try not to blame your sister.”

“No Momma,” said Ailsa. “Let’s go sit down in the kitchen.”

There was one bottle of formula made up that by rights I should have demanded and drunk earlier that morning. Jill put it on to warm, holding me in the crook of her arm all the time.

She had looked at once for the knife, when she came into the kitchen, and seen in wonderment that it wasn’t there. But she could make out the faintest dust on the counter-or she thought she could. She wiped it with her free hand before she turned the tap on to get the water to heat the bottle.

Mrs. Shantz busied herself making coffee. While it was perking she put the sterilizer on the stove and washed out yesterday’s bottles. She was being tactful and competent, just managing to hide the fact that there was something about this whole debacle and disarray of feelings that buoyed her up.

“I guess Iona did have an obsession about the baby,” she said. “Something like this was bound to happen.”

Turning from the stove to address the last of these words to her husband and Ailsa, she saw that Dr. Shantz was pulling Ailsa’s hands down from where she held them, on either side of her head. Too speedily and guiltily he took his own hands away. If he had not done that, it would have looked like ordinary comfort he was administering. As a doctor is certainly entitled to do.

“You know Ailsa, I think your mother ought to lie down too,” said Mrs. Shantz thoughtfully and without a break. “I think I’ll go and persuade her. If she can get to sleep this may all pass right out of her head. Out of Iona’s too, if we’re lucky.”

Mrs. Kirkham had wandered out of the kitchen almost as soon as she got there. Mrs. Shantz found her in the living room looking at Iona, and fiddling with the quilt to make sure she was well covered. Mrs. Kirkham did not really want to lie down. She wanted to have things explained to her-she knew that her own explanations were somehow out of kilter. And she wanted to have people talk to her as they used to do, not in the peculiarly gentle and self-satisfied way they did now. But because of her customary politeness and her knowledge that the power she had in the household was negligible, she allowed Mrs. Shantz to take her upstairs.

Jill was reading the instructions for making baby formula. They were printed on the side of the corn syrup tin. When she heard the footsteps going up the stairs she thought that there was something she had better do while she had the chance. She carried me into the living room and laid me down on a chair.

“There now,” she whispered confidentially. “You stay still.”

She knelt down and nudged and gently tugged the violin out of its hiding place. She found its cover and case and got it properly stowed away. I stayed still-not yet being quite able to turn over-and I stayed quiet.

Left alone by themselves, alone in the kitchen, Dr. Shantz and Ailsa probably did not seize this chance to embrace, but only looked at each other. With their knowledge, and without promises or despair.

Iona admitted that she hadn’t felt for a pulse. And she never claimed that I was cold. She said I felt stiff. Then she said not stiff but heavy. So heavy, she said, she instantly thought I could not be alive. A lump, a dead weight.

I think there is something to this. I don’t believe that I was dead, or that I came back from the dead, but I do think that I was at a distance, from which I might or might not have come back. I think that the outcome was not certain and that will was involved. It was up to me, I mean, to go one way or the other.

And Iona’s love, which was certainly the most wholehearted love I will ever receive, didn’t decide me. Her cries and her crushing me into her body didn’t work, were not finally persuasive. Because it wasn’t Iona I had to settle for. (Could I have known that-could I even have known that it wasn’t Iona, in the end, who would do me the most good?) It was Jill. I had to settle for Jill and for what I could get from her, even if it might look like half a loaf.

To me it seems that it was only then that I became female. I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was plain to everybody else since the beginning of my life, but I believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature.

And to some extent Jill took on hers. Sobered and grateful, not even able to risk thinking about what she’d just escaped, she took on loving me, because the alternative to loving was disaster.

Dr. Shantz suspected something, but he let it go. He asked Jill how I had been the day before. Fussy? She said yes, very fussy. He said that premature babies, even slightly premature babies, were susceptible to shocks and you had to be careful with them. He recommended that I always be put to sleep on my back.

Iona did not have to have shock treatment. Dr. Shantz gave her pills. He said that she had overstrained herself looking after me. The woman who had taken over her job at the bakery wanted to give it up-she did not like working nights. So Iona went back there.

That’s what I remember best about my summer visits to my aunts, when I was six or seven years old. Being taken down to the bakery at the strange, usually forbidden hour of midnight and watching Iona put on her white hat and apron, watching her knead the great white mass of dough that shifted and bubbled like something alive. Then cutting out cookies and feeding me the leftover bits and on special occasions sculpting a wedding cake. How bright and white that big kitchen was, with night filling every window. I scraped the wedding icing from the bowl-the melting stabbing irresistible sugar.

Ailsa thought I should not be up so late, or eat so much sweet stuff. But she didn’t do anything about it. She said she wondered what my mother would say-as if Jill was the person who swung the weight, not herself. Ailsa had some rules that I didn’t have to observe at home-hang up that jacket, rinse that glass before you dry it, else it’ll have spots-but I never saw the harsh, hounding person Jill remembered.

Nothing slighting was ever said then, about Jill’s music. After all, she made our living at it. She had not been finally defeated by the Mendelssohn. She got her diploma; she graduated from the Conservatory. She cut her hair and got thin. She was able to rent a duplex near High Park in Toronto, and hire a woman to look after me part of the time, because she had her war widow’s pension. And then she found a job with a radio orchestra. She was to be proud that all her working life she was employed as a musician and never had to fall back on teaching. She said that she knew that she was not a great violinist, she had no marvellous gift or destiny, but at least she could make her living doing what she wanted to do. Even after she married my stepfather, after we moved with him to Edmonton (he was a geologist), she went on playing in the symphony orchestra there. She played up until a week before each of my half sisters was born. She was lucky, she said-her husband never objected.

Iona did have a couple of further setbacks, the more serious one when I was about twelve. She was taken to Morrisville for several weeks. I think she was given insulin there-she returned fat and loquacious. I came back to visit while she was away, and Jill came with me, bringing my first little sister who had been born shortly before. I understood from the talk between my mother and Ailsa that it would not have been advisable to bring a baby into the house if Iona was there; it might have “set her off.” I don’t know if the episode that sent her to Morrisville had anything to do with a baby.

I felt left out of things on that visit. Both Jill and Ailsa had taken up smoking, and they would sit up late at night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, while they waited for the baby’s one o’clock feeding. (My mother fed this baby from her breasts-I was glad to hear that no such intimate body-heated meals had been served to me.) I remember coming downstairs sulkily because I couldn’t sleep, then turning talkative, full of giddy bravado, trying to break into their conversation. I understood that they were talking over things they didn’t want me to hear about. They had become, unaccountably, good friends.

I grabbed for a cigarette, and my mother said, “Go on now, leave those alone. We’re talking.” Ailsa told me to get something to drink out of the fridge, a Coke or a ginger ale. So I did, and instead of taking it upstairs I went outside.

I sat on the back step, but the women’s voices immediately went too low for me to make out any of their soft regretting or reassuring. So I went prowling around the backyard, beyond the patch of light thrown through the screen door.

The long white house with the glass-brick corners was occupied by new people now. The Shantzes had moved away, to live year-round in Florida. They sent my aunts oranges, which Ailsa said would make you forever disgusted with the kind of oranges you could buy in Canada. The new people had put in a swimming pool, which was used mostly by the two pretty teenage daughters-girls who would look right through me when they met me on the street-and by the daughters’ boyfriends. Some bushes had grown up fairly high between my aunts’ yard and theirs, but it was still possible for me to watch them running around the pool and pushing each other in, with great shrieks and splashes. I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a ghost.