When Alice Lay Down With Peter (31 page)

He brought with him several athletic German friends who went by the name of Smith, their European sensibilities rejuvenated by the yeasty nutrition of avant-garde prison aesthetics. The Ukrainian midwife found her way back to Alice too. She had lost a lot of weight in the camps, and her experiences had altered her from a good-natured chubby woman to a gristly skinny woman, not the same thing at all. Along with her body fat, she’d lost her songful speech; she became nasal and intellectual, and she began to talk about the future and the past in the same breathless gesture, an evacuation, a horrified refusal. The Histrionic Theatre Company made use of her revised physiognomy by writing new peasant roles for her—the kerchief, the apron, the fist.

And Helen. Helen played the Beauty in such a way as almost to save her own life. It would be her last parodic moment for many years to come.

After they got the vote, the ladies’ clubs went crazy for Greek drama, so Alice knew she could fill the house if she put Helen into a cream chiffon dress with a loose gold belt and loosened her black hair and set her upon a wine red chaise. One of the Smiths painted Helen’s portrait in this pose, and the company made up posters vaguely in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gashes of red paint, Helen’s raven hair and
“Helen of Troy by
Euripides” scrawled thickly, freehand, in white. Helen sat dutifully for the portrait, and when it was done, she stood up and laughed, a horse laugh.

Helen played Helen with the fierce intuition only a very young actress can achieve. Helen’s (that is, the other Helen’s) infidelity, the treacherous selfishness of her desire for Paris (or was it simply the necessity of freedom?) and the inexplicable justice of scandal, all of this came naturally to our Helen. She was a choreographic actress and worked very well with the freshly impassioned Mr. Kolchella. Generally, our theatre troupe worked with humorous sorrow; under our camaraderie ran the information, unbidden, ineluctable, that among men, war truly
is
an expression of beauty. My daughter
played
this, and I think she was so successful in her role because she didn’t let this insane fact grab her ankles and drown her.

The stage was lit by floodlights, the sets exposed, the flooring harsh and loud, and the scenes were announced in big printed placards. Despite my mother’s extraordinary direction, nothing could deter the audience from coming again and again.

The Greeks were the company’s bread and butter, the commercial side of things. But Mum hadn’t forgotten her original mandate: to produce histrionic history. She felt bad about taking
all that money from war widows. She had to give something back. On waking up from one of her fainting fits, she walked dizzily to her desk and composed the following:

“The first battle of Ypres. 36.000 dead Germans. Get kids; they’ll like the uniforms. Smoke, agony, blood. Everybody dies. Except one. An Austrian. No, he’s German. Need A LOT OF SMOKE.

“One weird German, falls, gets up, walks away.”

Alice stopped. One German. One weird German walking away. She stood. She went to Peter. He was seated in the oak chair. Alice held her scene out to him and he read it. “What’s this character’s name?” he asked.

Alice listened to the muses a moment and then she said, “Hitler.”

“That’s good.” Peter handed the scene back to Alice. “Good name. I like the ‘hit’ part. It’s going to be huge success. How are you going to do the thirty-six thousand dead Germans?”

“Oh,” said Alice. “The usual. Placards and circus music. We’ll improvise.”

I
T
WOULD BE MY MOTHER’S LAST
and greatest and least popular production.

Everybody got involved, including the police magistrate, who would arrive to shut the place down. We worked at it for six weeks. We all took turns playing Prime Minister Borden. We made big puppets on sticks. It was messy and the midwife played the accordion and my dad, Peter, once again took up the fiddle. We called it
Massacre of the Innocents
. There was a lot of singing and fighting. Something for everyone. The audience might have liked it, but the timing was all wrong.

The world premiere was November 10. A Sunday. Maybe we went too far, opening on a Sunday. It was an innocent mistake that we made on purpose, because that was our theme. We were my mother’s disciples. “Histrionics, Hyperbole, and How!” was our motto. “Push!” yelled Alice. “Push it till it falls over!” Each gesture and idea, pushed so hard, to such a crazy extreme, it became—if we were successful—its opposite.

The press gave us a glowing preview and a nice photograph of the entire cast in costume. Alice kept telling the reporters we were putting on a play of social realism. They smiled and nodded and pretended they knew what she was talking about. It was true, though—social realism through a meat grinder, just like real life in 1918.

We rented the Walker Theatre because it could accommodate the animals. We had a cast of two hundred people, one white horse and a dog of little consequence, a bald thing from Egypt. When the rioting began, somebody stepped on the dog and killed it. Alice wept openly. “Another dog! Why me and dogs?” One of the cast members, a wonderful little girl of eleven who understood everything, said, “It’s how it goes, Mrs. McCormack. You have to go the mile to win the inch.”

November 10 came all too soon. The place was packed. The first act went okay because everybody thought we’d settle down and give them some nice
Ben Hur
. Another innocent mistake: the tickets said
Ben Hur
. The stage manager saw the white horse and thought that’s what we were putting on, so he printed tickets saying
Ben Hur
, and that’s what everybody thought they were seeing, so they enjoyed the first act, I think they did, I think we had them in our pocket. The chariot race came as a complete surprise to everyone. The stage manager took it on himself to hitch the horse to the chariot, and he took off his overalls and rode on stage in his undershirt.

Dad knocked together a kind of tank out of an old boiler. A Smith played this fellow Hitler, but he was afraid to say anything with his strong German accent. I was Woodrow Wilson, and Eli was a German general, which was upsetting because we were acting with an obsessive energy that transformed the world into a battlefield, which in some ways wasn’t at all what Alice wanted from us, but we just got lost inside that play.

Woodrow Wilson was a nice enough character, saying things like “We will fashion world order based on self-determination without force or aggression!” Pleasant concepts, lousy theatre,
and it took a lot of courage to get up and declaim them, like shouting Newtonian formulas, so I played him with a strong subtext that I discovered in an ambivalent relationship with his mother, though God knows I wouldn’t say this if Alice were still alive. She’d kill me.

Eli was stunning, distressing, a tragic ironic character, and even now, when I think back on his terrible moment at the end of Act IV when he stood, ghastly in a German helmet, and removed his red mask and revealed his white painted face and struck his head and said, “They fought for ideas! I didn’t know! God help me! I didn’t know there were ideas in this war! I thought we were fighting for land!” Well, it still stops my heart and my hands grow numb. Eli. How much of the world lives in the soul of one man.

Our audience was not possessed of a well-developed sense of irony. The German helmets upset them. The horse stepped on a Smith’s foot, and in pain he shouted, “Tante
Gretchen, meine Knie!”
It was part of Alice’s Freedom through Contradiction to have Helen dressed in sackcloth carrying the placards late in Act V, by which time people were throwing things on stage, their Histrionic program notes obviously unread, and later their own shoes. Backstage, the stage manager grabbed my arm and said, “They want Helen! Everybody’s dressed ugly! Please, can’t you give them something beautiful!” I was sorry for him, but this was my mother’s most important production ever and I would not interfere.

Helen walked on stage into chaos. All two hundred cast members were ready for the final number. The horse was loose and the dog was dead. Helen’s job was to parade four placards
downstage before the footlights, left to right, right to left. “600,000 YOUNG MEN!” “CANADA SACRIFICED HER YOUTH FOR NATIONHOOD!” “THE BRITS THINK WE’RE SERVANTS!” And the last one: “PEACE THROUGH FEAR!”

A groan went through the audience, half because of the placards and half because Helen was wearing the hooded sackcloth instead of the chiffon gown. The police arrived just as Helen entered with “PEACE THROUGH FEAR!” and they rushed the stage and the audience ran after them and general mayhem is what followed. Strangely, Alice did not faint. Peter retired to the stage manager’s office during the riot, then joined us all for the ride in the paddy wagon.

By the time they got us to Stony Mountain, a good two hours later, the Armistice had been proclaimed. Bells were ringing everywhere, and lights from the city thrown to the clouds brightened our way to the penitentiary. I was happy. I imagined that I was following the footsteps of Big Bear, waiting in
his
cell, sitting on
his
toilet, looking through the same bars through which he had looked. All around us across the countryside, people were rising from their beds to celebrate peace. One of the Smiths was locked up with us. We whispered to him not to speak. We hugged each other and wept for joy.

The guards looked tired and relieved. No charges had been laid, so they treated us gently, and one of them said, “Funny kind of justice, putting you in here without charge.” And Alice said, “It’s imaginary justice. Because we are imaginary.” The guard looked at my mother closely, with one of those sudden penetrating stares. She was seated in a dark corner of the cell,
and my dad sat beside her. They were holding hands. The cell glowed, chiaroscuro.

At breakfast, the formal charges still had not arrived from Winnipeg. The day broached and boiled and dried up and failed to a snowless dusk. Still we remained in prison without charge. I was bored. I tried to imagine Big Bear’s boredom, but stale waiting is simply not romantic. We did get let out for a short walk in the late afternoon, but I was somewhat taken aback to see that the place was mostly inhabited by Indians. In some ways, Big Bear never did get out of jail. It was actually very depressing.

I sat with my daughter. Helen looked flushed, excited. “What’s got you stirred up?” I asked her.

Just then, she stiffened like a greyhound, listening to a dull vibration through the stone floor. The sound of marching grew louder. In our corridor, an overhead bulb went on and swung a little, and everything quivered to the rhythm of boots.

Eight pairs of boots in sync and the jingle of keys. The first to appear was the magistrate who had stormed Alice’s Histrionic production, a mild man with amber eyes and a reluctant ruddy face, carrying a sheathed sword before him, blinking at us like a kindly beagle. His police officers arranged themselves around him.

One more set of footsteps, clipped, brisk, eloquent. Richard walked down the grey stone hallway into the light. He was in his naval uniform. He weighed about ninety pounds. “Well, damned I’ll be,” said Alice. Richard smiled slightly. He bore the air of a man who did not believe in the power of confession. “We’ve come to let you out,” he said.

“Yes,” said the magistrate. “No harm done.” He motioned to his man to unlock the door. We stood on the threshold of the open cell, hesitant as budgies.

“It’s all right,” Richard said. “Come.” He took Helen’s arm and led us all away, folk following the golden egg. “There was a mistake. Quite an innocent mistake.” He glanced at the magistrate. “Sir John did not know that you are my friends.”

We were bundled into several waiting cars. Richard and Helen went alone in Richard’s fancy Packard. I liked this much less than illegal imprisonment. Half an hour earlier, I had lived in a world of small-town bigotry and small-scale corruption. The police were driving fast. Everybody seemed to be under secret orders.

I realized it was dark in the silent car. I looked at my mother and father. They were sitting with their eyes closed. I leaned towards them, put my hands on them, emitting a mild jolt. No effect. “Are you all right?” I asked, the way a child asks her mother if she is sleeping.

“Take us to the Histrionic Theatre,” said Alice. That was all she could say.

W
E ENTERED THE SILENT THEATRE
. Alice fainted twice walking from the police car to the green room, which is where she asked us to take her. Peter was calmly attentive. When we reached our destination and laid Alice upon the horsehair couch, he sat and put her feet on his lap and closed his eyes.

“Is it all right if I stay?” I asked.

My parents nodded. I sat on the floor before them. Then my mother looked down and smiled at me. She patted my head and said, “Go get the moon, Blondie.” I stupidly told her I would, thinking she was speaking metaphorically, forgetting that she’d given up metaphor at least a year earlier. She smiled again, forgiving me, and said, “The electric moon, dear. It’s backstage.”