The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [29]
Did Grandfather Benjamin breathe a sigh of relief when Adelia was gone? He may have grown tired of knowing he could never measure up to her exacting standards, though it’s clear he admired her to the point of awe. Nothing about Avilion was to be changed, for instance: no picture in it moved, none of its furniture replaced. Perhaps he considered the house itself her true monument.
And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren’t. As she was dead by then, we couldn’t argue.
My father was the eldest of three sons, each of whom was given Adelia’s idea of a high-toned name: Norval and Edgar and Percival, Arthurian revival with a hint of Wagner. I suppose they should have been thankful they weren’t called Uther or Sigmund or Ulric. Grandfather Benjamin doted on his sons, and wanted them to learn the button business, but Adelia had loftier aims. She packed them off to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where Benjamin and his machinery couldn’t coarsen them. She appreciated the uses of Benjamin’s wealth, but preferred to gloss over the sources of it.
The sons came home for the summer holidays. At boarding school and then at university they’d learned a genial contempt for their father, who couldn’t read Latin, not even badly, as they did. They would talk about people he didn’t know, sing songs he’d never heard of, tell jokes he couldn’t understand. They’d go sailing by moonlight in his little yacht, the Water Nixie, named by Adelia – another of her wistful Gothicisms. They’d play the mandolin (Edgar) and banjo (Percival), and furtively drink beer, and foul up the tackle, and leave it for him to unscramble. They’d drive around in one of his two new motor cars, even though the roads around town were so bad half the year – snow, then mud, then dust – that there wasn’t much of anywhere to drive. There were rumours of loose girls, at least for the two younger boys, and of money changing hands – well, it was only decent to pay these ladies off so they could get themselves fixed up, and who wanted a lot of unauthorized Chase babies crawling around? – but they were not girls from our town, and so it was not held against the sons; rather the reverse, among men at least. People laughed at them a little, but not too much: they were said to be solid enough, and to have the common touch. Edgar and Percival were known as Eddie and Percy, though my father, being shyer and more dignified, was always Norval. They were pleasant-looking boys, a little wild, as boys were expected to be. What did “wild” mean, exactly?
“They were rascals,” Reenie told me, “but they were never scoundrels.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
She sighed. “I only hope you’ll never find out,” she said.
Adelia died in 1913, of cancer – an unnamed and therefore most likely gynecological variety. During the last month of Adelia’s illness, Reenie’s mother was brought in as extra help in the kitchen, and Reenie along with her; she was thirteen by then, and the whole thing made a deep impression on her. “The pain was so bad they’d have to give her morphine, every four hours, they had the nurses around the clock. But she wouldn’t stay in bed, she’d bite the bullet, she was always up and beautifully dressed as usual, even though you could tell she was half out of her mind. I used to see her walking around the grounds, in her pale colours and a big hat with a veil. She had lovely posture and more backbone than most men, that one. At the end they had to tie her into her bed, for her own good. Your grandfather was heartbroken, you could see it took the starch right out of him.” As time went on and I became harder to impress, Reenie added stifled screams and moans and deathbed vows to this story, though I was never sure of her intent. Was she telling me that I too should display such fortitude – such defiance of pain, such bullet-biting – or was she merely revelling