The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [31]
But she knew the family histories, or at least something about them. What she would tell me varied in relation to my age, and also in relation to how distracted she was at the time. Nevertheless, in this way I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original. I didn’t want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.
My father had proposed (said Reenie) at a skating party. There was an inlet – an old mill pond – upstream from the falls, where the water moved more slowly. When the winters were cold enough, a sheet of ice would form there that was thick enough to skate on. Here the young peoples’ church group would hold its skating parties, which were not called parties but outings.
My mother was a Methodist, but my father was Anglican: thus my mother was below my father’s level socially, as such things were accounted then. (If she’d lived, my Grandmother Adelia would never have allowed the marriage, or so I decided later. My mother would have been too far down the ladder for her – also too prudish, too earnest, too provincial. Adelia would have dragged my father off to Montreal – hooked him up to a debutante, at the very least. Someone with better clothes.)
My mother had been young, only eighteen, but she was not a silly, flighty girl, said Reenie. She’d been teaching school; you could be a teacher then when you were under twenty. She didn’t have to teach: her father was the senior lawyer for Chase Industries, and they were “comfortably off.” But, like her own mother, who’d died when she was nine, my mother took her religion seriously. She believed you should help those less fortunate than yourself. She’d taken up teaching the poor as a sort of missionary work, said Reenie admiringly. (Reenie often admired acts of my mother’s that she would have thought it stupid to perform herself. As for the poor, she’d grown up among them and considered them feckless. You could teach them till you were blue in the face, but with most you’d just be beating your head against a brick wall, she’d say. But your mother, bless her good heart, she could never see it.)
There’s a snapshot of my mother at the Normal School, in London, Ontario, taken with two other girls; all three are standing on the front steps of their boarding house, laughing, their arms entwined. The winter snow lies heaped to either side; icicles drip from the roof. My mother is wearing a sealskin coat; from underneath her hat the ends of her fine hair crackle. She must already have acquired the pince-nez that preceded the owlish glasses I remember – she was near-sighted early – but in this picture she doesn’t have them on. One of her feet in its fur-topped boot is visible, the ankle turned coquettishly. She looks courageous, dashing even, like a boyish buccaneer.
After graduating, she’d accepted a position at a one-room school, farther west and north, in what was then the back country. She’d been shocked by the experience – by the poverty, the ignorance, the lice. The children there had been sewn into their underwear in the fall and not unsewn until the spring, a detail that has remained in my mind as particularly squalid. Of course, said Reenie, it was no place for a lady like your mother.
But my mother felt she was accomplishing something – doing something– for at least a few of those unfortunate children, or she hoped she was; and then she’d come home for the Christmas holidays. Her pallor and thinness were commented upon: roses were required in her cheeks. So there she was at the skating party, on the frozen mill pond, in company with my father. He’d laced up her skates for her first, kneeling on one knee.
They’d known each other for