The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [33]
Grandfather Benjamin read these letters avidly. As time wore on without a victory for either side, he became more and more jittery and uncertain. This was not the way things ought to have gone. The irony was that his business was booming. He’d recently expanded into celluloid and rubber, for the buttons that is, which allowed for higher volumes; and due to the political contacts Adelia had helped him to make, his factories received a great many orders to supply the troops. He was as honest as he’d always been, he didn’t deliver shoddy goods, he was not a war profiteer in that sense. But it cannot be said that he did not profit.
War is good for the button trade. So many buttons are lost in a war, and have to be replaced – whole boxfuls, whole truckloads of buttons at a time. They’re blown to pieces, they sink into the ground, they go up in flames. The same can be said for undergarments. From a financial point of view, the war was a miraculous fire: a huge, alchemical conflagration, the rising smoke of which transformed itself into money. Or it did for my grandfather. But this fact no longer delighted his soul or propped up his sense of his own rectitude, as it might have done in earlier, more self-satisfied years. He wanted his sons back. Not that they’d gone anywhere dangerous yet: they were still in Bermuda, marching around in the sun.
Following their honeymoon (to the Finger Lakes, in New York State), my parents had been staying at Avilion until they could set up their own establishment, and Mother remained there to supervise my grandfather’s household. They were short-staffed, because all able hands were needed either for the factories or for the army, but also because it was felt that Avilion should set an example by reducing expenditures. Mother insisted on plain meals – pot roast on Wednesdays, baked beans on a Sunday evening – which suited my grandfather fine. He’d never really been comfortable with Adelia’s fancy menus.
In August of 1915, the Royal Canadian Regiment was ordered back to Halifax, to equip for France. It stayed in port for over a week, taking on supplies and new recruits and exchanging tropical uniforms for warmer clothing. The men were issued with Ross rifles, which would later jam in the mud, leaving them helpless.
My mother took the train to Halifax to see my father off. It was crammed with men en route to the Front; she could not get a sleeper, so she travelled sitting up. There were feet in the aisles, and bundles, and spittoons; coughing, snoring – drunken snoring, no doubt. As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence. Her young husband might be killed. His body might perish; it might be torn apart; it might become part of the sacrifice that – it was now clear – would have to be made. Along with this realization came desperation and a shrinking terror, but also – I’m sure – a measure of bleak pride.
I don’t know where the two of them stayed in Halifax, or for how long. Was it a respectable hotel or, because rooms were scarce, a cheap dive, a harbourside flophouse? Was it for a few days, a night, a few hours? What passed between them, what was said? The usual sorts of things, I suppose, but what were they? It is no longer possible to know. Then the ship with the regiment in it set sail – it was the SS Caledonian – and my mother stood on the dock with the other wives, waving and weeping. Or perhaps not weeping: she would have found it self-indulgent.
Somewhere in France. I cannot describe what is happening here, wrote my father, and so I will not attempt it. We can only trust that this war is for the best, and that civilization will be preserved and advanced by it. The casualties are (word scratched out) numerous. I never knew before what men are capable of. What must