The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [37]
Light step, heavy step, light step, heavy step, like an animal with one foot in a trap. Groaning and muffled shouts. Broken glass. These sounds would wake me up: the floor of the turret was above my room.
Then there would be footsteps descending; then silence, a black outline looming outside the closed oblong of my bedroom door. I couldn’t see him there, but I could feel him, a shambling monster with one eye, so sad. I’d become used to the sounds, I didn’t think he would ever hurt me, but I treated him gingerly all the same.
I don’t wish to give the impression that he did this every night. Also these sessions – seizures, perhaps – became fewer and farther apart, in time. But you could see one coming on by the tightening of my mother’s mouth. She had a kind of radar, she could detect the waves of his building rage.
Do I mean to say he didn’t love her? Not at all. He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn’t reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.
What would that be like – to long, to yearn for one who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? I’ll never know.
After some months my father began his disreputable rambles. Not in our town though, or not at first. He’d take the train in to Toronto, “on business,” and go drinking, and also tomcatting, as it was then called. Word got around, surprisingly quickly, as a scandal is likely to do. Oddly enough, both my mother and my father were more respected in town because of it. Who could blame him, considering? As for her, despite what she had to put up with, not one word of complaint was ever heard to cross her lips. Which was entirely as it should be.
(How do I know all these things? I don’t know them, not in the usual sense of knowing. But in households like ours there’s often more in silences than in what is actually said – in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight. No wonder we took to listening at doors, Laura and I.)
My father had an array of walking sticks, with special handles – ivory, silver, ebony. He made a point of dressing neatly. He’d never expected to end up running the family business, but now that he’d taken it on he intended to do it well. He could have sold out, but as it happened there were no buyers, not then, or not at his price. Also he felt he had an obligation, if not to the memory of his father, then to those of his dead brothers. He had the letterhead changed to Chase and Sons, even though there was only one son left. He wanted to have sons of his own, two of them preferably, to replace the lost ones. He wanted to persevere.
The men in his factories at first revered him. It wasn’t just the medals. As soon as the war was over, the women had stepped aside or else been pushed, and their jobs had been filled by the returning men – whatever men were still capable of holding a job, that is. But there weren’t enough jobs to go around: the wartime demand had ended. All over the country there were shutdowns and layoffs, but not in my father’s factories. He hired, he overhired. He hired veterans. He said the country’s lack of gratitude was despicable, and that its businessmen should now pay back something of what was owed. Very few of them did, though. They turned a blind eye, but my father, who had a real blind eye, could not