The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [66]
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who’ve simply been present at them.
The bank has Roman pillars, to remind us to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, such as those ridiculous service charges. For two cents I’d keep my money in a sock under the mattress just to spite them. But word would get around, I suppose – word that I’d become a loony old eccentric of the kind found dead in a hovel crammed with hundreds of empty cat food tins and a couple of million bucks stashed in fivedollar bills between the pages of yellowing newspapers. I have no desire to become an object of attention to the local hopheads and amateur second-storey men, with their bloodshot eyes and twitchy fingers.
On the way back from the bank I walked around by the Town Hall, with its Italianate bell tower and its Florentine two-tone brickwork, its flagpole that needs painting, its field gun present at the Somme. Also its two bronze statues, both commissioned by the Chase family. The right-hand one, commissioned by my Grandmother Adelia, is of Colonel Parkman, a veteran of the last decisive battle fought in the American Revolution, that of Fort Ticonderoga, now in New York State. Once in a while we’ll get some confused Germans or English-men or even Americans wandering through town, looking for the Fort Ticonderoga battlefield. Wrong town, they’re told. Come to think of it, wrong country. You want the next one over.
It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he’d lost. (Though perhaps that’s not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He’s shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and a pointed beard, every sculptor’s idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn’t erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.
On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman’s axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.
The Weary Soldier was a project of my father’s. The sculptress was Callista Fitzsimmons, who’d come highly recommended by Frances Loring, convenor of the War Memorial Committee of the Ontario Society of Artists. There was some local objection to Miss Fitzsimmons – a woman wasn’t considered appropriate for the subject – but Father steamrollered the meeting of potential sponsors: wasn’t Miss Loring herself a woman, he asked? Thus inspiring several irreverent comments, How can you tell being the cleanest of them. In private, he said that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and since the rest of them were such cheapskates they’d better either dig deep or knuckle under.
Miss Callista Fitzsimmons was not only a woman, she was also twenty-eight years old and a redhead. She began coming to Avilion frequently, to confer with Father on the proposed design. These sessions would take place in the library, with the door open at first and then not. She was put up in one of the guest rooms, the second-best one at first and then the best. Soon she was there almost every weekend, and her room became known as “her” room.
Father seemed happier; certainly he was drinking less. He had the grounds tidied up, at least enough to be presentable; he had the drive regravelled; he had the Water Nixie scraped and painted and refitted. Sometimes there were informal weekend house parties, the guests being