Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin

"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 gynaecological 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 in the harrowing details? Both, no doubt.

By the time Adelia died, the three boys were mostly grown up. Did they miss their mother, did they mourn her? Of course they did. How could they fail to be grateful for her dedication to them? Still, she'd kept them on a tight leash, or as tight a one as she could manage. There must have been some loosening of the ties and collars after she'd been properly dug under.

None of the three sons wanted to go into buttons, for which they had inherited their mother's disdain, though they had not also inherited her realism. They knew money didn't grow on trees, but they had few bright ideas about where it did grow instead. Norval-my father-thought he might go into law and then eventually take up politics, as he had plans for improving the country. The other two wanted to travel: once Percy had finished college, they intended to make a prospecting expedition to South America, in search of gold. The open road beckoned.

Who then was to take charge of the Chase industries? Would there be no Chase and Sons? If not, why had Benjamin worked his fingers to the bone? By this time he'd convinced himself he'd done it for some reason apart from his own ambitions, his own desires-some noble end. He'd built up a legacy, he wanted to pass it on, from generation to generation.

This must have been the reproachful undertone of more than one discussion, around the dinner table, over the port. But the boys dug in their heels. You can't force a young man to devote his life to button-making if he doesn't want to. They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.

The new fan has now been purchased. The parts of it came in a large cardboard box, and were assembled by Walter, who carted his toolbox over and screwed it all together. When he'd finished, he said, "That should fix her."

Boats are female for Walter, as are busted car engines and broken lamps and radios-items of any kind that can be fiddled with by men adroit with gadgetry, and restored to a condition as good as new. Why do I find this reassuring? Perhaps I believe, in some childish, faith-filled corner of myself, that Walter might yet take out his pliers and his ratchet set and do the same for me.

The tall fan is installed in the bedroom. I've hauled the old one downstairs to the porch, where it's aimed at the back of my neck. The sensation is pleasant but unnerving, as if a hand of cool air lies gently on my shoulder. Thus aerated, I sit at my wooden table, scratching away with my pen. No, not scratching-pens no longer scratch. The words roll smoothly and soundlessly enough across the page; it's getting them to flow down the arm, it's squeezing them out through the fingers, that is so difficult.

It's almost dusk now. There's no wind; the sound of the rapids washing up through the garden is like one long breath. The blue flowers blend into the air, the red ones are black, the white ones shine, phosphorescent. The tulips have shed their petals, leaving the pistils bare-black, snout-like, sexual. The peonies are almost finished, bedraggled and limp as damp tissue, but the lilies have come out; also the phlox. The last of the mock oranges have dropped their blossoms, leaving the grass strewn with white confetti.

In July of 1914, my mother married my father. This called for an explanation, I felt, considering everything.

My best hope was Reenie. When I was at the age to take an interest in such things-ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen-I used to sit at the kitchen table and pick her like a lock.

She'd been less than seventeen when she'd come to Avilion full-time, from a row house on the southeast bank of the Jogues, where the factory workers lived. She said she was Scotch and Irish, not the Catholic Irish, of course, meaning her grandmothers were. She'd started out as a nursemaid for me, but as a result of turnovers and attrition she was now our mainstay. How old was she? None of your beeswax. Old enough to know better. And that's enough of that. If prodded about her own life, she would clam up. I keep myself to myself, she'd say. How prudent that seemed to me once. How miserly, now.

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'thave 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.)