Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace

Once you start feeling sorry for yourself they’ve got you where they want you. Then they send for the Chaplain.

Oh come to my arms, poor wandering soul. There is more joy in Heaven over the one lost lamb. Ease your troubled mind. Kneel at my feet. Wring your hands in anguish. Describe how conscience tortures you day and night, and how the eyes of your victims follow you around the room, burning like red-hot coals. Shed tears of remorse. Confess, confess. Let me forgive and pity. Let me get up a Petition for you. Tell me all.

And then what did he do? Oh shocking. And then what?

The left hand or the right?

How far up, exactly?

Show me where.

Possibly I hear a whispering. Now there’s an eye, looking in at me through the slit cut in the door. I can’t see it but I know it’s there. Then a knocking.

And I think, Who could that be? The Matron? The Warden, come to give me a scolding? But it can’t be any of them, because nobody here does you the courtesy of knocking, they look at you through the little slit and then they just walk in. Always knock first, said Mary Whitney. Then wait until they give you leave. You never know what they may be up to, and half of it’s nothing they want you to see, they could have their fingers up their nose or some other place, as even a gentlewoman feels the need to scratch where it itches, and if you see a pair of heels sticking out from under the bed it’s best to take no notice. They may be silk purses in the daytime, but they’re all sows’ ears at night. Mary was a person of democratic views.

The knock again. As if I have a choice.

I push my hair back under my cap, and get up off the straw mattress and smooth down my dress and apron, and then I move as far back into the corner of the room as I can, and then I say, quite firmly because it’s as well to keep hold of your dignity if at all possible, Please come in.

Chapter 5

The door opens and a man enters. He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say. He’s tall, with long legs and arms, but not what the Governor’s daughters would call handsome; they incline to the languid ones in the magazines, very elegant and butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, with narrow feet in pointed boots. This man has a briskness about him which is not fashionable, and also rather large feet, although he is a gentleman, or next door to it. I don’t think he is English, and so it is hard to tell. His hair is brown, and wavy by nature — unruly it might be called, as if he can’t make it lie flat by brushing. His coat is good, a good cut; but not new, as there are shiny patches on the elbows. He has a tartan vest, tartan has been popular ever since the Queen took up with Scotland and built a castle there, full of deer’s heads or so they say; but now I see it isn’t real tartan, only checked. Yellow and brown. He has a gold watch-chain, so although rumpled and untended, he is not poor. He doesn’t have the side-whiskers, as they have begun to wear them now; I don’t much like them myself, give me a moustache or a beard, or else nothing at all. James McDermott and Mr. Kinnear were both clean-shaven, and Jamie Walsh too, not that he had anything much to shave; except that Mr. Kinnear had a moustache. When I used to empty his shaving basin in the mornings, I would take some of the wet soap — he used a good soap, from London — and I would rub it on my skin, on the skin of my wrists, and then I would have the smell of it with me all day, at least until it was time to scrub the floors. The young man closes the door behind him. He doesn’t lock it, but someone else locks it from the outside. We are locked into this room together.

Good morning, Grace, he says. I understand that you are afraid of doctors. I must tell you right away that I myself am a doctor. My name is Dr. Jordan, Dr. Simon Jordan.

I look at him quickly, then look down. I say, Is the other doctor coming back?

The one that frightened you? he says. No, he is not.

I say, Then I suppose you are here to measure my head.

I would not dream of it, he says, smiling; but still, he glances at my head with a measuring look. However I have my cap on, so there’s nothing he can see. Now that he has spoken I think he must be an American. He has white teeth and is not missing any of them, at least at the front, and his face is quite long and bony. I like his smile, although it is higher on one side than the other, which gives him the air of joking.

I look at his hands. They are empty. There’s nothing at all in them. No rings on his fingers. Do you have a bag with knives in it? I say. A leather satchel.

No, he says, I am not the usual kind of doctor. I do no cutting open. Are you afraid of me, Grace?

I can’t say that I am afraid of him yet. It’s too early to tell; too early to tell what he wants. No one comes to see me here unless they want something.

I would like him to say what kind of a doctor he is if he’s not the usual kind, but instead he says, I am from Massachusetts. Or that is where I was born. I have travelled a good deal since then. I have been going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it. And he looks at me, to see if I understand. I know it is the Book of Job, before Job gets the boils and running sores, and the whirlwinds. It’s what Satan says to God. He must mean that he has come to test me, although he’s too late for that, as God has done a great deal of testing of me already, and you would think he would be tired of it by now. But I don’t say this. I look at him stupidly. I have a good stupid look which I have practised. I say, Have you been to France? That is where all the fashions come from. I see I have disappointed him. Yes, he says. And to England, and also to Italy, and to Germany and Switzerland as well.

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the ocean as if there’s nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another.

But now it’s my turn to say something. I say, I don’t know how you manage, Sir, amongst all the foreigners, you never know what they are saying. When the poor things first come here they gabble away like geese, although the children can soon speak well enough.

This is true, as children of any kind are very quick to learn.

He smiles, and then he does a strange thing. He puts his left hand into his pocket and pulls out an apple. He walks over to me slowly, holding the apple out in front of him like someone holding out a bone to a dangerous dog, in order to win it over.

This is for you, he says.

I am so thirsty the apple looks to me like a big round drop of water, cool and red. I could drink it down in one gulp. I hesitate; but then I think, There’s nothing bad in an apple, and so I take it. I haven’t had an apple of my own for a long time. This apple must be from last autumn, kept in a barrel in the cellar, but it seems fresh enough.

I am not a dog, I say to him.

Most people would ask me what I mean by saying that, but he laughs. His laugh is just one breath, Hah, as if he’s found a thing he has lost; and he says, No, Grace, I can see you are not a dog. What is he thinking? I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry. Aren’t you going to eat it, he says.