After Alice (13 page)

“And my younger boy doesn't like the work; he's in computer programming,” Walt says.

Ah, there it is, the exacting equation of inheritance. The children must leave to be successful. Some of the children must leave, because the orchard will support only one family; if one doesn't stay, there is nobody to run the orchard. She remembers that Walt has two girls as well, but they are not part of the calculations, it seems.

She and Walt are here, possibly, because their older siblings died young.

She asks, “Do you think Georg Rhenisch will want to buy Beauvoir as well?” She's half-joking; she will have to think what to do now. This applecart well and truly upset.

But Walt takes her seriously. “We did ask him for you; hope that wasn't making assumptions. But he says that they don't need that much more land right now, and Beauvoir slopes north a little too much; not enough sun for grapes.”

“If you're thinking about selling though,” Christina says, “you know that the old Inglis place above you is nearly all built out now; the developer might be looking for a new property. And people have been having good luck getting the rezoning lately. Tell her what those lots are going for,” Christina urges.

Walter shakes his shaggy white head. “Two-fifty.”

Two hundred and fifty thousand?
An acre
? That is shocking. She wonders if Hugh knows that.

“No — for a sixth-acre lot.”

The amount seems impossible.

“I kid you not!” Walt says.

How much did the developer pay for Sans Souci?

Christina shakes her head. “It's changed hands since Hugh Inglis sold it, and I heard he got two-fifty for the whole thing, back in 86. But there's what, fifty lots in this new subdivision?”

“Holy mackerel, eh?” Walt says.

She doubts it's that easy to get things out of the ALR these days. It was an aberration, back there in the mid-eighties. Different government.

“What about Alice's boys?” Walt asks. “Any chance one of them would take it on? They must be all grown now, eh?”

Alice's boys. “I don't think any of them would be interested,” she says, more coolly than she had intended. She does not want to say that she has no idea where one of Alice's three sons is, has not spoken to two of them in twenty years.

“I see Stephen around,” Christina says.

She does not reply.

“Well, we just wanted to let you know,” Walt says, with a letting out of breath as if for a hard task accomplished. “So that you can plan.”

She drives home,
south on the highway. Now, by herself, inside the safe shell of her car, she is able to begin to think. Breathe; slow her mind. Let her mind ebb back into her body, her limbs.

What to do with her forty acres: her hillside of fruit trees, what is left of the estate her parents planted and ran? Fruit trees, a willow-choked gully, a few acres of steep slope wracked with pine beetle, a wrecked house, empty for nearly three decades. It's been too much trouble, finding someone to lease or manage the land, these days. She can charge almost nothing for the lease; it's not worth it to anyone to cultivate if they have to pay a large rent. She's been charging just enough to pay the taxes. Even so, she has had difficulty finding someone willing to take it on, to put in the work. But the land should not sit idle; that's a waste.

She has been thinking of her boy, Justin. He is only eighteen. Not ready. She has planned that he would have the university years, would come into the land, as her father had done, in his thirties: mature, seasoned, a man.

It is not for herself. She will never live here again among the trees. She has no illusions about what is required, physically, socially, to run an orchard, to take on the community roles that her father or Mr. Inglis played. But she had wanted that for Justin.

Perhaps it has been stupid to hold that idea, that Justin would want the estate. What were the chances, after all? She had wanted him to become educated, to get his university degree, to travel a little. To become more than a farmer. And then to return and live here, to manage the orchards intelligently — to use his brain, not just his muscle. She had envisioned him at her father's old desk, looking at accounts, discussing plans with his foreman. She had imagined buying more property for him — forty acres, after all, could not support a family in very much comfort — setting him up in some style.

A daydream.
Buddenbrooks
, Clara had said scornfully, when she'd mentioned it once.

But the hills, the lake, the sky, the trees. The apples glowing red among the leaves. Her father walking through the orchard in his Panama hat, the sun on his shoulders. The dignity of his labour, of making with his hands and eyes and brain a little world.

Her mother with her garden, the jeweled jars of peaches and beets and pickles lining the larder. Herself and Alice running through the tall grass. Alice with her apron full of day-old Rhode Island reds. Alice stepping out to a school concert, often the star, in crinoline and shining pale pageboy. Herself climbing to the height of land, lifting her face, smelling the air, storing the molecular print of the landscape in her bones.

In his speech at her retirement dinner, her director Dr. Haephestes had said, inaccurately, that she was returning to the village in which she had grown up. “Sundrenched, pastoral, fruit-growing village,” he had said, actually. And not grown up, but “in which the fruits of her investigative genius had first been nurtured, as tiny seeds,” which was botanically inaccurate, as well.

She is not returning to this community, no. She has bought a little house, a townhouse, as they called row houses here, on the outskirts of the city, ten kilometres further south along the highway, near the airport. A much more practical idea. She will continue to write and give conference papers for several more years, with any luck.

But she had envisioned, also, Beauvoir continuing on, at arm's length, under the husbandry of the Rilkes. Herself called in to vet big decisions. Beginning soon to bring Justin with her — he must be introduced to the orchards gradually, so they seemed appealing, not a millstone. At some point, she had planned to hire an architect to look at the house site — for the house itself would have to be bulldozed, likely; it was almost certainly damaged beyond retrieval — and have some discussions about a new place. Justin, of course, would have been part of that.

And yet, without the Rilkes. . . .

It has been an unfeasible dream, perhaps. Clara was right. She cannot practicably live here and run the orchard. She is too out of touch, not strong or young enough to manage it. She would have to work in the trees, and she is not up to that, no matter how fit she is for her age.

She has forfeited the land, perhaps, by her absence, by not having children of her own, by pursuing an intellectual life. By not being born a boy. She hadn't even wanted the estate for many years. She had rejected ties, had given it to Alice. Though it had come back to her, or what was left of it had. She had not wanted it.

But she had not ever thought that it would cease to be, cease to be hers. Cosmic irony, of course.
You don't know what you've got till
it's gone
, as Joni Mitchell had sung.

She thinks that it might have been in those early days after Justin's birth, the nights she walked him up and down the short path of her apartment's breadth while Cynthia slept, that she had begun to think again of Beauvoir, of the slope of trees beside the shimmering lake, as something to which she belonged, something of value. Something to pass on to Alice's grandson.

Though perhaps it was more truthful to say that she had seen, in Justin, something of value to Beauvoir. A caretaker for Beauvoir. She has not thought of that.

Something ties her to this place, she sees that. She has not lived here in more than forty years — closer to forty-five — but something in her bones has become magnetized, is pulling her towards the landscape itself. Is it the minerals, the iron and calcium in the well water, long ago laid down in her bones, pulling back to the earth from which they leached? Longing pulls her, lines up her neurons like iron filings. She cannot see how to hold the land. But she must.

HUSBAND

Hugh telephones:
he'll be back, he says, in June, with his daughter Ingrid. He seems to assume that he will stay with her again, that they will stay with her. It's a trespass: she resents it, then gives in, weakly, shaking her head at herself.

And now she must get through the boxes somehow, because she'll need space for Ingrid as well as Hugh. She must begin.

It takes her nearly a week before she acquires file folders, some labels, a package of paper dust masks, latex gloves, clear plastic boxes. Before she summons up enough will to descend the stairs to her daylight basement and to dive in, seizing a first box, sitting herself on a low stool beside it, slitting the packing tape.

She is ready to begin. She does not begin.

She turns on a lamp, angles it so the light shines directly into the box. She puts on a dust mask, tucking the elastic thread behind her ears, pinching the metal tab over the bridge of her nose. She puts on a pair of close-fitting latex gloves.

It is not dust she is worried about, or mouse droppings, even. It is the past, the underworld of memory.

About two-thirds of the boxes are labeled
Alice
: some in her mother's copperplate writing, the rest in her own impatient scrawl. She wishes the labeling had been more explicit; then she'd have some idea of where to start. As it is, she must try to guess, by the exteriors alone, what is in the containers. Some boxes are significantly older and marked with pasted-on labels written in thick, browning fountain-pen ink. Those must have been packed or assembled when she and Alice were still girls.

She has no desire to root through all of these things. If they could only be given to Hugh and Cynthia as they are. But no; who knows what could have been slipped into a box. Only she can go in safely, extricate any live fuses.

That's melodramatic. There may well be nothing. At most, only a few notes or letters to disturb the reader, and then only if he or she is alert and has sufficient background knowledge to be able to absorb the implications.

She will start with those that are not marked with Alice's name.

A large carton next, containing two metal boxes, each a foot square by half a foot deep, each with a lid, which has been sealed with duct tape. The tape is brittle, but not broached; what's in the tin boxes should be still intact.

Her mother's work again. She finds two loose paper labels, which must have originally been stuck to the metal; the glue on these has long undergone whatever chemical changes glue does, and is neutralized. One reads “Keepsakes 1940 – 1953” and the other, “Keepsakes 1953 – 1973.”

Dating, then, from the year of her mother's arrival in the valley to her death. Mother must have sorted and packed these tins during her last illness; they have been dealt with efficiently, with a view to long storage. They say, now, that Mother didn't trust Alice and Sidonie to do the job properly. Had Mother expunged things as well? Who had she imagined breaking the seal as she taped the lids down? Or had she thought that the boxes might very well be destroyed without being opened?

She has seen the tin boxes before, of course: it comes to her now. They had lived in the attic, and Mother had brought them down on sentimental occasions to leaf through them.
Here is the program
from the war bond concert, when the operatic society did
The Pirates of Penzance
, and Betty and Anne Protherow and I were the sisters. . .
and look; the blue ribbon I got for my dahlias!
And Father would sing a bit of the operetta, and they'd say
do you remember
, and be off for an hour or so, in a place that Alice and Sidonie couldn't follow.

Even then, even in her childhood, Marshall's Landing had seemed a place of past glories: exotic, paradisiacal. Her parents had reminisced: concerts and dances, flower shows and picnics on barges, of Father and Mr. Inglis playing polo, of Mother and Mrs. Inglis and Mrs. Clare and other women who were all now staid and grey dancing the cancan on stage in the community hall. Some of this world still existed, in remnants, in Sidonie's and Alice's childhood; more in Alice's, perhaps, as Alice was five years older than Sidonie and could remember occasions that Sidonie couldn't. But what remained seems a shadow, only, of a more luxurious, a more cultured time. There was always the sense that the best world had passed: only poor rags remained.

And what is this world to her, now? Or the realm of her childhood?

One of the boxes will be full of concert programs and dance cards and tea invitations: that will be interesting to Cynthia, perhaps. The other box will have — what? — school memorabilia, birthday cards, newspaper cuttings, largely featuring Alice. Also interesting to Cynthia, but preferably sorted first. But which is which? The boxes must have been purchased at the same time; they are identical.