Читать книгу Alaska Highway Two-Step - Caroline Woodward - Страница 15

The Rosemont Painters will be here by one o’clock. I’ve ironed another of Aunt Ginger’s terrific rayon dresses, all violet and lilac colours, and I’ve outdone myself and made five dozen coconut macaroons.

“Oh you shouldn’t have!” they’ll all tut-tut before diving on them like so many silver-haired, sweet-voiced chickadees. I’m looking forward to them, I guess because they’re one last link with Aunt Ginger. The weather has co-operated beautifully and the rhododendrons are absolutely magnificent, at their multi- coloured peak.

I’d better change into the tea dress at the very last minute. Knowing me, I’ll slop something on it or catch it on a nail. Now, the tea. None left in the caddy in the kitchen. Nothing but the best, tip-top leaves of the tea plant, Ceylon No. 1, for our Rosemont Painters.

I’ll have to head downstairs to Aunt Ginger’s collection of trunks. Downstairs. Shudder. Spider and newt territory. As long as the gas furnace, which I replaced just last fall, keeps going and the water pipes don’t freeze, I really don’t care if I ever have to go down there. The only storage space in this little three-room cottage, however, is downstairs, and downstairs I must go.

I brace my feet and heave at the brass ring to lift the trap door in the hallway. Damp, cool, stagnant air plumes upward. I take a deep breath and make my way backwards down the impossibly steep steps. The cord to the light switch hangs conveniently within arm’s reach of the bottom rung.

The cellar is a small, dank space carved into the sandstone with cement foundation walls on three sides. A wooden door leads to the outside, facing the lake, but it’s locked from the inside. Along one wall, shelves hold cobwebbed sealers, some empty, and others whose dark contents I am reluctant to investigate. Looked like Chutney From Hell the last time I checked.

When I moved into this cottage last year, the first order of business was to replace the ancient roof, which was leaking in at least a dozen places. Aunt Ginger had an ingenious system of buckets and pans to catch the drips but the damage was done. Wood rot and stains everywhere. Fortunately for me, I was so poor I qualified for a roofing grant. Then Hope, bless her, gave up her exotic Caribbean holiday to come and help me redo the wallpaper and paint after a hardware store shopping spree.

“You’re looking at your Christmas and birthday presents, kid sister,” she’d said, stuffing the receipts into an envelope and flashing her gold caps at me. She looks a bit like Jane Fonda—definitely takes after Mother’s lean, leggy family genes.

Aunt Ginger had divided her BC Telephone stocks, her Canada Savings Bonds, and her collection of foreign coins among my three siblings. These items turned out to be far more cashable, of course, than this dilapidated cottage and the land I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, sell. Justice still grouses about my inheriting this place, calling me landed gentry and such, but he’s never lifted a finger around here, before or after Aunt Ginger died. I guess she figured that Faith and Thomas had their own law firm, Hope ran a chain of fitness spas, and Justice was a part-owner of a used car dealership, while I, the budding writer of the family, had been budding for more than a decade. Aunt Ginger correctly surmised the odds were slim I’d ever own my own home.

Our parents hadn’t been able to save much after attempting to put us all through various institutions of higher learning. They’d sold their apple orchard and strawberry, raspberry, and black currant operation during the second-to-last recession and moved to a little trailer court to retire. The first holiday they took together in thirty years? Bang. A fly-by-night plane outfit travelling from Los Angeles to Mexico crashed. I was seventeen. After that, I spent most of my university breaks and Christmas holidays with Aunt Ginger here at Willow Point on Kootenay Lake.

Here’s the tea trunk. Brass and blue metal. Right where I left it after first exploring this musty hole last spring. None of the six trunks are locked. I suspect all the keys are lost. The tea trunk is much smaller than the others, which contain her dance costumes, sheet music, piles of 78 rpm records, books about teaching ballet, and at least one hundred pairs of shoes. She couldn’t bear to throw away shoes. She would have them repaired until there was nothing left to work with and even these she saved, lovingly wrapping each pair in dark blue tissue paper. I am unable to toss them out either, although I may donate them to the daycare just down the road so someone can have fun with them. She’d like that, I think. Much as I love the many greens and dark purples and pale yellow leathers, the dozen gleaming black patent character shoes, and the rainbow of satin dance slippers, I can’t ever wear them. My feet are size six and hers were size ten.

Aunt Ginger had bought the tea ten years ago, each pound encased in heavy tinfoil, the Sinhala lion logo and Ceylon No. 1 printed on every label. The scent that rises from the opened trunk lid is a perfumed blend of tea and something else. My nose drinks it up. Not for nothing was my childhood nickname Super Nose. In our family the nickname meant respect for my ability to sniff out the turning of milk, the taint of turkey kept too long past Christmas, the secret stash of chocolate chip cookies. But this, this is a treat and I take in another big snort with gusto. I pick up a silver package from the top left-hand corner and start to close the heavy tin-lined lid.

The green marbled cover of a book peeks out where the pound of tea used to be. I put the tea on a big steamer trunk beside me and pull the book out from underneath the snugly packed double layer of tea packages. Beneath the gleaming packages are still more books with marbled-green cloth covers, each wrapped with a green silk ribbon tied neatly in a bow. Right away, I know what they are because there were two just like these upstairs in the rolltop desk.

Aunt Ginger’s will had been a straightforward legal document except for her passions. We could all imagine the expressions on the notary public’s face as Ginger’s sequined dance dresses, Spode china, antique roses, and wooden Walton rowboats had pride of place among all the other material possessions and henceforths and thereafters:

Please don’t publish my journals or donate any of my dance costumes or music to anyone. The dresses will end up on some terrible mannequin in a museum and I’ll look ridiculous by association and be completely unable to do anything about it. I trust your good judgment and hope that the family children will play dress-up with them or perhaps another dancer in the family will make good use of them. I had every intention of writing my biography of course but I couldn’t stop living long enough to do that! If the writer in our family, our own Mercy Brown, can ever sit still long enough to read the journals, she may be moved to write a little article and sell it to one of the dance or women’s magazines. I think the modern feminists may be interested. I don’t think the lipstick-and-face-cream type of magazine would be interested unless you put a lot of sex into it. I’d rather you didn’t. Again, I trust your good judgment on this score. I realize it may not pay very well.

I had found the two green diaries in the rolltop desk, skimmed through them and, truth be told, what I found there saddened me. She had started making attempts to sum up her life but the paragraphs would trail off, the writing shaky and barely legible. One had started out being the 1981 World Jaunt journal and here, the descriptions of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka were delightful. Aunt Ginger always loved meeting people and they, in turn, responded to her sincerity and joie de vivre. She never went on organized tours, preferring to make up her own itinerary. She ended up in kitchens of cooks she’d met in the marketplace, in the library of an ambassador, or on a collective onion-and-chili-pepper farm worked by formerly unemployed university graduates.

She had a major stroke in Sri Lanka as she waited to board the Air Lanka plane to Madras. When she was flown back to Canada, she, and we, discovered that she’d had several little strokes already. We also discovered, to her great embarrassment, that she’d knocked ten years off her actual birth date somewhere along the way.

The writing in the diary changed after the stroke, from the lively descriptive travelogue (and dozens of addresses) to stilted attempts to sum up her own life. Over and over she started with where she was born (Montreal) and her first dance teachers (Mlle Langlois, Mlle St. Amande) and then she tried to say what called her to dance as a vocation. “I simply knew I was to devote my life to the dance…I made the decision to devote my life to the art which beckoned me—the Dance...I realized at an early age, that I was, despite my proper Westmount upbringing and gangly physique, a dancer.” And so on. Then her writing dissolved into illegibility, her transparent thought processes collided and crumbled, and the journal entry for that day trailed away into scribbled notes crammed along the margins, some with circles drawn around them. “Must mention Morocco…Ruth St. Denis in Santa Barbara...More on Isadora in Paris…More original Canadian works please!…Vancouver in 40s?” She tried, several times, to tackle an overall outline. My Early Life. The Decision to Dance. Twenty Years of Performance. Choreography and The Duncan School of Dance. The Cottage Life. My Travels in Later Years.

I open the journal I’ve just found. The first page is dated October 30, 1929. Winnipeg. Her navy blue writing is ornate and confident. Youthful. Then I hear the clomp-clomp of many pairs of feet coming up the stairs to the kitchen door above me.

The Rosemont Painters. Oh no! I drop the diary back into the chest, pick up the package of tea, and scramble up the steps, banging my elbow funny bone at the very top as I lurch out. I toss the package of tea at the kitchen counter and run into the bedroom. This is what happens when you live alone and ponder every possible thing. Time goes bye-bye.

I hear a subdued group murmur, punctuated with tinkly giggles before the first tentative knock on the door.

“Be there in a minute!” I holler, trying for a spritely sort of yell instead of a desperate bid for more time. I look in the dresser mirror and see a very dark clump of cobweb with the desiccated remains of some insect life on top of my head. I pick it off and throw it in the general direction of the wastebasket beside the dresser. My hands are filthy. I yank off my jeans and T-shirt and shimmy into the pretty dress. I run on tiptoe to the bathroom and scrub my offending hands. Two violent scratches with the hairbrush and my coiffure is presentable. Jump into my sandals. Run down the hall. Stop to heave the trap door back over the gaping cellar hole. I hear an ominous crackle from somewhere between my shoulder blades. Too late to check.

“Well, hello everyone!” I trill breathlessly. (I will inspect the dress after I shepherd them all down to the lawn.) They beam at me, a sea of glinting glasses and gleaming teeth. All grasp folding lawn chairs and easels and painting supplies.

“Shall we go down to the lawns?” I suggest and shoo them down the stairs again. “Be with you in a minute! Make yourselves at home.” I stop at the first turn and then, ever so casually, back slowly up the stairs. It seems I have a rip along the line of stitching keeping the zipper in place. It is only a couple of centimetres long but it troubles me. The fabric of this beautiful dress is forty or so years old and was never meant to be worn by someone heaving and hauling heavy trap doors. Still, it is barely noticeable. I’ll take a chance wearing it. As long as I stick to pouring tea and holding a tray of featherweight macaroons, I’ll be okay.

In less than three hours, I intend to sit down with thin white gloves on my hands, the better to handle fifty-year-old journal pages from my own personal archives downstairs in that tea trunk. In the meantime, I’ll be a gracious, if somewhat distracted, host.