Friday, August 22

When I visit her today, Adelaide is still wearing her butterfly nightgown. Francine is wearing a blue and white pantsuit that is the color of my clock. After we eat supper, Adelaide pushes her plate away and asks if I'd like to see the garden.

"Mais, maman, tu es en chemise de nuit!" says Francine.

This time I know what Francine is saying: But, Mother, you are wearing your nightgown! Adelaide does not answer. She just gets up from the table.

"Okay," I say, and follow her.

We walk into the garden. I have already seen it but I don't mind seeing it a second time.

"When I was a girl my father made me an elephant out of potatoes," Adelaide says. She has told me this before. "He glued potatoes together and that was my Christmas present. And I treasured it. After it went rotten, we put it on top of the frozen garden and then I had the space back on my dresser."

We walk over to the stone bench.

"There are little fish in the pond," says Adelaide. "You will see them if we sit quietly for a minute." We settle on the stone bench and wait. Soon, bright orange shapes dart to the surface.

"The heron eats the big ones," she says.

"What?" I ask.

"Every so often, the heron comes and eats the bigger fish. Only the small ones escape him, but when they get big enough, they too are eaten."

"That's terrible," I say.

"It is what it is," she answers.

Rain begins to fall, making dimples on the surface of the water, and the orange shapes disappear.

"Swim, swim while you can," says Adelaide, "for tomorrow you may die."

"That's terrible," I say.

"It is what it is," she answers. She looks down at the water. "I like to get up in the middle of the night and play 'God Save the King' on the piano. It drives Francine crazy."

"God Save the King?" I ask.

"King George," she says. "A fine figure of a man. I took my students to see them both—King George VI and Queen Elizabeth—when they came to Canada in 1939. We went on the train, all the way to Regina. We stood on the corner of Victoria and Broad to view them as they drove by. My parents met us there—my father was driving the Essex 1928 at that time. When we got home, I had the children write down their favorite part of the trip. Most of them wrote about the royal couple, what they were wearing and all of that. One

little fellow wrote: My best part was when the train was going through the tunnel and even though it was daytime the air was black all over."

We go inside to her studio and the picture of clouds is still on the easel. I look at it carefully and the clouds seem quite safe.

"Try some more," she says, and I do. I take a long look out the window and then I use the charcoal to shade and soften, until the clouds seem to stick right out of the paper. Adelaide plays Liszt on the record player. She falls asleep on the couch on top of the patchwork quilt and I notice a large brown stain on the front of her nightgown. I think it might be gravy but I'm not sure.

After twenty-two minutes, Adelaide wakes up and pulls the patchwork quilt onto herself.

"I remember where each of these squares came from," she says.

"Oh," I answer. "You remember where each of the squares came from."

"You bet I do," she says. "Like this creamy silk. Annie Arbor brought this cloth, surprised us all because we thought she hadn't the means. Skinny as a rail, and all them kids. From England she was, answered an ad to marry Simon Howler. Lived in a tar paper shack they did, nothing much to eat in winter except molasses bread and what the neighbors brought. All the ladies sitting around, gossiping, sewing bits of their lives onto this quilt for my trousseau, and Annie Arbor steps in with that old burlap sack wrapped around her shoulders and carrying a stretch of creamy silk. Well, everyone was happy for her. It wasn't until later, after the quilt was done and colder weather hit, that we knew what happened."

"What happened?" I ask, shading in another cloud on the paper.

"It was her wedding dress," Adelaide said. "They found the rest of it all torn up. The day they found Annie hanging in the barn, dead as a doornail, poor dear soul."

"She killed herself?"

"Poor dear soul. It was her only way out."

I think of Stanley locked up in his room. How awful it would be to have only one way out.

"Do you remember all the women who made this quilt?" I ask.

"Every one of them. Martha Henry, who married the son of the richest man in town after being their servant for only six months. She was a mite stout on her wedding day, but no one thought any less of her. These scraps were left over from the dress she made her little daughter—pink tulle. Looked sweet on the child, that's for sure."

"And this blue one?" I go over to her and point to a dark floral print that repeats itself along the border.

"Well, this was one of my mother's. She had waited and waited for a store-bought Christmas dress, and when it finally came from the Eaton's catalogue, it was four sizes too big. She had to shorten it and take it in at the sides, and so there was lots of leftover material."

I think about my journal, and how each entry is like a piece of cloth that has been sewed into place on a quilt.

Adelaide gets up to examine the drawing on the easel. "Very good. You have been looking carefully," she says.

"Yes," I say. "I have been trying to see better."

"Being an artist takes more exercise than people think," she says. "To begin to draw is the first step. People these days have had enough of this crazy nonsense called contemporary art. In my day, three years of Art School meant architecture, perspective drawing, interior design, publicity, art history, the history of civilization, ceramics … it took seventy different disciplines to make the diploma, and that shows in the work."

"You spent three years at Art School," I say.

"Did I meet you in Art School?" she asks.

"No." There is a silence. Luke Phoenix would fill it with a quotation, but I don't want to do that. "We met at the beach," I tell her.

"Oh," she says. After a minute she goes on. "There were thirty of us in the first year, twenty in the second, and only ten in the third. From these ten, only three got the diploma. I was one of those three."

"Did you go to Art School in Canada?" I ask.

"No," she says. "In Nice. I went to Art School there, at the Ecole Nationale d'Art Décoratif. My husband, the bastard, was trying to keep me happy after we moved to Europe, so he arranged for this. But then he left us."

"My father left my mother and me," I say.

"Was he a bastard, too?" she asks.

"I don't think so," I say. "They just wanted to be with different partners. He wants a woman named Sadie Richards who is tall and looks like Julia Roberts. She wants a man named Alan Phoenix who didn't actually hire me for the babysitting job this summer—but now he has. I don't know if he and my mother will get married, but if they do I will have two brothers. These two brothers could replace the brother who died before I was born and whose name did not get put on a gerbil. I hope I don't get Martin Phoenix as a brother before this summer is over because then I can't put personal care assistant on my resumé. I also hope that Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett are not eating each other."

"Did we meet in Art School?" asks Adelaide. She is breathing heavily and I think she is trying to cough, but she does not.

"No," I tell her. "At the beach."

"When I was a girl my father made me an elephant out of potatoes," wheezes Adelaide. It's like her brain is stuck on this. "He glued potatoes together and that was my Christmas present. And I treasured it. After it went rotten, we put it on top of the frozen garden and then I had the space back on my dresser."

When I get back to the villa, Luke Phoenix and Julian are sitting at the dining room table with my mother and Alan Phoenix. Julian holds out a notebook.

"This is about a rare type of bats 'ere," he says. "I translated some things from French to English for you because of all of my materials being in French."

"Thank you," I say, taking the notebook. The title is Bechstein's Bat.

"Is Martin Phoenix asleep?" I ask.

My mother nods and that means yes.

"Julian and Luke are going to a wedding tomorrow," she asks. "Can you babysit?"

"No," I say. "But I am available as a personal care assistant if Alan Phoenix needs me."

"Taylor, why do you have to be so difficult?" she asks, but this is not a rational question and so I do not answer.

"Thank you," says Alan Phoenix. "Your mother has a class and I have to hang the paintings for the show. It opens on Sunday."

"Who is getting married?" I ask.

"Julian's ex-boyfriend," says Luke Phoenix.

"Oh," I say. There is a silence for one minute. "What class are you taking, Mom?"

She looks at me and doesn't answer for a moment.

"It's a cooking class," she says.