“I don’t know. What is it about when you pee in the snow in the middle of a university campus?”
“He probably had a jar,” said Morgan. “Maybe he kept them and his wine cellar is filled with jars of old urine.”
“I wrote an entire name in the snow once.” She didn’t want to return to questions of moral responsibility. “It wasn’t my own pee, of course …”
“Your handwriting’s legendary, Miranda.”
“Is it? He watched me. I let him, and then we were lovers.”
“You weren’t lovers.”
“I was eighteen.”
“A virgin?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Well?”
“What? I forgot losing my virginity, Morgan. If time heals, why didn’t I forget enough to remember? All these years I never thought about it. Isn’t that funny?”
“Time doesn’t heal. It creates scar tissue. I remember.”
“You weren’t there!”
“Losing my own —”
“I don’t want to hear about it. God, Morgan!”
“Sorry. I’m not too smart sometimes, but I have good instincts, and I’m sensitive.”
“You’re relentlessly intelligent, Morgan, with the sensitivity of a watermelon.”
“And?”
“The instincts of an aardvark.”
“Now that’s funny. So what do you think happened? Why did Molly suddenly leave town?”
Miranda seemed from her benign expression as she faced the breeze drifting over the millpond to be almost passive, sorting things out, following things through. It was difficult, Morgan thought, to connect the dots when they were swarming like gnats or mosquitoes. You didn’t want to rush the design; it was all in the perception.
“Did you notice that Detzler’s mill closed in 1988?” she suddenly asked. “That was the summer she was sixteen. Griffin left. Oxley bought the abandoned mill nine or ten years later. Yes, well. Then. No. Yes! Yes, they did. They did it! That last summer, that’s what happened!
“At sixteen I wasn’t a foundling, but I was sixteen. You want desperately to know the limits of identity from the outside in … from the immeasurable genetic sea, to know the current that flows through your veins. Know what I mean? So you endlessly analyze your parents, you find them wanting. Maybe they were exchanged at your birth. But she had no parents at all, not even an origin myth, just a girl at the door with a baby, and a self-professed spinster and her old friend who pooled their affection to make a place for her in the world, but it wasn’t a place of her own.
“So she turns to Griffin. She’d been pushing and pushing. He was like a great ugly mirror, but she could see herself in the glass. She was exploring her awakening sexuality, maybe skinny-dipping or sunning on the grass between the mill and the house. She loved her old granny, but she needed to know who she was, from the inside out as well as the outside in.
“After summers of playing him, not knowing whether he was walleye or pike, fresh fish or foul, she needed to connect. She walked in on him literally. He was her prince, and he raped her, Morgan. There’s a precedent, there’s a pattern. He raped her inside the mill, in the shadows, on a cot on the planks over the watercourse, inside the mill. I know he raped her. And then he closed down the mill and left.”
“And next?” he asked.
“She was pregnant.”
“Pregnant!”
“Pregnant with Elizabeth Jill.”
“Named after Elizabeth Clarke.”
“Molly Bray went to the city.”
“What happened?”
“She tracked him down to his Rosedale mansion. It would have seemed like a mansion to her.”
“And?”
“Griffin sent her packing. Maybe he gave her some money. My guess is she spent the next few months on the street learning Toronto.”
“How do you figure?”
“There had to be a period of metamorphosis. Where else could she go? I know about metamorphosis, Morgan. I can imagine what she must have endured. You don’t just shuck off one identity and unfold your wings to dry in the air. Transformation is traumatic. There had to be time. She didn’t just pass from being a girl to being a woman during the course of her pregnancy. She remade herself …”
“Became her own creation.”
“She worked on it.”
“No one was looking for her.”
“Even if they had been, she was invisible.”
“Seven thousand, maybe ten thousand kids on the streets last winter, just in TO.”
Morgan took the statistics as a personal affront. When he was a kid in Cabbagetown, he had never seen street people. There was one old guy called Bert Shaver who lived in a cardboard shack in a ravine and did odd jobs for the poor in return for a meal. He never talked except to say thank you. The poor looked after their own, and the rich after theirs. And the government looked after the addicts and the damaged and the defectives in institutions.
“The RCMP figures there are fifty thousand homeless kids in the country,” he said, his words taking flight. “There are some wee little kids caught up in porn rings and prostitution, kept out of sight by the worst of the creeps, pervs who get them on booze and drugs, eight-year-old drunks, ten-year-old hookers, kids who can talk their way around lawyers and cops and social workers, and have energy left to roll a john, cut up a derelict, do themselves down with the drugs of their choice.”
Sometimes Miranda thought Morgan should have been a professor or a politician, but she realized he was too restless for either. He might have been a preacher, except for the part about God.
“So,” she said, “Molly was on the street long enough to know she didn’t belong there. She went back to Robert Griffin’s place, determined to hold him responsible. She was no butterfly, not the iron butterfly she would become, but she was on her way. That’s what I would have done if I were her, which I wasn’t … I’m not.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“You saw her, Morgan. That was a woman in control of her life.”
“And death.”
“So it seems.”
“Did she blackmail him? Was it extortion?”
“It’s not extortion when he’s the father. It’s just negotiation.”
“You think she could wield that much power? She was sixteen.”
“Sixteen can be tough.”
“I don’t think a few months on the streets, no matter how bad, empowers anyone that much,” said Morgan.
“Something did. Maybe something innate. He set her up. There might have been a transition before Wychwood Park, an apartment or condo, and he hired Victoria, or she did, and she became Eleanor Drummond. Without abandoning Molly Bray she brought up Elizabeth Jill to be a very together young woman.” She corrected herself. “Girl, she’s still a girl.”
“We can’t even be certain Robert Griffin was the father.”
“You can bank on it, Morgan.”
11
Shiners
They