Critical Analysis:
About Peter
Peter’s father had intended to be with them, but he had been
sent to a sanatorium just before the date for the secret departure. He was to
follow them when he could, but he died instead.
What Peter's mother did was get to British Columbia, where
she improved her English and got a job teaching what was then called Business
Practice to high school students. She brought up Peter on her own and sent him
to college, and now he was an engineer. When she came to their apartment, and
later to their house, she always sat in the front room, never coming into the
kitchen unless Greta invited her. That was her way. She carried not noticing to
an extreme. Peter's opinions were something like his complexion. When they went
to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterward .He didn’t see the
point in going further. He watched television, he read a book, in somewhat the
same way. He had patience with such things. The people who put them together
were probably doing the best they could.
About Greta
It’s hard to explain it to anybody now—the life of women at
that time. What was okay and what was not. You might say, well, feminism was
not. And you would have to say feminism did not exist, you had never heard the
word. It wasn’t just the round of housework and children, either. That was
nothing. It was the way any serious idea, let alone ambition, was seen as some
sort of crime against nature.
One thing, though. When it came to writing poetry it was
maybe safer to be a woman than a man. That’s where the word poetess came in
handy. Like a load of spun sugar.
There was a magazine then, called The Echo Answers,
published irregularly in Toronto.Two of the poems had been published, and the
result was that when the editor of the magazine came to Vancouver last fall,
she had been invited to a party to meet him. The party was at the house of a
writer whose name had been familiar to her, it seemed, her whole life. The
party was in the late afternoon, when Peter was still at work, so she hired a
sitter and set off on the North Vancouver bus across the Lions Gate Bridge and
through Stanley Park.She was greeted by a woman.Nobody spoke to her or noticed
her, but in a short time a teenage girl thrust out a tray on which there were
glasses of what looked like pink lemonade. Greta took one and drank it down at
a thirsty gulp. She thanked the girl, then helped herself to another. She tried
to start a conversation about the long hot walk but the girl was not interested
and moved away, doing her job.Greta moved on. She kept smiling.
She didn’t give up, though. The drink was helping her and
she resolved to have another as soon as the tray came around.She never did find
out who the editor from Toronto was.
A man stood over her. He said, “How did you get here?”
She said that she had been invited.
“Yes. But did you come in your car?”
“I walked.” But that was not enough, and in a while she
managed to offer up the rest of it.
“I came on a bus, then I walked.”
One of the men who had been in the special circle was now
behind the man in the shoes. He said, “Excellent idea.” He actually seemed
ready to talk to her.
“Carry them. Or I will. Can you get up?”
She looked for the more important man to help her, but he
wasn’t there. Now she remembered what he’d written. She asked what he wrote. He
said he was not that kind of writer, he was a journalist. Visiting in this
house with his son and daughter, grandchildren of the hosts. They—the
children—had been passing out the drinks.
“Lethal,” he said, referring to the drinks. “Criminal.”
Now they were outside. She walked in her stockinged feet
across the grass, just barely avoiding a puddle.
“Somebody has thrown up there,” she told her escort.
“Indeed,” he said, and settled her into a car. “North
Vancouver,” he said. She must have told him that. “Okay. We’ll proceed. The
Lions Gate.”
Those great leafy trees above them. You could not see any
stars. But there was light shining on the water, between wherever they were and
the city lights.
He said that he had already told her that. Possibly twice.
But once again, okay. Harris Bennett. Bennett. He was the son-in-law of the
people who had given the party. Those were his children, passing out the
drinks. He and they were visiting from Toronto.
During the coming fall and winter and spring there was
hardly a day when she didn’t think of him. There really wasn’t a day. It was
like having the very same dream the minute you fell asleep.
he found herself writing a letter. It didn’t begin in any
conventional way. No Dear Harris. No Remember me.
“Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—
And hoping
It will reach Japan.”
Nearest thing to a poem in some time.She sent her letter to
him there, at the newspaper. She could not be sure that he opened his own mail,
and she thought that putting Private on the envelope was asking for trouble, so
she wrote only the day of her arrival and the time of the train, after the bit
about the bottle. No name. She thought that whoever opened the envelope might
think of an elderly relative given to whimsical turns of phrase.
Main story
This summer Peter was going to spend a month or maybe longer
in charge of a job that was being done at Lund, far up, in fact as far as you
could go north, on the mainland. There was no accommodation for Katy and Greta.
But Greta had kept in touch with a girl she used to work
with in the Vancouver library, who was married now and living in Toronto.
Once Peter had brought Greta’s suitcase on board the train
he seemed eager to get himself out of the way. But not to leave. He explained
to her that he was just uneasy that the train would start to move. Once on the
platform looking up at their window, he stood waving. Smiling, waving. His
smile for their daughter, Katy, was wide open, sunny, without a doubt in the
world, as if he believed that she would continue to be a marvel to him, and he
to her, forever.
Katy had evidently not understood that Peter’s being outside
on the platform meant that he would not be traveling with them. When they began
to move and he didn’t, and when the train’s gathering speed left him behind,
Katy took the desertion hard. But in a while she settled down, telling Greta he
would be there in the morning.
A young man Greg and woman Laurie came up the stairs and sat
down across from Greta and Katy. The young man and woman said good morning with
considerable cheer, and Greta responded. Laurie told Greta that they had been
going around to kindergartens, doing skits. This was called reading readiness
work. They were actors, really. She was going to get off at Jasper, where she
had a summer job waitressing and doing some comic bits. Not reading readiness
exactly.
They were both quite beautiful, Greta thought. Tall, limber,
almost unnaturally lean, he with crinkly dark hair, she black-haired and sleek
as a Madonna. A bit later on, when Greta mentioned their physical similarity,
they said they had sometimes taken advantage of it, when it came to living
arrangements. It made things no end easier, but they had to remember to ask for
two beds and make sure both got mussed up overnight.Greg and Greta waved to
Laurie when she got off at Jasper. She blew kisses from the platform.
Greg and Greta were
drinking while all this anguished but also somewhat comforting talk went on. He
had produced a bottle of ouzo. She was fairly cautious with it, as she had been
with any alcohol since the writers’ party, but some effect was there. Enough
that they began to stroke each other’s hands and then to kiss and fondle. All
of which had to go on beside the body of the sleeping child.
There was no room for two people to lie down properly, but
they managed to roll over each other.
She got herself decent and left him. Actually she didn’t
much care who met her. Greta took hold of the curtains to open them all the way
and saw that Katy was not there.
She went stupid. She yanked up the pillow, as if a child of
Katy’s size could have managed to cover herself with it. She pounded her hands
on the blanket as if Katy could have been hiding underneath it. She was between
the cars, on one of those continually noisy sheets of metal—there sat Katy.
Eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone.
Greta grabbed her and hoisted her onto her hip and stumbled
back against the door that she had just opened.
The day was dark, with summer thunder and lightning. Katy
halted, so Greta did too, till people got by them. Then Greta picked Katy up
and set her on her hip, and managed the suitcase with the other arm, stooping
and bumping it on the moving steps. At the top she put the child down and they
were able to hold hands again, in the bright lofty light of Union Station.
There the people who had been walking in front of them began
to peel off, to be claimed by the people who were waiting, and who called out
their names, or who simply walked up and took hold of their suitcases.
As someone now took hold of theirs. Took hold of it, took
hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a determined and
celebratory way. Harris,First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an
immense settling.She was trying to hang on to Katy but at that moment the child
pulled away, she got her hand free.She didn’t try to escape, she just stood.
Downcast, waiting for whatever had to come next.
Bibliography:
Pandey, Dr. Sanjay Prasad. “Beauty: Illusion or Reality.” The Achievers Journal 1.1. (2015) .pag. web <theachieversjournal.com>
By G .KOUSHIK CHOWDARI
Reg. 11402637
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