The Staircase Letters (8 page)
Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
In Carol’s short bracketed question about Argentina and the answer Don gave her lies one of life’s great truths, beautifully and simply expressed; for while we are challenged always to take a larger vision of the world, we have ultimately to live in the place where we are, and deal with everything there, rather
than be anxious about what more we might do elsewhere. Don was right in his counselling: Carol’s contribution to a suffering world was already big enough.
The next day, I added for Elma something of a postscript, which brought to mind also Mahler’s
Das Lied von der Erde
, which tells how the lovely earth in spring grows green again.
Dear E.,
Remember Strindberg’s
A Dream Play
, in which the daughter of the god Indra is sent to earth to assess mankind’s predicament? “Go down and see,” says Indra. “Truly a discontented, thankless race is this of earth … Descend and see and hear, then come again and tell me if their lamentations and complaints are justified.” And after every encounter with a variety of human situations, the daughter’s report to her father is always the same: “Human beings are to be pitied.” But we might also remember what the daughter said at the beginning of the play: “I see that earth is fair … It has green woods, blue waters, white mountains, yellow fields.”
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
Getting things right, putting things straight, while still alive to do that, was one of Elma’s concerns, which is why she mentioned the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Carousel
in her reply. She might not have seen the Stratford production in 1997, but she had obviously thought about how best to use one ‘s time on earth.
Dear A,
I don’t know the Strindberg play you refer to, but I like the image of the earth: I just hope we don’t screw that up as well. I was also reminded of
Carousel
. As you may remember, Billy, who gets killed in a bank robbery when desperate for money, has a chance to return to earth for a day to do one good deed, which he eventually does, though his first reaction is not even to look at the daughter he never saw in life.
I think my lot will do OK eventually— when I think how long it took to get things
right between Mart and me … At least there is a lot of love there—of that I have no doubts. And it took a wee while for you to orient your own love life,
n’est ce pas?
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
How rhetorically but genuinely innocent was this last little sentence of Elma’s, punctuated with a French question! Innocent as a purling stream can still bring with it, from dark and forbidding mountains of memory, the sludge of years. For me, it brought the layers of pain from a broken marriage, the anxieties of concealment, the failures to my truthful self, and the sorrows of an adversarial divorce, until all was carried away and allowed to sink into an ocean of unrecoverable loss. Only then was I able to venture onto a greater sea of sunlight and love.
Elma knew the whole story, as I knew hers. She was right. It had just taken a wee while, n’est ce pas? What I had not been able to tell my Oxford tutor, I had been able to tell her.
In the week following, because Elma had found many references, always favourable, to bees in Carol’s stories, she had asked her about them. Strangely enough, the prescient references predated Carol’s cancer.
Dear Elma,
About bees: did I send you my favourite poem by the late Karl Shapiro? Faced with death, he compared himself to a cut flower rather than a flower with roots, and the poem ends like this:
Yesterday I was well, and then the gleam
The thing sharper than frost cut me in half
I fainted and was lifted high. I feel
Waist-deep in rain. My face is dry and drawn
,
My beauty leaks into the glass like rain
When first I opened to the sun I though
My colors would be parched. Where are my bees
Must I die now? Is this a part of life?
Sometimes I mutter to myself, Where are my bees? That’s what I’m missing, just that.
So simple. And this is why I can’t think of a spring holiday. But I’m starting to, despite the thing sharper than frost, which is always there.
A beautiful Saturday afternoon, and the sun, at last, is out.
love,
c.
Dear E.,
On the weather channel right now, where all the announcers are, in their own words, “passionate about the weather,” we are told that a weather bomb is on its way to Atlantic Canada and will reach us tonight; but I am secure and warm in this wonderful old house—wood fire burning in the downstairs entrance hall, both cats (Nicholas Nickleby and his sister, Kate) comfortably stretched on the rug in front of it, Alasdair writing songs in his top-floor studio—and I am free for these moments to be with you.
Certainly I think now, much more than I used to, about dying as the last living thing I must do. But without the rather more specific
time frame you have—though even yours and Carol’s cannot be specific—my own dying seems altogether theoretical, which it is not.
I wonder if you remember the lines I gave to a character in my novel
Swing Wide the Door
, an actress who drank too much and said to everyone she met, including the gay Salvation Army officer, whose story it is: “What are you dying from? Laughter? Old age? Boredom? Fatigue? Cynicism? Obesity? Stress? Cancer? It’s got to be something. We’ve all got to die of something.” And the comment on that: “She’s only dying because once upon a time she was born, like the rest of us.” That’s the way I feel, I guess, but I haven’t had to attend any “dress rehearsals” (as you put it) just lately, so it goes on feeling unreal.
Here I am, quoting myself! But then I don’t have a wonderful poem to quote, such as Karl Shapiro’s, and it’s a truly haunting image. Bees. I am lucky. Mine are still around. But not forever. I woke from a reassuring dream two nights ago, and wrote down the sentence I was saying in my sleep (could I
have been to you?): “We hope you are happy there, journeying through galaxies with all your friends who are there already. We’ll be joining you ourselves one day, which will turn into eternity.”
Putting my exact scribbled words (with not a single letter changed) from a sheet of paper into this computer for you now seems like a strange and distant message, but I hope you will receive it differently and with the love that comes with it. May you find peace. You know I’m thinking of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
Dear A.,
How extraordinary that you should dream those words. (Well, no, it isn’t. I should have guessed that you, of all people, would have had those thoughts.) Did I ever tell you that, while I do not believe in reincarnation on this earth, I would not be surprised to find that we somehow go on evolving in other galaxies? The image fits in with the strange visions I had
shortly after I started receiving treatment—all the cosmic patterns and designs—so beautiful and vividly coloured. When I think of it, they’re a little like the best “trips” described in Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception
.
But while a part of me certainly relates to the poem Carol quotes, I don’t really identify with the flower Shapiro describes so beautifully.
Right now, I feel that my root system is doing fine. It’s not the season for blooming. (Or bees.) And I guess I also believe in that seed far beneath the winter snows, though it may not fit in very logically with travelling through galaxies. But for
this
spring, anyway, who can tell? Even about bees?
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Even in this new year, which had begun with a funeral, Elma was able to believe that her own root system was “doing fine,” and Carol could wonder if a spring holiday might be possible, “despite the thing sharper than frost” that was ever present.
Because I believed that the language of words
was constantly failing me on this journey with Elma and Carol, a journey that was harder than I knew when I agreed to bear them company, I looked sometimes beyond words to say what I wanted to say, and found it in Alasdair’s music. He had written a work entitled
Spirit Room
that I decided to send to Elma, together with his explanatory program note:
Spirit Room
, a work for piano and orchestra, was inspired by a dream in which the golden light emanating from beneath a closed door seemed to beckon the dreamer to open it and release the energetic spirit within. This image was the starting-off point for the musical work, which develops its own organic structure free from a sense of programmatic narrative. The first movement is longer and explores a slowly transforming lyrical theme, while the shorter scherzo-like second movement alternates, at a brisk tempo, between a lively tune and subsequent variations of itself.
Elma wrote that she played the work immediately upon receiving it, and, as I learned later, she played it many more times in the three months she had left
to live. So obvious was it to her that there was a beckoning light under a door she would one day have to go through, a door that would take her into a brilliant world of colour and energy, that
Spirit Room
became an identifying part of her final quest.
January of that year, however, had been a relatively good month. As Carol had promised, Elma received a galley proof of
Unless
. She had asked to have it sent, fearing she might not live long enough to hold the published novel in her hands.
Dear A.,
I am loving the illicit reading of Carol’s novel. Maybe it’s the subject matter (a lot to do with mother/daughter relationships); maybe that I’m more focused now that I’m not restricted so much to reading at the end of a working day. But I’d say it’s her crowning achievement.
Not to be greedy, but do you have any more short stories kicking around that I could read sometime? My eyesight is quite erratic, so I’m trying to fit in what I can while I can …
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
“Short stories kicking around,” she had written, and because two, “Her Treasures” and “A Delicate Letter,” had appeared in a small New Brunswick literary journal, I sent those first, and then others over the next couple of weeks, stories that had been languishing in a desk drawer for want of finding a home. The two published stories were about women, the third (“Lions at Delos”) was about two men, and the fourth (“The Baptism”) about a five-year-old boy, baptized (“regenerated and born anew of water” so that he might “die from sin and rise again”) by a flushed priest with roving hands.
Dear A.,
I have only read your stories once so far, which is not enough for a decent evaluation. But I read them immediately after finishing Carol’s novel, and felt no sense of drop off— you are marvellous in this medium … Please send me more. I’ll return them, pay the postage, whatever. They’re exactly what I need right now. From a technical point of view also, since they’re short, in a good-sized type, lines well-spaced, well laid-out on the page—these
are becoming major considerations if I am to be able to keep on reading. (And if I can’t read, I might as well not breathe!) The length doesn’t matter nearly so much as the other factors. Send more! I don’t care if they’re not what you think are your best efforts—I’ll love them anyway … (So far, I’m enjoying you more than the latest Alice Munro—and I love Alice.)
Elma asked if I was writing anything new, and I had told her I was doing another draft of
What’s Remembered
(a novel that was published after her death) and I was working obsessively. The problem was that I was haunted by the biblical injunction not to pour new wine into old bottles. The process was tricky, I related to her, because “I create new characters and then wonder if they will fit into the old existing form.” But Elma assured me that Carol had once faced and overcome a similar problem when she had tried to fix and extend something she had written earlier.
I can imagine it must be hard to do what Carol called a sort of “darning job.” She had
to perform this on one of her novels, which also needed extra characters, more developed situations etc. … I don’t think she ever tried that again, though it worked out OK—in fact, I thought it was one of her better ones, so take heart!
Elma had read only the first of twelve drafts of
What’s Remembered
, and I had taken her comments to heart. That fact made me deeply regret that she did not live long enough to see the work in print. No reason, of course, for Death to wait or pay attention to the heavy sound of “deadline,” even when that word comes from a publisher. I thought then of Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop for Death
,
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
.
