They Left Us Everything (28 page)

“So you just went along with it?” Jessica says.

“In those days, that’s what we did.” I laugh. “I wasn’t a rebel like you are.”

“I’m not a rebel—you didn’t give us anything to rebel against!”

“You rebel against everything!” I can’t believe she doesn’t see herself the way I do.

At university I began to appreciate Mum, to admire her rebelliousness, her radical ways of thinking. Now when she didn’t give a damn, I was as titillated as everyone else. But still I didn’t rebel. Like a dutiful daughter, I got my degree, returned home, taught high school briefly, and then became an advertising copywriter—just as Mum had done thirty years before. When I married, gave up my career, and took on the role of housewife and mother, it seemed I was finally pleasing everybody.

I became the young mother in the park with a baby on my back—and during those years Mum was my role model and advocate. She was always there for me, calling every day, inviting me to bring the children out so she could help look after them. She taught me not to sweat the small stuff, to encourage their creativity, to let them make a mess.

I ask Jessica, “Do you remember the summers in Oakville when you were little?”

“Of course! Camp Anya!” Jessica says, recalling the T-shirts we had specially printed. Mum always had popsicles for children in her freezer, and she kept a drawer in the pantry full of crayons and toys. She’d even pile her nightgowns on the verandah for dress-ups.

“She was younger than I am now,” I say wistfully.

Once Dad retired, Mum began travelling and going on cruises with him. But then things changed. Life as we knew it began to fall apart. Most of us started divorcing. Sandy died. Dad got Alzheimer’s. Mum’s feisty, rebellious nature began battling for breath. Those are the years that have clouded my memory. They seemed to go on forever.

Ten years ago, when Jessica was studying at the Florence
Academy of Art, I was still trying to juggle the duties of being both a mother and a daughter at the same time. Mum was eighty-three, recovering from a stroke, and Dad was well into his Alzheimer’s.

Jessica called me from Italy one night. “I have a crazy idea …” her voice crackled through the phone line. “My roommate is leaving for August. Instead of me coming home for the holiday, why don’t you come here to Florence?” In the background I could hear the crashing of dishes, the clatter of cutlery, and shrieks of laughter.

“Where are you?” I asked, noting that it must be four o’clock in the morning on her side of the Atlantic.

“Payphone … Restaurant!” She giggled. “Think about it. We could paint together!”

I’d just seen the movie
Tea with Mussolini,
so I lay back on my pillow and imagined myself as Judi Dench, floating through the streets of Florence in a billowing kimono with Sambo in my arms. I didn’t know if I could leave Mum and Dad for two weeks, but Jessica’s plea gave me courage. I called Mum the next day.

“Florence?” she shrieked. “But it’s so hot there this time of year!”

“No hotter than here.”

“But it’s expensive!”

“It’ll never be cheaper!”

“But it’s so far away …”

“I know …” In my mind that was the best part about it.

I went shopping … in search of a 1940s kimono. I found one in a vintage shop on Queen Street, and twirled around in front of my bedroom mirror. Mum called back.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Why can’t Jessica come home … and the two of you go to the art school in Haliburton instead?”

“Haliburton?”
I felt the umbilical cord snap.

“There’s a wonderful art school in Haliburton!”

“Mum, somehow Haliburton doesn’t sound as
romantic
as Florence.”

“If you lived in
Florence
you would think Haliburton was romantic!”

I braced myself for her arguments. Mum was so powerful in the art of persuasion that I always acquiesced. This time I wanted to be the mother. I wanted to be with my daughter. I needed to find the courage to disappoint Mum—to put my needs and my daughter’s needs before hers.

I drove out to Oakville and took the kimono out of the bag to show Mum. She looked wistful and stopped talking about Haliburton; she knew my mind was made up. She fingered the cream-coloured silk with its embroidered green leaves.

“This is the trip I always wish I’d taken with you,” she said quietly. Then she rummaged in her desk and brought out a small blue cloth-bound book. “Did I ever show you this?” The title “Scribble Book” was gold-embossed on its cover. Inside its yellowing pages were pencil sketches she’d made of her trip to Italy in 1937.

“Oh, Mum,” I said, “I didn’t know you’d gone to Florence when you were the same age as Jessica!”

What happens to a woman’s dreams? Why hadn’t Mum and I ever gone painting together? I thought about all of Mum’s artwork that went up in the flames of Dad’s fireplace. It made me more determined than ever to grab this opportunity with Jessica. I didn’t want to be eighty-three looking back with regrets.

“Promise you’ll call me every day!” said Mum. “Promise me!”

A month later I’d packed my paints and brushes and was high in the sky with Alitalia, endlessly rehearsing the only two words in my Italian vocabulary:
“Ca-poo-chee
—
no, pear-fah-vor-eh!”

I turn now to Jessica.

“Do you remember that summer I stayed with you in Florence?”

“Of course!”

“How come you don’t paint anymore?” After studying languages and then learning to paint in the classical style, Jessica returned home and got a degree in psychology. Now she works in the hospitality industry.

She shrugs. “Because it doesn’t make me happy anymore. I’ve found something else that I enjoy doing.”

“Wait a minute … you flew there by yourself … you chose the school … you stayed three years. You painted all those beautiful masterpieces.”

“Maybe you should go to art school. Maybe
you
have an unfulfilled dream!”

I’m stunned. Are all our unfulfilled dreams unconsciously passed down from mother to daughter for generations? Does it never end?

A week later, my Other Mother Pat drives out to spend the day with me. I tell her I’ve been having dreams about Mum. Last night I dreamt my bedroom was missing its furniture. In its place was a miniature child, about the size of a paper clip. I picked her up and went looking for her family. I met Mum
in the hallway and placed the child in the palm of her hand. I hurried to lock all the doors, but I was too late: in rushed a group of gypsy archaeologists. They were clutching valuable artifacts that they were excited to tell me they’d found in the basement, but when I looked closely, I could see they were holding only the old props I’d handmade as a child for my theatre. “How dare you trespass into our house!” I yelled. “This is not a museum! This is our HOME!” They wanted their daughter back, but I wouldn’t give her up until they returned our old furniture.

“What a marvellous dream,” she says. “A real
epic
! You must be exhausted.”

She tells me that in a dream, when someone is breaking into your house, it is to force you to confront something. She thinks the tiny child is me—representing the start of something, perhaps the new life I’m being given.

“The problem is, dear, you’re still prepared to give her up for old furniture, for goodness’ sake!” she says. “You’re still trying to lock the door. Don’t you see? The furniture belongs in the past. The child is now.” Then she laughs. “Basements always represent the unconscious, our creative side, our deeper self. And you have a very deep unconscious!”

Pat and I wander through the rooms. She’s astonished at how big the house is, how empty it feels, how much clutter is gone. I tell her it’s turned out to be harder than I ever imagined. I’ve felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass, going down so many rabbit holes.

“I know how you feel, dear,” she says. “It’s why I decided to do the final edit myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“After Geoff died, when I moved to the house where I am now, I was ruthless. I was eighty-one, you know. I gave away or threw away everything. I didn’t want to burden my children.” She giggles. “I even burned all my diaries!”

“You burned your
diaries
?” I am aghast. “Why?”

“They were private … full of personal feelings.”

“But didn’t you think your children would want to know you in that intimate way after you’re gone?”

“I didn’t think it was fair for others to read them.”

“Don’t you wish you’d been able to read your own mother’s diary?”

“Actually, I would …” says Pat, looking into the distance. “I regret it now.”

Earlier I’d resolved to clear out my own mess, too, so my children wouldn’t have to face it, but since then I’ve had a change of heart. Now I believe this clearing out is a valuable process—best left to our children. It’s the only way they’ll ever truly come to know us, discovering things we never wanted them to find. I’m still hoping to find a diary of Mum’s. The only thing she ever showed me was her sketchbook.

At least my dreams are changing. In my childhood dreams I always feared I was about to drown, overwhelmed by a threatening wave; now they’re about discovering how deep my creative powers are. I can see that Pat’s right: my dreams are about letting go. They’re telling me that the most valuable things come from within myself.

But—if dreams are to be believed—I’m still trying to give myself back to my mother.

Careful What You Wish For

In late November I dial home, into my archived phone messages, clicking through until I find the one Mum left me a year ago, two months before she died. In a happy, heartfelt, enthusiastic tone, with her lilting Southern accent, I hear her sing
“Hap-py birth-day, m’dah’lin’!”
I listen to it over and over again. Then I burst into tears. I had wanted her to leave me alone, and two months later she did. Now I find myself looking up at the sky, searching for her.

“Are you there, Mum?”

Yes, darling, I’m right here.

“What do you want me to do with all this stuff?”

Whatever you want—they’re only things. Nothing lasts forever.

I’m recognizing that this house is only the shell my mother and father left behind, but it represents their marriage, the life they built together, their frugality, and their generosity. It represents their personalities, too—the pairing of two opposites. When I look out at the lake—sometimes smooth as glass, sometimes gently waving, sometimes roiling with
stormy whitecaps—the vista reflects their life together. Like the rocks and pebbles under the surface, their edges eventually fit together, rubbed smooth over time because beneath it all there was a commitment to stay together. This house still dances with that powerful energy, even though Mum and Dad have died. Its bones are soaked with the DNA of all who went before, in this wide-open setting, so attuned to nature. The house hums and rattles and whispers to me. I want to burrow back into it, reconsider my past, find the mother I once knew, reconnect our broken link. I want the house to help me. I want to bathe in the memories.

Why can’t we keep it?

On the other hand, why can’t I let go?

Every time I drive in and out of the driveway, past the
FOR
SALE
sign staked on the lawn, I’m reminded that we’re about to lose another member of our family—this house that we took for granted would forever be here as a backdrop to our lives. I worry that we’re saying goodbye to more than just a house. What will hold the family together after it’s gone?

Victor was right about our first potential buyer: unable to secure financing, he has reluctantly withdrawn. I gave him his portrait. I didn’t feel right about accepting any fee, so he made a donation in honour of Mum to Oomama, the charity that sponsors African grandmothers. Mum would have liked that. He tells me that our family and this house have had a profound effect on him, and that although he’s sad to have lost out, he believes everything happens for a reason. I still have coffee with him from time to time, whenever I find him sitting by the lake in the early mornings. We share a common bond now: both mourning the loss of this house. I’m glad I painted him sitting on the verandah steps, evidence of one
last guest—a stranger—invited in. Mum would have liked that most of all.