They Left Us Everything (33 page)

Maybe Mum hadn’t wanted independence! Maybe she tried to reconstruct a relationship with me like the one she wished she could have had with her own mother. I always felt that I instinctively understood Dad, but these letters are helping me understand Mum, after pushing her away for so long. These are the puzzle pieces I had hoped to find. This is her
diary
.

My heart stops when I find this:
My Darling Anne, I’m saving all your letters because I know your biographer will one day want them … your devoted Mother.

Am I my mother’s biographer? Do all daughters become their mother’s biographers, taking her history and passing it on to future generations? Writing letters was one of Mum’s greatest talents, and here is the record of her life. At the end of our lives, we become only memories. If we’re lucky, someone is passing those down.

All night the lake roars like a freight train. When I go to bed the waves are racing, flat and sleek, competing with each other for speed. The surface of the lake looks like a Venetian blind, with only the horizontal white lines of surf visible in the blackness of
night. By midnight, ice pellets have started to fall and the waves become wide shovels, slamming the ice up against the shore with a thunderous force and spectacular spray. The waves shovel all night and are still working slavishly in the morning. There’s an ice shelf forming—an amazing phenomenon. It feels as if I’m in a bowl of white ice. From the verandah, I’m looking out at the lip, which curls over in front of the house like a prehistoric iceberg. It’s about eight feet high now and thirty feet deep and still growing its crystalline wall along the shoreline. Mum would have been clapping her hands. “Come see! Come see! It’s the best show on earth, and it’s free!”

Frosted beards of icicles grow from the windowsills and freeze-frame my views. When I describe them to Robin in an email, he writes back, “I hope they’re on the outside!” Later in the week, when the sun melts their roots, I hear the giant ones plummet and shatter onto the brick path below.

Outside, the water in the lake is a deep viridian green. It’s lapping at the ice shelf and licking it away. Splotchy chunks of ice, glittering with crystals in the early sunlight, are floating away from the jagged-edged crust and a few brave ducks are paddling amongst them. The sky is sliced apart with white contrails and wispy, long-legged clouds are drifting past in the shape of dancing camels. I can never go back to being surrounded by buildings again, hemmed in and confined by man-made structures.

This house and its setting, Mum said, were “in her bones” … and they’re in mine, too. But I’ve spent so many of the past twenty years feeling trapped here and wishing for release that I hadn’t stopped to imagine what it would be like when it was all gone. Now I want a reprieve. Why do we have to sell it? Why can’t I die here like everybody else?

I speak to my friend Lesley on the phone, lamenting my pending loss of this beautiful landscape with its limitless horizon. She understands only too well; she grew up in similar surroundings.

“When you have an unobstructed view,” she muses, “something happens to the mind … it expands, doesn’t it?” Then she adds, “But if you look up, you’ll see the clouds. The thing about clouds is that they tell you how to live.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re always
moving
… and that’s what we’re supposed to do, too.”

Hong Kong Farewell

In early January, I find myself in the doctor’s office: Dr. Breen, my mother’s doctor. She gives me a warm hug and her thick brown curls brush my cheek. She asks how I’m doing. I haven’t spoken to her since the night Mum died, although once or twice I’ve seen her youthful figure walking briskly along the lakefront path in front of the house. I have a small blemish on my leg, I tell her, so I need a referral to a dermatologist in Oakville. She takes a look and decides it’s unnecessary; she thinks the spot will go away on its own.

“But let’s take a little social history,” she says and turns to her computer.

I answer questions like how old I am, when did I divorce, how many children do I have, how much exercise do I get, how much alcohol do I consume, and then: am I still smoking? Yes, I tell her, I’ve quit in the past but now cigarettes are my friends. Then I blurt out, “Of course, it’s a slow suicide—I know that.”

Dr. Breen has her back to me, typing, but when I say this, she stops. “Do you think about suicide?” she asks.

I tell her no, but I don’t want to live long enough to get dementia, like Dad. I’d rather die early, of a heart attack. Then I tell her that this past week I’ve been feeling a little depressed. I’ve been second-guessing my motivations for everything. Maybe isolating myself in Mum’s house is unhealthy, akin to pulling blankets over my head. I’ve been cutting myself off from family and friends. My world is shrinking and I’m strangely okay with this. But maybe I shouldn’t be?

When I leave her office I’m clutching a referral, not to a dermatologist, but to a therapist. I’m told that the intake secretary from the Adult Mental Health Office will call me to schedule it. When I get home, I vow to cancel. The thought of having to bring some shrink up to speed with what’s been going on in my life over the past twenty years fills me with fatigue. Besides, I think, I’m hardly worth their time: until recently, I’ve been feeling wonderful. Am I really depressed or just “lying fallow”—an artistic condition that usually precedes a period of great creativity for me. How can I tell the difference?

When Halton Healthcare finally calls, they tell me I’m in luck—there’s been a cancellation and they can see me tomorrow. I’m about to say “No thanks” when my brain stalls: wait a minute … why does that date have resonance for me? The anniversary of Mum’s death! How could I have forgotten? No wonder I’ve been feeling low this week. It seems too coincidental—almost preordained—so I decide to go.

The intake secretary, a soft-spoken woman in a lavender sweater, asks me a variety of in-depth questions, smiling as she speaks. She has a ten-page printed questionnaire on her desk and she circles things and puts checkmarks or lines through boxes. Her bright, lively eyes give no hint of judgment. She asks me about my physical health: whether I’ve ever
had a head injury, any serious accidents or operations, and expresses surprise when I tell her the only thing I take are vitamins.

“We rarely see someone your age who’s not taking any medications,” she says.

She asks me whether I’ve ever taken drugs (no), how much alcohol I consume (not much), and how much exercise I get (lots). Then she asks whether there’s a history of suicide in the family. I answer yes—my mother’s brother Frank—although no one was ever sure whether he jumped or was pushed, and this was eighty years ago. She asks about my childhood: What kind of child was I? Shy? Happy? Gifted? What about my past careers, what I do now? When I tell her I’m an artist and a writer, she asks what I live on. I want to say “hope,” but instead I confess that I’m burning through savings from my earlier career in publishing. It’s a big stressor in my life. When I decided to follow my bliss ten years ago, I knew I’d have to give up luxuries. Dad was right: society doesn’t value artists, even though, when a civilization disappears, artwork is the only thing that survives. We dig up pots and statues and ancient wall murals and put them in museums. If it hadn’t been for Mum and Dad’s frugality, and what they’ve just left us, I’d be really worried about my future.

The secretary probes my parents’ marriage. “How would you describe it?” she asks.

I stumble for words. “Well … it was passionate … passionate in both directions.”

“Was it violent?”

“No,” I say, “I wouldn’t describe it as violent … I would say … um … emotionally intense.” I didn’t recall any physical violence between my parents, but I find myself making a
conscious effort not to defensively cross my arms, remembering the letter I read only last night.

Sept. 28, 1949. Honolulu, aboard the ship S.S.
President Cleveland.
Dearest Mum, The other night, Alex got very irritated & started pushing Plum around for no reason, so I smacked him. He got so mad that he hit her very hard & she cried and cried. I tried to comfort her & explain that he was tired. Later, full of remorse, he told me he was sorry. I told him he should apologize to Plum, not to me. So he did—whereupon she looked up sympathetically & said, “That’s awright, Daddy, you didn’t mean to.”

“Did your parents drink?” she asks.

I find myself minimizing Mum’s alcoholism. After all, it started in the fifties—women in frilly aprons, evening cocktails and all that. Besides, she quit drinking when my brother Sandy asked her to. My memory flashes to all the empty gin bottles Dad had stacked up in the garage to make her feel guilty.

“She had a will of iron, my mother,” I tell her. “She smoked until she was eighty-five, but she gave it up each year during Lent. She chewed an empty corncob pipe instead.”

“Were there any weapons in the house?” she asks.

“Only Dad’s bamboo cane,” I say. “The one he disciplined my brothers with … I think one of them took it away to be framed.”

She asks me if I have hallucinations, hear voices, or see things that aren’t there, and rapidly strikes through the remaining boxes. Then she caps her pen and turns to me, smiling sympathetically.

“Do you think you need to talk to a grief counsellor?” The thought that I might be finally grieving had never entered my head until now.

As I pull out of the parking lot and head south, I look up
into the cold, clear sky. Two large flocks of Canada geese are flying high above in their V-formation, one on either side of my car. They escort me all the way down Dorval Road, east along the Lakeshore, down Trafalgar Road, and straight home to the lake. Am I seeing things that aren’t there? I wonder what the psychiatrist would make of this?

As I drive into the boathouse, I think of how I’ve been navigating memories of the past, like stuffing myself in the hull of Dad’s boat again—looking for ballast. It’s been a necessary process but now I know I’m ready to move on.

A few days later, in my old bedroom, I awaken with the gift of dawn. The radiant light warms my cheeks, and when I open my eyes, the whole room is filled with an orange glow. To have a perfectly round sun lift up over the horizon, directly outside my bedroom window, and pour gold into my lap fills me with hope and optimism.

In February, Alex phones to say she has some people who want to come back for a second look. They’d seen the house before Christmas and they can’t get it out of their heads. Once again I spend hours vacuuming and mopping floors, and once again I leave for the prescribed hour. But when I drive back their cars are still in the driveway, so I pull up on the street and wait. I wait and wait. After an hour, I think,
Okay, that’s enough,
and barge in through the boathouse door.

“Time’s up!” I shout.

Alex greets me in the pantry and introduces me to Clive and Hilary. Hilary is a pretty, petite blonde with a warm, engaging smile. Clive is a tall, dark, ruddy-faced Welshman with a black
moustache and bushy eyebrows. His eyes are dancing, and I think,
Uh-oh, this could be serious
. He’s marvelling at the old built-in glass cabinets in the dining room and the wide woodplank countertops in the pantry and he wants to know the history of everything. By mid-afternoon we have an offer from Clive, but it’s too low. Victor doesn’t even want to respond.