They Left Us Everything (6 page)

“What’s that?”

“Everybody’s born knowing how to die.”

I awake before Jessica and carry Sambo downstairs. I try to clear a place on the kitchen table for breakfast, but Mum’s clutter is everywhere. I replace her plastic daffodils with a glass bowl of mandarin oranges. With the dryness of the furnace, the mandarins will petrify after several weeks and stay hard and colourful for a long time. Dad always refused to add a humidifier. Instead, he placed pans of water on the floor beside every hot air vent, which only hydrated the dogs. We used to joke that the reason Mum and Dad looked so young was that the dryness had mummified them, but since Dad rarely turned up the furnace, it’s also possible they were simply freeze-dried in the permafrost.

As I pop bread into the new toaster, I can hear Jessica stirring upstairs. I’ll soon be driving her to the train. When she comes downstairs, I can tell she’s been crying—her eyes are rimmed red. All three of my children had a unique bond with Mum: Virginia as the first grandchild she doted on; Carter through his shared love of politics and history; and Jessica through a mutual understanding. She seemed to bring out the best in Mum—perhaps the extra generation gave them space to breathe. Dad said they were “simpatico.” Jessica was deeply affected by Mum’s death, and small things can suddenly trigger her grief. This morning she’s been ambushed by a photograph: Mum’s head is tilted into Jessica’s neck and the
two of them are laughing with their arms around each other. I’d moved the picture onto the hall table, where she didn’t expect to see it.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” I say, and I fold her to me.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I just really miss her.”

I look up at the windows. Every frame drips with icicles that thaw and freeze and thaw again in our wild, unpredictable winter. Sometimes they all melt away to nothing. Then, forty-eight hours later, the icicles are so long it feels like I’m imprisoned behind bars.

When I get back from the train station, I go upstairs to make the bed. I empty the hot water bottles into the sink and remember that Dad used to turn the furnace off at night. When we awoke, icicles had formed not only on the outside of the windows but on the inside, too. We slept in woollen socks, hats, sweaters, and nose cozies—my own invention that I started to knit as soon as I was old enough to hold knitting needles. They were cone-shaped affairs that covered our noses and had loops to hook over our ears. Dad supplemented with hot water bottles, but he’d pour in only a tablespoon of boiling water, and so they’d lie flat and floppy on our bellies. “Waste not, want not!” Dad would say. Then he’d climb into bed beside Mum, who he claimed was the best kind of furnace there was.

I pass by the open doors to all the bedrooms and reality finally hits. How am I ever going to untangle this mess? How am I ever going to separate the trash from the treasure in the overstuffed contents accumulated during Mum and Dad’s combined lifetimes of more than 180 years? Some of the valuable items I know none of us will want, while junk of no apparent value has such memory-laden significance that we’ll have to draw straws to see who gets it. All the grandchildren
tell me they want the plastic sign of the gun on the mudroom window. I wonder where the nose cozies are?

I stomp down the wooden stairs to the basement with my load of dirty towels, keeping my head down low so my hair won’t brush up against any spider webs lurking in the ceiling. Light filters in through the laundry-room windows behind pots of wispy dried geranium plants, casting splinters of cold morning sun on the concrete floor. A cat’s cradle of empty clothesline zigzags across the room. The ironing board sits forlornly in the corner, an old flannelette cover clipped over it with wooden clothes pegs.

Then I look up. There’s Mum’s hornet’s nest, which she saved in a brown paper bag to show to her grandchildren. It’s grey and papery, about the size of a football. She’d found it in the garden, fallen from the eaves, and sliced it in half. She marvelled at its architecture, its complex geometry, and the sheer intelligence of the hornets that built it.

“Isn’t it fascinating? Look at all those compartments! All those thin layers of paper packed together! Did you know hornets spend their whole lives flying back and forth just to build nests like this for their children?”

Mum used to take it in her car to show members of her bridge group, her Bible study group, her belly-dancing class, and her Alzheimer’s support group after Dad got sick. She even called the mayor’s office to see if they wanted it for their education department. The rest of the time it hung in its bag from the basement ceiling, along with an envelope of Dad’s hollyhock seeds.

What should I do with it?

I can hear Mum’s voice: “You can’t throw that away!” And it stops me in my tracks.

This house I am now slicing apart is
theirs
—the place that we’d taken for granted would always be here as a backdrop to our lives.

Where do I start? I worry that one piece of pocket litter will lead to another until I’m following flakes of memory so deep into the woods I may never get out.

On the other hand, maybe I have this opportunity—this temporary stay of execution—to sift through a half-century of stuff, to see what everything means. Maybe I’m looking for answers instead of exits.

What answers?

How could I still have questions?

Friends warned me of this. They said, “When your mother dies, you’ll wish you’d asked her some questions.” I had more than sixty years to ask questions, but the questions didn’t form until after she’d gone.

Now there are questions I didn’t even know I had.

Point O’ View

Mum loved to name her houses. They all had spectacular views, so just as she’d named our Hong Kong house “Taipanorama,” she named our new one in Canada “Point O’ View.”

When World War II ended, Dad finished his stint in the British navy and returned to his old job in Hong Kong. As a young war bride, Mum eagerly followed him out there with me in her arms. By 1950 we’d moved to Singapore and I had two little brothers. If Dad had had his way, we might have lived there forever—he loved the tropics—but during the final days of 1950, Singapore exploded into what the colonial government called “The Malayan Emergency.” To Dad it must have seemed that the Anti-British National Liberation War had entered his own living room, because Mum packed us all up and left him. We landed at Rokeby—her family’s historic home in King George County, Virginia.

Despite Dad’s entreaties, Mum refused to return. Dad’s British relatives had warned him about the folly of taking on an “American wife with independent spirit,” and he soon
found out what that meant. Mum dug in her heels, backed up by her formidable clan. Their separation lasted a year; it was Dad who surrendered.

I remember the night he walked in. Christmas festivities were in full swing at Rokeby and the massive front hall was packed with people laughing and drinking. In the music room, I and the other small cousins had just heard Leon, the farm hand, clomp on the roof with horseshoes—a family tradition that signalled the arrival of Santa’s reindeer. Suddenly, an uncle leaned down and said to me, “Your daddy’s here! Your daddy’s arrived!” The crowd seemed to move in a wave of excitement towards the front door and I was swept along with it. Through the forest of adult legs, I glimpsed in the distance a man in a grey fedora and a long dark coat. He’d been gone for a fifth of my lifetime—a locked-away memory from a faraway place. I hung back and waited.

He moved into the downstairs bedroom with Mum and baby Robin, and early the next morning Sandy and I tiptoed in to find him dressed in a sarong, standing at the marble sink in their bathroom, using Oriental toothpaste from a little round tin. Mum lay in bed, snuggled under the quilt, smiling.

Over the next few weeks, they discussed where to go next. It became clear that Dad wouldn’t live anywhere “American,” and Mum wouldn’t move to England, so after many discussions, they agreed that Canada would be their cultural compromise: it was close enough to Mum’s America, yet part of Dad’s British Empire. Canada seemed a vast unknown, appealing to their penchant for adventure, yet only a few days’ driving distance. Mum’s family worried we might get lost in the wilderness: they’d read the popular new book
Mrs. Mike,
so as far as they knew, the only things north of the border were Mounties and grizzly bears.

Dad took Mum on a train ride across Canada to decide where to settle. Mum took along her windup Bell & Howell movie camera and Dad filmed her in her coonskin coat, knee deep in virgin snow, waving to miles and miles of empty railway tracks with nothing but pine trees in the background. It was a far cry from the lush landscape we’d left behind in Singapore, but just outside Toronto, they met someone on the train who recommended a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario. They decided to call it home.

Oakville had the feel of an artistic summer-camp community—sleepy and rural, surrounded by farmland, not unlike Rokeby. It had one traffic light and a couple of gas stations. The short main street had a Woolworth’s department store, a grocery store, a drugstore, and a candy store—Donna Lee’s—where the owner’s son sat in his wheelchair at the back, fixing clocks. Early each morning horse-drawn wagons from Gilbrae’s Dairy clipped-clopped from house to house, rattling glass bottles. At the end of town, near the bridge, the police station had a friendly two-room jail that doubled as a homeless shelter.

Three blocks south from the main street sat an empty house: a rambling, unheated barn of a place surrounded by dirt paths and lilac hedges and overlooking a wild, pebbly beach that coughed up dead fish and driftwood. It had been used by out-of-towners as a seasonal cottage and had languished on the market after the war like a white elephant: a burdensome beauty, too costly to maintain. In a letter to his brother in England, Dad called it “a wreck.” His uncle in Rome wrote,
My dear boy, do you mean to tell me that you have paid £5,000 for a house in … the colonies? Made of wood?
Who wanted an unheated barn of a place on cinder blocks, facing stiff winds off the lake, with high ceilings, twenty-three rooms, and eighty-four drafty windows?

Mum, that’s who. The fact that it lacked a furnace didn’t faze her: she was still unpacking mothballs and recovering from the heat. This house had two things that mattered to her most: cross-drafts and servants’ quarters. Maids—and especially cooks—had always been part of Mum’s household. Even as a young working girl in New York City, she’d been in the habit of sending her dirty laundry home to Virginia each week by train. Her mother’s maid, Lucy, would return it freshly ironed, along with a home-baked meal prepared by the family cook, Edmonia.

The house suited Mum’s Southern disposition: its wide, white-columned verandah reminded her of her
Gone with the Wind
childhood: she claimed she could see New York across the lake from her bedroom window. The lake reminded Dad of rowing along the Thames in his student days and his war stint with the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean.

It took Mum and Dad almost a year to shore up the exterior. Dad added insulation, storm windows, and central heating, and threw a few more cinder blocks under the verandah to carry our weight. To the four thousand square feet of interior space, Mum added closets, tennis racks, and miles and miles of bookshelves. She slapped up some wallpaper in the dining room, but she didn’t bother renovating the kitchen—she didn’t expect to spend much time there. The house came with some big old turn-of-the-century furniture that the previous owners had abandoned.

When Mum left behind our luxurious ex-pat lifestyle in Hong Kong and Singapore, she unwittingly left behind chauffeurs, houseboys, cooks, and gardeners. When Chris and Victor were born here in Oakville, Mum was shocked to discover that babies born in Canada didn’t automatically come with
amahs.
But although the staff was missing, this house in Oakville approximated the size and shape of the houses they’d left behind. It was expansive and commanding, just like their personalities, with strong bones, too, able to withstand the storms generated by their frustrations. It saved their marriage: Dad quipped that it had so many rooms they could go days without seeing each other.