Swing Low (24 page)

Hercules has left the building. Nurses have told me he will be fine. I’ve heard those words before, and I do not believe them. Number of things that are fine: zero. Am reminded of a newspaper article I read in
Free Press.
A psychiatric patient from St. Joseph, Missouri, claims that all his knowledge is stored in two boxcars — he quoted numbers — on the Great Western line, just outside Kansas City. Patient would like to retrieve knowledge, request denied by state hospital. Man quoted as saying: “It is too bad when a man got to use a boxcar to get out of a hospital.”

I am allowed out on walks, but where will I go? Daughters mollified somewhat by the idea of me walking. They want me to have my freedom but are afraid I will get lost or hit by a car. They tell me to look both ways before crossing the street. Have told me things are looking up. That hired woman is getting things done, answers, transfers. That I will be reunited with Elvira very, very soon now. That the move is under way.

Several weeks after the lawn-mowing fiasco Elvira and I sat together in lawn chairs in front of our house, staring at the traffic and waving hello to the people that passed. Elvira tried to convince me that everything would be all right, that
the girls would be safe, that leaving home was a natural thing to do and that we were free now to do whatever we pleased. I had no idea what she meant by that last comment. I nodded and smiled.

I continued to teach, and Elvira began a new career as a social worker with the Children’s Aid Society and continued taking university courses. Our paths crossed less often. I left for school early, before she was up, and she returned late, after I had gone to bed. On the weekends, however (after I had returned from church, where I was still racking up the attendance awards), she and I would go for long drives, or watch a ball game together, or visit with friends, and our love for each other persevered.

Our girls were away, “having experiences,” according to Elvira, who had trained them to believe that accumulating experiences, good or bad, was the meaning of life. I had hoped that one or both of them would want the experience of marrying a local boy, settling down within walking distance, attending church, and working part-time at the bank or Penner Foods. No such luck. My girls did not come back except for short visits, during which I often remained in my bedroom while they laughed and carried on with Elvira in the kitchen, like old times. They were three women now, and they had changed. If I did emerge from my bedroom, it was only to say hello and good-bye, or to leave for a long walk. And yet I hated to see them go. It didn’t make sense.

During this time we were having problems with skunks in our backyard, and it bothered me a great deal. So much so that one evening while saying grace at the supper meal, I asked God to help us find a way of getting rid of the skunks through non-violent means. Elvira actually laughed out loud mid-prayer, and, when I had finished, said: Mel, if you can pray for the well-being of skunks, can’t you also pray once or twice for the well-being of your own daughters?

After that I did include my daughters in my prayers, but I felt ashamed for not having thought of it myself and embarrassed at the obvious ridiculousness of praying for skunks.

I
have walked! We have walked! My daughter and I. We took a circuitous route to the house — I can’t bear to walk down Main Street for fear of whom I’ll meet — and indeed the flowers are fine, the lawn has been mowed. That’s a huge relief. Inside the house, however, was another story. Empty. Cleared out, save for a few boxes yet to be moved. My daughter had warned me. What about all my files? I asked. They’re fine, at the new apartment. We sat together on the kitchen floor (somebody has cleaned up the blood) and ate Husky Burgers from Edgar’s Diner. She talked about the move as a positive thing, rubbing my shoulder intermittently in an encouraging manner. She is getting tired. You need a nap, I said, but there are no beds in the house. She says she isn’t tired at all, but I persuade her to curl up on the living-room carpet and rest before we head back to the hospital. What will you do? she asks me. I tell
her, I’ll be in the yard. It takes us a long time to walk back to the hospital. I bought her an ice cream at the A&W, as I had hundreds of times years ago, and a milkshake for myself. When we got to the hospital parking lot, I turned and began to walk away. She didn’t notice for a few seconds and when she realized that I wasn’t beside her, she looked over her shoulder and then stopped. Dad, she said, and I stopped too, turned around and came back to her.

After she left, the nurse came to my room with pills. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the hospital, I said in the manner of a stand-up comedian. How can you joke about it, Mel? she asked. How can you not? I answered, before swallowing my medicine.

During the summer of 1985, it just so happened that all four of us were in London, England, at the same time, together in a way, but not exactly. Marj was staying in a posh flat in Notting Hill with a couple of friends. Miriam was staying with her boyfriend and several other people, including a Dutch woman who ate heart, rare, twice a week, in a rundown house in Brent Cross, and Elvira and I were staying in a hotel in Russell Square, on holiday.

Marj had purchased tickets for all of us for Mozart’s Requiem at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. She said this was a rare opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Miriam showed up without her boyfriend at the last minute and offered to take the seat directly behind the pillar in the church. I may nap, she informed us. Later that evening the four of us wandered
over to Hyde Park and joined thousands of Londoners who had come to see the spectacular bank holiday fireworks choreographed to Handel’s Water Music. To be silly, we each bought one of those green reflective tubes and wore them around our necks. We were together again, if only briefly, and I remember looking up at the night sky and silently thanking God for that perfect day. After the fireworks, we all said good-bye and left in different directions for our various lodgings.

The next morning Miriam and her boyfriend picked Elvira and me up at our hotel in their 1969 (Summer of Love) Volkswagen minibus and the four of us headed off to Scotland for a few days of sightseeing. All I remember of that trip is Miriam smashing the van into a toll booth on the far side of the Humber Bridge. The steering wheel’s on the wrong side for these damn things, she said, which made little sense to me. Her boyfriend changed the tire that had popped on impact with the little building, while Elvira and I made small talk with the man in the toll booth, who was understandably rattled by the experience. I didn’t understand much of what he said, so thick was his Scottish brogue, but I smiled sympathetically.

Marj’s life made a certain amount of sense to me, in that it seemed to be following a focused course, but again, Miriam’s did not. Her experiences included several continents, little money, strange jobs, sporadic university attendance, and two children, each by a different man, neither of whom she had or has any intention, it would seem, of marrying. I’ve never once spoken to her about her “choices,” as they’re called these days, but I’ve been very, very troubled by
them and by what people would think — that is, people in this town, my church, my mother. People whom she gives no consideration to whatsoever because I’ve shown her, over the years, the damage that living up to their expectations will do to a person. Or so I believe. Perhaps I haven’t been such a parental disaster. Again, I’ve held myself up as an example of what not to become. Perhaps she’s a better student than I gave her credit for.

Marj seemed to pull away from the church and this town more gradually and certainly with less obvious hostility. She didn’t mind spending a week or two at home, and she found things to do and old friends to talk to while she was here. She was tolerant of the town’s pace, and patient with its people. She wasn’t as quick as Miriam to denounce everything about this place as being backward, soul-destroying, hypocritical, or excruciatingly dull. And because she and I shared an interest in history and politics it was easier to have a conversation with her than with Miriam, who was critical of everything about this town and often said (vociferously announced) that it depressed the hell out of her.

What’s new in this place, Dad? Miriam would ask me when she and her kids came to visit. Well, I’d say, smiling, not much. Didn’t think so, she’d say, satisfied.

Sometimes, to get her to laugh, I’d say something like, Well, the town’s thinking about adding another nine holes to the golf course, or, Well, there’s talk of a new culvert going in behind the school. And she’d spend a good minute or two oohing and aahing for my benefit.

Elvira would race into the city regularly between work and university to spend time with the girls and the grandchildren,
while I doggedly stuck to my usual routine of school and church and Mother. Both my brother and sister were living in the United States now, and so the task of taking care of Mother continued to be mine and Elvira’s. Sadly, Henry, her second husband, passed away, and her drinking got worse again.

In her eighties she was becoming too feeble to make the trek to Economy Foods to nick her vanilla, but she got around the problem by ordering boxes of it through the grocery delivery service. Sometimes, in a (touching and comical) attempt to appear less obvious, she would also order a box or two of breakfast cereal, or a bag of flour to give the impression that she was doing a tremendous amount of baking. During our regular vanilla purges at Mother’s apartment, Elvira and I would clear out as many as thirty boxes of breakfast cereal at a time. The number of vanilla bottles, empty or otherwise, was much higher. While we cleaned, Mother would sit in her green La-Z-Boy, next to her tidy arrangements of African violets and framed photographs of family members, and gaze out the large window, towards the outskirts of town, towards her old homestead, grinning wildly from ear to ear, thinking of God knows what, or whom.

The idea of my informing my mother (twice!) that Miriam was pregnant and unmarried was unthinkable. I was desperately afraid of her reaction. Again, I felt, I had come up short of her expectations. Now, not only was I a disappointing son but I was a wretched father as well, and it was more than I could take. Each time Miriam jubilantly announced to our family that she was pregnant, I panicked
and took to my bed for three or four weeks, leaving Elvira with the responsibility of breaking the news to Mother.