Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
The Staircase Letters (2 page)
With wax melting in the sun, it would be a perilous voyage.
I am now the lone survivor.
Elma had made sure that Carol Shields knew something about me, but I had not met her, except in her books. This meant, however, that I knew a few things about her. She, too, had been a teacher, a professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of
British Columbia, and the University of Manitoba, as well as being one of Canada’s truly great writers, someone who reminded us again “why literature matters,” which is what
The New York Times Book Review
said of her Pulitzer Prize—winning
Stone Diaries
in 1993. For that novel and others that followed, Carol was either nominated for or awarded some of the world’s great literary prizes, her repertoire extending to poems, short stories, plays, and literary criticism.
Carol was someone Elma deeply loved, but she also made it clear that she loved something in me, though what exactly and why? We might tell someone why we love them, but to tell ourselves why we are loved may prove only a searching excuse for vanity. In one of his early poems, beginning “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” Yeats speaks of “the pilgrim soul” found in a beloved. Unspecific though that is, it may yet be the only way to articulate the impossible.
In this my eighty-second year, I look back on my own years as a teacher, aware that I won’t be a survivor for another four decades of teaching. Even if I were, there would not be time enough to understand
whatever it was I did for Elma or for anyone else, or even how or why I did it. It amazes me to hear of teachers who profess answers for what can never be known and what is forever beyond reach. For my part, I had no method unless it was to care. I had no philosophy or formal structure of ideas, unless it was to make a teacher different from a book. Is this why Elma turned to me, despite her love of books, knowing that I wasn’t a book? Was this the “pilgrim soul” she may have found in me?
It was Michael Ondaatje who wrote: “All my life I’ve admired teachers, those mysterious catalysts, fathers without a bloodline, those who point out an unknown field or surprising city over the horizon. Leonard Cohen, for instance, spoke of Irving Layton this way: ‘I taught him how to dress. He taught me how to live.’”
If I ever pointed out to Elma or any other student such a field or such a surprising city, it may have been that I didn’t know it was there myself until I saw it.
When Elma was a student, I had introduced her to Mahler with a recording I had of Kathleen Ferrier singing
Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of
the Earth)
. She had been moved deeply by the last song, “Der Abschied,” where the poet bids his long farewell to life.
Still is my heart. It is awaiting its hour!
Everywhere the lovely earth blossoms
forth in spring and grows green anew!
Everywhere, for ever, horizons are blue and bright
For ever and ever
.
Listening, we were both struck by the sheer beauty of all that loveliness fading away almost to nothing, but never really fading away at all, not ever … ewig … ewig … ewig. And that is the way we would end all our letters to each other thereafter … ewig … ewig … ewig … and all our e-mails to each other in the last months of her life … ever … ever … ever … our pledge that the world would remain green.
Despite sensing my own lack of qualifications for the role Elma was asking me to play—after all, she and Carol shared the prognosis of cancer while my health was fine—I said yes, I would try. And so it was that, after reflecting further on
Swing Wide the
Door
, the novel she had so helpfully criticized, she sent a long e-mail:
Oh Arthur, you poor man, you started something up again when you wrote me that touchingly tentative letter asking me if I would consider reading your book. I had forgotten how much I missed being in regular contact with you—not the Christmas card stuff, but the feeling of being able to tell you almost anything with the assurance that you would understand—or at least tolerate.
Is there anyone else I could have talked to so freely about the fact that nature probably intended me to be bisexual, for example? (Now there’s another road not taken.) And just as much, if not more, I have missed seeing your handwriting on an envelope, knowing that whatever you had to say would be worth pondering, that always the essence would be there, and that it would be instinct with love.
Do you think I don’t know how it feels to be approaching the end of one ‘s life with the feeling, “Surely I could have, even should
have, accomplished more than this? Left some monument, however small, more lasting than bronze?” (That colossal wreck of Shelley’s
Ozymandias
in the sands is hardly comfort. Something more lasting than a human memory might be more like it anyway.) And I may be fourteen years younger than you, but I have my doubts I’ll live as long—nor as well. I can try to put a good face on it, but I have to say I’m a bit scared after this latest finding.
Mind you, there is a silver lining. I could have developed Parkinson’s like my mother; or the emphysema, which is my legacy of forty plus years of smoking, might have killed me through rapid lung-function degeneration (though I enjoyed smoking immensely, goddamn it, especially when I had to quit drinking. At least I can still have an occasional cigarette without spiralling out of control, which is emphatically not true in the case of alcohol).
Maybe the earth goddess is giving me an out. I won’t have to start saving up sleeping pills or whatever: I can refuse to go on having
colonoscopies and polypectomies and let nature take its course—and just hope that in my case colon cancer develops and metastasizes fairly quickly. Does this sound self-pitying? Probably. But I would be sincerely grateful to have an alternative to Parkinson’s, especially. My poor mom, with her basically strong constitution, living for so long in that ghastly cage. I simply don’t think I have that much courage—or that much faith.
I do feel sorry for you reading all this whining! At least it’s been a help to me just to write it out. I’ll leave it for tonight and read it again later. I guess I had a rather off-putting day, which began bright and early with having yet more blood tests for various things (and I’m always so cheery at 8 a.m. anyway, of course), and then went on to become one of those days at work that leave you feeling exhausted, frustrated and as if there’s no point whatsoever to anything you’re doing (or have ever done).
Strange, isn’t it, that while it means much to hear (and even occasionally believe!) that one has been a good parent, partner, teacher,
whatever, there is still the desire to have created some small thing of value which is more … concrete? tangible? How we do ache to see our words made flesh—and with at least a measure of grace and truth.
“And not breed one work that wakes …” was Hopkins’s own anguished summary of failure. Oh yes, I know, believe me, I know. Indeed, I look at your accomplishments and I only wish I could leave a legacy such as yours. It’s all relative, no? “Send
my
roots rain,” indeed.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
P.S., or maybe a preface:
I might mention that the mood of this letter has probably been affected by my hearing of the death (at age sixty-one—no reason given) of L. R. Wright, a Canadian “much-more- than- a- mystery” writer, many of whose novels I have immensely enjoyed. She had an uncanny ability to make you feel what it might be like to have the mind and soul of a female psychopath, or to understand the circumstances
and undercurrents that could lead an apparently “nice, quiet” teenage boy to explode in a murderous rage and kill his entire family. I am sad that she will write no more, especially since she was growing in power and subtlety. And I wonder how she died.
As Hopkins, always a favourite poet of Elma’s, had pleaded that God send rain enough for his parched roots, so now she was pleading for hers. In the spring and summer months that led into early September, some rain fell, but never enough. She began to wonder just how she would die, just as she wondered how L. R. Wright had died. Would it be given to her to know ahead of time, or would she meet her death unprepared, like the many hundreds on that September 11th who got up for breakfast, only to fall without wings a few hours later from buildings that reached into the sky?
Elma never spoke to me directly about the tragedy in New York, but like everyone else, she must have thought about it. Life’s bargain is that we die, of course. Everyone knows that, but when? how? where? Can we ever be ready? Howsoever
our deaths happen, will our final moments be the same whooshing fall into nothingness, observed by those left to watch? Elma had become aware that terrorists also attack from within, and the war being waged inside her body must have been as devastating to her as the towers’ collapse.
It was a friend who reminded me that Jane Austen never mentioned the “troubles” of the world beyond her characters’ lives, and it’s just as well. They were internalized and played out unbidden. Carol would have known and understood that. In addition to her vast creative output, she had written the biography
Jane Austen
, which won the important Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
The question of dying rarely bothers the young, when the prospect is mere theory, but facing it later, in sickness or old age, one prays not to flail or not to be seen to flail. Let others come to clear the site and build a monument.
Ever the realist, Elma began now seriously to contemplate her own dying and what the consequences
would be for her family, her friends, and her work. For more than twenty years she had worked for literacy groups in Manitoba, first as a volunteer tutor, then a fundraiser, a writer of grant proposals, and an organizer of workshops. (Could anyone have been better qualified to show others the joy and value of reading?) Tireless in this, that fall she was recognized with a Canada Post Literacy Award as one of Canada’s top five educators in the adult literacy field. The ceremony was held just three days after she learned she had terminal cancer and had announced her retirement, though no one knew why. In a picture of her with Martin, her husband, taken that night, she is seen flashing a smile so dazzling you would think she had just been granted a vision of the beyond. Maybe she had.
By late autumn, however, Elma’s situation had worsened. Hopes were raised by one set of tests, dashed by another, and debilitating radiation treatments and chemotherapy sessions were ordered. The lung cancer, diagnosed that September, was beginning to spread to the brain.
Her next letter, in November, was addressed specifically to Carol, though I was co-recipient.
Responding to what Carol must have said privately about her own treatments, Elma wanted to know more. Her rational scientific mind managed always to surprise me, for she could talk about and analyze her own distresses as though they were someone else’s, even when I was aware of the pain and fear she was feeling.
Dear Carol,
I’m always thinking of you, and what’s been happening. I wonder if you have been on a chemo treatment called Etoposide (also called VP-16 and Vepesid)? This one makes me so susceptible to infection the whole time I am on it, which will be to the end of January, at least, if I live that long. I take it by IV at the hospital for almost a whole day, three days in a row in a month, and it has to be “flushed” constantly, day and night for three days, and I’m lucky if I can doze for even ten minutes before it’s “up again, girl!” Not only does this deprive me of three days, I am often too tired to want to see anybody for a couple more. So there goes almost a week out of each month.
I still have to be very careful of balance, since that was the really big part of my brain affected. There are possible emergency treatments for this spot, but in general they avoid messing with the brain again for at least a year. Sooo—given the six months prognosis, and the brain’s involvement, I’m working to a tight schedule right now. Martin says he’ll kill me if I use “window of opportunity” or something similar one more time. He thinks I’m into enough windows on the computer!
Would you be willing to tell me something about the chemo you’ve had/are regularly having? I’ve always been fascinated by medicine and would, I think, have been a doctor myself if I hadn’t wanted kids. Besides, I was lacking in the necessary stamina, and those were different times, eh?
There’s an anecdote I’d like to share with you and A. I have always believed in something, if only that “good” and “god” are basically interchangeable terms, and have zero to do with a god who has any involvement in this world, even an impersonal one. Definitely
I think there is “a power greater than myself” as they say in AA (and even there you can use alcohol as the power, if that’s all you can manage).
But do I love arguing both sides of anything! Well, my grandson Andrew had asked his parents about cancer, dying, etc. I later got him alone, with dad John off to one side, and asked if he had any more questions for me. “Yes, actually I do.”
First he asked about the effects of radiation. Second he asked, “What gender are your doctors?” Even John’s eyebrows went up at that one. I said so far one male and the rest female, and he said, “That’s about what I figured.” This is a kid who had to be rushed to emergency with asthma from infancy, so a medical interest is natural.
But he had one more question: “Do you believe God always existed?”
I said, “Basically, yes,” not feeling either of us was really ready at that point for a debate on the meanings of God, existence, or the nature of the space-time continuum.
But he went on: “So you are a believer?” (No further specification.)
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Well, that’s what really matters,” to which I replied, “You are bang on, it is indeed.”
My minister brother later remarked that Andrew had accomplished the feat of pushing me off my fence-sitting (and onto the unexpected side of the fence) after five hundred people had spent over fifty years trying to do just that!
But I find that I do have indeed a newfound faith in a God, which I still have to fight to hold to, of course. It’s all bound up with the patterns within patterns, and designs within designs, I see and delight in—from the inconceivably cosmic to the tiniest grain. And it has been a great comfort and a help— in many ways. For example, it has made it so much easier to tell those with a religious belief about my dying.
And that is way more than enough for now, guys!
Carol, I love you.
A.
—ever … ever … ever …
E.
P.S. Carol, I want to read your new novel. A., I want to read yours. And I’d like to read Alice Munro’s latest. People naturally think “Elma + free time = reading.” (Even without the free time, that’s always been true.) And with the kindest intentions, I am being snowed under. I don’t want more books. I want contact with old friends (and some new) right now, and that means, when I do feel like reading, it’s old book-friends I choose. What so many people don’t realize is that it takes energy to read—sheer eye energy, too, and my vision is very unpredictable. A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t begin to follow a plot line. People who have been sick in hospital understand this best. I’m improving a lot, thank God, but it still varies, and I have enough books to last me 99 years as it is.