Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
The Staircase Letters (5 page)
Dear A. and E.,
It’s good to hear from you both. Elma, I’m hoping this next chemo is accompanied by the wonderful golden (expensive and gold- coloured) anti- nausea pills. About hair:
I think I’ve finally realized that the hair issue is germane only to the hair loser, though I grieved and continue to grieve about it. It is not vanity, but rather the integrity of the body broken—added to all the other indignities. We have done three things this month, and we’re ticking them off. We’ve gone to the Giller, gone to Calgary for convocation, and gone to Vancouver for a PET scan (results to come). We have one more thing to do—leaving Sunday for Paris where my play
Thirteen Hands
will open on Tuesday night. We’ll be home on Thursday and will stay in the nest here in Victoria forever. This is where I really want to be at the moment. I am thinking of you every day and hoping you are ever your bright and wise self.
love,
carol
She rightly thought that to grieve over the loss of one’s hair should not be interpreted as vanity, compared with the greater indignities of a body broken. But the comment for me had special resonance,
for the thick head of wavy hair I had in my youth I began to lose in my twenties, and I grieved about it for years. My body, all the while, had not been broken, and I was in good health. Only now, therefore, do I realize how much vanity there was in this superficial grieving, for my only wish was to be admired. “You have the most marvellous head of hair I have ever seen on a man” was the comment I got frequently in the 1940s, and when I was seventeen, cast as the romantic lead in a university production of
Romeo and Juliet
, I let my hair grow even longer, in the hope of being admired even more.
Vanity, vanity, was the sole root of my grieving. Bald now since middle age, I might have benefited earlier from Carol’s wisdom, that “the hair issue is germane only to the hair loser.”
Carol had said she had done three things that month, when she was so ill: one very private (the PET scan); one more public (a university convocation); and the third, an event open to the world on television (the Giller awards in Toronto). She had not published anything that year, and was, therefore, not up for the prestigious literary award, when
Richard Wright won for
Clara Callan
. But the warm response she got from everyone present at the gala was her own personal award.
It was especially because Elma’s daughter, Beth, was living in Paris when Carol wrote about going there that Elma got back to her immediately.
Dear Carol,
How wonderful that you are going to the opening of
Thirteen Hands
—at least, I hope it is wonderful for YOU, though I can well understand why you want to stay put thereafter. I’ll see if my daughter can get tickets and tell me all about your success.
I had the “gold pill” last time, and no nausea at all. It was the three days sitting on the toilet that got me down (or rather up).
I’m getting floods of lovely tributes from the literacy field as people gradually learn about the fact that I am not absent from events because of retirement. I must say it’s nice to hear some of this
before
the funeral. A bit of basking won’t hurt, I hope.
Life at the moment is golden—and if
you’ve been tracking the weather here, you will know how incredible it’s been.
Love always,
Elma
More than ten days elapsed before I felt able to make any sort of reply. Sometimes I found it truly difficult to know what to say. How could two such people possibly need me? What could I offer? Words, words, words. Are they ever enough?
Dear Elma and Carol,
I know that you, Elma, have had friends and family with you just recently, and I hope it has been a happy time for you. As for me, I have been here and there with Alasdair for these last several days, but always I have taken you with me. Carol, you, too, I presume, are back from Paris, taking Elma with you on that longer trip, which must have been tiring for both of you, so get extra rest now.
It might cheer both of you to hear that I was at a concert last night in Rothesay, when one of Alasdair’s works was performed by
the wunderkind cellist Denise Djokic, on her six- million- dollar Bonjour Stradivari cello, on loan from the Canada Council. Really stunning, both the music and the performance! At the intermission, I was introduced to, and had a lovely long chat with, Gordon Fairweather, a couple of years older than I and now retired from politics, a real delight, unpretentious, droll, and wonderfully human. A lawyer originally, he was, in his time, chairman of the Immigration and Refugee Board and then the Human Rights Commission. When I commented that, in my career, I had met few academics who were large, generous spirits, he smiled softly and said that years ago he had been on a search committee to select a new president for the University of New Brunswick, and had never before witnessed such vicious in-fighting as he saw then among the professors, though he had spent twenty-five years in the Conservative caucus! Lester Pearson had been his favourite prime minister and had taught him one of life’s more important lessons, which
was ‘Learn to say no!,’ though that was, unfortunately, also a line from a temperance hymn about the evils of drink!
Enough chatter for now. I think of you, both of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
In the weeks that followed, Elma began expressing thoughts that were more sombre than when she mentioned “a bit of basking” before the funeral. It would prove a roller-coaster ride of lengthening shadows and sunshine. But lines from Hopkins would always be there:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
What hours, O what black hours we have spen
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay
.
But Fay’s noticed something she’s never
noticed before. That love is not, anywhere,
taken seriously. It’s not respected. It’s the one
thing in the world everyone wants—she’s
convinced of that—but for some reason people
are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and
foolish. … It’s possible to speak ironically
about romance, but no adult with any sense
talks about love’s richness and transcendence,
that it actually happens, that it’s happening
right now, in the last years of our long, hard,
lean, bitter and promiscuous century.
—From
The Republic of Love
Dear C. and A.,
Middle of the night chills time. I was just reading the latest
Maclean’s
(mistake No. 1, no doubt) and it contained a description of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney visiting George Harrison, who has entered “the final stage of his life.” Apparently, George denied the existence of his “brain cancer” (as they call it—it’s metastasized lung cancer, just like mine) in July, and on October 1st he recorded a sound track for an album, and now he’s
reached the end. That’s less than two months ago.
Oh well, I was glad to see that while Paul had cried, George was in pretty good spirits. (Probably manic on steroids, unfortunate man, as my doctor accuses me of being when she thinks I’m too cheerful.) At least he appears to be somewhat compos mentis. But the speed with which a lung cancer patient can go from functioning fairly normally to being at death’s door has clearly not been exaggerated. On the other hand, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing … oh dear, I seem to be an incurable optimist.
I might add that Mart and I have been having some fairly intensive talk sessions and I think he is really going through a very bad patch right now. The reality of the situation is beginning to hit him pretty hard. Actually, I think it’s just as well that he had that transition period of denial. I guess it’s a phase one has to go through at some point, and I’m not sure I’ve quite finished with it yet myself, though I seem to be experiencing
a number of the so-called requisite stages simultaneously. Anyway, I hope we can do some special things together—and with friends and family—during the next few months, and also just
be
.
And now I will go back to reading
Winnie-the-Pooh
or
The Wind in the Willows
—both, in their very different ways, extremely profound books, and of far more lasting impact than anything in
Maclean’s
, thank God. Do you ever re-read those classics? Winnie has all kinds of helpful hints for cheering oneself up in scary situations, and even for hanging on for dear life (as when dangling in the air surrounded by bees).
A few days later, she wrote again, but just to me.
I am not dead—indeed, I am very well right now, and also very busy. I’m trying to do 100 things before (a) my next round of chemo beginning December 12th and (b) Christmas visitors, who start arriving December 18th— just as I’m back on my feet again, I hope!
Carol’s cancer has suddenly become much more aggressive. At this point, we both realize how little time we have, but Carol has had many ups and downs, and hers will probably be a slower process, whereas right now I am in quite good shape. But when the brain starts to lose it, it will do so at quite a speed, from what I’ve been told.
In whatever time she and Carol had left, however, it became evident that they would both summon the strength to cope with prejudice and stupidity wherever found, sometimes even in doctors.
In early December, Elma had indicated to Carol her state of fury over a letter her doctor had written in support of a disability claim: she was critical of the letter’s phrasing, its offhand tone, its lack of sensitivity. Furthermore, she found difficulty talking to Martin about it, worried that he was
still in some sort of state of denial, and we never seem to have time to talk about the things that really matter. We do not really have an easy communication system—
shorthand or otherwise—for this situation as yet. It came on us too suddenly, I think, though it has improved a great deal in the past few days, and will continue to do so, especially as Mart will be teaching only one course next term. His department head offered to have someone else take over the other.
Carol had written back the same day.
Dear Elma,
You need never apologize to me for a burst of outrage. I’m on your team here. Please continue to hold my hand, as I will hold yours, all the way.
Tactless doctors. And how dare they use the word
lady
or
ladies
. Oiiiiii! Really, a good many of them have not evolved. (I’m feeling very evolved these days, a comfort.)
Your words about Martin not being able to talk to you about this struck Don—who has always read my mail (I read his too). It’s like having a joint account. Should we be talking
more? he asked me. My answer: we are talking all the time, only in the very private code we’ve evolved over all these forty-four years, part of it gesture, of course, and certain kinds of jokes. Neither of us knows how to do this, but I don’t want to do it the sappy way, whatever that means.
My dear friend, hang on tight.
love,
carol
I felt myself challenged again for something to say to Elma that might be of interest to Carol. I could understand their anger about the doctor’s dismissive tone, recognizing, as I did, that under any civilized veneer, including my own, there lurk always passions ready to erupt, even when triggered by something relatively small. “We are the animals Christ is rumoured to have died for,” wrote Robinson Jeffers, the great American poet. And were it not for the redemptive flashes of insight coming now from Carol and Elma, I could be easily persuaded, in my own dark moments, that Jeffers spoke the truth.
Thus I began one early December morning:
Good morning, dear E. and C.!
I would like to think you are both sleeping peacefully as I start this at 9 a.m. my time, but, knowing you, Elma, you are probably wide awake, while you, Carol, in Victoria, may be moving down a beautiful set of curving crystal stairs in search of sleep and finding it before you get to the bottom.
After both your letters, I am teased out of thought, contemplating all the things I don’t understand and may never. I have not been afflicted like Job, like both of you, though maybe in other emotional ways, years ago, at the time of my divorce, wondering how I would survive and almost didn’t. Do I deserve now to be with Alasdair on this wonderful plateau of understanding in old (or is it just older) age, and to be with other friends and family, as well, rejoicing in every day I have? No, of course I don’t deserve it, any more than each one of you deserves what has been measured out to you. I cannot know, I can only imagine what it must
be like to be counting the days, as you must now count them, but I suppose, also, as all of us must and should now count them. One day at a time, O Lord! “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” It has all been said already. I blather on, but my heart is full.
The “private code of communication” that you, Carol, spoke of puts it beautifully. In varying ways and to varying degrees, that’s what we all share. A blunt, head-on verbal explication just won’t do. Music, in its highest forms, can move us towards that other state of being. You and I, Elma, realized that a long time ago when we listened to Mahler together.
Blue jays and black-capped chickadees are now at the bird feeder below the upstairs window of my small study where I am writing this. The day advances, and you are surely now awake. I hope it will be a good day for each of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.