They Left Us Everything (25 page)

When we get to the priceless historical items, the first things to go are the family portraits: Robin takes Great-Grandfather and I take Grandmother. Nobody wants Great-Grandmother: she languishes loudly on the staircase in her black dress, sitting on a black chair against a black background with a black lace shawl draped over her head. She haunted me as a child. I still nip by her haughty, disapproving glare as fast as I can without looking.

“She’s a copy,” Robin reminds us. “The original is in New York.”

“Why would anyone in their right mind want a copy of her? She’s deadly looking.”

“Ah-hah!”
he says. “That’s what you think. Our copy was probably made from a soot-stained original. It’s been cleaned since then—I’ve seen it. And guess what? Her lace shawl is white and the chair is red!”

“That doesn’t change her expression!” I say.

We wade through a list of old Masonic medals, nineteenth-century English-school prizes for Latin, the house guest book,
Dad’s naval uniform, two large family Bibles documenting the change of our surname to an “alias” when our ancestors fled the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and even a purported chunk of the wall from Pompeii that some ancestor must have purloined on their grand tour.

As much as I’d love to have some of the ancient Napoleonic documents, I know the boys want them more, so I avoid bidding. Victor finally comes alive and asks for the dinner gongs.

Robin is amassing a museum-like collection of maritime items owned by our seafaring ancestors. Since Mum already bequeathed him the prison ship, he’s bid on most of the related documents. He would have grabbed Lord Nelson’s sideboard, which Grandfather used to own, except that an uncle has already donated it to the naval museum in Portsmouth, so he has to make do with a photograph showing the sideboard in Grandfather’s office.

Chris has smartly bid on small items, mostly silver. He’s in the process of moving to the West Coast and doesn’t have much room, but the one major piece of furniture he does win is the dining-room table—a vast Victorian oak piece that, when extended with its eight leaves, could comfortably seat twenty people or more. The rest of us had expressed no interest in it, but now, realizing it’s going to B.C. when Chris moves in the fall, I experience a deep sense of loss. It has no historic family provenance—it came with the house—but for the past half-century it’s where we’ve eaten our meals, played board games, held family meetings, and watched Mum type her letters. I did my sewing there, too. When Sandy was dying, I made his hospital-style gowns in brightly printed flannelette, spreading the fabric on the table and cutting out six at a time. I console myself with the knowledge that Chris is a
wonderful chef, so no doubt this table has many more adventures in store.

There are some items none of us want, so these will be sold at auction later. But what of Mum and Dad’s cake topper, shaped like a battleship? Who’s going to sink that?

I start to think about the antique music box that Mum left me in her will. I’m conflicted as to what to do with it. It’s so rare that we’ve never been able to locate another like it. I feel it should go to a museum, where the whole world can see it, but within the family there’s a debate on this subject. I feel that important objects or documents shouldn’t be hidden away or hoarded by one family when the wider public might appreciate them. Even though Robin plans to build a special room to display his Napoleonic artifacts, what happens to it all when Robin dies? Will his infant grandsons grow up to protect them and to pass along their stories? I worry about these things.

Robin feels that all historic items should remain in the family, although he’s willing to turn over some historical papers to professional archivists. He’s already given many of Sandy’s papers to the Virginia Historical Society, which has a large collection of Williams family papers going back to our great-great-grandfather, John Williams, The Immigrant. We all agree that Mum and Dad have left us a great treasure, but it comes with a daunting responsibility.

Chris suggests that Mum’s old alma mater, Bennington College in Vermont, might like her college scrapbook and letters, and Victor thinks a naval museum in England might like Dad’s wartime letters. Several books have already been written about Dad’s exploits, including
Escape from the Rising Sun
by Ian Skidmore and
Alarm Starboard!
by Geoffrey Brooke. Dad’s annotated, dog-eared copies were in his desk.
Some of Mum’s exploits have been published, too, in a book called
“Flak” Houses Then and Now
by Keith Thomas, but men got the lion’s share of a nation’s gratitude after the war. Contributions by female veterans, especially American Red Cross workers, were largely ignored. On Remembrance Day, each November 11, Dad marched to the Cenotaph with his war medals, but Mum wouldn’t even stand up in church when they asked veterans to stand. “They don’t mean
women,
” she said. We’ve found a Certificate of Merit awarded to her by the U.S. Army, “in recognition of conspicuously meritorious and outstanding performance of military duty” when she was an Assistant Red Cross Director. On her U.S. government ID card, she was designated 2nd Lieutenant in the event of capture by enemy forces, but after the war, Mum wasn’t even given a pension.

I argue with my brothers that the era of large families, anchored by one ancestral home where everyone gathers on special occasions, is long gone. The majority of modern, globetrotting families are coping with divorce, blended offspring, downsizing, and far-flung relatives, so who has the time and space to properly display these things anymore? My children certainly don’t. Carter, for example, is living and working with his wife in Turkmenistan. He’s a seeker, a globetrotter, drawn to exotic locales. He hates being tied down by possessions and always travels light. Virginia expresses no interest in anything except the portrait of Grandmother and Mum’s ancient flowering geranium tree, which is staked together with old oxygen tubing. She and Louis have recently built a sleek modernist townhouse, with no room for brown furniture. Jessica has no room for anything in her one-bedroom apartment, and all of my brothers’ children are in similar situations.

I’m shocked that none of the boys wants the framed watercolour painting of Dad’s cottage on Lake Kashwakamak. It’s a good painting, evoking the solitary, rustic nature of the place, surrounded by birch and pine. It always hung in a place of honour beside Dad’s bed.

“I can’t believe you don’t want this!” I say to Victor. “Are you sure?”

He looks at me as though I’m as thick as one of its planks. “If you had survived a concentration camp, would you want a painting of it?” he says.

“But you helped Dad build the cottage … I thought you loved going there!”

“What do you know? You’d bailed by then—you were away at university. It was a mosquito-infested swamp! All I remember are the blackfly bites and the calluses on my hands. Thanks, but I don’t need any souvenirs.”

I try to superimpose this new piece of information over the old tape in my head. I thought we all criticized Mum for not going with Dad to his cottage, but it sounds like the boys would have rather stayed home with her if they could. Did I judge Mum too harshly? Did I only listen to Dad’s side of the story? Sometimes our remembered experiences make it seem as if we each came from a different family. I keep forgetting that Victor spent time as an only child. He and I—the bookends— were the only two children who did, but the parents I experienced had just turned thirty, in the bloom of early romance; his were in their forties and fifties, getting ready to kill each other. Not only were Victor’s and my vantage points different, our backdrops were different as well.

When the boys and I finally finish, we go out on the verandah, drinks in hand, and do some horse trading. There
are private trades going on all over the place. Robin has something Chris wants and I have two things Robin wants, so with a bit of circuitous swapping, we all end up happy: I get the dining-room chairs plus Mum’s bed.

Robin smiles. “You know, I think Mother would be quite pleased with how we’ve worked things out. She told me once that she was amazed by how well we got along, given how different we are.”

“She said that?”

“Yes! She thought maybe it was because we all share the same sense of humour.” He takes a sip of his bourbon. “But I corrected her … I told her it was because we all share the same crooked teeth.”

We’re all laughing by the time the boys’ wives have returned from their day trip, and we celebrate with a homemade feast.

We sound Dad’s dinner gongs for the last time.

Robin plays reveille.

Earthquake

At the end of June, Victor’s children come to spend the day by the pool. I’ve been sitting at my computer all morning, working on my Shakespeare project. Suddenly, all the letters on my screen begin to dance in slow motion. Then I feel unsteady, as though the floor is shifting under my feet. Even the pictures hanging on the wall look like they’re sliding back and forth. I run outside to the verandah where Nick is strumming his guitar.

“Nick? Did you just feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“An earthquake!”

“Nope,” he says and keeps on strumming.

I call over the railing to Hannah who’s lying in the sun down by the pool, eyes shut, earbuds plugged in.

“Hannah!” I shout. “Did you just feel an earthquake?”

She lazily takes out an earbud and looks up at me quizzically. “An earthquake? No, I didn’t feel anything.”

Did I just have a stroke? Seeing shaky letters is one of the warning signs. Maybe my prayer to outlive Mum by a few months wasn’t so far off. Maybe I should lie down. I head upstairs and take a two-hour nap. When I turn on the radio at suppertime, however, the announcer is talking about the earthquake in southern Ontario—5.0 on the Richter scale. I’m so relieved I want to celebrate. But how was I able to feel it in the downstairs hall—the part of the house that rests on solid ground—while Nick at the end of the verandah, raised on stilts, and Hannah down below him by the pool, never felt a thing?

Does a fault line run straight through this property? If so, the rectangular slab of concrete that we call our pool may very well be our Maginot line. It was, after all, the site of an epic battle between Mum and Dad back in the 1960s.

In those days, Dad spent much of every winter in Argentina, insuring cattle. Mum wouldn’t go with him, but she resented his time away. While he was gone, she said, the boys lacked a father figure. She also complained that Dad never left her enough money. He would return spilling words in Spanish, describing lavish dinner parties in Buenos Aires, lyrical rides in the moonlight across the Pampas on grand
estancias
… and the many beautiful stewardesses he’d met en route.

So finally Mum eyed the unused maid’s room next door to Sandy’s bedroom at the back of the house and came up with a plan to teach Dad a lesson. At the local high school, she posted an ad for a room for rent during the fall term when she knew Dad would be away. Only males need apply.

One Friday afternoon a shy, thin, bespectacled math teacher arrived for an interview. Mum was giving him a tour of the kitchen to show him where she kept her pots and pans.

“Don’t expect me to cook for you,” she said, “… and if you want clean sheets, the laundry’s in the basement.”

At that precise moment Dad walked into the kitchen carrying his briefcase. He’d come home early from the office.

Dad looked the man up and down and said, “May I ask who you are, sir?”

“Mind your own business,” said Mum. “This has nothing to do with you!”

Mum started shouting that since Dad had decided to abandon his family every winter, she had decided to take matters into her own hands. Dad was furious. How dare Mum turn his home into a common boarding house! Mum wanted to know who the hell Dad thought he was, speaking to her like that? Dad accused Mum of being a spendthrift! Extravagant! Lazy! Mum accused Dad of being a killjoy! Insensitive! Obstinate! Voices rose and doors slammed as the math teacher fled out the back door.

Eventually, Mum took off to Virginia to cool down and spend a few weeks with her brother. While Mum was away, Dad called in the contractors. They demolished the wall between Sandy’s bedroom and the maid’s room, thus eliminating the room Mum had planned to rent out. Sandy was happy—he now had a huge bedroom with twice as many windows as before—but Mum returned in fighting form.

The day after Dad left on the plane for Argentina, Mum was on the phone to the contractors herself. A maiden aunt had died and left her some money, and now she planned to sink it into a hole in the ground. In came the bulldozers and backhoes. They rolled through the garden gate, trundled down the manicured lawn, and hunkered down beside Dad’s beloved vegetable patch. In giant mouthfuls, they scooped out
the earth that had harboured Dad’s pumpkins, carrots, and lettuce plants and regurgitated it onto the lawn. A truck, with its big vat of churning concrete, parked itself by the edge of the fence, and by the time they were finished we had a sparkling blue thirty-foot swimming pool where Dad’s vegetables once grew. A truce was declared when Dad got home. You couldn’t see the pool—it was blanketed by snow and ice—and Dad was glad to be back. He had missed us.