They Left Us Everything (29 page)

In December,
The Globe and Mail
runs a half-page feature of our house in their Homes section and we get a surprising hit. Alex has just called to say that a Mr. Baines has booked an appointment to see the house tomorrow. He saw the write-up and couldn’t believe it—this house once belonged to his grandfather! It was their summer cottage, affectionately named Summerholme.

Only three families have lived in this house since it was built in the nineteenth century. The Baineses bought it in 1917 and sold it to Mum and Dad in 1952. I usually don’t hang around when Alex shows the house, but the next day I’m so excited that I’m cutting short my scheduled lunch to be here. I want to meet Mr. Baines. What are the chances that, while Mum and Dad’s descendants can’t find a way to hang on to this house, grandchildren of the previous owners might save it? My hopes are soaring. I race back to meet them as they arrive.

Two generations spill out of their car: two middle-aged grandsons of the original owner with their wives, and a greatgrandson in his thirties, Robert, who’s never been inside the house before. In their arms they carry ancient oversized albums with black pages stuffed with photos held in by gummed corners. They run through the house, pointing things out to Robert, matching pictures to rooms. They can’t believe everything looks the same.

I am mesmerized. The photos in their albums could have been taken of us. Black-and-white snapshots show their similarsized family assembled on the verandah, sitting in identical wicker armchairs, and gathered beside the beach-stone
fireplace in the living room, just as we have done. In the corner of one photo, an old CCM bicycle like mine is thrown haphazardly on the lawn, lying on its side, looking like its wheels are still spinning. The garden bench is the same one Robin donated to the museum—I recognize its decorative iron base even though the wood slats have been replaced. A teepee is pitched in the garden—almost identical to the one we used to play in. It feels as if we’ve found a whole new branch of the family we never knew we had.

Robert tells me his ancestors brought their furniture out from Toronto each spring and then packed it up in the fall, leaving the house empty all winter.

“I always heard about a huge chest of drawers,” he says. “My grandfather said it was blue and had a magical secret drawer!”

“Would you like to see it?” I ask him.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s still here!”

His eyes widen. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

I take him to the upstairs hall where the monster wardrobe sits. It’s got a gleaming mahogany veneer now. Dad removed the blue milk paint years ago, a “restoration” that, as it turned out, dramatically reduced its value. I slide out the middle bonnet drawer and show Robert the secret button inside that releases what appears to be a decorative rim above. He is agog.

Downstairs, I show him a few Victorian pressback chairs with their worn leather seats that also came with the house. Sadly, the others have broken and the matching table has gone with Chris to B.C., but there are so many other things to see. His father tells me that the room we always called our playroom was originally designed for a pool table, and now the low-hanging brass light fixtures we found in a cupboard make
sense. We pore over the photos and talk for hours, promising to keep in touch. It’s obvious they didn’t come to buy, merely to take a trip down memory lane, but the house is speaking again and Mum would have loved this encounter.

Early the next morning I awake to find my body aligned to the Earth’s magnetic pole, as if my head has been pulled due north. I’m not a practitioner of feng shui, but just for fun I check my Ming Gua number and find that it’s six: metal. This tells me that if I sleep facing north, the influence is separation. Could my body be telling me something—that separation is what I need right now?

I see another beautiful sunrise accumulating across the horizon. It is so dramatic. In the west, a horizontal wedge of deep indigo is sandwiched between a deep splotch of apricot, which is feathering into the opaque, milky white of the lake below. The tiny pinholes of electric light along Burlington Bay cut through the ink. I run to my paints, but even as I open the lid I know I might be too late to capture the changing light. I plunge my brush into a mixture of aquamarine and raw umber and let it flow onto the only blank card I can find: the backside of one of my
Romeo and Juliet
prints. I’ve just had them printed for Christmas cards, but I don’t care. I have to sacrifice one to this scene. I scrumble and scratch and lay orange on thick and then wipe it with a dishcloth. Within minutes the inky blackness is dissolving into puffs of smoke, the water is changing to slate grey, and the apricot is fading to shell pink.

Will I ever get used to the beauty of early mornings here?
The optimism of the rising sun shoots through my veins like adrenalin. A lone duck has appeared on the surface, serenely bobbing on the waves near shore. Another joins in, washing its feathers nearby. Our Canadian flag has woken up, flapping sleepily. It was a formless black line half an hour ago; now it looks russet and its maple leaf becomes clear.

I have unlocked the verandah door. Even though the thermometer outside the kitchen window reads only forty degrees Fahrenheit—just above freezing—it doesn’t feel cold; it feels fresh. The sun has popped up over the horizon, directly across from the door, and shines a searchlight onto my face. All the living-room furniture is backlit, outlined by a halo of orange, as if I’m at Stonehenge during the winter solstice, on a pilgrimage of healing, worshipping the recently deceased.

Joggers run by, laughing, their running shoes crunching on the gravel path. The geese honk, but no birds are singing. They should have all flown south by now, but I’ve learned that the swallows stay here. A woman walks by briskly in a long coat, hurried along by her golden Labrador.

Now the clouds have parted, as if the sun has swept them aside. They fan out in brilliant white plumes, leaving behind streaks of lavender and robin’s egg blue. It looks like one of those holy paintings on the ceiling frescoes in Florence.

I need a last hurrah. Maybe I should make Mum’s famous eggnog this December?

Once we moved to Canada, Mum could never attend her own family’s massive annual Christmas Eve party in Virginia, so she attempted to replicate it at Point O’ View. Instead of hordes of cousins, Mum invited everyone she met to our Christmas parties, and sometimes more than two hundred people crammed into the downstairs rooms. One year, a guest
even rode in on his horse. Carols were sung around the piano in the playroom, food was laid out in the dining room, and halfway through the evening Dad turned off all the lights and marched through the rooms like the Pied Piper, carrying aloft a platter of flaming raisins that he’d soaked in brandy and lit with a match. He lowered it for the children so they could see the flickering gas-blue flames up close. He urged them to put their hands in to grab a few. It was the only kind of flame that didn’t burn you, he said.

Mum would bring down Granny’s music box—the antique automaton that she kept wrapped in a sheet and stored throughout the year in a special cupboard upstairs. She set it on a low table so that visiting children could turn the crank and watch the figures come to life to the tune of the old German carol “O du fröhliche.” I suspect the music box has lasted because it was only ever cranked each Christmas—a total of about 133 days since 1878—and also because the old linen sheet Mum wrapped it in was probably as organic and acid-free as the Shroud of Turin.

But the
pièce de résistance
was Mum’s eggnog. Using her family’s bourbon-laced recipe, she served it up in Granny’s silver punch bowl. It predated Peg Bracken’s recipes by about a hundred years, but it followed her ideology: as long as it got stirred once a day, you could continue serving it until the dog walked away. The recipe required staggering quantities of rum, bourbon, scotch, and sherry, and Mum delegated the making of it to me. We began fermenting it in late October. By Christmas, it was lethal. Mum served it to adults in tiny juice glasses; more than two and they’d have to spend the night.

I carry the old five-gallon stone crock into Dad’s workroom and start cracking the three dozen eggs. I mix in the sugar and
skim milk and dribble the quarts of mixed liquors in a slow, steady stream, stirring all the while with the long-handled wooden spoon until my arm aches, just as it did in childhood. I cover the crock with a heavy board and make a note to stir it once a day until Christmas. Dad’s workroom is cold, so the eggnog will safely do its lethal fermenting, just as it always has.

My plan of spending six weeks here has stretched into a year. For the first time in my life I’m free to have Christmas in my own house in Toronto, but I’m still feeling tugged in two different directions, wanting to be there with my children but unable to let go of the tradition of being here. Nobody else in the family feels this way, it seems. My brothers have long since raised anchor.

Victor is excited to tell me that he’s found a friend who’ll house-sit Point O’ View for a few days so that I can have Christmas at my own house, as I’ve always told him I wanted. In his mind, he’s giving me the ultimate Christmas present. As I drive into the city with a thermos of eggnog tucked in the back seat, I think how strange it feels, leaving Mum’s house just before Christmas, still having to hit the road, only this time driving in the opposite direction.

This time last year, I was helping Mum wrap her presents and decorating her house. In previous years she had always directed me—“Why don’t you put the angels up there”—but last year she’d just dismissed them with a wave of her hand: “I don’t care where you put the damn things.” I watched her sit on the guest bed, picking through her bags of junk, trying to decide who would get what. She handed me pieces of old
gift wrap—folded and reused so many times they felt like soft suede—and strips of ribbon that were wrinkled and frayed. When Dad was alive, he used to iron them.

The turkey was a disaster. I usually cooked one ahead of time and brought it out on Christmas morning, but last year, to give me a break, my brothers suggested we pick one up from a hotel. Dry slabs of tasteless, pre-cut turkey, square potatoes, and bland stuffing arrived in huge tinfoil pans. We didn’t even pretend to disguise it: we served it up assembly-line style, as if we were in an institutional soup kitchen, and sat helter-skelter. I didn’t eat with Mum—she was in the other room. We forgot to say grace. There was no warm aroma of gravy simmering, no anticipatory scent of cinnamon in the air. The kitchen smelled cold and tinny—conversation drifted up to the ceiling; nobody was listening and sentences trailed off.

When we opened Mum’s presents, my son received a pad of writing paper with the name “Mary” printed on each sheet. He looked surprised and reminded Mum, plaintively, “But my name isn’t Mary.”

“So what?” she snapped. “It’s perfectly good writing paper, isn’t it?”

We took pictures of each other wearing shirts with
NORYEL
emblazoned on the sleeves and clutching books with titles like
All the President’s Men
and
Terry Waite: Man with a Mission
. Then everyone quickly departed.

Mum’s house was the originating maypole, but divorces and remarriages and grown grandchildren and their new in-laws had added a million extra ribbons to the dance tangle. Most of the younger generation spent Christmas Day on the road, rushing from one turkey dinner to the next, and church was forfeited altogether—there was no time.

What had started out as a lovely tradition on holidays— after all, her house was the only one large enough to accommodate all of us—had, over the years, tied me inexorably to Mum. I’d never established a Christmas tradition in my own home with my own children, and now they’d all moved out.

Mum had looked despondent as one by one the grandchildren bundled into their coats and hustled out the boathouse door—on to the next set of in-laws.

When I tried to blend in with the departing crowds, Mum said, “You, too? Can’t you stay?” And I felt trapped. I was the only one with no prior commitment; my children were off to their father’s house. As I watched the other rats leaving the sinking ship, I felt abandoned, too. I took off my coat and agreed to stay a little longer.