Unless (19 page)
One friend—or acquaintance, rather—said to me: “You’re all worked up about nothing. This isn’t such a big deal, a kid taking a season out on the street. It happens.”
Dr. David McClure, the psychiatrist we consulted, urged non-interference. “Her actions indicate that she is giving herself something. A gift of freedom, you might say, the right to be a truant in her own life. You may not think so, but she has made practical arrangements to stay alive. Vagrancy can be thoughtful or careless, and she has chosen the former. But then she is intelligent. Intelligence will see her through this crisis. Crisis, I say, but that isn’t really the word I should have used. It is more in the nature of a behavioural interlude in which she is either escaping something unbearable or embracing the ineffable.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“Ah, that is unanswerable.”
Our daughter Chris said: “What happened? What terrible thing happened to her? There has to be a
thing
.”
Natalie said: “I don’t believe it, I’ll never believe it, she’d never do this if she were in her right mind.”
Lois, my mother-in-law, said: “I can’t bear this. Not Norah, not Norah.”
Willow Halliday said: “I’ve always heard that people begging on the street are frauds. That they make big bucks, a
couple of hundred dollars a day. Some of them have cell phones, I’ve seen that myself in Toronto.”
Have I articulated how difficult I find Willow Halliday, the mother of one of Norah’s friends? Willow is a superb cook and she has said to me a dozen times—I exaggerate, but only a little—that she reads cookbooks the way other people read novels. “But wouldn’t you be less of a bore if you read novels?” I long to say, but of course I don’t.
Tracy Halliday, a horsey, popular girl, has been a friend of Norah’s since childhood. Tracy and another friend made the trek down to Bathurst and Bloor, where they presented Norah with an enormous jar of marbles. (Natalie and Chris were there and later reported the incident to Tom and me.) Tracy knelt down and shouted into Norah’s ear, explaining that each marble represents a Saturday, and that if Norah lives to be eighty, she will enjoy an astounding 4,160 such days. Of course, at nearly twenty, she has used up some of the Saturday mornings, but still has more than 3,600 left. If she takes one marble out each week, she will see her supply slowly diminish and will come to value time and her own life.
When I try to imagine Tracy looking at Norah, I understand that she sees no one. For a minute I was Norah. Norah the anchorite, Norah the outcast. I trembled with the thought of what Tracy might think of me.
The real Norah failed to respond, she sat all day with the jar of marbles beside her, and left them there when she
returned to the hostel that night. In the morning, apparently, they were gone. I’m not sure what I think of this exercise. Someone told me the marble idea was floating around on the Internet. People wander into the Internet seeking diversion and instead they get a pelting of hard fact and gusty inspiration about the wonderfulness of life. Is this marble-counting exercise a recipe for savouring time or is it a cutting reminder that time cannot, however much we wish it, repeat itself?
I can go for months without seeing Emma Allen, who is a journalist in St. John’s, Newfoundland, but just five minutes in her presence persuades me that she is the one person in the world I can tell everything. “Norah is alive,” Emma said to me when she was passing through last week—my dear Emma, whose son died of a heroin overdose at age twenty-two. “Her limbs are intact. She hasn’t mutilated herself or even shaved off her hair. She isn’t drunk, she probably isn’t on drugs. She’s not shouting obscenities or spitting on strangers. You, her parents, know precisely where she is and something of her routines. That’s the thing to remember, that you’re still connected to her in time and space.”
Professor Hamilton, who taught the Flaubert course in which Norah had been enrolled, said: “She was an excellent student, until she stopped coming to class. This was not long before exams. March twenty-eighth, she was at the March twenty-eighth lecture, I’m almost sure. But you know, many
students fall away once the good weather begins. She was always alert and inquiring. Well, yes, we did have one or two altercations, you know how things go these days. Could Flaubert possibly imagine himself into a woman’s life? The class divided on that issue, it happens every year. Norah saw Madame Bovary as a woman blandly idealized by Flaubert, and then reduced to a puff of romanticism, and capable of nothing else but kneading her own soft heart. Your daughters view, and it is a perfectly viable view, was that Madame Bovary was forced to surrender her place as the moral centre of the novel. Others, needless to say, disagreed.”
Tom doesn’t say so, but he sometimes intimates that Norah is manipulating us. Either that or punishing us for some reason. I resist this interpretation. Tom goes every Friday morning to see her on the way to his trilobite research meeting—he is the only “lay” member of this small group—at the University of Toronto. He’s given up talking to her. Now he just sits with her for half an hour, on a folding chair he takes along for that purpose, and slips her money in an envelope. Cash, not a cheque. Norah lives outside the realm of cheques and banks and signatures, even though there’s a bank on the corner where she sits and another across the street. Is it when he’s counting out the twenties that Tom thinks: manipulation?
An old school friend, Gemma Walsh, an active member of the United Church, has written to tell me that Norah’s
name has been added to an all-Ontario prayer list. I send her back my sincere thanks, which I sincerely mean. I didn’t know I had this depth of sincerity in my soul. I thought sincerity had gone from our generation, driven out by post-sixties disillusionment and the marketplace.
Marietta Glass, Colin Glass’s estranged wife, writes from Calgary, quoting Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Meaning all is well for the moment and for the moment that follows and the moment after the moment.
Danielle Westerman, with her adamantine certainty, has not swerved from her view that Norah has simply grown into the knowledge of her powerlessness and doesn’t know what to do with it. “Subversion of society is possible for a mere few;
inversion
is more commonly the tactic for the powerless, a retreat from society drat borders on the catatonic” (
Alive, 1987
, Already). I wasn’t inclined to believe this statement when I first translated it, but now I believe it absolutely. Danielle’s hypothesis has moved into my body and occupies more and more space.
December 2, 2000
Dear Dennis Ford-Helpern:
I have recently finished your book,
The Goodness Gap
, and felt an impulse to put down my impressions. It’s taken me a long time to read this book and digest it. (I’ve had to renew it twice at the public library.)
I was stunned, to say the least, by your theory of goodness being a kind of problem solving. As I interpret your text and epilogue, you see moral dilemmas sprouting like tables and chairs on the sidewalk, growing ever more quickly, nourished by advances in technology and by the decay of the ecosystem. Solutions to serious moral questions inevitably lag behind the problems that arise, hence the “gap.” Your fourteen chapters sketch out examples of successful or unsuccessful problem solving. Closing the gap is dependent on quick resolution, sideways thinking, general creativity. All the problem solvers in your examples are men, all fourteen. I consulted the index and found that women
are scarcely cited at all. This seems a moral dilemma in itself, don’t you think?
Listen to me, how I natter on, just like—just like a woman, the way I fluff up my fantasies of persecution. It happens that I am a woman and the mother of a nineteen-year-old daughter, twenty in May, who is deeply troubled. She is alienated from our family and from society. We don’t know the cause of Norah’s malaise, but I am more and more persuaded that she is reacting—morally, responsibly, the only way she can—to a withholding universe. What she sees is an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors. Yet, goodness is exactly what she is seeking, the nature of goodness, how we learn to be good and what that means.
I don’t think you intend to be discouraging in your book. I think you have merely overlooked those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the worlds population. By the way, you may not be able to catch my tone in this letter, but I am trying to put forward my objection gently. I’m not screaming as you may think. I’m not even whining, and certainly not stamping my little lady-size foot. Whispering is more like it. The last thing I want is to be possessed by a sense of injury so exquisitely refined that I register outrage on a daily basis. Anger is not humanizing. It’s a rehearsal for the performance that never arrives. Try to imagine my particular realm of feeling at this time of trouble and my belief that there is a circuitry linking your
philosophical approach and my daughter’s resignation from life, her consignment to dysfunction. Probably you will dismiss this as a crank letter from one of those women who go around begging to be offended, but you must understand that I am trying to protect Norah, and her two younger sisters, Christine and Natalie, who want only to be allowed to be fully human. And you should know, as I set down these words, that I am shaking like a tree of nerves.
Yours,
Rita Orange d’Ville
V
IRTUE IS PERFORMANCE
,’” I Said to Danielle Westerman on Wednesday when we had lunch in her sunroom. “A form of acting. Someone said something like that, but I can’t remember who.”
“Yeats, I think,” she said dreamily, stretching in her chair.
“Yes, Yeats.”
She is a woman with twenty-seven honorary degrees and she’s given the world a shelf of books. She’s given her thoughts, her diagram for a new, better, just world.
A high school in Ontario is named after her, and in France, in the small city of Mâcon, there is a Danielle Westerman Square, a surprisingly beautiful public space with linden trees and cobbled paths, where, when Tom and I walked there early last March, we seemed to move through the drifts of perpetual springtime, as though the people passing us, families, old people, had never known a time of fixed gloom or shame, that they had never been without the filtering, healing buzz of warm sunshine.
In her last years Danielle has become cranky, even with
me, her translator. She suspects I’ve abandoned the “discourse,” as she always calls it, for the unworthiness of novel writing. She has a way of lowering her jaw when she skirts this topic, and her eyes seem freshened with disappointment. She is such a persuasive force that I often find myself agreeing with her; what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes?
Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior “discourse,” but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they’re just so much narrative crumble. Unless, unless.
Unless
is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence. Unless—that’s the little subjunctive mineral you carry along in your pocket crease. It’s always there, or else not there. (If you add a capital
s
to
unless
, you get
Sunless
, or
Sans Soleil
, a very odd Chris Marker film.)
Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.
Unless
provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough.
Unless
keeps you from drowning in the presiding arrangements. Ironically,
unless
, the lever that finally shifts reality into a new perspective, cannot be expressed in
French. À
moins que
doesn’t have quite the heft;
sauf
is crude.
Unless
is a miracle of language and perception, Danielle Westerman says in her most recent essay, “The Shadow on the Mind.” It makes us anxious, makes us cunning. Cunning like the wolves that crop up in the most thrilling fairy tales. But it gives us hope.
At eighty-five, she’s not quite lost her superstitious hold on the belief in bad luck and good luck. She’s had enough of both bad and good, so that even when occupied with changing the world, she comes on like an old-style Presbyterian, accepting her mixed lot. Her new book is selling briskly everywhere, praised for its originality and sinewy analysis. No author tour, hardly any advertising, but such a response. We talk about the reviews today over our smoked salmon and devilled eggs. Oh, what a thick, rich pile of reviews, one of them referring to the “incantatory” flow of the prose—I like that—and another claiming Danielle as a National Treasure—an epithet that makes her squirm slightly but to me signals her earned authority. After a while we get on to the subject of how we carry a double history in our heads, what is and what could be, and how we must try to keep them from inflating or deflating each other.
She has deleted the early roots from her life, or pretends to have done so. Papa worked for the post office in Mâcon, Maman in a bar in La Roche-Vineuse. Their
appartement
in this village was three rooms in a house on rue des
Allemagnes. She refuses to speak of those days (though she did not hesitate to recommend La Roche as a tourist destination). She stored up her energy of repression in her early years and decided to spend it somewhere else. There must have been a day, a moment, when this decision was made. “They’re dead,” she says, meaning either her parents or the early years. And she adds: “To me they’re dead.” Her memoirs begin when she is eighteen, in Paris. She had passed her baccalaureate, boarded a train, and enrolled at the Sorbonne. So much for childhood. Miraculously, she has got away with this sketch of a life, so far at least.