Elephant Winter (12 page)

“Believe me, I don’t. Why doesn’t Jo want it?”

“He thinks it’s bad luck,” he wrote glibly.

“What makes you think it won’t survive? Jo’s never said that.”

“The odds are against her. There aren’t many live births in captivity.”

“You’ve already done this kind of autopsy. I remember reading about it.”

“That’s what Jo said.”

“I don’t know.” I was tempted. It would be an interesting thing to see.

He leaned forward charmingly, his jaw still stiff, and wrote, “No need to answer now, just keep it in the back of your mind.”

I erased his slate and said that I thought I should be going. The beer was making me feel tipsy and I shouldn’t have been drinking anyway with my baby. I wanted to get home before he said anything else. I shouldn’t have let his hands linger on my arm. I shouldn’t have enjoyed the touch. I shouldn’t have laughed at him. Nothing had happened. But I still wanted to get home. I should have known that even though nothing had happened, something had.

The sicker my mother got the more I wanted from her. I pulled out boxes of old photographs to get her to tell me our story. The boxes were a jumble of three generations of family, dozens of my mother’s friends, places I’d never seen, my old school pictures, holidays and sketching trips we’d taken. We sat sorting and talking and she took up handfuls of my baby pictures and said, “Look at you, you were such a gorgeous baby, it was like falling in love, Soph.”

There were dozens of snapshots of me growing up. She didn’t like posed pictures. I was usually dirty, mucking in her
paints, digging in her gardens, arms wrapped around our various dogs and cats, holding out frogs and snakes and grasshoppers.

“Why aren’t there any pictures of me dressed up?” I laughed.

“You never were,” she said. “You loved these outfits, skirts with ruffles and rubber boots. You put them together and that’s what you’d wear.”

There were pictures of her at her openings, with red fingernails and bright red lips. She favoured tight cocktail dresses that pushed up her small breasts and nipped in her waist. There was only one picture of her working. She wore her hair pulled back and a blue apron covered with small flowers over her trousers. I was already older than she was in those photos. How young she did everything. As if she knew.

There were no pictures at all of some of the things I remembered, of her sitting smoking on the porch for hours when the critics tore through her shows, of her when her own mother died, of her when my father came for his only visit then left again, of her wandering through the house the day we heard he died in a car crash when I was still a child, drunk with another painter, smashed against a linden tree, across the ocean.

She met my father in France where she’d gone as a student. I fingered the half dozen photographs of my mother and father in Paris, my mother with her arm around a statue of Montaigne, his lips painted red by the students, my father
smoking in a café, shot through a steamy window, my mother sketching with him at the caves of Lascaux.

“Why didn’t you stay together?”

My mother left him when I was eighteen months old. I hoped there might be a few new details in those cardboard boxes, in the stories I’d heard before. She’d left and my father had tried to follow her to Canada and live with her. My only memory of him was from that visit. I was about two years old and he gave me an ice cream cone. I bit into it and screamed with the fiery shock of cold in my head. I wasn’t sure if I remembered or if the story was family lore. He was a dark, laughing man, clowning for the camera, someone I would have liked to have known. They touched in every photo. There was a picture of him towering over the little Austin he’d bought when he arrived in Montreal. They took drawing trips together in the little car, slept in northern motels and drank in barrooms with signs that read Ladies and Escorts. There was a picture of my young mother sitting on his shoulders under one of those signs. Her hands were thrust up in the air exuberantly, but she was very thin.

“Where was I?”

“You were sitting by our feet,” she explained. “I was exhausted and he wanted to take pictures outside bars and go drinking. I used to wash your diapers in the hotel sinks at night and dry them by hanging them out the windows of the car.”

She reached over and took the photographs from me and handed me some of my baby pictures. “When I first got
pregnant with you I cried and cried. One of his old lovers came to me, a lanky girl with black hair, and she said, ‘But why don’t you accept, men have art and women have babies?’ People used to say that sort of thing. She loved it that I was pregnant though she’d had three abortions. She thought it was romantic. She ran out and bought champagne and we sat on her bed talking all afternoon.”

“Where was I born?” I wanted to hear it again.

“In Paris. At the beginning it was gorgeous. I’d wrap you in a sling and walk all over the city. I’d sit inside Notre Dame during the organ practice and then take you over to Shakespeare’s to show you off to George who ran the bookstore. I took you to the parks to watch the children pushing their little boats with sticks.” Her eyes drifted away contentedly. She loved to tell me about those months of walking. “The light was yellow and it was a quieter city than it is now. After a few months you were a good sleeper. I was sitting with you in a café one morning and I thought, ‘I’d like to paint this.’ But I had nowhere to work. Your father worked in our studio and I got restless. I took you to the Bois de Boulogne and sometimes I took the train to the Loire. One day sitting by the river I thought, ‘North is Normandy and north beyond is England.’ That day I knew I’d come home. I missed being able to find a forest, to think of the north. I wanted to work. I loved your father and I took you out each day so he could work but when I was ready to start painting again he simply said,
‘Il faut que tu te debrouillés.’
He wouldn’t help with you and we couldn’t
afford a babysitter and the studio was too small to share. I did find a way to paint . . .”

Her voice drifted off into a shade of doubt. Then she looked back at me and suddenly laughed. “I was ready to come back. Besides, there weren’t even any squirrels in Paris. Can you imagine what kind of wildlife painter I’d have been over there? Pigeons!”

I could see her, nineteen years old, sitting with me in her arms beside the Loire, trying to work out her life. She always made sure I had three corn-sized kernels of love at the centre. That she loved me. That she’d loved my father. That I must love myself. These three bits she planted and tilled and nurtured in me though they were seeds that didn’t always grow easily together.

The pain pierced her from inside out. She tried to keep it hidden under orneriness. She was often thirsty but needed help to get her glass. Pain stripped each physical act to its core. There are things we do alone: give birth, choose when to stay and when to go, choose when to give of ourselves, die. Some we can escape, some not. I’d never been able to fill up all the holes in my mother’s life and I couldn’t in her dying, either. She was having to do most of it alone. Some days I bundled her up in the car and drove her to the escarpment to see the woods or down to the docks and the lake. There was time and we found love there. But dying slowly is hard work.

One easier morning, I took her to the barns to meet the elephants. Saba came over first and my mother fed her an orange. Kezia ran her trunk fingers up and down her arm. My mother stood in the stillness of the elephants scenting her. She enjoyed it quietly, breathing in the elephant air.

“Look,” I said, and I took a penny out of my pocket and flipped it to Saba. She didn’t catch it but picked it up dextrously from the floor and gave it back.

“Saba, hand it back to me,” I said, flipping it out. This time she snagged it in the air, stopped, unrolled her trunk and handed it deliberately to my mother, who reached out and took it with suprise.

I laughed. Saba had just cracked a joke and she shook her head and flapped her ears in amusement.

“She’s telling me she understands the routine and can do it with a twist,” I said to my mother. “They love to solve problems, not just follow the drill.”

My mother handed me the coin and said, “But what if you really meant she had to pass it to you?”

Saba swayed with pleasure.

“That’s where the real intelligence comes in, knowing when it’s all right to play around and when she has to be serious. My guess is that they tolerate all this domestic routine only as much as they have to. You’ve got to give them lots of room for creativity.”

“I never thought I’d admire my daughter tossing pennies to a baby elephant . . . they are wonderful aren’t they?”

She took another orange out of her pocket, peeled it and placed it, a segment at a time, on her shoulder. Kezia patiently plucked away the tiny pieces and put them in her mouth. The last piece my mother held between her teeth the way she did sometimes with her budgies. Again Kezia, hardly brushing her lips, reached out and took the orange.

“You’re a dear old thing aren’t you,” said my mother in the same voice she used to talk to Moore, stroking Kezia’s trunk which had returned looking for another piece.

We wandered out of the barn and stood leaning on the fences looking over the fields toward her house. The day was clear and very cold.

She said, “I can see why you come every day. Your elephants are . . .” and then she started to cough. Her air hunger was the worst part of that awful dying. Every cell in her body craved oxygen and she could not get enough of it for them. She stopped, waited, absorbed her breathlessness and dissolved it somewhere deep inside. I hated it when she accepted, when she took heartbreaking pleasure in doing the simplest tasks, holding her sketch pad, taking a brief walk to smell the late-winter earth. She became childlike then, leaning on me, concentrating on the difficult details of living: breathing, keeping her balance, looking out at the world. We did not hurry. We got into the car and went home. I put on some music and crawled up on her big bed to talk. I brought out the photos again, hoping to please her, but she threw them to the floor. “Put them away, I’m not going to spend my last moment
thinking about the past like some idiot old woman! Bring me my sketch pad! Turn on the light. Moore, damn it! Get out of my water!”

I left the house with relief that afternoon when Lottie arrived, and after mucking out the barn I stood leaning against Kezia. The elephant rumbled her greeting to me and when I cried, she dabbed her trunk on my tears and tasted them. She shuffled in close to me and I watched the light skin on her forehead fluttering. I cried and listened to silence inside and out and Kezia made me understand that she would drink as many tears as I had.

Jo used me to practise Lear’s new trunk-lift for the circus. He was working with the gestures elephants use to move teak trees, grasping the trunk, turning it on its side, balancing it and lifting it in the air. Jo had worked Lear in the sequence using a six-foot log. Now it was time to try it with an acrobat. Jo said to me, “Pretend you’re a tree, make your body stiff as you can.”

I trusted Lear but I didn’t understand at first how to keep my body rigid as a tree. He wrapped his trunk around my torso and lifted but I flopped down, instinctively protecting my belly. With his powerful trunk and neck Lear was able to get me up as if I were a burlap sack and Jo smiled and called, “You’re making it hard for him! You’ve got to keep your arms straight at your sides, hold
your legs straight, and keep your head in line with your body.” He touched Lear’s shoulder and instructed, “Lear, good, down.”

Gently Lear placed me on the ground and we tried again. This time I turned my back to the ground and let Lear lift me to the sky. I held my back and legs rigid, his thick, strong trunk wrapped around my waist, and the muscles all through my torso and stomach stretched as I trusted and watched the winter clouds above.

Jo said to Lear, “Up.”

Lear rose then on his two back legs, lifting us above the tops of the trees through the frozen air. I thrust my arms out like a performer and in my own weightlessness felt a bubble move in my stomach. Astonished I hung in the air, waiting for my baby to move again. I felt that first wriggle inside me as if I’d seen gold in dross. Jo clapped and tapped Lear’s front shoulder to come down. We landed with a little bump as Lear placed his front feet back on the ground, then smoothly he lowered his trunk, and tipped me up to stand. I hugged him and Jo came forward with an orange and a nod of satisfaction. “He’s good!”