Fugitive pieces (23 page)

I loved the river, though my five-year-old explorations were held in close check by my mother; a barrage of clucks from the kitchen window if I even started to take off my shoes. Except for spring, the Humber was lazy, willows trailed the current. On summer nights, the bank became one long living room. The water was speckled with porch lights. People wandered along it after dinner, children lay on their lawns listening to the water and waiting for the Big Dipper to appear. I watched from my bedroom window, too young to stay out. The night river was the colour of a magnet. I heard the muffled thump of a tennis ball in an old stocking against a wall and the faint chant of the girl next door: “A sailor went to sea sea sea, to see what he could see see see …” Except for the occasional slapping of a mosquito, the occasional shout of a child in a game that always seemed dusky far, the summer river was a muted string. It emanated twilight; everyone grew quiet around it.

My parents hoped that, in Weston, God might overlook them.

One fall day, it would not stop raining. By two in the afternoon it was already dark. I’d spent the day playing inside; my favourite place in the house was the realm under the kitchen table, because from there I had a comforting view of my mother’s bottom half as she went about her domestic duties. This enclosed space was most frequently transformed into a high-velocity vehicle, rocket-powered, though when my father wasn’t home I also set the piano stool on its side and swivelled the wooden seat as a sailing ship’s wheel. My adventures were always ingenious schemes to save my parents from enemies; spacemen who were soldiers.

That evening, just after supper—we were still at the table— a neighbour pounded at the door. He came to tell us that the river was rising and that if we knew what was good for us we’d get out soon. My father slammed the door in his face. He paced, washing his hands in the air with rage.

The banging that awakened me was the piano bobbing against the ceiling beneath my bedroom. I woke to see my parents standing by my bed. Branches smacked against the roof. It wasn’t until the water had sloshed against the second-storey windows that my father agreed to abandon the house.

My mother tied me in a sheet to the chimney. The rain hit; needles into my face. I couldn’t breathe for the rain, gulping water in mid-air. Strange lights pierced the wind. Icy tar, my river was unrecognizable; black, endlessly wide, a torrent of flying objects. A night planet of water.

With ropes, a ladder, and brute strength, we were hauled in. As if released from the grasp of searchlights from the shore, when our house plunged into darkness, it was swept, like every other on the street, fast downstream.

We were fortunate. Our house was not one of the ones that floated away with its inhabitants still trapped inside. From high ground I saw erratic beams of light bouncing inside upper floors as neighbours tried to climb to their roofs. One by one the flashlights went dark.

Shouts flared distantly across the river, though nothing could be seen in the pelting blackness.

Hurricane Hazel moved northeast, breaking dams, bridges, and roads, the wind tearing up power lines easily as a hand plucking a stray thread from a sleeve. In other parts of the city, people opened their front doors to waist-high water, just in time to see an invisible driver backing their floating car out of the driveway. Others suffered no more than a flooded basement and months of eating surprise food because the paper labels had been soaked off the tins in their pantries. In still other parts of the city, people slept undisturbed through the night and read about the hurricane of October 15, 1954, in the morning paper.

Our entire street disappeared. Within days, the river, again calm, carried on peacefully as if nothing had happened. Along the edges of the floodplain, dogs and cats were tangled in the trees. Alien bonfires burned away debris. Where once neighbours strolled in the evenings, they now wandered the new banks looking for remnants of personal possessions. Again, one might say my parents were fortunate, for they didn’t lose the family silverware or important letters or heirlooms however humble. They had already lost those things.

The government distributed restitution payments to those whose houses had been washed away. It was only after my parents died that I discovered they hadn’t touched the money They must have been afraid that someday the authorities would ask for it back. My parents didn’t want to leave me with a debt.

My father took on as many pupils as he could find. We vanished into a cubbyhole of an apartment nearer to the music conservatory. My father preferred living in an apartment building, because “all the front doors look alike.” My mother was frightened whenever it rained, but she was happy to be living high up and also that there were no trees too close to the building to threaten our safety.

When I was a teenager I asked my mother why we hadn’t left the house sooner.

“They banged at the door and shouted at us to leave. For your father, that was the worst.”

She peered from the kitchen into the hallway to see where my father was, and then, with her hands cupped around my ear, whispered: “Who dares to believe he will be saved twice?”

That my mother took Naomi into her heart chafed me, a jealousy that grew intense. Like my father, I was being thrust out. The first time I was startled to attention by their familiarity, I was waiting for Naomi to finish scrubbing a pot. I had twisted the dish towel into a crown, a trick my mother had taught me. Offhand, innocently, Naomi said: “Just like your cousin Minna.”

My mother held kitchen conferences with Naomi, in the guise of discussing ingredients or dress patterns, while I sat mute with my father in the living room, scanning the bookcases and shelves of phonograph records for the umpteenth time. How my mother must have pressed Naomi’s hand, held on to her, conspired with her. Naomi emerging from the kitchen smiling with a recipe for honey cake. All the loving attention she lavished on my parents, the care so characteristic of Naomi—ever-considerate, generous to a fault—I began to read as insinuation, manipulation, a play of power. Later I even distrusted her visits to my parents’ graves, her gifts of flowers and stones of prayer. As if Naomi were buying me a guiltless conscience the way a man buys jewellery for his mistress. Why do you do it, why?—thinking, what good does it do? She’d always say the same thing, a reply that made me ashamed, lowering her head like a felon: “Because I loved them.”

How could anyone simply love my parents? How could an untrained eye see past my father’s silence, his crabbed rigidity and rage, his despair; past the diminished piano teacher to the once elegant student conductor in Warsaw? JHow could an unskilled heart see past my birdlike mother’s paisley dresses and cut-glass brooches to the passionate woman who kept a pair of elbow-length, white leather opera gloves wrapped in scented tissue in her drawer, and a postcard collection in a shoebox in her cupboard, who cooked to remember generations, who gardened on her balcony so she could have fresh flowers without my father’s disapproval? By what right did Naomi earn their trust?

I began to recall the brusque affection she evoked in my father when she spoke of her own father’s love for music. She was so blatant with them¡ For a long while I had no idea how much this hurt me. In fact, I’d even come to believe I liked this familiarity, this family feeling Naomi brought to that empty apartment. She was blunt and sweet, a crayon, when everything before her had been written in blood. She blundered in with her openness, her Canadian goodwill, with a seeming obliviousness to the fine lines of pain, the tenderly held bitterness, the mesh of collusions, the ornate restrictions. And while I now see that nothing could have pried open my father or melted him—even at the end of his life—I began to believe he had shared himself somehow with Naomi. Of course he had, but they hadn’t been the sort of confidants I’d suspected. A foreigner, a stranger in our midst, Naomi entered the powder-box apartment and instead of blowing our furtiveness sky-high had simply brought flowers, sat on an ottoman, accepted our ways, never overstepping her position. Decorous, patient, an impeccable guest. What I had mistaken for confidentiality from my father was simply the relief of a man who realizes he won’t have to give up his silence. It’s the ease Naomi’s grace encourages in everyone. She will honour privacy to the end.

People ask, do you dream in colour? But I wonder, is there sound in your dreams? My dreams are silent. I watch my father lean over the table to kiss my mother, she’s too frail to sit up long. I think: Don’t worry, I’ll comb your hair, I’ll carry you from the bed, I’ll help you— and realize she doesn’t know me.

In dreams, my father’s face, with the expression he wore on Sundays listening to music, contorts; a reflection in the still surface of a lake smashed by a stone. In dreams I can’t stop his disintegration.

Since his death, I’ve come to respect my father’s caches of food around the house as evidence of his ingenuity, his self-perception.
It’s not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

In the back of my mother’s closet was a small suitcase, the contents of which my mother revised as I grew. This small suitcase, which I feared as a child, now represents to me the enormity of their self-control.

My mother was suddenly old. She had turned herself inside out; her skin hid behind her bones. I noticed the pull of fabric over her curved back, her thin hair over her scalp. She looked as if she might close up, clatter like a folding chair. All that was left of her were the parts that would make a terrifying sound—skeleton, eyeglasses, teeth. Yet at the same time as she was disappearing, she seemed to become more than her body. And that’s when I realized how deeply Naomi’s daughterly attentions were injuring me, each small jar of scented hand lotion, each bottle of perfume, each nightgown. Not to mention the distress evoked by the futility of objects that outlast us.

After my mother died, almost instantly my father slipped beyond reach. He heard things, white as whispering. When his brain was tuned to the frequency of ghosts, his mouth was a twisted wire. During one visit on an autumn Sunday about a year after my mother’s death and two years before his own, I watched him from our kitchen window while Naomi made tea. He sat in our yard; the book he hadn’t been reading had slipped to the grass. Someone in the neighbourhood was burning leaves. I thought about the cool, smoky air on his freshly shaven face, skin I hadn’t touched for years. How strange that this memory has become beautiful to me. My father alone in the garden, lost in loneliness for his wife. He held his cardigan on his lap like a child asked to hold something without knowing why. The trace of beauty I now sense is this: perhaps, for the first time in a long life, my father was experiencing pleasure at looking back on a happier time. He sat so still the birds weren’t afraid of him, plummeting from newly bare branches, sweeping a breath above the lawn around him. They knew he wasn’t there. In his face the expression I now recognize from all those Sunday afternoons we sat together on the couch.

My father’s last night. Holding the dial tone against my ear, waiting for Naomi to come to the hospital. I will always associate the dial tone with the mechanical horizon of death, of no heartbeat. I realized then I’d been wrong about him all my life, thinking that he wanted death, was waiting for it. How is it possible I never knew, never guessed? Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time.