Lucky Man (5 page)

I let myself into the apartment. I could smell dinner cooking in the kitchen and hear Sam giggling with Iwalani, our friend and Sam's nanny. I couldn't go in there and face him right at that moment. Tracy entered from the kitchen and I met her in the foyer and silently motioned her toward our bedroom. It is seldom that my face is set in so serious an expression, and she sensed immediately that the news was not good. As she followed behind me, I could feel her curiosity escalating toward panic.

There's an odd little hallway, shaped like a 7, leading to the master bedroom in our old West Side apartment. The bottom of the 7 opened onto the bedroom where I told Tracy. We cried, we held each other. I remember thinking the scene was a very strange, sad, upside-down version of the pamphlet I'd left in the cab—funny if it wasn't so . . .
happening to us.

Having no real idea about what this monster was, vaguely understanding that it would be years before we would feel its teeth and claws, we exchanged assurances. Tracy, stunned and frightened, was at the same time so present, and loving . . .
in sickness and in health
, I remember her whispering, arms around me, her wet cheek against mine. Typically, my first instinct was:
There's an angle here, there's got to be a way out of this, just keep moving
. To Tracy:
It'll be okay
. . . To myself: What
will be okay?

Only a few of us will admit it, but actors will sometimes read a script like this:
bullshit . . . bullshit . . . my part . . . blah, blah, blah . . . my part . . . bullshit . . .
I loved it /I hated it really depends on the
bullshit
to
my part
ratio. Days, maybe weeks into it, I transitioned into high bullshit mode:
not my script, hate it, not doing it
. I went through the motions, sought second opinions; the opinions were unanimous. I had Parkinson's disease. Resolving never to see the neurologist again unless a hurricane blew him through my living room window, I had my internist prescribe P.D. meds. I'd carry these around with me, loose and broken in the pockets of my trousers, like Halloween smarties. Therapeutic value, treatment, even comfort—none of these was the reason I took these pills. There was only one reason: to hide. No one, outside of family and the very closest of friends and associates, could know. And that is how matters stood for seven years.

Chilliwack Army Base, British Columbia—1963

The boy was gone . . . vanished. I had slipped away while my mother was occupied with that thankless task familiar to any career military wife: unpacking the family's possessions and setting up yet another new household.

My mom, Phyllis, and dad, Sgt. William Fox, Royal Canadian Army Signal Corps, had become experts at relocation. Between their wedding day in 1950 and that afternoon Mom spent uncrating the effects of thirteen years of family life, Dad had been stationed at six different army bases.

My father's job involved encryption and decoding—his skill at these arcane arts is the reason the army required him at postings all across Canada. (We could never visit him at his office, which was always sealed off.) There had been a previous stint in Chilliwack from 1955 to 1958. The family was returning there from the province of Alberta, where Dad had spent the intervening years at bases in both Calgary and Edmonton. (I was born in Edmonton in June of 1961.) This was life in the military, and if it was inconvenient, or even traumatic for a serviceman's family—
well, tough
. Dad knew the reply he'd get from the brass should he ever complain, and with a rueful half smile he'd often remind us, “If the army wanted me to have a family, they would have issued me one.”

Dad had actually put in for this latest transfer, though, and it was no hardship saying good-bye to the flat, featureless landscape and insultingly cold winters of the Canadian prairie. Mom and Dad still had many friends in Chilliwack and both had grown up in British Columbia. Driving westward from Alberta, Mom remembers crying all the way across the Rockies, so thrilled was she to be traveling toward home. The Chilliwack base sat right at the spot where the rugged mountains settled into miles and miles of rich Fraser River Valley farmland. If you followed the Fraser eighty winding miles or so from Chilliwack, toward the delta where it empties into the Pacific, you'd come to the small community of Ladner. The daughter of one of that area's many Depression-era tenant farmers, Mom considered Ladner the home she always carried with her in her heart. So, if the Fox family had to load into the Chevy and hit the Trans-Canada Highway once again, at least they were moving in the right direction.

Unpacking was tedious work and having a toddler underfoot couldn't have made it any easier. I was a handful, a whirlwind—cheerful, bright, and precociously funny in a what-spaceship-dropped-off-this-alien kind of way. But I'm sure that I was testing her limits, chattering, digging into boxes, making nests in the piles of clothes she had unpacked, unfolded, refolded, and set aside to be carried upstairs to each of the three cramped bedrooms.

Cramped was the operative word for army housing. PMQs—Permanent Married Quarters—did not provide generous living space, but situated as they were on well-guarded government real estate, you couldn't ask for a safer environment in which to raise children. Sprawling grids of identical row housing, PMQs were tidy neighborhoods where folks quickly forged new friendships or reestablished old ones. Everybody looked out for everybody else and everybody was in exactly the same socioeconomic boat. If another family owned something yours didn't—a color TV, say, or a fancy car—all you had to do was count the kids: chances are they had one or two fewer than you did. In 1963 we had four: Karen, Steven, Jacqueline, and me. In 1964 our baby sister Kelli showed up—effectively postponing the purchase of a color TV until the early seventies.

As Mom counted casualties among the stacks of mismatched dishes wrapped in crumpled sheets of old Edmonton newspaper, it's not hard to imagine how I might have escaped unnoticed. If she could no longer hear me, she'd have assumed I'd curled up for a nap somewhere, and would have been grateful for the respite. If she didn't see me, well, that was even easier to explain. It might sound redundant to say “tiny for a two-year-old,” but that's exactly what I was—knee-high, weighing little more than a wet beach towel, and slippery-quick. Several minutes would pass before Mom realized I was missing.

Ladner, British Columbia—1942

Every family has its stories, its formative legends. In mine, they tend to revolve around the figure of Nana, my grandmother. It was accepted as fact in our family that Nana had a gift for prophecy; whether literally true or not, what matters most here is that those who believed, especially my mother, ordered their lives—and mine—accordingly.

Two decades earlier, another mother discovered that her son was missing. In this particular story it was my mother's mother, Jenny Piper, and the son was my uncle Stuart. The year was 1942. Jenny—my “Nana”—and her husband Harry had been through this once before with their oldest boy Kenny: the telegram at the door, the brutal wording: “Missing and presumed dead”—shot down somewhere over Germany. Both Piper sons were serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force over the European theater of operations. Both had been declared missing and presumed dead.

When Nana had read that first telegram a year earlier, the words essentially the same, except for the names, she took it hard. Within weeks, she suffered a heart attack. Her health didn't rally until she received further word several weeks later that Kenneth was in fact alive—that he was a prisoner of war in a camp in Germany.

DREAMERS

So when word of Stuart's disappearance reached Nana's relatives in Winnipeg (in search of better work prospects, Henry and Jenny had relocated from Manitoba to the West Coast at the outset of the Depression), they feared she would succumb to another heart attack, and pleaded with her to come back east for a rest. She wouldn't budge. “Not until I know for sure that Stuart's alive,” she said. Then one day, several weeks into the nightmare of waiting for word about Stuart, Nana came downstairs into the kitchen and announced, “We can go to Winnipeg now. Stuart's okay. I had a dream.”

There was a sudden and violent explosion. A fireball in the sky. From its center, she sees something small and white drift lazily toward the earth, toward the beach, in fact. She runs to it, recovering what now appears to be a small white envelope just before the lapping waves can claim it and take it out to sea. One word is typed on its white face: Stuart.

This collection of images, delivered to Nana from her unconscious, could be interpreted in any number of ways. But to Nana, the meaning was clear: just like Kenneth, Stuart had parachuted from a burning plane and survived. Her faith in this vision was unshakable. Two days after Nana's dream, a telegram arrived. It was just as she prophesied: the burning plane, the white parachute. Like Kenneth, Stuart had been taken POW and was very much alive.

So what does any of this have to do with my life? One thing about which I am absolutely sure is this: if Nana hadn't woken up with that dream, I never would have realized my own. For the unshakable confidence Nana had about Stuart's fate she would later have about me. He would escape what looked to every other member of the family like certain death. And I, she was equally sure, would escape the destiny everyone else in the family assumed was mine.

Chilliwack Army Base, British Columbia—1963

I can't pretend to remember my two-year-old state of mind, but it's likely that my motive in wandering out the back door was not specifically to “escape.” More likely, I simply failed to recognize boundaries; that the screened kitchen door represented a line beyond which an unsupervised toddler did not venture. The impulse to push against the limits of my world was something I would never grow out of, and it would by turns amuse, exasperate, frustrate, and terrify the adults in my life; all of them, that is, except for Nana.

I recently asked my mother about her reaction to my unscheduled field trip that afternoon in Chilliwack, an episode that, for her, set the pattern for her experience raising me. I was, she recalled, a mysterious, mercurial blur.

“I was unpacking and whatnot, getting things squared away, and all of a sudden I couldn't find you. This was a new neighborhood, of course, so I panicked. I went outside and I'm calling and calling for you, until finally this lady came out and asked, was I Mrs. Fox? When I said yes she said, ‘You're looking for your little boy? Well, he was just here and what a charmer! He just talked and talked.'

“That's how it went: everybody in the neighborhood knew who
you
were before we knew who
they
were. Over and over again I heard, ‘Oh, that Michael. Are you Michael Fox's mother?' You know, after you became famous, everybody would say to me, ‘You must get tired of being asked, “Are you Michael Fox's mother?”' And I'd say, ‘Not at all. I've been hearing it since he was a baby.'”

I turned up shortly after Mom's encounter with the new neighbor. Smiling, giggling, no idea I'd caused a stir—just doing a little reconnoitering of my new environs, which, I'd been happy to discover, included a candy store just across the grassy field behind our block. Dad got home from work, and while Mom was recounting my misadventure, I slipped out again. When the phone rang a few minutes later, the proprietor of the candy store tried to contain his amusement. “I've got your son here. He wants to buy something.”

I can easily picture my mother, one hand gripping the phone, the other finding a handful of her thick red hair and giving it a tug, her pinkish Anglo-Irish complexion flushing crimson as she looked around in utter disbelief that I'd bolted once more. “Let him have a candy or something. My husband will be right there to pick him up and pay for it.”

At this point, the store owner could no longer keep himself from laughing out loud. “Oh, he's got money. He's got quite a bit of money, as a matter of fact.”

Thievery was not high on the list of my childhood quirks. I had simply made a two-year-old's connection between the pile of money my father had left on the counter—his entire transfer allowance—and the candy store, the coordinates of which I had already committed to memory. It was on days like this that I began to believe that nothing was impossible—and that my parents began to realize that when it came to their younger son, they would do well to expect the unexpected.

This was no small matter. Born into the uncertainty of the Great Depression and having come of age during World War II, Mom and Dad had carefully constructed a life together that avoided surprises. Dad's decision to embark on a career in the military must have been a calculated tradeoff—individuality for security—with no possibility for a windfall, but no nasty surprises either. If the powers that be saw fit to move you halfway across Canada, then at least you knew that waiting at the next destination was the same job, a similar neighborhood, and a nearly identical house.

Outside the lines, outside the experience of most of the adults in my life, and (according to my older siblings) completely out of my tiny mind—there's a brief but accurate sketch of what I was like in the first five years of my life. I'm constantly told what a friendly, curious, garrulous child I was—hell-bent on all forms of self-expression, artistic and otherwise, with a pronounced attraction to new possibility and an equally pronounced indifference to expectation.

Naturally I developed an understanding of what was expected of me in terms of behavior—the basic rules of society. I only took my father's wallet to the corner store once. My mother describes me as more Tom Sawyer than Dennis the Menace. I just wasn't interested in people's expectations. Or perhaps I should say, I lost interest in them over time. I can recall two formative experiences that turn on the expectations of others and probably helped turn me away from caring one way or the other.

When my baby sister Kelli arrived in 1964, I wasn't jealous. She was cute and I liked kids and babies—and, what the hell, the more the merrier—but by the time I was five or six and she was two or three, we were the same size. I have a specific memory of trick-or-treating with Kelli and being asked at house after house if we were twins. My self-possession and verbal skills had always surpassed anything a grown-up would expect from one so small. But once told that my supposed “twin” was actually three years younger, people's reactions changed, giving me my first troubling experience with the flip side of that expectation. I was
expected
to be bigger. This was a new one on me. I could do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, but I couldn't do
bigger
. This infuriated me. I wanted to steal my sister's candy, bind her up in the pillowcase she was carrying, and stick her in a closet somewhere.

The other incident that prompted me to associate expectation with disappointment had to do with my father. Even as a kindergartener, I recognized that Dad was a no-nonsense kind of guy. Though he delighted in the stories, pictures, and songs I would create, he inhabited a more orderly reality. While I was a dreamer, he was firmly anchored in the nuts and bolts of everyday existence. He never said it in so many words, but I had a strong feeling that someday he expected me to be more like him in this way. I remember one morning at preschool, on a day when my father was returning from an extended posting at a NATO listening post (euphemistically referred to as a “weather station”) somewhere in the Arctic Circle; Dad would be picking me up at lunchtime and walking me home.

In place of the customary finger paints, construction paper, and crayons, the teachers had placed odd-sized scraps of wood, small hammers, and Campbell's soup cans full of nails at our work tables. I would rather have had the paints. But seeing the other boys apply themselves to this practical sort of project, I became fixed on the idea of building something for my dad. I was positive that was what he would like—what he would expect.

And so with mounting frustration I spent that whole morning laboring in vain to construct something, anything. I had it fixed in my mind that that would impress him in a way I never had. It was a disaster: I could not so much as attach one piece of wood to another. Dad finally arrived to find me inconsolable. He scooped me up, balancing my butt on the underside of his powerful forearm, and I buried my face in his uniform. I can still remember the coarseness of the wool and the tang of its smell when dampened by my tears. For once in my young life, I was at a loss for words. We walked home and on the way, I wet my pants. Even Tom Sawyer had bad days.