Remembering the Bones (9 page)

When Ally and I helped out at the store on Saturdays, Phil taught us to cut a straight line through material by keeping our eye on the tip of the scissors. The best way to measure a bolt
of cloth was from nose-tip to fingertip, with one arm stretched out horizontally. “It’s a yard,” she said, as she poked her arm to the side. “A yardstick measure. As long as you don’t turn your head.” She also began to recount stories of her childhood, when she and Aunt Fred had been children and shared the same room—even the same bed—now shared by Ally and me.

Mr. Holmes, on the other hand, was coming home tired at the end of the day. His fatigue dampened us like a sodden cloak. He made himself difficult to love, but that was one of the facts of our lives together. We knew he loved us, but he was difficult to love back. I wondered why this was so, but there was no one to ask. If we had met our grandparents on the Holmes side, we might have had some insight, but there was no chance of that because they had died so long ago.

I went back to
Gray’s
and opened it to see what I could learn about the symptoms I was observing in my father, but I could not match his obvious exhaustion to anatomical description. I tried
Queen of Home
, and turned to the chapter called “The Sick-Room.” The nearest advice I could find concerned nervous disorders. Emotions, I read, could wear away the brain. Eight hours at one stretch were sufficient for any man to use his brain. If he exceeded that amount of time he would become nervous and exhausted.

I could not understand why Mr. Holmes was wilfully marching towards disaster. Once home from work, he had supper and then fell asleep, sometimes on the sofa. When this happened, we weren’t able to listen to the radio after our homework was done. One evening while he was sleeping in the parlour, he shouted, “Save the buttons! Grab them, quick! Dump them in here!” Ally and I, bent over our scribblers at
the kitchen table, looked at each other and shrugged. His face was becoming thin; the patch over his left eye failed to hide dark rings above the bone of his cheek—the malar. I thought of
Gray’s
and the yawning hole above the bone, which, on the page, looked big enough to swallow the face of the person to whom it belonged.

I went back to
Queen of Home
and worked up the courage to warn Mr. Holmes, telling him that if he refused to pay attention to the evil effects of the stress of brain work, it would soon be too late. I read out the symptoms as I stood over the sofa: dull eyes, heaviness of head, a stupid feeling after meals. These could lead to insanity and even death. Another evening, I read a different passage, letting him know that if he continued to neglect the warnings of brain exhaustion, he would be considered not only a fool but a criminal. Irritability towards his youngest child became a sudden, new symptom displayed by Mr. Holmes, one not listed in the sick-room chapter. He sat up. His face reddened; his unpatched eye glared. I quickly left the room.

The fatigue of Mr. Holmes, his general state of illness, went on through all the years of the war and became the norm in our home. What I did not know, what none of us knew, was that Mr. Holmes was suffering from chronic liver disease and that he would die in the fall of 1945, only months after the town celebrated peace. Trick had returned safely from the war, one of the first boys to come home. Mr. Holmes was present at Ally and Trick’s wedding but he was unsteady on his legs, and his skin and the whites of his eyes had yellowed. He wasn’t happy about having to be supported on either side, but he did his best to try to smile at the guests. All of us were pleased that he was
not too ill to sit through the ceremony. The night before the wedding, he presided over the family supper table, and a grand feast of roast turkey was served. He carved the plump bird and carefully removed the wishbone, and presented it to Ally, his first-born. She still has it, unsnapped, to this day.

R
ock of ages, cleft for me

Let me hide myself in thee

I sound like the
Titanic
, going down.

It was Mr. Holmes’s favourite hymn, and we sang it at his funeral. Five women sat in the front pew: Grand Dan, Phil, Aunt Fred, Ally and I. We wore black dresses, black gloves and black hats with veils. We rose to our feet together and sat down together, and held hands all the length of the pew.

Whenever I recall this day, I always think of the photo of the three queens at the funeral of King George VI. Queen Mary, the Queen Mother and Lilibet were heavily garbed in black, their profiles shadowed by dramatically long veils that flowed over their heads and shoulders. It was apparent that they were grieving but each, by herself, was a vision of strength.

At my father’s funeral, the closed coffin was ten feet in front of us, and we stared at it as if fearing that Mr. Holmes would suddenly shout and push back the lid. Our regular minister
was ill, and a man who had never met my father was sent from the Anglican church in the next town to conduct the service. He gestured towards the coffin and, in a mournful voice, began to talk about our dearly departed Connie Humes.

Someone must have given him the wrong name. The five of us in the front pew burst out laughing. I kept my head tucked to my chest and told myself we were suffering from brain exhaustion, nervousness, stupidity, grief. We shocked the congregation of mourners—the church was full—and we disgraced ourselves. Uncle Fred, and Ally’s new husband, Trick, seated in the pew behind us, could not understand what was going on. We laughed and laughed, and mopped the tears, passing handkerchiefs back and forth, our shoulders shaking and pressed into one another. We were out of control, and hoped that the people behind us would think we were sobbing, even though the minister in front could see perfectly well that we were hysterical. To add to the emotional bedlam, Grand Dan had forgotten her glasses at home and could not see the words of the next hymn—unfamiliar to us and chosen by the new minister. Phil whipped off her own glasses and thrust them at Grand Dan, who tried to hook the wire frames under her veil and over her ears. She looked back at us as if she were going to bleat. We were off again. None of us knew the words, none of us sang. We had been caught out, and we laughed through hard, crying tears.

We sobered on our way back down the aisle and, as we followed the coffin outside, Grand Dan took my arm and walked beside me. We were eye to eye because I had almost finished growing and she had begun to shrink. She muttered in a low voice between her teeth, “There’s a time to laugh and a time to weep, Georgie. But sometimes the two get muddled up.”

After the graveyard portion of the service and when we had returned to the church hall, Aunt Fred took me aside and told me about the memorial service held for my Grandfather Danforth, before I was born and shortly after the arrival of the axe-bloodied telegram. Aunt Fred was in a remembering mood, having been younger than I when she lost her own father. Because Grandfather was blown up, she said, there had been no body to bury. Even if his bones had been found, they would not have been shipped home from France. It was a funeral without a coffin. The townspeople from Wilna Creek came out to our country church to pay respects. Automobiles, horses and buggies were lined up along the dirt road and side by side in the churchyard. Grand Dan’s axed leg was extended straight out in front of her. Every pew was full, and chairs had to be set at the back of the church so that no one would have to stand. Grand Dan sat with her head bowed while she listened to the memories of a lineup of colleagues and patients, and then she laughed with a sudden, short bark. It was as if she were telling them that they knew nothing of the Dr. Matthias Danforth she had loved. She had held him between her thighs; she had run her hand down the muscles of his back; she was the one who made King Edward cake the way he liked it, with walnuts ground into the icing. She knew that he buttered his rolls in the centre and not to the edge, and that he held his knife in his left hand. She was the one with whom he had sat on the veranda in the evenings and shared his concerns about the men and women who climbed up onto his examining table in the Danforth library. She was the one whose skin, under his tracing fingers, had turned to silk. She barked her laugh once more and it was a laugh of pain.

What we were laughing at during the funeral of my father, I now believe, was fear.

W
e were on our own. Stuck with one another. If we had been largely a household of women before the death of Conrad Holmes, we were now entirely so. We knew this as we bowed heads at the graveside, as we stared down at the coffin in the hole and at one another’s feet. Grand Dan’s cottons were smoothly wrapped under lisle. The heels of our shoes sank into soft soil. I stood beside Phil and felt her body tremble through her gloved hand. Afraid that she would faint at will, I gripped her arm, but she did not sink to the floor until we were back in the church hall greeting mourners. Most were helping themselves to tea and sandwiches served by the Women’s Auxiliary, of which Phil and Grand Dan were members. So natural was Phil’s collapse to her knees and then to the floor, I wasn’t sure whether she had brought on the faint or if it had been caused by true oxygen deprivation.

Aunt and Uncle Fred stood together in the church hall and did not break into a passionate fight as they usually did when they were in company. Ally and Trick, the newlyweds, held
hands. I was pondering my future, which was in a state of confusion. On the way home, Grand Dan sighed as she looked out the window of Uncle Fred’s car. “We still have the rest of the hayfield,” she said. “That will be our insurance.” All of us knew that the store, a business that had been sinking for a decade, would have to be sold. It was also my place of work. Within a few weeks, we came to realize how truly bad business had been. The sale of the store managed only to cover outstanding bills.

Ally went back to her art—she was using charcoal, sometimes watercolours, and still liked to work with pencil crayons. She and Trick had a place in town now, and the first thing I noticed when I visited was a new drawing tacked over yellowed wallpaper in their living room. I recognized our father’s store, which, in the drawing, was buried under an avalanche. The roof was covered in white, the entrance hinted at by shadow, the main display window obliterated except for a jagged opening at its centre. Torn, but clearly visible over this central darkness, was the poster of the white elephant, one placid eye staring out.

When Ally came out to the house again for a visit, she and I sat in the room we used to share and talked about our father’s death. We began to wonder what his last words had been. We asked Phil, but she became deliberately vague and said she didn’t remember. She’d been with him in their bed at the moment of his death, ten past seven in the morning. We found her vagueness surprising, though we didn’t press the point. Had he shouted her name? Did he know he was dying? Did he mention us? Ally and I asked each other, but Phil remained silent.

“You’ll have to hire a shouter,” Ally said to me privately, “or it will be so quiet, no one will get any sleep.”

But we did sleep. Gloom had left the house, and the space it once occupied demanded to be filled. The store was up for sale and we prepared for the handover. At home, Phil drew the curtains and darkened the parlour. She walked through rooms slowly, made camomile tea and began to phone old friends, women she had known during her school days and women who had shopped in the store. She accepted condolences and commiserations. And she started, again, to work.

She was already known to be a fine seamstress, and now autos drove out from town and up our short lane. Women in stylish shoes stepped through the back door. They turned slow circles in our kitchen while being measured, and spread patterns over the table, discussing the way they wanted adjustments made. Phil, who now referred to herself as “dressmaker,” held a mouthful of pins between her lips while she raised and lowered hems. She stood on a short stool to take tucks under armpits, to let out waists, to adjust bustlines—and she talked about Mr. Holmes.

“He was a wonderful man,” she said, through her teeth. She grasped a pin tightly between her fingertips, daring her clients to challenge. “A wonderful man. When he came home in the evenings, he entertained us with stories of the old country. He was learned, too. And brave. He would have fought in the war, except for his eye.”

I watched and listened, astonished. Fate had handed Phil the role of widow, and she was going to make the best of it, even if she had to reinvent her life.

The next time I went to town I talked to Ally, who was not unused to inventing roles for her still imaginary villa. “Maybe it takes too much energy to recall darkness and gloom,” she said. “Phil probably draws strength from making a new life for
herself and consigning Mr. Holmes to a happy memory slot. Like some sort of character in a play.”

Indeed, the stories we had once heard from Phil after work each day now became stories Mr. Holmes had supposedly related. The Singer was pulled out farther from the wall. The treadle was pumped over and back, over and back, its regular hum becoming the new noise in the house. The needle stabbed and stuttered through yards of cloth fed into it. Phil cast off her mourning clothes and rewrote her history. She had a long life left to live.

I
’ve read that our bodies shift forty times a night when we sleep. What happens if we can’t move our limbs? Does the blood congeal? I have to resort to kicking the air with my good leg, punching with my good arm. One leg, one arm, one side scrabbling. I’ve invented the beetle kick. But I’m losing strength. I’ve been lying here forever, I feel sure of it.

Django was born outside, not in a ravine but in a Belgian field. Rice told me how wonderful music began to come out of him at an early age. When I listen to his strumming, I feel as if he’s about to run all the way up a fret and out the other side of my mind. An amazing spirit. But did he also die in a field? I think not. He died on his way home from a railway station in France. That was the year Lilibet was crowned in
her
country, 1953. How earnest she was at the Coronation. More than a hundred of us crowded into the Town Hall auditorium to watch the ceremony on two of the town TVs, set up on the edge of the stage. My Case and Lilibet’s Charles were almost five years old.

Yes, railways do play their part in history. Tolstoy dying in a station master’s shack; my grandfather, who left on a troop train and never came back. Aunt Fred, who, the Thanksgiving after she was widowed, packed a suitcase full of dark meat from the twenty-two-pound turkey she had just roasted and travelled a hundred and sixty miles by train to bring it to my mother. Aunt Fred ate only white, Phil only dark, and not a scrap of either was going to be wasted. And there was Uncle Fred, who did his own ironing and wore a pressed white shirt to bed every night in case he was called out when a train jumped track, or in the expectation of a passenger and freight train colliding head on and bursting into flames. Uncle Fred, Inspector, was always ready. Aunt Fred refused to iron his shirts—and who could blame her?—when he was only going to wear them to bed.

There was also the Royal Train in 1939—Uncle Fred called it the “pool train”—when Lilibet’s dad, King George VI, and her mum, the Queen, crossed Canada and stood on the rear platform in Brockville for one of their scheduled stops. Uncle Fred drove all the way to Wilna Creek to pick us up, and then on to Brockville where he and Aunt Fred, Ally and I stood beside the track—as close as we could get with our uncle’s official railroad status—and gazed up at the Royal couple. My four cousins were not present; they preferred to stay home to get into trouble. The Queen wore strands of pearls around her neck, a pearl bracelet, and two puffs of white fur attached like vertical muffs to her sleeves. Uncle Fred cajoled a superintendent into giving up a copy of the train’s Royal menu, and Ally and I laughed on our journey home as we read out the choices:
Chow Chow
or
Queen olives, Pressed ox tongue
and
Quince jelly.
But the Royals ate potatoes, too, just as we did. And green peas. They were
allowed pie or pudding or fruit, for dessert. After going over the menu in every detail, we examined the colour photograph on its cover, and admired the King and Queen and the two princesses in their crowns and ermine cloaks, which spilled down over red, carpeted steps. We settled against the back seat of Uncle Fred’s car, tired and silent, chastened by largesse.

But enough is enough. I haven’t lived this long only to rot on the ground thinking of princesses. If someone doesn’t find me, my skeleton will mould with the oak. Centuries from now, I’ll be a slab of petrified wood.

The cheese in my fridge will be mouldy when I get home.

I might never see the inside of my fridge again.

What will happen to my own fur stole? The mink I haven’t worn for years but never threw away. It was Phil’s. She handed it to me in a brown paper bag, the day she moved into the Haven. She bought it after Mr. Holmes died, with the wages she earned from dressmaking. Case has always laughed at the fur stole. Laughed or shuddered, take your pick. She’ll probably throw it into a trunk in the theatre storage room and haul it out someday for a vintage play.

Oh stop, Georgie. Keep your spirits up. Someone will be searching. You have only to believe.

I’m the Mistress of sequential disarray; Harry was right. I can’t keep my thoughts straight for two minutes.

It is deathly silent here, so quiet I hear the flap of a single pair of wings. In summer, Ally and I lay in the field and watched huge flocks of birds flying swiftly in a single direction. The birds flattened as one mass and flicked through the air like cloth, and then, with the same swiftness, veered and disappeared into a slit in the sky we didn’t know was there. Where did they go? A mystery.

If anyone is searching for me now, I’m the mystery. Phil might be seated on her walker wondering why she hasn’t heard a word since my arrival in London. I said I wouldn’t call until I was back, but she might expect a call anyway.

She’ll be waiting for her pigskin gloves.

It has become clear to me that Phil takes her long life for granted, that she plans to outlive everyone, including me. She has already outlived her husband, her sister, her brother-in-law, my husband and her friends. She plans to outlive the other residents at the Haven, whom she collectively calls “the inmates.” She has also begun to steal, which, when I was first told, I found hard to believe.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized she’d been moving in that direction for some time. Before she decided to become an inmate herself, she was obsessed with watching crime shows on TV. She kept notes, referred to as “suspicion reports.” When she looked out the windows of our old home and saw herself surrounded by newly constructed rowhouses, she began to record any behaviour she deemed suspect. Her reasoning was that she would be a reliable informant if ever called upon to be an expert witness. Because she wrote on yellow sticky notes, these were not lasting testaments. They curled up and were thrown into a kitchen drawer. I leafed through some of them before I advertised and sold the house.

—
Tall young man, black hair, entered corner house. Carried white cloth in two hands.

—
Woman, royal blue coat (doesn’t suit her) canvassed at door. Fraud? Gave no $.

—
Man in plaid jacket walked centre of road, stopped by stone wall, marched four paces on spot. Lunatic.

Those are a few I remember.

She steals only on Mondays, sheet-changing day. Six months after she moved in, I was invited by the nurses to attend a staff meeting about her kleptomania. Phil was not present.

“I don’t hurt a soul,” she said, later—and I suddenly felt weary. I looked at the face of feigned innocence before me and wondered if we’d switched roles and I had become the mother.

“I take things when I’m on my rounds,” she went on. “I nip into suites when no one is looking. Sooner or later the nurses find out where I’ve hidden my cache and it’s returned to the owners. No harm done.”

“What do you steal?”

“Belts, buttons, combs, a hand mirror—the old-fashioned kind with a bone handle. I stole that from Maudie Hanslow—remember her? She’s about ten years younger than I am. She used to come to the store. She tried to tell me I shortchanged her one day, after she bought a tag-end of felt. Well she’s an inmate now, and I stole her mirror. Serves her right.

“I also steal chocolate bars—I don’t eat them; I just take them. I grab up things that are small enough to stash under my clothes.”

She watched my face as she spoke. “It takes energy to steal, you know.” She looked at the floor and slumped and then raised her head and added slyly, “You wouldn’t believe how boring it gets.”

The staff members were not amused. It was reported that Phil had stolen a tin piggy bank from the bazaar table at the front entrance. “The bank,” said the charge nurse, “was found on a windowsill in your mother’s room. Behind the curtain.”

“Why would you steal a piggy bank?” I asked, later. “You have money. Why didn’t you just pay for the bank?”

“I did,” said Phil. “I dropped a quarter inside and then I stole it.”

She was energized by theft.

Oh, Lilibet, did you have responsibilities like these before the Queen Mum died? Were you held accountable? I know you addressed her as Mummy, because I heard you on TV, calling out during a horse race. Did she order you around? At least you were not her chauffeur. There were staff members, weren’t there? Stalwart, reliable people to take hold and keep Mummy occupied and well.

I think Phil’s friend, Tall Ronnie, aids and abets, Lilibet. I believe he checks to see if the coast is clear. They are a Mutt-and-Jeff pair but I’m glad they found each other. He’s almost six feet tall, hunched, while Phil has shrunk to five-two bent over her walker. But she can still move quickly. And there’s one other thing. Tall Ronnie can’t stay in one spot while he’s talking. He ends up a foot away from the point at which conversation begins. I have to tell my body to root to the floor when I’m facing him; otherwise, my feet will follow. His head shifts from side to side; he shuffles; he cannot remain still. I finally get relief when he sits, because then his body behaves like that of a normal person.

When Phil first told me about him, she slipped in the information one night just before we hung up the phone. I admit to being surprised, especially as she had never shown an interest in finding another partner.

“Oh, and I have a new gentleman friend,” she said. “He’s ninety-two and lives across the hall. The only thing I don’t like about him is that he cracks his knuckles. This will interest you—I can hear his fingerbones all the way from my room, even when I put a pillow over my head.”

She paused as if unsure whether to say more, and then she added, “His name is Tall Ronnie. He offers his arm in the old
way. When I go into his room, we shut the door. This drives the other inmates crazy. Maudie Hanslow said, at breakfast, ‘I thought we were all past that sort of thing. It’s unseemly.’”

I didn’t ask.

“Also,” said Phil, “Tall Ronnie knows how to make me laugh.”

He is as unlike Mr. Holmes as any man can be.