Swing Low (17 page)

I’d use this time to prepare for the activities that I’d planned the night before, setting up various work centres around the classroom, making dozens of trips to the supply room for paper and paint and hammers and nails and whatever else we’d need to bring the textbook to life. Or I would work on the history guide I was writing, called
It Happened in Canada.
I’d greet the teachers as they filtered in through the morning, wishing them well, and then, when the school buses finally rolled in and the town children began to arrive in groups of two or three, I’d stand outside on the sidewalk with my hands on my hips and my shirt sleeves rolled way up, welcoming them warmly and encouraging them to work hard and have a wonderful day.

Only a person who had lived with me for several years, a person such as E., could know that all this “goodness” would soon come crashing down around us like the walls of Jericho.

And that spring of 1964, with the birth of my second daughter, it fell harder than it ever had. Not a word at home for one entire year. Was I angry? Was I, subconsciously, punishing Elvira for her happiness at having another child finally after six frustrating years of trying to get pregnant? Was I insane? Why wasn’t my medication working? The pills I took, incidentally, were supposed to keep me somewhere in the middle of my moods, running the gauntlet between depression and mania, but generally leaning towards the safer side of depression. I don’t know why the birth of my second daughter, a normally joyous event, would plunge me into darkness and why the birth of my first daughter did not. Did it have something to do with the birth, so many years before, of my younger brother, Reg? When my mother became trapped in a psychotic whirlwind of grief over the death of my sister, of her obsession with her new baby, of maintaining her pious public image, and of her private drinking to quell the ghosts that haunted her?

I had a six-year-old daughter who meant the world to me, and during this time, when she entered my bedroom to tell me about her adventure-packed day, I turned away from her and faced the wall.

At school, however, where she was a grade one student, I’d smile at her tenderly if her gaze met mine during public assembly and I’d wave to her from across the school playground during recess. After school, if I wasn’t staying late to
work on some project or another, she and I would walk home together, hand in hand. Perhaps if I was a trained psychoanalyst I could make sense of everything, of the way I was, of the way I so desperately didn’t want to be. All I can do is shake my head and wonder how I didn’t destroy my family entirely. I suppose I had come, since being born, to associate home with danger and sadness, with the need to take cover, to lie low and hope it all goes away soon. Home, ironically, had become the very cause of my homesickness. I wasn’t smart enough to know that our home could be anything different, and yet I knew that I wanted it to be. I wanted to create a happy home but what I really wanted was the memory of a happy home. I was caught in a no-man’s land, paralyzed in a place that lay somewhere in between my past and my future, unable to move or dream or call out for help, or even die.

I wanted more than anything for my children to be happy and well cared for, and at the same time their happiness seemed to cut me like a knife. I was envious of my own children’s good fortune, of their easy laughter and long, lazy days of play, and most of all of Elvira’s abundant love for them and her delight in everything they said and did. The more I resented it, the harder I worked to maintain it. I told myself I would work as hard as I could to provide for them a life of freedom, travel, new clothes, culture, university, whatever their hearts desired. I would work for them, and Elvira would be their best friend and confidante. I would make them love me by working hard, by being the best teacher in the world. I should have learned, from my childhood, that hard work guaranteed nothing.

I continued to dream of homelessness two or three times a week, each dream ending in black as though a thick dark dye had been emptied into my brain to blot out everything, every single pinprick of light that may have accidentally filtered into my subconscious, like a small child who wanders into traffic, too young, too beautiful, too precious to be in such a perilous and chaotic place.

W
hen I travelled I was happy. When I’m with strangers I’m calm and garrulous.

The slant of the sun, the smile of a pretty waitress, birds singing, blue skies, I liked. And perhaps that’s why I so rarely allowed myself to leave. I felt that I didn’t deserve to relax. Every time Elvira suggested we go on a holiday I’d dig my heels in and come up with excuses for why it was a bad idea. Or I simply wouldn’t say a word. After a while she stopped asking me if I wanted to go. She’d simply buy the tickets, book the hotels, take the car in for a tune-up, study the road maps, pack the bags, and inform me that we were ready to go!

My girls have grown up, Elvira is gone, and I’m alone in a hospital room, I don’t know whether I’m sad or puzzled
or both, awake or dreaming, dead or alive. I’m not sure what I’m doing here. Elvira is dead and I’ve been in this hospital too long. My girls are working on my case and they will bring me to Elvira. They have told me that everything will be fine again soon. They have told me I will be transferred to the city soon, to where Elvira is, or elsewhere but eventually with Elvira. With home care this time, so she won’t get so tired. I don’t want to be in the city. I don’t want to be in the town. Sometimes I have a great notion to jump in the river and drown. Where I want to be is in my pink house, my dusty rose house at 229 First Street, listening to the sounds of my family in the kitchen, collecting papers for my family file, and that’s where I intend to go.

I remember my dusty rose house and Marjorie playing the piano, Schubert’s “Largo,” the wedding song, and conversation, the phone ringing, Elvira answering Hello! Miriam laughing in a tree outside my bedroom window, jumping onto the roof of the house and scrabbling about like a squirrel, and then … her face, upside down, Hello, she’s nine years old and peering at me from the other side of the screen, it’s summertime, it’s warm and her blond hair flops around her grinning face, she’s upside down on the roof looking into my room and I’m in bed, and I’m worried she’ll fall off the roof, but I don’t tell her that, I grin back at her from my bed. Hello there, how’s my bombshell blond? I say. Just hanging around, she answers.

That horrible year of silence that began with my daughter’s birth and ended twelve months later. Marjorie began to wonder why I never spoke and whether it was because of something she had said or done. Elvira knew that I was in a very rough patch, as they say.

But Marjorie, six years old, remained baffled. I hadn’t abandoned my students but I felt that I had abandoned her. At home I sat so quietly at the kitchen table, occasionally looking over at her in her chair, perhaps forcing a smile, but not saying a word.

Elvira did her best to give Marjorie extra attention, but what with taking care of the baby who cried non-stop, and her near catatonic husband, she had little energy left at the end of the day for a small girl who, it seemed, was weathering the situation admirably anyway.

Some afternoons when Marjorie and I were at school and Miriam was finally asleep in her crib, Elvira would run to Mrs. I.Q. Unger’s house and cry at her kitchen table the way my father had when Mother’s drinking got bad, and the way I had as a boy when I needed to escape Mother’s silent anger and disapproval. This time, however, I was the one being cried over, the one being fled from.

It so happened that Mrs. I.Q. lived just a few doors down from us on First Street, so, in the warm summer months when windows were left open day and night, Elvira was able to sit at Mrs. I.Q.’s kitchen table and still hear the angry wails of Miriam when she woke from her nap. Then it would be time for Elvira to dry her own tears and race to the house to tend to our baby, who, perhaps to balance things out, screamed non-stop throughout my year of silence.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, that horrible year ended. The next spring, when Miriam turned one, I began to speak. And Miriam stopped screaming. Elvira relaxed and made fewer trips to Mrs. I.Q.’s kitchen table, and little Marjorie, in her eighth year, started piano lessons.

I purchased the empty lot behind our backyard and with the stroke of my pen and a few thousand dollars our property doubled in size. The new yard was filled with fruit trees and rose bushes and of course I planted hundreds of red and white petunias as well. I built a sturdy swing for Marjorie and replenished the sandbox for Miriam. I even made a vegetable garden for Elvira, forgetting in the process that she hated rooting in the dirt for food and that she relished her daily trips to Penner Foods where fresh vegetables were cheap and clean and easy to pick at waist level, and where she was bound to meet a friend or two with whom she could enjoy a little
spitziring
and a good laugh. Mel, she said to me one summer evening as we surveyed our beautiful backyard, I hate gardening with all my heart and soul.

I tried to grow the vegetables myself, but I had little heart for it. I couldn’t stop thinking about my flowers, my petunias and tiger lilies and tulips and crocuses and roses and pansies and gardenias and … When I woke up in the morning I would rush to the kitchen window to look at my flowers. Just a glimpse of them gave me a feeling of hope and absolute relief, akin perhaps to the feeling a shipwrecked survivor has when he first spots land in the distance and knows he is saved.

That summer we camped with friends (rather pathetically in the rain in a pup tent that covered almost two-thirds of my six-foot-two frame) and had a wonderful time later as we recounted the typical camping horrors of the trip. Miriam learned how to walk, Marjorie fell in love with the piano and provided a rich and progressively less choppy, more polished soundtrack to our lives of Bach and Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, Schubert and Chopin, and Elvira and I … talked!

Oh, what a feeling that can be. A conversation with a beautiful, spirited woman in a yard filled with hundreds and hundreds of life-affirming flowers and two happy children frolicking about! Call me old-fashioned, but that summer I was in heaven. I was a whole man finally, a normal person. The two warring factions inside my head had reached a tentative agreement, the army generals of Mania and Depression reaching across the great divide of my ravaged mind and shaking hands.

A
nd then occurred yet another windfall in my life. I was asked by the local school board if I would be interested in a principal’s position at Southwood, another elementary school in town. In addition to my duties as principal I would be expected to teach grade six. The school board informed me that I had built, in a very short time, a solid reputation as an innovative and effective teacher, and that in addition to that I had exhibited the leadership and problem-solving skills necessary for the job of principal. The job would provide new challenges, greater room for innovation, more responsibility, and of course a higher salary. Was I interested?