Swing Low (20 page)

That year, too, Miriam began kindergarten at Elmdale and not surprisingly caused some trouble in the classroom by refusing to nap at naptime and by hurling crayons around the room rather than holding them to her paper. She hated cutting, gluing, colouring, napping, and sitting still. Often she was forced by her teacher to stand between the sinks as punishment. Sometimes, if I happened to be at that
end of the school, I would peek through the window of her classroom door and watch her. Almost always she would be talking out of turn, whispering, giggling, inciting her friend Debbie into various acts of five-year-old hooliganism. I would see her at assembly occasionally and she would remind me of Elvira in that old kindergarten photo I was telling you about, elbowing her way to the front row, determined to see and be seen.

My daughter has just informed me that it would be good for me to sit outside by the fountain, and that she will sit with me. (It is a dangerous fountain, I presume, one not to be faced alone.) But still, I like the idea. We’re off!

We sat in the sun and talked about the kids for a while. We talked about the town. There’s no place I can go here, I said, without people seeing me, and talking … Until I realized that I wasn’t really going anywhere anyway. I tried not to talk about Elvira, knowing how tiresome it was for my daughters to continuously reassure me that she was alive and in the city. But I couldn’t help myself. You’ll see her soon, she says. She desperately needed a break, she says. We’re taking care of her in the city and you here, and it doesn’t make sense. But she’s getting stronger. She wants to see you. We’re making progress. Progress? I ask. Yes, she says, we’ve got an appointment for you in the city to see a geriatric psychiatrist. (Horrifying words those: they mean I am old
and
crazy.) Then, daughter goes on to say, the ball will be rolling and we can get you homecare with Mom in
the city and access to better care, but you have to be in the city to qualify for … I drifted away. I had a frightening feeling that my daughters were only somewhat less confused about the situation than I was.

We sat outside for about an hour. I was beginning to get a nice suntan, and my daughter recommended a certain type of sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. I’ll be fine, I told her, not to worry. The sun likes me. A former student and his wife walked past us and we chatted for a minute or two. He introduced me to his wife, and I introduced him to my daughter. When they leaned over to shake hands, the fountain suddenly erupted and they both got a little wet. Did my former student wonder what I was doing sitting by the hospital fountain? Or did he already know?

When we came back inside my daughter kissed me good-bye, and I noted that warm, earthy summer smell on her skin, which reminded me of the lake, of our cottage, of her as a little girl, and of myself as something other than old and crazy.

It’s time to rest, the nurse says. Does she think sitting by a fountain is hard work?

Overheard nurse at desk telling other daughter on the phone: I wouldn’t get any nursing done if I was forever looking for your dad. My lunch has been forgotten. The places that I go: bed, washroom, hallway, now the fountain. Where has she been looking?

T
hree good years went by. I worked, the children went to school happily and spent time with their friends, and Elvira kept house. Mother had begun to shoplift her bottles of vanilla now, lining her large purse with tea towels so the bottles wouldn’t clink. This was also the time I began to take very long walks. Soon I was wearing out a pair of shoes per month, and Elvira insisted I buy better-quality walking shoes.

In the summer I gardened and researched the lives of remarkable men and women while Elvira feverishly planned road trips, sitting up in bed with maps and travel brochures, a bowl of popcorn, and the ball game blaring on the television that we had recently purchased. Elvira’s passion was baseball. Most of our trips included visits to cities that had Major League teams, Elvira having bought tickets in advance over the phone, and not for one game but for three
or four, including afternoon games. She’d insist on arriving an hour or two early for the experience of watching the players warm up and of collecting their autographs. In the last few years, as her baseball passion soared to a near hysteria, Elvira built herself a wall map of North America and marked, with a coloured thumbtack, every city in which she had seen a game. In fact, she developed a three-colour system: red for the cities she has visited with the girls and me, yellow for the cities she has visited with her baseball-loving friend Miss Martha Hill (the one I lost my temper with) and my grandson, and blue for the cities she has visited alone.

When Elvira wasn’t watching — or reacting to, I should say — the baseball game, or taking in an episode of
M.A.S.H.
or
The Waltons
or
McMillan and Wife
, I would watch
Hymn Sing
, my favourite show, although I was almost equally as fond of
Front Page Challenge
, with its inimitable panel of regular guests, Pierre Berton, Gordon Sinclair, and Betty Kennedy, and affable moderator, Fred Davis.
Hymn Sing
aired at 5:30 on Sunday evenings and preceded
The Wonderful World of Disney
, Miriam’s favourite show after
Don’t Eat the Daisies
and
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Hymn Sing
consisted of a formally dressed Winnipeg choral ensemble standing rather stiffly on strategically placed risers and singing hymns. The lyrics of the hymns, for those who weren’t familiar with them and wanted to sing along, rolled along the bottom of the screen.

It was becoming clear that Elvira was longing for something else. Not something instead of what she had but something in addition to it, something that I was oblivious to. So when it happened I was floored.

No, she didn’t have an affair or leave town one day to become a hippie in Kathmandu or some such place. Elvira cashed in her life insurance policy, purchased by her father when she was an infant, bought herself a flute, and joined the local orchestra, under the tutelage of the talented Bill Derksen.

In those days Mennonite women did not perform in public. They weren’t even allowed to get up and speak to the congregation, although fifteen-year-old boys were. The role they were expected to play was strictly behind the scenes, at home, in church, and in the community. So when Elvira took up the flute and joined the band I saw it as an act of rebellion, of defiance, not only of the Mennonite way but of me, or of the man I felt I was supposed to be, although my bewilderment left me, naturally, speechless. Never would it have occurred to me to ask her to stop or even to ask her why she felt she needed to join an orchestra. Every Tuesday evening, Elvira would leave the house at seven, her narrow black case tucked protectively under her arm, for two hours of orchestra practice with the illustrious maestro. She loved to say the words “orchestra practice.”

It wasn’t long before Marjorie, naturally gifted when it came to music, had bought her own flute (that life insurance policy was coming in handy) and joined her mother in the band. Elvira had sewn each of them a long black dress for performances, and the two of them spent hours sashaying around the house in their regulation show gear, spontaneously performing mini-concerts on the flute for Miriam and me, after which we dutifully applauded and asked for more. And then, as if our family wasn’t making enough of a
joyful noise unto the Lord, Elvira roped Miriam into learning the violin (purchased of course with the life insurance money) and joining the junior orchestra. In no time Elvira and the girls were banging out the classics on piano, flute, and violin every Sunday after roast beef, while I, now an audience of one, sat in my La-Z-Boy straining to recognize the melody beneath all the clatter. More often than not a squeak or a toot not written into the music would reduce Elvira and the girls to tears of laughter and at that point I would smile, stand up, and announce my necessary departure, either to my bedroom or to my flowers in the backyard.

I did, as the girls improved, come to relish these Sunday afternoons. Often, I would ask them to play and sing, and they would happily indulge me. Marjorie, by now a virtuoso on the piano, could play just about anything, but Miriam preferred to sing the sad French songs of Jacques Brel. Wearing her Pioneer Girls tam as a beret and holding a chopstick for a cigarette, she would beg her sister to play them over and over and over again to the point where I began to worry about her frame of mind. Another of her favourites, oddly, was the “Notre Dame Victory March,” written by the Reverend Michael J. Shea, which she would belt out with such earnest heartfelt gusto that both Marjorie and I had to hide our laughter.

Something about the flute incident tweaked my brain and made me realize that I too could take up a hobby, that my life of work and sleep was too narrow, that I was missing out
on things, and that it was okay to have a little fun from time to time. And so I approached the possibility rather tentatively and with not a small amount of fear.

In previous years we had enjoyed summer vacations in a town called Falcon Lake, eighty miles from town near the Manitoba-Ontario border, usually renting a cottage from a lakeside resort by the name of Big Buffalo Cabins. One summer Elvira idly mentioned that the prices of cottages in the area were down and that really if we were going to be renting a cabin at Big Buffalo every summer, it made as much sense to simply buy our own and come and go as we pleased. That very afternoon the girls and Elvira and I packed up the Ford Custom 500 (all of our married life I stubbornly insisted on driving Fords, to the chagrin of Elvira, who prefers Oldsmobiles and Lamborghinis) and headed for the South Shore to have a peek at the cottages up for sale.

I’ll never forget that gorgeous June afternoon as we slowly wound our way along the gravel roads of cottage country, pointing out the cottages we liked (lots of windows!) and the ones we didn’t (haunted!) while the girls chattered excitedly about the things they’d do at the lake, the friends they’d have sleep over, with Elvira bemused in the front seat next to me, smiling, touching my arm, reminding me that life could be grand. This makes you happy, doesn’t it? she’d ask, her feet up on the dash, hand tapping the roof of the car.

And it did. Oh boy, did it ever! Eventually we settled on a small, modest pink affair (always pink) on the top of a hill with a woodburning stove, an outhouse in the back, a large
front yard for badminton and barbecuing, and three bedrooms, one of which had a built-in double bunk bed that could sleep six little girls at a time. It was not a lakefront property but we had our own dock in the bay just on the other side of the road and down a narrow path, a minute’s walk away. The year was 1971 and the cottage cost us $7,000. That summer I bought a red fibreglass canoe for Elvira for her birthday, and the two of us, and sometimes the four of us, would paddle around our bay after supper, listening to the loons and the motorboats and the distant voices of other cottagers and wondering, at least I was, what I had done to deserve such happiness. We still went on road (baseball) trips in the summer (stopping at every single historical marker along the way so that I could jump out of the car and copy its message word for word into my notebook, much to my daughters’ exasperation). But now, instead of simply going home afterwards, we could go to the lake. It remains one of the few places in this world, if not the only place, where I was able, truly, to relax. When you’re a schoolteacher, and especially when you’re a teacher in a small town, you are on stage nearly all the time. It is inevitable that you will, on a daily basis, run into students, former students, and parents of students, and you are expected to be a constantly cheerful, supportive, reliable pal to all of them, forever. Not that I resented having to be such a person — that was exactly the sort of man I wanted to be, the type of level-headed, upbeat individual I most respected and admired. But oh, the fatigue of it.

I
have made another mistake. I have mixed up words, again. Am beginning to panic, as though I’m running out of oxygen. What have I left? Not what have I left, but what do I have left? is what I’m trying to say. Mistake re the word “confusion”: nurse enters room, checks my feet, mentions something about contusion on foot, to which I respond, Yes, it seems I can’t make head nor tails of things. I actually wonder what my foot has to do with my confusion and say so. Really, I say politely, it has to do with my head. Nurse responds: Your feet? I answer: My head. Nurse says: Mel, we are talking about your feet right now, okay? Inane conversation, non-conversation. Yes, let’s talk about my feet, why not? The nurse eventually left, and my daughter entered, with more paper, fancier than legal, but why? I know why. It is because she feels it is all I have, paper, and so she’s … Before we could greet each other conventionally,
I said, in a loud, panicky voice, Good. You’re here. Now, help me with a few things. Let’s get a few things straight. Sit down. Here’s a pen. Now write it down, please. Write this down: I will be well again. I will see Elvira again. I am not ill.