The Staircase Letters (3 page)
Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
To all of this Carol responded:
Dear Elma and A.,
I agree with you about reading—it is a great comfort, but often hard work. Being with friends or family is more and more what satisfies. Novels do get me out of my own consciousness, a good thing, and the best thing about novels is knowing how other people think—this means that only certain novels work.
You asked about my treatment. I am officially in palliative care, though I’m having a small dinner party tonight—hard to imagine. Among our guests is Marsha Hanen, who used to be president of the University of Winnipeg: you may know her. She suffered from lymphoma four years ago which was treated by stem cell implants, and has done well. Her friendship has been a gift. She is a thoroughly good woman. So I’m off to put the chicken in the oven, my daughter Anne’s recipe. Marsha is bringing dessert. A retired engineering prof (a neighbour) from
Waterloo is coming with his “girl” friend. This is called LIFE GOING ON.
What do you do in the middle of the night? Is there anything to watch on TV? I don’t find TV much use at any time, though I love CBC radio. Dear Elma—I’m thinking of you every day. carol
(In e-mails Carol never signed her own name with a capital
c.)
I noticed it was All Saints Day when Elma and Carol wrote these letters, and I remembered that my mother had been buried on All Saints Day, some ten years earlier and just four years short of her one-hundredth birthday. “Why did Daddy have to die so young?” was her question after my father’s death. “Well, Mother,” I replied, “you must remember he was ninety-two.”
I am left to wonder if life is always too long or never long enough.
Would we view life and death differently if we believed that all we simply are is music, a collection
of vibrating strings? The friend and former student, Stephen Haff, who had reminded me about Jane Austen told me of another belief, founded on quantum physics and known as string theory, which is that everything in the universe is music. “Take one of these little strings,” he told me, “flatten it with a rolling pin, keep on flattening it until you get a vast and very thin membrane. That membrane is the surface on which our universe sits, like tomato sauce on a great lasagna noodle. So the tiniest particle, the angel’s hair noodle, when severely attenuated, is also the thing that contains everything.”
What Elma and Carol were to write to each other and to me in the months that lay ahead would be, according to my friend, like a vast sheet of lasagna, embodying a dazzling cosmic truth. They would have appreciated such a homely analogy.
“Patterns within patterns, and designs within designs, I see and delight in—from the inconceivably cosmic to the tiniest grain,” Elma had written, perceiving one of the fundamentals in creation. It’s an insight ignored by right-wing religious fundamentalists and any limited scientists who aim to reduce all to a flat oneness and sameness. Famed though it is, Cleopatra’s
“infinite variety,” as Shakespeare described the range of that Egyptian queen’s seductive powers, can be thought limited only when measured against that found in plants and insects and animals and creatures that fly. Consider the complex patterns in the wings of hummingbirds, the colours in a peacock, the precise and detailed petals of any flower seen under a microscope, nothing ever exactly duplicated throughout creation. In a world of such staggering variety and abundance, Elma had also made it clear to me, in a letter written years earlier, that sexual diversity was part of the design. To her it was an obvious and accepted truth, and her earlier remark (never elaborated on) that “nature” probably “intended” her to be bisexual is best understood in such a context. God’s capacity is greater than man’s understanding.
And there is Carol herself, in her reply to Elma, saying almost casually that “the best thing about novels is knowing how other people think.” Yes, of course, though it took her to put it that way. Plot, dialogue, arresting language, characters beyond those we might meet in everyday life, these are elements in a novel, but the key ingredient is thought. What did Daisy Goodwill think in
The Stone Diaries?
And Reta
Winters in
Unless
, what did she think? Carol has told us. And if she had ever put Elma in a novel, we would know, in this instance, what Elma thought about patterns within patterns and designs within designs.
Dear Carol,
I have been mentally composing long letters to you—sorry ESP doesn’t work better. Usually I can write, but not always—I’ve had a lot of sleep deprivation recently. Flushing out the kidneys when on chemo is necessary, I guess, but a damn nuisance!
I had my rad. marks put on yesterday, and my first session today. (Took ten minutes—no immediate side effects, except some fatigue for the rest of the day.) Last week, I had chemo Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to around 3 p.m. And I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON!
My bladder has never been that big! I don’t have incontinence, but having kids has its effects, as you well know, and I’ve actually
had four of them. One was stillborn—rubella, they said, though from what I know now I could have killed it
—him
, “Joseph Paul”—myself with a few drinks too many, though I was able to control my alcoholism during pregnancy. It’s about time I started grieving for him, instead of denying his existence.
Wording her sentence precisely, in this letter to Carol she named the fetus, almost accusing herself of murder, a further torment. Shades of Hopkins again:
With this tormented mind tormenting ye
I cast for comfort I can no more ge
By groping round my comfortless, than blin
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet
.
It was only much later and after Elma’s own death that Martin told me the doctor had been “absolutely furious” when she had refused an abortion in the second month of her pregnancy, when she knew she had rubella (German measles). Despite learning that the baby, if ever born, would be almost certainly deaf
or blind or have serious heart damage, she insisted that life was important and she would try to carry the fetus to term. It was in the sixth month that the baby was stillborn, and the doctors thought seriously brain damaged. Although rubella was really the cause, Elma blamed herself. She had cut down on her drinking during pregnancy, but she now returned to alcohol in a yet more serious way and went spinning out of control. It was, however—so Martin told me later—because she recognized her own desperate situation that she started going to AA, and that led to her subsequent recovery. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” True enough, even when Milton gave the words to Satan. It’s the transforming mind that counts, and Elma’s mind was still capable of working, still transforming.
So sleep really has been my major concern. But perhaps I should be less interested in being unconscious! I am now beginning to realize that, in my case, that “miraculous 1%” (inexplicable cure) translates into a very slim chance of living more than about six months. And with no way of knowing at all when
which or all of my mental faculties will go during that time frame, I must try to develop at least one new thing a day, rather than being concerned about sleep.
I am a very happy woman, Carol, and bless you and all my incredibly supportive friends.
Talking is usually much easier for me, but I don’t want to interrupt your work.
Read about
Unless
. Great title. That story was the first I read in
Dressing Up for the Carnival
, and remains one of my favourites. I’m delighted you’re picking up that one— hope to get to read the book. All love,
Elma
P.S. I meant
this
week I had chemo Monday, etc., so I’ve had five straight days of chemo and then rad. stuff. See what I mean about sleep?
The next day I responded to Elma’s letter to Carol.
Dear E.,
Last night I got what you had addressed to Carol and perfectly well understood. How
sensible you are becoming! Save your energies! Write only what you want and when you want to write it.
Who was it who said—Arthur Koestler got it from someone else, I think—something about the best inspirations coming from the bus, the bath, and the bed? I hope that’s true, because in my morning bath a few minutes ago, I thought I should try, after all, to turn my Salvation Army novel into a play, which is what you suggested, and I even thought of an opening scene. The challenge would be to find a different way of telling the same story and not be reluctant to let go great chunks of the novel that won’t fit a format for the stage. If I ever do that, I’ll dedicate it to you—“For Elma, the brightest and best.”
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
A few days later, I wrote again to Elma, knowing that she had been suffering regularly from insomnia
and had asked Carol what her remedy was for getting to sleep at night. Carol’s answer was unfortunately lost in a later computer glitch, but it was so vivid and imaginative that I recall it clearly.
Carol wrote that she would imagine herself standing at the top of a staircase, with as many stairs on it as there were years in her life. Sometimes it was a grand staircase, made of Italian marble, with banisters stylishly shaped and decorated with pieces of glass from Murano; sometimes it was humbler and made of wood or polished ebony; sometimes it was built of concrete, hard, durable. And, lying in bed with her eyes closed, she would start on the top step, a beginning that was also an ending.
She would descend that staircase very slowly, each step a review of her life, stopping to feel each stair with her foot, appreciating its smoothness, its colour, and looking to see if it reflected light or not, if it had been created by an obviously loving craftsman. Down, down, down, always slowly down. Sometimes she would pretend that the steps she walked on were encrusted with jewels and highly polished. Sometimes they would be of silver or gold. And as she stepped down, one by one, she would marvel at the work, its
design, its symmetry, its sheer beauty, its honesty of purpose. She would continue down the staircase of her years, the journey of her life, until she found herself regressing into young adulthood by stair thirty-one, then childhood by stair twelve, but losing track of whatever number it was in infancy, where sleep never failed to arrive.
Dear E. and C.,
I have just returned from a concert in Antigonish—that name, by the way, according to guide books, is a Mi’kmaq word meaning “The place where bears gather in the winter and eat beech nuts,” demonstrating an economy of language unrivalled by anything in English.
Thank you for all you have both sent. My heart is in the right place, I hope, but what the two of you are experiencing leaves me feeling helpless on the outside, even when I’m not.
I like the idea of feeling one’s way down a flight of stairs in order to find sleep, and must try it sometime without falling. Do you remember, Elma, your own fall down the stairs
in my Lennoxville house long years ago? You had brought Martin, your new husband, whom I had not met, to stay with my wife and me in our rented campus house, only to have me take you to the hospital later that evening, when you tried to stumble up the stairs to bed but fell so badly to the bottom. More and more, however, I feel like a doctor out of Chekhov, amazed at all he once knew and no longer remembers in detail. Lucky for you, maybe!
I was sorting through some of my old poems the other day, prior to reading a few at a gathering here in Sackville, and thought you both might like the one I will now copy out for you, especially since it is short. (It would be even shorter, of course, if I had a complete vocabulary of Mi’kmaq words.) You might have to read between the lines a bit to see that the Old and the New Testaments are there, as well as all those of us who search for love, everything from one bite of apple! It was published once in a small literary journal out of Halifax, called
The Pottersfield Portfolio
. Its title is “Eden”:
