They Left Us Everything (13 page)

I hesitate before I break the ancient seal. Then I’m intoxicated by the rich, vibrant scent of gardenia, lilac, and leather, transporting me back to a New Year’s Eve party when, as a ten-year-old, I was allowed to watch in my nightgown from the second-floor landing above. I’ve dressed Robin as Old Father Time and Victor as Baby New Year; he sits beside me in a diaper and crown waiting to be carried down at the stroke of midnight. The rugs have been rolled up and Guy Lombardo’s orchestra is playing “I Love Paris” on the gramophone. I can see Dad in his tuxedo dancing in the living room with our
neighbour Vera Fenn in her red dress. Somewhere out of sight, Mum is dancing with Vera’s husband, Colin. Someone is calling for more dance wax. An unknown hand shakes a canister of powdered wax onto the hardwood floor to make it more slippery, the little yellow beads skittering across the bottom step. There is talking and laughter and the tinkling of ice cubes in glasses. Mum’s perfume drifts up through the stair railing.

I show Lesley Dad’s closet. He never bought anything new unless the old one had worn out, so he never accumulated clothes—his closet is sparse; there is the clang of empty hangers. His tuxedo is there, plus two suits, four white shirts, and three pairs of trousers. I save his navy wool blazer with its crest from Tonbridge School—the boarding school in England that was his home for most of his youth—but everything else gets tossed.

His dresser is neat as a pin, just the way he left it three years ago.

In Dad’s top drawer there’s a collection of items he obviously treasured. In a small cardboard box is a lock of Sandy’s blond baby hair along with his hospital baby bracelet. The tiny blue and white beads spell his name. There’s an envelope of foreign coins, a booklet of swim tickets for the public pool, and a tiny red pair of Victor’s baby mittens with appliquéd monkeys. Dad must have known these would be the last pair of baby mittens he was ever going to see, so he treated them with a special reverence. He treated Victor the same way—or at least that’s how the rest of us felt. We had to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to Dad, but when Victor came along he got away with “Okay”—a slang word Dad wouldn’t normally let us use. If Victor sometimes said cheekily, “So,
how’re ya doin’, old man?” Dad would just chuckle and shake his head.

In Dad’s bottom drawer I find a newspaper. At first I think he’s used it as a drawer liner so I’m about to toss it out, but it’s so carefully folded that I take a closer look. It’s the
Hong Kong Sunday Herald,
from Sunday, September 9, 1945. Why did he save this? The editorial tells me: this is the first edition after the surrender of the Japanese in Singapore—when Dad was there. The publisher apologizes for crooked lines and bits of missing typeface—they’ve hastily produced this edition with scrounged supplies. The articles are full of instructions about how to contact loved ones and where to get free cables to wire overseas. There are photos accompanying harrowing firstperson accounts from the women and children who survived the Japanese POW camps.

The lead article announces the Stanley Evacuation and shows a photo of the ship
Empress of Australia
on which 550 women and children internees will be repatriated to their homelands. All 550 un-alphabetized names—starting with
Mrs. D. Weir and baby
—begin on page one and continue, column after column, to the end of the paper on page six. Parentheses after their names give their nationality: Norwegian, Dutch, American, Polish, and British. The very starkness of the list bears witness to the horrors they must have endured. On page six—in tiny, faded script—I notice that Dad has underlined the name
Mrs. M. I. Crabbe
in red pencil and in the margin he’s written
Aunt Poppy.

What must I do with this artifact that Dad had so carefully made room for in his wartime luggage, carried from country to country, and saved all these years in his dresser drawer? On the internet, the only reference I can find to the
Hong Kong Herald
is in the national library of Australia. I email and ask if they’d like it. Their offhand response is that they’ll take it only if it’s in pristine condition with no rips or tears. I am insulted. What do they expect of a flimsy newspaper that’s been through the war?

The next day, I find Dad’s old naval uniform and heavy wool greatcoat from the war. We have photos of Dad in this uniform, seated at a table at The Stork Club in New York City, when he reunited with Mum after the war ended. He was always thin, but by the time he’d made his epic escape from the Japanese he must have been gaunt. This uniform was tailor-made and it’s small enough to fit me. During the war, an officer’s buttons often held secret compartments: you could unscrew the top and unfurl a silk escape map. Dad was with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret British organization that conducted espionage, so he might very well have been issued something like this, but I check the brass buttons and they are … well, just buttons. If only the greatcoat could talk. Dad would have worn it in the depths of an English winter, going to visit Mum at her American Air Force base.

I pick the best, most expensive dry cleaner in town and drop them both off. When I pick them up three days later, they’re twist-tied together in a clear plastic bag, on extra-thick padded hangers, their sleeves stuffed with tissue paper, looking like a body bag. It weighs about the same as Dad did when he died. I pay the seventy-five-dollar bill almost gratefully and lay the bag gently in the back seat of my car.

By Lesley’s last day, we’re simply heaving filled garbage bags over the banister and hearing them land with a thud inside the front door. The pile looks like a massive landfill and we’re exhausted. But just when I think we’re finished, I open
the door to the double closet in the guest bedroom and gasp at what greets me. A mountain of white plastic grocery bags are jumbled on top of one another, spilling their guts of wooden salad bowls, pink plastic clotheslines, naked Barbie dolls, and out-of-date atlases. I’d forgotten about this—Mum really did leave us Christmas presents for the next one hundred years. I can’t even bear to examine them. I can hear Mum’s voice: “What? You’re throwing away all this perfectly good stuff? What you children need is a good Depression!” But Lesley and I just scoop everything up, wrestle it into three giant garbage bags, and send them off the banister, too.

I wander the house by myself, absorbing the energy from the walls. With Mum and Dad’s forceful presence gone, the house seems to spring loose, lean back, and open up for me. Despite all the rules that Dad had imposed on us, this house and its natural surroundings had always soared with possibilities. Now I feel weirdly free—at liberty to inhabit this space the way I’d once longed for all those years ago. I feel the same creative surge I always used to feel as a child here, but now nothing is blocking my way. In the evening I turn to my computer and begin my art project.

I’ve always wanted to know how many letters Shakespeare used to write his plays, and now I can use the computer to easily find the answer. It feels as though I’m extracting DNA from his work, using synthetic biology to create a new life form: Shakespeare-at-a-glance; Shakespeare as abstract art.

I start with the tragic love story. I assign a colour to each letter of the alphabet and throw all the letters from
Romeo and Juliet,
one at a time, onto a digital canvas to see what happens. It is absorbing, solitary work, and the evening passes quickly. I feel the house embracing me.

The next morning, the sky is still grey, though brightening almost imperceptibly. The birds are silent—the ones who haven’t flown south. Looking out across the ice-covered pool to the west, the tall, bare walnut trees are silhouetted black against the sky. I can see the blinking red light of the lighthouse at the end of the pier. I go into the living room, open the heavy glass door to the verandah, push open the screen, and pad out in my slipper socks. I wait until the glow of sunrise begins to melt the horizon, blending and fading with a watery brush the nightlights in the distance. On the frozen grass, small grey lake stones lie nestled in a circle like forgotten eggs in an Easter hunt, the remnants of the labyrinth that one of the grandchildren laid out on the lawn after Mum’s funeral. Dad’s new metal wheelbarrow is dumped over on its side by the bottom of the hill.

This small hill is where we first learned to toboggan. When Dad wasn’t looking, we’d start on the verandah and then race down its nine wide steps, execute a sharp right-hand turn, and zoom down to the fence.

Robin and I are having many long-distance telephone conversations. I tell him I found our wooden toboggans yesterday when I pulled into the garage; they’re slung up in the rafters. His old Happi-Time sled is hanging from a nail on the wall, but he says he doesn’t want it. He’s preoccupied with Mum and Dad’s library.

He’s been documenting all the books in the house and doesn’t want me to dispose of any before he visits again. Some books are old treasures dating back to the early 1800s, leather-bound with gilt edges, inscribed to and from generations of
ancestors with quaint messages in ancient, feathery script. But most are contemporary: history, politics, and biography. There are an ungodly number of religious texts, including more than forty-eight Bibles.

As a self-confessed bibliophile, Robin has a pen-shaped mouse called a “cat” that scans the barcode of a book, automatically entering the title, author, publisher, and date into a database on his computer. With more than two thousand books in the house, the scanner is a godsend for books published after 1980. Unfortunately, most of the books predate the era of barcodes, so Robin has to enter them manually. He started this cataloguing project a year ago, before Mum died, but still has a long way to go. He thinks his catalogued list will have more value than the books themselves. He believes future generations will be interested to see what a typical family of the twentieth century had on their bookshelves. I remind Robin of all the books in the kitchen, but it seems he hadn’t considered including cookbooks. It’s as though he deems them a lesser species. He sounds confused when I ask him. He says, “But I haven’t included that … that … um … what is it—a genre?”

He’s not sure what to do with the books in the downstairs hall, either. This is where Mum kept material written by or about family members. Stuffed between books are magazine articles and newspaper clippings and binders on family history. There are several books Robin wrote, including a paperback of
Pedaling Northwards
, his travel memoir of bicycling twelve hundred kilometres from Virginia to Canada with his son, Frankie, in 1992. Our whole family had gathered with banners on the outskirts of town to welcome them, watching them pedal their last few kilometres.

There are the Kate Spade etiquette books illustrated by my daughter Virginia, dog-eared copies of my old
Kids Toronto
directories, and a book by Chris,
Something’s Wrong Somewhere,
about the moral economy of the farm crisis. Victor is the only one who hasn’t written a book.

Last Christmas, when a new book by Chris was coming out, Victor rolled his eyes. “I hope you’re not planning to give
me
a copy … I’ve got enough of your doorstops already!”

When I show Victor a new manuscript of mine, he weighs it in his hand and says, “I just want to know what its
R
-value is … how much heat can I get out of it? How fast will it burn?”

I know he doesn’t mean it—he’s full of support for our projects—but he’s beginning to remind me of Mum. Mum always gave us mixed messages. First, she’d say, “Don’t get too big for your britches!” Then in the next contradictory breath, she’d say, “Never hide your light under a bushel!” But whatever we did, she was always saying, “Why don’t you write a book about it?” When I look at this bookshelf now, I realize we were all trying to please her. She was the gifted writer, but there’s not a single book written by her.

On the top shelf, there are nine identical copies of
The Negotiator
—Frederick Forsyth’s fictionalized account of Sandy’s whistle-blowing experience when he uncovered a fraud at his bank in Saudi Arabia. It turned out to be bigger than he thought—an element of the Iran-Contra scandal. Forsyth gave Sandy the fictitious name of Andy Laing. Whenever Mum saw a copy she couldn’t resist buying it. Sandy has annotated one of the copies. Under a snapshot of himself standing next to the author in rural Virginia, he writes, “Frederick Forsyth likes to weave true stories into his novels. Here, the story is mine. The place, Saudi Arabia, the local bank name, and several of
the characters are historical, as are the details of my escape from Saudi and the fact of the suppression of my statement to the Chase Manhattan auditors. I have asked, too, ‘Is there more in here that’s true than even I’m aware?’ Perhaps …”