They Left Us Everything (27 page)

I stay up late every night, painting. I feel as if I have my own private observatory. The unobstructed view of the sky over the lake is pulsating with twinkling stars. Sometimes the Big Dipper is suspended right outside my bedroom window, and when the moon is full it’s like a huge searchlight, bathing the garden in an unearthly glow. Sometimes I paint all night and in the morning watch the black sky slowly separate from the lake as pale light creeps up over the horizon.

I feel super-charged by the creative energy in this house. The walls literally sing to me. I put Dad’s old Vera Lynn LPs on the record player in the living room and move my easel into the centre of the downstairs hall, surrounded by space and memories.

From time to time I email the buyer photos of his portrait as it moves through various stages so that he can see how it’s progressing, but he seems strangely aloof. When Victor gets home from his honeymoon he sees it on my easel and jumps.

“Yikes!” he exclaims. “For a minute, I thought he was in the room!”

I feel jumpy, too. Now there’s a stray black cat on the verandah every morning. “Shoo! Scat!” But he remains poised on the top step, switching his tail, his eerie yellow eyes staring up at me. He claws at the screen door and scratches at the wicker chairs. Sometimes he slides in unnoticed and I’m startled by a streak of black in the upstairs hall.

Mum and Dad hated cats because they stalked the birds, but this one seems to know something … I wonder what.

The buyer keeps postponing the closing date and Victor’s gut is telling him this deal is evaporating, too. He thinks we should start interviewing real estate agents to get the show on the road. We take all the disguised sympathy notes out of Mum’s gold wire slinky and reread them.

We pick the top agents and invite them to come and give us their dog-and-pony show. They all come with slick, overblown proposals and inflated ideas of what the house is worth. One has even gone to the trouble of printing up a mock brochure with our house on the cover. Another brings his laptop to give us a PowerPoint presentation, but his battery’s dead and when he wants to plug it in he can’t believe we have only one threepronged outlet in the house. Victor tells him to be grateful we have electricity. If Dad had his druthers, we’d still be operating by candlelight.

I go back to Mum’s slinky letter holder and pull out a handwritten note. It’s the only one from an agent that’s not disguised with sympathy; it’s refreshingly direct. It just says that when we’re ready, please call her.

The agent arrives with no presentation except her own voice, and I feel immediately drawn to her. Alex is nurturing
and sisterly with an enthusiastic, down-to-earth nature, a wide smile, and a ready laugh. At a subliminal level, it doesn’t hurt that she has the same name as Dad. We give her the inspection report, the appraiser’s assessment, and our new survey.

The only thing Victor wants excluded from the sale is the
SLAVE DRIVER
sign on the outside of the house. Although most people these days read it and laugh, there’s more awareness that Oakville was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, and I’ve seen some young African Canadians stop to take photos. I worry they’re researching a university paper and mistaking our sign for the real thing. I think it’s time to take it down, and I’m glad Victor wants it.

“Wait a minute!” I say to Victor. “Let’s exclude the garden gate, too.”

“What do you want that old thing for?”

“I’m going to hang it on my bedroom wall!”

“The whole rotten gate?”

“Sure—the fox latch has meaning for me.”

“You can’t take the whole garden gate—that’s ridiculous!”

“You know who you sound like?”

Victor grins. “Okay, okay.” Then he turns to Alex. “Exclude the garden gate.”

Alex quickly arranges an agents’ open house and puts ads in magazines, and over the following weeks there are numerous showings. This means disassembling my painting studio, carrying my easel back to the playroom, cleaning my palette, storing the wet canvas, and removing the floor cloth. I have to shut down my computer and hide all my papers. It also means vacuuming all the rooms and mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors—no small feat in a house this size. It takes me
a good six hours. But the repetitive quality of mopping gives way to meditation, the way school classes did in childhood when I had to listen to lessons in Latin.

After each showing, Alex debriefs me. She says, “Everyone loves it—they call it their lottery house!”

Me too, even though I’ve been buying tickets all year and haven’t won a thing.

Throughout October no bids come in. It seems the market is in the doldrums. Either that or buyers know this is an estate sale and think the price will come down if they wait. Some feel it’s overpriced; some wish they could tear it down; some say the property would be worth more if the house weren’t here. I am appalled when I hear what some clients plan to do with the house.

“I wouldn’t keep anything on the inside,” says one.

Why would she buy it then?

Another considers building a double garage down by the pool that would block the lake view of our neighbour to the north. This is unthinkable to us. Why shouldn’t they have a view of the lake, too?

We confer many times with Alex about the house. We’re not going to lower the price and I’m happy to continue living here, even if it’s for another two years. Especially if it’s another two years. I am acutely aware that I’m living in paradise. I can’t save it. I’m living here on borrowed time. Everybody else is moving on: Victor and Peni are moving east; Robin and Kitty will no longer drive up from Virginia for family holidays; Chris has been offered a new job as director of an Anglican retreat and conference centre in western Canada and so he and his wife, Anne, have decided to relocate to British Columbia. Even
Pelmo and Tashi have moved out for good. They’ve taken a job down the street: it seems their kind services will always be in demand.

A huge white moving truck arrives to pick up the items Chris bid on during the family dispersal. I can hear its air brakes wheezing and hissing as it pulls up to the front door. It takes up the whole block and looks like a black-headed dragon. Four burly men in black T-shirts and jeans hop down from the cab, carrying protective canvas, padded blankets, and tools. They stop at the door and pull white paper slippers over their boots. When they walk in, they survey the space and whistle. “You call this a cottage?” says one.

Chris has left me a list of his items, and I direct the men to various upstairs bedrooms where they lift out a dresser, some small side tables, mirrors, and two beds. Ironically, the brand-new mattress I had insisted on buying, so that guests wouldn’t have to spend the summer at the chiropractor, is now heading out the door. Why did I ever put it on the dispersal list? The men are taking all the furniture apart. Drawers are removed, legs are unscrewed, and knobs are taken off—each piece to be separately wrapped and labelled.

“Careful! Careful,” I say, “that hasn’t been taken apart in over one hundred years!” But they just ignore me.

There’s a wrapping station in the living room where a man wearing wide bracelets of masking tape on each wrist spreads brown padded blankets on the floor. He lays each item on the diagonal and then deftly wraps the corners up and over as if
he’s diapering a baby’s bottom. Then he encircles the whole thing with a tight cinch of tape.

I’ve spent the morning saying goodbye to the mammoth dining-room table. It’s been in the house since 1917. I’ve run my hand over the grain and taken photos of it from every angle. When it goes, this house will feel a whole lot emptier. The men remove the leaves and then heave the table over onto its back. It looks like a dead dinosaur with its feet sticking straight up in the air, exposing its ribs. They have to eviscerate it section by section and amputate its legs bolt by bolt. It takes them a long time. Bits of breadcrumbs flake to the floor. I wonder how old they are—from which last supper?

The following week, Chris calls from B.C. to tell me the table has safely arrived and now has a brand-new life in his kitchen. He’s left out the extra leaves, so it’s now square—a shape it’s never inhabited before in its lifetime.

It’s November 5th, and we’ve turned the clocks back. The light has changed. By early afternoon, long fingers of blue shadows are slanting across the lawn as the sun descends behind the house. Most of the tree leaves have fallen, pale gold, dry, and crunchy. At the far end of the verandah the leggy vines of the Dutchman’s pipe stand out in their nakedness, a few straggly leaves, shaped like huge brown lily pads, dangling from the vertical wires Dad strung from railing to roof. Walnuts fall from the three ancient black trees at the bottom of the garden. I hear them land with a sudden thud, unsure whether they’ve fallen of their own accord or been thrown by a squirrel. The pile of
dried leaves blown along the base of the fence is so deep that when the squirrels land it sounds like an army of men booting through; I look up to see who’s there. Then I watch them jump from a branch onto the eves and duck inside our house.

There was a time in the 1950s when Mum and Dad hired a man to sit in the garden with a shotgun to shoot the squirrels, but the older Mum got, the more she believed in sharing this house with wildlife. She wouldn’t have evicted the squirrels any more than she would have evicted that bird outside her bedroom or the spiders that laid claim to the high-ceilinged corners of the verandah. The birds are still singing this late in the season, but their melody has changed to a cacophony of urgent chirping, and smart flocks of geese are flapping their wings and heading south.

As I walk from the hall to the living room, I catch a glimpse of something out the playroom window: is someone riding a bicycle through the heaps of leaves? I run to the verandah to look out, but it’s only a golden retriever running with his owner. I realize how much this house aided and abetted Mum’s insatiable curiosity. Now I have it, too.

I’ve finished my five abstract Shakespeare prints and Robin suggests a title for them: “Shakespeare Unlettered.”

Jessica says, “You need to send them to a gallery in Stratford!”

“Uh-huh. For a
Shakesperience
?”

We both laugh.

Then I wonder, Is that what this is all about? Have I been obsessively counting letters all year just to please Mum?
I remember grade six, when she insisted I could imitate Shakespeare just because I had the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet that he did. Have I finally completed the task she asked me to do when I was ten?

I tell Jessica there’s no point in contacting a gallery—I have no reputation as a printmaker.

“That’s ridiculous … it’s as good as anything they have at the Tate! You’re an artist,” she says.

“I’d probably have more confidence if I’d gone to art school.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Mum wanted me to have a proper profession … just in case.”

Mum lumped “having a profession” into the same category as “knowing how to drive a car with a stick shift”—you never knew when you might need it in an emergency—but in her mind, motherhood was still the most important job. Dad sat me down at the kitchen table after I’d graduated from high school. He had such a low opinion of art as a subject worth studying that when I won the art prize that year I’d been too embarrassed to tell him. He thought theatre and art were nothing but frivolous hobbies, so he gave me two choices: I could be a nurse or a teacher. After considering my fear of needles, he crossed out “nurse.”