They Left Us Everything (9 page)

At the end of the day we lowered the sails and all their tiny clips had to be slipped from the mast again. This was my job and I hated it.

One day, as I sat shivering on the dock, my cold hands wrestling with the wet sails and icy clips, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. “Dad?” I said. “Why can’t the sails roll up and down into the boom
automatically,
like our movie screen does?” I’d often watched Dad pull up the screen when he set up the projector in the playroom. It was spring-loaded and would effortlessly wind out of its tube, and when he’d let go, it would roll quickly back in with a satisfying
thu-thu-thunk.

He swiped at me as if I were a gnat. “Because life isn’t meant to be
easy
.”

“Easy” wasn’t in Dad’s vocabulary. He liked a challenge. Perhaps this is why Mum and Dad were able to keep their marriage vows, against all odds, until death. Dad once told me that divorce didn’t solve anything because you were just trading one set of problems for another. You had to look beyond them, he said.

When my own children were young and I was thinking of divorcing, Dad took me for a walk. He told me the story of when, as a child, he’d gone into the woods and torn down his brothers’ tree house in revenge because they wouldn’t let him play there.

“I always regretted it,” he told me, “because I tore down the one thing I loved.”

He left it up to me to decipher this parable, but when I decided to separate anyway, he came into the city to help
me move out. I thought he disapproved, but in the kitchen, lifting boxes, I heard him mutter under his breath, “I wish I had your guts.”

Mum and Dad’s tumultuous battles reached one crescendo after another until eventually they simmered down. When they entered old age, their prolonged truce seemed to resemble companionship. When Dad got Alzheimer’s, it even resembled love. He began to pay compliments to Mum that she’d waited sixty years to hear—but we knew by then that he’d lost his mind.

By then, Oakville had matured into a sprawling, sophisticated commuter town with a population of over two hundred thousand people—one of the wealthiest in Canada.

Mum hated this change.

“People have more money than sense!” she’d say. “They tear down all these beautiful old houses, build monstrosities with five bathrooms, and then hightail it to Florida for the winter! Who wants to clean
five bathrooms
?”

Mainly she complained that, in the old part of town, all the children were gone. “It’s like a ghost town! Instead of sagebrush blowing down the streets,
newspapers
are all over the lawns—but nobody’s home. All the doors are locked. You walk down the street and you don’t see
a single soul
!” Young families, she pointed out, could no longer afford to live here; instead, they came as tourists.

On hot summer weekends, families who live in cookiecutter housing that was once farmland north of the highway drive down to the lakefront to picnic in front of our house. They peer wistfully over our hedge at a bygone era—at a house that looks frozen in time, the last unrenovated holdout. The verandah, wicker chairs, driftwood doorstops, white
porcelain doorknobs, screen doors with hook-and-eye latches, and tall blown-glass windows have all remained much as they were when the house was built in 1902. You can find faux replicas at expensive home decor shops uptown, where everything new has been purposely distressed, but here at home every scratch has a bona fide provenance. When Dad finally kicked his dilapidated wooden wheelbarrow to the curb one garbage day, it appeared two weeks later at an antique shop on the main street with a $200 price tag strung on a pink satin ribbon dangling from its rusted iron wheel.

Tourists now refer to our house as the “Old Slave Driver’s House” because of what they think is a historic plaque outside the front door … but it’s a fake, hung there fifty years ago when we were teenagers determined to spite Dad. Our neighbours have a real one—
WILLIAM BOND, MARINER
,
CIRCA
1874— but ours alleges that the owner was a
SLAVE DRIVER
,
CIRCA
1953. It’s signed by
THE OAKVILLE
HYSTERICAL
SOCIETY
. In our minds, it was a cheeky chance to get back at Dad for perceived injustices—and to let the world know what we thought of his motto: “Spare the rod and you spoil the child.” When Dad went away on a business trip we bolted the sign to the outside of the house and giggled behind a tree at our gall.

When he saw it three weeks later, Dad was furious. He unpacked like a madman, ready to come hunting for us. He’d caned us many times for lesser offences. But before he could do so, Mum handed him his mail. Tearing apart the envelopes, he opened an official-looking letter written on Oakville Historical Society letterhead. It was from the chairman. They had held a meeting. Our sign, they said, made a mockery of their organization and they demanded Dad remove it—immediately!

This intensified Dad’s rage but redirected his anger. He
stomped through the house shouting, “Who are they to tell me what to do? They have no authority—history be damned!” To our amazement, Dad refused to take the sign down. Not long afterwards, a letter to the editor of the local paper cemented Dad’s resolve. It said something like:

Dear Sirs, My wife and I recently visited your charming town and one of the highlights of our trip was coming across a sign on a house by the lake signed in fine print by the Oakville Hysterical Society. It gave us such a chuckle. Any town that has a sense of humour like this is one we plan to visit often.

The Oakville Beaver
had put a black border around it and centred it on their op-ed page. Dad was so delighted he cut it out and framed it. Mum photocopied it and sent it to all her relatives in Virginia. Not every tourist, however, noticed the fine print. Mum and Dad never locked their doors, and one day Dad found a thank-you note propped up on the kitchen table:
To whom it might concern, Thank you so much for letting us tour your lovely museum! We had no idea it was here.

Another time Mum answered the back doorbell to find an excited middle-aged professor from South Carolina standing there. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help reading your sign out front … I had no idea Canada still had slaves in 1953! Could you tell me a little more about it?”

“You’ll have to ask the slaves …” Mum told him with a straight face, “and I’m sorry, but they’re out sailing.”

Dancing Till the End

I was with Mum on her last day in January, but I’d left in the evening before she went to bed. I retrace the minutes of that day in my mind, looking for clues I might have missed, but there were none. Well—maybe there was one: it was one of the few days she hadn’t asked to go to Sears. She hadn’t even dressed. She’d spent all that Sunday in her dressing gown, sitting in her bedroom, laughing and making phone calls.

The last call she placed was long distance—to Bodrhyddan Hall in Wales—to one of her oldest friends, the 9th Baron, Lord Langford. Geoffrey was born in 1912, four years before Mum, and was the last surviving member of the escape in the
Sederhana Djohanis
—the small boat in which my father and fifteen other British officers eluded the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942.

Mum had been begging me for weeks to call Geoffrey for her, but I kept refusing. It felt like Mum was always either trying to direct my life or getting me to live hers, and I was desperate to draw the line. It was our perpetual dance.

“Please call Geoffrey for me,” she begged.

“You call Geoffrey.”

“I don’t have the energy!”

“Then wait till you do—he’s your friend, not mine!”

“I just want to know how he is,” she said quietly.

This time there was something about her tone—a sad vulnerability—that made me suddenly understand her differently. She didn’t lack the energy to pick up the phone—she had no problem calling me all the time—instead it sounded like she was feeling insecure, afraid she could no longer muster up her Life of the Party image and project it long distance, afraid she might disappoint Geoffrey. She wasn’t asking me to live her life; she was asking me to cover for her. I felt a surge of compassion and admiration: her spirit was indomitable.

“Okay.”

“You will?” Mum looked so surprised. I dialed his number easily, and when Geoffrey answered, Mum didn’t want to come to the phone. I acted as a long-distance operator, relaying their messages back and forth to each other.

“Geoffrey? Mum wants to know how you are …”

I put my hand over the receiver. “Mum, he says he’s turning one hundred next week. He wants to know how Alex is.”

“Oh, God,” said Mum. “He must know that. Remind him that he’s dead.”

“Geoffrey?” I said into the phone. “Mum says congratulations!”

Eventually I got the hang of it, digesting huge chunks of information and passing them along in edited bites.

Mum laughed with Geoffrey—
“Geoffrey? Mum loved that! She’s laughing really hard!”
—and shared war stories. She reminisced about her days in the American Red Cross, stationed in
England at the fighter base at Debden, and later at Eynsham Hall and Knightshayes Court. She described the day a pilot had buzzed the base to say goodbye, but he flew too low, clipped the trees, and crashed on the other side. Then she recounted what it was like when she was twenty-one and took her first trip abroad in 1937, aboard the
Queen Mary
.

“Tell him it was so exciting!” she said, “because the Spanish Civil War was in full swing and we heard Germany might attack France—so, naturally, I headed straight for Paris! At the World’s Fair, you could pay to jump off a replica of the Eiffel Tower,” she continued, waving her arms in the air, “… and I just couldn’t resist! We took an open elevator up to the top where a man strapped me into a parachute and told me to walk off this wooden plank … but I just couldn’t take my eyes off all those beautiful lights in the distance … so he gave me a shove and off I flew! I was wearing a yellow dress with a big, full skirt … and it went way up over my head. When I landed on my back in the sandpit, here were all these Spanish soldiers standing around, clapping … Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?”

To Geoffrey I said, “Mum remembers jumping off the Eiffel Tower during the Spanish Civil War!”

Mum just cracked up, laughing so hard that she started to cough and had to grab for the Kleenex box. Her phlegm was mottled with blood.

Alarmed, I covered the phone with my hand. “Are you okay?”

Mum shrugged it off. “It’s nothing—just something that’s bound to happen at my age,” she said.

Geoffrey’s voice crackled in my ear. “Tell your mother I turn one hundred soon!” he shouted for the third time.

Mum seemed flushed with happiness after that phone call with Geoffrey. There was no doubt she was still the life of the party. When I left her she was dressed in her pink flowered dressing gown, sitting in the blue velvet armchair, opposite her four-poster bed. The TV tray beside her was piled with books. Her dog-eared, black leather Bible lay on top, wedged with paper bookmarks. Her Christian faith had always been unwavering. Dad’s, too: it was one of the major things they shared together.

“You need to believe in something,” Mum said. “Something greater than yourself. It helps to hand your problems over.”

At the end of the afternoon, Pelmo’s young niece, Wosel, came into the room to give Mum her pills. Pelmo was about to come back on duty, to prepare a chicken dinner. I blew Mum a kiss from the doorway.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mum!”

I expected her to say, “So soon? Why do you have to go?” But she said nothing. She seemed disoriented, with a faraway look in her eyes—a look I hadn’t seen before.

I should have paid more attention, because I hadn’t been home more than an hour when Pelmo called.

“Your Mum … she is dying, I think.”

How was this possible?

I thought back to Mum’s face in her bedroom, when she seemed to focus on a distant point so far into the future that she was no longer here, with us. It wasn’t the normal look of someone in reverie. Had she been concentrating on a journey … letting go … stepping into infinity?