Turn Us Again (35 page)

He did it at the club, peeking over Baker's shoulder in the middle of an academic conversation and mouthing the words. A smile slanted across her lips before she could prevent it, and he crowed in delight like a three-year old.

Madelyn knew their behaviour in these situations was the root of the problems in their relationship. Silence, followed by tiny steps of rapprochement based on ‘let's-not-talk-about-it-but-have-you-forgiven-me-yet.' The passage of time, the tiny steps which weren't rejected outright. In the end forgiveness was assumed. Assumptions happened when words weren't forthcoming. The passage of time, until the forgiveness, which had been assumed in the first place, was no longer appreciated. Until forgiveness was forgotten. And the crime was forgotten even before the forgiveness was forgotten. Acclimatization and forgetting.

Then, ever so slowly, the gradual onset of inevitable bad moods. Resisted at first, because of the remnant of memory of crimes and forgiveness. But again the relentless passage of time, and allowing oneself to indulge in the bad moods. Finally, repetition.

How to break out of this pattern?

By Sam's third year in the English department, it was apparent that they wanted to get rid of him. Steve Baker made his life as miserable as he could, doing spiteful things like cutting a class on foreign books in translation that Sam had proposed, felt excited about and worked on. Sam settled back into the habit of his depression and stopped talking for weeks at a time.

Madelyn tried to be loving without censure. She made nice meals and demonstrated respect for his need for quiet by shushing Gabriel when he made too much noise during the evenings.

Gabriel became aware of a distinct difference in his levels of freedom before and after Daddy's entrance and resented it.

Then the mood changed.

“I applied for a teaching position at a university on the East Coast. They've accepted me!”

“That's wonderful! I didn't even know you were looking!”

“The other side of this immense country. Do you know it takes almost as long to fly from Vancouver to Nova Scotia as it does to fly from Montreal to England?”

“I don't want to go,” Gabriel interjected.

“It'll be nice when you get there. A new beginning,” Sam said.

“And you'll do it differently, won't you Sam? Keep a low profile?”

Sam sat down and furrowed his brow, as he did when he was thinking. “I have to think about what I am striving towards. Clearly, centredness in self, which I have lost recently. My reactions to various people in the department have been regressive, veering from hysterical excitability to despondency. Isn't there hope that I will reach a higher level of justice in this new place, through my experience of suffering?”

“I'm not quite sure what that means. Will you try not to alienate people?

“My centered-in-selfness may have degenerated into ‘I am solitary and withdrawn because I am superior-ness.' Perhaps the truth is that I do over-rate solitude and equate it with superiority to others, hence I alienate them. My proper role is to be sociable and to teach with joy. But the whole English tradition of aloofness and hiding behind the newspaper, in addition to my fear and resentment of those who cause me fear, make me escape into a solitude that in reality I hate.”

“Quite,” said Madelyn, who did not care how much he rabbited on so long as the correct conclusion was reached. “So since you hate solitude, then you will do your best to be sociable and a good teacher? And in order to be a success in both those things, you must conform to the way things work at this new university. If they are bad, maybe you can change them, but it must be done with tact.”

“This has nothing to do with our age-old battle about conformism. I will continue to uphold my principles as I have always done. I just explained to you that I want to think about what I am striving towards.”

“We are striving towards happiness. Here, it has been destroyed by your rudeness.”

“Are you a blithering simpleton,” Sam shouted, “reducing everything to black and white simplicity? According to you, the answer to all our problems lies in my realizing that everything is my fault. You think I am arrogant, and you despise me.”

Gabriel approached Madelyn as his father's voice spiraled towards the ceiling. He put his hand on her arm. “I don't know why you married Daddy,” he said.

Sam walked out of the house.

Later, when he fell heavily onto the bed beside her, Madelyn felt inebriated from the fumes of his breath. His great bulk tossed and turned on the bed, while she bounced with his movement like a feather on a hat. Suddenly he leapt to his feet. Madelyn didn't move until she heard him slam open Gabriel's door. Fear propelled her into her son's room, in time to see Sam's heavy hand crash down on the sleeping form. Gabriel shot upright, his eyes wide open and fastened on his father, his breaths coming in panicked gasps.

“Don't you
ever
speak to me like that again!” Sam screamed in his face. He shoved past Madelyn as she lunged towards the bed, gathering the frozen slab of shock into her arms.

“It's all right, it's all right.” She patted his back, cuddling and rocking. Gabriel didn't move at all for an eternity. Then his shoulders began to shake.

“Why? Why?” he wept.

“No reason. Daddy broods on things for a long time and then reacts at stupid times.”

“What was he brooding about?”

“Probably about your saying you didn't know why I married him. He wants love, and he felt that you didn't love him. His mind is panicky and full of paranoia. He doesn't understand you are a child, and children just say things.”

“I don't love him. I hate him!”

“Don't think about it, my dear child. Your father's insecurity has nothing to do with you.”

Madelyn held Gabriel for a long time. The tension slowly bled from his small body, and his sobs turned to hiccups, then to silence. She laid him down on the bed, rubbing his fragile back until he slept.

She did not want to lie beside Sam. Her whole body shuddered with rage.

‘I must leave him,' she thought. ‘I have to disappear with my son.'

TWENTY-NINE

I
flip the page, disbelieving its lightness, and am confronted with my corduroy knee. I turn the manuscript over and examine the other side of the page. It cannot end like this. I stare fixedly down at the manuscript, opening my eyes as wide as I can so the ridiculous salt water will have room to swim around without spilling its secret. I feel sick with devastation. I can't even think, I am so consumed with anger and disgust.

My father collects our glasses and moves silently towards the kitchen, dropping his handkerchief by my feet. In relief, I close my aching eyes and stem the downpour. Now he is gone I have the self control to push the ache to one side of my brain. Memories pulsate against my skull. I remember, now. More hits. Mum. And me. She never did leave him, though in my memory she fought back. I remember him smacking her face during an argument, and then sitting down by the fire with his head in his hands. She ran up behind him and broke a bottle over his head.

Another time I remember her with a knife, pointing it straight at him. “If you touch me I'll kill you.”

“Don't be melodramatic, woman. I wasn't going to touch you.”

Then at Grandma Golden's, on one of our visits to England when I was about ten years old. Those visits were always stressful. I associated the stress with my father, because such feelings were always his fault. But Grandma Golden managed to make everyone who entered her home feel rigid with fear. Grandma Golden was in the kitchen, and Mum went over and put her arms around her husband. He pushed her away and she stumbled. She started screaming, “I'm going to smack your face!” Grandma Golden just stood in the doorway, watching them for a few minutes. Then she looked at her son.

“You hit your wife,” she said.

I think she was nicer to Mum after that. I hope so.

I can't remember any other times with my mother. Perhaps that was it. Five or six times.

She fought back.

My father returns, bearing two glasses filled with scotch. I have never acquired a taste for scotch, and it burns me going down. Burns and fortifies. My anger constricts my breathing. I feel like there is a lump of cement sitting on my chest. My father waits, and I sneer at him.

“You say nothing, because there is nothing to say. Your behaviour was disgusting. Your violence terrified your family and robbed them of spontaneity. You ruined our lives.”

“If you're going to spout blind, emotional rubbish all evening, perhaps we'd better discuss this tomorrow, when you've calmed down.”

“I'm not going to calm down, father. This manuscript has dredged up memories that will choke me till the day I die.” I leap to my feet and start pacing around the room, talking as if I am alone. “I can't believe that I repressed all these memories, stuffed them
down like a fucking Jack-in-a-box. But now the crank's been turned, hasn't it…”

My father emits a contemptuous sound. An explosive in my brain detonates. I forget that he is sick, that I should curb my revulsion and shock. My mouth opens and venom gushes out.

“To think I felt guilty when I arrived because I hadn't seen you for so long! The reason I hadn't seen you was because you beat me and my mother, and I hate your fucking guts. You're a fucking wife-beater!”

“Your language is so immature that it fails to offend, if that is your intention.”

“I don't have a fucking intention, you stupid shit.” I don't care whether my words are childish or not. I just want to strike and hurt. I want to puke invectives, in lieu of punching his face.

“You will not talk to me like that in my house!” my father shouts.

Childish, ineffective curses beat against my lips in a frenzy to get out. With a supreme effort, I quell them. He brought me here and gave me the manuscript so I wouldn't find it after he died. So these feelings would not become his everlasting epitaph. I sit down opposite him, clutching my drink. “Do you have anything to say?”

My father takes several deep breaths. Maybe he had been on the verge of losing it as well. I would like to see him try to hit me now.

“I don't know if there's any point talking to you in your present mood. But perhaps it is natural, especially if this information comes as a shock. I was not aware that you had forgotten everything. How strange. In any case, I do not wish to justify my violence. I regret every incident. But you have to understand two things: there were very few incidents — maybe five or six in thirty years of marriage. The fact that you didn't even remember them proves how rare such outbreaks were.”

I interrupt him. “It proves how profoundly I was affected by your violence! My childish mind couldn't face such horror, so it repressed the memory.”

“Do you want to try and understand, or do you want to wrap yourself in a cloak of martyred victimization? Apart from those terrible, drunken lapses, the fault behind our marital problems was mutual.”

“We didn't know when the next time was going to happen, so we trembled every time you frowned. Between those five or six times, if it was so few, we lived in a realm of fear.”

My father lifts a weary hand to his temple. “I disagree. There were lots of good times, which this manuscript fails to describe.”

“Yeah, sure. When you weren't working. Remove the stress from any wife-beater's life and the number of black eyes would decrease.”

A mottled red stains my father's cheeks. Still he strives to keep his voice calm. “It was not all the time when I was working. I had the same low period each year, for a month in the spring. All I needed in order to get through these stressful marking times was a wife who refrained from criticism and negativity.”

“Her remarks were intended to help you! They were reasonable!”

“If you're going to take everything in the manuscript as the truth, then there is no point to this conversation. You did not live in a realm of fear. The manuscript suggests that, but it is not true. And your mother's interference was not reasonable, misunderstood by me through my insecure paranoia. She was often stupid, unfeeling and unjust, and she never understood how to handle me, despite our years together.”

“Why should she spend her life catering to your utter selfishness?” I bawl in his face, perhaps to prevent a more humiliating type of bawling. “When did you ever consider her feelings and needs? Why is it all about your feelings and your needs, and if she doesn't accommodate them, then whack!”

“Because I suffered from wrenching self-doubt. Because I struggled through life while she fluttered. Because I had to work in a miserable environment every day in order to support my family. I'm not talking about ‘catering' — a bare modicum of understanding would have sufficed. If she had felt the smallest sympathy for my sufferings, outbursts of frustrated rage would never have occurred. When I complained of tiredness and nervous exhaustion, she told me I was a hypochondriac. She loaded extra jobs on my back during my busiest times. She chose inopportune times to nag and criticize.”

The last two sentences are emphasized by a jabbing finger within an inch of my nose.

It is maddening aggression. I shove his finger away from my face and leap again to my feet. “You twist everything. Your fucked-up moods weren't her fault.”

He leans forward in his chair and pushes me. It's so sudden I topple backwards into my chair. I am astounded that he has dared to push me. My immediate instinct is to bash out at him blindly, pummel his face until he screams for mercy. But no, I am better than him. When next I speak my voice is dangerously calm. “How dare you lay a finger on me in violence. How dare you.”

My father is slumped in his chair, as though bowed with the shame of his push. “You started it. You initiated the first violent contact.”

Utter fury threatens to envelop me again. “What?”

“You thrust my finger away in an aggressive manner. That was the first violent physical contact. I would never have crossed the physical boundary otherwise.”

The absurd childishness of such an argument, the obscene need to prove himself right. If I am to blame, then he is blameless. If mother was a silly woman, she deserved his thrashing. I despise and hate him.

I get up and move past him, making sure we don't touch.