Dancing Lessons (24 page)

I lay in bed for a long time, not saying or doing anything. They had the doctor in. Their biggest concern, I could tell from the snatches of conversation that broke through my fog, was that I was
going off
. Just like my father.

I don't know how long I stayed like that. Until Aunt Zena got angry enough. One morning she came in, whipped the sheet off me, and hauled me out of bed.

“Get up, get up,” she said. “This has gone onlong enough. School starts next week and you are going to go. So, Missy, you had better get yourself ready.”

She forced me out of my nightgown and into clothes and pushed me out the door. She did it so fast, I had no time to think. From that day, I simply went along with what they said I should do, who I should be. I felt as if my head was stuffed with cotton wool, that cobweb still clung to me. They took care to knock the stuffing out of the rest of me then tie me up tight, after I had been purged with castor oil and bitter-wood drink. By the time I turned into a young lady, as they expressed it, I was bursting out. I was forced into brassieres and corsets and stockings and tight shoes, my hair pulled back so tightly and tied that my forehead hurt. It was as if Aunt Zena and Miss Celia were determined to rein me in, squeeze out vulgarity—madness and sluttishness. Which they did, for my feelings were locked down too. I never thought of my father. Never conjured up my mother. Never felt anything at all until that day Charles Leacroft Samphire came into my life. I certainly threw off the reins then. Or so I thought.

SOME WEEKS LATER, MR BRIDGES
came back to the question of my father. We were sitting on the veranda, he sipping his Scotch and soda and I sitting, doing nothing. Out of the blue he brought up the subject. He's funny like that, he'll let things slide and then he'll reintroduce the topic when you've forgotten, as if he'd been turning the whole thing over in his mind. This time when he mentioned my father I didn't get all choked up as I had before. I had in fact seen my father one more time and my heart was broken all over again. But I was much older then, hugely pregnant with my first child, with Celia.

“It all came and went so quickly that it's almost a dream. His coming back,” I told Mr. Bridges, fishing in my mind for the details of that day. “In all the excitement my waters broke and the baby came so quickly, I didn't have time to think about anything else. It was only afterwards, that I started to worry and wonder …”

“What happened?”

“He just vanished again.”

“Vanished?”

“Yes. Sam was at home that day, as I was due. He had sent to call the midwife. I don't know where he was exactly when my father suddenly appeared, but I remember afterwards hearing their voices out in the yard, Sam and Georgie, a cousin of his who was visiting.”

“Your father just came back? After all those years?”

“Yes. I had no idea where he'd been. I suppose he was in Kingston in Bellevue but I really didn't know. His name was never mentioned by Miss Celia or Aunt Zena, at least not in front of me. To tell you the truth, after he left, I only thought about him occasionally. Those thoughts were so painful I always forced them back down. I didn't want to know.”

“So how did he find you?”

“That's just it, I don't know if he knew that it was me living there or if he was just wandering around and turned into our yard by chance.”

Talking about it now, I could still see the scene so vividly, me standing on our veranda, my hands on my big belly, sort of dreaming about this baby ready to pop out. I was not afraid at all. I probably had a smile on my face, when this apparition, I can only call it that, came through the gate.

“The minute I saw him I knew, I just knew it was my father.” I had to pause to slow myself down, for I was feeling as excited as I did that day. “I wanted to run to him, but of course I couldn't move very fast. When I got up closer I could see it was him in truth. But I was so shocked. He was such an old man, filthy, thin to the point of vanishing, his hair long and uncombed, most of his teeth gone. But I already had my arms open. ‘Papa,' I cried.

“He had this silly grin on his face the whole time, but when he heard me call out he stopped and looked at me. A smile broke on his face. I thought he recognized me. He held out his arms to embrace me, or so I thought, and I moved towards him. I didn't care what state he was in, I was just happy to see him.”

I paused, envisaging the scene again. How my father held out his arms and I thought it was to greet me, but then he clapped his hands together and opened them and looked at his palms and laughed and then he spun around and did the same thing, clapped his hands together before opening them, looking and laughing in glee. As he continued to turn round and round, over and over, reaching up high sometimes, first one side then the other, I realized he hadn't recognized me at all, he was chasing and killing mosquitoes or some other flying insect that only he could see.

I think at some point I must have cried out, for I remember hearing the voices of Sam and Georgie and then Sam holding me and getting me into my room and onto the bed. After that I remember very little except the baby coming in a great rush.

After telling this to Mr. Bridges, I must have sat there with a smile on my face, lost in the miracle of the moment, the birth of my child, for I was startled by his voice asking, “But what happened to him?”

I had to pull myself back to the thread of this other story.

“Well, yes, that's the strangest thing. When I finally asked about him, Sam said that after the midwife came and they knew the baby and I were all right, he and Georgie put him in Georgie's car and took him to the Richards house—Georgie was, like Sam, a relative on that side of the family. The Richardses claimed he never turned up, though Sam swears he opened the gate and they left him inside. Nobody seems to have seen him from that day to this. If Sam had not been there as a witness I would have thought I had dreamt the whole thing.”

“So that was it then? Nobody reported it to the police or anything?”

“I don't know, I guess the Richardses might have done that. By this time everybody in the district knew he'd turned up again because Sam would have talked about it, I'm sure. But people just saw him as a madman anyway, so who would have cared about him?”

I paused then, thinking, and we sat in silence for a while. “It's just that I would give anything to know what happened to him. You know, it's like a hole in my heart. Of course when they found the skeleton, I thought about him all over again.”

I wasn't looking at Mr. Bridges when I said this, I was so focused on the past, but I could sense him turning to stare at me and his voice seemed a bit sharp when he said, “My dear G, this is getting too dramatic. What skeleton?”

“Oh, this was a long time after, Celia was a big girl then, maybe four or five. Anyway, this man—a neighbour of ours—was bringing some new land under cultivation, on a little side track off the main road, nobody ever went down there really. It was all rocky stuff, bush, and he was working down the gully, very steep-sided, clearing it by burning, when he came across this skull. Well! You can imagine the excitement that caused. The police came and dug around and they found bones strewn all over that gully, probably scattered by animals, but when they assembled it, it was all the bones of one person.”

“And you think …?”

“I don't know what to think. But no one else went missing in those parts, as far as I know. Of course it wasn't like now when they have all sorts of fancy ways of making identification.
DNA
and that sort of thing.”

“So did you tell the police about your father?”

“Well, I wanted to, but Sam was dead set against it, I didn't dare. He just kept saying we didn't want to get involved. I guess he was anxious about the baby too. ‘Just imagine what he could have done to you. To the baby,' he kept saying. ‘That madman. You didn't see how he was behaving when you were in labour. Me and Georgie had to tie him up. You were crazy to go out there to him. He could have killed you. He could have knocked you down.' Of course I knew that he wouldn't have. But Sam never listened to me. He was always saying I was lucky the baby didn't come out with a madman's mark.”

That made me smile, for I remember the midwife agreeing with him about that.

“Madman's mark?” Mr. Bridges raised his eyebrows.

“You know how country people are,” I explained. “They think shocks to the system of the pregnant mother will mark the baby in some physical way, though I can't imagine what a madman's mark would look like. Of course it was all nonsense, for the baby was perfect. I don't know if anyone else mentioned my father to the police but it was a nine days' wonder. They carted the bones away and we never heard anything more about it.”

“You don't think .?”

“No, I don't think,” I said firmly. I suddenly felt tired and headachy and I didn't want to pursue the matter any further. Thankfully, the dinner bell saved me.

IT WAS AS IF
everyone from my past vanished the years I was having my children. When Junior was two, Aunt Zena died, much to everyone's surprise, for up to then she had been a hale and hearty woman. She had a massive stroke that took her off quite suddenly. I went to her funeral and stood at the back in both the church and the graveyard, not wanting to disturb any ghosts. She had never reconciled herself to me, though it wasn't for lack of trying on my part. I left without speaking to any of the family. After that, I did summon up my courage and for the first time in eight years walked up the front steps of their house, determined to see Miss Celia as she hadn't been at the funeral. I did see her, but it was as I had heard. She no longer recognized anyone. I still felt it as a blow that she didn't remember me. She otherwise seemed the same, older and more frail. She sat up in bed and chattered away while I was there, giving instructions to her helpers and behaving as if everything was quite normal. I tried to smile. But really, I wanted to weep, for looking on the spotted white skin now fragile as parchment, the straight fleshy nose, the silky white hair, the realization came to me that this woman was really my grandmother. My flesh and blood. For the first time it seemed real. In the years that I lived with them, I had never been encouraged to act as if this was so. No connections were ever made for me. But there she was, my father's mother. When I was leaving, I wanted to throw myself on the bed beside her and take her in my arms, but all I dared to do was bend down and touch my lips to her cheek. Surprisingly, she reached up her frail arms and put them around my neck and hugged me. I'm not sure who she thought I was. The gesture only pained me more, as if it were a mockery.

On leaving the house, I stood on the front steps and looked across at the faraway blue hills as I used to do as a child, believing then that they formed the rim of the world, a world that was nevertheless boundless. My own world had so narrowed, I could no longer fantasize about the pull of adventure out there. It was as if I'd found my place at last. Down to earth. Grounded.

I took a deep breath to steady myself, for I felt a kind of numbness creeping over me. I wasn't grounded at all. I was terrified by the knowledge that there was nothing to hold on to, all that had shored me up had crumbled, for Aunt Zena and Miss Celia were my last links to that past. And though they were the ones who refused to acknowledge my existence after I had run away, I still felt guilt for what I had done, for they had after all taken me in and cared for me in their own way. Whether they liked it or not, I was their child. They were the ones who had made me.

OF ALL THE PEOPLE
at Ellesmere Lodge, Mr. Bridges goes out the most. He has lots of friends and relatives who come and take him out, and, although he says he hates travelling, he goes to Miami from time to time. That is as far as he will go, to stay with a sister. His children must travel from other parts of the States to come and see him. He gets lots of mail too, much of it with U.S. stamps, which is all I ever manage to glimpse. More and more he talks of moving back to his house. This makes sense since he is still quite fit and active, especially compared to most of the people at Ellesmere Lodge. Indeed, for an active person, as I am too, contemplation of the residents collectively is sometimes a depressing prospect, all white hair and glasses and walkers and orthopedic shoes—except for the high-heeled Pancake Sisters, of course—and snoozes and snores mid-morning and afternoon and drooling. There is probably a lot more life here than at similar places; still, the illnesses and operations, the life-sustaining medical interventions, and the endless discussions surrounding them are quite depressing. So are the vanishings, as I think of them—the people who are too ill or frail to stay at Ellesmere Lodge and who disappear, shifted elsewhere to places with hospital beds and bed pans and professional nursing care.

Equally distressing are the deaths, Babe's being the most shocking one. She took ill one day, was taken to the hospital, and was gone within a week. Ruby was to say later Babe had had so many medical interventions she was living on borrowed time. In our dismay at the suddenness of it all, I could see the other two, Ruby and Birdie, eyeing each other in a speculative way, as if to say, who will be next? Babe had a lovely funeral, her three children, grandchildren, and great-grands all came from abroad and saw to that, but apart from them and some of the Ellesmere Lodge residents and staff, the turnout was scanty. Like the rest of us, she had outlasted most of her contemporaries.

Shortly after Babe's death, Mr. Bridges said, out of the blue, “I am thinking of getting married again.”

I looked at him, startled, my heart beating so fast I'm sure he could hear it, though on my face I never showed a thing. Is this a proposal, I thought? Should I say something? What should I do? I looked quizzically at him, hoping my face showed nothing but interest at the news. But he just turned his glass round and round and looked at it and smiled and said, “I really need to get back to my house. I was over there on Sunday and though Gerald does try, things are really in a mess.”