Dropped Threads 3 (12 page)

The Mitchells would effuse, “We love Barbara.” My parents would say, “We like Orm.” The Way lexicon was one of taciturn moderation, the Mitchells’ one of excess. “Love,” “the best,” “wonderful,” “beautiful” were common words in the Mitchell vocabulary. My family kept those words intact—burdened with a virgin purity. I don’t remember saying out loud to my mother or father, “I love you,” though I would sign my letters “with love,” and I did love them. But Merna and W.O. fell instantly “in love” with people. Later I realized that they sometimes expended a lot of “love” on people who turned out to be unworthy of it—a “brilliant” filmmaker who, in six months, plummeted to a “bastard.”
Amazingly, they never felt guilty, or ashamed of having wasted their affections. While I began to understand that the language of love did not need to be bartered out stingily or, worse, avoided, I was bothered by questions of meaningfulness and sincerity.

Soon our families were socializing. A dinner at the Mitchells’ was like watching a tennis match—back and forth between the two players at either end of the table while we, the spectators, were left to ooh and aah. Merna would begin a story—perhaps about the evening that the “goddamn horses” escaped from the pasture two blocks over and came trotting down the street, right by their kitchen window where they were having dinner with Bruce Hutchison. W. O. would interrupt, “For Christ’s sake, Merna, get the story right. Let me tell it.” Merna would give way, interjecting, however, with clarifications. “Shut up, Merna,” W. O. would roar, “don’t interrupt me.” I suspect my parents wondered if this marriage would last.

I was on tenterhooks when my parents were invited to the Mitchells’. My father, who never raised his voice or swore, must have been overwhelmed by the Mitchell bombast. I can visualize him sitting uncomfortably in the living room, waiting for the customary rye and ginger. I nervously wondered how he would fare in the conversation, but there was only one moment of embarrassment that I can recall. One evening he told a joke that so mortified me I blurted out, “That’s not funny; that’s in bad taste.” He said later, at home, having more tact than I, “You are a snob.” I recognize now how much I must have hurt him. The Mitchells, at that time, could do no wrong in my eyes. I had dressed them in godlike apparel.

My mother enjoyed the literary talk, and their swearing did not upset her, as she, too, could swear a blue streak
(though only at home and at inanimate objects). I enjoy thinking of her cursing “the Christly store” that made my father late for dinners or tossing the unripe tomatoes, just sent up from Way’s Grocery, on the counter, saying, “God’s teeth! Why can’t they send me edible tomatoes?” This, and her other favourite, “Hell’s bloody bells,” were so antiquated they seemed Shakespearean. In spite of these at-home outbursts, my mother kept her emotions in check. She had a privateness, a closeness, that mystified me. Her age, finances and health, in that order, were taboo subjects. I see now that it must have been uneasy for her at the Mitchells’, as she and W. O. had attended the same university. But she had let me believe that she was younger than he, though, in fact, she was eight years older and fourteen years older than Merna.

My mother was slightly disapproving of the Mitchells. When my relationship with Orm became serious, she was unable to prevent herself from trying to protect me, subtly warning me that Merna and W. O. were unrealistically optimistic and self-centred. But her cold truth and their affection for me clashed. Though still hesitant and suspicious, I tried to learn their language of affection. My parents must have felt displaced. Having now experienced this mixing of families as a mother and mother-in-law, I am conscious of the territorial issues involved. But then I was innocently drawn to the Mitchell realm, to the spectacle and drama of their family. My parents could not compete. Who could?

I did not know that my parents and I would have so few years for connecting and for sharing family stories. I moved away to university and, soon after, my mother became ill. I was just twenty, my sister sixteen, when I was called home and told that mother had six months to live. Before university that fall I married Orm, my mother standing pale and thin beside me. I went off to university while she fought with
doctors, insisting on radiation and chemotherapy. She won that fight—and a four-years’ grace from death. When I became pregnant with my first child, she said to me how strange it was that she, too, looked pregnant. I knew she meant that mine was life; hers was death.

Four years later I was called home again, this time from England, with two small children. She was in the hospital, sometimes coherent, other times in a morphine-induced schoolroom reverie, murmuring a lesson from the past, inscribing the air with imaginary chalk. In my youth and sadness I asked many useless questions: “What would you like me to bring you?” “Nothing.” At least nothing material. I did take her hand, tracing the prominent purple-blue veins, tributaries of the heart. She spoke briefly, pragmatically, of her funeral, “No eulogy,” and of her gravestone, “No birth date.” We did not say, “I love you.” I did not speak of her life, of her mothering. Once she said, “I had a good life. The last five years were important.” I hung on to those words, and for many years I thought she simply meant she had had the chance to travel. But now I see that she was giving me a kind of blessing—that she was happy to have seen me married and to have held two grandchildren.

I am haunted by her last night, her black hair on the white pillows. I sat as usual by her side, but there were no words spoken. Finally I took her hand, “I’ll be back in the morning.” At the door, I turned. I can feel the pull back into the room as strongly now as I did then. I hear her say, “Goodbye”—like the thunk of a stone tossed so high it falls in a single deep-throated sound into dark lake water. There I stand, uncertain and frightened. Then I opened that door and walked down the long hospital corridor.

It is not that I lost my mother traumatically early (I was twenty-four), but I lost the map to my past, to her past.
“What was she like?” I now ask my aunts. I need those emotional co-ordinates. I was startled to discover that she was sixty-two—ten years older than I thought. Before I arrived in her world, she had experienced thirty-eight years of exciting—or boring or difficult or sad—life. She had told me only a few stories from her young adulthood. The one that gives her a glamorous past in my eyes was of a visit in 1939 to “beautiful, beautiful Savory Island.” I imagined her steam-boating up the coast from Vancouver, landing at the Royal Savory Hotel, settling in the wicker lounges on the veranda overlooking the most golden sand this side of the Pacific. But who were her companions? Were there dances and late-night swims in the sea, sparkling with plankton like underwater fireflies? (I can imagine that scene because my sister and I followed her trail up there nine years after her death.) I want to know some of the passion that must have been in her life—what she laughed about, cried about, loved and hated.

My father died from a massive stroke just five years after my mother’s death, although I think he died of loneliness. In the hospital I remember the brief moment of recognition, the flicker of eye contact that, without words, spoke of love. I was able to stay to the end for him. Then I was set adrift from my own past.

I spent almost twice as long with the Mitchells as I did with my own parents. They showed me the joys of expressing emotions, of telling stories, of saying it all out loud. Living in that family was transformative. W. O., very near the end of his days, brought things full circle for me when he spontaneously declared, “I loved your mother and your father, you know.” I always did love my parents, but that ease of expression that he possessed never came as naturally to me and my family.

But there was always a gap with the Mitchells—on both sides. From the beginning I could not call them Mum and Dad. Preserving that place for my own parents was an important symbolic gesture. As time went on, the Mitchell standard tarnished somewhat and my parents gained value. I recognized how extraordinarily difficult it was to sustain my own identity in such a powerful family without the balancing factor of my own parents and history. I was always a degree of hyphenation away from the Mitchells—a daughter-in-law. Their own children, quite naturally, but also anyone new and dramatic, registered first on their radar screen. Although W. O.’s exaggerated assertions were sometimes embarrassing to his own children, they conveyed a love and pride that I missed out on. He would say, “I’d like you to meet my son, Orm, the famous Blake scholar, who is writing my biography.” When he neglected to mention that I, too, was writing the biography, I felt as if I were being vanished.

I am still finding my way, not to diminish, but to counterbalance the Mitchell luminescence. After twenty years buried in the Mitchell biography that Orm and I have been writing, I have fallen into the role of unofficial memoirist for my own family. My aunts and uncles, now in their eighties and nineties, are, more than they know, bridges to my parents. My father’s family has passed on, reminding me more urgently to grab hold of the flesh and blood memories on my mother’s side. It’s not the statistics I want to gather; it’s the physical resemblances, the temperaments, the language, the stories, the intimate memories, the secrets. Now I see that long line stretching back, and I feel the strength and power of belonging. I feel attached; I feel significant, laden with the substance of my family.

Surprisingly, we have discovered a past not known by my mother, not talked about by my grandmother. I find I am
descended from Hudson Bay men and their country wives, from Scots (Orkney), from English and Aboriginal ancestry. Now I know the names: Turnor, Harper, Loutit, and the places: Rupert’s Land, Moose Factory, Albany Factory, Stromness. My ancestor, Philip Turnor, mapped these places. He taught David Thompson how to survey; he told Alexander MacKenzie, who believed he had discovered the Hyperborean Sea, that he did not know “where he had been.”

With such map-making genes surely I, too, will find my way.

I was generally
well behaved when I was a little girl. The limit of my rebellion then was giggling fits, usually with one or both of my brothers. It drove my father mad. The angrier he got the worse the giggling became. I think it was then that I realized you could push things further than it might appear.

It wasn’t until my late teens that my full-fledged rebellion took wing. Whatever I was told I couldn’t do was what I wanted to do. “Girls don’t go into science,” they said. In those days, “they” was the word used whenever anyone in authority was summing up conventional wisdom to limit the desires of a child, most often a girl child. I went into science at McGill University even though my great passion was writing and reading. I would have done much better taking English or general arts, but that was what was expected of me, and I was rebelling against those expectations. I wanted to be a doctor because once again I was told, “Girls can’t be doctors.”

My rebellion led me into an almost dead end in university. As soon as I understood university science, I realized I had made a mistake. I’m a big-picture kind of gal and the detail of science just didn’t suit me. Never one to give up, I looked elsewhere for my passion and found it in the
McGill Daily
. It turned out that the
Daily
was a hotbed of
radicalism in those very radical times, and I found other people who didn’t like the restrictions that society had placed on us.

I had spent most of my teenage years in pitched battle against my domineering father. My strongest memory from those years is of running up the stairs and slamming my bedroom door. I stayed away from home more and more until finally, in my last year at McGill, I left for good. Even after I was on my own, I made choices to go against what my father expected or tried to insist I do. When that rebellious streak affected my decisions on relationships with men, it was in some ways to my detriment.

In October of that final year at McGill, I met an older man at a party. He came on very strong and ended up coming home with me to my newly occupied first apartment. Those were the days of free love, but the reality of an overweight, insecure middle-class Jewish girl was far from the bohemian appearance that I affected. I had had a few lovers before him, but this man understood female sexuality and provided me with my first experience of an orgasm with a man. He wanted to move in and I agreed, thinking that having an orgasm with him must mean I was in love with him. I was really that naive.

I was twenty-one, Roger was thirty-four—and insistent—and I just let his life wash over me. Montreal in those days was teeming with alternative cultures. Through Roger, I became part of the bohemian scene there, which at the time was probably the most exciting and creative in North America. This was the time of Leonard Cohen, the grand poet, and Roger knew him. All of Roger’s friends were fascinating people, like none I had ever known. They were wild sexually and into experimentation with a wide range of drugs, from marijuana to opium to LSD. Roger himself was
a kind of dysfunctional Renaissance man. He read and retained a book a day. He was ahead of his time in some ways and very much of his times in others—he was for women’s rights at the same time as being an incredible womanizer; he could go months without drinking very much and then descend into frightening binges. Our life was unpredictable and intense.