Face
I am convinced that my father looked at me, really
saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there.
In those days, they didn’t let fathers into the
glare of the theatre where babies were born, or into the room where the women
about to give birth were stifling their cries or suffering aloud. Fathers laid
eyes on the mothers only once they were cleaned up and conscious and tucked
under pastel blankets in the ward or in semi-private or private rooms. My
mother had a private room, as became her status in town, and it was just as
well, actually, seeing the way things turned out.
I don’t know whether my father saw my mother before
or after he stood outside the window of the nursery for his first glimpse of
me. I rather think that it was after, and that when she heard his steps outside
her door she felt the anger in them but did not yet know what had caused it.
After all, she had borne him a son, which was, presumably, what all men wanted.
I know what he said. Or what she told me he said.
“What a chunk of chopped liver.”
Then, “You don’t need to think you’re going to
bring that into the house.”
One side of my face was—is—normal. And my entire
body was normal from toes to shoulders. Twenty-one inches was my length, eight
pounds five ounces my weight. A strapping male infant, fair-skinned, though
probably still red from my unremarkable recent journey.
My birthmark not red but purple. Dark in my infancy
and early childhood, fading somewhat as I got older, but never fading to a
state of inconsequence, never ceasing to be the first thing people noticed
about me, head on, never ceasing to shock those who had come at me from the
left side. I look as if someone had dumped grape juice on me, a big, serious
splash that turns into droplets only when it reaches my neck. Though it does
skirt my nose pretty well, after dousing one eyelid.
“It makes the white of that eye look so lovely and
clear” was one of the idiotic but pardonable things my mother would say, in the
hope of helping me to admire myself. And an odd thing happened. Sheltered as I
was, I almost believed her.
Of course, my father could not do anything to
prevent my coming home. And, of course, my presence, my existence, caused a
monstrous rift between my parents. Though it’s hard for me to believe that
there had not always been some kind of rift—some incomprehension, at least, or
chilly disappointment.
My father was the son of an uneducated man who
owned a tannery and then a glove factory. Prosperity was ebbing as the
twentieth century progressed, but the big house that my grandfather had built
was still there, as were the cook and the gardener. My father had gone to
college, joined a fraternity, had what was referred to as a high old time, then
entered the insurance business when the glove factory went under. He was as popular
around our town as he had been at college. A good golfer, an excellent sailor.
(I have not mentioned that we lived on the cliffs above Lake Huron, in a
Victorian house facing the sunset.)
At home, my father’s most vivid quality was a
capacity for hating and despising. Those two verbs often went together. He
hated and despised certain foods, makes of automobiles, music, manners of
speech and modes of dress, radio comedians, and, later on, television
personalities, along with the usual assortment of races and classes it was
customary to hate and despise in his day (though perhaps not as thoroughly as
he did). In fact, most of his opinions would have found little opposition in
our town, among his sailing companions or his old fraternity brothers. It was his
vehemence, I think, that brought out an uneasiness that could also amount to
admiration.
Calls a spade a spade.
That was what was said of him.
Of course, a production like myself was an insult
that he had to face every time he opened his own door. He took breakfast alone
and did not come home for lunch. My mother ate those meals with me and part of
her dinner also, the rest with him. Eventually, I think, there was some sort of
row about this, and then she sat through my meal with me but ate with him.
It is clear that I did not contribute to a
comfortable marriage.
But how had they ever come together? She had not
gone to college; she’d had to borrow money to attend the school where teachers
were trained in her day. She was frightened of sailing, clumsy at golf, and if
she was beautiful, as some people have told me (it is hard to make that
judgment of your own mother), her looks were not really of the kind that my
father admired. He spoke of certain women as “stunners,” or, later in his life,
as “dolls.” My mother did not wear lipstick, her brassieres were unassertive,
her hair was done up in a tight crown of braids that emphasized her wide white
forehead. Her clothes lagged behind the fashion, being somewhat shapeless and
regal; she was the sort of woman you could imagine wearing a rope of fine
pearls, though I don’t think she ever did.
What I seem to be saying, I guess, is that I may
have been a pretext, a blessing even, in that I furnished them with a
ready-made quarrel, an insoluble problem that threw them back into their
natural differences, where they may, in fact, have been more at ease. In all my
years in our town, I encountered no one who was divorced, so it may be taken
for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other
men and women who had accepted the fact that there were words or acts that
could never be forgiven, barriers between them never to be washed away.
It follows, unsurprisingly in such a story, that my
father smoked and drank too much—though most of his friends did, too, whatever
their situations. He had a stroke while still in his fifties, and died after
several months in bed. And it was no surprise, either, that my mother nursed
him through that time, kept him at home, where, instead of becoming tender and
appreciative, he called her foul names, the syllables thickened by his
misfortune but always decipherable to her, and to him, it seemed, quite
gratifying.
At the funeral, a white-haired woman said to me,
“Your mother is a saint.” I disliked her instantly. I was at that time in my
second year of college. I had not joined, or been invited to join, my father’s
fraternity. My friends were planning to be writers and actors, and were at
present wits, dedicated time-wasters, savage social critics, and newborn atheists.
I had no respect for people who behaved like saints. And, to be truthful, that
was not what my mother aimed for, either. She was far enough from pious notions
that she had never asked me, on any of my trips home, to go into my father’s
room and try for a word of reconciliation with him. My mother was no fool.
She had been devoted to me—not a word that either
of us would have used, but I think the right one—till I was nine years old. She
had taught me herself. Then she had sent me away to school. This sounds like a
recipe for disaster. The mother-coddled purple-faced lad, thrown suddenly amid
the taunts, the ruthless assaults, of young savages. But I didn’t have a bad
time, and to this day I’m not sure why. I was tall and strong for my age, and
that may have helped. I think, though, that the atmosphere in our house, that
climate of ill temper and ferocity and disgust coming from my often unseen
father, must have made any other place seem reasonable, almost accepting. It
was not a question of anybody’s making an effort, being nice to me. There was a
name for me—it was Grape-Nuts. But almost everybody had a derogatory nickname;
a boy with particularly smelly feet that did not seem to benefit from daily
showers cheerfully put up with the name Stink. I got along. I wrote my mother
comical letters, and she replied somewhat in kind, taking a mildly mocking tone
about events in town and at church—I remember her describing a row over the
right way to cut sandwiches for a ladies’ tea—and even managing to be humorous
but not bitter about my father, whom she referred to as His Grace.
I have made my father the beast in my account so
far, and my mother the rescuer and protector, and I believe this representation
to be true. But, even before I left for school, they were not the only people
in my story and the atmosphere in the house was not the only one I knew. What I
have come to think of as the Great Drama of my life actually involved someone
else.
Great Drama. It embarrasses me to have written
that. I wonder if it sounds cheaply satirical or tiresomely self-aggrandizing.
But then I think, Isn’t it normal for me to see my life that way, to talk about
it that way, when you consider how I chose to make my living?
I became an actor. Surprising? Of course, in
college I hung around with people who were active in the theatre, and in my
final year I directed a play. There was a standing joke, which I had
originated, about how I could manage a role by always keeping my unmarked
profile to the audience and walking backward across the stage when necessary.
But no such drastic maneuvers were needed.
In those days, there were regular plays on national
radio, and a particularly ambitious program on Sunday evenings. Adaptations of
novels. Shakespeare. Ibsen. My voice was naturally flexible, and with a bit of
training it improved. I got small parts at first. But, by the time television
put the whole business to rest, I was on almost every week and my name was
known to a certain faithful, if never large, audience.
Once acting was over for me, my voice stood me in
good stead, and I was able to get a job as an announcer, first in Winnipeg,
then back in Toronto. For the last twenty years of my working life, I was the
host of an eclectic musical show presented on weekday afternoons. I did not
choose the selections, as people often assumed. I have a limited appreciation
of music. But I crafted an agreeable, slightly quirky radio personality. The
program received many letters. We heard from old people’s homes and homes for
the blind, from people who regularly drove long or monotonous distances on
business, from housewives alone in the middle of the day with the baking and
the ironing, and from farmers in tractor cabs plowing or harrowing some
sweeping acreage. All over the country.
There was a flattering outpouring when I at last
retired. People said they felt as if they had lost a close friend or member of
the family. What they meant was that a certain amount of time had been filled
for them, reliably, five days a week. They had not been left adrift, and for
this they were truly, embarrassingly grateful. And, surprisingly, I shared in
their emotion. I had to be careful not to choke up as I read some of the
letters on the air.
And yet memory of the program, and of myself, faded
rapidly. New allegiances were formed. I made a complete break, refusing to
chair charity auctions or give nostalgic speeches. My mother had died a few
years earlier, after living to a great age, but I had not sold the family
house, only rented it out. Now I prepared to sell it, and gave the tenants
notice. I decided to live there myself for the time it took to get the
place—particularly the garden—into shape.
I was not lonely as an adult. In addition to my
audience, I had friends. I had women, too. Some women, of course, specialize in
the kind of men they imagine are in need of bucking up—they are eager to sport
those men around as a sign of their own munificence. I was on the watch for
them. The woman I was closest to in those years was a receptionist at the
station, a nice, sensible person, who had been left on her own with four
children. There was some indication that we would move in together, once the
youngest was off her hands. But the youngest was a daughter, who managed to
have a child of her own without ever leaving home, and somehow our expectation,
our affair, dwindled. We talked on the phone after I retired and moved back to
my old home. I invited her to visit. Then there was a sudden announcement that
she was getting married and going to live in Ireland. I was too knocked off my
perch to ask whether the daughter and the baby were going, too.
The garden is a great mess. Old perennials still
straggle up among the weeds; ragged leaves larger than umbrellas mark the place
of a sixty- or seventy-year-old rhubarb bed, and a half-dozen apple trees
remain, bearing wormy little apples of some variety whose name I don’t
remember. The patches I clear look minute, yet the piles of weeds and brush
I’ve collected are mountainous. They must, furthermore, be hauled away at my expense.
The town no longer allows bonfires.
All this used to be looked after by a gardener
named Pete. I have forgotten his last name. He dragged one leg after him and
carried his head bent to one side. I don’t know if he had had an accident, or
suffered a stroke. He worked slowly but diligently and was more or less always
in a bad temper. My mother spoke to him with soft-voiced respect, but he did
not think much of her proposals for the flower beds. And he disliked me because
I was constantly riding my tricycle where I shouldn’t, and because he probably
knew that I called him Sneaky Pete under my breath. I don’t know where I got
that. Was it from a comic strip?
Another possible reason for his growling dislike
has just occurred to me, and it’s odd that I didn’t think of it before. We were
both flawed, the obvious victims of physical misfortune. You would think that
such people would make common cause, but it just as often happens that they
don’t. Each may be reminded by the other of something he’d sooner forget.
But I’m not sure that that was the case for me. My
mother had arranged things so that most of the time I was seemingly quite
unaware of my condition. She claimed that she was teaching me at home because
of a bronchial ailment and the need to protect me from the onslaught of germs
at school. Whether anybody other than me believed her I don’t know. And, as for
my father’s hostility, that had so pervaded our house that I really don’t think
I felt singled out by it.
And here, at the risk of repeating myself, I must
say that I think my mother did the right thing. The emphasis on my one notable
flaw, the goading and ganging up, would have caught me too young and with
nowhere to hide. Things are different now, and the danger to a child afflicted
as I was would be of receiving too much fuss and showy kindness, not taunts and
isolation. But the life of those times took much of its liveliness, its wit and
its folklore, as my mother likely knew, from pure viciousness.
Until a couple of decades ago—maybe more—there was
another building on our property, a small cottage where Pete stored his tools
and where various things that had once been of use to us were put out of the
way until some decision was made about what to do with them. It was torn down
shortly after Pete was replaced by an energetic young couple, Ginny and Franz,
who brought their own up-to-date equipment in their truck. Later, they went
into market gardening, but by that time they were able to supply their teen-age
children to cut the grass, and my mother had lost interest in doing anything
more.
But, to get back to the building—how I circle and
dither around this subject—there was a time, before it became just a storage
space, when people lived in it. First, there was a couple named the Bells, who
were the cook-housekeeper and the gardener-chauffeur for my grandparents. My
grandfather owned a Packard, which he never learned to drive. Both the Bells
and the Packard were gone by my time, but the place was still referred to as
Bells’ Cottage.
For a few years in my childhood, Bells’ Cottage was
inhabited by a woman named Sharon Suttles, who lived there with her daughter,
Nancy. She had come to town with her husband, a doctor who was setting up his
first practice, and within a year or so he had died, of blood poisoning. She’d
remained in town with her baby, having no money and, as was said, “no people.”
This must have meant no people who could help her or who had offered to take
her in. At some point, she got a job in my father’s insurance office, and came
to live in Bells’ Cottage. I am not certain about when this happened. How old
was Nancy when I first knew her? Could she have been only three? Four, most
likely. She was half a year younger than me. But I have no memory of them
moving in, or of the cottage when it was empty. It was painted, at that time, a
dusty pink, and I always thought of that as Mrs. Suttles’s choice, as if she
could not have lived in a house of any other color.
I called her Mrs. Suttles, of course. But I was
aware of her first name, as I seldom was of any grownup woman’s. Sharon was an
unusual name in those days. And it had a connection with a hymn I knew from
Sunday school, which my mother allowed me to attend because there was close
monitoring and no recess. We sang hymns whose words were projected onto a
screen, and I think that most of us, even before we learned to read, got some
idea of the verses from their shape in front of us.
By cool Siloam’s shady rill
How sweet the lily grows!
How sweet the breath, beneath the hill,
Of Sharon’s dewy rose!
I can’t believe that there was actually a rose in a
corner of the screen, and yet I saw one—I see one—of a faded pink, whose aura
was transferred to the name Sharon.
I don’t mean to say that I fell in love with Sharon
Suttles. I had been in love, when barely out of my infancy, with a tomboyish
young maid named Bessie, who took me out on jaunts in my stroller and pushed me
so high on the park swings that I nearly went over the top. And, sometime
later, with a friend of my mother’s, who had a velvet collar on her coat and a
voice that seemed somehow related to it. Sharon Suttles was not the type one
would fall in love with in that way. She was not velvet-voiced, and she had no
interest in showing me a good time. She was tall and very thin for a mother—there
were no slopes on her. Her hair was the color of toffee, brown with golden
edges, and in the time of the Second World War she was still wearing it bobbed.
Her lipstick was bright red and thick-looking, like that of the movie stars I
had seen on posters, and around her house she usually wore a kimono, on which I
believe there were some pale birds—storks?—whose legs reminded me of hers. She
spent a lot of her time lying on the couch, smoking, and sometimes, to amuse us
or herself, she would kick those legs straight up in the air, one after the
other, and send a feathery slipper flying. When she was not mad at us, her
voice was throaty and exasperated, not unfriendly but in no way tender or wise
or reproving, with the full tones, the suggestion of sadness, that I expected
in a mother.
“You dumb twerps,” she called us.
“Get out of here and let me have some peace, you
dumb twerps.”
She would already be lying on the couch with an
ashtray on her stomach, while we scooted Nancy’s toy cars across the floor. How
much peace did she want?
She and Nancy ate peculiar foods at irregular
hours, and when she went into the kitchen to fix herself a snack she never came
back with cocoa or graham crackers for us. On the other hand, Nancy was not
forbidden to spoon vegetable soup out of the can, thick as pudding, or to grab
handfuls of Rice Krispies straight from the box.
Was Sharon Suttles my father’s mistress? With her
job provided for her, and the pink cottage rent-free?
My mother spoke of her kindly, not infrequently mentioning
the tragedy that had befallen her, with the death of her young husband.
Whatever maid we had at the time was sent over with presents of raspberries or
new potatoes or shelled peas, fresh from our garden. I remember the peas
particularly. I can still see Sharon Suttles—lying on the couch—flipping them
into the air with her forefinger, saying, “What am I supposed to do with
these?”
“You cook them on the stove with water,” I said
helpfully.
“No kidding?”
As for my father, I never saw him with her. He left
for work rather late and knocked off early, to keep up with his various
sporting activities.
There were certainly days when Nancy’s mother was
not at home—not in her kimono on the couch—and it could be presumed that on
those days she was not smoking or relaxing but doing regular work in my
father’s office, that legendary place that I had never seen and where I would
certainly not be welcome.
At such times, a grouchy person named Mrs. Codd sat
in the cottage kitchen, listening to radio soap operas and eating anything on
hand. It never occurred to me that, since Nancy and I usually spent all our
time together, my mother could have offered to keep an eye on her as well as
me, or ask our maid to do so, to save the hiring of Mrs. Codd.
It does seem to me now that we played together all
our waking hours. This would be from the time I was about five years old until
I was around eight and a half. We played mostly outdoors—the days we spent in
Nancy’s cottage annoying her mother must have been rainy ones. We had to stay
away from the vegetable garden and try not to knock down the flowers, but we
were constantly in and out of the berry patches and under the apple trees and
in the absolutely wild area beyond the cottage, which was where we constructed
our air-raid shelters and hideouts from the Germans.
There was actually a training base to the north of
our town, and real planes were constantly flying over us. And, because of all
these reminders of the war, we chose to make of Pete not just a local enemy but
a Nazi, and of his lawnmower a tank. Sometimes we lobbed apples at him from the
crab-apple tree that sheltered our bivouac. One time, he complained to my
mother, and it cost us a trip to the beach.
She often took Nancy with us to the beach. Not to
the one with the waterslide, just down the cliff from our house, but to a
smaller one that you had to drive to, where there were no rowdy swimmers or
water-skiers. In fact, she taught us both to swim. Nancy was more fearless and
reckless than I was, which annoyed me, so once I pulled her under an incoming
wave and sat on her head. She kicked and held her breath and fought her way
free.
“Nancy is a little girl,” my mother scolded. “She
is a little girl, and you should treat her like a little sister.”
Which was exactly what I was doing. I did not think
of her as weaker than me. Smaller, yes, but sometimes that was an advantage.
When we climbed trees, she could hang like a monkey from branches that would
not support me. And, in one fight, she bit me on my restraining arm and drew
blood. That time, we were separated, supposedly for a week, but our glowering
from windows soon turned into longing and pleading, and the ban was lifted.
In winter, we were allowed to roam the whole
property, building snow forts stocked with sticks of firewood and arsenals of
snowballs to fling at anyone who came along. Which few did, ours being a
dead-end street. We had to make a snowman, just so that we could pummel him.
What about sex games, you may wonder. And, yes, we
had those, too. I recall our hiding, one extremely hot day, in a tent that had
been pitched—I have no idea why—behind the cottage. We had crawled in there on
purpose to explore each other. The canvas had a certain erotic but infantile
smell, like the underclothes that we removed. Various ticklings excited us,
then made us cross, and we were soon drenched in sweat, itchy, and ashamed.
When we got ourselves out of there, we felt more separate than usual and oddly
wary of each other. I don’t remember if the same thing happened again, with the
same result, but I would not be surprised if it did.
I cannot bring Nancy’s face to mind as clearly as I
can her mother’s. I think her coloring was, or would in time be, much the same.
Fair hair, bleached by so much time in the sun, that would eventually go brown.
Very rosy, even reddish, skin. Yes. I see her cheeks red, almost as if colored
in crayon. That, too, owing to the time we spent outdoors, and to her decisive
energy.
In my house, it goes without saying, all rooms
except those specified to us were forbidden. We would not have dreamed of going
upstairs or into the front parlor or the dining room. But in the cottage
everywhere was allowed, and the cellar was a good place to go when even we
tired of the afternoon heat. There was no railing alongside the cellar steps,
and we could take more and more daring jumps to land on the hard dirt floor.
And when we got bored with that we could climb into the old buggy and bounce up
and down without springs, whipping an imaginary horse. Once, we tried to smoke
a cigarette filched from Nancy’s mother’s pack. (We would not have dared take
more than one.) Nancy managed better with it than I did, having had more
practice.
There was also, in the cellar, an old wooden
dresser, on which sat several tins of mostly dried-up paint and varnish, an
assortment of stiffened paintbrushes, stirring sticks, and boards on which
colors had been tried or brushes wiped. A few tins had their lids still on
tight, and these we pried open, with some difficulty, and discovered paint that
could be stirred to an active thickness. Then we spent time trying to loosen up
the brushes by pushing them down into the paint and hitting them against the
boards of the dresser, making a mess but not getting much of a result. One of
the tins, however, proved to contain turpentine, which worked much better. Now
we began to paint with those bristles that had become usable. I was eight by
then, and could read and write to some extent, thanks to my mother. Nancy
could, too, because she had finished the second grade.
“Don’t look till I’m finished,” I said to her, and
pushed her slightly out of the way. I had thought of something to paint. She
was busy anyway, smashing her own brush around in a can of red paint.
I wrote, “NAZI WAS IN THIS SELLEAR.”
“Now look,” I said.
She had her back to me and was wielding the
paintbrush on herself.
She said, “I’m busy.”
When she turned around, her face was generously
smeared with red paint.
“Now do I look like you?” she cried, drawing the
brush down her cheek. “Now do I look like you?”
She was overjoyed, as if she had managed something
magical, a radiant transformation. You’d have thought that this was something
she’d been hoping for all her life.
Now I must try to explain what happened in the next
several minutes.
In the first place, I thought she looked horrible.
I did not believe that any part of my face was red.
And, in fact, it wasn’t. The half of it that was colored was the usual mulberry
birthmark color.
But this was not how I saw it in my mind. I
believed my birthmark to be a soft brown color.
My mother had not done anything so foolish, so
dramatic, as to ban mirrors from our house. But mirrors can be hung too high
for a young child to see himself in them. That was certainly so in the
bathroom. The only one in which I could readily see my reflection hung in the
front hall, which was dim in the daytime and weakly lit at night. That must
have been where I got the idea that half my face was a dull, mild sort of
color, almost mousy, a furry shadow.
This was what I was used to, and what made Nancy’s
paint such an insult, a leering joke. I pushed her against the dresser as hard
as I could and ran away from her, up the stairs. I think I was running to find
a mirror, or even a person who could tell me that she was wrong. And, once that
was confirmed, I could sink my teeth into pure hatred of her. I would punish
her. I had no time, just then, to think how.
I ran through the cottage—Nancy’s mother was
nowhere to be seen, though it was Saturday—and out to the gravel, then the
flagstone path between stalwart rows of gladioli. I saw my mother rise from the
wicker chair where she sat reading on our back veranda.
“Not red,” I howled with gulps of angry tears. “I’m
not red.” She came down the steps with a shocked face but, so far, no understanding.
Then Nancy ran out of the cottage behind me, all garish and amazed.
My mother understood.
“You nasty little beast,” she cried at Nancy, in a
voice that I had never heard. A loud, wild, shaking voice.
“Don’t you come near us. Don’t you dare. You are a
bad, bad girl. You have no decent human kindness in you, do you? You never have
been taught—”
Nancy’s mother came out of the cottage then, with
streaming wet hair in her eyes. She was holding a towel.
“Jeez, can’t I even wash my hair around here—”
My mother screamed at her, too.
“Don’t you dare use that language in front of my
son and me—”
“Oh, blah-blah,” Nancy’s mother said immediately.
“Just listen to you yelling your head off—”
My mother took a deep breath.
“I am—not—yelling—my—head off. I just want to tell
your cruel child she will never be welcome in our house again. She is a cruel,
spiteful, cruel child to mock my little boy for an accident of nature that he
cannot help. You have never taught her anything, any manners. She did not even
know enough to thank me when I took her with us to the beach—doesn’t even know
how to say please and thank you. No wonder, with a mother flaunting around in
her wrapper—”
All this poured out of my mother as if there were a
torrent of rage, of pain, of absurdity in her that would never stop. Even
though by now I was pulling at her dress and saying, “Don’t. Don’t.”
Then things got even worse, as tears rose and
swallowed her words and she choked and shook.
Nancy’s mother had pushed the wet hair out of her
eyes and stood there observing.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You carry on
like this and they’re going to take you to the loony bin. Can I help it if your
husband hates you and you got a kid with a messed-up face?”
My mother held her head in both hands. She cried,
“Oh—oh,” as if pains were devouring her.
The woman who worked for us at that time—Velma—had
come out on the veranda and was saying, “Missus. Come on, Missus.” Then she
raised her voice and called to Nancy’s mother. “You go on. You go in your
house. You scat.”
“Oh, I will. Don’t worry, I will. Who do you think
you are, telling me what to do? And how do you like working for an ol’ witch
with bats in the belfry?” Then she turned on Nancy. “How the livin’ Jesus am I
ever going to get you cleaned up?” After that, she raised her voice again to
make sure I could hear her. “He’s a suck. Look at him hangin’ on to his ol’
lady. You’re not ever going to play with him again. Ol’ lady’s suck.”
All this time, Nancy was stricken. Not a sound out
of her.
Velma on one side and me on the other, we tried to
ease my mother back into the house. She had stopped making the terrible noise.
She straightened herself and spoke in an unnaturally cheerful voice that would
carry as far as the cottage. “Fetch me my garden shears, would you, Velma?
While I’m out here, I might as well trim the glads. Some of them are downright
wilted.”
By the time she was finished, they were all over
the path, not one standing, wilted or blooming.
All this must have happened on a Saturday, as I
said, because Nancy’s mother was there and so was Velma, who did not come on
Sundays. By Monday, or maybe sooner, the cottage was empty. Perhaps Velma got
hold of my father in the clubhouse or on the greens or wherever he was, and he
came home, impatient and rude but soon compliant. Compliant, that is, about
Nancy and her mother getting out. I don’t think Nancy’s mother would have made
any fuss about leaving.
The fact that I would never see Nancy again dawned
on me slowly. At first, I was angry with her and didn’t care. Then, when I
inquired about her, my mother must have put me off with some vague reply, not
wanting to recall the anguished scene to me or herself. It was at that time
that she became serious about sending me away to school and began looking
around for a suitable place. She probably suspected that once I got used to
being at a boys’ school my memory of having had a female playmate would grow
dim and seem unworthy, even ridiculous.
On the day after my father’s funeral, my mother
surprised me by asking if I would take her out to dinner (though, of course,
she would really be the one taking me) at a restaurant some miles along the
lakeshore.
“I just feel I’ve been penned up in this house
forever,” she said. “I need some air.”
In the restaurant, she looked around discreetly and
announced that there was nobody she knew.
“Will you join me in a glass of wine?” she said.
Had we driven all this way so that she could drink
wine in public?
When the wine had come, and we had ordered, she
said, “There’s something I think you ought to know.”
These may be among the most unpleasant words that a
person ever has to hear. There is a pretty good chance that whatever you ought
to know will be burdensome, and that in the telling of it there will be the
suggestion that other people have had to bear that burden, while you have been
let off lightly, all this while.
“My father isn’t my real father?” I said. “Goody.”
“Don’t be silly. You remember your little friend
Nancy?”
I actually did not remember, for a moment. Then I
said, “Vaguely.”
At this time, all my conversations with my mother
seemed to call for strategy. I had to keep myself lighthearted, jokey, unmoved.
In her voice and face was a lurking sorrow. She never complained about her own
plight, but there were so many innocent and ill-used people in the stories she
told me, so many outrages, that I was surely meant, at the very least, to go
back to my friends and my lucky life with a heavier heart.
I would not coöperate. All she wanted, possibly,
was some sign of sympathy, or maybe of physical tenderness. I would not grant
that. She was a fastidious woman not yet contaminated by age, but I backed off
from her as if she were harboring a contagious mold. I particularly backed off
from any reference to my affliction, which, it seemed to me, she especially
cherished—the shackle I could not loosen that had bound me to her from the
womb.
“You would probably have known about it if you were
at home,” she said. “But it happened shortly after we sent you off to school.”
Nancy and her mother had gone to live in an
apartment that belonged to my father, on the Square. There, one bright fall
morning, Nancy’s mother had come upon her daughter in the bathroom, using a
razor blade to slice into her cheek. There was blood on the floor and in the sink
and here and there on Nancy. But she had not given up on her purpose or made a
sound of pain.
How did my mother know all this? I can only suppose
it was a town drama, too gory, in the literal sense of the word, not to be
related in detail.
Nancy’s mother wrapped a towel around her and
somehow got her to the hospital. There was no ambulance in our town at that
time. She probably flagged down a car on the Square. Why didn’t she phone my
father? No matter—she didn’t. The cuts were not deep and the blood loss was not
so great, despite the splatter—there was no injury to any major blood vessel.
Nancy’s mother kept berating the child and asking if she was right in the head.
“You’re just my luck,” she said. “A crazy kid like you.”
“If there had been social workers around at that
time,” my mother said, “the poor little thing would have been made a ward of
the Children’s Aid.”
“It was the same cheek,” she said. “Like yours.”
I had tried to keep silent, pretending not to know
what she was talking about. But I had to speak.
“The paint was over her whole face,” I said.
“Yes. But she was more careful this time. She cut
just that one cheek. Trying the best she could to make herself look like you.”
This time, I did manage to keep quiet.
“If she had been a boy, it would have been
different,” my mother said. “But what an awful thing for a girl.”
“Plastic surgeons can do remarkable things
nowadays.”
“Oh, maybe they can.”
After a moment, she added, “Such deep feelings
children have.”
“They get over that.”
She said that she did not know what had become of
them, the child or her mother. She was glad that I had never asked, because she
would have hated to have to tell me anything so distressing, when I was still
young.
I don’t know what bearing it has on anything, but I
have to say that my mother changed completely in her old age, becoming ribald
and fanciful. She claimed that my father had been a magnificent lover and that
she herself had been “a pretty bad girl.” She announced that I should have
married “that girl who sliced up her face,” because neither of us would have
been able to crow over the other about having done a good deed. Each of us, she
cackled, would be just as much a mess as the other.
I agreed. I liked her then quite a bit.
A few days ago, I was stung by a wasp while
clearing out some rotten apples under one of the old trees. The sting was on my
eyelid, which rapidly swelled closed. I drove myself to the hospital, using the
other eye (the afflicted one was on the “good” side of my face) and was
surprised to be told that I had to stay overnight. The reason was that, once I
was given an injection, both eyes would be bandaged, in order to avoid strain
on the one that could see.
I had what they call a restless night, waking
often. Of course, it is never really quiet in a hospital, and in that short
time without my sight it seemed as if my hearing had grown more acute. When
certain footsteps came into my room, I knew that they were those of a woman,
and I had the feeling that she was not a nurse.
“Are you by any chance awake?” she said. “I’m your
reader.” I stretched out an arm, believing that she had come to read what are
known as the vital signs.
“No, no,” she said, in a small persistent voice.
“I’ve come to read to you, if you’d like. Sometimes people get bored lying
there with their eyes closed.”
“Do they choose the reading matter, or do you?”
“They do. I carry a whole batch of things around
with me.”
“I like poetry,” I said.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
I realized that this was true, and I knew why. I
have some experience of reading poetry aloud, over the radio, and of listening
to other trained voices, and there are some styles of reading I find pleasing,
and some I abhor.
“Then we could have a game,” she said, as if I had
just explained this. “I could read you a line or two, then stop and see if you
can do the next line. O.K.?”
It struck me that she might be quite a young
person, anxious to get some takers, to be a success at this job.
I said O.K. But nothing in Old English, I told her.
“The king sits in Dunfermline town,” she began, in
a questioning voice.
“Drinking the blood-red wine,” I chimed in, and we
proceeded in good humor. She read well enough, though at a rather childlike
speed. I began to enjoy the sound of my own voice, now and then falling into a
bit of an actorly flourish.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“I will show you how the lilies grow, / On the
banks of Italie.”
“Is it grow or blow?” she said. “I don’t actually
have a book with that in. I should remember, though. Never mind, it’s lovely. I
always liked your voice on the radio.”
“Really? Did you listen?”
“Of course. Lots of people did.”
She stopped feeding me lines and just let me go
ahead. You can imagine. “Dover Beach” and “Kubla Khan” and “West Wind” and
“Wild Swans” and “Doomed Youth.” Well, maybe not all of them, and not all the
way to the end.
“You’re getting short of breath,” she said.
Suddenly, her quick little hand was laid on my mouth. And then her face, or the
side of her face, on mine. “I have to go. Here’s just one more before I go.
I’ll make it harder by not starting at the beginning: ‘None will long mourn for
you, / Pray for you, miss you, / Your place left vacant—’ ”
“I’ve never heard that,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Sure. You win.”
By now, I suspected something. She seemed
distracted, slightly cross. I heard the geese calling as they flew over the
hospital. They take practice runs at this time of year, then the runs get
longer, and one day they’re gone. And then I was waking up, in that state of
surprise, indignation, that follows a convincing dream. I wanted to go back and
have her lay her face once more on mine. Her cheek on mine. But dreams are not
so obliging.
When I could see again, and was at home, I looked
for the lines she had left me with in my dream. I went through a couple of
anthologies but did not find them there. I began to suspect that the lines did
not belong to a real poem at all, but had just been devised in the dream, to
confound me.
Devised by whom?
But later in the fall, when I was getting some old
books ready to donate to a charity bazaar, a piece of brownish paper fell out
of one of them, with lines on it written in pencil. It was not my mother’s
handwriting, and I hardly think it would be my father’s. Whose, then? I don’t
know. Whoever it was had written the author’s name at the end: Walter de la
Mare. No title. And not a poet I have any particular knowledge of. But I must
have seen the poem at some time, maybe not in this copy, maybe in a textbook. I
must have buried the words in some deep cubbyhole of my mind. And why? Just so
that I could be teased by them, or by a determined girl-child phantom, in a
dream?
There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share;
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over,
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.
The poem didn’t depress me. In some peculiar way,
it seemed to back up the decision I had made by that time: not to sell the
property but to stay.
Something had happened here. In your life there are
a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then
there are the other places, which are just other places.
Of course, I know that if I had spotted Nancy years
later—on the subway, for instance, in Toronto, both of us bearing our
recognizable marks—we would in all probability have managed only one of those
embarrassed and meaningless conversations, hurriedly listing useless
autobiographical facts. I would have noted the mended, nearly normal cheek or
the still obvious scar, but it would not have come into the conversation.
Children might have been mentioned. Not unlikely, whether her face had been
fixed or not. Grandchildren. Jobs. I might not have had to tell her about mine.
We would have been shocked, hearty, dying to get away.
You think that would have changed things?
The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
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