IT STRUCK ME, in the mid-1990s that I’d never asked either of my parents what they thought about life and about their place in it. The truth was that I’d never been very interested, and the idea that they had “inner lives” was alien and vaguely threatening. In part this is a “natural” carry-over of the authority parents have during one’s childhood, but in my case it was at least partly because my father was always telling me exactly what he thought, then trying to force me to agree with him, and finding it incomprehensible when I had alternate views, which I did have about virtually everything.
But now I wanted to get some of their thoughts onto the record, not so much because I was suddenly filled with curiosity, but because their grandchildren and great-grandchildren might someday wonder what their ancestors liked and disliked, and what they thought about the human condition. I drew up a list of about 40 questions, starting with simple stuff like, “What’s your favourite colour or vegetable or fabric?” After that, I moved on to fundamental questions like, “Is your life a success?” and “How important is sexual happiness?”
It seemed an outlandish thing to ask one’s parents point-blank what they liked and disliked about the world and what they thought about life’s big issues. I could find no one who’d done anything like it in a systematic way. When I told several friends what I intended to do, most responded with an “oh, wow,” that let me know they weren’t about to rush off to draw up a list of their own questions.
As the decade began to wind down, it became apparent that I’d better get going if I was to have these conversations. My father was already in his nineties, and my mother’s health, in her late eighties, was beginning to fail. So in September 1998, I cornered her while she was visiting Toronto, and got her to agree to answer “some” questions. I didn’t say how many, or what they were going to be about. She wasn’t terrifically enthused, but after a bit of wrangling, she agreed to it.
We sat down on the backyard deck of my house on the second-last day of her two-week visit. She’d come because she wanted her tenth grandchild, my then 14-month-old daughter, Hartlea, to know her paternal grandmother.
The visit had gone very well. Grandmother and granddaughter quickly bonded, and the small anxiety my mother’s growing physical handicaps must have been raising in her mind about the practicality of a relationship with a toddler had been sweetly resolved. Hartlea’s walking pace was perfectly tuned to my mother’s, and they spent hours together happily exploring the streetscapes in our neighbourhood. The relationship had been made, my mother had a sense of little Hartlea’s character, and she’d relaxed, her mind at peace.
I was the anxious one, actually. Several years before, I’d made a number of tape recordings of her reminiscences about the past, with the thought of collecting them in the same sort of life history I’d made for my father 15 years before. In the tapes I made with her, she’d recounted anecdote upon story after fable for me, but they’d all been oddly unsatisfying. She was so seamless a raconteur that the stories dramatized events without revealing very much, if anything, of her. Her recall of her life was utterly unlike my father’s reminiscences, which all led back to a single philosophical point of reference: his business successes, and why I and everyone else ought to emulate him. Her reminiscences were pure plot—and therefore pure fabrication, complete with the telling, but disconnected from any deeper issues of character or values. For posterity, I wanted a record that would reveal at least something of what she believed about human life and the things about it that troubled her.
It was late in the afternoon before we got down to it, sitting across from one another at a round metal deck table with a pot of tea and a tape recorder in the warm September sunlight. As we settled in, I realized that the two of us had been talking all my life, but we’d never once talked this way. She told stories—usually about others—or she gave situational and practical advice. But she was elusive about herself and evasive when asked to talk on terms not of her choosing. It hadn’t ever been that one or the other of us consciously controlled the agenda when we talked. It was more an issue of having comfortably worked out our relative roles with one another. She’d never been one to burden her kids with her thoughts, and as the youngest of her children and the one on whom she’d lavished the most attention, I’d let myself think that she didn’t have an inner life. She, underplaying her hand as she always did, had allowed me to think whatever I wanted for nearly 50 years.
I clicked on the tape recorder, and to get her attention, I shuffled the sheet of questions I had in front of me. “I’ve got about 40 questions here,” I said. “So why don’t we start with some of the easy ones. Let’s try this: What’s your favourite season?”
She looked puzzled for a moment. “What’s my favourite seasoning? That’s rather hard to say. I can’t imagine life without salt or cinnamon.”
“I don’t think that’s quite the question,” I said, laughing. “But it’s a good answer. Salt and cinnamon. I’ve got to write that down.”
She frowned. Was I playing with her? Wasn’t this supposed to be serious? “Well,” she said, “I do love anything with cinnamon in it. And what would life be without salt. It’d be like life without sex.”
“I was asking you what your favourite season was.”
Her turn to laugh. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “I thought you wanted to know my favourite seasoning. That’s funny. Well, my favourite season is autumn. It’s so rich and fulfilled, and oh, I don’t know. It just seems to me the ultimate harvest time, I guess.”
We went through the other easy ones. Favourite vegetable: asparagus, preferably wild; Fish? She liked salmon, but having spent most of her adult life in the B.C. Interior, distinguished it from seafood, which she enjoyed more. For that, it was orange roughy. She described it this way: “splendid. It comes from Australia, and sole is nothing compared to it. It’s like sole but it has body. It doesn’t fall apart on you, which I don’t like.”
I asked her a question I thought I knew the answer to because I bought it for her most Christmases: What was her favourite perfume?
“I prefer 4711,” she said. “I used to like Chanel 22. But older women shouldn’t wear strong perfume. It makes them cheap, I think. So Chanel 22 is now too harsh for me. Too, ah . . . indelicate. It was good when I was young and flirty.”
She looked directly into my eyes to make sure I’d gotten the message. “My ambition in life now is to grow old gracefully. And 4711 is graceful.”
I made the appropriate mental note: No more Chanel 22. Had she been giving it away, or did she have a cupboard full of it somewhere in the Penticton house?
On we went: favourite flower? carnations (a surprise, I assumed it would be roses); favourite tree? maple, because of their autumn colours; favourite colour? rose, and yellow; favourite fabric? satin. I could see she was getting a little bored, so I began to pop more complicated questions.
“What,” I asked, “do you think life is for? Does life have any purpose?”
She was silent for a long moment. “Do you mean personally, or in general?”
“Either, or rather, both.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s rather a difficult question because it has so many aspects.”
I could feel her scrambling on the unfamiliar ground. “For instance,” she said after another pause, “a man and a woman have different purposes in life. Basically, I think most women want to be mothers. Men may want children to bear their name or continue the race I guess, but women want children because, well, they make you whole. I think they bring us the greatest happiness in life, depending of course on your outlook.”
“If you’re a professional woman, for instance”—she glanced into the house where Leanna was fussing with some papers in the kitchen—“possibly not. But when I look at you, or at your brother, or the twins, I understand that life is going to go on. It doesn’t end with me. And that’s everything.”
“So the purpose of life is to continue life?”
“Yes, I think so,” she said, gazing directly at me. “Life is its own purpose.”
“Okay,” I said. “Next question: Does God exist? And if so, in what form? I mean, do you think that God is a guy up there somewhere, sitting on a throne, dreaming up horrible things to do to us?”
She cleared her throat and laughed, accepting that this line of questions was going to go on, and letting me know she thought it was absurd that I was asking her about such things.
“I’ve never analyzed what God is,” she said. “But you know, religion is purely a matter of faith. I asked our minister in Prince George about it once, and he said that sometimes he’d had questions. So it’s what you choose to believe. There’s no proof or certainty.”
I let that answer hang for a moment because its sophistication surprised me more than a little, and because I was hoping she’d go on.
“When I had cancer,” she said, “I said to God, if you let me live and see my children finish high school, get married, and start successful lives where they’ve got somebody else to love them besides me, I promise that I’ll try to help other people as long as I live. And I’ve done that—because I made a promise to something that is real. It wasn’t an imaginary something in the clouds that I made that promise to. And I think because of that, when I had the second bout of cancer, I never questioned whether I’d survive.”
For a moment I was thrown by the idea of my mother talking to God. She’d told me several times in the past she didn’t believe in God. Then the second datum registered: second bout of cancer? When did that happen? And why didn’t I know about it?
I had to collect myself to prompt the next question: “So this God you talked to was more an embodiment of what goes around comes around rather than the giant guy in the white robe, inflicting natural disasters and sending people plagues of boils, right?”
She tried to give me a stern look, but lost it to a smile. Then she composed herself.
“I’ve really never tried to analyze what God might look like. God has never needed to look like anything. God just is. I mean, how can anyone look at a beautiful tree, or all the beautiful flowers, the wonderful colours of nature and not see something behind it. What would the world be without beauty? So, where did it come from? It had to start somewhere. I think that’s why people say God created the world—because it’s beautiful.”
She was warming up to what we were doing, so I pressed it. “You’re saying that beautiful things have to come from something beyond us? That they’re not random?”
“I’m saying that life didn’t just appear out of nothing. That doesn’t mean it’s all good, though. The world is like your father says it is: there are good people and there are bad people. But I would never try to ram any of this down other people’s throats the way he does. I decided with you children that I would take you to church, but that what you did with it, once you got old enough to think for yourselves, was up to you. It wasn’t for me to say what you should believe about these things. I have my own private beliefs, and they’re actually quite different to that of a lot of people I know. It’s a private thing. Just mine. Sometimes I drive along the street and see something that disturbs me, and I’ll say, ‘Well, what do you think of that, God?’”
That made me laugh out loud, and she did, too, albeit sheepishly. “Maybe it’s a weakness that I need something to lean on,” she said. “But I don’t see it so.”
“I don’t think it’s silly,” I assured her, and changed my tack slightly to let her expand on it in a different way. “What’s the most important thing in life, then?”
The question seemed to stop her in her tracks. “That’s a toughie,” she said. There was a long silence as she considered how to answer.
“Here’s what I think,” she said, finally. “The most important thing in life—to me—is family. My family. It’s so important that we belong to one another, and that we love each other. It doesn’t matter whether what we do is perfect or imperfect. What matters is that we’re still family.”
“There’re several possible ways to understand family,” I said. “One is family in the sense of ‘us against them.’”
“No, no,” she said. “Not that way. That just starts wars.”
“Then there’s family for the purposes of living a good and decent life. Are you saying that the best way to lead a good and decent life is through the family?”
She considered this for a moment.
“That’s close to what I mean,” she said. “But let me explain how this works for someone my age. This latest granddaughter, for instance. She’s a perfect little thing in and of herself, but she’s also partly me, and mine. I feel that way with all of you, including the great-grandchildren. They’re my family, and they’re part of what is me.”
“Your sense of family is mostly in the present,” I said. “It doesn’t go very deep into the past, does it?”
I wondered if she’d see this as a criticism, but she didn’t. It was an opening to something else she wanted to make clear.
“My sense of family doesn’t go into the past because the family I grew up in didn’t have a sense of belonging to anything larger than themselves as individuals. In that respect, I’m different from the rest of them. That was the difference between me and your uncle Ronald, for instance. I was the one who had a family, but he only had himself, even though he’d had two wives, and three children. He thought what I had was wonderful, but he didn’t really understand it. You know, he once said, ‘Family isn’t important to me, but at the back of my mind I’ve known, all my life, that my sister Rita was there. That she was mine, even if no one else was.’”
“Dad’s family doesn’t have a strong sense of what you’re talking about, either, does it?”
“No,” she said, flatly. “None at all.”
“Do you think that not being interested in family and kin is a British thing? I’ve always noticed that my ethnic friends here—the Italians, or Leanna’s family—are a lot more conscious of who their ancestors are, and where they came from. Our families go back maybe a generation, and that’s it.”
She looked up into the trees, as if considering whether what I’d suggested might be true. For a moment her face went blank.
“No,” she said, and hesitated again. “I think it’s a matter of individual families and individuals. I was raised exactly the same way as my brothers and sisters, and none of them had the strong feeling about family I’ve always had. I think maybe my sister, Enid, had it with her kids, but it didn’t extend any further. I don’t know why they didn’t have it, but there you are.”
“Do you think this might have something to do with the fact that you were the one who got the farthest away from the family you were born into? There you and Dad were, in a sense, out there in the B.C. wilderness, and there wasn’t anybody to help. So you had to invent a new kind of family.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But even before we moved to British Columbia, I kept in touch with both my family and his. I was always the only one who wrote letters to all my brothers and sisters, and to my mother. That impulse comes from within. If you haven’t got that instinct, you just don’t have it.”
“But where does it come from in the first place?”
She laughed, signalling that she’d taken this one as far as she could. “I don’t know everything. That’s your job.”
“Let’s change the subject, then,” I said. “How about this question: Which person most influenced you in your life?”
Just for a moment I caught a flicker of panic in her eyes. Then she settled herself in her chair. “Someone completely outside the family,” she said.
“You’re being mysterious. Who are you talking about?”
She laughed again, but her eyes were serious, and a little distant. “This person gave me the courage to go on living when I . . .” Her voice trailed off as she stared into the trees across the alley.
“Cancer,” she said after a long pause, “is a very frightening thing.” She paused again, rolling her tongue and swallowing, as if recalling the fear she’d felt anew. “And as perhaps you know, your father had nothing to offer me emotionally. I was pretty damned scared until this man gave me the assurance I needed that I was going to be alright. And I believed him. If I hadn’t, I don’t think I’d be sitting here today.”
I scrambled for a way to get her to clarify something she clearly thought I was supposed to know all about and didn’t. Well, I thought, let’s go through the front door.
“Who are we talking about, exactly? You’ve lost me.”
She named a man I’d met once or twice, one of my father’s business suppliers. “It all started innocently enough,” she said. “After my breast was removed, which you know all about, I was there in that hospital all by myself, not knowing if I was going to live or die, and he came in and sat with me.”
“Go on,” I said. “Tell the story.”
“There isn’t really a story,” she said. “He was there when I needed him, sometimes just talking about what was going on in the world, and sometimes talking directly about what was happening to me. He gave me the same message every time.”
“What message?” I said, feeling perfectly stupid at not being able to lead the story for her.
“That I was going to be fine, that it was just a medical procedure, and that everything (she put a heavy emphasis on the word) was going to be okay.”
“That was a very kind thing to do,” I said, still lost.
“He was there,” she said, “in a way your father never was. I had to go back down to Vancouver for radiation treatments several times after that, and there he was then, too. And a few years later, he came to Prince George.”
“This must have been when I met him,” I said, trying hard to picture him—and failing.
I could see that she didn’t want to tell me the whole story, and I was feeling uncomfortable about its implications: Was my mother telling me she’d had an affair? I moved on to the next question, not quite sure whether I was being discreet or cowardly.
This was a question to which I was pretty sure I had the answer: “What would you say your life’s most important accomplishment has been?”
No hesitation on this, and her face brightened. “Ah,” she said. “My children. I feel so fulfilled when I see them. Maybe I’m just a homebody, but that’s what it is.”
I thought about pointing out that her children are fairly flawed and ordinary, but telling her that would have stolen some of her pleasure. Why do that? She thinks we’re wonderful, even if we know better. Then it occurred to me that she did know how flawed we are—better than we do—and that she didn’t care. What mattered to her was that we’re all alive, and all of us have given her grandchildren. She didn’t ever ask much more from us. I read out the next question, still thinking about her answer to that one.
“Which gender is superior, and why?”
She frowned, but answered immediately. “Neither, as far as I’m concerned. Each individual has to be judged on their own merit. You can’t classify this one as superior, or that one, just because they were born male or female . . .”
“I guess what I’m asking is what natural advantages the different genders have.”
Her expression shifted. This nuance interested her, and she thought about it for a moment before answering. “I think, well, that a mother gets to mold her children when they’re babies and beyond that. She’s got to be there for them, and they’ve got to know she’s there for them. And maybe a father—if he’s a good father—has a stronger influence on them when they’re older.”
“That,” I said, “would make you both my mother and my father.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, and laughed. I could see I’d pleased her. But once I’d said it, I wasn’t certain it was true. Sure, I was always closer to her than to my father, but how much had she influenced me? She’d never much tried to after I reached the age of 12 or so. She was much better at enjoying me, and at times, teasing me. She’d teased me all through my adolescence as a way of cautioning me against the goofy teenaged stunts that could have gotten me killed. It worked surprisingly well, too. I’d walked away from more than a few situations because I could sense her laughter coming.
“Here’s one I’ve never asked you,” I said. “How would you describe your politics?”
“My what?”
“Your politics.”
“Hah!” she spat out. “I’ve deliberately kept clear of politics because I haven’t agreed with your father about his politics. And publicly disagreeing with him was hell on earth.”
“So you’re saying you’re really a communist.”
We both knew that wasn’t true, but curiously, she didn’t deny it.
“I have my own private thoughts about politics,” she said. “But like I said, I’ve had to stay clear of talking about them because I got into trouble whenever I did.”
“Did you find yourself characteristically not in agreement with Dad?”
She laughed, not quite merrily. “Yes,” she said. “Always. Unfortunately. You know he was always accusing me of being against him, but the truth is that we couldn’t ever have political discussions because if I didn’t agree with everything he said, he accused me of being against him. That’s a shame, because you learn so much by discussing things. But with your father I never could express my political opinions because in his mind they were simply personal attacks on him. So politics was just something I didn’t talk about, after a while.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
“It wasn’t. But I kept my mouth shut to keep the peace, because that was more important.”
“Okay,” I said. “Another question: Where is your home? If you were to go home in the deepest possible sense, where would it be?” Her eyes narrowed, as if she was wondering if I was laying some sort of trap. She couldn’t see one, and relaxed. “You know, it didn’t matter to me what city I was living in. What mattered was where my family—my kids—were. I was always home when I was with my kids.”
“But given that, in which city did you feel most at home?”
“Oh, then it would be Prince George. That’s where you all grew up and that’s where you were mine entirely.”
“Was that because those were the years when you were in the ‘big part’ of your life?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess that’s what it was. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but that’s what it was.”
I found myself recalling a strange story she’d once told me about those early days in Prince George. It was late August 1944, so there was the deep ripeness of summer. The war was going well after the Normandy invasion, and she’d taken all four of us downtown for a walk, me in a carriage, since I was barely four months old.
The Fall Assizes were about to start, so the town was full of people, many of them aboriginal families of those who were about to go on trial. As she was approaching the main intersection of town, Third Avenue and George Street, passing along the large display windows of Ben Baird Men’s Wear on the southwest corner, there was a minor earthquake tremor, strong enough for her to see the window glass bulge and undulate above my carriage. But the tremor passed, the windows didn’t shatter, and the order of her gentle universe resettled.
When she told me this story, her point seemed like an odd one: that she always felt safe in Prince George. She’d been surrounded by the alien and mostly uncommunicative families of Carriers, no doubt by drunken loggers, she’d been threatened by an earthquake and crazily shimmering store windows, and this made her feel safe? From what? What was the threat?
She wasn’t about to articulate the threat that had made Prince George seem like a haven to her, but now it was clear to me. The morass her family constituted for her; the grudges held, the overindulged emotions and appetites; the sheer muck of being. She’d gotten herself and her children away from it, and she felt, for the first time in her life, safe enough to make a different kind of world for them.
She was drifting away into a reverie, and it was my fault. I’d been pushing my private agenda, and been getting the answers I wanted. But as I watched her, I recognized that many of the answers were more complicated than they appeared, and more complicated than I’d expected—and that the questions ran deeper for her than for me.
“When,” I said, “were you most happy in your life?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “When all you kids were at home. I mean, really, I had a wonderful girlhood. From the time I reached my teens I had the most marvellous group of girlfriends. We went to new places all the time, explored things. And I kept in touch with them all our lives. But they’re all gone, now. Inez was the last to go. She and I were much closer than I was to my sisters, in a way.”
“So ages 12 to 25 was also a good period in your life.”
“No, it was more ages 16 to 25. I really wasn’t very happy until about 16, and began to get away from my family a little.” She frowned, as if she didn’t like the implications, and shifted the subject. “You know, both your father and I have lost nearly all our old friends. You suffer the loss, but you forget that time passes. You know what I mean.”
I didn’t but I could feel my skin starting to crawl at the thought of my own friends dying. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” I asked.
There was silence. Then she had it, or rather, it had her. Her eyes clouded. “I . . . I think,” she said, “it was the day I found out that I had cancer. That was quite a blow. It was in the summer, and it changed my whole way of looking at the world.”
“Changed it how?”
“After that happened, a coloured leaf, say, or a flower, became the most wonderful things imaginable. Before, I just sort of saw the world around me as if it was wallpaper, and went about my business. But after, I knew I might die, and it made everyday things precious.”
She laughed again, but it was dry, a hedge against the emotions that were washing through her. “An experience like that changes you. It either defeats you, or you become a better, stronger person. I like to think I did become a better, stronger person.”
She wasn’t eager to stay with that memory, still traumatic to her, so I let it go.
“What’s the second worst thing that ever happened to you?” I asked.
No pause to think about this one. “When your father took off a couple of times it was pretty awful,” she said, with a quick, rigid laugh. “That was a blow to my ego.”
I was startled at the shift. “I guess it must have been,” I said. “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”
She was willing to explore this catastrophe. “I mean,” she said, “I thought, my God. How am I going to deal with this? But you know, you couldn’t blame him entirely. I had to take some of the blame myself.”
“Wasn’t that last mess set off by Ron Surry’s presence? I have to admit you kind of brought that one on yourself. A little bit, anyway.”
“Well, I would never have had your uncle come there the way he did, but your father was all for it. He said, ‘Oh wonderful, have your brother here.’ At the back of it was the thought, aha! She can go live with him, and I can get rid of her. He told me that, actually. He said, ‘What do you think I had your brother come out here for?’ You see, your father can be a very devious person.”
Over the years I’d thought of my father in various uncomplimentary ways—as harsh, insensitive and occasionally as cruel, but devious? I’d seen him try to be devious, mostly during family card games. He was the world’s most incompetent cheater. I’d spent a half-dozen Christmas night Rumoli games tucking cards under my seat while everyone was focused on his lame attempts to do the same.
I looked up, and saw that she was waiting for a response. “Yes,” I said. “I suppose he can be, but only in a short-sighted kind of way. He doesn’t think very far ahead or very deeply when it comes to personal matters.”
The hint of a sneer twisted her lips, and then she plunged on. “You do know,” she said, her voice dropping a little in case anyone was listening, “that the basis of that affair he had with that woman was that he’d become impotent? He was on all this medication for his heart. But he blamed me for the impotence.
“‘You don’t inspire me anymore,’ he’d say. ‘You’re just an old hag.’ And I said, ‘Please, Hartley, go and discuss it with your doctor. I’m sure it’s your medication.’ But he said, ‘No, no bloody way.’ And then, of course, he goes off with this woman who is a nurse. And, of course, sure enough she tells him the same thing.
“So the next thing I heard was, ‘Mommy, can I come home?’ It wasn’t Mommy’s fault at all. But anyway, to have your husband walk out on you is an awful blow to your ego. The first time he left he said it was your grandmother’s fault.”
I must have looked startled, so she took a deep breath and explained.
“He left me twice. Both times there was another woman involved. The first time was while we were still in Prince George, and that time he even went so far as to buy a house for his girlfriend in White Rock. The reason I found out was because I was keeping all his accounts, and I found myself writing cheques to make the mortgage payments on the house. So I went to see the woman— she was a social worker living in Prince George—when he went up to Grande Prairie on business. He didn’t know until quite a while afterward I’d talked to her.”
She paused, as if reliving the details had become acutely painful.
“Go on,” I said. “I probably ought to know about this.”
“You see, he’d just sold his business, and the word around town was that he was quite a wealthy man. This woman had a little house, and had put it up for sale, and he came across her because he was looking for property to buy. Meanwhile I was cleaning up the accounts receivable on his business after he’d sold it, and they were a mess. I had to work backward about four months because there were nothing but mistakes—he’d been doing it by himself. So I was working about eight or ten hours a day on this, and your grandmother was staying with us, bless her heart, and she was trying to talk to him and entertain him, and naturally that was driving him crazy. Part of what set things off was that he had nothing to do. The people who’d bought the plant had told him to stop coming around. So he was at loose ends, and ripe for something. And I had no time to go anywhere with him because I had to get these account books cleaned up for him.
“The next thing I knew he’d gotten this girlfriend, and he’d bought a house for her. So anyway, as I said, I dropped around to chat with her. I’d talked to old Hub King, the family lawyer, about it before I went, and he’d said, ‘Well, the man is nuts.’ So I went to this woman and I said, ‘You know, Hartley, my husband, who you’ve decided to take off with, is under a lot of stress, and the day he moves out of our house, his lawyer and I are going to have him declared mentally incompetent—which Hub King had promised he was going to try to do—and so he won’t have any money that we don’t give him. And I will never divorce him while he’s ill.’”
“That was devious of you.”
She laughed at the turnabout. “Maybe it was,” she said. “But there was a lot at stake. Anyway, when he came home from Grande Prairie and went bouncing over to see her, she dumped him. He’d already bought the house, and they’d both been down on a couple of weekends to look it over. You didn’t know that? He ran away on me twice.”
While I was trying to think of something to say, she went on. “You see,” she said, “your father needs somebody to build him up all the time. Or he needs someone to lord it over so he can feel . . . ah, I don’t know what he needs, and I guess I’ve stopped caring. You do know the girls and Ron were very cross with me the second time I took him back, don’t you? They said, ‘You’re an idiot. You know he’s not going to change.’”
“Did he change?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I stopped caring about it somewhere along the line. I kept things together because I thought our family wouldn’t be the same if your father and I divorced. You’d be going here, you’d be going there, and that wasn’t my family. The family needed us to be together, so . . . I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
She took a small sip of tea, stared out across the small garden, and waited for me to get her out of it. Had staying been a good idea? On her terms, yes: family was everything. But all the divorces amongst her four children suggested another possible way of seeing things. Should I tell her this? No. I did what you’re supposed to do in difficult moments: I made a joke of it.
“I can remember the second affair pretty clearly,” I said. “The Grecian Formula 16 he used to make himself look younger, and how ridiculous it was when it turned his hair bright yellow.”
“Well,” she said, not buying the deflection, “I knew how to handle the second one better than the first. He came to see me—and slept with me—the day he moved down to White Rock. I was sick with the flu, and he had a key and came in. I was still doing the bookkeeping and he had to come and sign some cheques. So, before he went down there he stopped in—he’d already taken a truckload down filled with furniture—and now he had his car with a U-Haul on the back, and he parked it in the carport and stayed there that night, and then he took off anyway the next morning. But ten days later he was back.
“This time I said, ‘You can go to hell,’ but of course I didn’t mean it. Anyway, marriage wasn’t heaven. There were a lot of difficult things that happened.”
“So, how important is sexual happiness?”
She gazed at me as if she didn’t quite understand the question. “Very,” she said, after a moment. “But your father doesn’t know what sexual equality is. Sex was all for him. And if you tried to do anything, you were a slut. He’s a terrible prude. He didn’t know what sex is about, not for a woman. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t just for his physical release. That it could be joyous. Providing . . . Well, it takes two. And it rises and falls—it doesn’t stay static, ever. But, if you haven’t got it . . . I don’t think anyone can be completely happy without it. I think when it’s mutual it’s what makes a marriage . . . sometimes. Companionship is important, too. Very, very important.”
I could see she was unhappy with the way this was going, so I changed directions—or so I thought. “What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever done?” I asked.
This got me another thoughtful pause. I thought she was trying to decide what had surprised her most, but I was wrong. She had it instantly.
“I had my own chance to take off, once,” she said. “It startled me that I had the guts to say no when I wanted to say yes with every bit of me.”
“And you said no anyway? That surprised you?”
“Well, it surprised me that I had something in me that had to do the right thing. The other person came to the same conclusion. So, we decided, together. And the funny part of it is, I’ve never been sorry, and yet I’ve never lost the memory of that moment when I had that choice. So really, I’ve had it both ways. Maybe if we’d said yes to it, who knows? It might have ended up with disillusionment and unhappiness. Family is so, so much a part of me, and yet I would have been lost if that moment had never happened. But then I wouldn’t have been completely happy without all of you.”
“So you’re saying that life sometimes presents us with situations where there’s no right choice?”
“Yes. Not often, but yes, it happens. And the choice he and I made was the right choice, for both of us. It was a situation where we couldn’t win.”
She refilled her teacup from the pot—Leanna had freshened it—and leaned back. “It would have been glorious, though. For a while, at least. But you know, you never lose the feeling. The most amazing part of it, as far as I’m concerned, when I say you never lose it, is that over the years when I got utterly desperate, in my dreams this moment came back and gave me the courage to go on. It still does. It’s like it happened yesterday, and we’re still there, you know? So maybe I did the right thing. I haven’t ever really regretted the decision. Not often, anyway.”
“Is your life a success?”
“I think it is. I don’t feel like I’m a failure. I really don’t. I may be a jack of all trades and master of none, but I think I’ve done—not all but—many of the things I wanted to.”
“What did you accomplish that you didn’t think you’d be able to?”
This got a laugh without a trace of cynicism in it. “Sticking around as long as I have,” she said.
I felt a pang when she said this. There was a powerful current of anxiety in it, and a smaller one of guilt. It had never really occurred to me during those years that she was in distress, nor that she would not be as she’d always been: permanent, there forever.
“I guess,” I said, “when you had cancer that first time, you didn’t think you’d be around forever. I mean, you may have thought you’d survive it, but you didn’t think you’d live as long a life as you have.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, and giggled.
“What else didn’t you think you could do?”
“Well, this is my silly sense of humour. Most people wouldn’t think they were successes, but they were my successes.”
“What are they?”
“I think I’ve been good to many people and I’ve had a lot of wonderful friends. As a girl growing up, mostly because we lived in the country for so long, I never thought I’d have these continuing friendships. When your father and I lived in Camrose, for instance, I made two friends there, and we corresponded until they both died. One of them later visited your grandmother every week for the 15 years she was there. She never missed a week.”
“What is it about the loyalty of others that surprises you? It isn’t like you didn’t earn it.”
“I suppose maybe I did. But it still surprises me.”
“Time for a harder question: What did you fail at that you wanted to achieve?”
“I’d like to have been a poet, I’d like to have been a writer like you, maybe . . .” I could see her rejecting this as she said it. “I’d just like to have excelled at something, and I never did. I would like to have done just one thing in an exceptional way.”
“You were exceptional at family-building, weren’t you?”
Her eyes brightened, then darkened. “Oh, yes,” she said, barely audibly. “I guess so, but I meant . . . I would like to have played the piano, but I didn’t have the talent. Just one thing I wanted to really do well. And I didn’t have it.”
“It’s okay, Mum,” I said. “You did a lot of things well. Many more things than you can see, and I’m not just talking about your recipe for shepherd’s pie.”
She smiled at this, and seemed to relax.
“So let me ask you this,” I said. “What do you think constitutes a good life?”
“Achievement,” she answered. “Companionship. And love. Not necessarily in that order.”
This was a painful admission for her, admitting that she never got enough of those things. Not the first for herself, and not the last two from my father. As I sat there I recalled an elderly couple we’d seen together on the Skaha Lake boardwalk the last time I was in Penticton. I’d taken her down so we could walk through the autumn leaves—one of her favourite things—and we were sitting on a bench beside the boardwalk. The couple, in their eighties, had been holding hands as they strolled along the lake. Watching them, my mother broke into tears.
“So tell me this,” I said. “Is life worth the trouble?”
“Yes,” she said, unequivocally. “I’m glad I’ve lived. I’m glad I’m me.”
“If you had it to do over again, what things would you change?”
Her face went still. “Well,” she said, “we don’t know ahead of time what companion we’re choosing for life. And how can you know? So I don’t know if I’d made a different choice that it might not have been worse. But beyond that, I don’t think there are many things I’d do differently if I could. I always wanted to be a nurse, but that wasn’t possible because of your grandmother’s tuberculosis. And in a way, I’ve fulfilled that desire by volunteering at the hospital all these years.”
“What things from the past do you miss most?”
For a moment, she seemed puzzled by the question. “I don’t really think there’s any specific thing I miss because possessions were never very important to me. So I can’t say I feel devastated by anything that’s gone. I do miss your grandmother’s sense of humour. You know, it’s odd. If something amusing happens even today, I still hear her chuckle. Everyone forgot what a fine sense of humour she had.”
I could sense that she was tiring, and so I fired off the next question: “Is it our duty to take care of others?”
“It’s a little ambiguous when you say ‘others,’” she said.
“Well, it’s an ambiguous question. I guess I’m asking whether we’re our brothers’ keepers?”
Her face hardened. “Some of our brothers’ keepers, anyway. But not all.”
“Where do you draw the line?”
“I think you help people when they’re desperate or lost. But you keep your eyes open, because needy people are often out of control, and they can be ruthless and cruel.”
“Does love conquer all?”
She gave me a calculating look. “No.”
“What does it conquer?”
She laughed aloud. “A lot of things,” she said, almost gaily. “Common sense, most of the time. It’s also true that life would be unbearable without love. But there are other things that are necessary besides love.”
“Would you say that love does conquer life’s emptiness?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, a certain kind of love does. And that’s enough.”
“Why did you succeed at the things your brothers and sisters each failed miserably at? I mean, basically, at personal happiness.”
“I think I was designed to be a happy person, whereas my brothers and sisters were so filled with themselves and knowing everything that they didn’t have time to enjoy the small things that make people happy.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I’m not sure what you mean by this.”
“You know, in my own private mind I thought they were each brilliantly intelligent, but they were, well, oversexed. All of them. I didn’t see it until I was older, but my father was like that, too. And his brother, Uncle Vin, took Aunt Blanche to Paris on their honeymoon in the 1890s, and spent every night of their honeymoon chasing prostitutes. He was sort of the black sheep of the family anyway. That’s why he came out to the United States. His family refused to speak to him for 20 years.”
“I remember Uncle Vin as a kindly old man who tied different fruit to his trees to impress us when we visited.”
“Well, good and evil are usually mixed together in people. Uncle Vin had some wonderful qualities. But when he was a younger man he liked to cheat on his wife, and a lot of other things you don’t need to know about.”
“Where do you think those sorts of urges came from?”
“I don’t know. But that side of the family was obsessed with sex. Father had eight children, two with his first wife, and then six children with your grandmother, bang, bang, bang, bang.”
“A person could do that by having sex eight times.”
“Not the Surrys. Some of the things Nana told me, late in her life, say otherwise. And of course, he was so much older than she was. I know that Alan had a problem with sex. And Boydie was obsessed with it. And Enid. God. I can remember her saying to me one time, ‘What’s the most important thing about sex for you?’ I answered, ‘I’m not sure what you mean by sex, but I like the cuddling and the loving.’
“‘Oh, bullshit,’ she said. ‘Not me.’”
“She was saying that she liked to screw?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I guess so. And Daphne, she was an enigma. Nobody ever knew what Daphne was thinking. She’d say the most dreadful things, always trying to shock people. And how much of it was real and how much show, I honestly don’t know.
“You know, it’s odd,” she continued as another thought struck her. “In another way, my father was an extremely proper man. The day he went to the hospital—he died four or five hours later—he said to your grandmother, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Jessie, I’ve never looked at another woman since the day I met you.’
“The trouble was, that was the only really wonderful thing she had to remember from their marriage. He had the disease of jealousy, and it ruined all our lives. He was jealous of his own son Alan, and by the time he was 15, Alan left home, changed his name, and didn’t use his real name again to the day he died.
“He was cruel, my father. Alan was ill and so delicate as a child that Mum gave him more attention than she did the rest of us. He was her first-born, after all. But it made my father insanely jealous—of his own son! Can you imagine that?
“I remember when I first got married, your father and I moved down to Camrose, and I had the twins and he’d be away all week. Then he’d come home weekends and disappear playing golf all weekend. So I didn’t see him, period. Very selfish. I remember Mom came down one weekend on the bus. Nobody came to meet her, but she knew where we lived in this little town—it wasn’t hard to find, I guess. And so the moment she got in the door she said, ‘Where’s Hartley?’
“‘Oh, he’s out at the golf club,’ I said. ‘He plays golf all weekend. I think he’s got a woman out there.’
“She jumped on me, and said, ‘I never want to hear you talk that way again. Your father ruined my life and all you kids’ lives with his jealousy, and now you’re starting. It’s something you’ve got to fight.’
“She was odd that way. She defended your father against me every time if he and I were arguing, and he never had a clue she did that.”
“That’s sort of strange,” I said. “You’re talking about the person who went out of her way to tell me, when I was about 12, that my father hadn’t wanted me to be born.”
My mother shrugged. “He didn’t,” she said. “He didn’t want any more children. I was the one who wanted another baby. One reason he didn’t want another child was that he was just building the house you grew up in, and that’s all he could think about. He’d begun by digging the basement—he had just enough money to do the basement. Then he’d go off to the bank, and get them to loan him 50 dollars, and he’d build something more, pay it off, and go back to the bank for another loan. That whole house was built that way, in bits and pieces. He’d hire a carpenter who’d show him how to put a window in, and then he’d fire the carpenter and put all the other windows in himself. He did the same thing with the door jambs, and everything else. Your father could figure out almost anything once he put his mind to it.
“But from his point of view it was a bad time to be thinking of having children. It was the middle of the war, and people still didn’t know what was going to happen, the house was unfinished, and he just didn’t think it was wise to have another child in those circumstances. I pointed out to him I really hadn’t gotten pregnant by myself, but that didn’t matter to him. He was upset about it for a long time, but really, he got over it once you were born. So your grandmother made more of it than was there. Toward the end of her life, she had nothing to do but think about things that had gone wrong, and I guess this grew into a significance it didn’t really have, along with a lot of other things. But so many times she’d take Hartley’s part when he and I were fighting, and even though I’d be furious with her, she’d say her piece. ‘Maybe you want to have an unhappy home like the one your father made for us,’ she’d say. ‘Well, jealousy is the best way to get that.’
“So I forced myself not to be jealous. I simply refused to allow myself to feel it. But it was hard. Your grandmother understood that. ‘You know he’s a travelling salesman,’ she’d say, ‘and he’s going to be away all the time. Are you going to be imagining all the things he’s going to do, like your father did every time I left the house?’”
“I’ve wondered that about Dad myself, him being a travelling salesman,” I said.
She shrugged. “I don’t think so. But it was true that he found being around all of us hard to take.”
“I remember that when he went into business, he went down there all the time at night. He didn’t seem to have a lot of heart for family life.”
“Your father didn’t have much of a heart, period,” she said. Then, as if she’d realized that it wasn’t that simple, she added, “You know, he couldn’t hold you when you were throwing up or sick, but if you threw up on the floor, he could clean that up, and he often did, cheerfully. From the day I had that breast removed, he’s never touched me there. If his arm touches me there during the night, he flinches, even now. Imagine the effect that has had.
“One of the wonderful moments in my secret relationship was when he came to Prince George. He said he was making chance visits here and there, but the truth was that he’d come to see me. Anyway, the first thing he said to me when we were alone was, ‘Let me see it.’
“And he ran his hand over the scar, the way he had when I was in Vancouver for the radiation treatments. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘Not too bad at all. They did quite a credible job. You’ll be fine.’ He was running his hands back and forth over the scar while he said all this. He wasn’t revolted at all. So, there you are.”
“There I am,” I repeated. “I didn’t know any of this.”
She gave a short, curiously bitter laugh. “Now you know.”
I shut off the tape recorder so we could go off the record. “What aren’t you telling me?” I said.
She smiled. “Use your imagination. You’re supposed to be good at that.”
“Do you know if he’s still alive?”
“I don’t,” she admitted. “Old age takes even those kinds of things from you. I always used to know where he was.” She named a family friend who’d been one of his business associates. “Once he said to me, ‘I don’t know what you did to that man. I’ve travelled all over the world with him and he never looked at anyone before. What did you do to him?’ I gave him my best blue-eyed smile and said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Neither of us ever admitted to anyone that there was anything between us, but he knew.”
“Who else knew?”
“No one, really. It was my secret. Or, ours, rather, because he never told anyone either, as far as I know. I think your sisters may suspect something of it, but we’ve never talked about it.”
She fell silent, and I kept a respectful distance from it, not wanting to disturb her reverie. After a moment, she looked up.
“You know that your father found his letters to me, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know there were letters,” I admitted.
“There were quite a few. When your father found them, he phoned my man’s wife in a fury and said—I don’t know what he said to her. When I talked to my man a few months later in Vancouver, he sat me down and said, ‘God, now what have you done? I told you to destroy those letters, but somehow I knew you weren’t going to, and now, look what’s happened. What did you tell Hartley?’
“‘I said that you were just helping me through the cancer, which was true. I said that you encouraged me—which was more than he was capable of. I guess I lost my temper when I said that. I told Hartley that you actually cared about me, and not just about business. I told him that you saved my life. That’s what I told Hartley.’”
“‘Did he buy it?’ he wanted to know. ‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, I told my wife more or less the same. She was a little upset at first, but she got over it.’
“The truth was that he did save my life. But it could have been so much more. Maybe if we’d lived closer it wouldn’t have ended the way it did, I don’t know. But anyway, that’s how it goes. As I said, he’s the reason I’ve been able to cope with life the way I have. You never lose something like that, even if you . . .”
Her voice trailed off into a suddenly rich silence. It wasn’t one I was going to tamper with, because I could see that she was back in that moment of decision, savouring it.
“I think,” she continued, “that there are special things in the world that you don’t go out looking for. They happen, they’re there, they’re a fact of life. If you experience them, you’re lucky.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty about this,” I said. “He was a good man, and I think you’re right: He did save your life.”
“We didn’t allow what was between us to hurt anybody. I mean, we didn’t talk only about ourselves. We talked about our kids and what we hoped for them. He was concerned because his wife’s parents were going to simply give everything to his son, and he didn’t want that. He wanted his son to earn things. He said, ‘My parents didn’t put a silver spoon in my mouth. They told me to go out and earn what I wanted. So I won’t allow them to do that to my son.’ The last time I heard from him the son was the president of some big organization in the United States, I forget the name of it.
“When I think about him even now,” she said, “I feel nice. I feel nice inside. I don’t know whether that’s right or not. Maybe that’s not the right description, either, eh? But somehow there was never anything wrong about it. It didn’t hurt anybody. Brian? It didn’t hurt anybody.”
I reached over and touched her hand. “No, it didn’t hurt anyone.”