I see no end of it, but the turning upside down of the entire world. —Erasmus
Only the gumbo is immortal. —Blondie McCormack
IDA STARTED TO COLLECT PHOTOGRAPHS of duets and trios caught in a moment, very particular, as moments are. Sometimes, but not necessarily, deciding the shape of post-war Europe. Sometimes just hanging around.
She was fond of one that was particularly offhand: Winston Churchill standing beside a fireplace with Canada’s secretary of state, Lester B. Pearson. Pearson, whom everybody called Mike, is smiling that toothy, wholesome smile, whereas Churchill looks dyspeptic and embarrassed. Maybe what’s embarrassing Churchill is the fact that Mike Pearson is wearing the exact same clothes as he is. Exact. The bow tie, the deep blue pinstripe suit, the watch chain; they’re doing the same thing with their hands, left hand in trouser pocket, right hand holding a cigar in front of a paunch in a vest. Ida loved that picture. They looked liked such nice men, just standing around after dinner. It helped her to start getting dressed in the morning.
She got out of bed mostly for Dianna’s benefit. Dianna watched Ida like a baby hawk. If Ida hadn’t made it, she would have proved to Dianna that her mother had been afraid when she died. That may not be reasonable, but it’s true. So Ida rallied and tried her best to become reacquainted with the world.
Here we were, with the Second World War vets all grown up and running the show less than twenty years after yet another armistice, and it seemed natural to consider the circumstances in which we were about to experience an atomic war. It must have been all that war-jism. Dianna accepted the threat of nuclear war as if it were a birthmark on the face of reality. Bill, Ida, Eli and I were stumped. We wanted to protect Dianna from fear, but we didn’t know how to do that, short of giving her an anaesthetic, and we did think she should be awake, aware. It was a dilemma. I had to work a miracle. So—I made a casserole and set the table.
Soft food was just the thing. Here we were, trying to provide Dianna with a sense of terra firma in Canada, with nothing better to offer than a lunatic prime minister named John Diefenbaker, an overwrought prairie lawyer forced to play monkey in the middle between Russia and the States, two superpowers at high noon. Yes, I thought, in a pinch, make a shepherd’s pie. I sat Ida at the head of the table and passed her a quart of the casserole on a paper plate. “Worcester sauce?” I offered.
She took it reluctantly, saying, “Why are we doing this gravy stuff?” She added grumpily, “I don’t know if I can eat.” The pressure had been building up intensely with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ida spread the shepherd’s pie miserably about her soggy plate and put down her fork, bursting out, “Let’s face it. Diefenbaker’s nuts. We’re looking at a nuclear holocaust, and we’ve got a complete nutcase as our prime minister.”
A pause. Bill, tired, seated cross-legged on his dining-room chair and wearing his white cotton pyjamas, said, “It is a bit tricky.” We all stared into our mashed potatoes.
“We’ve got to keep things in, um, perspective,” I said brightly. “Diefenbaker makes this country seem… small.”
“Small,” said Bill.
I passed the creamed corn. “Eat what’s put before you.” And went on. “Our prime minister is a Saskatchewan man. He may be paranoid, yes. But he’s paranoid in such a Canadian way.”
“Paranoid about his Eaton’s card,” said Eli. I plucked his paw from his lap and kissed it.
“Paranoid about the air-defence agreement with the States,” I said, waving the margarine before Ida’s nose.
“Paranoid about being a nuclear ballboy,” said Eli.
“I’m proud of that,” I said. “I really am.”
Eli’s blood sugar took a sudden surge. “Diefenbaker hates being a serf to the Americans.”
“He hates it!” chimed Bill.
“For sure!” said Eli.
Ida peered at Eli and Bill, through a glass darkly. Suddenly she figured it out, turned to Dianna and chirped, “What a guy!” and bit into a slice of Wonder Bread.
Dianna watched Ida chew. “Paranoid about Kennedy,” she said, as if in her sleep.
Bill moved over to crouch at his daughter’s side. “Khrushchev’s not paranoid about Kennedy,” he said softly. “Khrushchev’s worried about Kennedy.” Bill ran his hand over Dianna’s forehead. “Nobody’s going to be paranoid any more, Dianna. The war is over. We’re at peace.” His lie sat on the table. Ida cleared her throat, embarrassed.
“President Kennedy thinks Prime Minister Diefenbaker is an idiot,” said Dianna. “That’s what Richard says.” She yawned.
“Shhhhh,” said Bill.
“Dief doesn’t care,” I lullabied. “He’s used to that kind of thing. He’s a Western Canadian.”
We had strawberry cheesecake with whipped cream in the living room, with the TV on but the sound off. Ida kept shaking her head, saying, “What is this stuff?” I followed it up with a nice cup of Ovaltine, turning down the lights, speaking softly, “Diefenbaker wants the North, like a frontier. Imagine. An enormous landscape with a tiny ecosystem, huge and fragile as an obese little girl.” Ida yawned. Dianna laid her head upon her godmother’s shoulder. I removed their plates, softly, softly. “One sneeze with DDT and every gull’s egg falls to pieces.”
“That was rather good,” said Ida. She couldn’t keep her eyes open.
We were stuffed into obeisance. Outside caromed the moonless night. The sky was a bulletproof ceiling, remote-controlled, ready to fall on our heads. Ida had come up. And the governments had bunkers underground, and the missiles were hidden in submarines in the surrounding seas and in thick lead silos buried deep in the deserts. Ida said she could hear the missiles whistling down under the earth. She always did have good hearing.
RICHARD FOUND DIANNA a position in Winnipeg’s most limestone law firm—what he called “the old firm,” which meant no Ukrainians or Jews. It made her an instant “spinster,” or what they’d soon call “a women’s libber.” She dressed the part, but you could see the heat build up in her, especially when Jack was around. Though she was only twenty-six, Dianna considered herself dry around the ears. She sustained a lonely life. She saw a lot of Richard.
Richard was the most static man. He absolutely would not let anything happen. Nervous people have a hard time with change.
Dianna was determined to remain lucid. Her mother had been a romantic. So Dianna was anti-romantic. She didn’t realize that Richard was a romantic too. A nervous romantic is a dangerous thing. Richard was especially nervous about Jack.
Among her many dads, Dianna’s real father, Bill of the butterfly garden was neither romantic nor entirely rational. Bill walked beneath the shattered sky as transitive as a new leaf. In his white pyjamas, he walked so much that he remained lithe and light. Somehow my dark daughter had given us this bright man full of grace.
With Helen gone, poor Dianna had no mother to kill. I did try to offer up myself; I criticized, drew inaccurate analogies from my own life, read her diary, felt hurt and anxious. I did what I could, but she didn’t take the bait. And she misunderstood her father’s scepticism. In her hungry mouth, his indifference tasted of bile. She might have avoided romanticism, but she sure got trapped by rage.
In the era of “mega-deaths,” of intercontinental ballistic missiles and all that bogus sanity, it was easy to mistake scepticism for cynicism. The poor kid started to believe in some kind of anxiety she liked to call Man’s Freedom. (At the time, I guess she was a man.) Despite her position at the old firm, Dianna began to talk about “taking action against American imperialism.”
“What are you staring at?” I asked her. She was transfixed by the blank television set.
“Things as they are,” said she.
“Darling,” I said, and handed her an old sketch pad from her girlhood, “if I fetch you a dead squirrel, won’t you draw us a nice picture?”
She kissed my withered cheek. “Peace, Gramma. I’m going to kick butt.” Then she rubbed her lip. I’d discovered the energy to deliver a small jolt.
She rode off to deface an American flag at the Legislative Building. She was, she said, politically involved. Dianna was mad. So was the Hungarian refugee who took the placard reading “PIGS GET OUT OF CUBA” out of Dianna’s hands and broke it over her head. When she came to, she was in the back seat of my car, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, bleeding all over my leather seats, being driven home by the same Hungarian (weeping) who had rifled through her wallet till he found her address, who drove her all the way to St. Norbert, who backed out of the car apologizing, I think, in Hungarian, I guess, who was last seen walking north back to Winnipeg in a most abject state, of whom we have not heard since.
RICHARD’S CADILLAC ROLLING PAST our house and down the drive. I assumed he’d be going to Bill and Dianna’s cabin by the butterfly field, and hobbled out after him. But he drove on, down to the cup of the oxbow, to Marie’s grotto, and parked. By the time I got there, he and Jack were talking at the screen door. In fact, the interview was over. Richard, about to get back into his car, pointed his finger at Jack. “He told you he was from Toronto,” he said to me.
“What does it matter?” I asked.
“I don’t like being lied to. I’ve had enough for one lifetime.”
“Helen never lied to you.”
He stopped. “I was talking about this fellow Jack.” Paused. “Besides, she lied to all of us.”
I marvelled at the black sickle in his blue eye, wanting to poke my finger into it.
Jack turned his back on us, the door squeezed shut behind him. Wasn’t like Jack not to call out one of his flirtatious insults.
Richard bristled. “I’ve spent a small fortune tracking him down. Listen, Blondie. Nobody knows who he is. Not my detective. Not the RCMP. Not even the tax department.”
“That’s a very wide net you’re throwing.” The sun darted through the branches of pine and the despondent shadow of spruce, and hit me on the head.
“He’s hiding something.”
“Yes. I like that about him.” Black splotches in my vision. Richard’s gold head seemed to consume all the light.
“He shouldn’t be allowed to stay here under false pretenses.”
“That’s not for you to say.”
“Actually, Blondie, I’ve got enough of a stake in this property to feel I do have a say.”
“If I weren’t ninety-two years of age, Richard, I would punch you in the nose.”
He stepped back. And smiled. “Falling behind in the taxes again. I don’t mind for myself. I can carry you. But this land—” he looked around; the black spruce sank deeper into the bog—“it could go for a song at auction, if the municipality decides to call your debt.”
“You always were a pain in the ass, Richard, but I never thought I’d consider you an enemy.”
“I’m not your enemy. I’m your benefactor.” He touched my elbow. Then he looked up sharply. Dianna crossed by the car, angling sideways. She had a black eye and her hair was still matted with blood. She smiled blandly at us and nodded hopefully, and then backed her way into Jack’s place, entered without knocking and closed the door firmly behind her.