THE OLDEST story is the story of flight, the search for greener pastures. But the pastures we flee, no matter how brown and blighted – these travel with us; they can’t be escaped.
My father was an immigrant. You would think this no penalty in a nation of immigrants, but even his carefully nurtured, precisely colloquial English didn’t spare him much pain. Nor did his marriage to a woman of British stock (as we called it then, before the vicious-sounding acronym Wasp came into use). That marriage should have paid him a dividend of respectability, but it only served to make her suspect in marrying him.
My father was a lonely man, a stranger who made matters worse by pretending he wasn’t. It’s true that he was familiar enough with his adopted terrain, more familiar than most because he was a salesman. Yet he was never really of it, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. I only began to understand what had happened to him when I, in my turn, left for greener pastures, heading east. I didn’t go so far, not nearly so far as he had. But I also learned that there is a price to be paid. Mine was a trivial one, a feeling of mild unease. At odd moments I betrayed myself and my beginnings; I knew that I lacked the genuine ring of a local. And I had never even left my own country.
Occasionally I return to the small Saskatchewan town near the Manitoba border where I grew up. To the unpractised eye of an easterner the countryside around that town might appear undifferentiated and monotonous, part and parcel of that great swath of prairie that vacationers drive through, pitying its inhabitants and deploring its restrooms, intent only on leaving it all behind as quickly as possible. But it is just here that the prairie verges on parkland, breaking into rolling swells of land, and here, too, that it becomes a little greener and easier on the eye. There is still more sky than any country is entitled to, and it teases the traveller into believing he can never escape it or find shelter under it. But if your attention wanders from that hypnotic expanse of blue and the high clouds drifting in it, the land becomes more comfortable as prospects shorten, and the mind rests easier on attenuated distances. There is cropland: fields of rye, oats, barley, and wheat; flat, glassy sloughs shining like mirrors in the sun; a solitary clump of trembling poplar; a bluff that gently climbs to nudge the sky.
When I was a boy it was a good deal bleaker. The topsoil had blown off the fields and into the ditches to form black dunes; the crops were withered and burnt; there were no sloughs because they had all dried up. The whole place had a thirsty look. That was during the thirties when we were dealt a doubly cruel hand of drought and economic depression. It was not a time or place that was kindly to my father. He had come out of the urban sprawl of industrial Belgium some twenty-odd years before, and it was only then, I think, that he was beginning to come to terms with a land that must have seemed forbidding after his own tiny country, so well tamed and marked by man. And then this land played him the trick of becoming something more than forbidding; it became fierce, and fierce in every way.
It was in the summer of 1931, the summer that I thought was merely marking time before I would pass into high school, that he lost his territory. For as long as I could remember I had been a salesman’s son, and then it ended. The company he worked for began to feel the pinch of the depression and moved to merge its territories. He was let go. So one morning he unexpectedly pulled up at the front door and began to haul his sample cases out of the Ford.
“It’s finished,” he said to my mother as he flung the cases on to the lawn. “I got the boot. I offered to stay on – strictly commission. He wouldn’t hear of it. Said he couldn’t see fit to starve two men where there was only a living for one. I’d have starved that other sonofabitch out. He’d have had to hump his back and suck the hind tit when I was through with him.” He paused, took off his fedora and nervously ran his index finger around the sweat-band. Clearing his throat, he said, “His parting words were ‘Good luck, Dutchie!’ I should have spit in his eye. Jesus H. Christ himself wouldn’t dare call me Dutchie. The bastard.”
Offence compounded offence. He thought he was indistinguishable, that the accent wasn’t there. Maybe his first successes as a salesman owed something to his naivete. Maybe in good times, when there was more than enough to go around, people applauded his performance by buying from him. He was a counterfeit North American who paid them the most obvious of compliments, imitation. Yet hard times make people less generous. Jobs were scarce, business was poor. In a climate like that, perceptions change, and perhaps he ceased to be merely amusing and became, instead, a dangerous parody. Maybe that district manager, faced with a choice, could only think of George Vander Elst as Dutchie. Then again, it might have been that my father just wasn’t a good enough salesman. Who can judge at this distance?
But for the first time my father felt as if he had been exposed. He had never allowed himself to remember that he was a foreigner, or if he had, he persuaded himself he had been wanted. After all, he was a northern European, a Belgian. They had been on the preferred list.
He had left all that behind him. I don’t even know the name of the town or the city where he was born or grew up. He always avoided my questions about his early life as if they dealt with a distasteful and criminal past that was best forgotten. Never, not even once, did I hear him speak Flemish. There were never any of the lapses you might expect. No pet names in his native language for my mother or myself; no words of endearment which would have had the comfort of childhood use. Not even when driven to one of his frequent rages did he curse in the mother tongue. If he ever prayed, I’m sure it was in English. If a man forgets the cradle language in the transports of prayer, love, and rage – well, it’s forgotten.
The language he did speak was, in a sense, letter-perfect, fluent, glib. It was the language of wheeler-dealers, and of the heady twenties, of salesmen, high-rollers, and persuaders. He spoke of people as live-wires, go-getters, self-made men. Hyphenated words to describe the hyphenated life of the seller, a life of fits and starts, comings and goings. My father often proudly spoke of himself as a self-made man, but this description was not the most accurate. He was a remade man. The only two pictures of him which I have in my possession are proof of this.
The first is a sepia-toned photograph taken, as nearly as I can guess, just prior to his departure from Belgium. In this picture he is wearing an ill-fitting suit, round-toed, clumsy boots, and a cloth cap. The second was taken by a street photographer in Winnipeg. My father is walking down the street, a snap-brim fedora slanting rakishly over one eye. His suit is what must have been considered stylish then – a three-piece pin-stripe – and he is carrying an overcoat casually over one arm. He is exactly what he admired most, a “snappy dresser,” or, since he always had trouble with his p’s, a “snabby dresser.” The clothes, though they mark a great change, aren’t really that important. Something else tells the story.
In the first photograph my father stands rigidly with his arms folded across his chest, unsmiling. Yet I can see that he is a young man who is hesitant and afraid; not of the camera, but of what this picture-taking means. There is a reason why he is having his photograph taken. He must leave something of himself behind with his family so he will not be forgotten, and carry something away with him so that he can remember. That is what makes this picture touching; it is a portrait of a solitary, an exile.
In the second picture his face is blunter, fleshier: nothing surprising in that, he is older. But suddenly you realize he is posing for the camera – not in the formal, European manner of the first photograph but in a manner far more unnatural. You see, he is pretending to be entirely natural and unguarded; yet he betrays himself. The slight smile, the squared shoulder, the overcoat draped over the arm, all are calculated bits of a composition. He has seen the camera from a block away. My father wanted to be caught in exactly this negligent, unassuming pose, sure that it would capture for all time his prosperity, his success, his adaptability. Like most men, he wanted to leave a record. And this was it. And if he had coached himself in such small matters, what would he ever leave to chance?
That was why he was so ashamed when he came home that summer. There was the particular shame of having lost his job, a harder thing for a man then than it might be today. There was the shame of knowing that sooner or later we would have to go on relief, because being a lavish spender he had no savings. But there was also the shame of a man who suddenly discovers that all his lies were transparent, and everything he thought so safely hidden had always been in plain view. He had been living one of those dreams. The kind of dream in which you are walking down the street, meeting friends and neighbours, smiling and nodding, and when you arrive at home and pass a mirror you see for the first time you are stark naked. He was sure that behind his back he had always been Dutchie. For a man with so much pride a crueller epithet would have been kinder; to be hated gives a man some kind of status. It was the condescension implicit in that diminutive, its mock playfulness, that made him appear so undignified in his own eyes.
And for the first time in my life I was ashamed of him. He didn’t have the grace to bear an injustice, imagined or otherwise, quietly. At first he merely brooded, and then like some man with a repulsive sore, he sought pity by showing it. I’m sure he knew that he could only offend, but he was under a compulsion to justify himself. He began with my mother by explaining, where there was no need for explanation, that he had had his job taken from him for no good reason. However, there proved to be little satisfaction in preaching to the converted, so he carried his tale to everyone he knew. At first his references to his plight were tentative and oblique. The responses were polite but equally tentative and equally oblique. This wasn’t what he had hoped for. He believed that the sympathy didn’t measure up to the occasion. So his story was told and retold, and each time it was enlarged and embellished until the injustice was magnified beyond comprehension. He made a damn fool of himself. This was the first sign, although my mother and I chose not to recognize it.
In time everyone learned my father had lost his job for no good reason. And it wasn’t long before the kids of the fathers he had told his story to were following me down the street chanting, “No good reason. No good reason.” That’s how I learned my family was a topical joke that the town was enjoying with zest. I suppose my father found out too, because it was about that time he stopped going out of the house. He couldn’t fight back and neither could I. You never can.
After a while I didn’t leave the house unless I had to. I spent my days sitting in our screened verandah reading old copies of Saturday Evening Post and Maclean’s. I was content to do anything that helped me forget the heat and the monotony, the shame and the fear, of that longest of summers. I was thirteen then and in a hurry to grow up, to press time into yielding the bounty I was sure it had in keeping for me. So I was killing time minute by minute with those magazines. I was to enter high school that fall and that seemed a prelude to adulthood and independence. My father’s misfortunes couldn’t fool me into believing that maturity didn’t mean the strength to plunder at will. So when I found an old Latin grammar of my mother’s I began to read that too. After all, Latin was the arcane language of the professions, of lawyers and doctors, those divinities owed immediate and unquestioning respect. I decided I would become either one, because respect could never be stolen from them as it had been from my father.
That August was the hottest I can remember. The dry heat made my nose bleed at night, and I often woke to find my pillow stiff with blood. The leaves of the elm tree in the front yard hung straight down on their stems; flies buzzed heavily, their bodies tip-tapping lazily against the screens, and people passing the house moved so languidly they seemed to be walking in water. My father, who had always been careful about his appearance, began to come down for breakfast barefoot, wearing only a vest undershirt and an old pair of pants. He rarely spoke, but carefully picked his way through his meal as if it were a dangerous obstacle course, only pausing to rub his nose thoughtfully. I noticed that he had begun to smell.
One morning he looked up at me, laid his fork carefully down beside his plate and said, “I’ll summons him.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” he said scornfully. “The bastard who fired me. He had no business calling me Dutchie. That’s slander.”
“You can’t summons him.”
“I can,” he said emphatically. “I’m a citizen. I’ve got rights. I’ll go to law. He spoiled my good name.”
“It is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I’ll sue the bastard,” he said vaguely, looking around to appeal to my mother, who had left the room. He got up from the table and went to the doorway. “Edith,” he called, “tell your son I’ve got the right to summons that bastard.”
Her voice came back faint and timid, “I don’t know, George.”
He looked back at me. “You’re in the same boat, sonny. And taking sides with them don’t save you. When we drown we all drown together.”
“I’m not taking sides,” I said indignantly. “Nobody’s taking sides. It’s facts. Can’t you see …,” but I didn’t get a chance to finish. He left, walked out on me. I could hear his steps on the stairway, tired, heavy steps. There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to make it plain that being on his side meant saving him from making a fool of himself again. I wanted him to know he could never win that way. I wanted him to win, not lose. He was my father. But he went up those steps, one at a time, and I heard his foot fall distinctly, every time. Beaten before he started, he crawled back into bed. My mother went up to him several times that day, to see if he was sick, to attempt to gouge him out of that room, but she couldn’t. It was only later that afternoon, when I was reading in the verandah, that he suddenly appeared again, wearing only a pair of undershorts. His body shone dully with sweat, his skin looked grey and soiled.
“They’re watching us,” he said, staring past me at an empty car parked in the bright street.
Frightened, I closed my book and asked who was watching us.
“The relief people,” he said tiredly. “They think I’ve got money hidden somewhere. They’re watching me, trying to catch me with it. The joke’s on them. I got no money.” He made a quick, furtive gesture that drew attention to his almost naked body, as if it were proof of his poverty.
“Nobody is watching us. That car’s empty.”
“Don’t take sides with them,” he said, staring through the screen. I thought someone from one of the houses across the street might see him like that, practically naked.
“The neighbours’ll see,” I said, turning my head to avoid looking at him.
“See what?” he asked, surprised.
“You standing like that. Naked almost.”
“There’s nothing they can do. A man’s home is his castle. That’s what the English say, isn’t it?”
And he went away laughing.
Going down the hallway, drawing close to his door that always stood ajar, what did I hope? To see him dressed, his trousers rolled up to mid-calf to avoid smudging his cuffs, whistling under his breath, shining his shoes? Everything as it was before? Yes. I hoped that. If I had been younger then and still believed that frogs were turned into princes with a kiss, I might even have believed it could happen. But I didn’t believe. I only hoped. Every time I approached his door (and that was many times a day, too many), I felt the queasy excitement of hope.
It was always the same. I would look in and see him lying on the tufted pink bedspread, naked or nearly so, gasping for breath in the heat. And I always thought of a whale stranded on a beach because he was such a big man. He claimed he slept all day because of the heat, but he only pretended to. He could feel me watching him and his eyes would open. He would tell me to go away, or bring him a glass of water; or, because his paranoia was growing more marked, ask me to see if they were still in the street. I would go to the window and tell him, yes, they were. Nothing else satisfied him. If I said they weren’t, his jaw would shift from side to side unsteadily and his eyes would prick with tears. Then he imagined more subtle and intricate conspiracies.
I would ask him how he felt.
“Hot,” he’d say, “I’m always hot. Can’t hardly breathe. Damn country,” and turn on his side away from me.
My mother was worried about money. There was none left. She asked me what to do. She believed women shouldn’t make decisions.
“You’ll have to go to the town office and apply for relief,” I told her.
“No, no,” she’d say, shaking her head. “I couldn’t go behind his back. I couldn’t do that. He’ll go himself when he feels better. He’ll snap out of it. It takes a little time.”
In the evening my father would finally dress and come downstairs and eat something. When it got dark he’d go out into the yard and sit on the swing he’d hung from a limb of our Manitoba maple years before, when I was a little boy. My mother and I would sit and watch him from the verandah. I felt obligated to sit with her. Every night as he settled himself onto the swing she would say the same thing. “He’s too big. It’ll never hold him. He’ll break his back.” But the swing held him up and the darkness hid him from the eyes of his enemies, and I like to think that made him happy, for a time.
He’d light a cigarette before he began to swing, and then we’d watch its glowing tip move back and forth in the darkness like a beacon. He’d flick it away when it was smoked, burning a red arc in the night, showering sparks briefly, like a comet. And then he’d light another and another, and we’d watch them glow and swing in the night.
My mother would lean over to me and say confidentially, “He’s thinking it all out. It’ll come to him, what to do.”
I never knew whether she was trying to reassure me or herself. At last my mother would get to her feet and call to him, telling him she was going up to bed. He never answered. I waited a little longer, believing that watching him I kept him safe in the night. But I always gave up before he did and went to bed too.
The second week of September I returned to school. Small differences are keenly felt. For the first time there was no new sweater, or unsharpened pencils, or new fountain pen whose nib hadn’t spread under my heavy writing hand. The school was the same school I had gone to for eight years, but that day I climbed the stairs to the second floor that housed the high school. Up there the wind moaned more persistently than I remembered it had below, and intermittently it threw handfuls of dirt and dust from the schoolyard against the windows with a gritty rattle.
Our teacher, Mrs. MacDonald, introduced herself to us, though she needed no introduction since everyone knew who she was – she had taught there for over ten years. We were given our texts and it cheered me a little to see I would have no trouble with Latin after my summer’s work. Then we were given a form on which we wrote a lot of useless information. When I came to the space which asked for Racial Origin I paused, and then, out of loyalty to my father, numbly wrote in “Canadian.”
After that we were told we could leave. I put my texts away in a locker for the first time – we had had none in public school – but somehow it felt strange going home from school empty-handed. So I stopped at the library door and went in. There was no school librarian and only a few shelves of books, seldom touched. The room smelled of dry paper and heat. I wandered around aimlessly, taking books down, opening them, and putting them back. That is, until I happened on Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. It was a small, thick book that nestled comfortably in the hand. I opened it and saw that the left-hand pages were printed in Latin and the right-hand pages were a corresponding English translation. I carried it away with me, dreaming of more than proficiency in Latin.
When I got home my mother was standing on the front step, peering anxiously up and down the street.
“Have you seen your father?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
She began to cry. “I told him all the money was gone. I asked him if I could apply for relief. He said he’d go himself and have it out with them. Stand on his rights. He took everything with him. His citizenship papers, baptismal certificate, old passport, bank book, everything. I said, ‘Everyone knows you. There’s no need.’ But he said he needed proof. Of what? He’ll cause a scandal. He’s been gone for an hour.”
We went into the house and sat in the living-room. “I’m a foolish woman,” she said. She got up and hugged me awkwardly. “He’ll be all right.”
We sat a long time listening for his footsteps. At last we heard someone come up the walk. My mother got up and said, “There he is.” But there was a knock at the door.
I heard them talking at the door. The man said, “Edith, you better come with me. George is in some trouble.”
My mother asked what trouble.
“You just better come. He gave the town clerk a poke. The constable and doctor have him now. The doctor wants to talk to you about signing some papers.”
“I’m not signing any papers,” my mother said.
“You’d better come, Edith.”
She came into the living-room and said to me, “I’m going to get your father.”
I didn’t believe her for a minute. She put her coat on and went out.
She didn’t bring him home. They took him to an asylum. It was a shameful word then, asylum. But I see it in a different light now. It seems the proper word now, suggesting as it does refuge, a place to hide.
I’m not sure why all this happened to him. Perhaps there is no reason anyone can put their finger on, although I have my ideas.
But I needed a reason then. I needed a reason that would lend him a little dignity, or rather, lend me a little dignity; for I was ashamed of him out of my own weakness. I needed him to be strong, or at least tragic. I didn’t know that most people are neither.
When you clutch at straws, anything will do. I read my answer out of Caesar’s The Gallic Wars, the fat little book I had carried home. In the beginning of Book I he writes, “Of all people the Belgae are the most courageous.…” I read on, sharing Caesar’s admiration for a people who would not submit but chose to fight and see glory in their wounds. I misread it all, and bent it until I was satisfied. I reasoned the way I had to, for my sake, for my father’s. What was he but a man dishonoured by faceless foes? His instincts could not help but prevail, and like his ancestors, in the end, on that one day, what could he do but make the shadows real, and fight to be free of them?