MY GRANDMOTHER NEVER LIKED BABIES. At least, this is how the story goes. We have a picture of Dad as a small boy sitting on her knee. She is wearing a blue silk blouse and large pearl-drop earrings, holding a thin cigarette loosely between her manicured fingers. She has just learned that her parents have been murdered. She stares off into the distance. It is as though the child in her lap—my father—has been placed there by a stranger, or belongs to someone else entirely.
Granny covered her depression with words. Armed with a cocktail and a cigarette, she made herself the centre of any group. She knew history, politics, opera, literature. If anyone else tried to speak, Granny talked right over them.
At the end of our summers with her when I was a child, she would stand in the doorway in her pale blue and white checked Hermès dressing gown, crying as my father pulled our family station wagon down the long driveway. She was terrified of being left alone.
During the first crippling depression I suffered in my early twenties, I called her at the condominium in Florida where she wintered. “I’m starting to think life is inherently painful,” I told her.
I remember the uncharacteristic silence. I could hear the ice cubes clinking in her rye and then the sharp inhale on her cigarette. From farther behind her came the muffled sound of waves crashing on Longboat Key. Her silence lengthened. For once, she was searching for words.
When she finally spoke, I was relieved to hear her glamorous European accent; relieved she was still there at the other end of the line at all.
“Yes,” she said simply. “You’re right.”
Granny was twenty-two when the Nazis entered Czechoslovakia. She was newly married, with a baby. Her husband—my grandfather—was out of the country that day; from his position of relative safety, he was able to secure the visas they needed to leave.
My grandparents used those visas: I’m alive today as proof.
There were visas for Granny’s parents, too; she had agreed to flee the country only because her parents would follow. The plan was for the family to meet in Canada when all the “Jewish business” had blown over. But Granny’s parents delayed. They couldn’t believe they were in danger.
They would leave next week, they said.
Then the week after.
Finally, of course, it was too late.
I think of those visas sometimes, sitting on a dusty oak desk in a vacated flat, bathed in momentary sunlight from a thin space below the drapes and then falling into darkness again.
Granny passed her depression on to my father, who refers to it as “the bad blood.” I think of his description when I wake in the early-morning hours, swamped with existential dread. The bad blood arrives as though a tap has been turned on. My body is flooded with the toxic liquid. My heart, against my will, pumps it into every part of my being. The bad blood makes it hard to do simple things: wash a cereal bowl, lift sunglasses to my face. Later—months or years—it leaves with the same squeak of finality, the heavy, rusted tap being wrested closed.
The idea of blood as the source of disease is, of course, ancient. The Greek and Roman philosophers and physicians believed blood was one of four humours that, when out of balance, had dire consequences. Before Sigmund Freud’s popularization of the unconscious mind, “tainted blood” was often seen as the source of insanity. It’s a notion that persists—blood has a way of asserting itself. During the Spanish Inquisition, great numbers of Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism. Generations later, their ancestors found their way back to the truth of who they were. They had a phrase for history’s siren song: la sangre llama.
The blood is calling.
I met Degan just after Granny died. We attended a writers’ conference together in Saskatchewan. We were the only two participants from Ontario and we decided to carpool. Our first date wasn’t a coffee or a glass of wine before a movie but three straight days in my parents’ old station wagon, driving three thousand kilometres across the country. We spent our first night together in a ratty motel room outside of Wawa. We were young writers; we needed to save money. And I knew right away I could trust him.
I went into the bathroom to put on my pyjamas and came out to find Degan propped up against the pillow of his single bed, surrounded by newspapers. Not just The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, but The Guardian, The New York Times. What, I wondered, could a person want with so much news?
I climbed into the twin bed on the opposite side of the room. We looked—it did not escape me—like an old married couple who had drifted, over the years, into a companionable friendship.
We read in our separate silences, said good night and turned out the light.
Degan arrives in Toronto the week after the Griffin Prize. He brings with him the last boxes and bags from our old home at the far edge of the country. He kisses me hello in the front hall of our new apartment. His hair is messy and there are circles under his blue eyes. “How did your meeting with the wedding dress lady go?” he asks.
He passes me a box. My legs buckle under its weight.
“It went fine,” I lie. I stagger across the hall and place the box on a pile of others. The new apartment has mirrors on all of the doors fronting the hall; from where I’m standing, facing the stairs, I can see the back of my own head.
“We should nail down the date for the wedding,” Degan says.
I pause with a hand on my low back, like a pregnant woman.
“Right?” he says. “Get on top of it and all that?”
“I guess.”
“I was thinking May.” He rolls his shoulders back, absently digging at the muscles. “But May might be buggy. If we do it outside.”
I’m quiet.
“Well?”
“Can we talk about this later?” I ask.
He nods his assent, turns away from me in a silence I can’t read. We spend the rest of the evening making house, unpacking late into the hot June night. Putting away colanders and cutting knives and knee socks and boxes and boxes of books. There’s a near-constant wail of sirens from up on St. Clair, and several eruptions of drunken yelling. “Who called it? Who called it?” we hear a man holler, followed by the shattering of glass. The sky darkens but never to black, tempered always by the neon glow of the street lamps and signs. In the morning, Degan will start his new job as a counsellor at a college downtown. This is the reason we have moved back to Toronto; this and to be closer to our families. We’re engaged, after all. Who knows what else might be in our future.
It’s after midnight when we finally fall into bed—which is to say, onto an old futon over which we’ve draped an ill-fitting sheet. Degan rolls toward me, puts an arm across my chest. “I’m happy we’re here,” he says.
I should feel something. I don’t know what. But something.
“What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asks, nuzzling my neck.
I pull away from his stubble. “Can’t you stay home with me?”
I know he’s looking forward to the first day of his new job, but I can’t help myself. I’m overcome with a sudden anxiety at the thought of being alone in the apartment.
Degan’s eyes soften. “I wish I could.” He pushes my hair off my forehead. “Organize your books,” he says. “And make sure you get out of the house. Go for a walk. Or a run. That’ll make you feel better.”
He knows me so well. Still, I roll away from him and curl my body around a pillow. I feel wooden, like an actor on a set.