Silent Refuge

by Margrit Rosenberg Stenge

  The school year at Vanier College ended in late April, and Helen went to Israel for the summer with a youth group, which included her boyfriend, Mark, and two of her girlfriends. I kept some of the letters she sent Stefan and me from the kibbutz where she spent the first few weeks and read them again recently. We must have been so happy when we received these letters. They are descriptive, funny and precious. Helen, who came to love the kibbutz and the people there, wished she could spend the rest of the summer working in the fields and swimming in the big pool. However, her group left the kibbutz at the beginning of July to tour Israel.

  When Marvin and Lily left for Israel, our house became very empty. I had the distinct feeling that Marvin would never really live with us anymore. Helen, too, was away a great deal. I had given her my car to drive while I drove Marvin’s brown Toyota, and she had now become completely independent. Her life was busy with school, work, riding her horse and, of course, Mark. She had a curfew of 1:00 a.m. on weekends, and she was hardly ever late. I used to fall asleep after Helen went out but woke up again and lay awake until I heard her come in. I was never at ease until she was safely at home.

  Lily and Marvin were barely settled in their respective schools in Israel when they decided that neither of the schools was suitable for them. It was easy for Lily to switch to a program for foreign students at Bar Ilan University, but Marvin resolved that, rather than going to school, he would go back to Kibbutz Tirat Zvi as a volunteer. No amount of objection or cajoling on our part could persuade him to change his mind. Both Stefan and I feared that this would be the end of Marvin’s formal education. How would Marvin be able to earn a living? We were upset and disappointed. This was not the way it was supposed to happen. We realized that our children were not ours any longer and had to lead their lives as they chose — a hard pill for us to swallow.

  Lily enjoyed her course at Bar Ilan, while Marvin worked in the fields of Tirat Zvi. They spent most weekends together either in Tel Aviv or at the kibbutz. Both of them wrote to us regularly.

  That winter, Stefan and I went to South America. We joined a tour that took us to Brazil, Argentina and Peru. The train ride to the station where we would board a bus to Machu Picchu was spectacular. I couldn’t stop looking out the window at the scenery outside. Forests of tall trees lined the train tracks, and small rivers blinked in the sun. A bus took us up to the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu along winding and narrow roads, but the sight that greeted us was well worth the trip. It was breathtaking. This excursion to Machu Picchu was the highlight of the entire trip.

  On our way home, we stopped in Miami, where Stefan declared that he had travelled enough and would not go on any more trips if he could help it. He wanted us to buy an apartment condo in Florida, where we would spend our winter vacations. We had often spoken about such a possibility. I could no longer really object; we had seen a lot of the world. In between the trips I have described, we also went on a trip to Asia that took us to Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as trips to Bermuda, California, Freeport and Nassau, and several to Miami Beach.

  The following day in Miami, we set out in our rental car on Interstate 95 in search of Palm Aire Golf and Country Club in Pompano Beach, a development that had been recommended to us by friends. Palm Aire appeared to be a beautiful development, and we were soon the proud owners of Unit 108 at 2851 South Palm Aire Drive. For years to come, during the winter months, we would spend three weeks at Palm Aire and return home for six.

  In the late winter of 1975, a letter arrived from Lily telling us that she and Marvin had decided to marry. They would return from Israel at the end of the school year and get married sometime in the summer. A separate letter from Marvin arrived shortly thereafter confirming this news. Both Stefan and I were shocked. Although we had been reasonably sure that Lily and Marvin were serious about their relationship, we had thought they would wait to get married until they were somewhat older.

  In order to discuss the situation with Lily’s parents, Simi and Peter, we invited them to our house one afternoon. If I had expected them to oppose their daughter’s marriage at the age of not quite eighteen, I was in for a surprise. They talked blithely about the wedding, where and when it would take place, seemingly without worry about how the young couple would manage after the festivities were over. Stefan, however, had thought long and hard about this problem and come up with a solution. Lily and Marvin could move to London, Ontario, where Marvin could oversee, with Stefan’s help, the development of a tract of land that Stefan had bought.

  As Helen grew into adulthood, I became somewhat excessively attuned to her moods. When she was happy, so was I, and when she was unhappy, I suffered with her. Even when she moved away and her tone of voice on the telephone was sad, I got upset. Did I expect her to be eternally happy? I knew that could never be. It was only when she married that I let go, but still today, after living apart for so many years, I am sensitive to the tone of her voice.

  Lily and Marvin returned to Montreal in the spring of 1976. We had of course told them about the land purchase in London, Ontario, and about the opportunity for Marvin to develop this project. It was a foregone conclusion that he would not continue his education at McGill University. He had enjoyed his work in Quebec City and was now looking forward to getting started in London.

  It was a busy summer for all of us. Helen attended a French course at the Université de Montréal, Marvin and Stefan spent a lot of time in London to prepare for the construction of the project, and I participated in the wedding arrangements. Before we knew it, it was August, only one week away from the wedding on August 8. I had ordered beautiful flower arrangements for the tables, but, at the last minute, Lily and Marvin decided to forego the flowers and donate the money we would have spent on them to Israel. I thought this was a touching gesture and clearly so did the florist. When we entered the room for the wedding dinner, we saw that small bud vases with flowers adorned each table, which the florist had arranged at no cost to us.

  Their wedding was one of the most lively and wonderful weddings I have ever attended. Lily, looking radiant, led everyone in Israeli dances, and her enthusiasm was so infectious that Marvin even persuaded my seventy-four-year-old mother to dance with him. Looking recently through the album of this wedding has made me very sad. One picture shows the beautiful bride with her attractive parents, her pretty younger sisters and her brother. In photos of our family, Stefan and I are beaming, and Helen, looking lovely in her long gown, is smiling. And there is Marvin, laughing with Greg, his best man. And, of course, there are pictures of the bride and groom. Where have the years gone?

  And so Lily and Marvin were gone. It took some adjustment, but I knew we would see them often. Marvin had always been very close to us, and I had come to love Lily. I thought of her as a daughter rather than as a daughter-in-law.

  The following year, Helen decided that the time had come to leave Montreal. Most likely she also felt that she had lived at home long enough, which, combined with the political situation — René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois had come into power and many young people had left the province — convinced her to apply for admittance to the University of Toronto, where she was accepted. And when she went to Israel in the summer of 1977, I knew that Helen, too, had left home for good.

  Alone Again

  Ever since my mother came to Canada, I had felt responsible for her, but as she grew older, my feelings of responsibility increased. When my mother turned seventy-five in 1977, I realized that the time had come for her to move to a seniors’ residence. She had been travelling less and less in the last few years and was quite lonely. Several of her friends had passed away, others were unwell and her bridge games had become few and far between. We visited the King David residence and rented a spacious one-bedroom apartment with a balcony. She would be farther away from us than she had ever been while in Montreal, since the King David was located in Côte St-Luc.

&nbs
p; It was a difficult time for my mother. She had to get rid of many of her treasured belongings because they would not all fit into the new apartment. She chose her favourite things to keep, among them her desk and portable typewriter. My mother had learned to type when she was young, and her letters, like mine, were always typewritten.

  My mother adjusted well to her new life at the King David. She felt safe there because there were always people around. I came to realize that she liked to be looked after, which made the situation much easier for me, then and later. How different I am from my mother! I treasure my independence and will not give in, although the time has now come for me to make some concessions. I struggle and fight, and at times I do not understand the point of it all. But I suppose that I am still my father’s daughter, because that is exactly what he did until the end.

  About a year after my mother moved to the seniors’ residence, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. At the time, it was not customary to tell patients more than what they wanted to know, and my mother was not curious. When I spoke to her doctor, he told me, much to my relief, that in her case no chemotherapy was indicated. She was subsequently hospitalized at St. Mary’s Hospital a couple of times, but she never asked any questions.

  On a balmy summer evening in June 1978, the phone rang. It was Marvin with the most unexpected news: Lily was pregnant. I don’t know why I was as shocked as I was. My first thoughts were: I am not ready to be a grandmother yet, Lily is still studying, they are too young — it cannot be! But it was. Lily felt relatively well. She was continuing school and already making plans for what to do with the baby after it was born. One thing was sure: she would graduate as planned.

  Our little grandson was born in London, Ontario, on March 11, 1979, and when I laid eyes on this sturdy, healthy little boy for the first time, I no longer doubted that I was ready to be a grandma. The baby was named Mordechai after my father and would be called Motti. When the baby was just a few days old, Marvin told us that, on the day Motti was born, he had promised Lily that they would make aliyah — move to Israel — in two to three years. When I heard this news, I felt a deep sense of loss, as though their departure were imminent. The joy I had felt at becoming a grandparent was instantly marred. We stayed in London until the brit milah was over and returned to Montreal filled with mixed emotions.

  That spring, Helen graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Science degree. She had been working part-time for a veterinarian, and soon after she graduated, she got her first full-time job with Pitman-Moore, a company that sold veterinary pharmaceuticals. She had been living in her own apartment for about a year, and for obvious reasons, we began to see less of her. She had a few friends, found opportunities to ride horses, and if she was lonely, she never said so. But I could not help worrying about her just the same.

  In the spring of 1979, after spending a few weeks in Palm Beach, Florida, with her cousin Claire, my mother returned home and was hardly able to walk. I took her to a bone specialist who proclaimed that she was too old to spend much time on. This was the most shocking thing I had ever heard, and I got her out of the doctor’s office as fast as I could. Her condition deteriorated, and before Pesach that year, I persuaded her to spend the two seder nights at our house, with the understanding that we would bring her to St. Mary’s Hospital at the end of the holidays. Marvin and Lily came from London with the baby, Helen from Toronto, and we had two quiet seders with my mother. Stefan and I had given her our bedroom with its adjoining washroom, but I was constantly worried that she would fall. In the end, we realized that she had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. My heart sank when I watched her leave my house on a stretcher.

  Dr. Villemure, a neurosurgeon, who was called in from the Montreal Neurological Institute, convinced my mother and me that back surgery was indicated despite her age of seventy-seven. He assured me that if she were his mother, he would opt for such an operation, as otherwise she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. And so it was that my mother’s back was operated on at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

  She spent the first night after the operation in the Intensive Care Unit, and when I called the hospital a few times that night to inquire about her condition, I was told that her breathing was laboured. Eventually I realized that her breathing problems might be due to her lifelong smoking habit, and the nurse I subsequently spoke to on the phone confirmed this. When I arrived the next day at the hospital, my mother was lying on her back in one of the small rooms adjacent to the nurses’ station — smoking a cigarette! Although cigarette smoking was then allowed in hospitals in Quebec, I was shocked.

  From the hospital, my mother was transferred to a convalescent home, where she had to learn how to walk again. Since she was an exceedingly optimistic person, she was convinced that she would recover. And walk she did, albeit with a cane and a great deal of difficulty. The King David could not take her back under the circumstances, as all its residents had to be totally self-sufficient. As always, my mother was very compliant. If moving to a nursing home was the solution, so be it. Once again she had to get rid of some of her furnishings, and this time only her beloved desk and typewriter followed her to the Villa Maria Nursing Home. There my mother was well looked after, and the nurses loved her. Because my mother was still reasonably ambulatory, she had few, if any, complaints.

  I had always maintained that I would not leave our home on Vincent Street until we could find a condo we could buy, and in the fall of 1979 we found one that was being built in Côte St-Luc. The building would be located facing a park. We moved in April 1980, leaving the house that had been my anchor for twenty years, and I never looked back.

  Our new condo unit was spacious and comfortable with almost as much room as our house. It consisted of an entrance hall that led to a cozy den on the left and a living room straight ahead. The dining room next to the living room was adjacent to the kitchen. My favourite room came next. This is the room that contained all my toys: a computer, a printer, a fax machine and a typewriter. A very large bedroom completed our new home. I had never found the stairs of our split-level bungalow an inconvenience, but having no stairs at all made life easier. I had thought that moving to a condominium was a sign of old age, but we have been here twenty-five years now.

  Lily and Marvin also moved in 1980. A small bungalow had been put up for sale at a reasonable price, and Marvin considered the house a good buy. Lily graduated from the University of Western Ontario that summer, and we proudly watched her as she received her certificate, wearing the customary black hat and gown.

  That same year, Helen, on a visit to Montreal, announced that she had a new boyfriend, Murray. She had known Murray, also an ex-Montrealer, for some time, and they had been just friends until recently when she realized that her feelings for him had deepened. She promised to bring Murray home to meet us and was sure that we would like him, too. Hearing that great news, I began to worry less about my daughter.

  My mother was still reasonably well, and I visited her in the nursing home about three times a week. She was able to come to our place frequently, but of course not nearly as often as before. It was obvious that walking was difficult for her, and the symptoms of her kidney cancer caused her to be hospitalized from time to time. But she still never asked any questions. Although my mother was smart and may have suspected what was wrong with her, she did not want to talk about it. When Lily, Marvin and Motti came for visits to Montreal, she showed little interest in her great-grandchild. Perhaps it was just too much for her to be around such a young child.

  In October that year, Helen and Murray came to Montreal, primarily to visit his sister, who had recently given birth to a little boy, her third. Both Stefan and I liked Murray immediately. What we saw was a slight young man, a few years older than Helen, well-spoken and intelligent. At the time, he was working for a small advertising agency, although his Honours BA was in Psychology. It was obvious to me that he
and Helen had a special relationship, and I hoped that in time it would develop into something more. I did not have long to wait. In January 1981, they announced their engagement.

  We met Murray’s parents, Rose and Natan, and his sister Annie and brother-in-law Bernie. Rose and Natan were originally from Poland and Holocaust survivors. Natan had lost his first family in the camps, and Rose and he met immediately after the war and married. They had worked hard and now lived in the downstairs apartment of their own duplex while Annie and her family lived upstairs.

  Helen and Murray did not want to have a long engagement and decided to get married in July 1981. The Beth Ora synagogue had a hall available for July 12, a Sunday. I began scurrying around to get things organized.

  Lily and Marvin had in the meantime also formulated their plans. Marvin had done well in London, overseeing the building and rental of several commercial properties. He and Lily planned to go to Israel for six weeks the day after the wedding to make inquiries about apartments and job opportunities, and to make aliyah shortly thereafter. Lily had told me early in the spring that year that she wanted to become pregnant with their second child as soon as possible, and, at a wedding in Toronto in June, she confided in me that she was in fact pregnant again. Would this interfere with their plans? I asked. Of course not, was Lily’s reply.

  The big day arrived. The synagogue looked lovely, and so did the bride. I had known in advance that this wedding would differ from Lily and Marvin’s simcha (celebration). Neither Murray nor Helen wanted a particularly Jewish affair with a lot of horas (traditional Jewish dance) and Hebrew music, but a wedding is always fun. There were new people to meet, mostly Murray’s friends, and our own guests to entertain. Little Motti, an adorable two-year-old, kept everyone busy. My friend Sigmund had arrived a few days earlier and planned to stay on after the wedding. And the event we had been planning for months was over in a few short hours.