We stay in a hotel in which the decor seems not to have changed since I lived in Vancouver. There is, ominously, a giant plunger in the bathroom, but the breakfast of bagels and cream cheese is good and it’s a short walk to Pender Street. The shop that housed English Textiles, and the tenements at the back that housed immigrants and refugees, are all gone. Hudson’s Bay and Army & Navy, the department stores my harried mother would herd us into, having to strip off boots, leggings, ear muffs and mittens in winter and wrestle us back into them when we left, are still in business. Chinatown, too, remains, and so does Modernize Tailors, which has been in Pender Street since 1913. It’s closed or I would have run in and said, "Does anyone here remember my father?” Although it’s now certain that he is lying dead in Brockville, I can’t shake the feeling I will find him in Pender Street.
We head to dinner in the gentrified Gastown district, a block away. The sight of so many people begging, many of them disabled, is a shock. Vancouver has changed. A woman identifies us as tourists and says, "You don’t want to go down there. It isn’t safe.” At dinner a man who cannot lift up his head comes over to ask for money. "Go away, John,” the waiter says. The amount of food we have in front of us is obscene. Nicola asks the restaurant to pack up a box and takes it over to John.
Next day Chris and I set off in search of the old family homes. First we go to the North Shore by bus over the Lionsgate Bridge, then trek up familiar streets to 4414 Canterbury Crescent, the last house we owned, where my father yelled at my mother for refusing to ask Sy for help and for agreeing to ask Sy for help, where they came and took away the piano.
A neighbour comes out on the porch.
"Can I help you?” He sounds a little suspicious.
"I used to live here,” I say vaguely. It feels as though either the man is a ghost or I am.
Chris is digging me in the ribs. "Tell him your name,” he hisses.
"We were the Wichtel family,” I say.
"Oh, sure,” the man says. "I remember the Wichtels.”
The past is roaring in my ears. If I squint hard I can remember this man, Sandy Thomson—tall, lanky, normal, with an overbite— coming across the lawn to see what’s up when my father is standing in our front yard shouting about a septic-tank pipe that one of the neighbourhood kids has thrown a rock at and broken.
Sandy remembers the episode. It wasn’t one of his kids.
We stand talking on the doorstep until we are invited in. Now in their eighties, Sandy and his wife Margo were much younger than my parents. Margo, who is getting ready to go off to tennis, is wearing a housecoat like my mother used to wear in the morning. I feel a wash of grief for my parents, who lived there, just over the fence, before their lives fell apart.
Sandy and Margo tell us about the neighbours, the kids with whom we would play games of Monopoly that went on for days. There were the Shugs, and the family who lived next door on the other side. I babysat their two children when I was twelve. Louise, aged four, used to wake with night terrors, her unseeing eyes wide open. I had to get medicine into her and wait until she stopped screaming. The father, it was whispered, suffered from depression.
Up the road was Keith Milton. He was cute and nice and had a sunny rec room and a portable device you could pop a 45 record into. I am happy to hear he ended up playing in a band.
The Beveridges lived down the road. I played Barbies with Sheila, who had a little brother called Jimmy. Once I went to a party there and the whole family played Dictionary. We never did things like that.
Across the road is a modern house in the place of the one where the Gardners used to live. Carol Gardner was my sister’s friend and had a little brother called Jimmy. Everyone had a little brother called Jimmy. The children went to a Catholic school. Once when I was visiting them I was shocked to hear her mother say Carol had got her period.
Margo describes my mother as "very nice” and remembers her making a delicious dessert with cream and apricots. Once, at our house, she’d seen her serve my father hors d’oeuvres in a little crystal dish on a stool by his armchair. When he knocked it over and broke the dish my mother was annoyed. I wonder if my father was already getting shaky.
There’s a slight look of panic when I ask about him. "Oh, we didn’t really see much of him. He worked a lot,” Margo says.
At one point I blurt out, "Did you think we were weird?”
Oh no, they say.
We go outside and I peer over the fence into our old backyard. There’s the room I shared with Ros. In winter, if we were lucky, we would wake to see the window lit with the spectral glow that meant it had snowed in the night. I almost expect to see Dukey trying to bury her toast and honey in the hard earth. The house looks exhausted. We got there just in time, Sandy says. It’s going to be demolished. Prices have gone sky-high in the neighbourhood—1.3 million dollars for that place across the road, imagine. Where the Wichtels once lived something more substantial will be built.
Sandy insists on getting out the car and driving us around the neighbourhood. We go down Highland Boulevard and look at our last house. It’s opposite Capilano Heights Elementary, where my little brother Jeff could have gone, where Uldis put in the lawn, and where my father would appear in the doorway looking lost; where he said to my mother, "Can’t you give me another chance?”
We go through Edgemont Village where we kids would go for comics, and where there were excursions to the deli for matzo and hot smoked salmon. We drive by my old school, Handsworth High, closed for the summer. I still remember the school song: "Hail to thee our alma mater / Loyal and true every son and daughter.” We would sing a subversive version: "Hail to Handsworth Jail / Hail to thee our penitentiary.
I want to walk down what we called "the cut”, a steep ravine that was a shortcut home. Boys would make giant snowballs and drop them on us as we ran the gauntlet. You could slide down to the bottom on your school bag and part-way up the other side when the creek was frozen. But Sandy is waiting to drop us at Capilano Canyon, with its giant suspension bridge. Dad used to take us there and rock the bridge to frighten us when we crossed. Amid the old-growth firs and walkways in the treetops that weren’t there in our day, I get mixed up about where I’m supposed to meet Chris and we have an argument. The past is exhausting.
Next day we go to Kerrisdale to see the house I still dream of, with its gabled bedrooms and secret door to the attic inside a wardrobe, the house where you could hide out in the basement avoiding school, and where Dad brought home the girlie movie. On the way we stop at the elementary school, which looks largely unchanged except that the beautiful dogwood tree in the playground is gone, and take the familiar walk home to 3389 West 43rd. Emboldened by our encounter with Sandy and Margo I consider knocking on the door, but something makes me hold back. My enchanted house looks like it’s fallen under an evil spell. Shrubs have grown up high, right in front of the windows. Little light must get in and it would be impossible to see out.
I cross the road and knock on the door of what used to be the Mitchells’ house. There were five children—Barbara, Pat, Billy, Bofer and baby Sam. Mr Mitchell was seldom home. Mrs Mitchell played the piano and taught us songs from South Pacific. I felt comfortable there.
A woman answers the door. She’s pleasant but doesn’t invite us in. She is too young to recall the Wichtels, or Doreen and Warren who lived in the house next door to hers. She says an Asian family have been living in our house. She believes the elderly woman has recently died. In Kerrisdale the past is another country where there’s no one home.
IN MONTREAL WE MEET UP with Nicola again, and my brother Jeff, and visit the address on the last letter we have from my father: 1624 Sherbrook Street West. It’s a brick building that used to be a boarding house. What was Dad doing while he lived in this place? We know from his file that when he was picked up by the police in Cornwall, confused and frightened, trying to cross the border into the US, he had in his belongings a "Jewish cap”. This suggests he was in touch with the Jewis
h community here. Maybe he still had contacts from when he arrived in Canada in 1947 and lived in the city for a few months.
IN JANUARY 2016, four months before we set off on this trip, another bombshell had landed in my inbox. I had got in touch with another wonderful Canadian, Alan Greenberg of the Jewish Genealogical Society, a volunteer organisation helping people like me do searches like ours. He was intrigued by this request from the ends of the earth. There was no Ben Wichtel or Witchell in the society’s archives, but after reading my recounting of the story—"Your whole saga sounds so painful”—he had offered to get in touch with Montreal’s Jewish Immigrant Aid Society to see if my father had had any contact with it during his time in Montreal in 1965.
"We have a hit with JIAS records!” Alan wrote. He’d attached a copy of a hand-written index card dated November 26, 1965. There was little information, just my father’s name, correctly spelled, his address in Montreal, and his city of birth, Warsaw. Then I noticed six words neatly printed at the bottom of the card: "Wants to go to New Zealand.”
I sat staring at the words, stunned. All this time I had wondered if my father had never really tried to come, if the story that he was to follow us was a fiction to cover up a final separation. After we arrived in New Zealand I felt he’d abandoned us. Now here was hard evidence that just over a year after we left he was trying to join us.
Alan advised me to contact Janice Rosen at the society for the rest of the file. Soon she sent it by email. It revealed that my father sought help with the paperwork required to travel to New Zealand. It contained the phone number of the New Zealand Trade Commission and a short history of tribulation: "Wife Patricia nee Scantlebury, 2 girls and boy live in New Zealand since one year. Lost business and house in Vancouver (Haberdashery and Clo.).”Then the words, again, that can’t be read without tears: "Wants to go to New Zealand and join family.”
The society had informed him that all he needed to proceed was his Canadian passport. The file contained his passport number; this will help me to finally, after failed applications under Canada’s Access to Information Act, get his Canadian immigration and citizenship file. With the information about his application for citizenship in 1954, there’s a passport photograph from 1965. Taken from microfiche, it’s a negative. Chris manages to invert it and suddenly there he is. It’s the only photo we have from his later years, possibly the last ever taken that was not for police files. He is smartly suited, his tie neatly knotted. His hair looks dark and well groomed. He looks older, wan, but there’s a small hopeful smile for the camera. When he was living in the house at 1624 Sherbrook Street West, Montreal, he was trying to come to New Zealand. He didn’t abandon us; we abandoned him.
FROM MONTREAL IT’S A SHORT, tense, two-and-a-half-hour drive to Brockville. We stop off at Embrun. Perhaps it was the boredom here that helped drive my father mad. Where Lapalme Nursing Home once stood there’s nothing to see but a forlorn statue of the Virgin Mary presiding over a vacant lot with a view to a water tower. There is now a smaller rest home next door. They’ve been having some sort of gathering and we speak to a man who is coming out. He takes us in and we talk to the woman running the home. Her mother once worked at Lapalme but is very old and unlikely to know anything about my father.
We have lunch in the sort of place you find off the beaten track in eastern Canada: a Mom and Pop eatery that reminds you of your grandmother’s parlour but with a more extensive menu. I’m not really hungry. We dally. I’m afraid to get to Brockville.
Finally, Oakland Cemetery, 1524 County Road, Brockville. It’s a dazzling Ontario summer’s day. The cemetery is more serene and cared for than I imagined it would be. There are trees. There are birds. We find the St Francis Xavier section. Markers of graves of inmates from the psychiatric hospital are set into the lawn, each with a stark inscription: name, year of birth, year of death.
We can’t find my father. I knew it. There’s a panicked call to Dale Trickey. In a minute or two he pulls up in a shiny red ute. "You were so close,” he says. There it is, on the end of a row, by the path. Dale has cleared away the grass from a grave never visited in forty-five years. Family and friends present at the burial: none. We stand and look, take photographs, kneel down to make contact. We place stones and sea glass brought from New Zealand, tucking them in around the stone so the lawnmower won’t scatter them. "Hey, Grandpa,” says Nicola. She has her father’s easy way with people, living or dead. I whisper useless words: Dad. I love you. I’m sorry.
Next stop: the Psych. It’s not far away. Around the side, fenced off, is the bleak-looking forensic unit that houses, among others, Russell Johnson, a sexual sadist, murderer and nechrophiliac who scaled apartment buildings up to fifteen storeys to kill seven women between 1973 and 1977. Russell Johnson is your worst nightmare.
Ben Wichtel’s grave in St Francis Xavier Cemetery, Brockville, Ontario, in 2015.
There are old greenhouses. We stop by what were once stables for horses and cows. The place had its own farm until 1967, the year my father arrived, and continued to have gardens growing produce. We stop to talk to a caretaker. He tells us the inmates of the forensic unit are sometimes allowed out to help out around the place. "They can lift logs I couldn’t pick up. They don’t know their own strength,” he muses. "They’re just like normal people but you don’t turn your back on them.”
The old buildings where my father was housed are abandoned. Through the windows are corridors and rooms that appear untouched since the last patients left. At the front, verandahs look out over the lawns. Nicola likes to imagine her grandfather sat there and found some comfort in the gardens, the squirrels, the birds. The sign for his wards—Ward K, Ward G—remain. "Visiting Hours 11am–8pm. Please sign in and wear visitor badge.” A security guard drives up to enquire what we think we are doing. One of our family used to live here, we say. "That’s okay,” he says. "It’s just we’ve had trouble with people breaking in.” It probably used to be the other way around.
Brockville turns out to be quite a pretty town where everything is a tribute to Sir Isaac Brock, who defended what was then the province of Upper Canada against the United States. A statue by the St Lawrence River depicts another more recent Brockville identity, an eccentric sheltering beneath a holey umbrella while pushing a pram with a bird in it. It seems okay to be a bit unhinged here. After dinner we say goodbye to Jeff and Nicola. In the morning Chris and I will take the train to Toronto, my father’s last city of residence before the Psych, and then fly to New York.
I understand now something I found bizarre and primitive when I read Mary Gordon’s book The Shadow Man, about her lost Jewish father. She had said she wanted to hold his bones. In the end she dug them up and had them reburied where she thought her father should be. We must disinter my father and take him, finally, to New Zealand, I have decided. Jeff and Chris, demonstrating the need to have good people around to tell you when you are heading dangerously off piste, suggest a less insane plan: we will make a new headstone. It will have the history no one at Brockville asked him about. It will correctly spell his name. It will say who he was and what he managed to do in a world out to get him, a world gone mad.
CHAPTER 17
Comparing notes
Never forget you are a Wichtel.
Uncle Sy, summer 1971
BEFORE WE SET OFF for that first drive to Brockville in 2015, Jeff and I had sat down in an Airbnb apartment in downtown Montreal. We've never really talked about Dad, my brother and I, not more than fragments. Jeff was only five the last time he saw his father.
"I can remember going to his tailor shop," he says. "I have quite vivid memories of that for some reason: very dark and lots of strange equipment, things for pressing clothes. And I have a vision of an old porcelain sink in the back, with copper staining in it.
"My memories are of him coming home with a chocolate bar, or something to spoil me. I remember him buying me a little pedal car—that was a big day in my life." Jeff would have been two at the
time. Dad also bought him a toy rifle. It was this he shouldered in the backyard at Kerrisdale, and, looking down the sight, said, "I once saw a woman have her breasts shot off."
Jeff remembers just once being the focus of one of our father's sudden rages. "It was at the dinner table. I wouldn't eat my peas. He lost his temper, flew off the handle. Peas ended up flying all over the kitchen." As soon as he conjures up this scene I'm convinced I remember it too.
"I suspect I was protected a lot from what was going down in the latter years," he says. He spent most of his time with Mum. "I don't understand why I didn't go to kindergarten. I was probably more than ready for it. Maybe she just wanted the company."
When he escaped the house there were adventures. One time he and a friend took off with their toy guns, headed in the direction of Grouse Mountain as the crow flies, climbing over people's fences. My mother was about to call the police when they finally returned.
"I can remember going to Capilano Canyon," Jeff says. "It was one of the rare times when Dad and I did something together. He liked to scare me about the bears, which I took quite seriously. I'm not sure I looked at him as a father figure. He was almost like a benign uncle."
He recalls no sadness when we left. "I remember backing out of the driveway and waving goodbye to my friend Bradley out the car window. I was probably told Dad was going to follow, that this was just a temporary arrangement. My life was so focused on Mum that if she'd said to jump off a cliff I would have.”
In New Zealand, with our mother working, Jeff's life as the longedfor boy, the little prince, was gone. "I came home from school early one day and panicked because no one was home. That's how I got this scar," he says, indicating his hand. "I broke the window trying to get into Nana's house.
Driving to Treblinka Page 17