I felt, in fact, as if I had brought the body of an infidel into a holy place and laid it down amongst the true believers. Still, this was what my father had wanted—and how could I refuse him? Neither Cy nor Rita would do it for him. Gone, they had said. Good riddance.
And so it fell to me.
I was always the least informed. I was always the most inquisitive. During my childhood, nobody told me—aside from the single word Dieppe—what it was that had happened to my father. And yet, perhaps because I knew the least and because I was the youngest and seemed the most naive and willing, it was more than often me he focused on.
His tirades would begin in silence—the silence we had been warned of when he first returned. He would sit at the head of the table, eating a piece of fish and drinking from a glass of beer. The beer was always dark in colour. Gold.
Our dining-room had a window facing west. Consequently, winter sunsets in particular got in his eyes.
Curtain, he would say at his plate—and jab his fork at me.
If I didn’t understand because his mouth was full, my mother would reach my sleeve and pull it with her fingers. The curtain, Ben, she would say. Your father’s eyes.
Yes, ma’am. Down I’d get and pull the curtain.
Then, no sooner would I be reseated than my father—still addressing his plate—would mumble lights. And I would rise and turn on the lights. Then, when I was back at last in my chair, he would look at me and say, without apparent rancour, why don’t you tell me to shove the goddamn curtain up my ass?
You will understand my silence in response to this if you understand that—before he went away—the worst my father had ever said in our presence had been damn and hell. The ultimate worst had been Christ! when he’d nearly sliced his finger off with a knife. Then, however, he hadn’t known that anyone was listening. And so, when he started to talk this way—and perhaps especially at table—it paralyzed me.
Cy or Mother would sometimes attempt to intervene, but he always cut them off with something worse than he’d said to me. Then he would turn his attention back in my direction and continue. He urged me to refuse his order, then to upbraid him, finally to openly defy him—call him the worst of the words he could put in my mouth and hit him. Of course, I never did any of these things, but the urging, the cajoling and ultimately the begging never ceased.
One night, he came into the bedroom where I slept in the bunk-bed over Cy and he shouted at me why don’t you fight back? Then he dragged my covers off and threw me onto the floor against the bureau. All this was done in the dark, and after my mother had driven me down in the truck to the Emergency Ward of Wellesley Hospital, the doctors told her that my collar-bone was broken. I heard my mother saying yes, he fell out of bed.
Everyone—even I—conspired to protect him. The trouble was, my father had no wish to protect himself. At least, it seemed that way until a fellow veteran of Dieppe turned up one day in the shop and my father turned on him with a pair of garden shears and tried to drive him back onto Yonge Street. Far from being afraid of my father, the other man took off his jacket and threw it in my father’s face and all the while he stood there, the man was yelling at my father: Coward! Coward! Yellow Bastard!
Then, he turned around and walked away. The victor.
Thinking for sure the police would come, my mother drew the blind and closed the shop for the rest of the day.
But that was not the end of it. She gathered us together out on the porch and Cy was told to open a can of pork and beans and to make what our mother called a passel of toast. He and Rita and I were to eat this meal in the kitchen, after which Cy, who’d been handed a dollar bill my mother had lifted from the till, was to take us down to the Uptown Theatre where an Abbott and Costello film was playing. All these ordinary things we did. Nonetheless, we knew that our father had gone mad.
It was summer then and when the movie was over, I remember Cy and Rita and I stood on the street and the sidewalks gave off heat and the air around us smelled of peanuts and popcorn and Cy said: “I don’t think it’s safe to go home just yet.” For almost an hour, we wandered on Yonge Street, debating what we should do and, at last, we decided we would test the waters by going and looking at the house and listening to see if there was any yelling.
Gibson Avenue only has about twenty houses, most of them semi-detached—and all of them facing south and the park. The porches and the stoops that night were filled with our neighbours drinking beer from coffee cups and fanning themselves with paper plates and folded bits of the Daily Star. They were drinking out of cups—you could smell the beer—because the law back then forbade the public consumption, under any circumstance, of alcohol. Whatever you can hide does not exist.
Passing, we watched our neighbours watching us—the Matlocks and the Wheelers and the Conrads and the Bolts—and we knew they were thinking there go the Max kids and David Max, their father, tried to kill a man today in his store with gardening shears…
“Hello, Cy.”
“Hello.”
“Ben. Rita.”
“Hi.”
“Goodnight…”
We went and stood together on the sidewalk out in front of our house.
Inside, everything seemed to be calm and normal. The lights were turned on in their usual distribution—most of them downstairs. The radio was playing. Someone was singing Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.
Cy went up the steps and turned the handle. He was brave—but I’d always known that. Rita and I were told to wait on the porch.
Two minutes passed—or five—or ten—and finally Cy returned. He was very white and his voice was dry, but he wasn’t shaking and all he said was: “you’d best come in. I’m calling the police.”
Our father had tried to kill our mother with a hammer. She was lying on the sofa and her hands were broken because she had used them trying to fend off the blows.
Father had disappeared. The next day, he turned himself in because, as he told the doctors, he had come to his senses. He was kept for a year and a half—almost until the war was over—at the Asylum for the Insane on Queen Street. None of us children was allowed to visit him there—but our mother went to see him six months after he had been committed. She told me they sat in a long, grey room with bars on all the windows. My father wore a dressing gown and hadn’t shaved. Mother said he couldn’t look her in the eyes. She told him that she forgave him for what he had done. But my father never forgave himself. My mother said she never saw his eyes again.
Two weeks after our father had tried to kill our mother, a brick was thrown through the window of Max’s Flowers. On the brick, a single word was printed in yellow chalk.
Murderer.
Mother said: “there’s no way around this, now. I’m going to have to explain.”
That was how we discovered what had gone wrong with our father at Dieppe.
Our mother had known this all along, and I still have strong suspicions Cy had found it out and maybe Rita before our mother went through the formal procedure of sitting us down and telling us all together. Maybe they had thought I was just too young to understand. Maybe Cy and maybe Rita hadn’t known. Maybe they had only guessed. At any rate, I had a very strong sense that I was the only one who received our mother’s news in a state of shock.
Father had risen, since his enlistment in 1939, all the way up from an NCO to the rank of captain. Everyone had adored him in the army. He was what they called a natural leader. His men were particularly fond of him and they would, as the saying goes, have followed him anywhere. Then came Dieppe. All but a handful of those who went into battle there were Canadians. This was our Waterloo. Our Gettysburg.
There isn’t a single history book you can read—there isn’t a single man who was there who won’t tell you—there isn’t a single scrap of evidence in any archive to suggest that the battle of Dieppe was anything but a total and appalling disaster. Most have called it a slaughter.
Dieppe is a port and market town on
the coast of Normandy in northern France. In 1942, the British High Command had chosen it to be the object of a practice raid in preparation for the invasion of Europe. The Allies on every front were faltering, then. A gesture was needed, and even the smallest of victories would do.
And so, on the 19th of August, 1942, the raid on Dieppe had taken place—and the consequent carnage had cost the lives of over a thousand Canadians. Over two thousand were wounded or taken prisoner. Five thousand set out; just over one thousand came back.
My father never left his landing craft.
He was to have led his men ashore in the second wave of troops to follow the tanks—but, seeing the tanks immobilized, unable to move because the beaches were made of stone and the stones had jammed the tank tracks—and seeing the evident massacre of the first wave of troops whose attempt at storming the shore had been repulsed by machine-gun fire from the cliffs above the town—my father froze in his place and could not move. His men—it is all too apparent—did not know what to do. They had received no order to advance and yet, if they stayed, they were sitting ducks.
In the end, though a handful escaped by rushing forward into the water, the rest were blown to pieces when their landing craft was shelled. In the meantime, my father had recovered enough of his wits to crawl back over the end of the landing craft, strip off his uniform and swim out to sea where he was taken on board a British destroyer sitting offshore.
The destroyer, H.M.S. Berkley, was ultimately hit and everyone on board, including my father—no one knowing who he was—was transferred to another ship before the Berkley was scuttled where she sat. My father made it all the way back to England, where his burns and wounds were dressed and where he debated taking advantage of the chaos to disappear, hoping that, in the long run, he would be counted among the dead.
His problem was, his conscience had survived. He stayed and, as a consequence, he was confronted by survivors who knew his story He was dishonourably discharged and sent home to us. Children don’t understand such things. The only cowards they recognize are figures cut from comic books or seen on movie screens.
Fathers cannot be cowards.
It is impossible.
His torment and his grief were to lead my father all the way to the grave. He left our mother, in the long run, though she would not have wished him to do so and he lived out his days in little bars and back-street beer parlours, seeking whatever solace he could find with whores and derelicts whose stories might have matched his own. The phone would ring and we would dread it. Either it was him or news of him—either his drunken harangue or the name of his most recent jail.
He died in the Wellesley Hospital, the place where I was born—and when he was dying he asked to see his children. Cy and Rita “could not be reached,” but I was found—where he’d always found me—sitting within yelling distance. Perhaps this sounds familiar to other children—of whatever age—whose parents, whether one of them or both of them, have made the mistake of losing faith too soon in their children’s need to love.
I would have loved a stone.
If only he had known.
He sensed it, maybe, in the end. He told me he was sorry for everything—and meant it. He told me the names of all his men and he said he had walked with them all through hell, long since their deaths, to do them honour. He hoped they would understand him, now.
I said they might.
He asked if his ashes could be put with theirs.
Why not, I thought. A stone among stones.
The beaches at Dieppe can throw you off balance. The angle at which they slope into the water is both steep and dangerous. At high tide you can slide into the waves and lose your footing before you’ve remembered how to swim. The stones are treacherous. But they are also beautiful.
My father’s ashes were contraband. You can’t just walk about with someone’s remains, in whatever form, in your suitcase. Stepping off the Sealink ferry, I carried my father in an envelope addressed to myself in Canada. This was only in case I was challenged. There was hardly more than a handful of him there. I had thrown the rest of him into the English Channel as the coast of Normandy was coming into view. It had been somewhat more than disconcerting to see the interest his ashes caused amongst the gulls and other sea birds. I had hoped to dispose of him in a private way, unnoticed. But a woman with two small children came and stood beside me at the railing and I heard her explain that this nice gentleman is taking care of our feathered friends. I hoped that, if my father was watching, he could laugh. I had to look away.
The ferry arrived in the early afternoon and—once I had booked myself into La Présidence Hotel—I went for a walk along the promenade above the sea-wall. It being May, the offshore breeze was warm and filled with the faintest scent of apple trees in bloom.
I didn’t want to relive the battle. I hadn’t come to conjure ghosts. But the ghosts and the battle are palpable around you there, no matter what your wishes are. The sound of the tide rolling back across the stones is all the cue you need to be reminded of that summer day in 1942. I stood that evening, resting my arms along the wall and thinking at last, my father has come ashore.
In the morning, before the town awoke, I got up in the dark and was on the beach when the sun rose inland beyond the cliffs. I wore a thick woollen sweater, walking shorts and a pair of running shoes. The envelope was in my pocket.
The concierge must have thought I was just another crazy North American off on my morning run. He grunted as I passed and I pretended not to know that he was there. Out on the beach, I clambered over retaining walls and petrified driftwood until I felt I was safely beyond the range of prying eyes.
The stones at Dieppe are mostly flint—and their colours range from white through yellow to red. The red stones look as if they have been washed in blood and the sight of them takes your breath away. I hunkered down above them, holding all that remained of my father in my fist. He felt like a powdered stone—pummelled and broken.
I let him down between my fingers, feeling him turn to paste—watching him divide and disappear. He is dead and he is gone.
Weekends, our parents used to take us walking under the trees on Crescent Road. This was on the Rosedale side of Yonge Street. My brother Cy and I were always dressed in dark blue suits whose rough wool shorts would chafe against our thighs. Our knee socks—also blue—were turned down over thick elastic garters. Everything itched and smelled of Sunday. Cy had cleats on his shoes because he walked in such a way as to wear his heels to the bone, as my mother said—and causing much expense. The cleats made a wondrous clicking noise and you could always hear him coming. I wanted cleats, but I was refused because, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t walk like that.
The houses sat up neat as pins beyond their lawns—blank-eyed windows, steaming chimneys—havens of wealth and all the mysteries of wealth.
Father often walked behind us. I don’t know why. Mother walked in front with Rita. Rita always wore a dress that was either red or blue beneath her princess coat and in the wintertime she wore a sort of woollen cloche that was tied with a knitted string beneath her chin. Her Mary Jane shoes were just like Shirley Temple’s shoes—which, for a while, was pleasing to Rita; then it was not. Rita always had an overpowering sense of image.
After the advent of our father’s return, she said from the corner of her mouth one Sunday as we walked on Crescent Road that she and Cy and I had been named as if we were manufactured products: Cy Max Office Equipment; Rita Max Household Appliances and Ben Max Watches. This, she con-eluded, was why our father had always walked behind us. Proudly, he was measuring our performance. Now, he had ceased to walk behind us and our mother led us forward dressed in black.
Tick. Tick. Tick. That’s me. The Ben Max Watch.
I have told our story. But I think it best—and I like it best—to end with all of us moving there beneath the trees in the years before the war. Mister and Mrs David Max out walking with their children any Sunday afternoon in any kind of weather
but the rain.
Colonel Matheson, striding down his walk, is caught and forced to grunt acknowledgment that we are there. He cannot ignore us, after all. We have seen him every weekday morning, choosing his boutonniere and buying it from us.
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