by Louise Ells
“When I saw through the mist, the dawn sky full of parachutes, I believed they were coming to save us. It was a beautiful moment, that moment of hope.”
I’d stirred a packet of brown sugar into the froth on the top of my coffee and waited.
“The war had taken everything,” she said. “My father, our house, everything we owned. My mother needed food, a blanket. I did what I could.” Another pause. “And then I did what I had to do.”
First for her mother.
Then for her son.
She reached into her own handbag’s secret compartment and took out a black and white photograph, smoothing a dog-eared corner before passing it to me. “Here is my baby Thijs, Richard’s father.”
I might have gasped, or maybe I bit my tongue. I was angry that Richard wasn’t beside me, to witness this; he should have known what his grandmother endured to ensure his father’s future. Matthew Smith, this baby, the man who overheated his house through the winter, saying as a child he’d never been properly warm.
She must have had a mantra, a stubborn streak, pride - something to help her put one foot in front the other as she walked through the jeering crowd that parted for her. Keep moving, keep moving. She was carrying her bald baby in her arms, her own shaved head held high.
I think of her every time I pull deadheads, a few when I walk by, and scatter them across the lawn. And, though I rarely visit aquariums, when I do, I find the moon jellies and watch them glide down through the water like a sky full of parachutists and think of death and regret.
And then I remember the hope.
The beautiful moments of hope.
Family Tree
It was, as it turned out, my very last summer living at home and perhaps that’s why I remember the wild blueberries as bigger, sweeter, than any I’ve seen since. There was some reason, or so my mother told me, and I guess I believed her. A wildfire seven years previously, started by the McCormack boys who were smoking dope and dropped a butt - here my mother went off on a tangent about Ellen McCormack, something she’d said to my mother at a long-ago parent teacher meeting, the upshot that it wasn’t entirely surprising her boys were pot-heads, but I let that part of the story drift to one side of me; those were not boys I had any interest in. The fire took out all the other shrubs and left the acidic soil ready for jack pines and berries. And then that brief burst of spring - such a surprise - in mid-March. The snow melted and I foolishly trusted spring had truly arrived - I wore a knitted blue poncho to school three days in a row. Of course the cold came back, and more snow, and it was May before I could wear my poncho again. But those few days of warmth had been just enough to get the berries into blossom and then they saved all their energy while we all endured the longs weeks until spring proper.
Summer came; it aways did. Late light evenings and long, lazy afternoons, and those enormous clusters of berries, plump with juice, dragging the branches of the bushes to the ground. Acres of blue, enough for the whole township to pick, and all the neighbouring communities, the air smelled of jam and pie and crumbles. Enterprising teenagers paid their younger siblings to pick while they themselves sat behind makeshift stalls on the highway. Our town was not on the way to or from any real destinations but enough tourists still drove along, willing to stop and buy wild berries by the quart, the city folk imagining a dark shape they saw in the woods might be a moose or a bear.
Mother and I - (this was the first summer I called her mother - feeling at sixteen I had outgrown the more childish Mum, but not quite as brave as my best friend who called her own parents Betty and Jack) - Mother and I picked far beyond the main patch, by the edge of one of the lakes. No one else bothered walking the extra half mile when there was no need. A mile, by the time you’d walked there and back again to the path that took you out to the lane where you could park, but at the end of each afternoon we treated ourselves to a swim and that made the trek worthwhile.
What almost-seventeen year old would spend hours each day in the stinking hot sun with a hum of jack flies (the weather so conducive for the berries had also, alas, produced the worst batch of flies in recent memory) and her mother? I suppose I had a choice, but it never occurred to me not to go on the daily expeditions. I knew that come February, when the cold days were short and colourless, I’d have spoonfuls of jam on my breakfast toast and a second helping of pie at dinner. And perhaps I was aware, too, that graduating the following June was going to change everything.
What did we talk about? My project that summer was a family tree. I had the idea that I might be able to hand it in for a social studies project to count towards my university application package. Not so conceited as it sounds, my mother’s family neatly mapped odd moments in the history of eastern Canada and I knew I could produce a strong essay by focusing on three key dates.
My great-grandfather, born in Bytown on the tenth of February 1841, lived in Upper Canada for precisely one hour of his life. Then Upper Canada became Ontario, and not quite fourteen years later Bytown became Ottawa. I loved this story; it was remarkable to me that someone could be born in a place, stay always, and die somewhere different, and made Canada feel as exotic as a small foreign country with shifting borders.
He had not, in fact, stayed always but left Ottawa to manage a hotel in Saint John and that was where he met his wife who gave birth to their first son on the twentieth of June 1877, hours before their hotel burnt down in the Great Fire. Two hundred acres in nine hours. In my essay I would write that it changed the destiny of Saint John forever, offering proof enough to convince my teacher that I could, at least, set out an academic essay with argument and supporting evidence. I gilded the lily when I then tried to draw a comparison between the fire’s reach over the water to passages from both Shakespeare and the Bible and my teacher remarked with red ink in the margin that I might be better served by keeping to the facts.
That child, my grandfather, ended up living in a settlement on the Ontario-Quebec border during the 1920s gold rush, and was still there in 1935 managing a mine when my mother was born. First of November. Same day as the Témiscamingue earthquake. Many times I had done the math on my fingers; he was fifty-eight years old when my mother, the oldest of six children, was born. Seventy when my youngest Uncle arrived. That could happen in those days, my mother always explained, leading me to wonder if she thought it hadn’t happened since, couldn’t happen now.
When I was a child, first piecing together these histories, I’d worried that nothing of import happened in our town on the day of my birth. I presumed my mother consoled herself with the fact I was born in the country’s centennial year, but had she managed to give birth five weeks earlier so I arrived on July first, (still, then, called Dominion Day), my birth wouldn’t have been such a disappointment. The day I mentioned this to my father - it was the morning of my seventh birthday I think - he laughed out loud. “Nothing of import! Nothing of import? Your birth changed my life, your birth was the most important thing to happen here. Ever.” And after that I stopped agonizing quite so much.
So as we sat in the sun, swatting at horseflies and filling six-quart baskets with the berries I begged her for stories of her childhood, ones she hadn’t told me before. She’d told them all up, she said, she’d have to move on to her teenage years. She thought for a while before she spoke.
When she was fifteen (significantly younger than I was now, she reminded me, as if I might have forgotten my birthday was in two weeks’ time) she took a job for the summer. Babysitting, live-in, four nights of the week. She was paid well, she said, very well, in a town where there were a lot of families living on the edge of poverty.
Why so much you must wonder, she said. (Although I hadn’t.) She leaned towards me and lowered her voice. No one else would take the job. They weren’t Catholics.
At that I suspect I rolled my eyes. Not everyone in Quebec in the fifties was a Catholic I said. I accused her of exaggerating, and quoted my father’s fictitious title for her biography: Lies my Mother T
old Me.
My mother would have paused, tilted her head; this was how she always dealt with my sass. Perhaps not, she allowed. But the only church in town was Catholic. It was quite a drive to the United Church, further still to a Baptist place of worship. If you weren’t Catholic you pretended, that was what people did on a Sunday morning. Anyhow, she said. These people were more than just not Catholic. The husband was an engineer on the Ontario Northland Railway, driving trains between Toronto and Moosonee. His wife had just given birth and the woman they called his sister-in-law, who lived with them - she too was pregnant and due in a matter of weeks. My mother looked at me. So. You see, she said.
I did not see.
The so-called sister-in-law had no husband. Never any mention of one either, so everyone guessed they knew who the father of that baby was. Two wives, she hissed, though there was no one within sight, let alone hearing distance.
“Mother!” The idea of polygamy would have shocked me. “You have a vivid imagination.” (This too was something my father often said.)
“It’s true.” She held her hand on her heart, or close enough. “All true.”
“So that’s why you were paid so well? To keep that secret? Which clearly everyone in town already knew.” I didn’t want to dwell on the idea of one man impregnating two women. Gross.
“But wait. Why did they need you to babysit if there was the mother and her sister-in-law, or co-wife, or whatever she was? Surely two women could look after a single baby?”
“Ah. But.” This was how my mother often launched into one of her longer stories. We moved a few feet to an untouched patch of bushes, and continued picking.
My mother explained that when she had gone to the house to be interviewed the husband had made it clear that neither woman was to be left alone with the baby. No further details were forthcoming, but the woman who did for the neighbours and also my grandmother, said there were arguments, terrible arguments from that house whenever the husband was off driving his trains. Screaming and broken plates. My grandmother had doubts about allowing her daughter to take the job, never mind she could use the help herself at home, but it was the thought of the poor wee baby suffering that made her relent. She explained to my mother how some women don’t manage childbirth as well as others, that after the baby arrives they have mad thoughts. I could picture my grandmother saying this; she’d have considered mad thoughts a sign of too much money, too much free time.
Whatever.
Maybe there was some jealousy between the women, my mother thought, the one being the first to produce a child, the other being younger and prettier, blonde hair and what we called then porcelain skin. Yvonne was pale-skinned too, but in a sickly way, with dull brown hair and bad acne.
And her husband? I asked. I wanted to build a picture of these three people. Handsome, my mother said, as if that described him. Tall, strong, blue eyes. I remember thinking he looked like one of the big American movie stars, the one in the Christmas movie.
“James Stewart. It’s a Wonderful Life.” I prided myself on my knowledge of trivia. But my mother didn’t acknowledge what I’d said. Off she went, my mother, to take up residence in one of the guest rooms in the three story house at the bend in the river. The husband met her at the end of the lane, reminding her again that she must never leave either woman alone with the baby. It must have been awkward between you and the women, I said, imaging myself in that situation. You were just a kid with no job experience-
I beg your pardon, my mother interrupted me. Straightened her back. I was the eldest of six, she said. I had five younger brothers and more experience of changing diapers and heating milk and soothing babies than either of those two women. Yvonne and Cesily. Who were both very happy to let me take over; I hardly saw them. Cesily, the pretty, pregnant one, spent her days lying on a chaise lounge on the porch, complaining about the heat. Yvonne, the new mother, barely acknowledged the baby before she went off walking every morning.
Walking where, I wanted to know. But my mother had no idea. She said she hadn’t thought it her place to ask but I wondered if she hadn’t cared. The baby was a girl and my mother was delighted with the dresser full of brand new dresses from the Sears Catalogue, untouched books and brand new toys. (And, I read this between the lines, few of the chores that she’d have been expected to do at home.) She washed the diapers and the little dresses and outfits and hung them on the line as the baby slept at her feet in a bassinet, and prepared simple meals - but there was no housework to do, no garden to weed, no young boys’ arguments to mediate.
It would have been the perfect way to spend that summer, my mother said.
But? I asked.
The third week the heat really was unbearable. Cesily asked me to help her pull a chaise longue down to the river where she lay, dangling her hands and feet in the water. Yvonne said there was cooler shade in the forest. My mother told me to keep the baby inside, that she’d get heatstroke otherwise, so we played in the nursery and I kept her forehead fresh with a rung-out washcloth.
Finally the weather broke with a morning-long thunderstorm. Lightning took out a trestle bridge up north, and the husband came home a day and a half earlier than expected. His wife wasn’t there when he got home and nor was Cesily and I couldn’t tell him exactly where either of them was. Yvonne had set off before the storm, she must have sought shelter somewhere. And Cesily - I hadn’t seen her since breakfast. The baby and I were in here, in the house. I looked out the window but it was raining by then and I couldn’t see if the white and green striped lawn chair was still at the river’s edge or not. I put the baby down for a nap and offered him some lunch.
It was dark by the time Yvonne came home, soaked through. Where was Cesily she asked, why hadn’t anyone called the police to organize a search party for her, what was wrong with us. I heard then the screaming that had been previously mentioned, the shattering of plates, and went to calm the baby.
As soon as the police arrived, hats held in their hands, we all knew it was bad news. Death by drowning. Luckily they said, luckily her body had washed up on shore a few miles downriver instead of being carried off. So no one would have any false hopes about her survival.
I’d filled my basket, picking berries without being aware of what I was doing. This was not a story I was going to use in my family tree project but I was desperate to know the ending. And? I demanded. What happened?
My mother shook her head. It wasn’t ruled a suicide and we were all thankful for that small mercy. An autopsy was performed and the results were leaked, including the news that the unborn baby was, well was-.
Ah. So not Yvonne’s husband’s baby then, I clarified.
No, not possibly.
And?
But that was the end of the story, my mother said. They left soon after the funeral and the house was sold. Yvonne, poor woman, blamed herself for Cesily’s death, and there were rumours that she was institutionalised in Toronto. The baby must have been sent to relatives I suppose. The husband? I have no idea.
We’d both been so engrossed in the past we neither of us noticed the bears until one of them growled at us. Then more growling, the other side of us. We were between a mother and her cub.
“Run! Run! Climb a tree!” I yelled, pushing my mother in front of me. Where did that command come from? And how did we both manage? I’d never climbed a tree before, I don’t even remember noticing before that there were trees so close to where we’d been sitting. But I held my mother’s foot and then half-shimmied, half-shoved her up a white pine until we could reach the branches, climbing and pulling ourselves farther and farther away from the ground, until we could go no further. I looked up into my mother’s face. “It’ll be okay, Mum,” I whispered, and patted the bit of her I could reach.
Completely the wrong thing for us to have done, of course, running, climbing a tree. But we were lucky. The mother just wanted to keep her cub safe, and didn’t chase after us, climb the tree. The two of them ate all the berries we’d
picked and then lay down in the sun. We were up in the tree for the best part of two hours; when the mother and cubs ambled off we waited another half hour before getting down, which proved to be just as difficult as getting up had been. Hot, scratched, bloodied, I thought we’d go straight home but my mother pulled off her t-shirt and trousers and walked into the lake. I followed her in to the deliciously soothing water and sank down to my neck. Then, thinking of Cesily, held my hands to my stomach as if I were pregnant and, keeping my eyes open, slipped all the way under the water’s surface.
We held hands as we walked away and I asked the question I’d been considering the whole time I was up in the tree. The father must have come home at noon or so - you said the storm was still going on and you offered him lunch. Yvonne came home much later, it was already dark you said. And neither you nor the father had done anything to look for either of the women. So what were you doing? How did you spend the afternoon?
My mother said nothing.
Then or ever.
Surfacing
“Miss? Miss, we’re here.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Brigitte looked at the meter and passed the taxi driver two tens and two toonies. “Thanks.” She opened the door, hesitated.
“It’s blocked off,” said the driver. “Because of the demolition. You have to cross up there.” He waved his hand off to the right.
“Thanks,” Brigitte said again. She got out and strode off in the direction he’d pointed in case he was watching her, as if she was navigating with ease through the crowd of Torontonians whose lives she knew nothing about and who were equally oblivious to hers. Back straight, head up, walk with purpose, show no sign of being disoriented. The street was a mess of roadworks and temporary pedestrian walkways, anyone would be confused. She turned slowly, scanning the skyline. Where was the cluster of red brick towers and turrets? Until she was eight she’d assumed the Victorian building at the end of their street was a castle. When she discovered it was a hospital “for Psychiatric Maladies and Nervous Disorders” she changed her route to school. Right now it would be a useful landmark, pointing her towards her childhood neighbourhood.