by Louise Ells
“It was always junk to you,” she says. “But some of these things are my childhood treasures.”
“Speaking of treasures,” I say, passing them each a mug of the instant coffee. “Let’s move to the couch. I bet you guys haven’t seen these in a while.” I position myself between them with the photo album on my lap, and open it to the first page.
Laurent wipes some grime from the plastic covering and peers at a snapshot of Mémère and Pépère sitting in a hanging chair on a narrow white porch, two children squished between them. “If ever,” he says, wonder in his voice.
Apart from a single formal wedding portrait which lived on the mantelpiece for as long as I can remember, I don’t think I’ve ever seen photos of my in-laws where they look so young. “Is that your house in Val-d’Or?”
“Not his house,” says Claudine. “He never lived there.” Fierce resentment in her voice.
Laurent laughs. “Yes, don’t forget I’m only a Franco-Ontarian, not a real Québécois.” He rolls his eyes.
Claudine continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “No outhouse for the miracle child. No sharing a single bedroom with two other children. No three-mile walk to school.” She’s stiff beside me.
So this is not going to broker peace in the way I’d hoped. I shut the album. “Maybe not such a good time, eh.”
But Laurent opens it again, turns the page to a series of photos of a chubby baby on a snowbank, crawling away from the photographer in every frame but one.
“I’ve never seen these. Who is that, do you think?”
“Yvette,” Claudine says. Her body has softened beside me. “That was a pale pink snowsuit, new for her from the Eaton’s catalogue. There was a kitten appliquéd on the front.”
“We should take these in to show your mother,” I say. “Don’t you think she’d love to see them?”
Laurent nods, turns the page. The same baby in the same snowsuit, sharing Mémère’s lap with a toddler. And a close up of the toddler with marshmallow all over her face. “And that must be Annick,” says Laurent. He looks around me to his sister.
“Marshmallows in winter is a fun idea,” I say. My voice has once again taken on that irritating false note of cheer.
“I don’t remember a single winter campfire,” says Laurent.
Claudine turns on him “Well tant pis for toi!” and I start at the malice in her voice.
Laurent is also clearly surprised. “I’m not complaining, I just… You had an extra thirteen years with her. I’m jealous of the things you did before I was born. The energy she had then.”
Claudine was silent, and I wondered if perhaps she had never thought of it that way. But her next words are arctic. “You had no idea. You knew nothing. She wasn’t well until the year you were born.”
I am confused. Mémère’s only been unwell for the past few years.
But this is not my mother, not my discussion. I try to stand, thinking I’ll slip away and help the boys lug boxes, clean out the garage, anything, but Claudine pushes down on my thigh in order to glare at her brother, effectively trapping me to the sofa.
“You did not know my mother,” she says now.
“Our mother. I know her,” says Laurent. “I love her-”
“You never loved her as much as I do,” his sister whispers. “I love her more than my own self.” She grabs the album from me and turns the page with force, jabbing her finger at photographs that I barely have a chance to see. “Sailing. None of us could swim. Canoeing in the spring run-off. No lifejackets. Feeding a bear. By hand. Another bonfire,” it’s almost the height of the house. “After six weeks of drought.” As she carries on, her voice rising, the snapshots take on a forbidding look. Now I can see how not-quite-right they are, more like a stage set, hastily constructed and unsafe.
“She wanted an idyllic childhood for us - the picnics, the day trips. She used to yell at me to take a photograph, so you will remember this moment, remember it always.” She turns a few more pages and all the photographs pass by in a blur. Yvette and Annick age before my eyes, but Claudine is never in the frame.
Then a single photograph falls on to the floor. Laurent picks it up, turns it over. “Wait. I remember this castle.”
I look at the grainy snapshot with its rounded edges. Mémère is standing at the entrance gates of a red brick building, a mishmash of Victorian and Gothic, arched windows and round towers. To her side, three girls and in her arms, a toddler dressed in a blue wool suit.
Laurent brushes off the dust. “That is me. That must be me. I remember that suit, it was so scratchy. And I- I’m sure I remember chocolate.” He keeps staring at the photo in his hand as if looking for answers.
“Yes. The nurses loved you. A happy baby boy. We were all given Easter eggs but yours was the biggest. And many of the residents gave you treats as well.” Decades later, hurt at the unfairness still in her voice.
“Nurses,” Laurent says.
“City Psychiatric. Toronto. Or as it was called then, the hospital for Psychiatric Maladies and Nervous Disorders.”
There is a long silence.
No wonder Claudine had fought so hard against having her mother committed to a care home. I think of Yvette and her ‘bad days’ and of Annick, the sister-in-law I’ve never met, and of our sons. Our young, strong, healthy sons. “What- what illness was it?”
Claudine shakes her head. “The name?” She shrugs. “She was given many names. And many drugs. And finally electric shock therapy, which worked.”
It is Laurent who is now stiff beside me. “I didn’t know,” he says, several times. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I thought we shared a childhood. I had no idea.”
“No.” Her body softens a little. “How could you?” She takes the photo from his hand, puts it back in the book. “That was her last outpatient treatment. Then she was declared fully recovered.”
I am still struggling to reconcile the gentle old woman I know with this mother who seems to put her children in danger. Over and over again. Claudine turns to the last page of the album. The same building, a similar pose. Three girls only, no son, and the girls much younger. This must have been the day she was first released from the hospital. Mémère is wearing a long coat, autumnal colours, reds, russets, big patch pockets. There must be a hundred of the crocheted granny squares stitched together.
“And nine months after she came home,” Claudine says, her voice a whisper. “The son she’d always wanted.”
“She did get better,” Laurent says. He reaches across my lap to hold his sister’s hand. “A full recovery.”
He will tell me some days later, after we have made love; he will tell me that his mother’s full recovery had been beneficial to her and to his father, and to him. But his sisters, he thinks, by the time their mother was well, were already too broken.
Claudine keeps staring at the photograph of the women in the long coat. “That’s when she made them all,” she says. “In the hospital.” A long pause. “I want them to remind me of Mémère’s recovery and homecoming. Not of her illness.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn how to crochet,” I lie. “Maybe - Maybe you could teach me? Maybe we could crochet together?”
Fiddleback Symphony
I SONATA
I find my sister in the nursing home’s common room. Wince at the deep purple bruise under her chin.
“Aleatory. Rubato,” she says. Then she strings together more words which, to a foreigner, might sound like sentences. The words are English, her eyes meet mine as she speaks. Her voice rises as if asking a question, pauses for commas and full stops. But random words, in random order.
She’s sitting in an easy chair by the picture window that faces the front drive and its row of sugar maples, all reds and yellows, and it is easy for me to pretend she has been watching out for me. I know she doesn’t recognize me. But she’s happy to see what it is I carry. And suddenly, sense. “My fiddle. Good.”
“Hello Norma.” I lean in to kiss her cheek, bu
t she pulls back, turns her head away, while at the same time reaching for the violin case. The sight of the angry-looking bruise makes me hesitate and I understand why one of the nurses once hinted at elder abuse.
It doesn’t seem to bother her; she lifts the violin and places it against the contusion, closes her eyes and slowly, carefully, draws the bow across the strings to warm up with a series of scales and etudes.
It was our mother who taught Norma to play the violin, starting with folk songs that she herself had grown up with over on the island. When she realized how especially talented her daughter was, she saved up, first for sheet music, then for lessons from a retired music teacher down the highway.
I sang in the school choir, along with all the other kids, and at church every Sunday, but I didn’t get the musical gene. I was never jealous, because of the sixteen years between us or because even I understood that music was the only special treat Norma got.
I was the miracle child, Mother told me when I was young and cuddled in her lap. I’d take down the black and white family portrait that hung in the front hall and name my siblings one by one. My brother, Walter, who had moved out West looking for work, found a widow woman with three children and a wheat farm and stayed. (I didn’t meet him until I was twelve, and then it was hard to match the stoop-shouldered man with the freckled teenager in the picture.) Then Marlene and Beverly, both killed by an influenza epidemic the winter after the photograph had been taken, Norma, and finally Evelyn who was lost to consumption the spring before I was born. “I’m not there,” I used to tease. “Dorothy isn’t there.”
“Look for the twinkle in your mother’s eye,” she would answer, reminding me that my name meant ‘gift from God.’ A miracle child, a gift from God. It’s remarkable that my head didn’t swell up so big I couldn’t get through the narrow doorway into the parlour where, after the last of the day’s chores was finished, we’d gather, us and any of the kin or farmhands currently there, and Norma would tune up her fiddle and play for us all.
Just as she’s doing now. And all the old people stop talking because they know what’s coming. My sister, Norma.
II ANDANTE
She starts with a hymn, quoting from the Revelation as she plays the first notes. This is why I drive across Halifax to visit her and this is why that bruise is never given the time it needs to heal. The music she plays and lyrics she hums cut through the dementia. Her hands move, her toes tap time and she comes back, her features softening into someone I recognize.
Dear Refuge of my Weary Soul. This hymn was a favourite of our mother’s; I recall her humming it as she baked bread, fed chickens, beat dust from the carpets hanging on the clothes line. She was a believer in refuge, and it was her taking in boarders that got our family through the Depression, though there were several she never charged. One winter she gave the neighbours the last of our kerosene so we had none for our lamps; we huddled round the wood stove in the dark and in my imagination Mother sang this very song.
Love Divine All Loves Excelling. Norma is now fully in focus.
It was accepted as fact that mother had married beneath herself. She was a schoolteacher and daughter of a doctor, my father only a farm hand. But they were in love and they were lucky. A second cousin on the mainland needed help and took them in, Mother as the housekeeper and Pa to work the land and when the cousin passed on they inherited it all. And that house was the house where I was born, where Norma lived ’til three years ago.
“Your sister’s having episodes,” the district nurse told me, calling me from the local hospital. “She’s been found lost.” Well which one? In my panic I might have snapped.
“An off-moment,” Norma had corrected the diagnosis when I went to see her. An off-moment: the term mother had used when she dropped a vase, missed a step, was unable to stop her hand from shaking. An off-moment. I translated Norma’s words and I worried.
She should have married, had a passel of children and a farm of her own, but when I asked her once why she never had, she shook her head and said I’d be more fortunate. (As it turns out, I wasn’t.) There was money put aside to send her to college. The summer she left the local schoolhouse an extra hog was slaughtered and sold to cover the costs.
But Norma stayed. She became a seamstress, making as well, all my clothes. I tell her often about the shoddy workmanship of my store-boughten outfits and remember how she matched stripes, hemmed by hand, smocked at the neckline. Those clothes fit me perfectly. A tall child, I had to stand in the back row for the class photograph but I wish I’d been one of the girls in the front so I could remember those dresses more clearly.
There was more money by the time I was ready for college and I went, leaving Norma to care for the last of the farm and our mother. She made wedding dresses for young girls until handmade went out of vogue and then she sewed curtains and soft furnishings, played the organ in church on Sundays, and her violin, always.
After her ‘off-moment’ I tried taking her back to the house where she knew her way around the rooms, the yard, the gardens. But I had to start playing tricks on her, unplugging the stove when I went out, hiding the matches. When she could no longer bathe or clothe herself if I wasn’t there, and I worried that she wasn’t eating, I found her this nursing home, known for its work with music and dementia care. And an emphasis, the manager assured me, on non-verbal forms of communication. As if he knew that soon after she arrived my sister would stop speaking any sort of English that I would be able to understand.
III SCHERZO
The hymns over, a sly look comes over her face. Johnny be Fair. Shove it Home. The Moose. Uncle Chet’s bawdy songs from his logging camp days. I pretend to look embarrassed for the sake of the staff.
He wasn’t our uncle and his name wasn’t Chet but one year he arrived with the farmhands who came east from northern Quebec every threshing season. Mother welcomed him as she welcomed them all. Made them strip down and bathe out in the front yard. She scrubbed them herself, and cut their hair and trimmed their beards. She burned the clothes they’d arrived in and gave them a new set to wear, and told them to stay outside for a couple of days until she was sure all the lice had been killed. Then, when she was satisfied that the men were clean she had them fashion long tables in the yard, plywood on sawhorses, and she covered them with food. Fried chicken, baked ham, meatloaf. Stuffed eggs, potato salad and slaw. Tomatoes, pickles and four or five desserts. Though we were Baptist and didn’t drink, the same rules didn’t hold for the help and jugs of lemonade sat next to mason jars of moonshine.
Sometime after dusk the men with mouth organs and fiddles and banjos would get them out, someone would upturn Ma’s tub to make a washtub bass and everyone else would sing and clap. Norma would be called upon to play first, some of the local folk tunes, but as the night wore on and the ‘shine passed from hand to hand, the songs grew more and more raunchy. What does that mean, I’d ask when everyone laughed. Why is that funny? By the time I was old enough to understand the words I knew them all by heart.
The Sleeping Scotsman. Many of the other residents know a version of the song and join in, but in place of the nursing home’s harsh electric light, I see the glow of the fire bouncing off the jars, smell the harsh lye soap mother insisted on using, taste that one last mouthful of apple cobbler I ate even as I was falling asleep in Uncle Chet’s lap.
Some of the men came and went, but Chet came back every year. He was my favourite, and his arrival a fixture in my calendar. He liked it jes fine, he’d say, when younger, more modern men complained about mother’s bossiness, her burning the clothes and setting strict rules. He never complained when the other men teased him. He was my favourite and he spoiled me rotten, carving me dollhouse furniture, carrying me on his shoulders and telling me stories in all the voices. He sang every song, making up words if he didn’t know them, and my mother never once hushed him.
IV ALLEGRO
My sister prefers happy, up-tempo songs, and why not? There’s enough sadness in
our shared memories. When I sold the farmhouse I went up into the attic for the first time in years and pushed open the tiny cobweb-covered window at the far end to look over the land which had once belonged to us.
I mapped a path of sorrow from my vantage point. The most difficult year. A long hard winter was followed by a summer drought. We might have made it if a fire hadn’t taken out the back field and spread to the barn. Uncle Chet’s voice boomed as he rushed in to save the horses, tried - but failed - to hustle the pigs to safety. Men formed a line, passing buckets of water hand over hand towards the barn but there was nothing to be done. It fell, taking much of the equipment, all the winter feed, and most of the market-ready hogs.
Uncle Chet lost his eyebrows, singed his beard. I remember Norma holding a blanket over him, and lifting a glass of water to his mouth. He scratched the back of his neck and she stood on her tip toes to get a better look. “Jes a spider bite,” he said, scratching again. “A spider trying to git away from the flames. Must’a bin scairt, poor thing.”
I was scared too. Before that night I’d never imagined my father crying or squeals of pigs being burned to death. In nightmares I still smell the flames that reached for the black hide of the sky and the smoke that stayed with us for years.
As my sister plays now, I see her again as she was that night, outside in her nightdress, her hair loose down her back, her arm around Uncle Chet.
V LARGO
Norma’s performing slower songs now, melancholy tunes, a sign she’s growing tired. I reach for the violin and she lets me take it from her. There is applause, from the staff, residents, visitors. A few call out for an encore but I shake my head no.
Maybe it is a form of abuse, my wanting - needing - to see my sister this way. These few moments we have when I take her hand and walk her down the hall to her bed on the locked ward, where I’ll tuck her in and sit with her until she goes to sleep.