29. This Bird Has Flown
No surprise that I thought of Mom and Medea while I waited to start talking abortion with Kate. In a relationship, the word is a submarine, and it surfaces rarely. In the beginning, a man can tell himself it would be presumptuous to talk consequences before consummation. Carts before horses. Once the chemical decision is made, the pharmacological constitution of the land drafted, pill or no pill, how often does the actual word come up? Three times? Four? Maybe one of you is brazen enough in those early, talky dates to ask, What’s your stand on abortion? (My stand? Right on the little fetus’s head.) More likely you lay the birth-control ground rules then retreat into separate, silent camps. Our discussion about the new scarlet letter—This adult life brought to you by the letter A—involved an early declaration of Kate’s and then her later calling me on some bullshit I’d been carrying around. Very early, before she recognized how I really made my cash, she told me, “Of course I’m pro-choice, but you should know I’d have a hard time aborting my own child.” Who wouldn’t? And when she said that, was it really true of the moment or was she stretching her life forward a little and already thinking of herself as a salaried lawyer, not an incomeless law student? About two months later I naively trotted out some stat I’d read about lawyers having more abortions than any other profession. Kate demolished that prejudice without even exhaling.
“Do we actually have more abortions or just admit to them? Obviously your stat is just based on a survey of women. Would the Sisters answer that survey honestly? Would the secretary who feels judged and ridiculed every workday state that for the record? We’re more honest, Ant, not more murderous.”
Clutching each other in High Park, we were clearly about to sail into honesty country, yet nothing in a relationship is treated as euphemistically as abortion. When a family member dies you’ll hear lose, pass, and go, even if you yourself say die, death, and dead. Only if they’re close, though. Husbands and wives don’t pass; they die. But great-grandmothers? In Gran’s perpetual decline, I slid around phrases like when Gran’s gone or just after. Mom was the more irreverent, once saying, “When the old bird has finally flown.” Speaking of the bird, with Kate preggers, I started thinking more and more of Gran in her lean years of loss. Neither husband nor son was ever even a corpse to her. The Williams men and our vanishing acts.
Porn is everywhere, but abortion is still a secret. Abortion. Even in a couple’s home, the word itself is rarely used. End. Terminate. Options. Third-wave feminism (aka blowjob feminism), that wave crested and fell with not just the pornification of the world, but the amateur pornification of the world. When tens of thousands of young women post naked pictures and video of themselves for strangers, has feminism won or died? YouTu•be or Not Tu•be, that is the feminist question.
We don’t want to hear about abortion or see it, but we lack Oedipus’s severity and would never put out our own eyes. Like Odysseus, we too could tie ourselves to the mast if we really wanted to hear that siren song. Remember that Kate waited until night to disclose. Waited until night and took us to a dark park. Maybe she didn’t want to see too much of my eyes. Or maybe she wanted a better view of that warning light going off in my head. Abort. Abort. Abort. And then we were busy.
Usually the intensity of the make-up sex is directly proportional to the severity of the fight. Threat and vitriol become fuel. I’ll show you what you almost lost/gave up. You won’t get exactly this with anyone else. (So we want to tell ourselves.)
Make-up sex plus pregnancy sex. No one fucks with the abandon of a woman in her first pregnancy. All her sexual life she’s worried this could happen, that this deep switch could be thrown. Now that the engine was finally burning, Kate took us into overdrive. In a darkened recess of a wooded park, we tried to hold each other in the after. Her half-naked back was pressed against the rough bark of a maple, but she made no effort to move away. Distraction? Hair shirt? As for me, I surrendered to the physical. “Sleep with me. I want to hold you, sleep with you.”
Motherhood, tragic motherhood. I learned about tragedy from my mother (and grandmother). On the news, bus accidents and illnesses are inaccurately labelled “tragic.” Tragic=pitiable. And hero now generally means victim. Little Timmy fell down the well, so he’s a hero. Gloria taught me motherwise. Tragedy is chosen. The whole point of tragedy is that the suffering is self-inflicted. What I do to become king makes me a terrible king (or queen, as Mom’s Macbeth would soon show us). Motherhood is tragic. To be so needed, so wanted, so central—but only for a while. If you do your job well, your child will outgrow you. What a recipe for unhappiness.
Witness Kate’s mother. What had Gail been through in the last twenty-four hours? A phone call from her only child, perhaps a teary phone call, asking if she could, in that delusional and propagandistic phrase, come home. Who would have first used the H-word, Kate or Gail? If it had been Kate, had that been strategy or honesty? Oh the mom-flattery of the word, especially from an adult child. I have scholarships. I’m almost finished law school, live with someone else, and yet we’ll all pretend your home is still my home. If I had a Trent Reznor poster on that wall when I was fifteen, surely the room is mine forever. A phone call from a glum Kate, then Gail’s fretful, hopeful afternoon before the mom money started flowing. Plans for dinner out. Pick up a little cake on the way home. Maybe some flowers. But judging all the while. And how much news had Gail received? Did she get to hear pregnant before I did? Gail was a Chinese immigrant who had fought her way past a limited education and managerial sexism into a lucrative real-estate career. In her day she had to quit her job to have Kate, so she knew all the stepping stones: killer LSAT score, law school, internships, bar ads, and then the slave years making money she wouldn’t have time to spend. For a young lawyer, a baby doesn’t officially threaten her job, but every woman who steps aside for a baby lets another strident one barge up the middle. Those corner offices come at a high price.
What did Gail know? What did she suspect? Maybe abortion wasn’t the only word Kate and I were keeping silent. This park sex we’d just had, was it pro-body or just anti-word?
“Sleep with me. I want to hold you. A hotel, your mom’s, wherever.”
We drove to Gail’s to sleep, but didn’t sleep much. Kate went up to her mom’s room and did whatever quick diplomacy was necessary to get me back in the house. She returned downstairs with an armload of bedding and nodded towards the basement. At a maximum distance from the matriarch, we were terrible. Every piece of cast-off basement furniture was put to use. (Wicker: how it pinches.) We snuck upstairs to make pasta at 2:30 in the morning, though Kate didn’t reach for a bottle of wine. Near 5:00, I was awakened in the best way possible. At the end of that round, dawn spilling into the basement’s small, high windows, I finally saw what was happening. We weren’t being biologically close or turning the force of a fight into sex or drawing together in adversity. Nor were we simply buying the vase we had already broken. The little I saw of Kate’s eyes and the extra-dirty things she said and wanted to hear finally revealed the sex for the drug it was. She couldn’t sleep for worry, could not or would not drink or smoke, so there I was, a flesh drug, hiding her and letting her be hidden. Definitely not the time to say abortion.
30. The Sugar Deal
About the other pregnancy. Fathers aren’t the only mystery here. You must wonder about Gloria’s mother. Don’t we all.
Truth be typed, the abortion wasn’t the only mercy killing I’d been contemplating that August. By the time Kate was dividing and sub-dividing, Gran was 103 years old. A century with small feet. A war-torn century. She had crossed the Atlantic three times, once after each world war, though the second was a return trip. In her day, many people were defined by one crossing, the Atlantic their second birth canal. Generation after generation of immigrants. An army of war brides coming in after a nation of farm boys went out. Gran went back again to keep herself whole. Herself and/or all of us.
/> After her first war, Gran had sailed with her man beside her, promise and their hearts flung at unknown shores. Peg and Bill, the moll and her mole. Peace may have been declared between nations, but between people she knew it still needed to be coaxed. Bill spent his war in cramped tunnels, had survived by using his ears and his hands. Six months after the guns went quiet he and Gran were at the ship rail staring at the most expansive horizon on the planet (staring, in fact, at the planet, its great blue curve).
When Gran crossed back again in 1946, her skin no longer smooth, she’d have sailed through a longitudinal ghost line, felt the tug of those two younger souls passing through her, young souls unable or unwilling to read the French summons now tucked into her handbag. In 1946, a smile a stranger to her lips, she clung to the foremost railing every day, burnished her skin with the cold salt air. For the first few days, she reread the letter that had brought her on board and had launched a thousand hopes. Quickly enough the thin paper was no longer necessary. The orphanage director’s words had already burnt into her before she booked passage. But the photo he sent was rarely out of sight.
If this were another boring Canadian farm novel (excuse the redundancy) or mill-town saga, I’d reach now to shake a hatbox archive. The hatbox, originally purchased by a broken-hearted and/or consumptive great aunt at SomeExEuropeanBody’s Mercantile in downtown Empirillia, would wow you with pickling and preserve recipes and letters recounting the boxed lunch socials. The crown jewel would be not just a birth certificate, but an English birth certificate, a meat-inspector’s stamp from some distant, better Away. To douse Gran in this saccharine crap, our multiply subsidized hallucination, I’d speak reverently of the dusty military telegram, its paper softened with age but its words still as hard as bullets. WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU…
I’ll spare you the Cuban.
Grandpa Vic caught his nugget in April of ’45. Historically, that’s a hard pill to swallow, getting popped just weeks before the peace. According to some, he was at least able to leave a little something behind.
April ’45, Victor-Conrad dies and Gran’s thrown into a hell few of us can imagine. Her last link broken. What’s the point? What’s a country without children? Then in May, Victory in Europe. Salt in the old girl’s wound. In January ’46, her life changed with a single letter. No, not just her life; every life mentioned here. A French orphanage worker/con man threw a letter across the pond, and we are the ripples radiating from its splash.
Look up the phrase French letter. Pretty much the exact opposite of the letter Gran got. If you believe Wikipedia, when young Victorian gents set out on their grand tours of Europe, chasing old art and young hookers, their passage to Rome took them through southwestern France and introduced them to the ingenious gut work of the French shepherds around the town of Condom. A little sheep intestine over the pole and voilà, no pregnancy diluting the family line (i.e., coffers) and no syphilis going home to the English ladies. Back in London, the brothel-going gents eagerly awaited the arrival by post of more domers from France. These French letters eventually went on to climb the social ladder in London and ultimately greeted the visiting gentlemen of France when they were over shopping for a little crumpet.
Always this mud we sling at borders. During the Renaissance, Italian anatomist Gabriello Fallopio (‘discoverer’ of the Fallopian tube, this story’s best supporting actress), started working on modern, effective condoms to prevent syphilis. His work anonymously won a convert from his busy countryman Casanova. Casanova’s racy History of My Life repeatedly refers to his trusty “English raincoat,” which had in fact been designed, tested, and advocated by a fellow Italian. Perhaps in homage to the Venetian Casanova, the French Marquis de Sade wrote affectionately of his use of “Venetian skins.” The French wanted les redingotes d’Angleterre and the English wanted French letters. Made here but marketed from there. Shagging to Cuba. Pre-World War I, the French gentlemen couldn’t learn directly from French peasants, mon dieu. If the milords and seigneurs were going to learn from the plebs, if high were to stoop to low, they needed a border and some water to wash themselves clean. Condom was the Windsor of France. We always need to smuggle vice through some Away, claim it’s the custom of some foreign, unknowable other. Jungle boogie. Ontario hydro sold as BC Bud. When Gran got her French letter just after the war, the vice in question was still very, very far away.
Dear Mademoiselle Williams,
Please allow me to introduce myself before I deliver news of the days of your heroic son here in Calais. I am Monsieur Belliveau, of the orphanage of St. blah blah…I know my good French people, who are ravaged by war…yadda zut alors yadda…There is this one darling farm girl who was so grateful to the sacrifices of our liberators. She recognized your son Victor-Conrad for the gentleman he was. In a moment of gratitude she suspended her virginal honour. Now, moon die, here is a child of sacrifice, a baby girl, born to a fallen Canadian soldier and, alas, a young woman lost in childbirth. With the depravations of war, your granddaughter would face a miserable, no doubt short, life of malnutrition and exploitation. The tiny orphanage babies of France are dying every day. My duty compels me to relay this news of sadness to you there in prosperous Canada.
That’s a version of the story Gran received. She’d been translating from the Cuban for years and knew it really said: Your son knocked up a prostitute. How much are you willing to pay for the baby?
Plenty.
In time, cost, and labour, Gran’s baby odyssey was much more challenging and expensive than that of a contemporary North American woman booking time off from the firm and cancelling her pedicures to fly to Vietnam or China with a bank draft and a baby carrier. In March 1946, Gran took a train from Windsor to Halifax, a train she knew would be coming back out of Halifax still full of demobilizing soldiers, her son not among them. Then the week-long crossing by ship to England. The prodigaless wore a silver fox stole on her return to an England of crowded trains, piles of rubble, and hotels without soap. She visited busy offices, typewriters clacking, phones ringing, and made inquiries with her British passport, her northern accent, and her new world money. Handed out quarter-pound bags of sugar and coffee as a Williams knows how. One afternoon a busy English major would have been surprised to see Gran sitting before his desk for an unscheduled meeting. If he was observant, he’d have noticed new nylons on his secretary the next day. Gran greased palms with butter and American dollars, trying to learn what she could about Belliveau. Windsor’s daily groceries were gold bullion in pasty-faced England and diamond-studded platinum in horsemeat France.
Spontaneous criminals are an insult to us professionals—whimsical, emotional, narcissistic. Not for my tribe. Preparation. Preparation. Preparation. Gran dug in to enable her success. She did all the homework she could to get the drop on Monsieur Orphanage, a man audacious enough to ransom her possible grandchild. She tried offices in London and Paris hoping to determine whether he was a legitimate official or just another grifter with a stained collar and a half-loaded pistol in a threadbare pocket. But in 1946, there weren’t any more legitimate officials. “Mademoiselle, where are records in all of this rubble? There are bodies we cannot find, let alone records.” Another pack of cigarettes wasted.
With rail service still decimated in France, she hired a car, paying the highest gas prices the world had ever seen. Calais was sick of foreigners, and she couldn’t find a proper interpreter for hire. Oh well, she was there for the body anyway. Walking around, the silver fox stole now hidden in her luggage, on the cusp of raising a daughter who would go on to study and practice mime and all manner of experimental acting, Gran surprised all but one thing she knew about herself in order to get what she wanted. Approaching women in the village, she’d flash a goodie or two and attempt to convey her point through gestures. Half a dozen times a day she’d hold up a photograph of Victor-Conrad in uniform then rock an imaginary baby in her arms. She’d point at herself, cradle her arms again, then poi
nt back to the photo before miming VC’s death. This could have meant, as it did in Mom’s stage version of this scene, that her fingers were bullets against her own chest. Of her beseeching mime, Gran told me, “Your vanity prevents you from being understood. Death wipes away vanity.”
Stories get new layers with each generation, but each layer adds distance from the source. My images of Gran in war-torn France don’t just come from Gran herself. They also come from Mom or Gran telling me about Mom performing a version of Gran’s story as part of some early 70s theatre. The Sugar Deal played to a warehouse audience of ten to forty people willing to check out “a theatrical experience,” aka screaming under minimal lights, aka therapy with an audience. In an evening of mixed theatre, Glore did her bits with a suitcase and photographs, ending with a bundle in her triumphant arms. Decent theatre, I’m sure, but she followed an act that consisted entirely of adults riding tricycles while blowing kazoos and just before a leotarded orgy of seven groaning, barking, whimpering “actors.” Mom is the first to confess that her one-act play, with its actual characters, conflicts, emotions, and social commentary, was a complete flop. “In the early seventies, that wasn’t the war people wanted to hear about.” Trevor Reynolds had played the orphanage man.
However intimate The Sugar Deal was, Gloria chose to end it with the Gran character getting the baby, not with how she later dealt with the letter. This is pretty much the only time I know of that Mom has checked her disapproval. (She should remount the show now that she has the money.)
Keeping Things Whole Page 15