Tell

by Frances Itani

  “Partly,” said Kenan, as if he were unclear about details. “Oak gave me the photo. He said it’s the only one he had. It was taken at the older woman’s farm. The younger woman had just baked a cake for her mother’s birthday. Oak said he’d been given the photo, which could have been one of several taken that day. He was not present at the birthday celebration.”

  “But how are these women related to you?”

  Tress studied the faces in the photo: hairlines, cheekbones, eyebrows. She searched for signs of pleasure in the women’s lives, jokes in the kitchen, that sort of thing. But the older face was tight-lipped; jokes had not been captured by the camera. Still, both women must have enjoyed the moment, displaying the cake outside in the snow. The photographer would have needed the outdoor light and would have persuaded the two to go out.

  “So,” she mused, “there was a quick dash out to the snow, a pose, a quick run back. No, the older woman—whoever she was—wouldn’t have been able to run on those swollen legs and feet.”

  Kenan listened while Tress invented background. She turned over the photo. No names, no date. She looked at the younger woman, looked at Kenan, looked at the photo again. She wanted likeness and found it, in the smiling eyes, the grin, the curls around the forehead, the undisguised waves in the long hair, though most of the woman’s hair was fastened behind her neck. Still, the waves, the curls were there to be seen. Kenan’s hair had always been thick and curly. It still flopped over his forehead—on the side of the obliterated eye, which Tress was glad of.

  “Did Uncle Oak give a name?” said Tress. “More importantly, what did he say? I know he doesn’t talk much, but he must have given some clue.”

  Kenan could hold in the information no longer. “Roberta. The young woman’s name is Roberta. My mother. With my grandmother. Taken several years before I was born, Oak said. Only that, and that the photo rightfully belongs to me and he’s been meaning to give it to me for some time.”

  “Your mother, before she married? And your grandmother? Why now, all of a sudden? He must know more than that. Has he always known? Why didn’t he show you this when you were a child? Or when we were first married? You’re older now than your mother was in the photo—she doesn’t look more than seventeen or eighteen. If this is your mother, did she marry Oak’s brother? After all, it’s Oak’s surname we both carry now. Or is Oak your adoptive name only? No blood relation.”

  “Oak obviously has more to tell, but knowing him, he won’t be in a hurry. Last week, I asked him if he knew anything about my birth. He mumbled around but then showed up today with the photo. If it took him this long to bring one photo, it might take another twenty-five years before he adds in another detail.”

  “That isn’t good enough,” said Tress. “We’ll ply him with questions. He’ll be here Christmas Day and we can demand answers. Well, not demand, but ask.”

  Kenan, who was hearing “life is treacherous” in his uncle’s tone of voice, was not convinced by the suggestion and could see that Tress understood this from his expression. He knew Uncle Oak and his ways better than she did. But he was also recalling the unfamiliar sense of belonging he’d felt when Oak had handed him the photo earlier in the day.

  Tress examined the faces again. “Let me make up the story, then,” she said. “But we have to find out more. Maybe not right away, but soon.”

  She rolled onto her back. “An unseen young man took the picture. After the photo was taken, the photographer—your future father, maybe? someone who was in love with your mother?—carried the camera, and probably the chair, back inside. The chair was carved and ladder-backed, like Aunt Maggie’s beautiful kitchen chairs, the ones Uncle Am made after they were married.”

  “We don’t know that. We can’t see the back of the chair.” Kenan smiled to himself, listening to her voice, waiting for more.

  She carried on. “Your mother carried the cake back to the kitchen, being careful not to slip in the snow. She had a grin so wide you’d remember it one entire day and into the next. She had a mischievous sense of fun. When she was a child, she ran the circle of snow in Fox and Geese, yipping like a mother fox when it was her turn to chase. And long legs. She could catch up and overtake everyone, even the older girls. Her face was beautiful,” she added, and thought to herself, Like yours, which is still beautiful, no matter what you believe.

  “As soon as the women—and the unseen photographer—were back inside the house, they set down the cake and dug in because they were hungry for dessert. No, wait. There was a fourth person inside, an older man, your grandfather. He was a man who pronounced the word ‘bury’ as burry instead of berry when he paid his respects at the graveyard. He had been watching the photo session from a kitchen window that was either patterned with frost or dripping with condensation, and now he was impatient for his tea. What a fuss! To take a cake out into the snow. Your grandfather had a habit of pouring his tea into his saucer to cool. Your grandmother had learned long ago to ignore the slurping. Neither of the men complimented the women on the cake. Spice cake? Marble cake? If they did, no matter who had done the baking, the men would find themselves eating the same kind of cake for the next six months.”

  She checked the photo again.

  “I’ve changed my mind. The size of the cake indicates a larger celebration. There are more than four people present. Fiddle strings are at the ready and the room has been cleared for dancing. The younger generations will have pushed the kitchen furniture back against the walls. The food is ready, laid out under clean linen cloths on a long sideboard: scalloped potatoes with a sprinkling of flour between each layer and melted cheese overtop; an extra-large ham, glazed to perfection; a bowl of mashed turnips; a dish of mustard-bean pickles and another of gherkins; a plate heaped with slices of buttered bread; a container of applesauce. All of this will be served before the dancing begins. There are too many people to sit at one table, so they’ll carry their plates here and there, or find a chair, or lean against a wall. The non-dancers will move to the living room or the parlour after they eat. They’ll sit there and gossip and play cards until the young people finish dancing in the kitchen.”

  “Which kitchen?” said Kenan. “Which farm? Do you recognize anything?” He took the photo from Tress and said, “Roberta. My mother. Her name was Roberta.” He stared into the face of the young woman who had a grin like his own.

  “Bobbie,” said Tress. “She would have been called Bobbie if her name was Roberta. We do know the date of your birthday—or we think we do. We’ve never asked if we could try to look up birth records from twenty-five years ago. Isn’t that something that could be done? Your birth has to be registered somewhere. And we have your mother’s first name. That’s something.”

  “On my Attestation Paper, when I signed up, I was told to write ‘Deseronto (Adopted)’ on the line for my place of birth. You were listed as my next of kin.”

  He placed the photo on the bedside table and reached for the lamp switch. The light flickered and went out, and he understood within the space of that flicker, within the quick ripple between light and darkness, that he and Tress had, in those few moments, crossed into new territory. A thin path with barely trackable footprints, a new-old territory that offered an elusive shimmer of light that burrowed back and cast a glow over what they had once had. A past together. One that allowed imagination, sharing, spontaneous eruptions of humour and wit that could be exchanged between them.

  Roberta, he said to himself in the dark. Bobbie.

  Was this what was to be important in his life? Did everything distill to a moment of peering into a photograph the size of a postage stamp and seeking his place inside a family? Well, he had a family. He had Tress. He knew she loved him. He had Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am, and Tress’s parents, and her brothers, and Grania and her husband, Jim. He had Uncle Oak, and maybe Oak didn’t want to be pushed into telling what he did not want to tell. He had his friend Hugh, whom he hoped to see the following year. He could tear this photo to bits an
d he would still have a family.

  But he had thought of Hugh and now the cloud of war was in the room. It had drifted in without announcement, and shadows were circling. War was about defending and protecting. About allegiance, alliance, seizing and grasping territory. War was about death. A mass of lives, a tangle of human lives, young lives, had been clumped together to form exactly that, a mass. Millions of empty chairs. But couldn’t the mass be disentangled, looked at as one life, and another, and another? Each with a story, a photograph, a history, a family to love and who loved?

  No one person ever stood alone.

  And then, as he felt himself hovering on one side or the other, belonging or not belonging, Tress moved to stretch her legs. She slid over against him, the heat of her bringing him back. She wiggled her feet, settled in for sleep. And at that moment, a thought flitted through his mind and he wondered, crazily, if the young woman in the photo, Roberta, his mother, had ever eaten an egg.

  Chapter Twenty

  SUNDAY MORNING, MAGGIE WAS ON HER WAY TO St. Mark’s to sing in the church choir. The sky was perfect and unbroken, as blue as sky could be. Words swirled in her head as she walked, but these were not the words of hymns. She was thinking of lines from The Mikado, the intuitive framing of sun and moon. Three minutes of song headed toward the final consonant, the k in “awake.” She began to hum, thinking of how she must allow the music to slow and gather, ending with the weight on the final line.

  During Thursday evening’s rehearsal at Naylor’s, she had experienced a sudden, wondrous sense of being borne along, up and up, adrift on the moving notes. Zel was at the piano, or Luc, one or the other, changing back and forth as the songs were repeated. The rehearsal went on and on. Maggie, herself, might have been floating. And then, she focused. The rippling movement of the keys carried her forward; she approached the end, became aware of her voice slowing, slowing, finally, to “The moon and I!”

  A small triumph. A tiny one, but she had felt it, nonetheless.

  But before any triumph, every line had to flow. She must not let her pitch drop on a repeated note. She must enunciate. “If you don’t enunciate, the audience won’t understand the words, Magreet. Gilbert and Sullivan have done their work; now you must do yours.”

  Why didn’t she sink into the songs that way every time? Without worries. Trusting what she knew and had practised, trusting what she loved about the music, the lyricism. Singing joyfully in the company of others who also loved to sing. Why?

  Well, there were lines of “Peace, Gentle Peace” to muddle through, though she felt somewhat better about them now. Other singers would be standing around and behind her, the entire choral group, despite the fact that she was one of the soloists. After that, there would be volume, plenty of volume for “Hope and Glory.” Under those circumstances, surely it would be impossible to hear individual voices. The audience would join in and sing loudly and enthusiastically. She tried to imagine how much sound that would create.

  She wanted to perform well. She did not want to feel as if someone had seized her by the throat behind the curtains. Only one rehearsal remained, and that would be a final run-through of the entire programme, start to finish, the night before the concert.

  Andrew’s “Annabelle Lee” was to have choral backup. Maggie’s gypsy solo—it had been decided at the end of rehearsal—would be accompanied on piano by Zel. Luc would play accompaniment for her solo from The Mikado. The programme was sent out for printing the next day and there would be no further changes.

  She reached the top of the hill, paused to look at the sky again and hurried up the outside steps of the church. In the afternoon, there were things to do. Christmas Day was on a Thursday this year. She had one more day’s work at the library, and after that it would be closed until the second week of January. She had gifts to wrap, food to prepare. She had Christmas carols to go over, songs to sing, notes to remember. Remember the text and you’ll remember the notes. Who said that? She had sewed a thick, warm shirt for Am that she knew he would like. She had made a cloth handbag for Zel in beige with crimson lining, a matching crimson cord woven through the neck as a drawstring. She had finished knitting a scarf for Luc. A gift no one could or would notice or talk about. She had worked on it when she was alone in the apartment, and had buried it at the bottom of her knitting basket until it was finished. The wool she chose was dark and vibrant, evergreens in winter. She would not make a fuss; she would leave it in his room next time she visited. If there was a next time before Christmas.

  She would make a next time. She was invigorated by the thought. She would visit this evening, after supper. She would tell Am she wanted to deliver a gift before Zel went off to Belleville to her brother’s home for Christmas. She would wrap the new handbag and take it with her. She would visit Zel first. After that, she would take Luc’s scarf to him. She wanted to be with Luc. There. She said it again. And again. She could not stop herself. She hummed, the sun and moon.

  She arrived a few minutes before the service began, threw her choir robe over her shoulders and grabbed up a hymn book. Zel waved; Andrew raised his eyebrows, one high, one low. Several late-arriving children were led to the Sunday school room. The choir proceeded solemnly up the aisle. The service began.

  During the last hymn, Maggie stood tall, trying not to sway as the others seemed to be doing. Why were they swaying? This morning, everything was in harmony, in its proper place, in its proper rhythm. The minister said the final prayer and raised his shoulders as if he were about to be lifted by diaphanous wings.

  Maggie did not stay on after the service. She whispered to Zel that she wanted to drop by after supper. Zel nodded, squeezed her hand, told her she wouldn’t be leaving for Belleville until Tuesday morning, two more days. The others put on their coats and boots and left the church. It was Christmas week. The choir members had sung well; now they had children to amuse, last-minute errands. School was out until after the new year. The shops were closed Sundays, but the windows were brightly decorated, as was fitting at the end of the year the boys had returned from the war. Citizens had taken to strolling up one side of Main Street and down the other, exclaiming over the efforts the shop owners had put into beautifying their properties. On side streets, wreaths hung from front doors. The town was dressed in its finest for Christmas. The houses settled back and allowed a dusting of snow to drift through the narrow lanes between. Branches of the tallest trees nodded over the streets of the town.

  IT WAS AFTER TEN O’CLOCK, AND MAGS WASN’T BACK. SHE had left the apartment after supper, between six-thirty and seven. Am knew she was concerned about her performance. More than one performance—she had several pieces to sing. He knew she was concerned because of the way she’d been pacing around the apartment. For days. This evening, she had walked up the road to deliver Zel’s Christmas gift and to practise.

  He didn’t know what to do with himself. Go out, maybe. Visit Dermot, listen to his brother talk about politics or his auto. The hotel would be warm and welcoming; fireplaces would be blazing. There would be a large tree in the lobby and another in the dining room, the glitter of tinsel offset by velvet ribbons and bows. Even along the bar there would be pinecones, loops of evergreens, sprigs of red berries.

  Kenan hadn’t been by to visit Am for several nights. Am was restless, knowing that Mags was out. He wondered if Kenan would arrive. He didn’t feel like reading newspapers, didn’t want to play solitaire. He had nothing to do on a Sunday night except keep the heat going in the building.

  He climbed up into the tower and decided to wait for Kenan, who might or might not visit. If Kenan did leave his house tonight, he might head in the opposite direction. From the peering-out space in the clock, Am could tell if Kenan was coming toward the tower. If there were too many people on the street, Kenan walked east out of town, the same route he’d taken the first night he went out. He’d have tracked a good path through the woods by now, wherever it was he disappeared to.

  Am reached for the flask o
f whisky he kept stashed behind a beam. Dermot had handed it to him the last time Am visited the hotel. Wrapped, concealed, a heavy, oversized flask. Dermot had smiled behind his moustache and wished him a Merry Christmas. Told him to keep the gift under cover.

  Am took a large swig and decided he would not wait for Kenan. Instead, he would go out onto the bay, maybe take his skates this time. He’d pulled his skates out of the closet the day before and they were ready, waiting for him to slip his feet inside. He had placed them on the mat by the door where Mags had put hers. This was probably as good a time as any to go out and glide around the ice. There’d be no one around. He dressed warmly, pulled on a toque and wondered if he should leave a note for Mags in case she returned before he did. No, he wouldn’t bother. She’d figure he’d gone to visit Dermot at the hotel.

  ONCE HE WAS ON THE STREET, AM REALIZED THAT HE WAS overdressed. The temperature wasn’t nearly as low as it had been the past days and weeks. The night was mild, the air almost balmy. Soothing, in winter. But the ice would be good. Except during heavy snowfalls, skaters had been out every day since the rink opened. Every evening, too. He’d like to skate with Mags but he didn’t want to ask in case she refused. Maybe after Christmas. But she would have the concert to worry about. After the new year, then. He’d ask her after that. On New Year’s Day. The rink would be full. There would be cheer to spread around. It would be good for the two of them to be in a crowd.

  He crossed the street and took his time walking to the rink, enjoying the mild air. When he reached the shack, he went in but left the light off. He didn’t want to draw attention, didn’t want the caretaker returning and wondering if he’d forgotten to flick the switch when he closed up for the night.

  He tested himself as he walked on blades across the wooden floor and out onto the path that led to the rink. First time on skates this season. He stepped onto the ice without hesitation and began his long, even strides around the oval. He might not see as well as he used to, but he hadn’t forgotten how to skate. Round and round, a dozen times. He had plenty of strength in his ankles, his calves, his thighs. He opened his jacket so he wouldn’t become overheated and saw, when he looked toward the opposite end of the rink, a still, dark figure. The figure moved. He pulled up short, wondering what his eyes were telling him now. He was certain he was out here alone. He skated to the end, turned, skated back down the middle. He turned again and did a lap around the edges. The dark figure emerged again. He recognized his nephew, let out a low whistle.