A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  I wasn’t sure whether Peter felt badly that he’d held us back from our winter trip to India or whether he just wanted another trip to look forward to, but he’d grabbed on to the idea that we should spend November (after putting the garden to bed, of course) in Rome and began searching for flights and an affordable apartment. He kept calling me into his office to point out a great deal on a place that might go fast and I kept cautioning him to wait a few weeks without saying why or fully examining my own caution.

  We also talked that month about the wedding we’d always meant to have. Peter and I had officially met in August of 1989 when he came from Halifax to work at the television program The Journal on CBC, where I’d been working for a year full-time and as a freelancer before that. I say “officially” because I had spoken to him and seen him on a screen a year before meeting him in person. I had talked to him on the phone about a possible interview with the host of The Journal, Barbara Frum.

  Trained as a lawyer at Dalhousie University, Peter was writing a book about the Donald Marshall inquiry then taking place in Nova Scotia, an inquiry into how the justice system had imprisoned a Mi’kmaq man named Donald Marshall for a murder in a Sydney park that a white man had, in fact, committed. Peter was also an on-air commentator in Halifax with his friend Parker Barss Donham, and I was told the two of them were quite an act, so I booked them both to fill Barbara in on the inquiry when I couldn’t decide which one I thought would be better. My first sighting of Peter in the edit suite was of a bushy-looking man with a full beard. I found his manner somewhat ferocious, but I was immediately impressed with his voice and his forceful, precise speaking manner.

  At one point in the interview, Barbara suggested that since Donald Marshall hadn’t spoken articulately at his trial, he hadn’t won the public over to his side, implying perhaps that he was somewhat at fault for his own conviction. Peter quickly shot back, “Where’s the claim that in order for the justice system to be fair, impartial, and decent that the individual before them has to be articulate, well-educated, connected, and rich?”

  Apparently, that evening, in the bar in Halifax where Peter watched the interview with friends, an exclamation of shock filled the room. Had Peter Kavanagh just dissed the most powerful media figure in Canada?

  If he had, it didn’t matter. Once he was working full-time at The Journal, Barbara became a fan of his, as she was of all sincere, highly intelligent, highly curious people. “Where did you come from?” she asked him once when he stunned her with his instant recall of facts and his persuasive arguments. “Were you trained by Jesuits?” He’d had Catholic teachers, and some in his family thought he should have become a Jesuit priest. He was a man who stayed in law school because he loved studying the law, even though on his first day in class he knew he never wanted to practise it.

  I came back from my holiday that August in 1989 to find Peter sitting at a desk in front of mine. I remember he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the top, a look that, at first, I thought was kind of geeky. There’s an old saying that goes like this: a man falls in love with a woman he’s attracted to and a woman becomes attracted to a man she falls in love with. That was certainly true in my case; buttoned-up shirts, beards, and deep voices became more appealing to me the longer I knew Peter. That day, though, he’d made the mistake of having my phone book on his desk. Those were the days when chase producers, as we were called because we chased down guests for the daily interviews, lived by our phones, our Rolodexes, and our phone books. And Peter had my phone book, even though “GOODWIN” was written in bold letters on the edge.

  “You have my phone book,” I said, perhaps a little coldly. He handed it back to me and I set it on my desk, ready for a new season.

  Despite that obvious display of my possessiveness, Peter chatted freely to me, as he did with others who surrounded him. He took an interest in everyone and soon found out what they liked to talk about, although that didn’t stop him from talking about his own myriad interests. And despite the physical challenges his limp caused him, he made friends with AG, the tall, athletic producer who talked knowingly about basketball, just one of the sports Peter knew nothing about.

  We all learned quickly that Peter knew a lot about pretty much everything else, and it wasn’t long before producers came to him for help roughing out scripts for late-day paks. Paks were short videos shown before interviews that provided the audience with a background for the story. If a news story broke late or an important interview suddenly came through, then a pak, which had to be researched, written, voiced by the host, and edited for nine o’clock, could be assigned to a producer as late as six. And that was before we had Google or even computers to type scripts on that could be easily revised. We were still using typewriters long after the rest of the world had packed them away.

  Peter was about the only person around us who completely understood a clause in Canada’s constitution called “the notwithstanding clause” and the only person who could tell you, without looking it up, the ins and outs of the Meech Lake Accord, the accord devised to keep Canada together. As producers came to him to get salient facts so they could quickly get started on their paks, AG jokingly suggested a new segment for the show: “Just Ask Peter.”

  I liked Peter, but I was far from interested in any relationship at that point. Less than a year earlier, I’d discovered my husband of more than a decade was having an affair and wanted out of our marriage. I was determined to work through my sense of betrayal and abandonment and to figure out a way for me and Jane, who was then a toddler, to live well, since they say living well is the best revenge. I was seeing counsellors and reading relevant books, determined to pick myself up. My mother always liked to tell us to “get back up on the horse again.” I never rode horses, was a bit afraid of them, but I understood her meaning. My ex was not going to keep me down.

  Still, I found myself more and more intrigued by Peter and surprised to find myself wondering what connection I had to this man. It was at a birthday party for me that fall at a friend’s house that Peter, perhaps after a beer or two or three, came up to me and said, “I like you.”

  I ignored the noise of the party around me and answered, “I like you, too,” while looking around the room, but not at him. I could still see him shake his head, though.

  “No. I really like you,” he said. “Can we go for a coffee after?”

  It was well past the hour when I drink coffee, but Jane was away that weekend with her father at his parents’ home, so I had no reason to go home. And I was curious enough to agree.

  I drove us east from my friend’s house and we looked for a coffee shop that was open. We finally ended up at a Coffee Time on Queen Street East near my home, a place I’d never thought to go to when I passed it on the streetcar on my way to work.

  We spent much of the night drinking coffee there. Later, I’d hear Peter say again and again, “I can fall asleep drinking coffee.” But caffeine in the late night had me buzzing and alert. Even though we avoided drinking their coffee forever after, we had Coffee Time mugs for years to remember that night. Well into the morning hours we talked about ourselves, two wounded souls who wanted more in life.

  Peter talked about a year of separation from his family after he contracted polio as a two-month-old infant, about the experiments done on him as a child to lengthen his semi-paralyzed left leg, about the year he spent in a body cast when his leg was fused to his pelvis with a silver plate because doctors had missed the fact he’d had a dislocated hip at birth, so that by the time Peter was twelve he had worn out the socket and the ball of his left hip.

  As cab drivers stepped in for coffees to keep them awake and drifters came and went, I talked about believing my marriage had been good, about how my husband and I had been best friends, how my daughter and dream job had finally come into my life after years of waiting for both, and how I thought I’d been owed some time to enjoy my daughter and the job after putting my husband through graduate school. It was as th
ough we were setting our cards on the table. Those were the hands we’d been dealt, but neither of us wanted them to be who we were or where we were going.

  After that night, there was never any talk about dating others, or of not being together. However, I was slow to trust in a second chance at love. The first time we went out to dinner together, we walked from his apartment in downtown Toronto to a nearby restaurant called Le Paradis.

  “Well, with a name like that they’re setting us up for rather high expectations,” I said, with bitter cynicism in my voice.

  “There’s nothing wrong with high expectations,” Peter said.

  I have always remembered that moment when my cynicism slipped a little. I think I came to see how optimism had kept Peter going, and I think I started to fall in love with him a moment later.

  Still, I didn’t want to rush Jane into any new living arrangement and wanted to do all I could to spend more time with her. That fall, I left The Journal for a job with CBC Newsworld after a senior producer from the new cable channel phoned The Journal and I answered.

  “Are you happy there?” she asked.

  I was happy there. Being at The Journal, surrounded by all those smart, funny people, was my ideal job. But at The Journal I often didn’t know if I’d have to work through the evenings, and I didn’t like the idea of handing Jane over to a babysitter without any preparation or of negotiating with my ex on the fly about child care.

  The woman explained she needed a producer to help her with weekend programming for the new network.

  “Can I go home at five?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  It was enough for me. I loved the idea of being able to spend my evenings with Jane. But the work at Newsworld was a disappointment after the excitement at The Journal. I basically had to figure out ways to fill hours of airtime with no money.

  When the possibility of moving to Ottawa to create a program for the network came up at the same time as my ex’s request that we sell our house and divide the profits, I jumped at the job. My ex had suggested I could move somewhere cheaper than the Beaches, the Toronto neighbourhood where we lived, somewhere out of the city on the highway like Ajax (ignoring my dislike of suburbs or perhaps throwing it in my face). So Ottawa, where I could afford a house in a downtown neighbourhood, seemed like a good fit.

  I had been reading that a drop in economic status after a separation contributed to the negative effects on children. And I believed that was one aspect of Jane’s situation I could control. With my share of the Toronto house, I bought a good, older house in Ottawa. The previous owners had left a swing set in the backyard, which Jane ran to the moment she saw it, releasing some of her anxiety about the move to a new home. The yard offered me enough space for a decent-sized vegetable garden, which gave me an equal amount of comfort. Once the two of us were settled there, we strolled winter weekends on nearby Bank Street, where we stopped at a small Italian shop for hot chocolate, walked along the canal on wet spring evenings so Jane could jump in the puddles, and carried summer picnics to a nearby pond.

  Moving to Ottawa also meant I could get away from my mother. In Toronto, she’d taken to phoning me and urging me to do all I could to get my husband back at a time when I was trying to accept that my marriage had ended. When I’d first broken the news of my collapsing marriage, my parents had come to my house with baskets of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. I’d felt loved and was grateful that they could be there for me in a way I needed. But it hadn’t taken long for my mother to begin nagging, telling me that I had probably let myself go after having Jane, seeming to put all the blame on me. The counsellor I was seeing advised me to tell my mother I was going to hang up the phone whenever she started in on me.

  It took me a while, but soon I was able to repeatedly say, “I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to hang up now.”

  Even then, I recognized my mother was scared for me and Jane, as well as a bit ashamed about having a daughter who couldn’t keep her husband. Don’t get me wrong; my mother was a generous woman who endorsed and financed, along with my father, all her children’s choices for university, including my year abroad. She had won top honours in university herself and considered a career as a lawyer before switching to becoming a teacher. But she’d bought in to postwar domesticity, and impressed on her daughters the need for husbands. I just couldn’t deal with her contradictions and fears. I needed a time out from her. In later years, our relationship mellowed to a point where I enjoyed driving her around the Niagara Region, listening to stories of her childhood and the goldenrod and blue asters that grew in ditches then.

  I wasn’t trying to keep Peter out of my life by moving, but I knew that could be a consequence of living in a different city. But all he said was “There’s a train to Ottawa and I’ll be on it.”

  And I planned to go to Toronto frequently on weekends for Jane’s visits with her father. Peter and I were both determined to make it work. He was good to his word about coming weekends on the train, and our passion and comfort with each other blossomed on our frequent visits over the three years we were apart.

  It was Jane who finally said to Peter one day on the phone, “Why don’t you live with us?” Soon after, I sold my house in Ottawa and we all moved into a home in the west end of Toronto. I went back to a job like my old one at CBC, where I was able to begin travelling to produce documentaries.

  So, although we had loved each other for twenty-seven years and had lived together for twenty-three, we had never made our union official. For years, I was afraid to mess with the separation agreement I had with Jane’s father; divorce proceedings had the potential of opening the whole arrangement again. Later, life, work, holidays, and health issues all seemed to take priority, even after my divorce became final when Jane was in university.

  There was even a time, when Peter was smoking cigarettes, that I told him I’d always be there for him but I could not say the words in sickness and health while he was smoking. He saw that as a threat, I think, and I suppose it was. He didn’t respond well to threats and he gave up smoking in his own time, but we never got around to the wedding. The first full summer in our new house in Niagara-on-the-Lake, we’d talked about a ceremony again, but left the planning too late. We decided now, that if we sent out invitations in June, we could have a wedding in our garden in August, the month we’d met.

  On the night before Peter’s appointment for his CT scan, we went to Wednesday supper in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a summer tradition; local wineries and food trucks gather in a green space near our home and people from both the town and the region come and sit outdoors at picnic tables painted in pastel colours or on lawn chairs to eat fresh food and listen to live music. Because Peter had to call me in from the garden, we arrived late and the people with the truck that pulled a wood-burning oven were sold out of our favourite margherita pizzas. Instead, we split a lamb burger barbecued by a local butcher and each got a glass of wine. As we sat in the folding chairs we’d bought just for Wednesday suppers, I raised the topic of our wedding to give us something hopeful to talk about. We’d keep the guest list small, the food as local as possible, with offerings from the garden, put a tent on the lawn in case of rain. But we ended up returning to the subject we’d been avoiding: the next day and the few words that could send our lives in different directions, either to travel and a wedding or to cancer treatments again. A clean scan or one spotted with cancer.

  We waited longer than usual for our appointment with Dr. F the next day. Our breathing became faster, our sighs louder as we sat in the waiting area. Neither of us spoke. When a resident finally called us into an examining room, he wanted to look at Peter’s incision first and was surprised to find it still red and leaking. He said Dr. F would “discuss the plan” and left the room, left us not knowing if the plan to be discussed was for the incision that wouldn’t heal or the return of cancer. His avoidance of the topic of cancer left me on edge, but I tried not to imagine the worst. It was something Peter often
accused me of doing and cautioned me against. “Don’t get ahead of the narrative,” he’d say.

  When Dr. F finally came into the room, he too began by examining Peter’s incision and talking about why it was taking so long to heal. My stomach knotted as Dr. F described how some dissolving stitches were still stuck in two places, preventing the spots from closing. He asked me if I wanted to leave the room while he pulled the stitches out, but I wasn’t going anywhere. My stomach knotted further as he dug into the incision and Peter grunted with the pain. I was sure Peter was having the same thoughts I was: Why isn’t he mentioning the scan? But with Peter stretched out on the examining bed and enduring pokes with a pair of tweezers, I decided it was up to me to ask about the scan. Before I could, though, Dr. F mentioned — almost as an aside — that he’d want another scan in three months because he still had concerns over the scar tissue that had made the surgery so difficult.

  “But there’s no cancer on this scan?” I asked.

  “No,” he said as though we already knew that, and perhaps he thought the resident had given us that information. But as a storyteller, a journalist, someone who had been waiting for that word, I wanted to scream, Talk about burying the lead!

  Then, as he helped Peter sit up, Dr. F listened to Peter’s concerns about his back pain. “It isn’t cancer,” the doctor said. “It sounds muscular-skeletal. It might have to do with weight loss and changed sleeping habits,” he admitted. It was clear, though, that if it wasn’t cancer and it wasn’t a surgical issue, it was outside his realm. Still, the weight-loss theory matched the opinions of Peter’s physiotherapist and a top-notch masseuse we saw when we could. They had both recommended back-strengthening exercises and Peter was working on those at the gym.

  Driving home, we didn’t feel the joy we’d hoped would come with the words no cancer. There was something about the way Dr. F qualified the results, the caution about the scar tissue, that dampened our mood. Still, we had the outcome we’d been waiting for since that long day in the surgical wing. No cancer. It was enough for Peter to decide to get on with things, to keep searching for his new normal, enough for me to hope we’d have more years of travel, writing, and spending time in the garden. When I got home, I added the weekend in Casablanca to my itinerary. Together, we worked on the wording for our wedding invitation, and at his desk, Peter surfed for apartments in Rome.