by Wendy Orr
And Jane would answer, if she were assertive enough, which she isn’t, that’s why the conversation is inside her head on the other side of the world, ‘But that’s just it. It’s still Megan’s room. Just like your office is your office, and our bedroom is ours, and the living room is still your parents’.’ Because Fred and Dulcie had very sensibly abandoned their old green vinyl armchairs when they left the farm, and Jane and Ian are using them still. They’ve swung right around into fashion but not into comfort, and the room is still Fred and Dulcie’s lounge with no sign of Jane except more frequent dust.
‘If we don’t move,’ she says now, ‘we’ll renovate. We’re not that poor.’ What she can’t say yet, even to herself and especially in this room, is that she has presumably just inherited a substantial amount of money, a renovation lump of cash, possibly even a new house.
Yet her mother had taken over her parents-in-law’s house, her husband’s childhood home, just as Jane had, but not even the added weight of ancestors had prevented Ruth from making the house her own. Without major renovation—so the only answer seems to be the force of a personality that knew what she wanted and never felt the need to ask for permission to be herself. Just as she would, in the same situation as Jane, have bought that Royal Worcester.
However, Jane is here to sort out physical rather than psychological items: ‘Just start,’ she tells herself, and the desk is the obvious place, but it’s not that easy. In the end she switches on the computer; the operating program is the same as hers and connecting for email is automatic.
She doesn’t know what she’s expecting: her own letters and her brothers perhaps, a few references to the bus tour. Retrieving 1 of 64 messages, says the box on the screen.
Why should privacy be more invaded because her mother has never read these notes? Maybe it’s sadness for the writers not knowing that Ruth was already dead.
The spam mail is easy. Even if alive, it’s unlikely that Ruth would have wanted to assemble woodwork in her own home, gamble for a Caribbean holiday or call the hot girls waiting to speak to her now, ‘Live!’ the ad insists, which is ironic since Ruth isn’t, though it would be odder if the girls weren’t.
Thirty-two messages are from a Literary Calendar, snippets of esoteric information—on this day, so many years ago, a poet was born, a novelist died, someone else wrote a libellous review of an enemy.
Jane laughs aloud. Her mother’s literary knowledge had been vast, her references almost untraceable for the average reader. ‘Unlike Lady Peabury,’ Ruth would say, looking up from a book at the breakfast table, ‘I’ve never considered novels before luncheon to be a sin.’
Into a letter, apropos of nothing, she would drop a snippet: ‘When Robert Frost was asked why he didn’t write free verse, he replied, “I’d just as soon play tennis with the net down.” ’
Then there were the anniversaries. Jane has always known that she was born on Jules Verne’s birthday, and of the tenuous connection her mother had managed to trace between the writer and Acadia, while Megan shares Emily Bronte’s. But over the past year or two this knowledge had increased exponentially, so that no matter whose birthday Jane mentioned, Ruth would reply, ‘Tell her that she shares it with Edmund Spenser’, or ‘The day that Vanity Fair was published.’
An innocent vanity, but Jane feels a less than innocent prick of pleasure at having caught her mother out. Closely followed by a stab of guilt.
The remainder are personal letters; some from people Jane has never heard of. Several seem to have a common theme, and now the guilt is different and strong enough to nauseate, because she’d believed her mother’s claim that her adoption held no more grief. Had she in fact been searching all these years?
If not, she’d been extremely interested in the process. The letters all refer to the writers’ own searches. Two of them Jane guesses to be from Ruth’s own era. Depression children, informally adopted, one advertised in the Daily Standard like a puppy to a good home; one taken off the hands of impecunious neighbours by a wealthier but childless couple. Another had discovered that there was no particular mystery: being the fourth girl, her parents had simply swapped her for a boy cousin. If we’d only been told! the woman rages. Did they not think that it might be relevant to us to know the truth of our stories?
It is the sort of thing Ruth could have said herself, though never to her daughter.
The fourth, Jane would guess as much younger, less educated, an unlikely penpal for Ruth.
Your letter made me brave enough to start searching for my natural mother. I don’t want to be as old as you and start wishing I’d done it when she’s already dead. So I’ve filled in the forms today. My mom didn’t want me to but I showed her your letter and she said maybe that was right and she hoped I wouldn’t get my feelings hurt. Cross your fingers for me.
What letter? wonders Jane.
The last is from Australia, a Barnado boy sent out for a better life. His earliest memory is the feeling of bewildered abandonment as his mother left him at the orphanage.
‘Be good,’ she said, ‘and when you come home you’ll have a new baby to play with.’ I’ll never forget that, and I’ll never forget knowing the lady was lying when she told me my mum had died. Now with all this publicity about other kids who came out with me, I wonder if I was right all along, and if my poor mum got a story about me dropping dead while she was having her baby. She’s not likely to still be alive now, whatever happened, but that brother or sister might be. I’ll tell you how I go.
Jane is unmoved. ‘And Mom obviously told you how she went!’ she snaps, sending the letters to the oblivion of Delete. ‘But she sure never told me!’
She needs more coffee; this is hard. This is hurtful.
But the obligation to do the right thing is strong too, so she reopens all the messages in the Deleted folder and pastes in: Ruth died on the 16th of August. She does not feel a better person for doing so.
She doesn’t want to read any more of her mother’s mail, but it’s compulsive now she’s started, and it can hardly get worse, though she does have to make the coffee before she can go on, and allows herself to fantasise briefly that one of the unread notes will be for her from Ian. He would never write a love letter, which is what she longs for, but she’d settle for calving news or even a quick hi from Sue.
The person she does not expect to hear from is Winston.
Although of course the letter isn’t to her, and is a continuation of a conversation which she knows nothing about. Are you back and unjetlagged, O Wise One? I’ve thought some more about your comments on the paragraphs I sent you and have to admit you’re right after all. The extended metaphor doesn’t work in that context. Okay, it doesn’t work at all—satisfied?
My mother the editor, she thinks bitterly, although for the moment she’s too numb to work out exactly what she’s bitter about. Mothers are not supposed to go on writing to daughter’s boyfriends once they become ex, but even that doesn’t touch the surface of the hurt, the old fear that Winston had always been more infatuated by her mother’s mind than her own body. Her own self. She deletes the letter, admits that it does deserve a reply at some stage, drags it back to the Inbox and switches the computer off.
Her head aches and her eyes itch; she should go to bed. Instead she tries again to phone Ian, who’s still not in or is out again, and starts on the top desk drawer. Pens, pencils, a spare ink cartridge for the printer, envelopes and stamps; nothing significant. She shuts the drawer and opens it again: it all has to be sorted, significant or not. She throws a pencil stub and ink-marked eraser into the wastepaper basket, lines the pens up in a row and shuts the drawer again. Inheritance is supposed to be about sentiment or money—jewellery and mementoes, land and shares—but pens and paperclips don’t seem much easier to decide on.
As if in answer to her thoughts, the envelope on the top of the second drawer is neatly labelled Will.
She knows the contents, or pretty well. Ruth and Bill had discussed their pla
ns with all of them, some time after Rick moved to Toronto, but there’s still a sneaky feeling about opening this now, on her own, no family lawyer, no brothers, just Jane in an old dressing gown and socks in the middle of the night. Though she’s not quite sure where the old family lawyer vision comes from; they were a family who’d had remarkably few uses for a lawyer over the years, and whoever had drawn this up would have long since retired or died.
In fact it’s a newer one, from after Bill’s death, and in Ruth’s own handwriting, which is a shock but makes the document instantly more real—her mother had known she would die one day and that the world would carry on. Jane is not as ready to believe this, about her mother or herself or anyone she loves. But then she hasn’t had the experience with death that her parents had.
A few bequests: the jewellery is hers, Bill’s desk goes to Rick and the family Bible to Mike; ten thousand dollars to a fund to trace families of the children sent to Canada and Australia during the war; furniture and personal belongings to be divided ‘as equitably as possible’, and the estate equally into three portions, although:
in the event that one of my children or grandchildren should wish to occupy the house or the house and land, they may lease or buy the desired property from the other beneficiaries at a fair market price. Deposit and conditions to be negotiated in a proper commercial manner, but any interest payable on the amount owed to other beneficiaries to be at 2 per cent below current home lending rates. Failing purchase or lease by these direct descendants, the property to be offered to my nephews Howard and Ronald McBain, then to Leighton descendants and finally to all other family members, with any necessary loans at interest 1 per cent below current rates.
‘I could stay here myself,’ says a voice in Jane’s head, just fleetingly, the same sort of crazy voice that suggests jumping off high buildings or shrieking at pompous bores.
She leaves the will out on the desk for when Mike and Rick arrive.
Next is a small stack of last year’s Christmas letters, for the few people that Ruth writes to only once a year; other letters, like her emails, seem to have been trashed as answered and presumably replied to before she left for England. Was her mother always this organised, or was there some presentiment of the need for affairs to be tidied, like the nesting urge before birth?
Jane considers, too, how lonely Ruth must have been these last few years; letters and emails might be more tempting to answer if they’re your major human contact. More guilt, though it’s difficult to know what she could have done about it.
A photograph under the letters, and it’s strange she hasn’t seen it because it’s taken before her last visit. Bill is in it, alive and well, proud and happy. With good reason as his wife, with the embarrassed smile that could so easily look supercilious, is in graduation gown and cap, holding a rolled certificate.
‘What the hell!’ Jane is nearly as angry as she’d been at the cigarettes. Weekly letters of life’s daily trivia: plants in the garden, books from the library, a blouse from Sears, and yet her mother had failed to mention something as significant as a university graduation—a second one, as if a degree from Oxford wasn’t enough. She’d mentioned some courses from Acadia University, hobby study she’d implied or Jane had presumed, keeping the brain alive. It was much the same time that Jane had finally commenced on that Bachelor of Education Ruth had so wanted her to do twenty years earlier; making heavy weather, she suspects now, of struggling away at her books after a day of teaching, as if she were the only one with the perseverance to submit herself to the uncertainty, the occasional despair and the joy of late-life study. Meanwhile her mother, her proud, sharp-tongued mother, had not only never said ‘I told you so,’ but had refused to steal her thunder by admitting she was quietly, secretly, driving off to Wolfville however many times a week. Jane is scrabbling through the rest of the drawer now to find the degree at the bottom, unframed but not necessarily unvalued: Bachelor of Canadian Studies, 1989. Six months before Jane received hers.
‘I’m not that weak!’ she shouts. ‘You could have told me! Did you think I’d be jealous?’
Which is exactly what she is. Jealous and humiliated, her achievement subtly belittled by her mother once again outdoing her, though even that isn’t as crushing as being protected from it. ‘I had to find out eventually! You didn’t think of that, or did you think you’d done everything else so much better, you’d outlive me too?’
She can’t believe what she’s just said; hitting below the belt, or whatever the equivalent is on a ghost. ‘But, Jesus, Mom, give me a break!’ (Sounding even to her own ears like a petulant teenager.) ‘What else have you got up your sleeve?Any more little surprises I should know about?’
She yanks open the other desk drawers, dumps contents on the floor: Christmas cards, computer paper, coupons for free photo enlargements. ‘No,’ her mother could have said, ‘no more surprises. Now have you quite finished with this tantrum?’
Jane isn’t sure. The room is small and the mess fills it, overwhelms her; she has to squat on the floor to pick it up again, sorting into piles and drawers, weeping noisily and messily like a chastened five year old, not even a teenager now.
‘And I’m so tired!’ she wails, at which she hears herself and orders herself back into bed. It is so late now, or so nearly morning, and she is so desperate for sleep, that she takes the phone off the hook first.
It makes no difference. ‘Overwrought,’ the mother in her says, which is not much help. She needs something to read, something soothing, but instead of the Poldark she decides it’s finally time to start on the box Mary has given her, and reads the letter announcing her own birth.
It’s the way she felt when Megan was born, or would have if she hadn’t been stitched and sedated; it’s all the feelings of motherhood that her generation thought they’d invented with Leboyer births and bonding. She cannot imagine her mother feeling the same sort of ecstasy for a baby—for her, for Jane—but it’s here, it’s true, and she is still angry that her mother didn’t trust her with her secrets and had so little faith in her strength, and she’s still absolutely furious about the smoking, because without that maybe they would have had time to sort this out before Ruth died instead of her muddling through on her own; but she feels bathed in love, it’s the only way to express it, though she would have never said it out loud: her mother loved her the way she loves Megan. Because whatever secrets Jane doesn’t share with Megan—and there are some, if she’s honest, which she hasn’t been these past few hours—the ultimate bond, the mother–daughterness, she knows to be stronger than any doubts or misunderstandings that could ever come between them.
Snug in this glow, the phone still safely off the hook, her body relaxes. Though it’s strange lying in her narrow childhood bed; in Mary’s spare room she’d lain neatly on the right-hand side, never taking more than her fair share of the empty double bed, but here she lies right in the middle. There is no room for Ian.
Finally she sleeps. And wakes, heart pounding, from a dream of the consul’s office, the red-faced, jacket-ripping official of 1969. ‘How can you qualify for family reunion,’ he shouts, ‘when your husband’s dead?’
A nightmare, not a portent. She’s not psychic.
Though there was the Ruth’s-eye-view of Hamble.
And death’s so easy. People do it all the time. Just look at Mom. And the opportunities on a farm are endless. Gored by a bull . . .
The cows are calving—the bulls aren’t with them.
No, they’re sitting celibate in their paddock, getting cranky as the testosterone builds up, waiting for an opportunity—rape or rampage, it’s all the same to them. And then there’s the tractor, the bale feeder, the grain auger, waiting for that moment’s inattention to run amok, their sleepy operator jumping down without turning the engine off, a foot slipping under a wheel or arm under a pulley.
Ian’s careful. He knows about machines.
He’s never had to do it all on his own before; it’s too m
uch for one man at this time of year, when dairy families and even the vets and technicians who work with them look pale and haggard and begin to make foolish mistakes. Then there’s watering, the drought adding an out-of-season chore to this time of year—bore pumps and motors to be caught in, channels to be drowned in. Or just a falling gum branch, a widowmaker they used to be called.
The logical Jane, failing a little against this onslaught, picks up the phone but is not comforted by hearing her own message once again. ‘I’ll try later,’ she tells it. Working out that it’s now five-thirty, afternoon milking, doesn’t negate the possibility of Ian lying dead in a paddock. She dials Sue’s number but she must be milking too and Jane doesn’t leave a message.
She gets up properly now, defeating incipient widowhood with open curtains, boiling kettle. But what would you do? she asks herself. If he were. It would be a new start wherever you chose. Where do you belong?
In this grey light of early morning her imagination cannot stretch as far as Australia and the self who lives there. Images of husband and daughter elude her in the slippery manner of well-loved faces; easier to picture cows, paddocks, the lagoon. Easy enough, too, to visualise daily routine, what-would-I-be-doing-now, early morning ballet between the narrow kitchen benches—fill the kettle, turn to bread maker, turn again to thump out the bread, back to last night’s dishes in the draining rack, stoop or stretch to put them away.
Like watching a TV ad, too familiar to notice; nothing to do with her, with Jane. Whoever Jane is. Wherever Jane belongs.
Because right now there is no life that feels like her own, and the future seems as unreal but not nearly as exciting as when she was in grade 12 and trying to imagine life after school. Because it’s one thing to mention retirement in passing but another to try to imagine it, and she thinks that maybe this time Ian is serious about selling the farm, it’s not just the rigours of the calving season or the despair of the drought that sees farms yo-yo on and off the market, every place in the district for sale if someone would only offer the right price. Fifty-six is getting old for dairying, never mind that the average age of farmers gets higher every year; Ian a young farmer when he started and still younger than some, but he’s ageing before her eyes, stiff and sore in the mornings and asleep at the dinner table at night. He’s starting to talk about wanting some other sort of life, travelling again before they’re too old, simply having the leisure to lie in bed on a Sunday morning or go away for a weekend.