by Plum Johnson
“It’s typed on American Red Cross letterhead.”
“She took her typewriter to war?” I say.
“Along with her fur coat, high heels, and hot water bottle,” says Robin. “I remember she told me that.”
“I thought they were supposed to pack light … and take only what they could carry!”
“Uh-huh, those were the rules, but since when did Mother follow rules? She figured a troop ship would be full of men tripping over themselves to carry her luggage, and she was right—that’s exactly what happened. Especially since she was the only one wearing high heels!”
My darling Lackee: Ambo Sayo Baye Beenee! … Lord & Lady Amory were over last nite & I asked them WHY the British have such a custom of segregating the males & females at dinner parties? Women leave, while the men drink Port till they’re wheeled off unconscious to bed by their butlers. They’re known as “1, 2, or 3-bottle men” depending on their capacity …
“Hold that sentence!” says Robin. “I need more bourbon.” He heads indoors, tinkling ice cubes in his empty glass.
“I’ll be the two-bottle man!” I say, and follow him into the pantry for a new bottle of Pinot Grigio. When we return, Chris has flipped his page over.
“Mum’s back to the Battle of Britain now—she’s describing Germany’s invasion.”
Sir John said he went grouse shooting in Scotland & complained about the German strafing because they had to quit hunting for half an hour. He glanced at the newspaper headlines: “129 Shot Down!” & calmly remarked, “Hmmm—a bit more than we got grouse!”
“I reckon Mother was having a bit more fun than Father,” says Robin. “This one says Knightshayes Court even had its own golf course on the front lawn.”
“Here’s a nice, loving ending,” says Chris.
It is now late evening—peaceful & still—with only the singing of the birds & bleating of sheep to break the silence—and of course my longing for you which seems to reverberate from every distant hilltop.
“They were married by then—right?” asks Victor.
“Yep, but they didn’t really know each other.”
“Go back a page,” says Victor, “and reread that bit for Plum about Mum writing a book.”
“Mum wrote a book?”
“Not exactly …” Chris looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “She was delegating again—she gave Dad the title and told him to write it!”
Now that we’ve found all these letters, not to mention the bins and boxes of loose photographs, the task of clearing out the house feels much more daunting. There’s much more at stake—our whole family’s history. There’s no time to read them all. We’ve got to put them into some kind of order.
Robin and I buy hundreds of acid-free plastic sleeves, and over the next ten days he sleeves Dad’s historic documents in the playroom while I sleeve Mum’s letters in the dining room, sorting them into piles chronologically. We don’t separate the pages of letters; we slip the whole letter, plus the envelope if there is one (to preserve the postmark), into one sleeve. We’re focused and committed, working methodically in our separate rooms. Occasionally I hear Robin grunt, or slam a file drawer, but it feels like we’re working on an assembly line in a factory.
Each afternoon we take a break for a glass of wine on the verandah. I have a cigarette and Robin has a thin cigarillo. The smoke hangs in the hot humid air like a halo over my head and fights to escape the tangle of Robin’s grey beard. Then it drifts out over the railings into the garden as we reminisce about our childhood.
We both dress for dinner, as Mum and Dad would have done on special occasions. Well, not exactly … it’s more like we’re putting on plays in the basement fifty years ago. Instead of Dad’s tuxedo, Robin wears his short Scottish argyle jacket in Lovat blue that matches his eyes, his plaid kilt with its sporran, and his ivory-coloured kilt hose, cuffed at the knee with a fountain pen stuck in it. “The pen is mightier than the sword!” says Robin when I ask him what his pen is doing there.
Instead of Mum’s pale green satin evening dress, I wear Dad’s freshly cleaned British naval officer’s uniform—black, with gold braided stripes on the sleeves of the double-breasted jacket. It fits me perfectly. Dad was only twenty-eight years old when he last wore this.
We lay the table with care. Even though I’m using the thrift-store silverware, I remember Dad’s attention to detail: the proper number of forks and knives depending on what we’re serving; dessert spoons at the top facing left, forks underneath facing right unless our guest is left-handed (in which case they’re reversed); condiments in small glass bowls, each with a proper curved-handled spoon. The only things missing are the crested silver napkin rings—they’ve been locked away.
After dinner, Robin takes one of Dad’s gnarled wooden walking sticks, puts on his Scottish Glengarry cap with its ribbons hanging down the back, and we go for our evening hike. We walk with a bounce in our step—the “Family Stride”— as we march west along the lakefront, north on Navy Street, and back along the main street, inspecting Oakville as we used to do all those years ago with Dad. I can’t help looking for litter; the only difference now is that I don’t pick it up. But I still hear Dad’s voice: “Pick that up! Treat this town like your living room!”
One evening, as we’re walking onto the pier, three teenage girls in black puffy jackets, black tights, and Uggs on their feet pass us, stop, turn around, and run back.
“Excuse me,” they say to Robin, “but aren’t you somebody famous?”
“I might be!” he says as he bows courteously and tips his cap to them.
We walk on as they giggle and run away. I overhear words like “Gandalf!” and “the actor in Harry Potter!”
Robin shrugs. “I get this all the time, but in Canada it’s usually Farley Mowat.”
The next day, back in the dining room, I’ve finally finished sorting Mum’s letters. They fill twenty-three binders, bulging with airmail paper. Her life is literally laid out in front of me— the most valuable things in the house to me now—but I can’t start reading yet. There’s too much else to do.
Robin has found, amongst Dad’s letters, a collection of small pocket diaries. They’re bound in golden brown calfskin and each has a tiny pencil slotted into the spine. In one diary, 1946—the year I was born—I see Dad has scrawled across my birthdate, Received cable—eldest daughter born! I always thought he wanted only sons, but here is my first hint that he expected more daughters. When he recorded my birth in this diary he was on a ship in the South Pacific. Mum was in Virginia, preparing to join him in Hong Kong. I turned out to be his only daughter, but he called me “First Daughter” the rest of his life. In the Far East, this is a sign of respect.
From the post-war years in the Far East, I find a pocket dictionary published by The China Mail in Hong Kong titled Useful Cantonese Words and Phrases for the Visitor and the Resident. Thumbing through its pages, I’m shocked by phrases like
“This bathroom is not clean!” and “Who broke this plate?” and “You always tell lies to cheat me!” Given the context, even innocuous phrases like “What are you looking at?” take on a more sinister interpretation. Mum couldn’t have used it with our amahs—could she?
And then suddenly, as if fate has guided my hand, I find evidence of my first amah, Ah Kan. Tucked inside Mum’s 1952 passport is a letter and a photo. All my life I’ve been searching for details of her, and here she is.
My full name is Leung Kan Hoi, aged 32, native of Nan Hoi, Kwangtung. I first came to H.K. in 1938. I am very glad to hear that you, Master and the children …
It seems Ah Kan was missing me, too, and wanted my parents to sponsor her to Canada. She must have been twentynine years old when I was wrenched from her arms at dockside, and by now would be almost ninety, probably dead. But I’m thrilled to find this. I think again about the writing on the lake stones. Can we reach that far back?
Thank goodness people wrote letters. When I recently taught a university English course
, I discovered that none of my students under the age of twenty-five had ever received one; two remembered receiving a postcard; and one thought he’d seen his father’s handwriting—on a cheque. They could hardly recognize a full sentence; all my students textmessage. What’s going to happen to all our histories if computers crash? What happens when software formats change? Storing things is one thing, retrieving them a whole other matter—a lesson we learned with Dad’s Alzheimer’s. These days I take more photos than ever before … but they’re stored on my hard drive, so who sees them? I’m certain my great-grandchildren won’t. All the so-called letters my son and I have exchanged from abroad have been emails—which I can no longer access now that I’ve upgraded to new hardware. With computers, the more we think we’ve preserved, the more we may have lost.
I decide to make a photo album of the interior of the house. I want to record every detail before we lose it all. With my camera, I take a close-up of the dining-room wallpaper, the hole in the upstairs window screen, the white porcelain doorknob on the door to the basement, the latch on the back door, the wicker mail basket, the crack in the chimney plaster, the drawer pulls in the pantry. When I interrupt Robin in the playroom and get down on my hands and knees to photograph the scratchy paw marks at the base of the double doors, left there when Dad locked the dogs inside for barking too much, he looks at me quizzically.
“Don’t mind me—I’m just recording Sambo’s paw prints for posterity.”
“And Scrappy’s and Buffy’s and Jenny’s and Winnie’s,” he says, “… and if you look a little higher up, you might even find mine!”
Later in the day, even though it’s wintertime, I take all of Mum’s identical skirted bathing suits from the basket in the basement and hang them on the laundry line outside so that I can take a picture of them, too.
I get the feeling my brothers are worried about me. I sense they’ve been having telephone conversations behind my back because Victor’s been making pointed remarks about my state of mind a little too often. He’s all puffed up with confidence when he delivers them, as if he has the authority of a crowd behind him. Maybe I am going off the deep end, but how would I know? What I’m doing just feels right. I feel responsible for our memories. I don’t want them to disappear into thin air.
Tonight I lie awake listening to all the familiar sounds of the wildlife settling down in the walls—the scrabbling of tiny feet above and below me—and the sound of the waves and the wind predicting what the weather will bring tomorrow. It sounds like it’s going to be a clear day for Robin’s drive south. He’s sound asleep in his old bedroom next to mine.
The next morning I come downstairs in the semi-darkness and pull back the curtains in the same manner as Dad once did—first the curtains on the long row of windows facing the lake in the living room, then the street side, then the dining room. I love the sound of the tiny wheels scraping along on their metal tracks. The sky is slate grey with fingers of apricot clawing across the horizon. Even in the time it takes me to open the curtains, the apricot is winning and the grey is brightening to white. The lake is dead calm, with shimmering patches of robin’s egg blue striped with bands of navy.
A lone bird is chirping. As the sun lifts its head other birds start chattering, and when it pops fully formed over the horizon there’s a cacophony of birdsong, pitching higher and louder, building to a crescendo as if in concert, applauding the sun. Now the horizon turns silver—so bright the reflected light hurts my eyes—and the sky is breaking into high clouds shaped like fish scales, picking up speed, swimming eastward. It’s a scene I have all to myself, much the way Dad must have had it before we all stumbled noisily downstairs.
I go to unlatch the verandah door and pass by the framed picture of the impudent girl. She’s like a phantom limb— something connected to me, but missing. I keep whispering, “Who are you?”
To my surprise, the door’s already unlatched and Robin is coming up the verandah steps swinging Dad’s old walking stick. He looks windswept and his cheeks are flushed pink.
“Where have you been so early?”
“Up the high street,” he says. “Nobody’s awake.”
As he passes the picture beside me, he takes his hands and forms a frame around the girl’s face, blocking out her hair.
“This looks so much like Carter that it has to be you!” We both laugh—the resemblance is uncanny—but it’s not me.
We share a fast cappuccino and toast in the kitchen before Robin gets in his car for his twelve-hour drive home. As he lugs his suitcase out the boathouse door, he tells me not to give away the garden bench—he’s made arrangements to donate it to the Oakville Museum. Then he spies Dad’s fire escape ladder—the fat coil of sisal rope I’ve put aside for the garbage—and he’s so viscerally affected that he heaves it onto the back seat of his Volvo.
“I think I’ll rescue this,” he says.
“Just a sec,” I say. “Let me take a picture of it first.”
PART III
Dispersal
Two Weddings and a Funeral
Virginia calls me in early May. She’s started to plan her wedding—four weeks hence.
“Is it really as simple as you say it is?” she asks.
I tell her I think so, but then I had Mum as my wedding planner who brought her relaxed nature to bear. My reception was at home and the whole affair was potluck. When I asked Mum how many people I could invite, she was generous.
“Invite as many people as you want!”
“No, no, I mean how many people will fit in the house?”
“Don’t be so silly,” she said. “There’s no limit … if guests arrive and it’s too crowded, they’ll walk home and come back later!”
“What if it rains?”
“They’ll bring umbrellas!” she said. “For goodness’ sake— trust people’s intelligence!” And sure enough, my photo album shows the lawn covered by a rent-free canopy of multicoloured umbrellas. Neighbours brought casseroles, a friend made my wedding cake, my bridesmaids and I picked flowers from a neighbour’s garden, and everyone but the bride walked to the church … so no limousines were required. Dad proudly drove me in his newly waxed Volvo.
I remind Virginia that there’s another precedent she could consider. Her brother, Carter, and his bride, Diana, married a year ago using the postmodern idea of a “public elopement.” They flew from Turkmenistan to Las Vegas where they married in the Chapel of the Flowers. The whitewashed ceiling was studded with video cameras and we were all given a website to attend via a live-stream video link. There was no limit to the number of guests they could invite—the whole world could attend, uninvited.
Pelmo had trundled Mum and her oxygen tank to the back of the house to watch on her computer, and I’d stayed home in Toronto and watched in my pyjamas.
Diana wore a purple dress and Carter carried the bouquet. After their vows, Carter kissed his bride, waved at the camera, and said, “Hi, Mom!” I was transfixed ... sucked through the screen. It was better than watching The Bachelor.
Later that night when I phoned Mum and asked how she liked it, she said, “Oh, it was wonderful! Especially the bride’s white dress … but who was that chubby man standing next to her?” It turns out Pelmo had clicked the wrong link and Mum had watched the wrong wedding, but that hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm. Las Vegas offered digital photographs of Carter and Diana, so we downloaded one for Mum. It slid out of the printer with the word PROOF smacked across their foreheads.
Virginia decides to use Mum’s relaxed model for her wedding to Louis, except I remind her that the guests who brought casseroles to mine in 1971 are probably not on her guest list. Jessica steps in like a good sister and volunteers to bake the wedding cake. In Mum’s desk drawer we unearth a pile of leftover engraved invitations from my wedding and discover that the date is the same, so for a moment Virginia even considers crossing out her father’s name and mine and recycling them. Later in the week, she chooses a caterer in Oakville purely because
of its name: Plum Catering. Luckily, it turns out to be an inspired choice. A week later, she calls me again.
“Hi, Mum,” she says. “Are you able to meet Jessica and me at a store next Tuesday night?”
“Sure … what for?”
“I think I should buy a wedding dress.”
Of course! How could I have forgotten this small item? I’d worn Granny’s, an antique silk-and-satin relic from the post– Civil War era. It had so many hooks and straps inside it that it took three of my brothers, with their combined high-schoolcadet-uniform experience, to buckle me in. The puffedsleeve bodice was delicately ruched in silk chiffon. The heavy satin skirt was the colour of candlelight, splashed down the front with the faint stain of hot chocolate accidentally spilled there on a beautiful spring day in 1898. None of the subsequent brides had had the heart to remove it; instead, they’d embroidered their names around the inside of the hem. Most of the females in the family had worn this dress except Mum, who couldn’t risk shipping to England on a troop ship during wartime. She’d worn a white Confirmation dress. Virginia would have happily worn either of these dresses, but they’d both disintegrated long ago.
I drive into the city and find the bridal store in downtown Toronto. Jessica is waiting inside the doors, but Virginia arrives late. When she finally dashes in, the bridal consultant smiles broadly.
“When is your big day?” she asks Virginia.
“June 5th.”
“Next year?”
“No,” says Virginia, “this year.”
The consultant takes a step back and gasps. “In four weeks? Most people plan a year in advance!” She waves towards a small rack near the door. “Those are last year’s samples,” she says. “If you can find something there, we can help you; otherwise, I’m afraid …” Her voice trails off and she wanders away as if she’s got better things to do.