by Plum Johnson
Robin feels that all historic items should remain in the family, although he’s willing to turn over some historical papers to professional archivists. He’s already given many of Sandy’s papers to the Virginia Historical Society, which has a large collection of Williams family papers going back to our great-great-grandfather, John Williams, The Immigrant. We all agree that Mum and Dad have left us a great treasure, but it comes with a daunting responsibility.
Chris suggests that Mum’s old alma mater, Bennington College in Vermont, might like her college scrapbook and letters, and Victor thinks a naval museum in England might like Dad’s wartime letters. Several books have already been written about Dad’s exploits, including Escape from the Rising Sun by Ian Skidmore and Alarm Starboard! by Geoffrey Brooke. Dad’s annotated, dog-eared copies were in his desk. Some of Mum’s exploits have been published, too, in a book called “Flak” Houses Then and Now by Keith Thomas, but men got the lion’s share of a nation’s gratitude after the war. Contributions by female veterans, especially American Red Cross workers, were largely ignored. On Remembrance Day, each November 11, Dad marched to the Cenotaph with his war medals, but Mum wouldn’t even stand up in church when they asked veterans to stand. “They don’t mean women,” she said. We’ve found a Certificate of Merit awarded to her by the U.S. Army, “in recognition of conspicuously meritorious and outstanding performance of military duty” when she was an Assistant Red Cross Director. On her U.S. government ID card, she was designated 2nd Lieutenant in the event of capture by enemy forces, but after the war, Mum wasn’t even given a pension.
I argue with my brothers that the era of large families, anchored by one ancestral home where everyone gathers on special occasions, is long gone. The majority of modern, globetrotting families are coping with divorce, blended offspring, downsizing, and far-flung relatives, so who has the time and space to properly display these things anymore? My children certainly don’t. Carter, for example, is living and working with his wife in Turkmenistan. He’s a seeker, a globetrotter, drawn to exotic locales. He hates being tied down by possessions and always travels light. Virginia expresses no interest in anything except the portrait of Grandmother and Mum’s ancient flowering geranium tree, which is staked together with old oxygen tubing. She and Louis have recently built a sleek modernist townhouse, with no room for brown furniture. Jessica has no room for anything in her one-bedroom apartment, and all of my brothers’ children are in similar situations.
I’m shocked that none of the boys wants the framed watercolour painting of Dad’s cottage on Lake Kashwakamak. It’s a good painting, evoking the solitary, rustic nature of the place, surrounded by birch and pine. It always hung in a place of honour beside Dad’s bed.
“I can’t believe you don’t want this!” I say to Victor. “Are you sure?”
He looks at me as though I’m as thick as one of its planks. “If you had survived a concentration camp, would you want a painting of it?” he says.
“But you helped Dad build the cottage … I thought you loved going there!”
“What do you know? You’d bailed by then—you were away at university. It was a mosquito-infested swamp! All I remember are the blackfly bites and the calluses on my hands. Thanks, but I don’t need any souvenirs.”
I try to superimpose this new piece of information over the old tape in my head. I thought we all criticized Mum for not going with Dad to his cottage, but it sounds like the boys would have rather stayed home with her if they could. Did I judge Mum too harshly? Did I only listen to Dad’s side of the story? Sometimes our remembered experiences make it seem as if we each came from a different family. I keep forgetting that Victor spent time as an only child. He and I—the bookends— were the only two children who did, but the parents I experienced had just turned thirty, in the bloom of early romance; his were in their forties and fifties, getting ready to kill each other. Not only were Victor’s and my vantage points different, our backdrops were different as well.
When the boys and I finally finish, we go out on the verandah, drinks in hand, and do some horse trading. There are private trades going on all over the place. Robin has something Chris wants and I have two things Robin wants, so with a bit of circuitous swapping, we all end up happy: I get the dining-room chairs plus Mum’s bed.
Robin smiles. “You know, I think Mother would be quite pleased with how we’ve worked things out. She told me once that she was amazed by how well we got along, given how different we are.”
“She said that?”
“Yes! She thought maybe it was because we all share the same sense of humour.” He takes a sip of his bourbon. “But I corrected her … I told her it was because we all share the same crooked teeth.”
We’re all laughing by the time the boys’ wives have returned from their day trip, and we celebrate with a homemade feast.
We sound Dad’s dinner gongs for the last time.
Robin plays reveille.
Earthquake
At the end of June, Victor’s children come to spend the day by the pool. I’ve been sitting at my computer all morning, working on my Shakespeare project. Suddenly, all the letters on my screen begin to dance in slow motion. Then I feel unsteady, as though the floor is shifting under my feet. Even the pictures hanging on the wall look like they’re sliding back and forth. I run outside to the verandah where Nick is strumming his guitar.
“Nick? Did you just feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“An earthquake!”
“Nope,” he says and keeps on strumming.
I call over the railing to Hannah who’s lying in the sun down by the pool, eyes shut, earbuds plugged in.
“Hannah!” I shout. “Did you just feel an earthquake?”
She lazily takes out an earbud and looks up at me quizzically. “An earthquake? No, I didn’t feel anything.”
Did I just have a stroke? Seeing shaky letters is one of the warning signs. Maybe my prayer to outlive Mum by a few months wasn’t so far off. Maybe I should lie down. I head upstairs and take a two-hour nap. When I turn on the radio at suppertime, however, the announcer is talking about the earthquake in southern Ontario—5.0 on the Richter scale. I’m so relieved I want to celebrate. But how was I able to feel it in the downstairs hall—the part of the house that rests on solid ground—while Nick at the end of the verandah, raised on stilts, and Hannah down below him by the pool, never felt a thing?
Does a fault line run straight through this property? If so, the rectangular slab of concrete that we call our pool may very well be our Maginot line. It was, after all, the site of an epic battle between Mum and Dad back in the 1960s.
In those days, Dad spent much of every winter in Argentina, insuring cattle. Mum wouldn’t go with him, but she resented his time away. While he was gone, she said, the boys lacked a father figure. She also complained that Dad never left her enough money. He would return spilling words in Spanish, describing lavish dinner parties in Buenos Aires, lyrical rides in the moonlight across the Pampas on grand estancias … and the many beautiful stewardesses he’d met en route.
So finally Mum eyed the unused maid’s room next door to Sandy’s bedroom at the back of the house and came up with a plan to teach Dad a lesson. At the local high school, she posted an ad for a room for rent during the fall term when she knew Dad would be away. Only males need apply.
One Friday afternoon a shy, thin, bespectacled math teacher arrived for an interview. Mum was giving him a tour of the kitchen to show him where she kept her pots and pans.
“Don’t expect me to cook for you,” she said, “… and if you want clean sheets, the laundry’s in the basement.”
At that precise moment Dad walked into the kitchen carrying his briefcase. He’d come home early from the office.
Dad looked the man up and down and said, “May I ask who you are, sir?”
“Mind your own business,” said Mum. “This has nothing to do with you!”
Mum started shouting that since Da
d had decided to abandon his family every winter, she had decided to take matters into her own hands. Dad was furious. How dare Mum turn his home into a common boarding house! Mum wanted to know who the hell Dad thought he was, speaking to her like that? Dad accused Mum of being a spendthrift! Extravagant! Lazy! Mum accused Dad of being a killjoy! Insensitive! Obstinate! Voices rose and doors slammed as the math teacher fled out the back door.
Eventually, Mum took off to Virginia to cool down and spend a few weeks with her brother. While Mum was away, Dad called in the contractors. They demolished the wall between Sandy’s bedroom and the maid’s room, thus eliminating the room Mum had planned to rent out. Sandy was happy—he now had a huge bedroom with twice as many windows as before—but Mum returned in fighting form.
The day after Dad left on the plane for Argentina, Mum was on the phone to the contractors herself. A maiden aunt had died and left her some money, and now she planned to sink it into a hole in the ground. In came the bulldozers and backhoes. They rolled through the garden gate, trundled down the manicured lawn, and hunkered down beside Dad’s beloved vegetable patch. In giant mouthfuls, they scooped out the earth that had harboured Dad’s pumpkins, carrots, and lettuce plants and regurgitated it onto the lawn. A truck, with its big vat of churning concrete, parked itself by the edge of the fence, and by the time they were finished we had a sparkling blue thirty-foot swimming pool where Dad’s vegetables once grew. A truce was declared when Dad got home. You couldn’t see the pool—it was blanketed by snow and ice—and Dad was glad to be back. He had missed us.
Basically the pool was a concrete pit, just like the one Mum had known as a child at Rokeby. It had no heating apparatus and was best used in the winter—as a skating rink. But Dad grew to love it. He was hardy. More or less as soon as the ice melted, Dad would dive in. Naked. He had it all to himself.
An inspector comes for the day to comb through the house with his flashlight and tools. We want to know if there are any structural problems so that we can be upfront with potential buyers. He crawls into the knee walls, goes up the trap door into the attic, and takes his flashlight under the house. He’s surprised by how sturdy the house is. “Rock solid,” he calls it. There’s a little dampness under one of the windows in Mum’s bedroom, but this is no surprise. The plaster is falling away in clumps and has been for years. Mum’s favourite bird, a brown speckled swallow, always builds his nest outside that window, plugging the eavestrough. The only way to stop the moisture was to evict the bird, which Mum refused to do.
We decide to contact the three individuals who have expressed interest in the house and hold a private auction. Victor designs an official bidding form, sends it out in early August, and we sit back and wait. But as the days tick towards the deadline, we receive disappointing news: one by one the bids evaporate.
On the last day, I get an urgent call from a man who wasn’t on our list. He says our house has always been his favourite, but he’s only just heard it’s for sale. Can he come see it? When he arrives, I give him “The Cook’s Tour.”
In the nineteenth century, Thomas Cook & Sons was a British travel company famous for organizing guided sightseeing tours that crammed as much as possible into the shortest period of time. It spawned expressions like “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” I lead this man in and out of the house in less than half an hour, but I can tell he’s smitten. He asks for the bidding form; one day later we receive his offer. It’s close to our asking price and Victor’s pleased—now we can celebrate his wedding to Peni in September without any house-sale negotiations hanging over our heads. The papers aren’t signed, since the buyer still has to confer with his bank, but we agree on a handshake. The details will be ironed out when Victor returns from his honeymoon.
The night after we accept his offer, though, a strange thing happens. I’m alone downstairs, cleaning up my dinner dishes, when I hear a loud bang upstairs. I run to investigate and find that Mum’s bedroom door has slammed shut. When I try to pull it open it’s locked … from the inside. Dread slithers through me—because her lock is a small hook and eye. It’s entirely possible that a gust of strong wind sucked her door closed, but what are the chances that the tiny hook at the top of her door could fly up and land precisely in the tiny metal eyelet on the door frame? My heart starts pounding wildly. I race downstairs, out the back door in the dark, and over to Pucci’s house. Even though it’s late, I can see across the garden that their lights are still on. Phil helps me search room to room, but there’s no evidence of intruders or ghosts.
What am I to make of this? Does this mean Mum is giving her blessing to the sale, telling me I can leave her bedroom now and move on? Or is she telling us this is the wrong buyer and she wants him out of her bedroom?
In a frenzy of confusion, I ask if I can paint the buyer’s portrait. I’m having difficulty visualizing him in this house, so I think that if I can paint him in context, it might help me. He agrees to sit for me on the verandah when I offer to give him the finished portrait as a housewarming present.
Victor thinks I’m crazy.
“Why would you paint a portrait for free?” he says. “And why this guy? You don’t even know him!”
But I can’t explain it. I just need to work things out through my art.
The next day I open the broom closet looking for paint rags and find a plastic bag holding what looks like a matted grey wig. Eew … what is it? It looks strangely familiar and yet at the same time repugnant. I take it out in the sunlight and feel it with my hands: animal, mineral, or vegetable? Its strange coarseness resonates deep within me—a living, breathing memory—and suddenly I drop the bag. It’s animal! I find myself battling nausea. I run to the phone to call Pelmo.
“There’s a bag on a hook in the broom closet that has something … that’s, uh … grey and …”
“Sambo, is it?”
I’m bent over double, afraid I will faint.
She giggles. “Your mum, about the knitting she is reading in her news. From the dogs they take the wool. She save when I give brushing to Sambo. Your Mum, she thinks this can be good.”
When I get over my shock, I shake the whole bag into the forsythia bush so that Mum’s favourite bird can pad his nest. Maybe he’ll take the hint and leave the eavestrough.
It’s August 12th again—Mum’s birthday—and I decide to make her a homemade birthday card and place it with flowers on her memorial plaque. I take my mug of morning coffee and go out through the garden gate, lifting the fox ears on the latch and hearing their chink behind me. I associate the garden gate with so many memories. When the ears on the cast-iron fox flop down, their muted chinking sound reminds me of playing hide-and-seek with Dad. I can hear laughter, feel my heartbeat as I run, see fireflies in the dusky sky. I also associate it with afternoon tea—a neighbour’s head appearing through the bushes, a wicker chair scraping across the verandah, Mum standing up: “Hello there!” Opening the gate. Chink-chink.
There’s a bench by the fence but I don’t sit down; I just stand by the tree and let its energy surge through me. We have such deep roots here.
I read Mum’s plaque: ANNE ARMISTEAD WILLIAMS … BORN AUGUSY 16TH, 1916. Wait a minute … the 16th?
Shit! That’s not her birthday—that’s the date of her wedding!
I race back up to the house, spilling my coffee. I call Victor.
“There’s a typo on Mum’s memorial plaque! Her birthdate is wrong!”
“Don’t get your knickers in a knot,” he says. “It’s no big deal.”
“How could we have done this to her?” “Didn’t you proofread it?” he asks. “You were in charge of the wording.”
“No, I wasn’t!”
“Yes, you were!”
“We have to change it!”
“It’s cast in bronze! You can’t just take an eraser and rub out bronze.”
“We have to order a new one, then.”
“Are you crazy? It’s concret
ed in!”
“I don’t care,” I say, “this is important to me.”
I have memories of Dad, tromping through all the family graveyards in England and Portugal, making copious notes of names and dates on ancestral headstones so that he could leave us with a genealogical trail back to the early 1700s. Mum’s family did the same thing: her brother built a separate cottage on his property to house the family papers.
“How many people are going to know—or care—when Mum’s birthday is?” asks Victor. “At least we got the month right!”
When I tell Robin, he seems not surprised. “I hate to tell you, but last time I was home I noticed there’s an error on Dad’s as well.”
“There is?”
“Yep … the dates of Dad’s years with his company are wrong. Instead of 1931–1977 it should say 1933–1978.”
“What should we do?”
“We could order a fourth plaque,” he says, chuckling, “and title it ‘Errata.’ We could issue it from the Oakville Hysterical Society’s Department of Corrections!”
I will never trust information on gravestones again.
The tree that shades Mum’s plaque is a sapling that we planted after Sandy died. My parents outlived the 120-year-old maple that used to stand in the same spot. It was a grand beauty with a ninety-inch girth and sweeping arms that branched out over the lake. It seemed almost human to me. I used to wonder what it had seen—who had paddled by in a canoe or stroked its bark in the 1800s? As children, we used to pitch our tent under its leafy canopy in summer and swing on one of its long, sinewy arms, propelling ourselves out over the beach like Tarzan. Sadly, despite being fitted with steel cables over the years, it hollowed out, and one day the town sprayed a bright orange X on its side. Then men came with a two-storey crane and buzz saws and cut it down, amputating its limbs one by one. My brothers saved a large chunk of its belly in the hopes of reincarnating it as a tabletop, but over time it rotted under a tarpaulin in the bushes and eventually got hauled away to the dump.