by Dian Day
MY MOTHER DOES NOT EVER TRY to escape from the locked ward, like some of the other residents do. For a while there, this one old guy, Vincent, managed to get out every couple of weeks, one way or another. He can seem very rational and charming, and if a nice family came in to visit Great Aunt Maud or someone, he would lurk about by the coded door at the end of visiting hours, pretending to tie his elastic-laced shoes. Then he would just follow them out, explaining to them quite lucidly that he comes in every evening to visit his poor demented wife, and asking for their honest opinion of the facility.
“The food isn’t as good as at the other place,” he would say, mournfully. “My wife would like to have more donuts.”
The staff finally resorted to taping a life-size colour photograph of him on the outside of the ward door. Underneath are the words: “This is Vincent. He is A RESIDENT. Please do not let him out.”
I had rooted for Vincent; it was like a geriatric version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The main difference was that there was a lot more drool. After that once-successful route was lost to him, he did on one occasion try to climb out his second-floor window. Luckily, he is a large man, and he got stuck before he even got one knee through the small opening, and a personal care worker found him and laughed herself silly, which I initially thought was rather unprofessional. If Vincent had ever seen The Chief rip the washstand off the floor and pitch it through the window, the plaques had eaten away his memory of it. Or perhaps he just wasn’t ever that strong.
There was no sign of Vincent in the corridor. Nor was my mother’s wheelchair parked along the hallway with the others, and there was no one at the nurses’ desk. When I went into her room, someone had pulled the curtains closed and flipped the lights off and she was sitting alone in the near-dark. She looked up only briefly, and then she made a caught-animal noise and began to beat her hands together in her lap, like there was something lying there that she was trying to kill. I was still thinking of the movie, so I didn’t get what was going on. I went right over and held onto her wrists, gently at first, and I started a line for her.
Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
I was trying to pull her up but it was like her legs were somehow locked around the footrests and the whole chair kept coming with her. I added another line:
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
Glen!” cried my mother. “The bells of St. Clements! Lemons and limes! Oranges! Marmalade!”
I had my arms around her waist now, and was getting frustrated with why nothing was happening the way it usually did, and she began to fight me. Her right palm pushed against my sternum while her left knuckles caught me under the chin, so I bit my lip. I licked a trickle of blood from my tooth. Her arms were surprisingly strong.
“Come on, sing!” I said, interrupting my own singing for a moment and continuing to pull at her. I didn’t know what was up with her, but I’m not sure now why I was so sure at the time that I was doing the right thing.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.
“Marmalade!” my mother yelled. “Marmalade!”
“What is this thing with marmalade?” I said, exasperated. I love marmalade as much as my mother does, but there’s only so long a guy can talk about the stuff without losing it.
“Poison, poison, poison, poison!” she screamed. I had a sense of movement behind me. I was sure by then the staff were hovering in the doorway, wondering what the hell was going on, wondering if they should intervene. It was probably hard for them to tell who was abusing who. It was hard for me to tell, too.
“Stop it!” I said, still struggling to pull her upright. “Stand up! Stand up and sing, goddamn it!”
And then she reached out and slapped me across the face. I let go of her waist and backed off, putting my own hand on the sting. There was a silence so profound I could hear the slap echoing in my ears. It was terrible music.
“Get in the car,” said my mother, then. “Fix the trap, tap, cap. Get in the car. Green eggs and ham.” She had her hands on the arms of the wheelchair and she was struggling to push herself up, but she couldn’t seem to manage it. I just stood there, three feet away, and watched her.
“She’s strapped into her chair,” said the nurse, Helen, from the door.
“She never hit me before,” I said.
“You need to undo the buckle.”
“Never. Not even when I was a child.”
“It’s a child-proof buckle,” she explained.
“What the hell is she doing strapped into her chair?” It finally registered.
“Green eggs and damn, green eggs and damn,” said my mother, weeping. Crocodile tears, I told myself. I was still angry, and trying to calm down, but then it was just easier to shift the anger along to something else.
“She fell yesterday,” said Helen. “She didn’t hurt herself, but we thought—”
“Why didn’t someone call me?”
“Jennifer said she would make toast,” complained my mother. She was still trying to get up.
“You just need to undo the buckle. I did call you. I called five times. I left two messages. We thought you must be away.”
It was my own fault. I hadn’t answered the phone for three days. It hadn’t rung for three days, because I’d turned off the ringer. I hadn’t picked up my messages for twenty-four hours; the red-light blinking had gone unheeded. I’d been trying to escape.
“Tap, tap, tap, tap, TAP!” said my mother. I took a step, leaned forward, and tentatively pushed aside the bottom of her cardigan so that I could pull the strap out of the buckle. Now that I saw it I couldn’t imagine how I had not seen it before. It seemed like all that flailing about was so damned obvious.
“I would have hit me, too, if I’d done that to myself,” I said to her. She looked up right into my eyes and held my gaze for perhaps three whole seconds. Her cheeks were damp, as if the tears had seeped into the lines of her face, and run, willy nilly, unguided by gravity. Something caught me inside, so I staggered sideways, sat down on the edge of her bed, and put my head in my hands.
But only for a second.
“Tap, tap, tap, TAP!” As soon as the buckle was undone and I’d moved away again, she pushed her arms down and got herself to her feet. I looked up and half reached out in case she might fall, but I didn’t want to touch her, didn’t want her to know I was devoid of the faith that she could stand. She opened her mouth, and this is what came out:
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
“Oh!” said Helen. “She remembered the song.”
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
“She remembered what song you were singing.” Helen was starting to repeat herself. Sometimes I think dementia is infectious. The staff at nursing homes are especially prone to it.
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying
“Don’t you or anyone ever tie her into that chair again,” I said. “Write that on her chart, her file, her door notes, wherever you write those things.” I still didn’t look up. I could hear her hesitating, and then another resident’s alarm started, and she moved away from the doorway and down the hall.
And kneel and say an ave there for me.
I waited until she got to the end of the line. “Do you want me to make you some toast and marmalade?” I asked my mother. It was the only way I knew how to apologize.
FROM THE CHANCEL, we could see the priest’s back, and the end of the draped coffin, and the mourners in the pews. To most of the boys, it always seemed a terrible thing to die at Christmas time. What would you do with the presents? they asked each other. Alex and I were more inclined to believe that a special call had been made from Heaven, and who was anyone to argue?
The smell of incense was heavy in the air, and Alex was,
as usual, off in his own world beside me. I elbowed him from the safety of my cassock, pushing his arm forward and finding the sensitive spot between his third and fourth rib. I counted three seconds and jabbed him again, counted three more and leaned into his side as far as I could with the point of my bent arm. Elbowing had taken on the status of ritual.
“Mmmmuhh,” he said, quietly. But he sat up a little and reached for the music book. His Agnus Dei solo was up next.
We were both in what we came to call “the death choir.”
He got up, straightened his gown, dipped his head a couple of times, finding the deep part of the music, and opened his mouth.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis
One of the younger boys joined him about halfway through, and for the conclusion the full dozen of us entreated God to take away the sins of the world. We all sat down again when the last notes faded. I kept my elbow ready. We’d done this often enough that it was possible for most of us to let our minds wander until we heard the signal—two or three opening bars from the organ, or the quiet clatter of the thurible and smell of incense—that would bring us back to the matter at hand: singing someone into their grave. I am not sure what the others thought about; maybe food or comic books or, for some of the older boys I’m sure, how far they could get their girlfriends to lift their skirts. Alex always almost-slept, but I have no idea what he almost-dreamed. And I—I didn’t go far into my mind—just as far as the coffin standing draped before the altar.
Unlike the other boys, I thought about death quite a lot during those funerals, but always in a fairly pragmatic way, and without any doubt about my own fate after dying. I was concerned, rather, for all those who had somehow avoided the pointing of God’s finger—deliberately avoided, I thought at the time, for I believed it a sin to refuse God’s call, assuming naively that he bestowed the same opportunities on everyone, and what made the difference was our mettle.
IT WAS AN EARLY WINTER. Snow had come at the beginning of December and settled in like an unwelcome in-law, waiting for Christmas. For obvious reasons, my books got seriously overdue at the library, and my fines escalated to alarming amounts. I suspect it would have been cheaper to buy the books outright than to pay all the late fees, but I did not want to claim that I had lost them. Being careless with due dates was bad enough. I didn’t think a librarian would respect someone who was careless with the printed word. I didn’t want to give her any more reasons to think I was an idiot.
But I did anyway. The Monday afternoon I took them back, the weather was consistent with a trip to Hell, if Hell had been bitter cold instead of blazing hot. I didn’t see any sign of Luke. In fact, I didn’t see any sign of life out on the streets at all. I couldn’t even see the great dome of St. George’s in the next block; a blue whiteness spread across the sky like God’s windows had frosted over. There was a hearse parked in front of the Greek Orthodox church, and a couple of once-dark cars haphazardly parked, but it looked like people were pretty much doing their mourning in the warmth of their own living rooms. A poverty of people, and an abundance of stinging snow, and it wasn’t even officially winter yet. I slid up the library steps with the oversized book-filled plastic bag hugged to my chest, my hat pulled down over my eyebrows, my eyes squeezed three-quarters shut, and my head down like a charging bull.
I plowed into her just before I got under the portico. She let out a little “Unh” sound on impact and reached for the railing to steady herself. She had on a red coat with a hood pulled tight around her face, so I didn’t immediately realize who she was. All I could see was her nose and her little round open mouth. Then she tilted her head up to look at me, but her eyes were mostly closed against the stinging snow.
“Oh,” I said. I could feel a sudden heat in my half-frozen face.
“I’m sorry!” she said. “This weather!” And she tucked her chin back into her scarf, and made her way down the steps, watching her footing, her right hand on the metal railing.
“No! My fault!” I called after her, too late, not wanting her to get away without an apology, but she didn’t turn back again, so I don’t think she heard me. At the sidewalk she went left, down the street towards St. George’s, bent into the wind blowing up from the lake.
As if in some kind of delayed reaction, the plastic bag broke and books dived from my arms to toboggan down the empty library steps. I watched them, torpidly, as the sleet obscured their titles and the authors’ names. Judging by the jacket art, there was a wicked snowstorm in every story. Within a few minutes, you really couldn’t tell a book by its cover.
“SHIT!” ALEX SAID; he’d clearly just thought of something. He pulled the zipper of his parka halfway down and fished around in his inside pocket for his watch. “Yes! We have time!” He was exuberant. “Let’s go get some summer! Come on!” And he started to run through the squeaking snow without waiting for my agreement. I stood and watched his knapsack jumping up and down on his back like a diminishing monkey. When he got to the corner he called over his shoulder once more: “Come on!”
It was impossible not to follow him.
He zig-zagged over to Jarvis, with me twenty yards behind him, both of us slipping in slush and grime and the detritus of Toronto winter. An old man with a three-legged cane shook his mittened fist at me as I went by, and Alex got caught up in the leashes of dachshunds with matching plaid coats. At the intersection he waited for the light, and, when I caught up with him, he tossed the snowball he’d been making into my shoulder, where it exploded like a soft grenade. Ice chips ran down my face and neck like a baptism in boyhood, so long overdue.
And then we were running and diving and slipping, sliding, caterwauling, whooping, throwing and catching, ducking behind the streetcar, playing chicken with the couriers who rode their bicycles in shorts even in the winter. We ran among office blocks and past churches and pawn shops. I had no idea where we were going.
We threw ridiculously tiny icicles broken off from the bottom of No Parking signs, firing them like miniature spears at the backs of each other’s heads. We turned another corner, and I stopped to catch my breath, bent over double, my hands on my knees.
“Come on!” he yelled, and we were off again, my heart hammering out the beat like cymbals in an orchestral finale.
We entered a park. The paths were not well cleared, both of us fitting our feet into the half-frozen footsteps of previous walkers, stretching our boy-legs just a little to match the stride of men.
And finally he stopped, panting, in front of a huge and ornate house made of glass—in the fading light lit up from within like the true house of God—and looked at his watch again.
“We’ve got—half an hour—before—it closes,” he said, the words on his out-breaths ragged with running through the frosty air. And then he solemnly walked up the path and held open the door to summer.
We went inside. I was hit with a ferocious warmth, and the sight, and the scent: surely the fragrance of Eden itself, of fresh, damp, living green—so many greens, but also gold, white, sky blue, and magenta. Tiny flowers and tall ones; shrubs with large leaves like hearts or porcupine-like needles; trees that almost touched the high roof of glass and others that climbed like snakes upon the railings—a riot of shape, colour, smell.
But it seemed that we were not there to admire the greenery. Alex wiggled his shoulders so his knapsack fell to the floor behind him. He unzipped and removed his coat, and rolled it haphazardly under his arm. Then he picked up his bag with the coat hand and grabbed my arm with the other.
“Over here,” he said. “This way.” He’d caught his breath a little, but his voice still had an urgency to it. He pulled me down pathways and through doorways, the melting remains of snowballs brushed lightly from our shoulders by giant ferns and palm fronds. We passed a few other people on our way, but not many: a young family with a red-faced baby bundled in a sling, an old woman with a magnifying glass,
examining the stamen of a flower I didn’t know the name of. I thought I didn’t know the name of anything in there.
Finally we seemed to have arrived.
“Here,” he announced. “This is the best spot.” And he pushed me in behind an unfamiliar kind of tree with a thin trunk and leaves at the top like the giant fans I had seen in illustrations of the bible, with great big bright green sausages hanging seemingly upside-down beside my ear.
“Dude,” I exclaimed, “are those bananas?”
Alex shushed me, as if I had sworn in church. He closed his eyes, took a measured breath, and opened his mouth.
Ave Maria
Gratia plena
Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus
Ventris tui, Jesus
I cannot describe the almost unbearable poignancy and purity of his voice rising among the leaves in that green-drenched hall. I shrugged my own coat off my shoulders, and let it drop between the tree trunks in that tropical world.
We sang together:
Sancta Maria, Sancta Maria
Maria, ora pro nobis
Nobis peccatoribus
Nunc et in hora
Mortis nostrae
Amen Amen
In my heart I can still hear that ethereal music, even now, over twenty years later. We were both there for God, and there was no doubt for me then that he came down to meet us. If there was one moment of perfection in my life, it was lived there, behind the banana leaves in the conservatory of Allan Gardens. Our two voices together were like warp and weft, poem and paper, kiln and clay.
THERE WAS A CURIOUS SILENCE in the locked ward when I arrived. Marilyn was watching television in the living room, but she made no move to waylay me. She didn’t even look at me as I went by, but sat totally focused on Corner Gas, her eyes sinking into her skull and her cheeks gaunt.