The Saffron Gate

by Holeman, Linda

  I glanced at my mother. She didn’t answer, but gave a small, encouraging smile, her gnarled hands curled in her lap.

  ‘She could be anything,’ she said.

  I held my lips together tightly. Of course I couldn’t be anything. I wasn’t a child, and I was a cripple. Did she think I still believed her? I opened my mouth to argue with her, but my father spoke again.

  ‘Just until you marry, of course,’ he said.

  I frowned at him. Marry? Who would marry me, with my heavy black boots, one built an inch higher than the other, and my noisy, dragging limp? ‘No. I don’t want to work in a sewing factory or be a secretary or telephone operator.’

  ‘What is it you might like, then? Don’t you have some dream? All young people should have a dream. Leprechauns, castles, good luck and laughter; lullabies, dreams, and love ever after,’ he quoted. He had so many clichés about life, so many useless Irish sayings.

  I said nothing, picking up Cinnabar and burying my face in the thick coppery fur of her neck.

  What was my dream?

  ‘You don’t have an excuse now, Sidonie,’ he said, and I lifted my face from Cinnabar’s neck and stared at him. ‘Even though not like before, you can now get yourself about. There’s no reason for you to go no further than the yard. I know Alice Ann is having a party tonight. As I came home I saw all the young people on her porch, laughing and talking. It’s not too late. Why don’t you go, Sidonie? I’ll walk over with you. It’s not right, you sitting in the house with your paints and books.’

  Of course I wasn’t invited to Alice Ann’s; I hadn’t spoken to her since those uncomfortable visits almost two years ago. But even if I had been asked, I was deeply embarrassed of the way I had to swing my legs into position with each step. The braces announced my arrival with a loud clanging. The crutches sometimes hit furniture or slipped on uncarpeted floor. And I felt oddly out of touch; I didn’t know how to talk to people any more. I couldn’t imagine being at a party. Suddenly I felt older than my parents. How could I ever again be interested in silly jokes and gossip?

  ‘I just don’t want to, Dad,’ I said, turning away.

  ‘Don’t live with regret nailed to your shoulder, my girl,’ he said, then. ‘There’s a lot worse off than you. A lot. You’ve been given a new chance. Don’t waste it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, steeling myself, certain he would launch into his old story about the famine in Ireland, and the corpses piled like logs, of boiling the last of their own rags, all they had left to cover them, and eating them just to have something to chew. ‘I know,’ I repeated, and, still holding Cinnabar, went out into the back yard, where I sat on the old swing with the cat in my lap, idly kicking myself back and forth with my stronger leg. I remembered the dizziness of swinging high into the air. Now there was no dizziness; I simply swung a few inches back and forth.

  I put my head back to watch the evening stars come out. The fall night was cool, and the stars, emerging in the evening sky, were like points of a knife, hard and sharp.

  It was the beginning of the many arguments I would have with my father over the next few years.

  ‘You should go out into the world, Sidonie,’ he told me, more than once. ‘It’s no life for a young girl, living with her old mam and da.’

  ‘I like it here, Dad,’ I told him, and by this time I truly meant it. After a time I had been able to walk without dragging my legs. I was slow and awkward, still using the crutches, leaning forward a tiny bit at the waist, my legs stiffened by the braces. I eventually exchanged the hated crutches for canes. And then, after wearing the full leg braces for two more years, my legs growing stronger all the time, I exchanged them for small metal ankle braces, which could be almost hidden by the high leather boots. My left leg was now quite sturdy, but I was unable to walk without dragging my right leg in a limping gait.

  I knew that earlier I had felt sorry for myself, embarrassed at my affliction and, as my father had said, regretful to the point of bitterness. But those feelings passed, and now I accepted my small, quiet life. It suited me; everyone in our neighbourhood knew me, and there was no need to explain anything. I was Sidonie O’Shea: I had survived polio and I helped my mother care for the house on Juniper Road, and grew perennials so magnificent that people walking by stopped, gazing in delight at them.

  I loved our little house, which we rented from our next door neighbours, Mr and Mrs Barlow. For me the house had a human quality: the watermark on my bedroom ceiling looked like the face of an old woman with her mouth open, laughing; the boughs of the linden tree brushing against the living-room window sounded like soft-soled shoes dancing on a sandy floor; the cellar where the potatoes and onions and other root vegetables were kept for the winter had a rich and loamy smell.

  As my mother’s arthritis continued to cripple her, I took over the running of the house. I cooked and baked, I did laundry and ironed and kept the house clean. The piecework ended when a new sewing factory was built on the outskirts of Albany, and although I knew it meant a smaller income, I was secretly relieved, as I found the piecework terribly boring. I was glad for the old sewing machine, though, since I had begun making all my own clothing. I still had to get my father to borrow Mr Barlow’s truck to drive me to buy fabric and notions, but at least I didn’t have to go into the local dress shops, where I might run into the young women I had once known — either as they shopped or as they served customers.

  In fall I cleaned the garden of its dead and frost-blackened leaves and stems, heaping straw over the roots of some of the more fragile plants at rest for the winter. I planted more corms and bulbs, anticipating the new growth the following spring. Through the winter I studied gardening books, painting my visions of new designs for the garden, which had now filled most of both the front and back yard. As soon as the last of the snow melted in the spring, I walked among the pebbled paths I had had my father lay, exulting over the first crocuses and snowdrops, and then the hyacinths and tulips and daffodils, willing the first tiny pink shoots of the peonies to stretch into the warming air.

  In the summer I persuaded my father to again borrow Mr Barlow’s truck to drive me out to the marshes of nearby Pine Bush, where I sketched the flora and wildlife, so that I could create watercolour paintings from my charcoal renditions.

  And through every season I kept my vow. I had promised, in my endless prayers, that in return for being able to walk I would have no unclean thoughts. After a number of years had passed since that first prayer, and I knew that much of my recovery had to do with my body’s strength and my own determination, a small part of me was still superstitious enough to believe that should I not keep my promise, I might be forced to pay in some other way.

  I managed to quiet the desires of my body, but it wasn’t easy. I wanted to know a man, know what it felt to be touched, and be loved.

  I knew I would never meet anyone, living the way I did, and yet I wasn’t sure how to change that. And it certainly wasn’t as though a man ever came to the door of our house on Juniper Road, looking for Sidonie O’Shea.

  Shortly after my twenty-third birthday my mother became ill. First it was bronchitis, and then a virulent strain of pneumonia that would clear up but kept recurring. I nursed her as she had once nursed me, feeding her, brushing her hair, gently massaging her hands and feet to help with the pain, lifting her on to the metal pan, making plasters for her chest. Occasionally, on the days when her breath came easier, she still tried to sing her French songs, in a hoarse, low voice, and my father and I couldn’t look at each other at those times.

  Once more my father brought the daybed from the. porch, only now it was my mother who lay on it, propped up by pillows. She watched me as I prepared the meals, and took particular pleasure seeing me cutting out patterns and making my own clothes.

  After one terrible bout of pneumonia, the doctor told us that it was now only a matter of time; her lungs couldn’t take any more.

  My father and I sat up with her that night, after the d
octor left. My father spoke to her, and although she was incapable of answering, it was clear from her eyes that she understood. Her chest rose and fell with a painful rattle like the crumpling of paper. At times my father hummed, leaning close to her ear. And I — what did I do? I walked about their bedroom, walked and walked, feeling that my own lungs were filling with fluid, that I was drowning like my mother. It was difficult to swallow around the solid burning pain in my throat. My mouth hurt. My eyes hurt.

  And then I understood. I needed to cry. I hadn’t cried in eight years, since I’d wept as a sixteen year old in the aftershock of polio.

  I didn’t know how to cry any more. So overwhelming and tight was the feeling in my eyes and lips and throat, and in my chest, that I felt as though something must give way, must burst. My head or my heart.

  I went to the bed and sat down beside my mother, picking up her misshapen hand. I remembered how her hands had cared for me and soothed me. I lowered her hand back to the coverlet, but kept it in my own. I opened my mouth, trying to let the pain in my throat out. But nothing came, and the pain increased.

  My father touched my arm. I looked at him, seeing tears running freely down his cheeks, and I whispered, in a choking voice, ‘Dad,’ wanting him to help me. My mother was dying, and yet it was me asking for help.

  He shifted his chair closer and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Cry, Sidonie. A rain of tears is necessary to the harvest of understanding,’ he said, with something that was like a twisted smile. Another of his Irish quotes, but I needed it at that moment.

  ‘Dad,’ I said again, a strange whimper in my throat. ‘Dad.’

  ‘Tell her,’ he said, nodding once at my mother. ‘Tell her.’

  And then I knew what I had to do. I lay down beside my mother, and put my head on her shoulder. I lay like that for a long time. Her breaths were tortured, and far apart. Mine were rapid, aching.

  As I lay there, needing so desperately to cry, I asked myself why had I never told my mother that I loved her. Why had I never appreciated all she had done for me — not just when I was a child, or when I lay in bed unable to care for myself, or even later, when I was as recovered as I would ever be but still relied on her? Why had I never told her I knew how my affliction, and subsequent attitude, had affected her? Had I simply assumed she would understand?

  I had been her miracle. She had hopes for me, hopes that I would go out into the world. That I would take chances, and learn new things. That I would find satisfaction in a job, in helping others, in nurturing friendships. That I would marry, and have children. Instead, I had taken what had happened to me and turned it inward. I had been her miracle, and yet I had grown closed, and quiet.

  I had taken no chances.

  As I began to whisper to her, whisper all that I needed to say, my throat loosened. Finally I cried. I cried and whispered to her until she died, just after midnight.

  And after that I couldn’t stop crying.

  My father and I mourned in our separate ways: I with outbursts of uncontrollable sobbing, which I tried to stifle in my room, while Cinnabar watched me calmly from the end of my bed. My father mourned in silence, often sitting on the back steps, simply staring at the fence. Once, when I went out and sat beside him, he said, as if I’d interrupted him mid-thought, ‘She wanted to design dresses, you know. But instead she married me, and left her home and everything she knew.’ He picked a splinter of wood from the step and studied it, as if it held some insight. I’d never known about her dream. ‘You’re so like her, Sidonie. Sensitive, and imaginative, and determined.’

  It seemed anything could bring me to tears. I cried at the beauty of the sun shining through Cinnabar’s deaf ears. I cried when I saw a young couple walk past the porch pushing a baby carriage. I cried when I found the tiny foetal skeleton of a bird in a broken shell under the linden tree. I cried when we ran out of flour.

  I cried daily for three months. I cried every second day for another two months. I cried every week for two more months, and then I cried every second week, and eventually I stopped crying, and a year had passed.

  My father was a gentle man, with a beautiful lilting Irish voice, but he spoke less and less after my mother’s death. We found an easy comfort being with each other. My father and I created new routines that suited us both, and we moved through the house as though we were parallel wisps of smoke, never touching and yet somehow graceful in our harmony. Every evening, after dinner, we read: the daily newspaper, as well as books. I continued to read novels, and he biographies and history. We sometimes spoke about what we read, perhaps commenting on a piece of news, or about a particularly insightful passage from our respective books.

  We were all we had.

  But my mother’s demise had diminished my father in ways not only emotionally, but also physically. He seemed to grow smaller and more hesitant in his movements. And then — whether it was his reflexes or something about his eyesight, even with his eyeglasses — it was soon evident that his vision wasn’t strong enough to continue his chauffeuring. His first minor accident was simply brushing against a lamp post when he attempted to park his employer’s expensive, gleaming car, but that was quickly followed by nudging the front of the car into the closed garage door.

  After this his employer told him he couldn’t keep him on any longer. My father understood. What good was a driver who couldn’t be trusted to drive safely? But the employer was a kind man, sorry to have to let my father go, and had given him an unexpectedly large dismissal package. We lived frugally, but managed.

  My father had loved driving, and owned a 1910 Ford Model T. He told me that it was the true sign of a successful life in America to own a piece of land and an automobile. But even with their hard work and meagre lifestyle, my parents were never able to buy land or a house, and my father often mentioned how good it was of Mike and Nora — Mr and Mrs Barlow — to let us live on and on in this house, paying as little as we did for rent. And although while still employed he had purchased the Model T at an auction, it didn’t run and there had never been enough money to repair its engine. My father long held on to his dream to one day drive it. But that never came about; by the time his eyesight deteriorated he had given up the idea of driving the Model T. Still, he kept it in the shed behind our house, and every Saturday, in pleasant weather, we would take out buckets of soapy water and rags and a chamois, and clean it from its hood to its thin tyres. Some evenings he sat in it, smoking his pipe; I sat in it too, reading, in the summer months. There was something comforting about its smooth wooden steering wheel and its warm leather seats.

  One day my father brought home an old copy of Motor Age from the barber shop. He started talking about his love of cars, and, seeing him enthusiastic about something for the first time in so long, I bought him the most recent copy of the magazine the next time I was buying groceries, and we looked through it together, sitting side by side on the sofa. For an unknown reason I enjoyed looking at the beautiful, sleek new cars being manufactured.

  And then he found a Boyce Motometer hood ornament in a weedy lot, and polished it until it shone. A few weeks later he came home with a Boyce Motometer radiator cap he’d turned up in a second-hand shop. This became our hobby; we went into Albany together on Saturday mornings, hunting through second-hand stores and asking at garages. We pored over the auto magazines together, looking for opportunities to purchase the gleaming Boyce hood ornaments and radiator caps, sometimes writing away for one, with a small payment enclosed. The collection grew. Once a month I took them all out of the pine display cabinet in the living room and polished them, laying them on the kitchen table. My father would sit on the other side of the table, watching and occasionally picking one up to study it further.

  We went to car auctions together, just to be part of the excitement of all those cars and the frenzy of bidding. We also started laughing again.

  The years passed. The seasons came and went, and both my father and I grew older. Little changed until a late March d
ay in 1929, when an icy rain blew in from the east, and all that I knew disappeared for ever.

  FOUR

  As I waited at the front desk of Tangier’s Hotel Continental for the key to my room, I saw that the American on the boat had described it accurately: the other guests were fashionable in an elaborate, formal way, and the hotel itself was quite beautiful — a combination of European and Arabic influences. I wandered to a plaque on the wall near the front desk stating that Queen Victoria’s son Alfred was one of the first patrons. As I ran my fingers over the plaque, I again noticed the line of dirt under my fingernails.

  I was shown to my room by a young boy wearing a maroon fez; the fabric was discoloured where it sat on his head, and the tassel was a bit ragged. He nodded and smiled broadly as he set down my bags. ‘Omar,’ he said, patting his chest. ‘Omar.’

  I put a few centimes in his hand.

  ‘Thank you, Omar. Is there somewhere I might get something to eat at this time of day?’ I asked him, and as he studied my lips carefully, in the way one does when trying to understand a language one is not comfortable with, his head continued nodding. ‘Manger,’ I repeated, touching my mouth.

  ‘Ah, oui. Downstairs, madame, downstairs,’ he said,” backing out, still nodding and smiling. Suddenly the smile left his face. ‘But please, madame, not to go on roof,’ he told me, in tortured French. ‘Roof bad.’

  ‘Oui, Omar,’ I said. ‘I will not go to the roof.’

  When he’d left, I went to the narrow windows. They overlooked the port and the strait beyond, fed by both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The strait was perhaps only eight miles across, but it divided two continents and an ocean and a sea. And it was as if Tangier itself was caught somewhere in the middle, belonging to neither European Spain nor African Morocco.