That's My Baby

by Frances Itani

  When Billie is upset, the scene is piteous. She thrusts out her arms like a child, wailing, weeping, imploring. “What’s wrong with me?” she cries. “I’m all mixed up. Why do I feel so lost?”

  What is lost is her mind. She gropes for reason, for recent memory. Without memory, she truly is lost. The more she panics, the more confused she becomes. When she remains calm, she is capable of carrying on an almost normal conversation. “Thank heavens I still have my marbles,” she tells Hanora, and she believes this, absolutely. There is a disconnect between her actual behaviour and what she understands and remembers about that behaviour. But her worsening situation won’t be resolved until action is taken. She stubbornly stares out the window when the topic of moving is introduced. Her doctor, the visiting nurses and Hanora are the ones who have seen her in her worst state. They are trying to create a plan, having agreed that she can no longer stay alone in her home.

  The administrative workload is Hanora’s. She has toured four residences in the city. Each has an assisted-living floor. She has found a place she believes to be suitable.

  Details of the move lie ahead.

  BILLIE’S PHOTOS

  HANORA WALKS BACK THROUGH THE LOBBY and steps into the elevator. She greets Mr. Filmore, who has come up to the main floor from the storage room below. As always, he is dressed for safari: belted khaki jacket, four patch pockets. The hat has to be imagined, net drooping over the nape of the neck. At least he wears long trousers in winter. She thinks of him as Filament because he’s long-legged and thread-like. He never stoops. His safari suit is impeccably clean. One morning, she heard her own voice greet him as Filament and her cheeks reddened in embarrassment. If he heard, he didn’t let on. She is pretty certain his hearing has worsened since he moved to the building more than a year ago. He lives alone; his wife died. That’s as much as she knows about him. He slaps his newspaper against a trouser leg, memories of a swagger stick. Demeanour and carriage point to him having stories to tell, but Hanora can’t muster the energy to inquire. He raises a hand as if to tip his imaginary hat—she has always loved the gesture—and steps out onto the nineteenth floor.

  She glances down at her opened mail and sends a silent message: Oh, Billie, is this what we’ve come to? We amount to more than this. But she sees that this is also a message to herself: We amount to more than sending and receiving photos of a painted kitchen. We have outlived people. We, too, have stories to tell.

  It occurs to her that Billie might have mailed the photos in a moment of clarity.

  In her apartment office, Hanora spreads the photos over her desk and reaches for a fresh notebook. If Billie thinks the photos are important enough to send, she will grant that they are important enough to document. If there is a better place to start, Hanora has no idea what it is. The effort might amount to nothing more than a few pages of written memories that help Billie connect to her past. At the very least, Hanora will be writing.

  Before moving to her present apartment, Hanora donated cartons of books to the city library. She kept those she has yet to read and those she might reread. Shelves line the walls in the room designated as office. She has retained her reference books, even though the new computer is a help when she needs information.

  She sees that the phone light is flashing. Billie again. She’ll listen to the message in a moment. Everything and nothing is an emergency these days. She humours herself by thinking, Maybe I’ll find my lost luggage in Billie’s kitchen photos. And laughs aloud. She knows the difference between dream and reality. As much as anyone does. She also knows there might be no difference at all.

  BILLIE’S photos:

  Photo one: Pine table in corner, lace curtain, unstreaked window. Aunt Zel, honorary aunt and family friend, told her when she was a child: “Clean windows in shade, Hanora, never in sunlight.” Aunt Zel owned a rooming house in Deseronto and had many windows to clean. Hanora would pitch in and help if she walked up the road to visit on a day when windows were being scrubbed.

  Photo two: Four pears arranged unnaturally on countertop, one with sunken brown spot.

  Photo three: Braided rug in reds, whites and greys, created by Billie long ago. A Polish woman who arrived in Canada from a postwar refugee camp on the outskirts of Nairobi helped Billie make this.

  Photo four: Two pressback chairs with red cushions. As Billie lives alone, one chair in the kitchen is enough; the extra is for company. Apart from Hanora, who visits? A line of individuals shuffling ever forward, people who convince Billie that she is capable of managing her own house. She calls them “the strangers.” Collectively she needs the strangers, especially as her personal hygiene has lapsed, but at times she forgets her needs and threatens to bar the door. The strangers amount to fifteen people, most of whom have had police checks, and all of whom Hanora has hired, checked, confirmed. She receives reports by phone, accepts frequent changes to schedules. Four caregivers come and go at different times. Meals on Wheels delivers food. A physiotherapist arrives occasionally, as does a home-care supervisor, house cleaner, snow remover in winter, grass cutter in summer, the student who painted her kitchen, footcare provider, public health nurse, doctor. As Billie no longer goes downstairs to the basement, the house cleaner does the laundry. All these activities are coordinated by Hanora. It was the doctor who phoned to say that the move must go ahead, and soon. Billie must be moved to a residence that provides assisted living. City agencies are now involved. The area nurse followed up with her own phone call. “Your cousin has to be in a place where she will have round-the-clock care. Safety has become the primary concern because her dementia is going to worsen over time. We’ve also noted that she has begun to be non-compliant with the caregivers.”

  Hanora leaned into the wall, phone to ear, and thought about non-compliance. She was certain the nurse was reading from the pamphlet she’d placed in Hanora’s hand several weeks earlier. The next thing she’ll say is that the disease takes its own course. “This disease, you know,” said the nurse, “takes its own course.” Hanora stared out the window and imagined the nurse’s face, the harsh red patch of skin above her right cheekbone, the fixed expression of weary but professional intensity. Worsening condition noted, she replied to the nurse, but silently. I can document every step of my cousin’s worsening condition, to the minute. And if you want to talk jargon, here’s something else from your pamphlet: caregiver compassion fatigue. Please consider, and offer realistic suggestions.

  What she wanted at this moment was to sleep for a week, but she could not. She was supposed to be the strong one; she was in charge.

  Photo five: And now here it is, in the last of the photos, the sign she’s been watching for. The tiniest detail, a corner of a piece of luggage shown within a framed 1939 photograph of Duke, which now hangs in a prominent place on Billie’s freshly painted white wall.

  After the student finished painting the kitchen, Billie must have had him go to the storage space beneath the stairs and drag out the seaman’s chest she’d purchased at a market stall during her 1939 trip to England. She’d have dug the photo out of the chest, or maybe the student did on her behalf. Before Billie met and married Whit, she had been escorted to the Portobello Road area by a man they both knew as Blue Socks, or just Socks. In a shop that sold old items from seafarers, Socks helped her find the antique chest and then haul it to the hotel where he and Billie were staying. Later that day, he took her to a pub for a drink of shandy. She recounted the details on a postcard of Godrevy Lighthouse. Hanora has kept the card ever since, and now it is taped to a shelf of Virginia Woolf books. Billie ended her note on the card with: A curl of lemon peel floated in a glass offered tenderly by Socks. I miss you. I miss life aboard ship. Love you everly, your cousin Billie.

  THE framed 1939 photo is black and white, taken by no other than the singer Ivie Anderson, with a camera bought by Hanora and paid for with money she’d earned by writing three articles about cheese. Hanora had a copy of the photo made after the war and sent it to Billi
e.

  The cousins are standing on either side of the gifted composer, the three smiling broadly. And there’s the luggage, the suitcase she remembers as hickory brown, borrowed in March 1939 from her dear friend, her great love, Tobe. A corner of the luggage with its leather strap-buckle has been caught by the camera in the same frame that holds Duke Ellington. Hanora remembers setting the bag down moments after disembarking at Le Havre. And while goodbyes were flung about, while passengers hurried toward the special boat train to Paris, while Duke greeted musicians and cheering fans, she dared to ask Ivie if she would take the photo. Ivie grinned, shoved her purse strap farther along her arm and called to Duke, “C’mon over here, Governor. These young ladies want a photo.” Duke obliged. And Ivie—as they used to say in those days—“took the snap.”

  So, Hanora thinks. Dream luggage is not lost after all. It arrives in the mail and appears in a photo taken so many decades ago, I will make no effort to subtract the years.

  Her memory cells take up the challenge. The scene at Le Havre comes alive. Sounds, too. Music awaited Duke wherever he appeared in Europe: on station platforms, in streets outside clubs, on the quay at Le Havre. A chaotic mix of jazz lovers, musicians, photographers with bulbs snapping, press shouting for his attention and a quick interview, fans hoping for a few words, a glimpse, an autograph.

  In the photo within the photo, Duke stands between them, all six feet of him, or rather, slightly more than six feet. How could anyone look at that amazing smile and not think grace? He was dignified, private, preoccupied, friendly at every encounter. The three are looking directly at Ivie, who, behind the camera, is dressed to kill in a close-fitting button-down coat with flared bottom. A flash of red, a crimson stripe encircling her black hat, a hint of lapel beneath the coat.

  For almost eight days, they have been passengers on the SS Champlain, sounds of music escaping day and night from beneath cabin doors (ah, how the music beckoned, like soothing conversation, like seductive voices). Duke, wearing old slippers and a thick white bathrobe lined with royal blue, was glimpsed in corridors in various parts of the ship, a clutch of sheet music in hand, sometimes aware of others, sometimes not. Any time he and Hanora were face to face, he spoke to her, always allowed a grin, his moustache a careful shadow over the shape of his smile. And Ivie, with her pencilled, wide-arced eyebrows, invited the cousins, not once but twice, to join her for afternoon coffee upstairs, in the café lounge. Sometimes the other musicians were around. Like most passengers on board, especially at first, they were exploring the ship affectionately referred to as the Lady Champlain.

  One morning, Ivie beckoned Hanora and Billie into her cabin. Seashells were strewn across the top of her dresser. She saw Hanora looking and said, “These travel with me everywhere. They remind me of places I like to be.” When she learned that this was Hanora’s first time at sea, she said, “Oh, my dear, have you never walked a beach at sunset? Never dug a half-buried shell out of wet sand?” She reached into her collection, pulled forth a sand dollar and held it out. Perfect and five-petalled, its colour a mixture of sand and cream. Like other keepsakes, it sits on a bookshelf in Hanora’s office. Kept these many years.

  She calls up the singer’s voice with ease. The way Ivie controlled lyrics, the way she slipped into a song with style and kept its energy going, letting everyone know that the spark she brought to the room would remain long after the song came to an end. Her songs were charged with seduction, the promise of dusk and starlight. They could have been set in carnival alleys at night, lights glittering, rides circling in the background. If you were in the room when Ivie was singing, you felt she was grabbing your hands and pulling you up. You wanted to dance while you listened. “It Don’t Mean a Thing” . . . the song lodged in the brain for weeks on end. Others, too. So many others. “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” The slower songs compelled you to . . . well, no matter where you were when you heard Ivie’s voice, you stopped what you were doing; you listened to every word. Hanora did. Listen.

  In their shared cabin, Billie put on her own show, imitating Ivie. She swung herself in circles between the two berths, skirt raised to her thighs, hips wiggling, arms weaving. That sight, too, lodged in Hanora’s brain. Billie laughing—always laughing—Tangee lipstick coating what she called her “glowing lips,” red hair swaying, head back, eyes closed, freckles sprinkled across nose and cheeks, throat exposed. And then, collapsing onto her bed, kicking off the ultra-high heels she wore in the evenings when the two of them “fancied up” and headed to the main foyer on the promenade deck, or to the dance floor to check out the entertainment.

  BILLIE isn’t laughing these days; nor is Hanora, for that matter. If either could find something to laugh about, that would be celebration indeed.

  Hanora returns to Billie’s kitchen photos and wonders if there is a second sign, apart from lost luggage. Something she has missed. She shuts her eyes, opens again, stares hard. Not for a moment has she forgotten the dream.

  Loss approaches.

  Memories have been stirred. Plenty to think about for one day. So many people aboard ship are now gone. Ivie, in 1949. Tragically, an early death in her forties. Smoky clubs and bars, her places of work, did not help the asthma, the chronic lung condition.

  Duke, who was thirty-nine the year they were at sea (and turned forty a few weeks later in Sweden, to great fanfare), died in 1974, leaving more than two thousand pieces of music as his legacy. As tastes changed over the decades, he invented and reinvented himself. Hanora has never tired of reading about him or listening to the body of work: records, tapes, CDs. When he was alive, she followed every turn of his long career. She met him; they talked. He had charmed. He offered encouragement at the outset of her career. She has only to think of Duke’s name and she hears the resonance of his voice. Without playing his music, she can drift into the mood, toes and heels tapping.

  As for the ship, in the fall of 1939 it was painted wartime grey and survived to sail only a few more times. The last crossing in the direction of the States, May 1940, was used to evacuate some of the desperate who, at the last minute, had succeeded in escaping the deadly chaos under way in Europe. Nabokov, for one. Hanora tries to imagine him aboard with his wife and son, one year after she’d sailed in the opposite direction. If she had met Nabokov, what would she have said? I’m determined to be a writer. That is how I plan to make my living. I would like to interview you and your wife. Learn the conditions that have forced you to leave.

  When she sailed in 1939 she wouldn’t have called herself anything. She had remained in Deseronto after finishing high school and found work by writing regularly for the town’s weekly newspaper. Two articles had been accepted by the Star in Toronto. Nothing in Maclean’s or Life or the Washington Post or Collier’s. No awards. Not then, not yet. No book in sight, or even in her imagination. She knew meaningless facts about cheese because she’d reported on National Cheese Week. The rest would come later. And though she has celebrated her rewards, the celebrations have been short-lived. She knows, as every writer knows, that for the next assignment, the next book, she must start at the beginning again.

  She conjures the giant ship the way she came upon it when she stood at the pier in New York in March 1939. A young woman preparing to board, ready for anything life set before her. The luggage she’d borrowed from Tobe had been checked and delivered to her cabin. She made her way through a warehouse-like building and out into the air again. The March wind grabbed at the ends of her scarf and blew wildly at her hair. She gathered her coat around her and gaped at the great ship that loomed in front of her. In memory, the anchor was the height of a building. Could that be possible? What is certain is that she came to a halt. “Keep moving, Hanora,” Billie said from behind, and Hanora felt her cousin’s hand on her back. “If you stand here gawking, we’ll freeze before we get on board.”

  In June 1940, one year and three months later, after the SS Champlain’s final voyage from New York to France, that palatial vesse
l, one of the luxury liners of the world, a wonder of its time and in service only eight years, met with destruction near La Pallice, on the Atlantic coast of France, when it struck an air-laid German mine. A dozen people were killed and many others were injured. Days after the ship was damaged by the mine, its still-elegant remains were torpedoed by a U-boat. The Germans had decided to finish the job.

  Hanora, by then living and working in England, wept when she heard the news.

  OTHER memories work their way into consciousness and will not be suppressed. Hanora braces herself, sinks to her chair. Opens her notebook to the first—dreaded—blank page. Removes the cap from her pen.

  And now, in a kind of spirit dance of its own, the page, like music, beckons. Here rise the friendly demons. She will write what she can, when she can. She will try her best to involve Billie. Perhaps her cousin’s failing memory will be awakened. Hanora has learned how capably Billie can blurt out surprising details. Maybe she will illuminate the thirties and forties for them both, but from her own perspective.

  Sadly, it is Billie’s present existence that moves forward unremembered and unrecorded by her brain. She asks a question, listens to Hanora’s reply and asks the same question a moment later. She looks at an object she has owned for decades (a nightgown, a pair of glasses, a silver bracelet) and declares: “I have never seen this before in my entire life!” She always adds “in my entire life,” and this causes concern because she is so adamant. There is no point arguing because Billie is so sure of her ground. Sometimes, Hanora questions her own reality in light of Billie’s certainty.

  Billie has no trouble recognizing people she knows well, but she does not know the year, the day of the week, her address, her age or what she ate for her last meal. People new to her are repeatedly asked who they are. Sometimes she is hostile to “the strangers” and shouts at them when they come to her house. The changes are frightening—not only for her but for Hanora, too. As for the strangers, most take Billie’s behaviour in stride. They assure Hanora that they are used to working with clients who have varying degrees of dementia.