Carol Shields

by Dropped Threads 2

  Snapshots

  Sandra Martin

  Snapshots were always kept in a Black Magic chocolate box when I was a child, waiting for the moment when my mother could find the time to paste them into albums. Of course, that moment never came, and we continued to shuffle through the piles—the way we had once dug through the wrappers seeking out the caramels or the Brazil nuts buried in the second layer.

  After my mother died, my youngest sister arranged the pictures and gave them to my father as an act of remembrance. When he could finally bring himself to sit down and go through the books with us, I learned the significance of a snap taken of my parents and some friends in March 1946: six happy young people out for a walk on a spring day. Or so I thought.

  Now I know that nothing would ever be as promising again as it was on that sunny St. Patrick’s Day in the woods north of Ottawa.

  The war was over. My father and his friend Syd were alive. They were both newly married and employed—a feat for two boys raised in the Depression. In the picture, my mother is wearing stockings, spectator pumps and a dress under a wool coat with a Persian lamb collar. She is dressed more elegantly than the other women, who are in baggy trousers and lumpy jackets. Being attractively turned out, especially in public, was like a credential on her resumé. When I was old enough to go to dances, she would often ask me afterwards, “Did they say that you look like your mother?”

  Standing in front of my father, she is smiling into the camera, one hand in her pocket, her body slightly angled—the way I pose to make myself look slimmer—the other hand holding her gloves. For years I thought her coat was unbuttoned because she was warm in the spring sunshine. In fact, it wouldn’t close over the discreet mound that would become my older sister.

  The evening after the hike, Syd banged on the door to tell my father he was wanted on the telephone in the lobby of the quadruplex where both young couples lived. It was the priest. My mother’s younger brothers, George and Gerald, had drowned the day before. While she was blissfully walking in the woods, her beloved brothers were dying in the frigid waters of Lake Ontario.

  My mother was the eldest daughter of six children from a farming family on Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands, about three miles by ferry from Kingston. Her life was hard. When she was seven, the family home burned down, and she was sent to the mainland to live with a childless aunt and uncle until her parents could regroup. In later years, my grandmother was flattened by depression, and my mother often had to forgo her own plans to keep house and take care of the younger children.

  In a different age, she might have stayed on the island to run the farm, but of course that went, without question, to her older brother. Instead, she moved to the city in the dregs of the Depression and found a job in a pharmacy on the edge of the Queens University campus. That’s how she met my father.

  Although she didn’t attend classes, she used to say that she felt like a Queen’s grad because she never missed a football game or a formal. When asked, “Did you go to Queen’s?” she invariably responded, “Queen’s came to me.”

  The boys, as they were always known, had been out partying. They wanted to get home to see their mother for St. Patrick’s Day, but the ice was too thin to drive across, and still too thick for the ferry to navigate the passage. Stymied, they hitched a ride in a small, open motorboat. It capsized, and four of the passengers, including the uncles I would never know, drowned.

  How my father conveyed the news to my mother, I cannot imagine. Prompted by the hiking picture, he later recalled that “dreadful night” and talked of how the doctor had come to give my mother a sedative. The next morning, they set out in a borrowed car for Kingston. A day later, they went over to the island on the ferry, the ice having cleared by then. My father can still remember sitting in the smoke-filled cabin and feeling the boat rock as the first hearse drove on, and rock again a few minutes later as the second one was loaded.

  I don’t think my mother ever recovered from this tragedy; she had mothered her younger brothers, who were only twenty-one and nineteen when they died. Ever afterwards, she made it abundantly clear that at least one of her four daughters should have been a son to make up for the enormity of her loss. This lesson was so ingrained that when I was pregnant with my own children, I refused even to think about the sex of the baby I was carrying.

  Illness was as familiar as a radio serial when I was growing up. My mother often had the flu or headaches, and I was frequently expected to make dinner or to come home after school to take care of my little sisters. I don’t ever remember my mother making breakfast except at Christmas or before we all embarked on a holiday in the family car. When I was in high school, my youngest sister would carry a cup of coffee and a plate of toast to my mother’s bedroom before taking herself off to school.

  My mother also underwent a number of serious operations; one was a spinal fusion, when I was two, to correct an old back injury. After the operation, she was encased in a cast from her armpits to her thighs.

  I can remember standing in bare feet and nightgown beside my older sister, pressing our backs against the wall, while two men in white uniforms carried a body down the staircase. As they passed, a woman I recognized as my mother rose from the pallet and waved goodbye before slumping back down again. I thought that she had died, and that the husky men were taking her to heaven. Now I realize that the only way her cast could be changed was to put her on a stretcher and cart her back to the hospital by ambulance.

  Was that Lazarus-like image the reason I didn’t pay much attention when I heard she had found a benign lump in her breast? Was it because I had already confronted her death that the threat of the real thing seemed anticlimactic? More likely I was too wrapped up in my own doings. I was newly married and living in England, where my husband was a graduate student.

  From a shy, sickly child with her nose in a book, I had become both rebellious and unpredictable, prone to bringing home unsuitable young men and arguing about politics with guests at the dinner table. My insouciant outbursts about the population explosion or the hypocrisy of organized religion enlivened perfunctory conversations about the weather and the royal family, but they upset my mother’s precarious sense of decorum.

  Even as a little girl, I had been the odd one. My older sister was cute and boisterous, but I, the unexpected second daughter, was a clinger and a crier. My mother would often look at my glasses and my skinny frame and say, “Ugly in the cradle, beautiful at the table,” as though wishing were enough to make it happen.

  Most teenagers are deeply embarrassed by their parents, but my disaffection for my mother grew more, not less, rancid as I fled from her nagging and her pretensions about “my father’s position.” It was the seventies and I hated everything she revered: solid, boring, conventional, suburban respectability. And why wouldn’t I? I had never been poor, or homeless, or farmed out to relatives.

  My first inkling of trouble was a cryptic remark that she made about the lump being malignant after all as we were walking back from a visit to King’s College Chapel when my parents came to see us in Cambridge. Shocked, I said the words “breast” and “cancer” and she told me to be quiet because people—complete strangers living not only in a different country but a different continent—might find out.

  That imposed silence became the norm through the years of remission and during the final battle. If she brought up the C-word, we could talk gingerly about her illness, although the prognosis was always off limits. I learned never to raise the subject myself or to discuss it with anybody outside the immediate family.

  Monitoring the information flow became her way of exercising some control over her life. Often she would forget she had revealed her secret and then accuse us of disloyalty if her confidants inquired about her treatment. She was always afraid that people were comparing her breasts to see which one was augmented with a prosthesis. To this day, I don’t know which breast betrayed her.

  As the treatment options narrowe
d, she retreated into a bitter shell. Not even my father could penetrate her blackness. That was the way I saw it then. Now, thirty years later, as I fearfully check my own breasts in the shower, I envision her face flashing with alarm when she first felt that hard nugget.

  Our last trip was to a family reunion in the Maritimes. Nobody was to know about my mother’s illness, not even my aunts. My mother was too ill to drive to the cottage we had rented, so my husband and I drove from Toronto to Montreal, where my parents lived. While he continued on in the car, my mother and I flew on a packed plane with my son, who was eleven months old, teething and on the move. Nobody had warned her that the air pressure in the plane could affect her already compromised lungs. As the plane bucked and lurched, and I wrestled with my rambunctious son, I glimpsed the fear in her rolling eyes as she gasped for breath. That moment made me ashamed for all the times I had been irritated and impatient when she snapped and complained. For the first time I realized that she was frightened as much as angry. Rage was her camouflage.

  My mother’s medical and emotional needs increased, and the dynamics shifted as we all tried to help my father care for her. It was as though children and mother were exchanging roles. By the end of the summer, the cancer had invaded her brain stem and she was admitted to hospital. On my next trip to Montreal, I was terrified to go into her room. Would I recognize her without her wig? And would she even know who I was?

  She smiled when she heard my voice and opened her eyes briefly before drifting back into fogginess. As I sat by her bedside, I wept out my frustration and grief for silent, stony years wasted in misunderstanding. What she wanted was a daughter who would win the local beauty pageant, marry well and move up a rung in Montreal society. What I wanted was passionate debates about the pill, the Vietnam War and women’s liberation. What we both needed was unequivocal love.

  The farewell stretched out for nine weeks. Gradually I found that sitting by her side, ministering to her few needs, gave me an unexpected sense of peace and closeness. She was unconscious sometimes, confused at the best of times, but her lashing out vanished. By finally retracting the portcullis that sealed her from “intrusive” sympathy, she allowed us to soothe her anxiety. Her rage had been replaced with sweetness.

  In mothering her, I felt mothered in a way that I hadn’t since I was a small child. Even though I never had the cathartic conversation that I longed for, I felt content that everything I had wanted to say and hear was conveyed through touch.

  To me, the hiking snapshot is one of two photographs that bridge the great tragedies of my mother’s life: her brothers’ drowning and her own early death from breast cancer. I saw the other picture for the first time the night my mother died. We were huddled in my father’s study, sipping Scotch, after returning from the hospital for the final time. Having made the essential phone calls to family and friends, we were sitting there feeling numb, wondering what to do next, when my father suddenly left the room and returned with a photograph that he handed silently to my sisters and me.

  Unlike the snapshots in the Black Magic box, this was a glossy eight-by-ten portrait by a professional photographer. My mother was wearing a white mink derby hat and a rose-coloured wool paisley dress. She had a Mona Lisa smile on her face and a sleeping child in her lap.

  Perhaps by showing it to us, my father was trying to erase her shrunken, frozen image from our minds. Perhaps he was reminding himself of her beauty. Nobody looking at that picture could guess that my mother was terminally ill or that the smile and the smashing fur hat were female armour.

  My father had taught physics at McGill for decades, and my mother, a faculty wife to the core, was determined that night to attend the installation of the new principal, even though a bone scan had just produced alarming results.

  As the festivities wore on, she must have become exhausted and quietly found a chair. There, she was discovered by the youngest of the principal’s five children, a sleepy little girl looking for a nest. She crawled into my mother’s lap, fell asleep, and a press photographer snapped the picture. The child of a relative stranger, that anonymous little girl, is now an icon in my family’s mythology. Each of us has a copy of that photograph prominently displayed. I am looking at mine even now.

  That little girl sensed something maternal and comforting about my mother. By crawling, uninvited, into a stranger’s lap, she unlocked a warmth and a refuge. And that is what I had also done in my mother’s hospital room. I broke through the silence in those hours that I left my own family behind and sat by her bedside, holding her hand, knowing she didn’t have the strength or the will to resist.

  There is no photograph to record it, but somehow I don’t need one.

  Inside

  Talking

  Barbara Defago

  May 26, 2000

  I am sitting in the dark with a stranger, a man. He seems nice, and for some reason I’m feeling sorry for him. Should we turn on the lights? I ask, even though the subject of our meeting seems better left in the dark. He apologizes, saying he’s so used to the dark that he hadn’t noticed we were in it. He is an expert, and he has come to give me some news. I know what he’s going to say just because he’s here. I think about him going home to his family on this Friday night and hope that what he has to say to me won’t remain with him when he leaves this windowless room.

  There are some cases, he starts out, where we know for sure that there’s nothing wrong. This is not my case he’s referring to, I think. A cyst is a cyst, he says. If I had a cyst, he wouldn’t be here. He’s warming up now. Then there are other cases. I am one of the others. The man, this doctor, shifts his position from leaning against the desk, arms folded, to sitting on the edge, a bit like Humpty Dumpty with a firm grip. I uncross my right leg and cross my left leg, adjusting the blue gown to thoroughly obscure any hint of breasts. My position in this little chair with wheels is lower than his. I probably look hunched over, protecting myself. I want to bolt but stay, nodding uh-huh, uh-huh as he continues. Sometimes we’re suspicious, and in about 50 percent of those cases it turns out to be okay. This is also not my case. Then there are other cases that are more than suspicious. In those situations we might be 75 percent sure but could still be proven wrong. Uh-huh, uh-huh. I know what’s coming. This is when I’m feeling sorry for him. The odd time we’re very sure—99 percent sure. Which of those cases am I? A voice has just asked the question I don’t want answered. It sounds like my voice, but I haven’t felt the words coming out. I want my sweater that isn’t here and instead wrap myself in my arms. Very sure, he says. Uh-huh, I say. For a split second the room falls away. No desk. No machines. No chair. His eyes are keeping me from falling. I turn my head away just a little and the room comes back. You have breast cancer, he says.

  My life is now divided. The past will become before and the present and future will be after. The four words from this stranger on this day in May in the year 2000 have formed a black vertical mark on the line that is my life. I can see the length of the line to the left only.

  June 30, 2000

  Morning. Last night as I cruised the hallways attached to fluid on a pole, my chest felt like a gunshot wound—how I imagine one would feel, that is. But today it’s more comfortable underneath all the gauze. I’m up. I’m on my feet. Ready to go. Nothing wrong with me. Bet they’ve never seen anything like this. I’m a bloody medical marvel, I am. I wait until seven to call home. When are you coming to get me? I ask. Charlene, yesterdays admissions nurse, is just starting her workday. Hi, how are you doing today? What time did you wake up? She has stopped at her office door to converse with me. Her face is one big smile. This hospital is a warm, cozy place. Oh hi, I say. I woke up around six, I think. No, no, I mean yesterday, after your surgery. I don’t know the answer and I’m concerned about why she’s asking. Did something go wrong with the anaesthetic? Did they give me too much? Did they have to give me a jump-start to get me back to the land of the living? I do recall the anaesthetist accompanying a post-op patie
nt back to the ward late last night. I was on one of my forays down the hall. He hesitated and looked at me a second time, then smiled and waved. I remember noticing. Maybe he was relieved to see me walking around instead of brain-dead after what I’d put them through yesterday. I say none of this to Charlene. Good luck, she says, ending our conversation.

  I head back to my one-night room, stopping briefly to help a co-patient manoeuvre herself and her equipment into the bathroom. My roommate sits stiffly on the edge of her bed, gowned, protecting her chest from whatever might be flying around in the air. She is tiny—looks like a child to me—but tells me she’s forty-seven. Her mother has come from Hong Kong to look after her. When did you have your surgery? she asks tentatively. Yesterday? Me too. How come you’re up and walking around so well? She’s crying now.

  Afternoon. I am home from the hospital with my drain pinned to the oversize front-buttoned blouse I have borrowed from my mother. I’m a little less bulky. Dr. D., the surgeon, popped in this a.m. to remove some of the bandages. For the long weekend, she said. I wasn’t sure what she thought I might be planning. My underarm yells at me if I forget it’s wounded and reach out for something. Can’t baby myself, though. It’s important to exercise to prevent lymphoedema or Big Arm, as some people call it. Dr. D. phones to say the preliminary report on the nodes looks good, in spite of the fact that one had felt suspicious. We love her. A nurse will visit every day to check on my drainage. I haven’t looked at my left breast yet, or what remains of it.