Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

  She saw. She knew. She told stories.

  “HAVE I EVER told you,” my mother says, “about the machete your father brought along on our honeymoon?”

  We are in Tim Horton’s having a coffee. I stare at her, because I’m pretty sure she didn’t just say what I think she said.

  She nods, delicately picking at her muffin. She is recovering from what the doctor in the emergency room called “the largest ulcer I have ever seen.” To cheer her up, I’ve taken her to see a show of brightly coloured glass at the Royal Ontario Museum. We are both hot, peevish, and tired. These days she moves at a snail’s pace, and as we crept through the museum, around the obstacles of giggling, oblivious students, my fists were clenched in frustration.

  “A machete? Why did he bring a machete on his honeymoon?”

  My mother shrugs. There was so much of my father that was unknowable, and since he’s been dead for seven years, we’ll never know. She had her revenge on him in the end, in her particularly passive-aggressive way.

  “Your mother can’t let me die in peace,” my father liked to say. “I have to die bothered.”

  Sure enough, as he lay in his casket, she placed a rosary between his unbeliever’s hands. It seemed presumptuous, considering that while they were technically still married, they’d been separated for thirty years. When I observed that he may not have wanted to carry a rosary through eternity, she shrugged and walked away. My mother shrugs the way Baryshnikov danced.

  So. The machete. He placed it under the driver’s seat as they set off for their honeymoon in Quebec. My paternal grandmother, my nonna, who was quite crazy and did not particularly like my non-Italian mother, had told her earlier in the day: “You be good to Nino. You can always get another husband, but I can never have another son.” Late in the first night of their marriage, my father woke up screaming from a nightmare that he was trapped in a dark place. (We are a gothic family; subtlety is not our forte.)

  It is the first time I’ve heard the honeymoon story. I suggest to my mother, perhaps cruelly, that she should have taken a hint and fled while she still could. Immediately, I feel ashamed. It’s not something she hasn’t thought of a thousand times herself.

  My parents were married for fifty years. That is, they married in 1957, and when my father died fifty-two years later they had never divorced. However, they had not lived together for thirty years. Just before Christmas 1979, after many attempts and false starts, my mother finally got it together to leave my father. We were relieved, my brothers and my sister and I. In place of the screaming and the sound of Corningware dishes smashing the kitchen window, there was blessed silence.

  My father deserves his own book, if not his own library. I could tell you that he was a tyrant who cast a shadow over my childhood, and also a bohemian who opened my mind’s windows. He was eccentric, charismatic, and on occasion thoughtlessly cruel. There was something of Aleister Crowley about him: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. He once gave my ten-year-old nephew, his grandson, a book of Victorian illustrated erotica as a present.

  Some of his eccentricities I fashioned into sto­ries for other people’s delight: There was the time he called 911 from his hospital bed to complain that the nurses were torturing him. When we were children, we never went to the movies: We either went to plays and concerts (when there was money) or, when there was not (much more frequent), we were taken to witness natural disasters. Rivers flooded, trains derailed, buildings collapsed — these were all family expeditions.

  My father had an illegal police scanner and would monitor it carefully. If he heard of a particularly ferocious fire, he would load us into the car, even in the middle of the night, and drive us as close as possible to the flames, inching past police blockades. It was thrilling, sometimes, and terrifying, mostly, to be his child.

  He was also a terrible husband to my mother: angry, unfaithful, and petulant. I understand now the source of his pain: His own mother had suffered what would surely be diagnosed today as schizophrenia. She believed her family was trying to murder her, and was institutionalized. My father was forced to take her to the mental hospital in a taxi, with a police escort, while she leaned out the window screaming in Italian that her son was trying to kill her. He was fifteen years old. I came to have sympathy, much later, for the forces that bent him. Neither of my brothers were interested in the forces that bent him, and were largely estranged from him for years before his death.

  My mother’s stories rarely include my father, for obvious reasons. You might want to relive someone else’s maelstrom, but not your own. Especially if it was a maelstrom that nearly destroyed you. My sister and brothers and I rarely talk about the dimmer corners of our childhood, because what lurks there seems too ludicrous to be believed, too baroque to have existed in 1970s Toronto. There was a rule in our house, for example, that if we ever caught my father hugging my mother, or showing her any physical affection, we were to come between them and break them up. For this service my father would give us 25 cents, a shiny quarter. It was a system so perverse, so clearly damaging to our young souls, that sometimes I wonder if I imagined it. But my imagination isn’t that dark and borderless. I’m not William Faulkner.

  And then my mother escaped. That’s one ending of my mother’s story, and when I think about it as a feminist parable, she is Jill Clayburgh riding public transit into a sun-drenched future, supporting her children and her mother in a high-rise tenement on a nurse’s salary, growing as a woman and a human, travelling, reading, becoming the red-lipped, yellow-haired octogenarian who drew people to her at parties. But there was also another reading of her story, involving an addiction to pills and a stint in rehab, and depression, and a lot of offering pain up to God, which is a Catholic’s way of avoiding therapy. You could look at her on either path, and still see that she was a hero.

  DID MY MOTHER make me what I am? Do I tell stories because she did? Was I afraid to trust men, for so long, because of what one man did to her? Am I feminist because I saw the way the world treated her, and the way she refused to respond with cruelty in return?

  She would never have thought she was living a feminist’s life, even as she lived it. She supported her children, after my father kicked us out of the house when I was thirteen. (He told us to choose between them. We chose her. He made us leave that night, our possessions in green garbage bags.) She was a founding member of her union. She was a voracious reader, a seeker of knowledge, a collector of strays and outcasts.

  I became entranced with the histories of other mothers and daughters who shared stories. My favourite books from childhood were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novels. Years later, I would curl up on the bed with my own daughter, reading the books together, knowing the fraught history of Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. United by a libertarian ideology they wanted to camouflage as children’s literature, riven by professional jealousy, mother and daughter collaborated through gritted teeth on some of the most famous juvenile literature of the twentieth century.

  I did not tell my own daughter this: She was enchanted by young Laura’s corn-cob doll, by the pig’s bladder made into a football. It seemed criminal to shatter her illusions. One day she could discover for herself that the authors of the Little House books probably loathed each other a good part of the time but soldiered on so that they could awaken the American people to the evils of big government. Then she could decide if she’d read those books to her own daughter. The Circle of Life.

  As I was writing this book, the great writer and actress Carrie Fisher died. It was a blow to millions of people. It was a blow to me. I felt as if no one would ever make me laugh again, the way she had with her novels and memoirs. Other people loved her as Princess Leia, but for me she was always Carrie the Writer, inimi­table, semi-depraved, dark as baked-on sin. Consider this passage from her memoir Wishful Drinking, also the title of her one-woman show. She is describing
her father Eddie Fisher’s adulterous affair with a grieving Elizabeth Taylor, which was a front-page scandal in the 1950s: “He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and ultimately he consoled her with his penis.”

  Damn, I thought when I first read that line. I will never be as good as Carrie. It was a small consolation that none of us would.

  Carrie Fisher died in a Los Angeles hospital, less than a week after she’d suffered a massive heart attack on a flight home from London. Two days later, her mother, Debbie Reynolds, died of a stroke. Had Debbie died of a broken heart? Was such a thing even possible? The heart knows when there is not enough glue in the universe to keep it together.

  If any mother were to die of a broken heart, surely it would have been Debbie Reynolds. As adults, Debbie and Carrie lived in adjacent houses on the same property: the mother who’d been abandoned by a philanderer and a fraudster, and the daughter who’d been abandoned by a man for another man. Over the years, their relationship had been troubled, and at one point they were estranged. But they enjoyed each other too much to be apart for long. As presented in the documentary Bright Lights, they lived in raucous harmony, a kind of Grey Gardens for the age of sanitized voyeurs.

  In her books, Carrie set her own struggles with drugs and mental illness, hilariously, against her mother’s eccentric, show-must-go-on fortitude. Once, Reynolds suggested that her husband and her daughter should have a child together, because the resulting infant “would have nice eyes.” On another occasion, Reynolds gave her daughter — and her mother — a vibrator for Christmas. I picture Carrie Fisher cackling with joy as she pulled the vibrator from her festive stocking, recognizing, as all writers do, priceless material when they see it.

  “After I was finished thinking she was this trippy lunatic,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking, “I realized that she was pretty fucking amazing . . . I’ve watched her for my whole life, and she’s got this insanely strong life force. It pours through her veins and her muscles, and her heart. She’s remarkable.”

  I’ve watched her for my whole life, and she’s remarkable.

  MY FATHER DIED in the summer of 2009. Afterward, our little Addams family gathered to sort out his things, his weird trinkets and weirder books, his boxes of mysterious files, the detritus of a long life. We were oddly giddy, my brothers and my sisters and me, as we sorted and remembered the infrequent peaks of joy that rose from the storm clouds. We were high on post-stress chemicals. Until, that is, I found the letter.

  The letter sat in a dusty box with a collection of receipts and coupons and the bits of ephemera that constituted my father’s life. It was addressed to my mother.

  I recognized the writing on the envelope as my grandfather’s hand — that is, it was a letter to my mother from her father, addressed to her at the hospital where she worked, not at our home. And it said, on the outside, “to be delivered personally or returned to sender.” My grandfather hadn’t wanted anyone but my mother to open it, and I would soon see why.

  “Um,” I said, holding the letter up for my brothers and sister to see. “This is weird. A letter to Mom from Gramps. I wonder why it’s with Dad’s stuff, if it’s her letter.”

  “Why don’t you read it,” my brother said.

  Feeling slightly dirty, but only slightly, I slid the letter from its faded envelope. I read its contents. Afterward, I sat in uncharacteristic silence.

  “Well?” said my other brother. “What is it?”

  This is what it was: A letter from my grandfather to his daughter, telling her that he loved her, and that he knew she was unhappy, and that she should think about leaving her marriage. He worried that she was being mistreated by my father. He worried about his grandchildren. He wanted her to know that she could come home, any time, that her parents loved her and would welcome her with happy hearts. If she had made a mistake, it could be fixed.

  She probably never saw the letter. If she had, why would it still have been in my father’s possession? It crushed my heart to think that she had never seen it, never known of her father’s love, and worry, and offer of sanctuary. The weight of my mother’s story is too much sometimes. It is a stone, a boulder, a mountain.

  The next day, we brought my mother a few things from my father’s house: some CDs, a couple of books, a vase. I sat on the sofa beside her and pulled the letter out of my purse.

  “We found this, too.”

  My mother took it from me, and ran her fingers over the front. I watched her face for any hint that she recognized it.

  “That’s my father’s handwriting,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, and lied: “I haven’t read it.”

  She stood up, taking the letter with her, and went into her bedroom. Taking with her the story I’d never heard anything about before. Maybe she’d just forgotten. Maybe it had been too painful for her to tell. A little while later, she came back without the letter, lipstick freshly applied, dry-eyed.

  My curiosity could not be contained. “So? What was in the letter? What did Gramps have to say?”

  “Nothing,” my mother said. “It was nothing.”

  FOUR LIONS

  OVER THE YEARS, I have been fortunate to interview an extraordinary range of people. I often think about them and their generosity. Especially at Thanksgiving. As my mother goes around the table asking everyone what we feel grateful for, and each one of us mutters “this family,” with varying degrees of truthfulness, depending on how much we’re fighting that day, I secretly think: All of you who have shared your stories with me.

  All of you. Every person. Every Second World War codebreaker or bomber pilot, every single mother and survivor of domestic violence, every politician, opera singer, racehorse trainer, gardener, engineer, clown, and translator of Klingon (oh yes, folks, it’s a job). I’ve interviewed presidents and prime ministers, poets and carpenters, a dominatrix who went to the same elementary school as me, the first Canadian woman in space, and the geneticist who revealed that the bones found in that car park really did belong to King Richard III (that geneticist, Turi King, is also a woman, by the way, and a Canadian).

  Each of those interviews was a revelation, a magical window into the mind of another human being. There are times when this bounty makes me feel like Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner — “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” — except that I am neither murderous nor a cyborg. At least I’m pretty sure I’m not a cyborg.

  Not all encounters were equal. I have come away disappointed from interviews with famous people who I was sure would blow my mind, and I have become deeply enchanted with people who were unsung but passionate about some particular aspect of the universe (birds, stars, trees, their own misbehaving children). I never knew, when I set off with tape recorder and notepad, which way a conversation would turn.

  Sometimes, an interview would leave an indelible impression, a finger pressed into the soft loaf of my brain. I would walk away, dazed, and get on a train or bus home, staring out the window, my mind churning with thoughts and feelings. I have to remember this, I would think and scribble pages of illegible notes to myself. And then I would write the story, and it would be published, and sometimes readers would notice and sometimes they would not, but the impressions remained, unchanged.

  Those interview subjects lingered in my head, and I would hear their voices years later, what they said and how they said it. I’ve chosen to write mini-portraits of four women — three household names and one who should be — because each one of them impressed me in some profound way. I remember each of their voices vividly. Each one of them taught me something about the value of using your voice, for education or survival or self-expression or just to hear it lifted in rage.

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH YOU FRIGHTEN PEOPLE?”

  IT WAS SPRING 2008, and my cab driver was lost. He drove in circles around the Essex countryside, past fruit trees i
n bloom and ancient silos where hops were once stored. His aimlessness seemed deliberate; he may have been trying to protect me.

  “You’re going to visit her, are you?” he said, eyeing me in the rear-view mirror. He did not want to say her name, in the manner of Puritans who felt that naming Satan’s imps would summon them to the fireside. Eventually, he found the right address and we pulled up beside a beautiful old stone farmhouse. She was standing at the top of a set of stairs, staring balefully at the cabbie as he drove away.

  “I think that one must be missing a synapse,” she said, and her flat Australian drawl carried on the wind, perhaps as far as the taxi driver’s ear. Not that she would have cared if he heard; she never cared, which was one of the reasons I was there.

  I’d wanted to interview Germaine Greer for years. No, I hadn’t. Yes, I had. Let’s just say I’d wanted to interview her but had lived in mortal dread of being granted permission. What if she used my guts for tennis strings? What if she picked her teeth with my finger bones? On film, I had seen her pitted against Norman Mailer in Town Bloody Hall, the documentary about the notorious sexist pig showdown/debate in 1971 New York. In person, I saw her deliver a speech about Australian Aboriginal art, where she took apart a heckler with the brio of an Edwardian duke sitting down to a seven-course meal. I’d read her newspaper column, in which she eviscerated everyone from Princess Diana to Steve Irwin, the late crocodile hunter, whose death by stingray, Greer argued, was the poetic revenge of the animal world.

  In short, I was afraid. The previous year, I’d sent a tentative message to her assistant, asking if Greer might be available for an interview, and received this reply: “I’m afraid under no circumstances does Professor Greer do print interviews.” I slunk back into my cave, ashamed at my relief.