It had been three months since I wrote the psychologist the one last cheque. The sessions had seemed pointless, though I had to admit that my relationship with Betsy was changing in small but discernible ways. Betsy still did nearly all the meal preparation, and though I disappeared into my study on the third floor to write, I emerged in time to tidy the kitchen before she got home. Nor did I complain about being the courier of large and small objects in our house, which entailed running up and down four flights of stairs to fetch items never in the most convenient place. I talked with the boys more easily, and took an active part in discussions at the dinner table now. Also, I started weekend chore lists myself, emptied the dishwasher without any reminders, and even inspected the dishes for food particles before putting them away. Small things. Though like Peter I did have relapses.
I had also started taking each of the boys out for a father-son dinner once a month. A few weeks after the opera I took Peter to a vegetarian restaurant on Sherbrook Street. Peter loved food in a deep and sensual way, and he had an adaptable palate. That evening he ordered a barbecue-flavoured veggie burger.
“You know the opera we saw, Il Trovatore?” I asked him as the summer sun poured down on us. He looked up from eating to nod. “Do you know what part made me cry?”
“Yes. When the man wants to rescue his mother.”
“How on earth did you know that?”
He shrugged.
“Do you know why?”
Peter shook his head. His mouth was full of veggie fries that he ate too fast, and his face smeared with organic ketchup from a bright red bottle that said Made in New Jersey.
“When the hero, Manrico, sings about rescuing his mother, it made me cry because I thought of you and Grandpa both wanting to rescue your mothers. Don’t you wish you could rescue your mother?”
Peter responded with his own questions. “Why would Grandpa want to rescue his mother? She died when he was my age, right?”
“Yes, she did. Peter,” I touched his shoulder and lowered my voice, “you don’t want everyone to hear you, so you need to lower your volume.” Recently Peter had been close to shouting in most conversations, especially when he was excited.
“Grandpa’s mom died when he was a boy, you’re right. But I’ve never told you before about how she was raped by soldiers during the war.” Peter shook his head and his eyes filled with tears. “That’s what Grandpa would want to rescue his mother from,” I said and took a breath, realizing that I should probably stop on this subject. “And don’t you wish you could rescue your mother sometimes?”
“Yes, I do. But I don’t understand why people do things like that in a war.”
“You mean rape? Please sit up, Peter.” I was worried the organic ketchup would go all over his white T-shirt.
“Yes. And Grandpa’s mom wasn’t even in the army.”
“In war sometimes the point is just to make the enemy suffer, and the enemy includes everyone who is different from you.”
“Maybe the men who did that had their own hurts and difficult feelings.”
“I’m sure they did. Anyway, I want to talk about how it affected Grandpa.” He looked down and turned pale in the sturdy sunshine. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell the story of what happened exactly.” He looked up at me.
“Grandpa can remember all kinds of things from the day his mother was attacked. He remembers how the yard looked, what kind of trees they had, how a plane flew over, how the soldiers tossed a grenade into the pond just to watch the dead fish float to the surface.” At this Peter shook his head in short spasmodic movements, very upset.
“But Grandpa doesn’t remember what happened to his mother. He was eight years old, only two years younger than you are. So he was old enough to remember, not like you with your mother. Why do you think he doesn’t remember?”
“I say it’s because your brain is like a computer when you push control-alt-delete. You restart and then you don’t remember. Or you put the thoughts away and they’re like an apple core in the compost.” Peter loved metaphors and analogies.
“But the apple core just becomes dirt again. What about your thoughts or memories? Do they disappear like something in the computer’s memory might?”
“No, no they don’t.” He ate some more fries.
“Then you didn’t answer my question before. Why doesn’t Grandpa remember what happened to his mom?”
“Maybe it’s too hard to think about for him.”
“Yes. I believe that’s true. What kinds of worries do you think he had about his family after his mom died?”
“He probably always worried about losing his relatives, about losing people. He maybe thought, who will die next? Just like if someone tried to attack Bohdan, or my parents, or you, my brain would tell my body, you have to fight!” This last in a loud declamation; I gave him my lower-the-volume hand signal. “You know how people can get superhuman powers when they’re in emergencies, so they can even lift cars? That would happen to me. I’d bite and kick and not let anyone attack us.”
“I’m sure you’d fight hard.” Enough reality for one dinner, I thought, remembering how Peter and Bohdan once believed in my superhuman powers.
“Dad, you should talk to Grandpa so he doesn’t worry about losing Grandma.”
“Grandma isn’t dying. She’s losing her memory.”
“Yes, but that’s like she’s dying inside, and probably it scares Grandpa. You should talk to him. He must be worried about his family leaving him, just like I am.”
“It’s different with your dad when he’s older. He wouldn’t want me presuming to understand him.” I ground to a halt. Hadn’t I just been assuming I understood Peter?
“You should talk to Grandpa,” Peter said, ignoring my excuse-making. I nodded and he insisted that I finish his burger. The barbecue flavour was extraordinary.
V
The next day I took Peter’s advice and telephoned my father in Edmonton. But rather than inquire into his feelings, I asked him to tell me again the story of how he almost drowned. He did not hesitate.
“We lived near the Dutch border in Germany. I was ten and my mother was still alive. I was playing on an icy pond.”
At the edges, the bare branches of the chestnut trees swayed in the wind, just like they used to around the pond on his stepfather’s estate.
“I loved the water — this was the pond where I learned to swim in the summer.”
Dad had taught himself to swim by pretending he could already do it; it was no more dangerous than running away from drunken, trigger-happy soldiers.
“I was sliding across the ice and felt cracks rippling behind me. When I looked down I could see fish swimming. They were blue.”
On this winter day, men were nearby sawing fresh-cut lumber. They must have cut a hole in the ice earlier, and it had frozen over. Dad stepped on the thin ice and suddenly fell in — wet socks, wet shoes, wet pants, and no air. The sheer cold choked his lungs. Where was the hole? The blue sky gone now and he saw only shades of white. But then he saw a dark shape above the ice, moving.
“I kicked hard with my legs, and got my arms out of the water, then I hoisted myself on my elbows to get my head up, and lunged at the dark shape.”
A log had stopped just beside the hole like a curling rock. His hand slid over the gnarly surface and caught on an irregular bump. He pulled himself onto the ice and lay there for a moment, his clothes drooping beside him.
Then he went home and was drying himself by the fire when his mother came home from her job. When she asked what happened, he refused to tell her, and she spanked him.
“She was very strict.” He couldn’t remember what she spanked him with that time or how hard she had hit him.
My hearing this story probably wasn’t what Peter had in mind when he told me to talk to my father. But Dad’s telling me the story meant a great deal to me, given his sparse writings. Like my father’s, Peter’s diaries revealed very little, and that didn’t bother me. B
ut maybe in his seventies, when he felt safe enough, Peter would tell his son or daughter a story like my dad’s.
In November I drove to Regina to do a poetry reading in the midst of a crisis. Bohdan’s cat, Gracie Flames, had disappeared for several days. Over the weekend we’d walked the streets calling her, phoned the humane society and the no-kill shelters, and put up posters throughout the neighbourhood. Gracie was only a year old and we loved her. Bohdan was distraught.
On the highway, I alternated between Glenn Gould and the Beatles to keep myself awake for the tedious six-hour drive. Downtown Regina had more bustle and tall buildings than it used to. I met my host at a bar and we exchanged books, ate dinner, drank beer. Recently beer had become the thing I liked best about readings. I normally enjoyed these events, happily ignoring the fact that the only people who attend poetry readings are, in declining numerical order, would-be poets, other poets, and friends or relatives. But recently the airless confines of the readings had worn on me. Was there any point to being away from my family for these things? On the other hand, when I was at home I still frequently fought with my wife and lost my temper at Peter.
The reading was held in a tony downtown café with outrageously priced drinks and food. I sold a handful of books and stayed up until 3:00 am at my host’s apartment playing crokinole and talking poetry.
The drive home the next morning required more coffee than usual. I left at seven and drove into a fiery sunrise and the astonishing open sky of southern Saskatchewan. I was back in Winnipeg in time to pick the boys up from school.
In the early evening as Bohdan and I left for his tae kwon do class, Gracie limped onto our front walk from the side of the house, and Bohdan picked her up and brought her inside. One of her rear legs was injured and she was extremely thirsty. I took her to the vet the next day.
Her leg was shattered at the hip, probably from the impact of a car. Gracie had always crossed streets with regal indifference. Now she needed surgery and it would cost thousands of dollars.
Betsy and I decided to have Gracie euthanized. We lied to Bohdan, telling him that she died on the operating table. He accepted this news stoically but cried that night. Then he organized a memorial.
We stood around our dining room table where Bohdan had made me light a single candle and he turned out the light. He said we must all hold hands.
“Let’s each talk,” he said. “We are here to remember my cat Gracie Flames. She was beautiful with her orange flames. She had a happy life being outside a lot. Now she will go back to the earth.” He nodded at Peter to follow him.
“January will be very sad. He was Gracie’s only brother and this will be hard on him.”
“It’s OK if you’re upset, Peter,” said Betsy, squeezing his hand. A tear formed on his cheek. Bohdan pointed at Betsy.
“We will all miss Gracie. We’re sad about her dying.”
Then it was my turn. I cleared my throat. “We live in a world where a lot of things don’t make any sense.” I paused and gathered myself. “Gracie’s death made no sense. She was a great cat. We miss her a lot.”
Bohdan had us close our eyes and think about Gracie for a minute. When we opened our eyes he blew out the candle on the table and we stood in the dark. Where he got this sense of ceremony was a mystery. Peter still had his eyes closed, as if in prayer. Betsy put her arms around me, and then we hugged the boys before Bohdan turned on the light.
VI
In the late spring of 2010, Peter, Bohdan, and I walked home from daycare, just after 5:00 pm. Our usual route was Palmerston, the last street alongside the Assiniboine River. The houses jumbled on different sized lots in a queer variety. It was sleepy and peaceful. An orange tabby crossed our path and stopped to watch us. Bohdan wanted to chase the cat, but I held him back. The sun dappled the sidewalk and each band of light made the street quieter.
“You know,” said Peter, in the booming voice he often used, “I don’t want to be attractive anymore.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. You don’t want to look nice anymore?” I was wary because Peter often liked to roll out new vocabulary before he understood it.
“It’s the way some people have hard corners and others have soft ones — I don’t want to be hard. That’s attractive. It hurts other people.” His voice was loud enough to disturb the orange tabby, who skittered away.
“Peter, what you mean is you don’t want to be destructive. And the expression is having hard edges, not corners.” I used my calm and reasonable parent voice.
“No, I mean I don’t want to be attractive.”
Bohdan was pulling at my arm, showing me where the cat went.
“You’re shouting. Can you explain what you’re trying to say, Peter?”
“Well, Dad, have you read Artemis Fowl, Dad, the second book?” He repeated Dad like this when I most needed to stay calm.
“No. Please just tell me what you’re trying to say.”
“OK. If I don’t listen to you after daycare, and you get mad, and I still don’t listen, and you yell at me, that’s attractive.”
“The word you mean is destructive. It means something with qualities that destroy.”
“But Dad, that’s not how I use the words. I say attractive for what you’re talking about.”
“Peter, you can’t use words as if they have a private meaning just for you. Words are supposed to be things we use to communicate with others. You can’t have a private definition.”
“Yes I can.”
I sighed. “Look Peter. Do you want other people to understand what you say?” He shrugged, seeing the blind alley he was headed into.
“Peter, I know you want to communicate with other people. There was a German philosopher who talked about this. He said that language by definition is not private. The word you want is destructive. Attractive means having qualities that attract or draw people to you, such as being good-looking, which you and your brother are, by the way.” End of lecture on Wittgenstein, cue self-esteem talk from the most pompous father in the universe, I thought, squeezing Bohdan’s hand tighter as Peter spun off on his own. When I asked him again, later that day, Peter remained unwilling to relinquish his private definition of the word attractive.
Not only pompous, but hypocritical, I too had my own definition of attractive, and it included having dramatic and destructive qualities; this was something I could never admit to Peter. Betsy’s definition of attractiveness, she said, included how I stacked shovels, talked to the boys, and put away the dishes in the drainer. I went along, because until I was attractive to her again nothing else mattered to me, and I pinned my hopes like a dead butterfly on our vacation in North Carolina that summer. But some days I felt like a victim of her unreasonable demands. I believed in reason, which was why I liked giving lectures to Peter. I corrected him a thousand times a day in my reasonable and attractive style, nitpicking about posture, and table manners, and grammar, and wearing your clothes right, and God knows what else.
Peter stood on his bike in front of our house. It had twenty-inch wheels, bright red, with seven gears and fancy brakes of the kind that parents cannot repair without spending money. He was half-turned backwards, looking at the rear brake.
“Look, Dad. Something is wrong with the brake when I push it — just watch.”
“It’s working, Peter. I’m not sure what you mean,” and I really was not.
“Why don’t you step off the bike,” said Betsy. He did. She demonstrated, moving the bike with the handlebar and squeezing the back brake, which locked on the rear wheel exactly as it should.
“But if you squeeze slowly —”
“No, Peter. This happens every year. You play with something on the brakes until they don’t work anymore, and then we have to spend money getting them fixed,” I said.
“Did you touch something on the brake?” asked Betsy.
“Yes,” he admitted, pointing to a rubber sleeve on the brake caliper.
“Push it back to where it was.” He
pouted, whether over the non-failure of the brake or the matter-of-fact way we were talking to him was hard to say. I supposed that at the symbolic level that damn brake stood for something else that was bothering him, some private pain he couldn’t express. Or he was just feeling pissy.
Betsy told him that this year he’d have to pay himself for any brake repairs necessitated by his own fiddling, and I thought about how exhausting it was to have to constantly decide when an action or object was freighted with symbolic meaning and when, pace Freud, a brake was just a brake. When to interpret Peter’s actions and words in terms of his traumatic background, and when to treat him just like any other nine-year-old kid, was something Betsy and I frequently talked about.
One weekend that summer Jeremy and I stood back-to-back and Betsy held a level over our heads to measure our relative heights. I was still marginally taller than him, but he was officially over six feet. He’d become a history major and was working hard in school, and had moved out of his mother’s house and begun paying rent.
Upstairs he and the boys played with an elaborate Lego toy that Betsy’s father had given them for Christmas, a robot controlled from a computer. We had put the boys on notice that Jeremy was the boss and that he could banish them if they grabbed things or yelled or failed to listen. But Jeremy was patient and firm and the boys listened.
Watching them at the table together, I wondered what I’d learned from being Jeremy’s father. The night before, he’d called me in an elated state: he scored in the ninety-fourth percentile on the law school admission test. He knew what he wanted: he was going to law school. It looked like he was finally on track. And however little I’d had to do with that, maybe the fact that I didn’t have a fucking clue was somehow OK. My sons were OK.
VII
The ceiling fan in the boys’ bedroom needed to be replaced. When you turned it on, the whole fixture shook as if we lived in an earthquake zone. Betsy and I set aside a Friday afternoon when the boys were at daycare.
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