by Miriam Toews
Let’s go! she said. Let’s do it! I reminded her that it would only be for a year, that the sole purpose of the move was to further my education, and when that was done we’d move back to Steinbach. Yes, yes, she said, scrambling to find suitcases and arrange a school transfer for Marjorie.
twenty
The girls have hired a woman, a private consultant who understands the system, they say, to help them convince the doctors here that I need to be transferred to a psychiatric facility in the city immediately. That I have gone for fourteen days without seeing a psychiatrist. That the psychiatrist who saw me when I was first admitted retired that very afternoon. (Hmmm, was it something I didn’t say?) But that before retiring he had said I was a very sick man. Daughters are worried sick, very angry. This woman will help, they say, she knows how to work the system. This woman says it is imperative that Elvira remains in the city, health fragile, needs to rest. Elvira unsure. Enraged with treatment, furious with Bethesda, says if it comes to dying or being treated at Bethesda, let her die. Will have a stroke if she talks to one more Steinbach doctor. Wonders why she is not listened to re her own husband. (Still a fire under that grey thatch.) Wife and daughters in city: transfer husband. To them. Have lost track of details re my health, transfer, this hired woman. Woman says Elvira must not return to house. Or they will let me go home to her, will kill her. Must have help. Is not listened to. Must have home care. Failed kitchen test. Elvira wants me in the city. Girls want me in the city. Fourteen days, they say, fourteen days! Have signed several documents, girls tell me it is the right thing to do. No idea. Write it down.
On that spring day in 1968 when Elvira jumped for joy, my plan was hardly a reality. I still had to convince the school board that it was a good idea and ensure that my job would be there for me at the end of the year. Several days later I met with the board and they were all in agreement.
Elvira found an apartment for us on Grant Avenue, across from the new swimming pool built for the 1967 Pan-American Games. She signed the kids up for swimming lessons and signed herself up for an aquatic exercise class in her never-ending (and unnecessary) quest to lose ten pounds. I registered at the University of Manitoba, Marjorie was enrolled in grade five for the following September at Rockwood Elementary School, on Rockwood Avenue, just a stone’s throw from our apartment, and Miriam, four years old and born restless, was more than ready for a change.
Coincidentally, my sister, Diana, and her family were home on furlough and needed a place to stay. Elvira and I agreed that they could live in our house for a nominal rent while we were in the city. I wrote down elaborate instructions for the care of my flowers and shrubs and left them with my brother-in-law, hoping and praying he’d follow my directions.
Elvira bid a fond farewell to her multitude of friends, insisting that they come to the city and visit, and I promised Mother we would call and see her often. On the way to the city, Elvira hummed and whistled and clutched at my wrists as I drove, telling me over and over how happy she was to be moving to the city, and Miriam scrambled back and forth from the front seat to the back, to the front, to the back, while Marjorie remained quietly in her corner filled with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.
The year proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Somehow I managed to complete my degree, limping gamely towards the end of my courses, dragging my body out of bed to attend classes, writing my essays in manic fits and starts as Elvira urged me on, and collapsing, literally, on the finish line, unable to move or even think.
It was a complete nervous breakdown, similar to the one I experienced when I was seventeen. The mania that had propelled me forward for the last few years had now pushed me right over the edge, and I fell and crashed, in spite of all of the medication that was supposed to keep me on the straight and narrow, and in spite of my long-suffering psychiatrist’s attempts to get me to talk, to figure me out, to balance my chemicals, and to prevent me from losing my mind.
I was hospitalized for ten days at the Concordia Hospital, during which time Elvira and the girls packed up our belongings between visits to me in the psychiatric ward, cancelled their lessons at the pool, and said good-bye to the few friends they had made in the city.
In addition to missing her friends and suffering the indignity and mind-numbing boredom of having been placed in a slow-learners’ class, something we were unaware of until the end of the term, Marjorie was also involved in a bizarre assault right outside our apartment block. One winter evening, on her way home from a church activity several blocks away, she was stopped on the sidewalk by two men, one of whom was carrying a white pail, who asked her for directions to a certain place in the city. She told them she didn’t know where it was, and as she turned to enter our building the man with the pail dumped its contents over Marjorie’s head. The men fled and Marjorie, shocked, terrified, and humiliated, appeared at our apartment door looking as though she’d fallen into a tar pit.
We never did find out what the mysterious brown substance was. It stained her woollen winter coat and her white furry hat, but it didn’t have much of an odour and it washed off her skin easily. In hindsight I realize that we should have phoned the police immediately and had the substance examined. We should have taken Marjorie to a doctor to make sure this awful brown sludge wouldn’t harm her. We should have done more. As Elvira comforted Marjorie long into the night, lying beside her in her small twin bed, stroking her brow, murmuring words of love and sympathy, and finally falling asleep with Marjorie cradled in her arms, I lay in my bed blaming myself and wondering what had become of the man who had promised his infant daughter that no harm would ever come to her. It was my fault, I determined. If I hadn’t been so eager to obtain a university degree, in order to further my own career, in order to make more money, in order to succeed, in order to provide and impress, in order to feel good about myself, my daughter would not have been violated. In my mind I came to associate the city with evil, despair, and personal failure.
Nor could I acknowledge that I had, in fact, accomplished my goal of getting a university degree, or that the city had offered many exciting opportunities to Elvira, or even that it had been, say, an “interesting experience.” All I saw was darkness, and I longed to return to the comfort and familiarity of my hometown and my job at Southwood School. Originally Elvira and I had planned to move back home in June, when Marjorie’s school year at Rockwood was over, but in light of the circumstances, we agreed that we would go home the day after my last class and I would return to the city to write my final exams.
Again Elvira packed the boxes and made the necessary arrangements, dealing with the leasing agency, transferring Marjorie back to her school in Steinbach. Marjorie was ecstatic and relieved to be going home to her friends and classroom. She hollered out instructions to the piano movers as they hauled her prized possession down three flights of stairs and into their truck, on its way back to its rightful place in the pink house on First Street.
There was, however, one small glitch. Diana and her family would not be leaving the house, our house, until June. That was the plan, after all, and whose fault was it that we had returned early if not mine? Elvira and I arranged to live in the parsonage of the E.M.B. church, which just happened to be vacant at the time. Marjorie, wishing not to inconvenience Diana by showing up daily to play her piano, made the trek across town to her aunt Mary’s house instead, where she was allowed to play to her heart’s content.
I had believed, of course, that I would be back at Southwood in the fall, and if there was anything that had gotten me through my period of depression in the city, it was that.
But I was informed, shortly after moving back to town, that my contract at Southwood would not be renewed, in spite of their verbal agreement to the contrary. I realized that the school board, hearing of my breakdown and my hospitalization, had lost confidence in me, perhaps not as a teacher but certainly as a principal whose job it is to keep everything running smoothly, whose job it is to be reliable. And one do
esn’t run an elementary school from one’s hospital bed.
There’s a verse in chapter 16 of Job: I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. Years earlier, my psychiatrist had used the same words to describe me: Mel, he said, you’re a mark. Suffice to say, I’d never work as a principal in that town again. Or in any town, for that matter. But I did, eventually, get my house and flowers back. And that fall, I started where I had left off years ago, teaching grade six at Elmdale Elementary. They had always hoped I’d return.
There’s a verse in Psalm 16: Thou wilt show me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. This is the verse I chose to underline in my Bible that summer and recite to my reflection every morning as I shaved. In order to maintain a positive attitude, to get out of bed every weekday morning and do my job, I told myself that, if nothing else, God loved me, and that by being good, by being decent and civil and by working hard, I would one day experience the fullness of joy.
Never, ever did I admit or acknowledge even to myself that I was sick. My lapses into depression, I felt, were due to a weakness in my character, and my disappointments and failures in life, though they were rather typical of any average life, were what I felt I deserved. And so I resolved, with steely determination, to become a better human being.
That summer I spent hundreds of hours preparing my classroom for the fall, enlivening it with colourful paint and plants and cushions and curtains and posters and supplies, researching aspects of Canadian history and politics that I had previously overlooked, brushing up on my math (my least favourite subject), planning assignments, group projects, field trips, seating orders, and study guides. Every evening and late into the night I read and reread the biographies of great men and women, hoping to learn something about living one’s life to the fullest and leaving one’s mark (as opposed to being one) on this Earth. I filled boxes and then filing cabinets of notes to myself on living and teaching, and in no time the lines between the two subjects blurred. Living was teaching. Teaching was my life.
I didn’t just want to be a good teacher. I wanted to be a great teacher, and in order to become one, I felt I had to act as a filter. That is, I had to absorb the negative energy in the classroom, the hurt, the sadness, the confusion in my students. Whatever it was that blocked the mind from understanding, from absorbing information, and from experiencing the exhilaration of learning.
When I returned to Elmdale I was on fire. As I would be for the rest of my teaching days. At home, of course, unless I was manic, I rested. Marjorie was now in grade six and I was her homeroom teacher, a situation requiring some delicacy in how we treated each other, as student, daughter, teacher, or father. But generally it worked out well. Marjorie was a conscientious, clever, well-liked student. In fact, she was one of my brightest students ever, but I waited until she was almost forty before I told her as much. We tended to stay out of each other’s way as much as possible. Sometimes her presence would startle me. I would look up from my desk and see her staring at me with those large green eyes she inherited from yours truly and I’d wonder what she was thinking.
That year, too, Miriam began kindergarten at Elmdale and not surprisingly caused some trouble in the classroom by refusing to nap at naptime and by hurling crayons around the room rather than holding them to her paper. She hated cutting, gluing, colouring, napping, and sitting still. Often she was forced by her teacher to stand between the sinks as punishment. Sometimes, if I happened to be at that end of the school, I would peek through the window of her classroom door and watch her. Almost always she would be talking out of turn, whispering, giggling, inciting her friend Debbie into various acts of five-year-old hooliganism. I would see her at assembly occasionally and she would remind me of Elvira in that old kindergarten photo I was telling you about, elbowing her way to the front row, determined to see and be seen.
My daughter has just informed me that it would be good for me to sit outside by the fountain, and that she will sit with me. (It is a dangerous fountain, I presume, one not to be faced alone.) But still, I like the idea. We’re off!
We sat in the sun and talked about the kids for a while. We talked about the town. There’s no place I can go here, I said, without people seeing me, and talking … Until I realized that I wasn’t really going anywhere anyway. I tried not to talk about Elvira, knowing how tiresome it was for my daughters to continuously reassure me that she was alive and in the city. But I couldn’t help myself. You’ll see her soon, she says. She desperately needed a break, she says. We’re taking care of her in the city and you here, and it doesn’t make sense. But she’s getting stronger. She wants to see you. We’re making progress. Progress? I ask. Yes, she says, we’ve got an appointment for you in the city to see a geriatric psychiatrist. (Horrifying words those: they mean I am old and crazy.) Then, daughter goes on to say, the ball will be rolling and we can get you homecare with Mom in the city and access to better care, but you have to be in the city to qualify for … I drifted away. I had a frightening feeling that my daughters were only somewhat less confused about the situation than I was.
We sat outside for about an hour. I was beginning to get a nice suntan, and my daughter recommended a certain type of sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. I’ll be fine, I told her, not to worry. The sun likes me. A former student and his wife walked past us and we chatted for a minute or two. He introduced me to his wife, and I introduced him to my daughter. When they leaned over to shake hands, the fountain suddenly erupted and they both got a little wet. Did my former student wonder what I was doing sitting by the hospital fountain? Or did he already know?
When we came back inside my daughter kissed me good-bye, and I noted that warm, earthy summer smell on her skin, which reminded me of the lake, of our cottage, of her as a little girl, and of myself as something other than old and crazy.
It’s time to rest, the nurse says. Does she think sitting by a fountain is hard work?
Overheard nurse at desk telling other daughter on the phone: I wouldn’t get any nursing done if I was forever looking for your dad. My lunch has been forgotten. The places that I go: bed, washroom, hallway, now the fountain. Where has she been looking?
twenty-one
Three good years went by. I worked, the children went to school happily and spent time with their friends, and Elvira kept house. Mother had begun to shoplift her bottles of vanilla now, lining her large purse with tea towels so the bottles wouldn’t clink. This was also the time I began to take very long walks. Soon I was wearing out a pair of shoes per month, and Elvira insisted I buy better-quality walking shoes.
In the summer I gardened and researched the lives of remarkable men and women while Elvira feverishly planned road trips, sitting up in bed with maps and travel brochures, a bowl of popcorn, and the ball game blaring on the television that we had recently purchased. Elvira’s passion was baseball. Most of our trips included visits to cities that had Major League teams, Elvira having bought tickets in advance over the phone, and not for one game but for three or four, including afternoon games. She’d insist on arriving an hour or two early for the experience of watching the players warm up and of collecting their autographs. In the last few years, as her baseball passion soared to a near hysteria, Elvira built herself a wall map of North America and marked, with a coloured thumbtack, every city in which she had seen a game. In fact, she developed a three-colour system: red for the cities she has visited with the girls and me, yellow for the cities she has visited with her baseball-loving friend Miss Martha Hill (the one I lost my temper with) and my grandson, and blue for the cities she has visited alone.
When Elvira wasn’t watching — or reacting to, I should say — the baseball game, or taking in an episode of M.A.S.H. or The Waltons or McMillan and Wife, I would watch Hymn Sing, my favourite show, although I was almost equally as fond of Front Page Challenge, with its inimitable panel of r
egular guests, Pierre Berton, Gordon Sinclair, and Betty Kennedy, and affable moderator, Fred Davis. Hymn Sing aired at 5:30 on Sunday evenings and preceded The Wonderful World of Disney, Miriam’s favourite show after Don’t Eat the Daisies and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Hymn Sing consisted of a formally dressed Winnipeg choral ensemble standing rather stiffly on strategically placed risers and singing hymns. The lyrics of the hymns, for those who weren’t familiar with them and wanted to sing along, rolled along the bottom of the screen.
It was becoming clear that Elvira was longing for something else. Not something instead of what she had but something in addition to it, something that I was oblivious to. So when it happened I was floored.
No, she didn’t have an affair or leave town one day to become a hippie in Kathmandu or some such place. Elvira cashed in her life insurance policy, purchased by her father when she was an infant, bought herself a flute, and joined the local orchestra, under the tutelage of the talented Bill Derksen.
In those days Mennonite women did not perform in public. They weren’t even allowed to get up and speak to the congregation, although fifteen-year-old boys were. The role they were expected to play was strictly behind the scenes, at home, in church, and in the community. So when Elvira took up the flute and joined the band I saw it as an act of rebellion, of defiance, not only of the Mennonite way but of me, or of the man I felt I was supposed to be, although my bewilderment left me, naturally, speechless. Never would it have occurred to me to ask her to stop or even to ask her why she felt she needed to join an orchestra. Every Tuesday evening, Elvira would leave the house at seven, her narrow black case tucked protectively under her arm, for two hours of orchestra practice with the illustrious maestro. She loved to say the words “orchestra practice.”