Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  “Do you remember the boys at the Lab?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. That means she really does remember them.

  “Their names were Cam and Ray. They lived in a tent. There’s a photo of them with their feet sticking out. Do you remember those ones? That summer?”

  She says she does.

  It’s hard for me to picture what my mother was like at that time. No: it’s hard to picture her face. Her face has had so many later versions of itself laid down on it, like sediments, that I can’t seem to recover that other, earlier face. Even the photos of her don’t correspond to anything I can recall. I remember her essence, however: her voice, what she smelled like, what it felt like to lean up against her, the reassuring clatter she would make in the kitchen, even the sound of her singing, because she did used to sing. She once sang in church choirs; she had a good voice.

  I can even remember some of her songs, or parts of them:

  Blow, blow, sweet and low, wind of the western sea;

  Come from the something or other ta tum,

  Over the something or other ta tum,

  Blow him again to me,

  While my little ones, while my pretty ones, sleep …

  I used to think she was singing from happiness, but in reality she must have been singing to put us to sleep. Sometimes I wouldn’t go to sleep, though I would pretend to. Then I would raise myself up stealthily on the pillow and peer through a knothole in the wall. I liked to watch my parents when they didn’t know I was doing it. “I’m keeping an eye on them,” my mother would say, of boiling eggs or baking biscuits, or even of us, her children. Simply being watched, then, had a protective effect, and so I kept an eye on my parents. It made them safe.

  My older brother was restless; he had projects, he wanted to be up and doing, he had things to saw and hammer. He needed glasses of water, and then he’d want to know what time it was and how long it would be until morning. My mother must have sung her songs out of mild desperation, hoping to fence off a small portion of the evening for herself. If she succeeded, she would sit at the table with the kerosene lamp on, playing cribbage with my father.

  On some evenings he wasn’t there. He’d be working late at the Lab and would come back in the dusk, or he’d be away on collecting trips for weeks at a time. Then she’d be alone. She would spend the evenings reading, while the owls hooted outside and the loons mourned. Or she’d write letters to her distant parents and sisters, describing the weather and the events of the week, though nothing about her feelings. I know this because I myself received similar letters from her, once I’d grown up and moved away.

  Or she’d write in her diary. Why did she bother with these diaries? She and her sister made a bonfire of their diaries the night before their double wedding, and it was a custom she kept up throughout her life. Why set words down, just to destroy them? Maybe she saved the diaries until Christmas so she could put the main happenings of the year into her Christmas messages. Then, on New Year’s, she might have erased the old year and started again. She burned letters too.

  I never asked her about her reason for doing this. She would only have said, “Less clutter,” which would have been part of the truth – she liked to clear the decks, as she put it – but not all of it.

  I can remember what the back of her head looked like while she was writing, silhouetted against the soft light of the lamp; her hair, the slope of her shoulders. But not her face.

  Her legs, though – I have a clear image of those, in grey flannel slacks, but only at one time of day: late afternoon, with the sun low in the sky, the light coming in yellow shafts down through the trees and glinting off the water. At that hour we would walk along the hillside overlooking the lake to where there was an unusual object. It was a small cement plinth, painted red. It was only a lot-line marker, but at the time it seemed charged with non-human powers, like an altar.

  This was where we would wait for our father to come back from the Lab. We would sit on the warm rock, where there was a patch of reindeer moss, brittle in dry weather, soft after rain, and listen for the sound of the motorboat – for this we would have to keep very quiet – and I would lean against my mother’s grey flannel legs. Also her leather boots. Possibly I remember the intricacies of these boots – their creases, their laces – better than I remember her face because the boots did not change. At one moment they vanished – they must have been thrown out – but until that time they remained as they were.

  This ritual – the walking along the hillside, the uncanny red plinth, the waiting, the leaning, the keeping very quiet – all of this was surely what caused our father to appear, silhouetted against the sun, getting bigger and bigger as the boat neared our dock.

  Once in a while a couple of the boys at the Lab would come back with my father to our house and have dinner with us. Most likely the main part of the dinner would be fish. The only other choices were Spam or corned beef, or bacon, or – if we were lucky – something made with eggs and cheese. It was the War, anything in the way of meat was rationed, but fish were easily come by. My mother – when she still had hold of the plot – used to say that if they were expecting company she would just take a fishing rod down to the dock and make a cast or two. That was all it would take. She could catch enough pickerel for dinner in half an hour.

  “Then I’d whack them over the heads,” my mother would say to her later friends – her city friends – “and presto! Then we’d throw the innards in the lake, so the bears couldn’t smell them.” She’d be showing off, just a little: the friends thought she’d been crazy to go way up there into nowhere with two small kids. They didn’t say crazy, though, they’d say courageous. Then she would laugh. “Oh, courageous!” she would say, implying that it hadn’t taken courage because she hadn’t been afraid.

  Maybe Cam and Ray came to dinner, and had fish. I certainly hope so. The two of them are characters from a novel, a novel I’ve never read. I have no real recollection of them, but I fell in love with their pictures when I was twelve or thirteen. Cam and Ray were much better than movie stars because they were more real, or their photos were. I had no word for sexier, but they were that as well. They looked so full of life, so adventurous and amused, the two of them.

  They’re upstairs now, in my house. I took them into my care along with the rest of the photo album once my mother had gone completely blind.

  All the photos are black and white, though the earlier ones have a brownish tinge; they cover the years between 1909, when my mother was born, to 1955, when she seems to have given up on the whole idea. Between those years, however, she was meticulous. Despite her letter-burning and diary-destroying, despite the way she covered her tracks, even she must have wanted a witness of sorts – a testament to her light-footed passage through her time. Or a few clues, scattered here and there along the trail for anyone who might be following, trying to find her.

  Underneath each photo is my mother’s careful handwriting, in black ink on the grey pages. Names, places, dates. At the front are my grandparents in their Sunday best with their first car, a Ford, standing proudly outside their white-sided Nova Scotian house. Then there are several aging great-aunts, in print dresses, the shadows cast by the sun deepening their eye sockets and frown lines and making little moustaches underneath their noses. My mother enters as a ribbon-covered baby, then changes to a little girl in a lace-collared dress and ringlets, then to a tomboy in overalls. The sisters and the brothers have appeared by then, and grow larger in their turn. My grandfather sprouts an army doctor’s uniform.

  “Did you have the 1919 flu?” I ask my mother’s ear.

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Did your mother have it? Did your sisters? Did your brothers? Did your father?” It seemed they all had it.

  “Who took care of you?”

  Another pause. “Father did.”

  “He must have been pretty good at it,” I say, because none of them died, not then.

  An interval, while she consider
s. “I suppose he was.”

  She fought against her father, whom nevertheless she loved. He was a stubborn man, she used to say. He had a strong will. She told me once that she was too much like him.

  Now my mother is a teenager, joking around in a line of girls at the beach, wearing suits with long legs and striped tops, arms around one another’s shoulders. “Sweet sixteen,” says this seaside girls’ group. My mother is in the middle. The names are written underneath: Jessie, Helene, “Me,” Katie, Dorothy. Then a similar one, winter this time, the girls in scarves and jackets, my mother in earmuffs: Joyce, “Me,” Kae, “Fighting the Storm.” In those early years of her photo-pasting, she always refers to herself as “Me,” with quotation marks around the word, as if she’s citing some written opinion to the effect that she is who she is.

  Another view: this time she’s nose to nose with a horse, holding the bridle. Underneath is written: Dick and “Me.” The stories about the horses are popular with her now, I can tell them over and over. The names of the horses were Dick and Nell. Nell was easily spooked, and got the bit between her teeth, and ran away with my mother, and she slipped out of the saddle and might have been dragged to death, and then I would never have been born. But this didn’t happen because she held on – like grim death, as she used to say.

  “Do you remember Dick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember Nell?”

  “Nell?”

  “She ran away with you. You held on like grim death, remember?”

  Now she’s smiling. In there – at the end of the long dark tunnel that divides her from us – she’s off again on that wild gallop, over meadows, through orchards of apple trees in bloom, clinging to the reins and the pommel for dear life, her heart going a mile a minute with terrified joy. Can she smell the apple blossoms, in there where she is? Can she feel the air against her face as she rushes through it?

  “Never leave the barn door open,” her father told her. “If the horse bolts, it’ll head home to the barn and you could get crushed against the door frame going through.” And look, she paid attention, she didn’t leave the door open, because Nell draws to a standstill in front of the barn, quivering and sweating and foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling. My mother unclenches herself, lets go of the reins, descends. Both of them calm down. A happy ending.

  My mother loves happy endings. Earlier in her life – earlier in my life – any story that didn’t have such an ending was shelved by her as quickly as possible. I try not to repeat any of the sad stories. But there are some stories with no endings, or none I’ve been told, and when I come across them in the invisible file of stories I haul around with me and produce during my visits, my curiosity gets the better of me and I pester her because I want to know what happened. She holds out, though. She’s not telling.

  People she loves – people her own age – a lot of those people have died. Most of them have died. Hardly any of them are left. She wants to know about each death as it happens, but then she won’t mention those people again. She’s got them safe, inside her head somewhere, in a form she prefers. She’s got them back in the layer of time where they belong.

  Here she is again, in winter clothing – a cloche hat, a coat with a turned-up fur collar, the flapper style: “Me,” Eating a Doughnut. Some girlfriend must have taken that, during her college years. She earned those years, she worked for them, she saved up. The Depression was in full spate, so it couldn’t have been easy. She chose a college far away from her home so she wouldn’t be watched over and restricted by her father, who’d thought she was too frivolous to go to an institution of higher learning anyway. Then she was relentlessly homesick. This did not prevent her from speed skating.

  There’s a gap of several years, and now she’s getting married. The wedding group is arranged on the front porch of the big white house, decorated with garlands made by her sister, the youngest of the three. That sister cried throughout the event. The second sister is part of the wedding, because she’s getting married at the same time. My father in a short back-and-sides haircut stands with feet apart, bracing himself; he has a thoughtful appearance. Aunts and uncles and parents and brothers and sisters cluster together. They look solemn. It’s 1935.

  At this point in the photograph captions my mother stops being “Me” and identifies herself by her initials – her new initials. Or else she leaves her name out entirely.

  Here comes her married life. Some of the key events are missing. The honeymoon was an escapade by canoe, a watercraft my mother had never dealt with before but soon mastered; there are however no pictures of it. Soon my brother materializes as a bundle, and then all three of them are in the woods. They live in a tent while my father builds them a cabin, in his off-hours, when he’s not at the Lab. My mother does their cooking over a campfire and their washing in the lake, and in her spare time she practises archery – here she is doing it – or feeds grey jays from her hand, or makes a blur on the film as she splashes into the freezing cold lake.

  The cabin was already built by the time I was born. It was board-and-batten and had three bedrooms, one for my mother and father, a small one for my brother and myself – we had bunk beds made from two-by-fours – and one for guests. Most of the views of it I have on file in my head are of the floor, which was where I must have spent most of my time: on it, or close to it. I have an audio file, as well: the wind in red pines, a distant motorboat approaching. Beside the front door was a piece of metal: my mother would hit it with a spike to announce that dinner was on the table. I can hear the sound of it whenever I choose.

  That cabin is gone now. It was torn down; someone has built a much fancier house in its place.

  Nevertheless, here is my mother, standing outside it, feeding a grey jay. She’s far from the world of horses and Fords and floral-patterned aunts by now. The cabin can be reached only by a narrow-gauge railroad or the recently built one-lane gravel road, and after that by boat or trail. All around is the forest, scraggly and vast and bear-infested. Out on the lake – the cold and perilous lake – are the loons. Wolves howl sometimes, and when they do the dogs in the tiny village whine and yelp.

  The Lab has been built by now too. It was built before the cabin was. First things first.

  Cam and Ray must have been special, because there are a number of pictures of them. They appear on the Lab dock, and in their tent, and sitting on the steps of the log Lab building. In another picture they have bicycles. They must have brought the bicycles on the train with them, but why would they have done that? There was no place in the forest where you could go bicycling.

  But perhaps they bicycled to the village along the raw new gravel road. That would have been a feat. Or perhaps they’re on a collecting trip, somewhere with flat trails, because their bicycles are loaded with gear – packsacks, bundles, duffle bags, with soot-blackened billy tins hanging from the sides. They stand balancing the top-heavy bicycles, grinning their wartime grins. They have no shirts on, and their tans and muscles are on display. How healthy they seem!

  “Cam died,” said my mother once, when she was looking at these photos with me, back when she could still see. “He died quite young.” She’d broken her rule about not telling unhappy endings, so this death must have meant a lot to her.

  “What of?” I said.

  “He had some condition or other.” She has never been specific about illnesses: to name them is to invoke them.

  “What about Ray?”

  “Something happened to him,” said my mother.

  “Was he in the War?”

  A pause. “I’m not sure,”

  I couldn’t resist. “Was he killed?” If he had to die too early, this seemed to me to be a suitable way. I wanted him to have been heroic.

  But she clammed up. She wasn’t going to say. One dead boy was enough for that day.

  The last time my mother went through her photo album – the last time she could see it – was when she was eighty-nine. My father had been dead for five
years. She knew she was going blind; I think she wanted to have one last look at everything – at herself, at him, at those years that must have seemed to her now so far away, so carefree, so filled with light.

  She had to bend over so she was close to the page: not only was her eyesight failing, so were the photos. They were fading, bleaching out. She sped through her earliest life, smiled at herself among the girls in bathing suits, then smiled differently at her wedding picture. She lingered over the group picture of the boys at the Lab, gathered together on the dock. “There are the boys,” she said. She turned the page: my father was gazing up at her, holding a stringer with a huge lake trout on it.

  “I didn’t mind catching them,” said my mother, “but I drew the line at cleaning them. That was our arrangement: he always gutted the fish.” They did have such arrangements – who did what. I’d grown up thinking of these as laws of nature. It was news to me that some of these arrangements had been set in place by her.

  Then she mentioned something she’d never told me before.

  “One summer,” she told me, “an Indian came to the Lab.”

  “An Indian? You mean one of the Indians from the lake?” There were such Indians; they trapped and fished, and drifted by in canoes once in a while. People didn’t have much gasoline during the War. Nowadays the Indians have motorboats.

  “No,” said my mother. “An Indian from India.”

  It would have been like my father to have taken on this incongruous assistant. He wouldn’t have seen any difficulties for such an Indian, because there would have been none for him. Anyone who was serious about beetles was a friend of his. But what if the Indian was a vegetarian Hindu? What if he was a Muslim? There was always bacon, up there in the woods. If it was smoked it would keep for a long time, and was useful for frying things: eggs, if any, and Spam, and fish. Then you could rub the grease on your boots. What would a Muslim have done about the bacon?