The View From the Lane and Other Stories

by Deborah-Anne Tunney

  “Do you lie?” I asked. “I mean, it must be tempting, to make up stuff.”

  “No, the attention is always moving to someone else and some other story.” He looked toward the hallway where a man was walking, singing loudly. “There’s such sadness in the world, such fucking sadness. I feel it everywhere, as if it’s a thick mist I’m walking through.” He was growing agitated, so I looked past him to the window where the first signs of night made the sky grow dim. “I’ve learnt something being here,” he continued. “That what we believe is true is really just a product of our mind. Knowing this makes everything less serious.” Across the field to the highway, the distant streetlights shone, evenly spaced against a darkened sky.

  z

  “Stephen is manic-depressive.” The doctor was speaking to my mother and me in his cramped office. He was young with long hair that fell into his face as he bent to look at the file. I had seen him on the ward and at first thought he was one of the patients, but here in his office, he spoke with an authority that made his sandals and hair seem like a disguise. “This can be a long term disease, or it may correct itself by the time he’s in his mid-twenties. Manic-depression means Stephen’s mood swings are extreme and I’ve started him on some drugs to neutralize their intensity.” My mother looked down to the purse on her lap as he spoke, so that he turned to me and said, “Well there isn’t much more I can tell you. Everyone with this disease has a different route through it, so I really can’t say definitively what to expect”.

  Stephen left the hospital soon after this conversation. The nights he didn’t come home, my mother sat in the armchair facing the door, her legs curled beneath her, the floor lamp illuminating the book she was reading. While I lived out my raucous teenage years, she came to know his illness intimately, its signs and patterns, and she learned to depend on it in a strange way, as you come to depend on weather, mercurial and yet constant.

  Within six months, by the summer, it became necessary to hospitalize him again. At times when I’d visit he’d greet me jovially, introducing me to his companions, and at other times he’d be in the sunroom and eye me suspiciously. “Who are you?” he’d ask and when I’d answer he’d say, “Oh sure, that’s what you’d like me to believe.” And he’d sit and watch the television without speaking until I’d leave.

  It was during this stay at the hospital when he didn’t improve that it was decided he should be sent to the provincial facility near the St. Lawrence River, a large campus of buildings built more than fifty years before. My mother and I drove him there in a rental car, a two-hour drive through desolate farmland and small towns. I remember the trip, the scruff of fields, the low clouds against a china blue sky, and remember too the weight of my brother’s silence as he leaned against the backseat window, a silence broken only by my mother’s comments about the distance remaining or the chance of rain.

  The campus, composed of twenty or more red brick buildings joined by a labyrinth of pathways and tunnels, looked like a pre-war era housing development. My brother was placed in a ward with thirty other men. During the week when I’d be at school or working in the cinema in the evenings, I’d think of him there in that maze of brick buildings, the alleyways between them and the men standing silently along the hallways. There was something final, extreme, in their condition, as if uncovering truth was the purpose of their illness. I sensed the pursuit in their silence, their disengaged stance and calm dismissal of everything beyond themselves. They shuffled between the dining room and game room to the porch where they would sit or rock and stare at the view from the window. I too came to recognize this view through all the seasons, the lazy flow of the willows’ branches on hot summer days, the snow-packed fields of winter, the landscape moving through the months, placid and patient as a parent.

  At first my brother seemed happy there. He made friends and played cards during the evenings in the game room. Most of the men were middle-aged or older. Their illness had made them soft, pliant, asking for nothing except the common comfort of the ward with its routine and familiarity. But gradually Stephen became restless, and eventually angry. He told me about games when he threw the cards in the air, “They let me win...Goddammit. They’re gutless, taking their pills like scared rabbits.”

  We heard from the doctor that he’d stopped dressing in the morning and spent the day in his pajamas and robe watching cartoons in the game room, becoming abusive if someone tried to change the channel. One Saturday when I visited, he said, “They’re crazy here, you know. Not like the other wards. These guys are the real thing, it’s like fucking aliens are running them or something.” He looked away, toward the window and squinted. “The other night I woke and Sol, the big one over there, was performing some kind of ritual at the end of my bed.” He nodded toward one of the patients, a large, soft-looking man sitting alone at a card table, watching us.

  z

  My brother stayed at the hospital almost four years, the years I was in high school. In the end, because treatments of deprivation, shock therapy, and behaviour modification had not changed his condition, because he was not violent and because my mother agreed to care for him, he was allowed to come home. I was eighteen by then, had finished school and I left home shortly after his return. My mother and I argued about the way he moped around the house in his pajamas and ate without speaking. “How would you feel if you went through what he went through?” she said, adding, “The poor kid.”

  z

  After I left home I worked in a government office, and eventually married and left the city to live in a small town. My mother and brother moved into a two-bedroom apartment where he spent whole months in his room staring at the walls, humming songs popular in the sixties, and sometimes disappearing for two or three days, returning tired, hungry and uncommunicative. When he’d leave like this, my mother would call me, upset and worried; she repeated what he’d done the days before he left, what he was wearing, and when he ended up at the hospital she called to ask me to pick him up. When we’d arrive at her apartment, she was at the door, “Oh my God, let me get a look at you,” she said and patted his arm or cheek. “What happened? Oh Stevie, let’s get you washed up and put to bed.” Then she turned to me and asked what the doctor said, or how he’d been on the way home. “What are we going to do?” she asked, frowning and holding the top of her robe or sweater tight to her throat.

  z

  More than twenty-five years after my brother left the hospital, after he’d moved into a residence for the mentally ill, I found him on a curb of a busy four-lane boulevard, his head drooped, his thinning hair, now mostly grey, long and uncombed. At four-thirty that afternoon, I’d received a call from my mother who waited hours for him to arrive at her apartment and so I came to the city following the route from his residence to her apartment to see if I could find him.

  Although it was February and cold, he was not wearing a coat. After I parked the car and approached him, I said, “Stevie, it’s me. Amy. Come with me.” He wore a shoe on his left foot, a sneaker with velcro fasteners, because his hand shook and for the past few years he’d been unable to tie his laces. The sock of his right foot was wet and had a hole in it. He was mumbling, rocking back and forth. I knelt to speak to him and he managed to raise his head but his eyes could not focus. Cars rushed by on the nearby boulevard.

  “That’s it, that’s it, I know it, that’s it,” he said over and over, captive to the chant of his own voice. There was desperation in the words, in the breathless way he said them and in the unfocused gaze over my shoulder. He stared ahead, but put his hands on my arm. They were shaking and I wondered how much of it was due to the cold. His cardigan was soiled, and buttoned unevenly; under it he wore a T-shirt that had a drawing of a skull and the words The Grateful Dead on it. Bringing him to my car was a slow process, as if I was teaching him to walk, but when he was in the passenger seat he put his head back and stopped chanting. I thought of the many different types of
loss, as my brother and I sat side-by-side facing the front window of my car as if we were moving toward an ordinary destination.

  I’d seen him the week before when I visited and he’d been quiet, answering questions with either “yes” or “no,” eventually leaving the living room to read in his old bedroom. When my mother and I were alone she said, “He’s not doing well, the medication is wrong, I just know it and I told his doctor, but they don’t listen.” She was setting the table and moving between the kitchen and dining room, bringing in a salad, buns, plates with our dinner of pork chops and mashed potatoes. “You mark my words, he’s going to crash. Something bad is going to happen.” She stopped fussing over the table and looked at me, the skin between her eyes pinched with worry and her expression created a surge of anger in me, intense and irrational, so that I said sharply, “Mom, I mean really, what can be done?”

  I took him to the emergency ward of the hospital where he’d been admitted many times before. There I spoke with the nurses, explaining that over the years he had been diagnosed with a number of mental illnesses, including bipolar and schizophrenia. They took his blood pressure as he stared at the ceiling and then the nurse told us to sit in the waiting area, a crowded room with chairs linked by metal bars. We found two seats together and I picked up a magazine as he tilted his head to watch a TV that hung from the ceiling. He was no longer shaking. The nurse had given him slippers to wear and a blanket to put around his shoulders. The expression on his face, which had alternated from rage to fear to confusion, had softened and for a while we were content, sitting side-by-side, brother and sister, waiting.

  I thought of the times, over many years now, filled with such hospital visits, of other times when I’d waited with him outside doctors’ offices or emergency wards, and I thought about when we were children, Christmas mornings, and spring days when he’d shout with excitement and drive his bicycle recklessly. I remembered crouching together at the top of the stairs when we were supposed to be asleep, trying to see the television we were not allowed to watch. We’d muffle our laughter and take turns peeking into the living room, until our older sister or brother would catch us and yell, “Get to bed, you kids”.

  When the doctor examined him he was admitted to the psychiatric ward. We sat together until a nurse arrived to take him there in a wheelchair and when I watched him leave, he looked like any one of the lost and unloved souls often seen in downtown cores, shuffling along in their private world of destitution. He no longer looked like my brother; he’d grown old, his expression dulled and he had a stiff, awkward way of holding himself.

  After midnight when I reached the parking lot, the storm that had begun earlier had blanketed my car in a thick layer of snow. Through the front window I could not see other vehicles in the parking lot or the red neon sign that read “Emergency” over the hospital entrance. I knew I’d soon need to drive home, but I was mesmerized by the quiet and I thought of the long process that had led to this moment; how my brother, also by now alone in his room on the ward, was just as solitary. “I wish this were not real,” I said aloud, as the falling snow continued to isolate me in my car.

  The next day when I visited I was surprised to find Stephen sitting in his bed watching the news on the television. He was dressed and looked clean and alert. There had been an earthquake in Mexico the night before and when I entered his room he said calmly, “Looks like a bad quake.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” I replied. The newscast showed scenes of destruction, store windows cracked, houses reduced to rubble. The announcer spoke to homeowners who had lost their houses and the final image was of a doll wrecked and battered beside the debris of a destroyed duplex.

  “Remember that time we ripped the house apart?” he said after a few minutes. “It was these guys I met. I knew they thought I was stupid. They made faces behind my back.” I was staring at him and he was staring at the television. “It was wrong what they were doing and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop them. That bothered me, that I couldn’t stop them.” He sounded as if he were recalling a dream, something nonsensical and perplexing. “But I just couldn’t. I was paralyzed.” He turned to look at me and I saw the pale green of his eyes. “And I kept saying to myself, over and over, but this is real, this is real, this is real.”

  The View from

  the Lane

  Ileaned against the wall of the laneway beside the house where I grew up. Over the years the neighbourhood—a housing development of red brick townhouses and duplexes built in the early 1950s—had sunk into disrepair and gave off a general sense of neglect and decay. On this day a soft rain was falling and the colours of the pavement, the cars along the road, the wild assortment of discarded toys, bikes, lawn chairs, intensified and became shiny as if the objects beneath were melting. I was eighteen and this was to be the last season I lived here.

  Vancie, the boy who lived in the adjacent duplex, walked into the lane, saw me, put his head down and moved out to the street, his hands stuffed in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the wet cold. He ignored me even though we’d known each other for years, had attended the same school, suffered the same winter afternoons of drowsy heat that oozed from radiators, and walked the same streets home at the end of the day. I’d seen the quiet resignation of his mother, as she hung laundry or sat on the back porch drinking coffee, watching the afternoon creep into evening. She wore faded cotton dresses over her thin form, with an apron that was always weighed down from clothes pegs in her pocket. And I remember her in a snowstorm, on the evening of her husband’s death, moving slowly along the path leading to her home. These are the kinds of memories a neighbourhood like this can hold, the silent fall of snow on an evening full of loss, the muddy streets as spring nudges us into another year, or the hardening of colours on an autumn day.

  z

  From the lane I saw the spot where at five I’d played marbles with other children who lived on the street. Boys on their bicycles circled, cracking the layers of ice that floated, brittle as glass, on puddles. I’d left the house without boots for the first time that year, loosened my jacket and breathed in the raw smell of earth. I crouched on my knees clicking the marbles scattered on the hard ground into a hole the shape of a fist. I liked the sound of their click and the hard feel of them in my hand. Later I emptied my winnings on the chenille bedspread in the room I shared with my mother now that my father was dead, so that they pooled together, tiny planets, in the middle of the sagging mattress.

  Before my mother went to work and I started kindergarten, when he and his brother were in school, we often visited Vancie’s mother. We’d sit in the living room, the women drinking coffee, talking and smoking while I sat on the floor in front of the television, watching soap operas where women in chiffon lived out their inexplicable lives. These characters never had conversations like my mother and Vancie’s mother had—complaints about the cost of food, their careless children or loud neighbours. Later though, after my mother began to work in a department store, she stopped seeing Vancie’s mother except when they’d pass in the laneway or on the front path and my mother would say, “Oh, Louise, how are you?” and Louise would answer calmly, but I could tell there was a disappointment between them, a distance that kept their conversations short.

  z

  Early summer days the year I was eight, when sun lit houses, awnings and porches and I was on the street with Vancie and other neighbourhood children, we’d swing on railings, play hide and seek, run from porch to porch, gather on front lawns, scatter to back yards and collect again into groups in laneways, creating a strata of noise largely ignored by the adults. I hid beneath rusted cars, behind the garbage shed in my own back yard or under a nearby veranda, playing until my hands became stiff from cold, until the sky darkened, and my mother came to the back porch, calling my name.

  Sundays I attended mass, moved from sunlight into the dark vestry, smelled wood polish and smoke from the censer, knelt and followed the pries
t in prayers. Tablets marking the stations of the cross lined the nave; the solemn statues of saints and martyrs, their placid hands raised in the sign of the cross, stood in contrast with the crowded, noisy streets of that neighbourhood, just beyond the church’s huge silence.

  z

  I’d often see Vancie chasing his brother on the pathway behind our duplex, pathways I also followed coming home from school, trampling the trail between the yards where the dogs roamed, long grass scratching my legs, a smell of rot and decay being released into the bright air. A clean sharpness marked the end of summer and the lawn mowers, bicycles propped up against the brick walls, the cars rusting in laneways, so familiar I no longer saw them, suited the autumn coolness and added to the disorder. These yards were full of wild tufts of abandoned grass and earth pounded to a claylike hardness. It comes back to me, this time, with all the permanence and insular quality of an island seen from shore, a compact time, the lull between childhood and adulthood. It was full of earnest, humourless effort and the ordered sense of my place within the single files of the schoolyard, in the pew at church, and within the rooms of my house.

  The nuns who taught us guarded the schoolyard like black crows, their faces stern, as they gathered us into rows in hallways or stood before us in the classroom. I dressed in the black watch uniform my mother had ironed, with knee socks that gradually slouched to my ankle forcing me to bend every five minutes to pull them back up my leg. I’d sit before my mother as she braided my hair, feeling the tug of her impatience. After school I practised baton routines and in the autumn marched in a parade, dressed in a majorette outfit with tassels on my boots and matching sequined hat. The studious, careful handwriting in my new scribblers indicated the seriousness of my intent during those years, an approach that was to fall away as I became older, when the patterns no longer held the same sense of purpose.