All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  I stood up, wiped my mouth with my napkin. “I didn’t look at who she is as any different than who I am, if that makes sense.” I wasn’t certain if her question was a negative or positive one, but I wanted to leave it where it was. I had never heard anyone ask what it was like to play a heterosexual, so I was thrown slightly. Also, she did not know I was a lesbian, but she may have felt embarrassed to ask, had she known, because it would have been a foolish question. It would have seemed foolish if I had asked her as a straight person what it was like to play a straight person. It was likely an innocent question that came from a place of ignorance, or possibly she was fishing to know more about me, but it stuck with me.

  It felt good to play a queer character. Even though she was not the most stable character, it didn’t matter. She was a lesbian, and this was my moment.

  I didn’t know how to have the conversation yet about playing a lesbian; it was too close. I wanted to, but didn’t have the confidence to speak to what I was feeling, thinking, what life had been, what constantly pretending to be straight in films and television was like — it was erasure. Non-existence.

  I wish I’d had the poise to say then that I was a lesbian and that it felt great to play one, to step into the shoes I was born for, to be authentic in film, to be realized, to not hide. And to explain why playing a lesbian was the same as playing a straight person, except I didn’t have to change my own identity to play the character, I didn’t have to take part of my soul and bury it in order to be who they needed me to be.

  I am a lesbian. I want to play queer roles. I want there to be more and more of them so that I never have to pretend, lie, or hide again, so that I can work and live with dignity and stop the cycle of poverty that queer artists like me are always navigating. Wouldn’t it be lovely to not struggle so hard because of who you are?

  “Playing a lesbian is just right for this movie. I was happy to step into her skin. Thanks for asking. Excuse me, I have to use the washroom,” I said before walking away.

  In 1995 I would play my last heterosexual part, in a television movie called Derby — the cheesiest flick, but fulfilling. I was the lead, playing a horse-loving girl who would ride in the Kentucky Derby and win to save her family farm — like a TV version of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. It would be the last time I would try to pass. I believed I was destined for something more.

  I would have another six years to figure myself out, to fall, rise, make mistakes, reflect, rebel, march, speak out about LGBT equity rights. I would have another six years to grow before I would receive the call that my mother had cancer.

  In 2000, I had contemplated contacting my mother. I didn’t know why my gut was at odds with my mind, as if my gut was drumming something up that went against my own rational thinking and decision-making. I was set on never talking with my mother again. But some deeper part of me must have known something was on the horizon. I just didn’t know how to make sense of it until the call finally came: stage four uterine cancer. Terminal.

  PART FOUR

  The Stories Our Bodies Tell

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  2002 — Princess Margaret Hospital

  THE DOCTOR TELLS US our mother only has a few days to a week left to live. She slips in and out of consciousness, sometimes fully lucid, present, and able to engage in full conversations, and at other times it’s as if we aren’t even in the room, like she can’t see us at all.

  Sadie arrives in Toronto. All four of my mother’s children are in the same city for the first time since childhood. We are like teenagers, wanting to bust out of the formality, to ditch the trail of chains attached to us and run and scream, but we don’t. We steal away moments when we can let down our guard, my sisters and I giggling like girls, like when we watched television alone in our basement while our parents were away, aware that any moment they could come home. Even now that I am a grown woman in my thirties, my spine tingles like it did every time I heard Sadie scream. Every sense kicks into overdrive, adrenalin rushing right down to the marrow. Danger. Danger. High alert! Like the red code is on, but it is not. I need to self-talk and remind myself I am grown, or whisper with Lou as we connect in the hospital hallway. “You okay?” we ask, and we nod our heads up and down, but our expressions are filled with dread. It’s just how it is.

  My mother is bleeding out. Her body expels toxins and excrement and blood. She is in pain, and I hate every second of her suffering.

  I run to the fridge before stepping into her room and pull out a Popsicle. She can’t eat anymore, but I want her to experience some human pleasure. Simple moments are all that can be enjoyed — music on disc, television, art, photographs, being read to. Diego reads to her on his visits, a sacred exchange between them. He is losing his mother. He loves her. I don’t want to interfere with his relationship to her, even though it’s hard to understand what he does with the information he has been told about her. The pedophilia. I don’t think he believes me. The abuse in our family eroded our relationships, but we are all doing the best we can. Siblings seem to have the hardest time accepting the others’ truths. It’s hard to imagine a loving mother as someone who could want sex with a daughter or sister’s boyfriend, who enjoyed the suffering of her own daughters at the hands of a violent husband. But our mother did. And my brother did not experience the abuse in the same way. Diego loves his mother, and he is losing her.

  There isn’t much in the hospital to find beauty in, and it requires internal effort to even indulge in the thinking up of beautiful things for my mother, but I am determined to help her die with dignity. It isn’t hard to do, to be kind. I’m not sure if I am succeeding, but I try.

  I enter her room with the Popsicle, break it in half, and sit at the edge of her bed.

  “Hey, you awake?” I ask.

  She turns her face toward me, eyes open, alert.

  “It’s grape.” I hold up the stick.

  “Thanks.” She opens her mouth slightly. Her lips are dry. I hold the stick for her while her hands rest on the bed.

  “It’s good.”

  “Can you hold it yourself?”

  “Yeah.” She lifts her hand and grabs hold of the stick.

  I walk around her bed to the table and pop some Mozart into the CD player. I pull out her hand cream and her lip gloss.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” my mother says, staring at me.

  I look at her, blood vessels and bruises exposed through her porcelain skin.

  “I had a baby when I was fifteen, a boy,” she says in a soft tone.

  I sit on her bed, look into her eyes, not wanting her to lose her focus in case she forgets what we are talking about or changes the subject, falling away from reality, which she does too often. Not now, please. I turn on her reading lamp below all the machines that monitor her heart, her oxygen.

  “Tell me about the baby, Mom.”

  “A boy,” she says calmly, without breaking eye contact.

  “What year was he born?”

  “In 1955. I remember, I was scared because I knew they wouldn’t let me keep him.”

  “Who wouldn’t let you?”

  “The nuns, the home, my mother, father … but I wanted my baby. I even named him Luke after my father so they would let me keep him, but they didn’t.”

  I feel her emptiness taking over the room, her longing. It is him. Luke takes over the space as if there is an invisible umbilical cord stretching out from her body into the universe, still attached.

  I grab the Popsicle stick from her hand as the juice melts onto her blanket.

  “You were in a home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was it?”

  “It was on Stanley Street in Montreal. I remember we used to have to stay inside, hide our bumps … weren’t allowed outside much. They didn’t want people staring. We had to keep the curtains shut in the bedrooms, too. Like a prison.”

  I had learned about these homes of the 1950s from other women, but I had no idea my moth
er was forced into one.

  “Who was the baby’s dad?” I ask.

  “It was my father,” she says, without missing a beat, as if she were talking about the weather. I swallow and ask the same question differently.

  “Are you saying that the father of your first-born baby was your own father?”

  “Yes.”

  We stare at each other in silence before she speaks again.

  “Do you believe me?” Her expression shifts; she needs to be believed.

  “Yes, of course I do,” I say.

  “Isn’t that something, that of all people you believe me? My sisters didn’t.”

  “It’s the one thing that actually makes sense to me.”

  Siblings don’t always know these things. They can’t always know the truth. Families are tricky.

  My grandfather raped my mother. He gave her a baby, then took it away. How many parts of a girl could a father take? How are mothers supposed to be good mothers when all they know is violence?

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I can’t stop the empathy in me, though I want to. For so many months I tried not to care, as if caring would wipe away my truth. But it doesn’t. And I do care. I want to detach, but she is still my mother, and the wall dissipates as she tells me about her son. It is nearly impossible to hold everything at the same time — my own childhood memories along with hers — but it’s doable. We all have a history.

  I think of Lou, of Sadie, of my animals, and of the girls and women I know who are now gone, passed on. I think of their love, the very thing that provides oxygen, that makes the trees grow, the energy that shows up in birds’ nests, that turns caterpillars into butterflies, that pumps air into my mother’s chest.

  Mother stares at me, her expression flat, still. Her baby long gone.

  “What day was your son born?” I ask.

  “October 27, 1955, at Royal Victoria Hospital. The girls in the room told the head nun of the house that my water broke. It was the middle of the night and I was screaming. One girl in the room with me was crazy, she even said she would take it out with a butcher knife if I wanted her to, then they couldn’t take it away from me, but the nurses came and got me and took me away …”

  Mother coughs.

  The hospital room is dark, infused with my mother’s grief.

  “The girls all used to talk about what they would name their babies and they would knit booties and hats. But in the end every single baby was taken.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I had another baby, Dot. I named her Dot. A girl.”

  “Two babies? Was it your father? Was he the father as well?” I ask.

  “No … the father was a boy I met at a concert, a French boy.”

  “What happened to the girl, Mom?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t remember, Joanne.” Her eyes blink, getting heavier and heavier until they close, while the music continues to play softly in the background. I cover my mouth with my hand while my mother sleeps, her mouth wide open.

  A few moments later her eyes pop open. “What did I miss?”

  “Nothing, you were sleeping.”

  “Oh …” She looks around the room, then her eyes rest on the picture of a waterfall pasted on her wall. “Did you put that up?” she asks, still staring at it.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you pull out my photo album from my drawer?” She points to the table beside her bed. I grab the small album that I had put together for her, which holds pictures of her children, some photographs she has never seen before from movie sets. And there are photos from her own collection: black-and-whites from the 1950s of Studebaker cars and people posing at the St. Lawrence River; babies in christening gowns; the mountains in BC; her last home in the valley with the Nuxalk people and friends, black bears, salmon leaping through the river in spring — a different life than the one she created with her own children.

  “How did you end up with a picture of a bear?” I ask.

  “They’re everywhere in the valley.” She turns the page in the album while I hold it up. She points to a picture of Al Waxman and me with a boom microphone in the background. “What is that?” she asks.

  “It was Maggie’s Secret. A movie.”

  “You did a movie with the King of Kensington?”

  “Yeah, he directed the movie. He was good to me, fought for me,” I say. “He believed in me.”

  She flips to another shot on a movie set, points to a picture of me, my back to the camera, facing a massive cliff with a waterfall.

  “It’s South Africa. It was so beautiful, everything about it … the colour of the earth, like clay; the wildflowers, pinks, reds and greens; and the animals, roaming wildebeest, giraffe, zebras. I would be in a car and a herd of cows or monkeys would just file by. It was after the fall of apartheid,” I say, remembering the people and the stories I was told while I was there, of the Mandelas and the African National Congress, and remembering my secret escapades at night in Cape Town. I found an illegal underground gay bar and danced to music from the seventies, even though it was the nineties, while men in tight suits sniffed poppers and we all knew to be careful. It wasn’t only about race, but about our bond as gay people, an international code of brother- and sisterhood. When not on set, I was off meeting people, trying to take it all in and learn as much as I could. Conversations were not frivolous, not about clothing or which celebrity just got married or divorced, but real communication with near strangers. We were engaged about politics, community, oppression, race, about farming and protests, about Nelson and Winnie Mandela, about history and restorative justice, the stuff that made me come alive.

  “Look,” Mother says after she flips through a few more photographs. She is staring at a black-and-white photograph of Sadie, Lou, Diego, and me as children. As I look at the image of myself as a one-year-old, my thoughts quickly turn to our conversation of babies, of the siblings I never knew about. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a pregnant girl in the 1950s, sent away by abusive parents to live with punitive nuns in a home for unwed mothers, to give birth to your own father’s child. I don’t know what to do with this truth, but I feel the need to protect it, to be gentle.

  We stare quietly at the photo and Mother looks away, then opens her mouth to speak, her voice hoarse. “I wish I could have …” She stops speaking, her voice trails off while she holds all four of us in her hand. Her eyes start to close and open again. I take the album from her fingers, close it, and place it on the table beside her, pull her blanket up and turn out the light.

  It is too late for wishes.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  2002 — Princess Margaret Hospital

  MY MOTHER DIES.

  The moment comes after many twenty-four-hour shifts with Sadie and Lou on the same schedule and Diego and I on individual time. Sometimes I stay with my sisters. We snap at each other occasionally, and at other times we giggle in the wee hours of the night in the lounge beside our mother’s room, passing the time with stale coffee and cards and Krispy Kreme donuts.

  Anything can set us off into fits of laughter — the distant sound of someone moaning, or Sadie’s face, which she contorts in exaggerated expressions, the ones she made on purpose to make us laugh when we were little girls. Sadie’s eyes widen and she sticks her jaw out, then bites down over her lip with her upper teeth as if she has a massive overbite, like a gopher. For whatever reason, it always makes us giggle, but even more while we are stuck in the lounge on a hospital floor filled with the dying. We are impossible.

  “What am I?” Sadie asks, imitating the gopher again, sticking both her hands up for paws, bent at the wrists, making sucking sounds at the same time. I leave the lounge while my sisters snort with laughter, trying to shush each other at the same time.

  I leave to sleep at home so I can come back to relieve them later. I’m exhausted from our vigil, from th
e months leading up to it. I do not share the secret conversations I’ve had with my mother. Not yet. While I sleep, a bright light wakes me up with a message: “It’s time.” I hear it and I am awakened by the shining light, but it’s not the sun; it is a light I see while sleeping. I jump out of bed and am scrambling to put on my clothes when the phone rings. “Get here now. She’s dying.” I already know and within seconds I am in the car racing to get there, because it’s time.

  Mother gasps. We are all in her room. I hold her hand on one side of the bed. I gently touch her soft bald head and whisper in her ear, “It’s okay to go. You can go.”

  She continues to struggle for air, looking above her.

  Sadie starts to cry and whispers across from me. Then Diego steps up as Sadie retreats.

  We are letting our mother go. Time falls away. I am five years old and I am on the streets of Pierrefonds playing tag, climbing trees, on the mountain of Montreal, seeing Mother in the audience of the auditorium, in our home, around the kitchen table, and at Christmastime, the holiday she cherished, with trees and tinsel, song and celebration. As she takes her last few breaths, I remember the moments of joy. Time is a thief, a mystery, a mystic. If we are lucky, maybe we will catch a glimpse of her on the way out, touch the spirit of the woman we dreamed of having but never really knew. I want to see that magic, the purity of a soul.

  She inhales deeply, like she is trying to breathe through a straw. She gasps, her eyes widen. She seems so engaged with someone or something above her bed. She nods as if in conversation, or in answer to a question. Yes. I desperately want to know what she sees, what she is thinking. Who is she responding to? I look above her and try to see who it is my mother is communicating with. I want to be above her, to receive her on the other side and usher her toward a gentler place where there is no more pain, but I can see nothing, can see no one. Only she knows.

  Lou stands by the door, terrified, distant, as if she wants to be entirely on the opposite side and out of the room. Diego cries, something he rarely ever does.