It was strange.
I had grown up there. It was our home before I was born, and after I left it had been the focal point of all extended family activity. We called it Camp Maxwell. Generations of us. Fifty-six years. I knew where the hiding places were in the rafters in the basement, how to put your feet on the hot-air vent under the kitchen table to get warm on winter mornings. I knew which stairs creaked, which doors wouldn't close completely, which windows couldn't be opened no matter how hard you tried.
My mother was sitting in her wheelchair in the kitchen, Nanny sleeping upstairs in her bed, my brother Ron standing by the sink with a beer, laughing, kids running up and down the back stairs to the basement where the madness could boil over.
Empty now. Silent. My footsteps echoing.
When I left, I thought I had closed the door on the past, that I had sealed it up when I had pulled it shut for the last time. But like Jeanne and I said: the past doesn't go away. It just moves somewhere else.
The house on Maxwell moved inside me.
I make a point of driving by it whenever I'm in the vicinity, just to see it. Once I even got out of the car and walked down the driveway, curious what the new owners had done with the backyard.
There's a new front entrance, a new garage, new windows. There's new landscaping—it's got interlocking brick now. And that's only the outside.
I don't want to see the inside. I know what it looks like in there. I just close my eyes. There it is.
Dad took the money from the sale of the house and put it into low-yield GICs—Guaranteed Investment Certificates. I tried to steer him, to advise. He'd listen, then do what he wanted: established, name-brand banks. No trust companies. No risk.
He didn't care. Security and peace of mind were more important than investments that needed managing, more important than high-yield potential. Tommy Nolan was no gambler. He had seen the Depression, been the provider for too long, the elephant on whose back the rest of the family had ridden.
When I lost money in a limited partnership scheme last year, years after he had died, I thought of how he'd tell me that I was a damn fool. Then I heard Phil Berney, Jeanne's father, tell me to mark his words.
As usual, they were both right.
He was meticulous. He kept a brown leather folder in the top drawer of his dresser, which he would show me occasionally. You have to know this, he'd say. You have to know where everything is when I die.
It was almost impossible for me to listen to him when he started up like that. I'd shuck my responsibility, block him out.
I have to trust somebody. I've decided to trust you. You're the executor, he'd say. Everybody's counting on you.
In it he had the original deed to the Mount Hope Cemetery plot, Lot 198, Section 16, dated September 18, 1904, deeded to his grandfather, Matthew Nolan, shoemaker by trade, born in County Cork, Ireland, June 29, 1842. It had been purchased the day after Matthew's wife, Ann, had died. There was a receipt for two dollars for the final Lot Transfer to my father, dated August 20, 1980.
He had baptismal certificates dating back to 1876. There were death certificates for Nanny, his mother, (1974) and my mother (1984).
And he kept a book. It was gray, cloth-covered, an accounting ledger. In it was every family financial transaction he'd ever made: loans and mortgages given to family members, amounts and dates of principal and interest paid. You have to collect these debts, he'd say. It's all in the book if anyone says anything.
He was the elephant. Everybody was riding him.
"When they bury me, nobody'll come visit," he'd say.
I heard this lots.
"Worked with a guy," he said once, "who told me he was going to be buried underneath Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street. That way he knew he'd get a visitor. His wife would visit him once a day."
But he was right. Again. I hardly ever go to the cemetery plot. I don't need to. He's like the house: he moved inside of me.
After he died, I threw away the gray cloth-covered ledger. Never mentioned it to anyone in the family.
I think, deep down, it's what he hoped I'd do. I think he would have approved. Either that, or he'd call me a damn fool.
SIX
I
His glasses. The electric razor. The lamp. His ring. The tackle box. Instant coffee.
Our own lives start long before we're born. Millions of years of genetic encoding funnel down into our great- grandparents, then grandparents, finally parents. I mentioned that Dad had macular degeneration, that his eyes were going. It's something that I worry about myself, since I think I have his eyes, his skin, his hair. Like I have so much else of his. His job even, for God's sakes.
Able to see only shadows, shapes, he'd been certified as legally blind by the CNIB—the Canadian National Institute for the Blind—and given a card with his photo and registration number to carry in his wallet. In his eighties, he liked to ride around the city on the TTC—the public transit system—because he got on for free with his blind pass. He'd visit places and streets he knew from his youth, then come home and tell us how it had all changed. He relished claiming the four thousand dollars or so tax credit available annually as a CNIB registrant—anything, even blindness, to one-up the government. And he told me once with a lilt in his voice that when people came to the door and asked him to sign petitions, whatever, he gladly signed them. I'll sign anything, he'd say. I'm not legally responsible for anything I sign, because I'm blind. And he'd smile the half smile.
You might think, from everything I've told you, that my father's death was the most overwhelming thing that has happened to me. It's not true, not really. My brother Ron's death in '93 derailed me more than I ever imagined it would. He was twelve years older than me, lived in another city. I hardly ever saw him. But his death signaled something powerful in me. Of the five of us, my brothers and sisters and me, he was the first to go. I saw my father's eyes at the service for Ron, weak, disbelieving.
Somebody was going to go first. It was an idea that darted into my head on rare meditative occasions, one I didn't entertain at length. I kept wanting to tell my mother, who died in '84, Do you know what's happened to Ron? It's impossible, I'd say to her. She'd want to know. Somehow, she had to know.
My mother. Good Lord. She was the archetypal mother. Selfless. Naive. If you say you loved your mother, a lot of people tend to squirm, even drop their eyes. It's too sentimental an admission, they feel. It doesn't need to be said. Nuts. It does need to be said. I loved her. In hindsight, I understand how much of my life was spent wanting to please her, to make her happy. One of my favorite memories is of her carrying me along Eglinton Avenue, my head on her shoulder, me half asleep. I was the fourth of five. She didn't have me until her mid-thirties, so I know she was around forty when this happened. I know now how exhausted she must have been. And at age fifty-one, I know how much I'd like to put my head back on her shoulder, have her hold me, comfort me, stroke my hair. Just once.
Mom's death, and the death of my son. Stillborn. We were going to call him Aidan. These were the watershed events. These were the ones that rocked my foundations, changed everything.
Dad's death was different. It didn't have the same sense of incompletion. I'd had a chance to wrap up my relationship with him in a way that I had not with the others. I'm sure it was why I hoped that he would live with us for his final years.
I think of his half smile, of his pleasure at beating the government with a four-thousand-dollar tax credit, of signing forms for which he wanted no responsibility, and I understand that he taught me that happiness was a choice that we make.
II
April. May. June.
Adam got a job for the summer in The Book Cellar on the Danforth, perfect for him. I was glad. He'd sworn he couldn't take another summer at Mr. Lube, staring up at the undersides of cars, draining crankcase oil. Jeanne's work in the cafeteria at St. Michael's Hospital carried on, unabated. My job at the Star droned on further into the summer.
Bobby Swiss and
Dayton, Ohio, hovered, hushed shadows behind our lives, daring us to look at them, ponder them. Waiting to step into the light.
Later in the summer, Adam had said.
We waited. Silent.
Maybe it would all go away.
It didn't go away. I had another dream.
Some dreams are blurs. If you describe them out loud, or write them down, they exist. Otherwise, they evaporate, morning mist rising, burned off by the sun. Others are as vivid and hard as colored glass. This was one of those.
A Pub in Ireland. I know it is Dublin. I'm drinking Guinness. The street signs visible through the windows are in Irish and English. The man across from me is a young man, in his twenties, regaling a group of us with stories. He is familiar, but I can't place him. Then I see the red garnet ring on his right hand and know that it is my father, and he says, "Without any pressure, there is nothing at stake," but I do not understand.
Suddenly I am outside, in the mist and the rain. There are birds. Starlings, everywhere. The Irish has disappeared from the street signs. It is not Dublin, but an American city. There is a different feel, a texture, the rain is not as soft. And in the pub window, no longer Guinness, Kilkenny, but Budweiser, Miller signs, orange and blue neon. Neon like Vegas. I clutch American dollar bills in my hand.
But I am not in Vegas. I know where I am. I see a sign on a building, carved in stone: "Greyhound Bus Station, Dayton." I am in Dayton, Ohio.
When I awoke, Jeanne was there, wiping the mist and rain from my head, my shoulders. "You're having one of your night sweats. You haven't had them since you were sick."
Since I was sick. A flood of images rose up out of the
darkness, out of the shadows and memories of our trips together and why we took them.
Her hand was cool on my brow.
Even though I was awake, the dream was still there. I was half in, half out, swimming up out of that place where dreams swirl like whirlpools, drawing us down.
And that's most of what I remember.
They say that the Sumerians, more than five thousand years ago, chiseled their dreams onto clay tablets. And I read once that archaeologists discovered a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian book on dream interpretation.
In the clear light of the morning, I looked up Dayton in my road atlas, traced my finger along I-75, the blue line through Ohio. Bowling Green, Cygnet, Findlay. Bluffton, Lima, McCartyville. Pigua, Troyj, Tipp City. Beads on a string. Like beads on the rosary I held as a child, seated on a cool wooden pew at the back of St. Monica's Church, my mother and father on either side of me. Each town a prayer, a reflection, a step toward the past that must become the present.
III
Dad never knew what to make of nachos. What is this? he'd say.
Nachos. Corn chips, cheese, green onion, jalapeno peppers. You dip it in the salsa. You want a beer?
What're we having for dinner?
This. This is dinner. We'll have some green pea soup too.
How can this be dinner?
I laughed. It just is.
This is something you eat while you watch a hockey game. If you don't have any popcorn. Or ice cream, he added. But not dinner.
Eat it. You'll enjoy it. It's not like we have it every night. It's a change of pace. A treat. Fun.
Fun, he repeated.
I laughed again.
He ate it. He ate all of it. But he knew it wasn't dinner. The soup came the closest.
We developed routines that worked. Because we had strict time lines, Jeanne and I and Adam would get up in sequence in the morning, use the bathroom, shower, eat whatever breakfast we could force-feed ourselves, then off to work and school. After we had gone, after the house was empty and no one was around to pressure him, Dad would get up and dress and use the bathroom at his own pace, running that crazy electric razor all over his face forever. We'd find various pills on the bathroom floor on a daily basis. He had them for everything. He actually liked taking them. He'd line the little bottles up like soldiers. His devotion to doctors and pills was a religious faith— unshakable.
Then it was downstairs for cereal, juice, coffee. The coffee was from the pot I made every night and timed to start perking at six-thirty in the morning. Even with his bad eyes, there was nothing he couldn't handle in that routine, and he'd leave the dishes in the sink for me. Dishes were my domain. Jeanne would claim at parties that her hands never touched dishwater, and I took foolish pride in my work.
I made him a lunch every night, along with lunches for Adam, Jeanne, and myself. All he had to do was fish it out of the refrigerator when he wanted it. Dinners he ate with us. Jeanne handled them. That was her domain. She liked cooking and she was good at it—said that having a glass of red wine while making dinner was like therapy, as good as yoga.
And he always knew when she was working late or had gone out for the evening. Nachos. Or take-out chicken. It wasn't the same.
But he'd eat whatever you gave him. He was grateful.
I learned that from him too.
"What happened to your father?" I asked him once. He never spoke of his father. It was always Da he mentioned, his grandfather, Nanny's father.
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, "He went senile."
I listened.
"I remember one time he came downstairs at two o'clock in the morning. He was carrying a candle and had his feet wrapped up in rags. I had just come in. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was going to work." He paused. "He hadn't worked in years."
I didn't know him. He died in 1942, before I was born. Even Da outlived him, dying in '44. "What did he used to work at?"
"He was a shipper, then a driver, at Doyle Fish Company, down in the St. Lawrence Market. When he got older, he worked for the city. Department of Streets and Cleaning." He paused. "He had a twin brother that died at birth. It was a big family. He was one of ten."
I waited. He didn't offer any more. "Why was he called Bampi?"
"Your sister Anne started that. When she was little she couldn't say Grampa. It came out Bampi. The name stuck. We all liked it."
"Did he have Alzheimer's?"
He looked at me. "I don't know. I never thought of it."
"It sounds like Alzheimer's."
He was thinking. "I never heard of Alzheimer's until the last few years. Some people just went senile. It was the thirties. Happened in lots of families." He looked distant. "Never thought about it before."
"Sounds like it. It was just a thought."
He didn't say anything more. He was quiet for the rest of the evening.
I lived with him for seven years, from when he was eighty-three till he died at age ninety. He never mentioned Bampi again.
IV
At the Metro Reference Library I asked for the white pages of the Dayton, Ohio, phone directory. The woman at the Information desk gave me a small envelope of microfiche transparencies, showed me how to use the machine, then left me alone.
There was a "Swiss, B" on the black-and-white screen before me. Only one. I read the address, the phone number, copied them on a piece of paper, put the paper in my shirt pocket.
I sat back.
I saw my father, traveling around the city, blind, revisiting places from the past, coming home and telling me how everything had changed. I touched the piece of paper in my pocket. Another step toward becoming my father.
SEVEN
I
What else can I tell you about Jeanne? Besides everything, I mean. It sounds corny to keep mentioning how we're crazy about each other, but it's true. Most people don't believe us. Everyone is sure we're not being honest, hiding something—a discordant note that would make our relationship more akin to their own experience.
I don't know. I've had lots of relationships that didn't work—most of them, for God's sake. A failed marriage even. But this one works, and it probably shouldn't. And maybe I shouldn't be so smug. After all, no one gets married thinking it isn't going to work, do they? I didn't that first time. Y
et half of them don't make it—and of those that do, I don't know how many of them I'd say were real good.
High maintenance, low maintenance. This is Jeanne's theory.
"Most of the women I know treat their pets better than they do their man," Jeanne told me one day. "They got a dog, they'll get up early to walk it, scoop behind it, clean, feed, groom, ooh and aah, pick fleas off it, you name it. Yet they ignore their man. Like they'd be happier if he was gelded. Like their dog."
"Who are you thinking of?"
"Nearly everybody. They like them to bring home a lot of money, wear knee socks and shorts in the summer and mow the lawn, shovel the snow in the winter, and by and large leave them alone. Only a few exceptions." She thought for a moment. "Jenny and Walt. Jenny understands her man." Pause. "Christine and Fred. They're both happy as clams." Longer pause. Shrug. "That's about it. Jenny and Christine get it. Rest of them don't."
"Get what?"
"Lust makes the world go round." Her eyes twinkled.
I nodded sagely. "You'll get no argument from me."
"Course I won't. It's true."
"What about Ted and Irma?"
"What about them?"
"Aren't they exceptions? They seem pretty happy."
More thought. Then: "Nah. She's a little bit nuts."
"Why?"
"She actually does have a dog. She thinks he needs braces."
I laughed.
"Says he has an overbite. God knows what she thinks about Ted."
"Scratch behind my ears?"
A smile.
"Straighten my tail?"
She crooked her finger, twice, beckoning. "You come over here and I'll rub your belly."
It was my turn to smile.
"Women are high maintenance. Men are low maintenance."
St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) Page 4
