Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  Mimi’s grand-mere lives with her family. Grandmère’s bones are so tiny Mimi can wrap two fingers around her wrists. Grand-mère laughs when I tell her Little Red Riding Hood in French. “Je m’appelle le Petit-Chaperon rouge. Je vais chez ma grand-mère.” Red Riding Hood’s grand-mère does not get eaten in French, don’t worry. Ha Ha.

  Lyd still dares me to do things because she knows I will take any dare except to dive headfirst into the river. Mother says if I keep it up, I won’t live long enough for it to matter. Mother doesn’t know, but Lyd double-dared me to stick two fingers into the pantry light socket. The electricity fired me against the pantry wall. Eddie and Lyd were both scared but they didn’t tell.

  Mother says that because I am her child-between it is my job to see both ways, forward and back. When I grow up, she says, I am the one who will be doomed to tell the family stories.

  Love, Trude.

  TRUDE

  NEW YEAR, 1953

  I was excited about the arrival of Granny Tracks, who came to visit the third week of December. Our entire family rode the bus to Hull and then the streetcar across the bridge and past the Chaudière Falls, to meet her at Ottawa’s Union Station. This took an hour and a half each way. When she stepped through the iron gate, I was surprised to see our cousin Georgie—known to us as Georgie-Porgie—right behind her. He was the same age as Lyd; we’d coloured Shredded Wheat cards together in the backyard of our old place when we’d lived in Darley. We seldom saw him except when we returned to Ontario in the summer; he’d shot up half a foot and was now taller than Lyd.

  The air was cold and clear when we got back to St. Pierre; our family had been the only travellers on the bus and, except for Mother, who refused to abandon Granny, we’d placed ourselves all around the bus in different corner seats, as if we were strangers. We walked across the field to our road, chemin Brébeuf, and Granny Tracks stood on our front step, her back to the river, to let Father know that she’d been dropped into the Quebec wilderness. It was still early evening. Mother and Granny said they were going in to whip up a meal, but Father kept the rest of us outside.

  Lyd was appalled.

  “Oh, great. Weekly winter walk,” she said. “What’s Georgie-Porgie going to say about this?”

  Georgie had to set his suitcase inside the cold porch and join, whether he wanted to or not. Father initiated the walks in November of each year at the first sign of snow. No one was excused unless bedridden or struck down by fever. Cold weather was meant to keep us healthy.

  Round and round the village streets, we tried to keep pace in the dark. Our boots crunched on snow while Father’s voice kept up its relentless quiz. He didn’t ask questions, he said them.

  “Nine plus eight! Ten plus eleven! Multiply by two and carry one! Simplify, do it in your head, no fingers, no tapping fingers!” He knew Lyd hated math.

  He tried to trick us, catch us off guard. “What colour was Napoleon’s white horse. Which weighs more, a pound of coal or a pound of feathers.”

  The problems became more difficult. “Spell parliament, cinnamon, enigma! What does perpetual mean! Instigate!” Investigate!”

  He circled back to mental arithmetic, his favourite, setting up a competition as he strode. “First one who knows the answer—shout it out! Twelve times eleven, divide by six, times seven, add nine!”

  All the while, we ran along beside him. And our answers, shouted back, held an icy desperate ring.

  Lyd and I were humiliated having to face Georgie-Porgie in the porch light. I was terrified that Father would remove his scarf and gloves only to make a sudden charge into the living room, spouting poetry. Once started, his poetry was unstoppable. Georgie, forced to drag himself around the village, surprised us by blurting out, as soon as we took him to Eddie’s room to show him his top bunk, that his father had chased his mother around the house with a butcher knife. They’d sent Georgie to us while they were sorting things out. His father, Uncle Weylin, was Granny Tracks’s only son. The story was that Weylin had married a temperamental Irishwoman, Aunt Arra, who’d once kept house in northern England for a duke. Granny Tracks was glad her son had married Irish but thought her daughter-in-law affected. Maybe, we told Georgie, maybe your father isn’t Weylin, but the duke. We were thinking of money. After all, Georgie had an English name.

  We knew we couldn’t be mean to him after he blurted out the stuff about his parents; what irritated us was that he reeked of the sufferer. We were suspicious, too, because he did not seem to think our family unreasonable. He said he liked Father but we threatened to pound him when he admitted that he was glad he’d joined us in our weekly winter walk.

  “Jesus Cripes,” Lyd said, “he’s desperate for a father.”

  We were called for supper and Father squeezed in a chair for Georgie-Porgie between Eddie and me. Mother and Granny had served up bowls of thick homemade soup and set a plate of buttered bread, cut into ladyfingers, at each end of the table. We used our best manners and passed around a tray of soda biscuits and Chateau cheese, my favourite kind, flecked with pimento. I watched as Georgie pressed two soda biscuits between his palms and crumbled them into his soup, something we never did. I could see, too, that he had an eye on the Christmas baking that Mother had laid out on the shelf of the flour cupboard. I thought about Georgie being desperate for a father and I turned and stared at our own father, who was seated, unsuspecting, at the head of the table.

  After the dishes were done we cleared the table and sat back down around it. Lyd was working on her Royal scrapbook. Her Scottish penpal had just sent her a newspaper copy of the family photo on this year’s Royal Christmas card. Lyd was the only one in our entire school who had it. She’d found her penpal’s name on the back page of one of Eddie’s Scrooge comics; they wrote to each other all the time. The caption under the photo explained that the Queen and her family were standing on the steps of historic Balmoral Castle. I looked at Princess Anne and could see that she was gritting her teeth, probably because she was forced to stand still. Her hands were clenched into fat little fists. Charles looked pleased and patient beside his father, who was wearing a kilt. Elizabeth was wearing a skirt filled with pleats. She was not going to be crowned until next June but, at school, Mrs. Perry had already made us substitute the word Queen in “God save our gracious…” Both Mrs. Perry and the Queen, I could tell from the photo, wore the same kind of laced-up high-platformed shoes.

  Georgie was slumped at one end of the table, fatigued and sad-looking. Except for Granny Tracks and Lyd, the others had left the room.

  I started working on Granny to tell us about Grandfather Meagher, dead before I was born. Before any grandchild, for that matter. There were so few photographs on either side—Meaghers and Kings—Lyd said the two families must have dirt to hide. One tintype of Grandfather Meagher did exist but this was back in Ontario, in Granny’s Darley home. It was kept in a cigar box in her rolltop desk and we seldom got to see it. The tintype was bent lengthwise through the middle and Grandfather Meagher’s sepia face was trapped in this permanent concave fault. Even so, I was certain from the erectness of his posture that if he were alive, we would not be calling him Grampa Tracks.

  I had often thought of him in school when practising the sixteen être verbs, glancing up at the row of cardboard charts above the blackboards. My tongue passed over mourir. Mrs. Perry had shrieked, “You can’t use the past tense of mourir with je!” Because it was forbidden, I murmured as I conjugated—Je suis mort, tu es mort, il est mort—thinking of Grandfather Meagher. I imagined him whispering the past tense in the first person to spite Mrs. Perry, at the split second of his last breath.

  “Tell us, Granny. What did he look like? What colour was his hair? Did he shout?” All the men I knew shouted. Father. Duffy. Uncle Weylin. Grampa King. Father’s friends. They shouted every time they met one another: How are ya’, you old son of a gun? How the hell are you?

  Granny Tracks seemed annoyed for a moment; she’d been through this line of questi
oning before. She looked at a pad of foolscap lying on the kitchen cabinet behind me and reached out a hand.

  “Give me a piece of paper,” she said. “A ruler, a good one with a steel edge. And a pencil.”

  Lyd looked up from her scrapbook

  “I can see his face so clearly,” said Granny, as if she’d dropped into a trance.

  Georgie perked up.

  She began to line the paper, cross-hatching, covering the sheet with squares, shading here and there.

  “I can see his face so clearly,” she said. Louder, this time. She was filling in the squares to shape a head.

  Father walked into the kitchen and looked over her shoulder. He cackled. “Paint by number?”

  Granny Tracks ignored him. Thinking he might have hurt her feelings, I said, “She’s drawing Grandfather Meagher.”

  Father shot through to the living room. “Now I’ve seen everything,” I heard him say to Mother. “She’s drawing a graph of your father’s face.”

  Granny Tracks moaned. “Your grandfather Meagher scratched a cross in the dirt with the toe of his boot, the day before he died.”

  “Il est mort,” I whispered.

  When the drawing was done, two off-balance eyes glowered out of the squares. The hair was black and thick and high. There was no room for ears, as his cheeks touched both edges of the page. His nose was bumpy and unrealistic. Granny didn’t know about perspective. The mouth, though, could have been the mouth of a real person. This face had no age that I could tell.

  Granny Tracks was not unpleased. She held up the paper and laughed. “First thing I’ve drawn in my entire life,” she said. Lyd and I laughed, too, thinking this a great joke. I wondered what Mother would say if I showed her.

  “Sign it, Granny,” I said. She did and I took it to my room and looked at it again, and then I flattened it into my bottom drawer.

  Georgie turned on us. He went past our bedroom, later, and stuck his head through the doorway and said, “Your whole family is nutso.”

  “They’re your family, too, Puddin’ and pie,” Lyd said.

  “He’s probably suffering from exhaustion,” I said, thinking of the weekly winter walk.

  A long closet, it was really a dark tunnel, crossed the width of the house and joined the living room to my bedroom. Not only mine; I shared the double bed with Lyd. The chimney was at our end of the tunnel, and shelves and cupboards had been built to the ceiling at the living-room end. The rest of the space was used for out-of-season coats and for storing bedding. Just past the chimney there were three plastic garment bags, each with a collapsible cardboard bottom. Right after Christmas, the garment bags were unzipped, the contents laid out on Mother’s bed.

  Here were the pastel dresses Mother created; here were strapless taffeta gowns, an abundance of crinolined skirts, strapless bras, ribboned evening bags and dyed satin shoes. Here Mother had fashioned a world from Vogue. A world unconnected to St. Pierre or Darley or to any world that I could call up. Five women who sewed had found one another in the village and formed a club. Mother was the sixth; her induction had balanced the group, half-English, half-French. One of the women was Duffy’s new girlfriend, Rebecque, whom Lyd and I adored. She said things to us like, “Always dab your perfume where there’s a pulse. Ici! Ici!” Jabbing one finger at the veins of her wrist, her temple, the side of her slender neck.

  Mother’s latest creation, made during the fall, was a mauve strapless dress with net overlay and a stole of the same colour rising up behind her shoulders like stiff pale flames. Twice a year, New Year’s Eve and early summer, the women of the club mustered their men and held a party at one of the homes, so far not ours.

  This year, the New Year’s Eve party was at the home of Mona and Roy. Mona of the bound feet. Though she never talked about her childhood, the story was that forty-six years earlier, Mona had been born into a wealthy family on the Mongolian border. Her nurse had bound her baby feet until Mona had been almost crippled. By the time Mona immigrated to Canada, she was walking with tiny little steps. Lyd, whose feet were already growing alarmingly long, gawked at Mona’s feet every chance she could get.

  Lyd and I had heard the rest of the story while eavesdropping on Mother and Rebecque. Mona’s parents had lost their fortune but Mona had had a stroke of luck when she was eighteen. While working as a waitress in a bistro in Montreal, she’d been wiping a tabletop and looked down into the eyes of Roy, who was visiting the city for a day. Instant love, we were told. It was as if they’d been lovers in some other, previous life. They married and moved to the village of St. Pierre. They were older than the other couples in the club and had no children; the barren Mona was not lucky at everything, Rebecque told our mother.

  I watched as Mother studied herself in the bedroom and bathroom mirrors. Her black hair had been pulled back and pinned, and in those moments I believed that generations of women in our family had somehow betrayed the Irish by bestowing on their female progeny traces of Spanish blood. A stubby white jar of deodorant, a wide powder puff I had given her for Christmas, a touch of rouge over each cheekbone—Mother managed these as casually as if she stepped into formal dress two or three times a week. Lyd stood close by so that she would be the one to be asked to zip Mother’s dress from behind. Mother hummed to herself as she chose rhinestone earrings and a choker that sparkled like diamonds, and then Lyd and I sat on her bed, our cheeks as flushed as hers as she arranged her stole, crimping it between her fingers to round the folds. She dabbed lavender perfume behind her ears and raised her chin to the mirror to put on her lipstick, last of all. Lyd and I preceded her out the bedroom door, as if we were presenting her to the rest of the family.

  The transformation silenced Father. He was never comfortable when he was dressed up and he fidgeted, now, while Eddie circled him and brushed his jacket.

  We stood back, away from them, when the one and only village taxi arrived, as if being close might muss them up in some base family way. Granny Tracks was being dragged along with them and she stood, solemn and celebratory, in her plain black dress and strand of pearls. She travelled with these everywhere, she said, in case of invitation.

  The house was suddenly emptied of glamour. Left alone, and feeling plain, we turned out the lights and sat on the chesterfield, waiting for midnight.

  Each of us had a quart bottle of soft drink stuck between our knees and we swigged at these in controlled sips so there’d be something left to toast in the New Year. Mine was grapefruit and lime. After Christmas, Father had given us money to go up rue Principale to Le Loup’s to choose. We’d packed the tall bottles and some extra ginger ale into a box and rattled it back on our wooden sleigh.

  Georgie had been uncomplaining the past few days, knowing he needed us to survive. For one thing, after the Christmas bones had been picked, we’d carried him through four nights of turkey soup. The house rule was that you couldn’t leave the table until you’d finished what had been put before you.

  “Have a bowl of swamp soup,” we said cheerily, knowing it made him gag.

  But we helped Georgie by swapping bowls, a continuous round of trickery that enabled him to leave the table.

  He’d remained silent when Father had marched us around the village again, shouting out, “Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward.” And he needed us outside, too—needed our French words when we took him to the store, needed our familiarity with every inch of riverbank and every fingergrip in the old hydro wall that leaned over the rapids. He needed us at the rink we’d cleared on the river in front of the house, where we practised teapot and swan, and he needed us to guide him over thin ice on the swamp behind the barn.

  What Georgie had that we did not know was an unstoppable repertoire of horror stories and these he began to unleash as we sat in the dark, knees drawn up, petrified, sliding towards 1953. After two hours of bloody headless creatures he was droning in measured voice about ghosts that left no footprints, ghosts that drifted over fast waters and through the walls o
f lonely country homes. Ghosts that could be near at that very moment, the ebb of the old year. It was almost midnight and no one, not even Georgie, dared to put a foot on the floor. Eddie had pulled his sweater up over his head and refused to budge. After all the swigging at our bottles every one of us had to pee and it was Lyd, finally, who broke the spell. She crawled along the back of the chesterfield and stretched to reach the lamp switch. Georgie looked like pathetic Georgie again, in the light. But I could still hear his scaring voice in my ears.

  We pretended we hadn’t been scared.

  We tuned the floor-model radio in the living room to an Ottawa station across the river that took requests, and decided to phone in a dedication. Our mother loved radio, our mother loved song. I was at the phone end of the chair and kept a finger in the dial but couldn’t get through. I tried Father’s trick. If you dialled all the numbers but one, you’d block out the hundreds of other desperadoes. After a long pause, I dialled the last number. A man’s voice shouted. I shouted back.

  “Play ‘Lady of Spain’…for our mother…from Lyd Trude Eddie Georgie…her children…with love!” I didn’t want to get into complications of Georgie being a cousin; there was too much noise in the station background. I could see that Georgie was pleased.

  “Does ‘our mother’ have a name?” the man said sarcastically.

  I hung up. We laughed ourselves silly we were so excited, and we turned up the volume. We phoned Mother at Mona’s and the noise there was worse than it had been at the station. It took some time before Mother came to the phone. We told her we had a surprise for her, that she had to listen to the radio. It didn’t occur to us that if Mother had to listen, the whole party had to listen. Right at twelve o’clock.

  It was the first day of the year and Father came home from the party alone and in a cast. He’d made a bet with Roy, Mona’s husband, that there was black ice on the stones below their front steps. At two in the morning he’d gone outside in his stocking feet and slid across the ice, a glass of whisky held high in his right hand. He dropped the glass and broke his ankle, and after the men dragged him up the steps, Roy phoned for the taxi. Duffy accompanied Father across the Champlain Bridge to hospital. Mona drove Mother and Granny home, pressing the pedals of Roy’s big car with her tiny feet. We still hadn’t gone to bed, though we were all asleep on the chesterfield. Mother’s eyes were red and she curtly told us to get into our beds.