As most people do, I thought my own family fairly typical. My mother was perfect, except that she ran marathons, was a concert pianist and did not have her ears pierced. Fortunately, none of these quirks was considered strange enough to inspire ridicule from my friends, so they were easily forgiven. As far as I could gather, she was ideal in every other respect. And she eventually even pierced those formerly austere ears, to my great and very vocal delight.
I had grown up believing that my father also floated within the boundaries of normality, he being a professor at the university and, therefore, prone to excusable eccentricities resulting from excessive intelligence or degrees that allegedly proved the equivalent. He took pleasure, for example, in wearing raw silk pyjamas of French design, and while I suspected this was not standard practice for the neighbourhood, I understood that an appreciation for things European was an essential part of being intellectual, so did not mind, as long as he changed into regular clothes before anyone came over to play.
Slightly more distressingly, he also enjoyed skipping down the city sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the sides and snapping his fingers like castanets. I’m sure I loved it as a three-year-old, but by age ten, I had learned to fall out of step and begin idly window-shopping if terse and alarmed pleas for him to stop did not immediately suppress him.
On my seventh birthday, the only one my mother ever missed (she had to visit her sick father in hospital), I had requested hot dogs, coleslaw and chocolate cake iced with Cool Whip. My father, delighted to have been put in charge of my party, listened to my request and then, without consultation, changed the menu to Gruyère soufflé, waxed beans in tarragon butter, and crème brûlée. “It’s more festive,” he explained to my shame-inflamed face, as my friends sat around the table wrinkling their noses and exchanging bulgy-eyed stares. In place of loot bags, each child received a home-copied tape of the Mozart Wind Quintet, and in place of a father, I wished I had a hamster. Or that, at least, is what I shrieked once the last mopey-faced friend had left and I’d burst into tears, running at my father’s thighs with my fists. After being sent to my room for being wretched, I filled the stairs with signs saying I HATE SOOFLAY and, in the most powerful protest I could come up with, refused to turn seven.
The day I turned eight, however, I pulled myself up out of the water after a swim in the Trent Canal, arms folded up over my chest, fists rolled under my chin, shivering. I wandered through the Families of Faculties picnic, dripping across a few professors’ legs until I reached my father, whose arm was already outstretched. My bum fell into the wedge of his lap as I nestled into him, laying my head against his chest and staring at the dark red nose of his nipple. Above me buzzed numbing talk of political leadership conventions and voting behaviour, as effective a soporific as any I know, and I drooped into a groggy peace. The two things I took note of that afternoon were how the bottom of my thighs felt crazy-glued to the top of his—would I dangle from him when he stood up? I wondered—and how lucky I felt to be entitled to fall asleep on that lap, breathing in the sherry-bread scent of him.
On Sundays, my father liked to bake croissants from scratch, placing the doughy bundles to rise on a ribbed glass hotplate that was as magical to me as a witch’s cauldron. When the little crescents had puffed up dutifully, my father would lift the damp dishtowel and call us over to witness the miracle known as “doubling” before transferring the croissants to the hot stove and clicking on the oven light. There we would sit, my brothers and I, forever pushing each other out of the way—you’re hogging the whole window, move o-ver—watching the anemic goop transform into crisp, gorgeous pastry. Never did we manage to wait the suggested ten minutes before plucking—ow!—a fresh wrap of buttery gold and juggling it onto a plate. While my father put on choral music and began conducting dreamily to an invisible choir, my brothers and I would snap off the pastry’s pointed end and watch the steam coil out like a genie. The next task was to extract the stretchy white interior and fill the hollow with globs of rapidly melting butter and raspberry jam. As the Verdi Requiem blared chromatic drama across the kitchen, my father would sit with his eyes closed, alternately biting into his croissant and directing the music with a poised conductor’s hand, groaning with a combination of culinary and musical pleasure. With crumbles of greasy, golden flakes collecting on our lips and fingers, and the kitchen assuming the auditory grandeur of a cathedral, it was easy to love my father and his peculiarities.
When my brother Paul turned ten (and I was still frustratingly, single-digitly, eight), Dad dispensed with baking for several months, pronouncing that it was time for Paul and me to begin attending church. After the initial ooh-aah over the stained glass windows, the long shiny benches, and the unreachable-by-spitball ceilings, Paul and I dripped with boredom. The porridge-faced minister preached monotonously and could no more carry a tune than turn a cartwheel. Each time the congregation sang, Paul and I would cover our ears, proclaiming that their intonation was so bad it hurt our teeth.
After a few Sundays of this, the only way my father could entice us to attend church was by promising us something so implausible as to be miraculous: a post-benedictory trip to McDonald’s. The bribe worked spectacularly well, in that we agreed to go to the service, but as everyone else sang tired hymns (from books with pages that I was convinced, for some reason, were made from Jesus’s dried skin), my brother and I would whisper-sing the Big Mac jingle we’d turned into a psalm:
Two all-beef pa-a-a-a-a-tties,
spe-e-e-e-e-cial sauce, lettuce, che-e-e-e-e-se,
pickles, onions on a sesame, a sesame,
thou sayeth now a se-e-e-same,
may I beseech thee a sesame,
a sesame seed bu-u-u-u-n.
A-a-a-a-men.
On Communion days, we would accompany my father to the altar and kneel beside him while he received of the wafer and wine. Because we were too young to partake, the minister would lay his hand on our heads and wish us eternal life. The first time this happened after the bribe had kicked in, the blessing went thus:
“May you have eternal life, child.”
Paul: “Actually, I’m having a cheeseburger.”
My father separated his hands from prayer position and gave Paul’s bottom a light swat.
Shortly thereafter, my father abandoned the fast-food sacrament and returned to long Sunday mornings at home with the croissant ritual. We were all the happier, the healthier and, I dare say, the more blessed for it.
SANDWICHES AND SEPARATE BEDS
I do not remember my mother being part of the croissant extravaganzas. As I recall, she would have toast and go out for a run. Or shopping. Or upstairs. Or wherever it was she went when I lost track of her, which was as infrequently as I could manage it. My father flitted in and out of the nest of our lives like most men of his time, but I thought of my mother as the spiral of sticks itself, her limbs the very twigs that held our home together.
It never occurred to me that she might have been less than fulfilled in her role as Circle of Twigs, that there might have been things she wanted to do in her life besides shop for groceries, make spaghetti, load the dishwasher and do our laundry. She was every bit as dynamic as my father, as fun and as funny, as interesting and interested in the world, but her personal passions waned just as my father’s might have done had he been forced to leave the stimulating environment of the university and find joy instead in the six interchangeable parts of the vacuum cleaner.
My mother was not a domestic creature by nature. Keeping house did not, as it were, light her fire. When Mrs. Preston came to clean for the first time, she was considerate enough to assure my mother that she would never tell anyone how messy our house was. Which it was not, really, but nor was it, say, the picture of sparkle and organization.
“It would be easier for your mother if she weren’t so bright” was a neighbour’s offhanded comment one day as she sat in our kitchen waiting for my mot
her. Mrs. Bludge had come over to ask about piano lessons for her son, but my mother was in the middle of practising. Mrs. Bludge said she would wait because she didn’t want to interrupt my mother’s music.
“Oh, it’s not my mother’s music,” I replied. “It’s Schumann.”
Mrs. Bludge looked puzzled, so I added: “And she’s still not at the really tricky bit, so it’s still going to go on for a long time.”
Which is when Mrs. Bludge looked around the room and made the it would be easier for your mother comment, intended as either an insult or a compliment, I wasn’t quite sure. But as I stood there looking around at our chaotic kitchen—the jumble of dishes on the counter looked like a page from the Schumann concerto—I can say only that it didn’t feel very complimentary.
It is true that my mother was bored in her role as stay-at-home wife and mother, but she bore up so admirably under the boredom that none of us really noticed. Cheerful she was almost always, though not in the hyper-expressive way of the truly depressed mothers in the neighbourhood. There was tremendous splash in her when she was inspired (by music, great books, lively dinner debates), but she was mostly calm, tranquil water. A lake we lived by and took for granted, daily.
I was vaguely aware that my mother did not spring to life in the kitchen, a suspicion that was confirmed the year she unwrapped the I Hate to Cook Cookbook, a Christmas gift to herself. She was not a baker, as I was—happily reigning over my Easy-Bake Oven dominion with a dedication and panache my mother did not seem to possess.
For me, the feeling I had while baking approached bliss, the process of tearing open those sturdy packages of cake mix and pouring them—splosh!—into the bowl. The water would be measured with a scientist’s precision, the measuring cup teetering in my hands as I carried it from the sink to the bowl carefully, tongue out to one side, so as not to drip. My small hill of cake mix would transform into sensuous batter, and with a spatula the size of a toothbrush I would scrape the sweet goop into two miniature aluminum cake pans and ease them into my toy oven.
Apparently, my mother used to love watching me stare through the little oven window at my cakes browning under the heating mechanism: a hot bare lightbulb. It wasn’t so much the look on my face, she said, as the way I sat, my body and neck bent at just the right angle to allow me to see inside without getting my face burned, the way I was so mesmerized by the simple miracle contained within that warm little tin box. Between the croissants and my saucer-sized cakes, baking was my earliest devotion.
I do not know why having an oven ten times the size altered the experience so profoundly, but it seems that it did, for despite repeated efforts, my mother was never able to muster the same Easy-Bake Ecstasy. More than once, she pulled black-burnt loaf pans out of the oven, huffing as she heaved them onto the stovetop.
“Weren’t you watching?” I once asked timidly.
“No,” she mumbled in frustration. “I was working on a new Chopin étude.”
After Mrs. Preston and her Lemon Pledge joined the family picture, my mother would remain at the piano for longer stretches, learning the formidable Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, among others, while my brothers and I watched episodes of The Partridge Family on television. Occasionally, she performed as a soloist with the local symphony orchestra, but she was leagues above them and everyone knew it, though in good Anglo-Saxon fashion everyone smiled and said nothing of the sort. Eventually, my mother put Rachmaninoff on a back burner and took up running, replacing her nondescript leather shoes with swooshy trainers and making ever-widening circles around the house. Next thing we knew, she’d gone off to Ottawa to run a marathon. The news had no effect on me whatsoever, apart from formulating in my mind an understanding of big cities as places where people run around and around to the point of exhaustion for reasons baffling to everyone but them.
Another of my mother’s notable characteristics was her affinity for birds, and animals in general. I could not possibly count the number of birds that were tended in shoeboxes over the years, creatures that had either bashed themselves into windows, dropped prematurely out of nests or been the brief playthings of neighbourhood cats. For each one she would make a nest of Kleenex, feed them with eyedroppers, a heating pad and Bach. Most of them died. And she greeted every small death with a wince of such pain that my brothers and I would leave the room.
Broken wings she would always leave to the vet, ferrying the birds (and once a hawk, which nearly tore her to shreds as she gathered it up) over to his clinic on the rural route behind our house. Years later, the same vet told me my mother was one of the most incredible people he’d ever met. “Why,” I laughed, “because of all the birds?” “No,” he said. “Because of everything.”
As a young woman, my mother completed her undergraduate degree in music at the University of Western Ontario and, upon graduation, was awarded a bursary to further her piano studies in Paris. From there, she won a Canada Council scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, where she took lessons with a number of master pianists, including the renowned Myra Hess. The first time my mother told me about this illustrious period of her life, I watched a smile of serenity blossom across her face and ached to learn more. Every day she would walk more than an hour to the Royal Academy of Music, she recounted to me, enraptured audience of one. The words Royal Academy suggested such romance and elegance that I clapped my hands together and held them under my chin. There, she continued, she would close herself into one of the rehearsal rooms and spend the entire day, eight to ten hours, playing the piano, pausing only to eat the sandwich she had brought with her.
(Practising eight hours and eating a sandwich? Uh, was that the good part?)
Furthering the glamour of the story, my mother told me she rented a room at the back of a house in an unfortunate part of London, sharing the place with the Gutters, a family of five. On Fridays, Mrs. Gutter would pull a metal washtub into the kitchen, heat a large pot of water on the stove and pour it into the tub. Because my mother was the guest, she was the first one to use the water, a privilege for which she was extremely grateful. She said she often wondered how that sixth person bathing in the same water felt. Thriftiness in accommodations freed up the rest of her savings for the purchase of a grand piano, and while it just barely fit into her room, she was able to tuck her bed under the instrument’s black breadth and sleep beneath the soundboard.
“Where did you keep your clothes?” I asked, still on the lookout for the story’s charm.
Her answer: “I don’t remember. I must not have had any.”
My mother and father dated, on and off, over a period of seven years before getting married. They had met as students at the University of Western Ontario when my mother was in her first year and my father in his last. The first time he saw my mother sitting on the stairs of the university’s music building (where they were both studying), my father remembers, “I just wanted to put my arms around her and cuddle her.”
My father graduated with a degree in Economics and Political Science and a certificate in musical education, and went on to the University of Toronto to do an MA. He had wanted to give my mother his fraternity pin (a sort of pre-engagement), but she discussed it with her father and declined with the explanation that she didn’t really know what she wanted to do with her future—and that seemed reasonable to my father.
The following year, they both found themselves living abroad—my mother in France, my father in England—and their connection continued through correspondence, visits and the odd shared adventure. At one point, my mother broke off the relationship and my father remembers being devastated. The two went their separate ways and my father threw himself into writing his Doctorate of Philosophy at Oxford. (Apparently, he hoped to turn his dissertation into “something of a Sibelius symphony,” but as the subject matter was Elections and Politics in Canada West under Responsible Government, 1847–1863, it was difficult to meld the two ideas.)
After a separation of nea
rly two years, the angels of fate (and the careful strategizing of a common friend) ensured that my mother and father were seated beside each other at a concert in London. They chatted enthusiastically during the party afterwards and my father remembers driving off at the end of the night “floating on a cloud.” They spent the next few months having picnics and attending concerts, though never on Friday nights lest my mother miss her coveted bath.
After my father completed his symphonic parliamentary thesis and returned to Canada, my mother moved to Vienna to continue her piano studies and Spartan sandwich routine. Apparently, Vienna (or the Viennese—I can’t remember) drove her a bit mad and she never really warmed to the place. But the deciding moment came when my mother received a pearl necklace in the mail from my father. Then and there she decided to ship her piano from England to Canada, and she and my father were married later that year.
That’s my father’s version, at any rate. My mother doesn’t remember receiving a gift of any kind. “Your dad and I split up for a while and sometime after that we saw each other back in England and things kind of picked up again. But there was no necklace. I don’t remember him giving me anything. I came back from Europe because my money ran out. And then we got married. You know … people were expected to do that in those days.”
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Page 2
