“When everything started falling apart during the divorce, I remember thinking I was never going to get over it,” my mom said one night by the fireplace, a scratchy mohair blanket tucked in around her legs and my little alley-kitten, Figleaf, resting on her lap. “Do you remember that time you were in West Side Story in high school and we all ended up going on the same night?” She shook her head and ran her fingers across her eyes, the way her own father used to when he recalled something he preferred not to see. “Your dad made such a scene during the intermission, trying to get Dot to talk to him. Oh, it was so awful. I was just standing there thinking, I’m never going to get over this. I’m just never going to get over this.”
I leaned my head back, flung myself back a decade. “Yeah, I remember being backstage and wishing I were dead—”
“I think we all did,” Mom interrupted, as Figleaf crawled up her sweater and settled himself on her shoulder.
More silence. A few more stars lighting up above the tree-line. “But eventually I did,” she continued, almost serenely.
“Eventually you did what?”
“Eventually, I got over it,” she said, smiling tenderly in my direction. “And you will too.”
More stars. Wisps of an imminent moonrise over farmland. A gouging in my chest. Visions of the man I’d just left, echoes of his voice, the infectious laughter we had shared, the passion for words, travels, warm gingerbread savoured together on cold Montreal days.
And thoughts of Mel, his dreams of retiring here, pruning apple trees, stacking firewood, gradually growing old. Before cancer crawled through his bone marrow and pulled him to his knees. Before it elicited his humility and made him the tenderest, kindest of men. A man I grew so fond of, whose sparkling-eyed smile now filled the sky.
“And you will too,” I said.
My mom looked away and squinted, the moon spilling softness across her face.
III. Sanctus
The farm became Mel’s gift to my mother, and to me. A way back to each other, and to nature—one providing passage to the other.
It started with breakfast, the sharing of early company, that vulnerable honesty of mornings. The vulnerable honesty of mourning.
We did it our own ways: she, at the piano; I, with a fountain pen. Tea by the fireplace. The Fauré Requiem. Yoga.
And at some point every day, when the last of my mother’s piano students had left, we would head out the back door together with the half-blind gaggle of dogs and an alley cat, and walk.
While the land was not the same piece of music I had grown up on, it had the same key signature: hardwood forests and fields dancing free after decades of fallow release. So it was new, but familiar, including the marsh with its murky minor keys and cadences of lilies, rushes and marigolds that flowered out of darkness.
Daily, and in every weather, we padded the same path: past the garden, alongside the pond, across acres of old pasture, over the shoulder of the wetland and into the forest. Day after day, we circled its same loop, breathing its geography until it swept into me and became part of my own. Until my sorrow was held in the palms of buttercups, under the cool skirts of the cedars, and in the hollow hairs of nettle that both stung and soothed my throat.
“So was it music that brought you and Dad together, do you think?” I asked one morning as the dogs doddered around us and Figleaf followed us behind nearby trees like an elfin spy.
“I guess so. That was the main thing. But we had a lot of common interests.” She paused. “And, at the beginning, at least, we had a lot of fun. We travelled, went to concerts, out with friends …” Her rubber boots squelched as we skirted the edge of the swamp.
“But you never suspected he was gay,” I said, rather than asked.
She kicked some of the mud from her boot. “No.”
It was a tired answer; I felt the heaviness in it and wished I hadn’t brought it up at all.
A few steps later, she continued: “These days, you hear it everywhere: he’s gay, she’s gay. Every time I turn on the television it seems someone’s gay, but in those days, people didn’t talk about that.” She shook another clump of mud from her boot. “I just thought he was selfish.”
I laughed. “Selfish? What does that have to do with it?”
“Well, he was selfish. That was the kind of thing I thought about.” She spied a red-tailed hawk and followed its flight across the sky with her eyes. Then she smiled. “But we did have a lot of fun.”
I smiled back, then felt myself buckling, nauseated with grief about my own recent breakup. “We had a lot of fun too,” I whispered, the tears coming so fast to my eyes that I couldn’t imagine a time when I would ever be empty of them.
“I know,” my mother said, her face melting into one of her great wise smiles. “Mel and I did too.”
We turned and followed the path into a grove of cedars, the air suddenly cooler for their presence. At the top of the hill, the forest changed to hardwoods, maples that Mel had tapped one spring, boiling the sap down and smacking his lips proudly at the taste of his own caramelly maple syrup soaking a plate of pancakes.
“So, was Mel the reason that you and Dad didn’t stay friends?” I asked.
Mom was walking ahead of me with her arms clasped behind her back. “What?” She spun around. “Is that what you thought?”
I shrugged, nodded.
We walked in silence.
Walked until the forest opened into a small wetland, where a fallen tree offered an ideal place to sit. The greyhounds wandered off on their own, the Bichons curled up on our laps. Figleaf continued his sleuthing activities elsewhere.
“Mel had trouble forgiving people who hurt other people,” my mom said, looking out across the fen. “So he wasn’t very fond of your dad.”
That much I knew. The few times they had encountered each other, their exchanges had been civil and perfunctory at best.
“But that isn’t why we weren’t friends,” she continued. “I remember your dad wanting me to come to these meetings he would go to with other gay guys, and later he wanted us all to do Christmas together, but he had no idea what it was like for me …”
A pair of red squirrels battled behind us, squawking and cursing, before chasing each other up a tree.
“For a while, at the beginning, we tried to keep things together, you know, because no one really knew what you did in this kind of situation, and we both thought it would be best for you kids if we tried to stay together. So after I found out, the deal was that he would live at home three nights a week and then go to Toronto and have his gay life there.” She clasped her hands around her knee and rocked herself, dog in her lap. “But one night I remember lying in bed and hearing him walking up the driveway and then tiptoeing into the house really quietly, so he wouldn’t wake me up. I couldn’t figure out why on earth he was doing that: where was the car? did it break down? why was he walking home and being so quiet? It all just felt wrong. Well,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “turns out he had stayed out so late because he had met someone and, well, you know. So he had parked the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way home, so I wouldn’t realize how late he was getting in. That was it for me. I just remember thinking, no way, I can’t live like this.” She turned to me, incredulous. “I mean, what woman in her right mind would live like that?”
I didn’t move.
“So it was situations like that, and the money battles—oh, there were a whole bunch of things actually. And everything kind of soured. I know he always wanted to stay close, but quite honestly, I had no interest. I just wanted to get on with my life.”
“Well, I can understand that,” I said, reflecting on my own experience of feeling the same way.
We sat for a while, watching nothing in particular.
Listening.
“So it was never Mel’s fault,” I concluded.
My mom shook her head. “No,” she whispered.
“I always thought it was. I used to blame him for that,”
I admitted. “If he were still here, I’d apologize.”
My mother unclasped her hands, helped the dog off her lap and moved to stand. “He is still here,” she said, tipping her head back and looking up into the cathedral of budding maples around us. She looked at me and smiled, her eyes trembling with tears, and started on the path back home.
I stayed seated for a while, feeling the dampness of spring all around me. Mud under my boots. The dead tree beneath me. New life greening the ground.
“Sorry, Mel,” I finally whispered, looking at the sky with watery eyes. “And thanks for all of this.”
IV. Pie Jesu
The land became a turnstile of wildflowers, one tuft of colour unfurling into the next. On good days, I would select a flower to ride in my hair as I walked, and though I never quite understood how a few wisps of colour could so brighten my way in the world, they invariably did. Gave me a florid spunk. On bad days, I would walk for hours on my own, curling up like a deer in the golden grasses, weeping until the collar of grief came loose and I could lie in a tender grace, my sadness briefly suspended in the petals that trembled around me in the breeze.
My mom played the piano, sorted through boxes, busied herself outside. We shared smiles, kind words. Took turns cooking. Salad, mostly, with a side of yogourt, or toast. Drank wine—perhaps too much. And after a time, none at all. We played Scrabble, took turns having long hot baths, enjoyed candlelight.
“So, how did you first find out Dad was gay? Did he tell you or …?”
Mom reached out and played with the edge of the candle, a tear of hot wax spilling onto her finger and coating her fingertip. “I found a letter.”
I knew that. She had told me once, years before, but I wanted to hear more. I wanted to know how she had felt. “So you just found it?” I probed.
She watched the wax harden on her fingertip. “He had just come back from Germany, from his sabbatical. I knew something was up, I guess, but what did I know? I remember watching him sitting in the backyard with this letter pad, fussing over something that he was writing. He seemed obsessed by it. And he was being so strange. So after he went out, I went looking for it.”
She flicked the wax shavings from her fingertip onto the table and focused hard on brushing them slowly into a pile. “And it was a love letter to Tom. Do you remember that guy he shared an apartment with in Toronto when he was doing research for his book? We visited them once after your appointment with that sports doctor. Well, anyway, in this letter your dad was pleading with Tom to get back together.”
I took a breath. “And you had had no idea …”
“No.”
She stretched her arm towards the candle, touched its soft edge, dipped her fingertip in the small pool of wax.
“No,” she said again, dipping her fingertips, one by one.
By one.
Finally, I asked, “So what did you do?”
She lifted her hands, five wax claws. “I went down into the basement, where he had been doing a lot of writing—remember when he used to have his office down there?—and for some reason, my eyes went straight for this box beside his desk. It was full of all kinds of stuff: gay magazines, newspaper clippings, notes to himself, letters from friends. I read through as much as I could stomach, and then I called Sally and told her I needed her to come and stay with you kids for a few days. I didn’t tell her anything, but I drove up to Apsley. I had a tent and a sleeping bag, and a loaf of that black bread that never goes bad, and a couple of cans of tuna. That was it.”
“So what did you do—just lie in your tent and cry?”
She closed her fingers together. “No,” she said, and then smiled, wistfully. “No, I hiked up to the top of this big granite cliff overlooking the lake. It was so beautiful. I just couldn’t believe how peaceful it was. I remember thinking that I should probably do something, but it was so nice up there, just sitting. And I kept saying, is this ever beautiful … oh, is this ever beautiful … Then at night, I went swimming. I’d never done that before, in the dark, no one else around …”
Her eyes pooled. She shifted positions, began peeling the wax from her fingertips. Pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her nose. “Then I came home, hired a lawyer, filed for divorce on the grounds of homosexuality, and had the papers delivered to your dad’s office at the university.”
We listened to Bach that night, and then my mother went to bed. I was brittle with exhaustion but couldn’t sleep. Eventually I got up and lit a fire in the back room, settled into the rocking chair and stared out the long windows, imagining her swimming in that quiet, dark lake.
V. Lux Aeterna
When I first moved to my mom’s place—“the farm,” although it was now a patch of wild land—I had arrived with the arrogance of an urbanite. If I’m not surrounded by monuments to humanity, this must be the middle of nowhere. For the first few months, I felt compelled to make regular trips to Toronto for fixes of art films, ethnic food and strong coffee. Very soon, however, my compulsions waned and the fixes became irregular, then rare. After about half a year, I unplugged altogether, tuning instead into the world around me. And to the simplicity of rural life. Cutting asparagus at the bottom of the garden for dinner, eating out on the back porch with my mother, our feet up on the table, plates on our laps, watching the colours of a sunset, laughing about something or other, or nothing.
A green heron came to live in the marsh, its ballerina toes pointing behind it as it flew. The pond became host to a beaver who carried out such extensive construction, renovation and landscaping projects with the surrounding trees that my mother and I could not help but feel sorry for his wife. I trudged through entire nations of mosquitoes, my hand across the back of my neck often bringing back a smooth wipe of blood. But my skin was harder by then, not the grated peel of flesh it had been a few months before, the bugs not so much bothersome as a fortifying challenge. Songbirds trilled and tatted the air, their canticles of invisible lace draping the trees. And on full moon nights, I would listen to the owls and dance barefoot on the grass.
In early summer, after a weekend of trying (briefly, agonizingly, unsuccessfully) to resuscitate my dead marriage, I drove back to the farm and hiked up to the forest, only to find the ground had turned white in my absence, the once-verdant floor a wash of newborn light. They were triads of porcelain, tongues of cream, hundreds of them lying open in the sleepy shade of the maples. I had never come upon such a display of trilliums before. And I had never lain among them as I did that day, finding space enough for my limbs among their leaves and resting my head on my outstretched arm. I had not intended to fall asleep, just to rest in their anodyne beauty, to shed the feel of concrete in my heels, the noise and disappointment I was wearing. But I slid into their stillness, and in the slender moment after opening my eyes, the scatter of snowy blossoms felt like gifts of grace.
That night over dinner, my mother asked if I felt I had failed.
“Because we’re not getting back together, you mean?”
“Yes, well, because it didn’t work out.”
I stared at my plate. Lost my appetite yet again. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Pushed my plate to one side. “It just feels like this disaster.”
My mother smiled sadly. “I felt like that, too, with your dad.”
“What?” I felt a faceful of lines scribble onto my face. “But there was nothing you could do—he was gay.”
She shrugged. “It’s not logical, maybe. But I remember feeling this huge sense of failure.” My mother pushed her plate aside too. “And suddenly, I just sort of dropped out of everyone’s lives. So many of the people we had been friends with stopped calling. I couldn’t help feeling as if I was the one who had done something wrong.”
“But you don’t still feel that way,” I said quickly.
She shook her head. “No. But it took a long time …”
We shifted the food around on our plates with our forks. Pesto that suddenly felt too rich to ingest. “How about a piece of toast
?” I asked, bringing my half-eaten plate to the counter.
“No, thanks,” Mom said. “You go ahead.”
So I did, dropping a slice of black bread into the toaster and watching the coils redden slowly around it.
“So, when you were on that camping trip,” I asked with my back to her. “Did you ever wish you didn’t have kids? I mean, that just made everything so complicated.”
There was a pause.
My stomach tightened.
“That’s sort of like wishing I didn’t have arms,” she finally said. “I mean, kids are just part of you, and you go from there. I just knew I had a problem and I had to figure out what to do.”
“But you didn’t regret having us?” I asked, voice like a loose string.
“No offence …” Mom began, and I turned around to watch her rumple her face comically. “But why would I do a dumb thing like regret the best thing I ever did?”
We both laughed. The toast popped. And suddenly I remembered her coming home from that camping trip, hearing the garage door going up and racing to see her sitting behind the wheel of the car. I would have been eleven. But I could still see her expression as she sat there. She looked so strange. As though she were made of glass. “Hi!” she had called, and then she’d looked normal again. But I had never forgotten that first look on her face. I could even recall the smell of the garage. Cementy with a tang of weed killer.
“You never feel it at the time,” my mom said as Figleaf jumped up and settled onto her lap, “but it is in the most difficult moments of our lives that we do our best work as human beings. I mean, those are our opportunities to come into the depth of ourselves, to open to something greater than ourselves. And it’s often someone else who pushes us there, some life circumstance, because who wants to do it on their own? It’s too painful!” She smirked. “Given the chance, we’d all prefer to just keep being shallow and boring.”
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Page 19
