Swing Low

by Miriam Toews

  Those were good years. I remember long summer evenings when I would bring ice cream cones to “my girls,” as I liked to call them, and thunderstorms when we’d all stand in the front porch, feeling brave and excited and happy.

  Have lost my temper with good friend and colleague Miss Hill. Why her, of all people? How long, I said repeatedly, has John Q. Public known about this situation? What situation, Mel? asked Miss Hill. I’d repeat my question. How long has John Q. Public known about this situation? Miss Hill tried to calm me down. Nobody knows, Mel, it doesn’t matter anyway what people think … I explode: Oh yes it does! Oh yes it does! And I repeat the question again and again and again with increasing volume until Miss Hill whispers that she’ll be back soon, that I’ll be fine, that things will work out, that everybody wants me to be well again, that nobody blames me! Pointless to mention that I blame myself.

  Those first five or six years of our marriage were relatively blissful, but there were some chinks in the armour, signs perhaps of another impending breakdown. On Saturdays I would sleep until noon, while Elvira baked the weekly supply of buns and did the banking, racing off to the credit union at ten to twelve before it closed for the day. The odd time she would mention how helpful it would be if I were to take on the banking responsibilities. On Sundays I spent most of the afternoon in bed on an extended meddachshlope (Sunday-afternoon nap; some people get an early start on their nap while still in church). Come Monday morning, however, I was raring to go, ready to meet my students and lead them forward through their lessons. My mind spun with ideas for group projects and written assignments, and every morning I eagerly awaited the arrival of my students. I was sowing the seeds of a pattern that would stay with me for life. My reputation as a teacher was growing in the community and so was the number of hours I spent in bed on the weekends. Elvira, in the meantime, was kept busy doing the housework and taking care of Marjorie, born a year and a half into our marriage.

  When she asked me if I was okay, I assured her that I was only tired from teaching school all week, and not to worry, I’d be fine after a bit of rest.

  One day, shortly after her birth, I sat down and stared at little Marjorie, at her lovely green eyes and black hair, her tiny perfect fingers and her beautiful pale skin, and I told myself that I would always be strong for her, that I was her father, and that I would protect her, as best I could, from harm. I told myself that I would insulate her from the sadness of my past by never speaking of it. I thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t know then that I had made another bad decision. And I took it one step further. I decided on that fateful day that I wouldn’t talk to anybody about it, not one single soul. Ever. I had a new home, after all, and a wife and a baby and a career. I was no longer a child, and that part of my life was behind me. After making my decision I felt as though a great weight had lifted. I felt brave and noble, as though I had finally crossed the threshold into manhood.

  It was during this time, in my early twenties, that I began to attend church with unrelenting regularity. Not only Sunday-morning service but Wednesday-evening Bible study, Sunday school, and Sunday-evening service too. My favourite hymn is “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” an ironic but not unlikely choice for a man who has vowed to keep his mouth shut.

  If we were away on holiday the first thing I did when we reached our hotel was inquire at the front desk as to the whereabouts of the nearest Baptist church (a close enough facsimile of the Mennonite church) while Elvira asked about restaurants and the kids asked about the pool. Directions to churches were ones I found easy to follow. I must have some sixth sense for feeling out the location of a church. On holidays, I’d get up early Sunday morning, put on my suit and tie, and make my way to church while Elvira and the kids slept late or frolicked in the swimming pool. Church and the classroom became my haven. My faith in God and my faith in my students supplanted any faith I might have had in myself, but I didn’t know it at the time. Over the years I was awarded countless certificates for perfect attendance. The congregation would applaud when my name was called yet again, and although I smiled and waved good-naturedly as I bounded up to the front of the church to receive my paper, I always wondered why the normally staid congregation applauded, in the sanctuary no less, and kidded me about it on the church steps as we headed home for our roast beef dinners. Did they think I was doing this to amuse them?

  Every morning while shaving I would recite to myself my favourite Bible verses from Proverbs, chapter 3: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.

  My paths led to school and church and home. In school and church I gave all of myself, one hundred percent, and so there was very little, if anything at all, left for home. But home, with Elvira and the girls, was safe and private, a warm cocoon outside of the public spotlight where I could collapse and nobody, except Elvira, would know. And I had been brought up to learn that who we are at home and who we are at work and in the community can be as different as night and day.

  Remarkably, in spite of her drinking, my mother always managed to get her weekly column, “Pot Pourri,” into the local newspaper, the Carillon News. Her column consisted chiefly of gossip she’d heard through the grapevine: marriages, deaths, births, graduations, car trips, missionary postings (as opposed to positions), and church news.

  Later, my students and I would produce journals and newspapers with similar themes, only having to do with the chock-a-block lives of eleven- and twelve-year-olds.

  seventeen

  Nurses are outside my room arguing about my clothes. They have lost my underwear in the wash. Why wasn’t it labelled? one nurse asks the other. I’ll tell the daughters when they come in today, she says. (God forbid!)

  He should wear a johnnie (!) because the other patients don’t know why he’s here. He looks like a doctor when he roams around the halls asking everybody how they’re doing. He refuses to wear a gown, she says. Why should he? asks the other nurse, who has as of this moment become my favourite. I wonder, Is this a game? Underwear lost, move back two spaces. Refuses to wear a johnnie, miss a turn. I think next time we play, I’ll be the CEO instead of the mental patient.

  On August 26, 1963, my father died of stomach cancer, here again, just down the hallway. My brother and my sister and my mother and I were gathered round him for the final time, but he died without saying a word. As in life, so too in death.

  On the eve of my father’s funeral, Elvira and I made love, and nine months later, here in this hospital in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, our second daughter, Miriam, was born.

  Until then I had been able to manage my illness. I still spent a lot of time in bed on the weekends, and accomplished a great deal at school during the week. I continued to take my medication and see my psychiatrist in the city, an intelligent, soft-spoken gentleman who genuinely cared about me. He was different from the psychiatrist I had seen when I was seventeen. But of course, I told him nothing. The odd time I mentioned that my energy was low on the weekends and high during the week, but that was the only indication I gave that I was still on board the “cockeyed caravan” of manic depression. That he continued to see me month after month, year after year, when I offered him so little to work with, speaks volumes about his commitment and perseverance. Years later when he retired, I felt his loss as deeply as I had the death of my own father. Even if he hadn’t been able to help me much, at least he had understood that I needed helping.

  We spoke of my childhood in general terms. I told him I had felt lonely as a boy, but no more, nothing untoward, certainly no hint, even, that my mother had been unkind or that I had been criticized often while my brother and sister had not. Or that I was made to work long hours in the chicken barns as a boy or that, when my baby sister died, I was told not to cry and it would soon be forgotten.

  My mother lived to be eighty-nine years old and never found the time to put a simple marker on my sister’s
grave, nor was its location ever revealed to me. Perhaps if I had known more about my mother’s past, about her own dark secrets and demons, I might have understood why she was the way she was. I do know that she had been a lively, fun-loving girl from a very conservative background who enjoyed playing baseball with the boys and that it was thought by some that she had been asking for trouble because of it. I do know that in bad periods of drinking she would flail about punching and kicking at the empty air around her, shrieking, in a little girl’s voice, the names of various men in the community. Men who are long dead. When my daughter asked her, as an old woman, what she had liked best about her husband, my father, she replied: He was so very gentle.

  I did mention to my psychiatrist, at Elvira’s insistence, that my mother drank, and he asked me then: Would it have been possible that she couldn’t remember, from one day to the next, how she treated you, and so, with your mother as your example, you “forgot” as well?

  Naturally I had no answer for him other than to smile and briefly close my eyes.

  The birth of my second daughter triggered something inside of me, and I stopped talking at home. I didn’t say a word to my wife and daughters for a year. The only sound I made resembled the sounds of abject, wordless grief. Ah, ah, ah, I chanted tonelessly to my infant daughter as I walked her to sleep. At school I was the same as ever: articulate, tireless, enthusiastic, and full of ideas. Around this time I adopted one of the pet expressions I used throughout my teaching career: “Let’s try something new.” At school I offered encouragement to other teachers, making them laugh at my jokes and impressions, reminding them to keep up the good work. I stocked the cupboards of the staffroom with treats for the teachers and, in the spring, I’d set the long conference table with centrepieces of fresh flowers from my garden. I spent huge amounts of money that we didn’t have on gifts for other teachers and extra afternoon snacks for my students. I was eager to please, and Elvira was becoming increasingly alarmed with my erratic spending. Children from lower grades would stop me in the hall and say, Hi, Mr. Toews, can I be in your class when I get to grade six? Marjorie’s classmates would tell her, You’re so lucky to have Mr. Toews as your dad. I knew every student in the school by name and I made a point of finding out some of their individual interests so that when I greeted them in the hallways I could also ask, for instance, Scored any hat tricks lately, Johnny? or, Hello, Mary, how many books did you devour over the weekend?

  If new teachers had recently arrived at the school from elsewhere and if I knew they were feeling lonely or overwhelmed, I would be sure to invite them out to coffee at the Waffle Shop and do my best to make them feel at home. On Christmas Eve, when normal men were hunkering down at home with their families, I was traipsing all over town delivering gifts of ties and socks, which I had purchased from Rieger Clothing, to my male friends and colleagues and boxes of chocolates to my female co-workers. I did this until my retirement, although the list did grow shorter when Elvira reminded me of the cost.

  I befriended the custodians (a smart teacher always befriends the custodians) and built shelves for the new library. I organized baseball tournaments and skating expeditions, and every year my students would compete at the provincial music and spoken word festival, performing, with exuberance if not absolute precision, the humorous pieces that we had rehearsed in class. I made sure I had a smile and a kind word for everyone, especially those I thought were feeling down or lost.

  On several occasions I would somehow forget that Miriam had been born and I would ask Elvira, Have we had our baby? Then she would take me by the hand and lead me to wherever Miriam was and say, Yes, see, here she is.

  There were times when the manic component of my illness struck me at home, and I came to realize, much later in life, that Elvira dreaded these periods of crazed activity and their inevitable crashing conclusions even more than the depression. My children also came to mistrust my sudden enthusiasm, when I’d eagerly suggest we drive to the city and take in a Jets game or go for a burger at the A&W or play a board game or maybe toss the ball around outside. It was with guarded optimism that they’d agree to play, often only because Elvira encouraged them to do so. During these one- or two-week periods of mania, I’d set not one but two or three alarm clocks for five and sometimes four a.m. and often leap out of bed even before they had rung. Once, Elvira hid the alarm clocks in the basement, hoping, to no avail, that I’d stay in bed a little longer.

  I’d spend hours working on the yard and beautifying my flowerbeds, watering, weeding, making them bigger and brighter until the sun came up, and then I’d shower and shave and put on my suit and tie and race off to any number of local coffeeshops, but most often a place on Main Street called Pete’s Inn, where I’d chat animatedly with the farmers and businessmen who gathered regularly and often helped Pete the owner by serving endless rounds of coffee, fetching creamers and packets of sugar from behind the counter, and drying the dishwasher-clean cutlery with a tea towel until it shone. From there I’d race to the school and still have a good hour and a half before the students arrived at nine.

  I’d use this time to prepare for the activities that I’d planned the night before, setting up various work centres around the classroom, making dozens of trips to the supply room for paper and paint and hammers and nails and whatever else we’d need to bring the textbook to life. Or I would work on the history guide I was writing, called It Happened in Canada. I’d greet the teachers as they filtered in through the morning, wishing them well, and then, when the school buses finally rolled in and the town children began to arrive in groups of two or three, I’d stand outside on the sidewalk with my hands on my hips and my shirt sleeves rolled way up, welcoming them warmly and encouraging them to work hard and have a wonderful day.

  Only a person who had lived with me for several years, a person such as E., could know that all this “goodness” would soon come crashing down around us like the walls of Jericho.

  And that spring of 1964, with the birth of my second daughter, it fell harder than it ever had. Not a word at home for one entire year. Was I angry? Was I, subconsciously, punishing Elvira for her happiness at having another child finally after six frustrating years of trying to get pregnant? Was I insane? Why wasn’t my medication working? The pills I took, incidentally, were supposed to keep me somewhere in the middle of my moods, running the gauntlet between depression and mania, but generally leaning towards the safer side of depression. I don’t know why the birth of my second daughter, a normally joyous event, would plunge me into darkness and why the birth of my first daughter did not. Did it have something to do with the birth, so many years before, of my younger brother, Reg? When my mother became trapped in a psychotic whirlwind of grief over the death of my sister, of her obsession with her new baby, of maintaining her pious public image, and of her private drinking to quell the ghosts that haunted her?

  I had a six-year-old daughter who meant the world to me, and during this time, when she entered my bedroom to tell me about her adventure-packed day, I turned away from her and faced the wall.

  At school, however, where she was a grade one student, I’d smile at her tenderly if her gaze met mine during public assembly and I’d wave to her from across the school playground during recess. After school, if I wasn’t staying late to work on some project or another, she and I would walk home together, hand in hand. Perhaps if I was a trained psychoanalyst I could make sense of everything, of the way I was, of the way I so desperately didn’t want to be. All I can do is shake my head and wonder how I didn’t destroy my family entirely. I suppose I had come, since being born, to associate home with danger and sadness, with the need to take cover, to lie low and hope it all goes away soon. Home, ironically, had become the very cause of my homesickness. I wasn’t smart enough to know that our home could be anything different, and yet I knew that I wanted it to be. I wanted to create a happy home but what I really wanted was the memory of a happy home. I was caught in a no-man’s land, paralyzed in a plac
e that lay somewhere in between my past and my future, unable to move or dream or call out for help, or even die.

  I wanted more than anything for my children to be happy and well cared for, and at the same time their happiness seemed to cut me like a knife. I was envious of my own children’s good fortune, of their easy laughter and long, lazy days of play, and most of all of Elvira’s abundant love for them and her delight in everything they said and did. The more I resented it, the harder I worked to maintain it. I told myself I would work as hard as I could to provide for them a life of freedom, travel, new clothes, culture, university, whatever their hearts desired. I would work for them, and Elvira would be their best friend and confidante. I would make them love me by working hard, by being the best teacher in the world. I should have learned, from my childhood, that hard work guaranteed nothing.

  I continued to dream of homelessness two or three times a week, each dream ending in black as though a thick dark dye had been emptied into my brain to blot out everything, every single pinprick of light that may have accidentally filtered into my subconscious, like a small child who wanders into traffic, too young, too beautiful, too precious to be in such a perilous and chaotic place.