Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  You are not a man of the world

  nor a man of faith

  yet you want to own me,

  you mindless twit.

  Match riffed a little to end it, and we were all laughing and Jean said, Match, I see you learned to improvise. You pass, good work.

  Then he put on his coat and said, Mahsa, come play at Biddle’s tonight. You can recite that poem, I’ll be the mindless twit who plays with you. Ça fait des lunes qu’on s’est pas vu.

  I can’t tonight, Jean. Ali’s not well.

  Merde, Mahsa, for a few hours? We are making the next musique actuelle festival in Victoriaville. Dig out your gold sari and find a way to get yourself there. I’ll drive you if your worthless husband won’t. Oh, this letter came from Australia for you, to the faculty. I forgot about it. Anyway, it is not my fault, c’est toi qui as disparu dans la brume. Get yourself out.

  KATHERINE

  Ma and Sean were lovers for twelve years. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair and a wistful smile. He had the hands of a man who has not laboured with his body. After the war he had gone back to school with the veterans’ program and he became a lawyer, an unimaginable possibility for a boy who came from the neighbourhood he came from. He chose real estate law because he liked detail and predictable hours. He was a good man with a sense of humour who took care of other people’s problems.

  Ma said, Sean always makes people feel easier. He does that for me too. He can fix anything. Haven’t you noticed how well everything works in here?

  That was true. Taps did not drip and hinges did not squeak. The paint was fresh. He was a good cook. He said, My first day of high school I liked Jenny. She was pretty and funny and made all the boys laugh and a year ahead of me. I thought I’d never have a chance with her. She was miles out of my league but I kept watching her. When I finally got up the courage to talk to her five excruciating years later, she’d already quit school. I was hanging around a variety store trying to see her. She told me she was pregnant and I said, I’ll marry you. We were both still teenagers. But there was war, and I knew I was joining up and I did not want to lose my chance with her. Anyway, she said she didn’t think it would work out, she was still in love with your father. So I gave up and got married and went to war but I never stopped thinking about her.

  Sean shook his head and asked, Why do we think getting married is getting on with life? I came home from the war to a toddler and we had another baby right away but then I stopped because I knew I wasn’t in love and there I was already with two kids. I had my wife to thank for saving up my war earnings and not blowing them like a lot of the gals did. She didn’t mind that I went back to school. My wife was loyal to me but my heart got taken long before I met her. That wasn’t fair.

  He reached over to take Ma’s hand and she said, His wife has multiple sclerosis and he never could bring himself to leave her. I sent him packing when he told me he was still married. Later I decided, Life’s short. And I thought, As far as I know I’m still married too.

  She poked Sean and I knew it was an old joke between them. Sean took his hand from hers and put his arm around her shoulder. He said, Your mother’s a saint. I am a lucky man.

  Ma said, Katie, I should have told you. I did not want you to think badly of me.

  I wouldn’t have. I liked Sean. He was bright and tender and he put a shine on her days. She put a shine on his too. I thought, At least she found someone to love her.

  If I had a favourite time in Ma’s long year of dying, for me it was the spring. I liked the smell of the winter melt and the mills across the bay. I remembered waking up in my little basement bedroom, reading, listening to the first birds, knowing I was going to be outside all summer. My old bed still had the same mattress. I had hoped to make a bit of cash in Hamilton, but the scene was dead there. So I made myself learn how to sit still with her. Slow dying is quiet. A bit of sunshine is precious. A blade of grass looks like a work of art. Ma and Sean and I sat outside and we were grateful for more time after that long, long winter.

  Ma said, I used to watch the kids from this porch on summer nights with Nan. Katie ran the street and bossed all the boys. She liked to play Mafia. There was a lot of talk about Johnny Papalia and the Black Hand Society when she was small. Down at the end of the street was a big sewer pipe she called My Office and no one else was allowed to go in. She liked to sit in there and read. She used to say to them, I’ll break your kneecaps.

  My old stories. When Ma was gone, they’d be gone.

  Sean was always touching Ma, holding her hand, leaning sideways to have his arm around her chair. I’d never seen her let anyone touch her. He was interested in everything about her. It felt strange to see her with a man who loved her. I tried to imagine the years of their hidden life in her basement, the love that sustained them through his dogged sense of duty and her necessary secrets.

  A scrap of 1942 newspaper, the year of Ma’s marriage to my father, was wrapped around a souvenir spoon from Niagara Falls. The article was about a German submarine, a U-553, spotted in the Saint Lawrence River. I wondered if Ma and Henry had managed to go to Niagara Falls. When I showed her the spoon she said with great weariness, Katie, why are you going through all that stuff? Mind your own beeswax.

  The dying live in a place which denies admission. I used to watch Ma stir, see her hand reach unconsciously to her bedside table as if for a cigarette. Then she’d look around and say, I’m still here.

  Before she went to the hospital the last time, she asked me to get a shoebox from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Inside were envelopes of newspaper clippings and square photographs with fluted edges, my father’s goodbye letter, a children’s workbook where Ma practised writing her Chinese characters. I looked at the old photo of her and Henry Lau on their wedding day. She was so young, leaning her shoulder on his.

  Ma traced her finger over his face and said, Henry felt pretty good, wearing his hat tipped down, rakish like that, trying to belong. He gambled away my ring money so he borrowed a ring and I had to give it back after the ceremony. That’s why I’m not wearing one in the picture. I wish I’d had it on.

  She said, Katie, what happened with your father was more complicated than I’ve told you. I really did love him but it was beyond me to cope.

  I said, Ma, you don’t have to tell me. Let it go.

  I want you to know, she said. It was disorganized. I had no one to help me. After I married him I found out he already had a wife in China. He said he thought it didn’t count. Men are strange, aren’t they?

  I had buried the things from my childhood that I did not want to know. But now I was forced to look, and Ma’s stories came out alive and screaming like a newborn baby. My father must have been desperate-poor to sail halfway around the world to a foreign country to find a job, and desperate-lonely to set up a tidy little home in a garage with slippers lined up at the door, pretending he was free, marrying twice. He must have been a bad-ass adventurer too.

  Ma said, That’s why I never let him move in with us. I was afraid someone would find out and take you away again. A girl who married a Chinese during the war had to take his citizenship. I didn’t know until after I did it. But then I couldn’t get a Chinese passport either. I had put us in a bad position and I regretted getting married. I did it to make you legitimate so they couldn’t take you away again. I applied for a passport under my maiden name. It was illegal but I did it. I could have got five years. You thought I didn’t want to come to New York, you thought I couldn’t be bothered travelling, but the truth is I’ve always been worried about crossing borders.

  Our neighbours on Mountain Brow were salt-of-the-earth steelworkers with scrubbed forearms and red shoeshine boxes in their trim brick houses. They moved up there after the Stelco recognition strike when men defined themselves as in or out and made the USWA the biggest union in the country. They had middle-class aspirations and on summer evenings they put their families in Buicks and Fords and drove toward water: Cootes Paradise, the
Beach Strip, LaSalle Park on the other side of the bay across from the mills. It was a time when mothers made their children eat what was on their plates and told them to think of all the starving children in India. No Chinese were hired at the steel mills. The well-paying jobs were for white men and some Italians, and later, for men coming back from the war. I finally saw what Ma was up against.

  In those days the press could say an unmarried pregnant girl was stained by shame and fear, a fallen-woman-child who has injured herself and disgraced her family. There were neighbourhood groups that wouldn’t let unmarried mothers move in. One woman said, I’d rather have a bunch of Negroes living next door than tramps like this. Growing up, I never knew the real reasons there was no restless man in our basement, because Ma always made us out to be something special like some prize-winning orchid. Kids don’t like to be different. My kids were different too.

  She said, I wrote to your father for twelve years after he left. I sent him pictures of you. Then his wife found out and he wrote one last letter and said he couldn’t write anymore and he didn’t. One day to the next it was over. What gave him the right? I got so mad I burned all his.

  Ma looked at me and said, I guess I shouldn’t have. You might have liked them. This is the last address I have for him. In case you want it.

  I received the folded paper with the address written in English and in carefully traced Chinese characters. I did not want to think about this. Ma was dying and I was out of money and I did not like leaving Bea in New York alone and I wanted to play and I had too many other things to worry about. Her story, not mine.

  I said, Well, I didn’t have any luck staying together with T either.

  But I added, to please her, We both got good kids out of it.

  Her brittle eyes lost their shame and she laughed and said, I guess I’ve always had a thing for married men.

  We heard Sean pulling open the door upstairs and he called down, Hey, gorgeous girls. I’m home.

  That was the moment we felt closest through those long months of her dying.

  MAHSA

  Yes, Abbu. I walked her home.

  Asif hung up the telephone and I asked, What did Abbu make you promise?

  Nothing, Mor.

  Asif, you must tell me the truth. What did he say?

  He looked away and his cheeks coloured at the tops of the cheekbones like Ali’s and I felt his defiance and shame. He said, Mor, he asked me to watch Lai.

  How?

  My son looked down, said nothing.

  Asif, answer me.

  Mor, I am only doing what Abbu asked.

  Asif, does your girlfriend’s brother report on you?

  He did not know that I knew about his girlfriend.

  He said, I will tell when I’m ready.

  I said, I know you have a girlfriend. Why have you not told Abbu? Or me? Shall I tell him? Why do you keep it a secret? Are you afraid he will not approve?

  He said, Abbu wants me to take care of Lai.

  I don’t want you to.

  He said, I know that you are teaching too.

  It felt like a slap on the face. What was my son becoming?

  But Asif did not have Ali’s caged-in temper. He was charming like Ali, a Western boy who loved hockey and went to mosque with his father. Together they had started to do benevolent work and Asif was looking forward to his first business trip. He was a gentler version of Ali, not so angry. Always my son had seemed to me uncomplicated but I now felt a sharp twist in my stomach to see him divided inside himself in this alliance with his father.

  I said, Asif, you are better than this. I will make you feel my anger.

  Never had I spoken to him in a way that defied Ali. I saw him register a force in me which was unknown to him. My sweet-faced first child who I would have died for. Soon he would act alone in the world. Could he decide what was good? I knew his habit of trying to be water around stone. He wanted to satisfy me and Ali too. And this, of course, was impossible.

  Lai came home one day, eyes bright again, and said, When you talk to Abbu tell him I’ve got my own money and I’m going to study in Vancouver and I’m seventeen and he can’t make me do things forever.

  That was how she told me she won the scholarship. Then she said, I’m going out.

  I hugged her, took her hands and held her close again. I said, All right, no Quran today. Let’s have tea to celebrate. I’ll tell you a story before you go and you can memorize the last poem.

  With a great sigh she sat down, showing me that she could indulge me even though she was now independent, but I knew she was happy. I told her the story of I timad who was washing clothes in a river in Seville when the Prince Muhammad ibn Abbad was visiting. He was walking with a friend and improvised the first line of a couplet:

  The wind rippled a coat of mail in the water …

  He waited for his friend to complete the couplet but the friend could think of nothing. I timad, the girl by the river, spoke up with a second line:

  What a shield it would make if it froze.

  The prince was impressed, and he asked, Are you married?

  She answered, I am I timad, and I am not married and my master is Arruamik ibn Hajjaj.

  The prince bought her and married her. He was nineteen. She was eighteen. They loved each other deeply.

  Lailuma asked, How do you know they loved each other? He bought her!

  The story says they were in love, so they had to be. And he took a new title, Mu tamid, which he made using her name. When I timad said she would like to see snow, he planted almond trees on the hills over the town so she could look out on the white-as-snow blossoms. Years later, he was overthrown and imprisoned near Marrakesh. She stayed close to him and died a few days before he did. She sent a note, a famous poem, to him when he was travelling and far away:

  I urge you, come faster than the wind to mount my breast

  and firmly dig and plough my body

  and don’t let go until you’ve flushed me three times.

  Lai memorized the Arabic lines and set down her cup and looked at her watch. Can I go now? I’ll come back before dinner. When does Abbu get back from England?

  I said, Another week. Meet me at Biddle’s tonight instead. Jean phoned and asked me to play. We can get something to eat there. Don’t you have a boy you’d like to bring?

  Our eyes met and hers were bright. Perhaps she could begin to forgive me now that she could be free. Perhaps she could shed her anger. Family is an endless cycle of betrayal and forgiveness.

  At the door she turned to say goodbye. Her hair was loose around her face and the little frown between her grey eyes was gone. She wore a bright blue scarf around her neck and tall leather boots. She ran back lightly and hugged me and said, I’m happy, Mor. Then softly she asked, Should I give you back the money?

  I had often wondered where she had hidden it, if she had spent it. My sweet, frightened girl had learned to live a secret life. I said, Keep it with you, Lai. You never know. I have a student who moved to Vancouver. Here is her number. Don’t tell the rest of the family where you’re going. Why not keep that to yourself for a while?

  Her silence spoiled our moment of celebration but before she closed the door she said, I won’t tell anyone, Mor.

  Lai arrived at the club during my second set, with Gaetan, a boy she’d known in middle school. I felt her studying me performing with Jean. After the set, we joined them at their small table and I invited everyone home and set out sweets and tea. Asif came out of his bedroom and Lailuma said, You should have heard Mor play, Asif. She’s fantastic.

  Asif stood in the door frame, staring at Gaetan. His lips tightened, as they have since he was a small boy trying to master a new skill. Gaetan dropped Lailuma’s hand and they confronted each other, skin and smell and dominance. Gaetan said casually, Asif, b’jour, ça va le ga? Asif hesitated and, like the wolf assured of his place in the pack, he walked into the room and pulled out his chair and said, So, you’re the mystery man. Then to L
ailuma, About time you brought him home.

  KATHERINE

  Ma used to leave a cigarette burning in every room so she wouldn’t have to walk over to the ashtray. That’s the truth! That’s how I learned to be efficient. When I want to get anything done I leave half of it in one room and half of it in another. I’ve got staff paper all over the place.

  Sean and Ma were laughing. That’s baloney, she said.

  She was propped up and sliding down her pillows. She was difficult to move. Her last days at home haunt me like a dark, unfading bruise. When she could not stand there was bedbound toileting and washing and a painful bedsore to dress. When I had to move her, to roll her on her side, to trim her fingernails, she screamed at me, Go away. Don’t touch me. You’re hurting me. She made an awful, high-pitched scream. She tried to hit me and flailed out and sometimes I turned away, and when I came back, she still dreaded my touch. She said, Why are you doing this to me? Her finger and toenails were long and clipping them was painful. Even Sean’s touch she sometimes flinched from.

  The day before she went to hospital I was half-asleep in the living room, exhausted with the struggle. Sean was sitting beside her.

  Are you in pain?

  I can’t seem to.

  Sean’s loving eyes reached for hers. She looked through constricted pupils, unfocused filmy eyes, worked hard to stay with us. Sean was not afraid, moistened her lips, kissed them. He said, Jenny, dear heart, we will do what you want. There is an easier. You know. People who know.

  I know, she said. I will have to.

  She did not want to go.

  Sean and I pulled out the old records and tapes and set up her reel-to-reel to have something to do that last night home. When she drifted off, I played him “Dance of the Infidels” which he had never heard.

  I looked at an old box of unlabelled tapes and wound one on. Ma stirred awake and we listened to me as a kid, playing those infernal scales, and trying to riff on “You Are My Sunshine.”

  She lifted her fingers off the blanket and said, I forgot about.