Alone in the Classroom (29 page)

I told Michael about it too. I had phoned him when I returned to Ottawa, an impulsive call triggered by the sight of children trooping bravely back to school at the beginning of September. He was almost eighty by this time. I was in no great danger. I learned that he was still managing to hang on in the country, thanks to his self-reliance, his appetite for solitude, and the women who went in and out of his life. Every so often the urge to tell him something would come over me and I would pick up the phone. Like my mother, like me, he appreciated the notion that the lake had observed my grandfather’s passing. Perhaps my
grandfather had orchestrated the weather. Or come back as a pickerel.

One summer I spent a week alone in a borrowed cabin on the same lake, just down the shore from my mother’s childhood cabin, which was still there, though fully rebuilt. The nights were full of mice and wind, skitterings under and across wood, the odd mosquito, and on several occasions - storms. The days were divided between berry picking and writing. I took to haunting a neighbour’s raspberry patch, the raspberry season nearly over and no one about. My mother’s voice was in my head. We went out all day, she said. We carried pails and took our lunches. It was so hot. We had to walk and climb for the berries, hike for them. We wore old straw hats and long-sleeved shirts and afterwards we threw ourselves into the lake and oh, how our scratches stung in the water.

This was the place where she was happy, this lake six miles from Argyle with its main arm reaching east towards the surrounding hills. Now here I was in the same spot, fascinated with the jittery, nervous shaking, the incessant movement of a chipmunk’s hindquarters. It would sit poised on a log, ten feet from the picnic table where I was writing, and remind me of the tiny black-and-white snapshot in which a chipmunk ate out of my mother’s sixteen-year-old hand. The benign delight on her face was not unlike her expression in her wedding photograph, and similar to the look her face acquired after two weeks away from housework.

It happened several times when I was a child that she would go away for two weeks to a summer art school in Doon, near Toronto. There she would be taught by more experienced painters and not cook a single meal. When we picked her up at the end of those times, years had fallen away. Her face was softer, without irritation, and her bosom was fuller. Into her brassiere she had slipped those wonderful falsies women used to wear, endowing herself by hand with what nature had failed to provide. Anyone who saw the relaxed, eager face and the round swelling of the summer blouse would have concluded that here was someone in love.

She stood under trees - apple, pear, plum, birch - at the end of a grassy driveway and greeted us, her family, with abundant delight as we clambered towards her. She was in love with us and we with her, not having seen each other for days and days, but she was more in love with what she had been doing and who she had been with: they were the source of the transformation that was unforgettable and thought provoking, especially to a daughter of eight, nine, ten. She turned her laughing, welcoming face on us as if she were turning her head on a pillow, and her eyes were full of deep, womanly satisfaction.

The memories came back during that week at the lake as I jotted down loose thoughts about my mother and the valley - the woods and weather and split-rail fences of this rougher, less finished part of the world. I knew that despite her endless accommodation of my father and her dogged approach to domestic life, she was creative to the tips of her fingers. She was the touchstone, the springboard, the
key but overshadowed influence in my life. I intended to write a book about her, but nothing came of it for a long time. It’s inexplicable, the pause between the clear intent and the actual doing of the work. It can last for decades. In this case, my parents were still alive and I felt constrained when I tried to write about them, and so I put it off. But that doesn’t account for all of my reluctance (or for my willingness now, since they are still alive). It doesn’t account for how, when I finally returned to the material of my mother’s life, I came at it sideways, through the story of Parley Burns, which led me to Connie and to Michael. It’s rather like what happens when you go to visit a certain place in the general vicinity of an old lover’s house. You have no intention of seeing the old lover, you have something entirely different in mind. But then you allow yourself to just drive by.

When I remember it, I think of waiting for him to arrive. The air is hot, especially inside the house, and in the late afternoon shrubs and bushes start to toss their heads, the sky darkens, the winds drop, and the rain begins.

I see history passing me by. I am standing on the sidelines and it is whirling past, and the people who come after will see it one way and it won’t be my way. Liquid wax takes the shape of a candle. But I see the liquid and they will see the candle. His old Buick pulls up across the street. I am watching from the window. The rain has stopped and the heat has eased off. It occurs to me that I have never seen him in a hurry. He moves deliberately, at his own pace, and I am as grateful for that as I am for people not lowering their blinds or drawing their curtains, so that when I walk by I can see into their rooms and know how they
live without having to share their lives. I move away from the window and feel him closing in, this man who turned my life upside down, this heavily romanced and romancing man. I have never been entirely myself with him, not for a single minute, partly because he is so much older and partly because that’s how attraction works.

He still has a big voice, the sort of voice that calls to you across a stream and asks if you’ve caught any trout. His way of phrasing things, his broken heart.

“She was my first love,” he says, leaning forward in the summer chair, bringing himself a foot closer to me on the back porch, “and my greatest love.”

At the funeral in Maine the week before, he had sat apart. Then as soon as it was over, he made a round of rapid goodbyes. He embraced my children, who were thrilled to see him again, and embraced me and shook my husband’s hand, but he was determined to get away. He said he would call me. It was May of 1995.

My father had collapsed during the final hymn. Not a heart attack, it turned out, but a sudden drop in blood pressure brought on by dehydration and nervous strain. Soon he was sitting up, taking sips of water, which he loathed, and adamant that he would not go to the hospital.

Death and sex. They smash through the walls and sit like tanks in the living room.

My parents went back to their hotel, very tired, eager to be alone. The rest of us returned to Connie’s house - in her will she had left it to her old school as an island retreat
- and we had a little supper together, and then songs and poems. How beautiful my children were as they sat across from Syd Goodwin, who stood and sang, battling with his memory, “But I had it a moment ago,” pulling the lyrics out of the crack into which they had fallen, and delivering robustly, grandly, wonderfully, “Almost Like Being in Love” from
Brigadoon
. My daughter sang “Blackbird,” her hands dancing and diving and searching for lost words. My son read “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop after we ate the sole.

Had my parents been at the table, nothing of the sort would have happened. We would have been too formal and careful around my father’s grief.

Syd was in his nineties, still vigorous, with the muscled forearms and enlarged hands of old and dedicated gardeners. He traced his passion for flowers back to a childhood summer in Scotland when his widowed grandfather had taken him back for company and he experienced roses in dappled sunlight. “Old men have to fall in love with something,” he said. His garden on the Ottawa River was a teaching garden for nearby schools, and in her will Connie had left it a considerable sum.

On my back porch, Michael was saying that she always had a tremendous glow about her, kids used to follow her around like blackflies following a cyclist. He remembered a day when she rescued a monarch butterfly. She lifted it half-drowned out of a puddle and held it in her palm, then thought to set it down on the cherry pits, the residue of
the cherries they were eating, and after half an hour it revived and flew away. He said she was uninhibited, shameless, principled. She shimmied her hips in a way that kept him happy all day.

He was wearing old pants, dark grey, an old sweater, dark blue. Even his way of sitting was loose and relaxed. Brown face and neck. Out in the sun. He remembered a man whistling at her in the street as she took off her sweater, and her instant comeback that he was a little big not to have grown up. “She was schoolteacherish in her deadpan humour, her elegance.”

I followed the evening light fading on his face. He still looked much younger than he was; he became more handsome than I remembered. The life of an attraction. Like a pear in the sun. And then the shadows lengthened and he was as old as the hills.

Soon it was dark enough that I went in search of candles, and when I came back onto the porch I learned why Connie had stayed in the same school for thirty-five years. Something kept her there, someone she loved, a married man she loved.

“She was more bohemian than you are.” He leaned back, studying me with his blue-bleak eyes. I was Connie in diluted form.

Neither was I getting him at his best. He was dented and well used.

“You’re conservative.” His voice sounded so husky and cool and aged. “Yes. You are. You’re ready to break through the fence, but you don’t.”

“I’m perfect,” I laughed, “and don’t you forget it.”

I had broken through a fence and fallen into a ditch named Michael. But he was right. I knew he was right, although I hated hearing it.

My daughter rescued us. She arrived home from her summer job at the Ritz Cafe and sat with us for a while. Her arrival reanimated Michael, and his presence surprised and delighted her. She had forgiven me more easily for separating from her father than for putting half a continent between Michael and us. Responding to him, she looked rested and lovely. Her skin was perfect, free of birthmarks, moles, freckles. I say this gratefully. Grateful for the fresh start in front of my eyes. She was nineteen.

Just the three of us, there on the porch overlooking the garden. My husband was away for a few days, my son was staying overnight with a friend. In the darkness the white lilacs came forward, big and splendid, deeply fragrant.

Michael said with emotion, “There’s such
opera
in those flowers. When you look at them, they live and die at the same time.”

Connie indulged Michael the way mothers indulge their sons, so I’ve come to believe. The mothers can’t help it. And the reverse is true. Daughters quicken a mother’s critical faculties. None of this is deliberate or thought out - it’s on the level of the physical. And so sons bask. And daughters fume. And women brood. And men move on. And yet they don’t move on either.

At midnight I was making him coffee. We were in the kitchen, he was leaning against the counter.

“She often drove up to see me,” he said.

“In the summers.”

“Whenever the spirit moved her. She was impulsive. She never thought she did enough with her life. I told her to start her own school. She could have.”

“The teacher she was involved with. The married teacher.”

“He taught history and economics. I never met him.”

“He would have come to the funeral.” I was trying to picture who he might have been and assuming that this was the close friend in New York, the one she went out with every winter evening to one thing or another.

“I imagine so.”

Michael held out his mug for more coffee and I filled it. The kitchen light was unforgiving. I kept looking at him, the way you gaze into a mirror, half convinced that if you look long enough you won’t seem so terribly old, and after a while it works, you resurrect your younger self.

Seeing Michael again was natural and not painful, yet it would keep me awake for nights.

At the funeral, Syd had taken the stairs cautiously. He was still erect in his bearing, but he needed a cane. He had a fine, big head and a ready mouth out of which came one surprising, casual remark after another. He said how much he liked a wild garden, not French gardens, “which are like barbershops. Versailles. But gardens in which plants are
free, not restrained. Anti-military gardens.” He proceeded from plant to plant, not with energy but with intensity, noticing the lovage, mint, chives, and confessing to a new craving for onions, of all things, following a mild heart attack. “It’s like you work beside someone for twenty-five years without noticing her, and then one day you discover she is the apple of your eye.”

We came to Connie’s view of the sea and stood there breathing in the sea air and watching the sailboats in the distance. I was full of sorrow for not having made the effort to see her again before she died. She was supposed to live longer. Eighty-four didn’t seem very old to me, not when I was standing next to Syd who was closing in on a hundred.

He said, “A tender, tender thing comes over you when you get this old. It’s a marvellous thing when you learn how to live. As my mother said, you give over.”

I learned that he had spent years collecting and cultivating early-spring flowers, trilliums and snowdrops especially, developing as many strains as possible. He described how snowdrops struggle out of the ground without any appearance of struggle, suddenly there, small, white, drooping - simple; the first flowers after a long winter. One strain of snowdrop,
Galanthus plicatus
, he had named ‘Susan Graves.’

You think you are paying attention and then someone says something and you snap awake.

A dead child becomes a flower. A gardener weaves her back into the tapestry of life. It doesn’t lessen the tragedy, it makes it resurface every spring, a little shock to the heart.
“A bit of lonesomeness,” Michael had confessed on the porch, “is far better than the anguish caused by a woman’s expectations. I’ve cut off all the girlfriends.”

He was like that. He needed solitude until he needed its opposite. He binged; he cut himself off; he binged.