Alone in the Classroom (30 page)

I remembered something he had said to me when we were together. “It’s like musical chairs. We’ll see which woman is left at the end.”

Children tend to know so little about themselves and are so inclined to believe the worst, so inclined to agree they are no good, that they grow up confused and lost and at odds with themselves without knowing why. It’s only with great effort that they overcome this emptiness in themselves, this terrible sense of emptiness.

I was ugly enough at birth that my mother threatened to send me back. She joked with the doctor about it. Another woman would have been in tears over my mashed and flattened face and the size of my nose and the overwhelming number of birthmarks, the small islands of dark brown and red on my chest that formed the Outer Hebrides to the mainland of my discoloured left knee and elbow, and the river of scalded red across the back of my neck that echoed the same mark in the same place on my dreaded
grandmother. Some prenatal happening, an accident in the sea of the womb, had knocked me about, and I carried the evidence with me into this life, where it was mute, one of those untold stories that hover about us and tantalize.

A few years ago, urged on by my mother saying it was the best book she had ever read, I made my way through
Moby-Dick
and came upon these words about Ahab: “he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted.” In this house, I am hard by the nursing home on Powell Avenue where my grandmother lived out her final years and died at eighty-eight, virtually abandoned, after inflicting the wounds that still torment my mother.

It took me years before I bicycled past the home. I had been on my way to the National Library to do more research about the trial of Johnny Coyle for the rape and murder of Ethel Weir, and instead of noting the name of the street and continuing on as I always did, I turned right and bicycled its length, looking for the house number I knew from an old letter, a place we had visited when I was growing up, but not often, once every few years when we drove here from southwestern Ontario. My grandmother would light up at the sight of us, then manage to undo her welcome by letting us know we had neglected her, and we had.

I recognized the three-storey house with the wheelchair ramp, the place my grandmother called jail. More rundown, perhaps, but it had looked rundown when she lived there. It had the force of an anti-magnet, pulling me even as it pushed me away. I felt my grandmother’s deep
loneliness and deep touchiness. I felt it as an ache and a pressure, the scabbed-over relationship she had with my mother. By pressure I mean something moral and close to the bone that’s hard to put into words, but begging to be put into words.

Living here, immersed in my mother’s and grandmother’s past, is more like living in old bathwater than in Melville’s ocean, except for the waves of feeling. Even now, if I want to unsettle my mother, all I have to do is raise the subject of
her
mother. I asked her once what year Granny died, and immediately the air was awkward. She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to be reminded of the aggrieved figure in the nursing home who found fault with everything she did.

“She was never loved as a child,” my mother said. Then couldn’t help adding from her store of bitterness, “Another person would have overcome that.”

My mother meant overcome her tragic beginnings and then overcome the tragic middle of her life, too. Instead, she continued all the way to the tragic end.

My grandmother was only forty-three when she became a widow. She was a hard worker, my mother readily acknowledged, a seamstress whose life began with a cut thread. Her mother’s death, five days after she was born, came from puerperal fever, the “childbed fever” caused when germs enter the womb and lead to blood poisoning, something that could have been avoided so easily by simple cleanliness.

My grandmother was drastically unmothered as a child, read to only once. On the recommendation of others, her father bought a copy of
Alice in Wonderland
, which he opened in their farm kitchen on the Opeongo Road in 1892. He read three pages to her before he got up from his chair in high dudgeon, walked to the kitchen stove, lifted the black lid, and stuffed the book into the fire. He laughed out loud exactly once, at the sight of a dog spinning around in the kitchen chasing its tail. My grandmother went on to marry the peace-loving man who was old enough to be her father, then after he died she was forced to construct her living in a variety of ways, including selling Spirella corsets door to door, or as her three-line ad in the
Mercury
had it, “Spirella Training Garments. Latest models, attractive material. Prices ranging from $6.50. Mrs. E.N. Soper. 48 Argyle Street. Phone 316.”

She took in boarders, male boarders, with the exception of Connie. She did not like women. When she gave birth to my mother, having already produced three sons, she held her up and said, “It’s a girl. What do I do with it?”

And yet my mother named me after her.

For years I cherished this grievance, that in calling me Anne, my mother had set me up for the day when she would stand at the head of the stairs and scream down at me that I was the most selfish person she had ever known, even more selfish than
her mother
. Much later, when I was a young mother myself and apprised Connie of this stinging part of my history, she looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe your mother was hoping to have a different relationship with you.”

Then I was set back on my heels and the whole of my life looked different.

When I was small, my mother used to paint in the summer kitchen of our old house on the hill. Our beloved dog had his beloved armchair in the corner. My mother had her easel. Of her early paintings I recall a close rendering of the pattern on an oriole’s egg, the dark lines like calligraphy on a pale greenish-blue surface. And certain portraits. She painted all four of her children. She painted her mother and sculpted her head in clay. This last came into my possession when we emptied out my parents’ house. My brothers found it shoved to the back of a topmost cupboard in the laundry room, where it had been hidden from view for nearly forty years.

When I take it in my hands, I am holding something severed at the neck that refuses to die. My fingers follow my mother’s working into being the deeply furrowed forehead, the scornful eyes and flared nostrils, the peevish mouth that drags down at one side, and the coiled braids arranged in two figure-eights at the back of her head and held in place by a hairnet. My mother discovered a stash of these hairnets after her mother died, dozens upon dozens of unopened paper packages in her bedside table. “She must have thought she was going to live forever,” my mother said to me and, characteristically, she kept them. Years later, when my young daughter took ballet lessons and needed to hold her bun in place, we found a use for them. I have a package on my desk as I write. “Intimate
hair nets, the un-see-able nets, one size fits all hair do’s, neutral. 59 cents.” I lift the torn envelope to my nose and unbelievably I can smell the nursing home’s bad breath.

The home is a twenty-minute walk northeast of here, almost directly across the canal from the retirement residence where my mother and father have ended up - a coincidence that surprises me anew every day. It’s possible that a hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life.

One oppressively hot afternoon in early August, coming back from the archives, I stopped by the residence to see my parents and bring them breaking news of 1937.

“This is the day that Ethel Weir was murdered seventy years ago. I’ve been reading about her.”

My mother’s face became thoughtful and expressive. “What times those were.” She had a sweater on and another sweater over her knees.

She told me that she and her brothers had disagreed about Johnny Coyle. “I thought he was guilty. Well, the papers were full of it, and it was simpler and less upsetting to pin it on someone.” Her brothers, on the other hand, had thought anyone passing by could have done it, alone as she was in the woods.

A lucid conversation. More typically, my mother has to close her eyes in a furious effort to remember. “Damn,” and she’ll give her head a shake,
“nation.”

I washed her hair. We set up a heater on the bathroom floor to keep her warm. Then she took off her vest
and shirt. Her skin hung like silken parchment. She was skin and bone. She bent over the sink and I poured cupfuls of warm water over her head, then I shampooed and smoothed and rubbed, then worked her scalp with my fingertips, the good scrubbing she wanted, feeling the wens on her scalp like tiny hard nipples; rinsed, conditioned, rinsed; then emptied the sink, wiped up all the water, and lifted the heater onto the counter and trained it in her direction as she sat on the toilet, combing and brushing her still-impressive silvery-white hair.

The child I’d been reading about in the
Mercury
had an old woman’s name: Ethel. And now my mother was like an old, old girl. How was it possible for similar lives to diverge so completely and then become similar again? One day recently, I had rolled up my mother’s pant legs to check on her swollen ankles and knee, and was shocked to see that she had painted her lower legs yellow. In my dismay I thought of Ethel Weir, not just the little palette of colour-makings and blood in her clenched fist but the bruises all over her body.

The last summer in her studio, when she was eighty-seven, my mother asked me to help with her last big painting, four feet by five feet. All it needed was the final application of the beeswax sealant over the finished image. We used long brushes to apply the sealant, then moved a heating lamp inch by inch over the surface until none of the brushstrokes were visible - all slick, like flooding a rink to get smooth ice. Unhappily, in showing me how to do it, how to cook it, as she said, and in taking a turn, she aggravated the compression fracture in her back. Pain
pill, hot water bottle; unable to eat her dinner. The painting was of the stone, one of three, she had picked up at Lake Tuborg on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic when she was there with a group of scientists, living in a tent, sketching and taking photographs for future work; she was in her early seventies then and having the time of her life. A week after she came home, the face of the glacier gave way, slid down and took out the scientific instruments in the streambed and buried the streambed itself from which she had taken the stones. The ice slide lasted a minute and changed everything. My mother got the news a week later, and it was borne in upon her how lucky she was, and how precious the three stones were: they had almost vanished from sight for another million years. After that, they became the soul of her work, sandstone and quartz melted and run together into such interesting lines and colours and shapes that they never stopped feeding her imagination.

Now the stones are in a shoebox on a table in their small living quarters and my mother is stymied, unable to work.

At dinnertime, I accompanied her and my father downstairs to their table in the dining room and sat with them while they had their dinner. My mother emptied her tiny paper cup of pills onto the table and made compositions with them, like Cezanne arranging his peaches. My father pointed out various inmates, as he liked to call them: a small, alert woman who used to be Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s secretary; a retired English professor, one hundred years old, who was rereading Milton; a former air force man whose fingers were severed at the knuckle by
a propeller, but still he managed to play the piano. “That woman,” my father said of someone petite and ancient and pushing a walker, “is very proud of her legs.” Her short skirt revealed dainty legs and dainty knees.

At one of the tables sat a monotone of old woman with her nose in a book.

“Your mother knows who that is,” he said.

My mother smiled and I tensed a little, knowing she had forgotten, as my father was about to point out.

“Who is it?” my father said to her.

My mother kept smiling, having perfected an adroit evasion of his teacherly interrogations. “Oh, some tagalong.”

“She’s from Argyle,” my father said.

“She
is.”
My mother nodded brightly.

“She taught French at the collegiate.” Always quick, my father, to connect with another teacher.

But neither of them could remember her name.

I happened upon the same woman as I was leaving. She was sitting on a bench in the sunshine with her book. “You’re from Argyle,” I said to her, “like my mother. You taught French.” And I told her I was the daughter of Hannah and James Flood.

Her name, she said, was Doris Burns.

I nearly said, I thought you were dead, I was so astonished to be meeting Doris “the Brain” Burns.

She indicated the small volume of French poetry she was reading. “My stepfather gave it to me. He taught French too.”

I took the book from her hands, feeling almost lightheaded, dropped straight down into the eerie pattern of human life.

She was ninety-four years old, she confessed. “Isn’t that disgusting? It’s awful.” Her horror had both of us laughing.

“My mother talks about your stepfather. Mr. Burns.”

“I have good memories of him.” She wasn’t defiant, she was firm. “We read plays together. We dressed up in costume.” She said it again, “Good memories. Of course the poor man was mad. He had himself committed and then he put an end to himself.”

I sat down beside her on the bench. “Tell me more,” I said.

“I remember your mother. She doesn’t remember me. I invited her to a Halloween party once. She refused to bob for apples. Didn’t want to get her hair wet. Or perhaps she felt intimidated by my stepfather. Everyone did.”

The sun shone in our faces and I turned sideways to get it out of my eyes and to see her better. They are their own breed, these capable spinster-teachers of old. A handkerchief poked out of the cuff of her brown cardigan.

I said, “I know your stepfather as Parley. That’s what my mother called him, and my aunt. My aunt taught with him in Saskatchewan.”