Swing Low (19 page)

T
he girls have hired a woman, a private consultant who understands the system, they say, to help them convince the doctors here that I need to be transferred to a psychiatric facility in the city immediately. That I have gone for fourteen days without seeing a psychiatrist. That the psychiatrist who saw me when I was first admitted retired that very afternoon. (Hmmm, was it something I didn’t say?) But that before retiring he had said I was a very sick man. Daughters are worried sick, very angry. This woman will help, they say, she knows how to work the system. This woman says it is imperative that Elvira remains in the city, health fragile, needs to rest. Elvira unsure. Enraged with treatment, furious with Bethesda, says if it comes to dying or being treated at Bethesda, let her die. Will have a stroke if she talks to one more Steinbach doctor. Wonders why she is not listened to re her own husband. (Still a fire under that
grey thatch.) Wife and daughters in city: transfer husband. To them. Have lost track of details re my health, transfer, this hired woman. Woman says Elvira must not return to house. Or they will let me go home to her, will kill her. Must have help. Is not listened to. Must have home care. Failed kitchen test. Elvira wants me in the city. Girls want me in the city. Fourteen days, they say, fourteen days! Have signed several documents, girls tell me it is the right thing to do. No idea. Write it down.

On that spring day in 1968 when Elvira jumped for joy, my plan was hardly a reality. I still had to convince the school board that it was a good idea and ensure that my job would be there for me at the end of the year. Several days later I met with the board and they were all in agreement.

Elvira found an apartment for us on Grant Avenue, across from the new swimming pool built for the 1967 Pan-American Games. She signed the kids up for swimming lessons and signed herself up for an aquatic exercise class in her never-ending (and unnecessary) quest to lose ten pounds. I registered at the University of Manitoba, Marjorie was enrolled in grade five for the following September at Rockwood Elementary School, on Rockwood Avenue, just a stone’s throw from our apartment, and Miriam, four years old and born restless, was more than ready for a change.

Coincidentally, my sister, Diana, and her family were home on furlough and needed a place to stay. Elvira and I agreed that they could live in our house for a nominal rent
while we were in the city. I wrote down elaborate instructions for the care of my flowers and shrubs and left them with my brother-in-law, hoping and praying he’d follow my directions.

Elvira bid a fond farewell to her multitude of friends, insisting that they come to the city and visit, and I promised Mother we would call and see her often. On the way to the city, Elvira hummed and whistled and clutched at my wrists as I drove, telling me over and over how happy she was to be moving to the city, and Miriam scrambled back and forth from the front seat to the back, to the front, to the back, while Marjorie remained quietly in her corner filled with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.

The year proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Somehow I managed to complete my degree, limping gamely towards the end of my courses, dragging my body out of bed to attend classes, writing my essays in manic fits and starts as Elvira urged me on, and collapsing, literally, on the finish line, unable to move or even think.

It was a complete nervous breakdown, similar to the one I experienced when I was seventeen. The mania that had propelled me forward for the last few years had now pushed me right over the edge, and I fell and crashed, in spite of all of the medication that was supposed to keep me on the straight and narrow, and in spite of my long-suffering psychiatrist’s attempts to get me to talk, to figure me out, to balance my chemicals, and to prevent me from losing my mind.

I was hospitalized for ten days at the Concordia Hospital, during which time Elvira and the girls packed up
our belongings between visits to me in the psychiatric ward, cancelled their lessons at the pool, and said good-bye to the few friends they had made in the city.

In addition to missing her friends and suffering the indignity and mind-numbing boredom of having been placed in a slow-learners’ class, something we were unaware of until the end of the term, Marjorie was also involved in a bizarre assault right outside our apartment block. One winter evening, on her way home from a church activity several blocks away, she was stopped on the sidewalk by two men, one of whom was carrying a white pail, who asked her for directions to a certain place in the city. She told them she didn’t know where it was, and as she turned to enter our building the man with the pail dumped its contents over Marjorie’s head. The men fled and Marjorie, shocked, terrified, and humiliated, appeared at our apartment door looking as though she’d fallen into a tar pit.

We never did find out what the mysterious brown substance was. It stained her woollen winter coat and her white furry hat, but it didn’t have much of an odour and it washed off her skin easily. In hindsight I realize that we should have phoned the police immediately and had the substance examined. We should have taken Marjorie to a doctor to make sure this awful brown sludge wouldn’t harm her. We should have done more. As Elvira comforted Marjorie long into the night, lying beside her in her small twin bed, stroking her brow, murmuring words of love and sympathy, and finally falling asleep with Marjorie cradled in her arms, I lay in my bed blaming myself and wondering what had become of the man who had promised his infant daughter that no harm
would ever come to her. It was my fault, I determined. If I hadn’t been so eager to obtain a university degree, in order to further my own career, in order to make more money, in order to succeed, in order to provide and impress, in order to feel good about myself, my daughter would not have been violated. In my mind I came to associate the city with evil, despair, and personal failure.

Nor could I acknowledge that I had, in fact, accomplished my goal of getting a university degree, or that the city had offered many exciting opportunities to Elvira, or even that it had been, say, an “interesting experience.” All I saw was darkness, and I longed to return to the comfort and familiarity of my hometown and my job at Southwood School. Originally Elvira and I had planned to move back home in June, when Marjorie’s school year at Rockwood was over, but in light of the circumstances, we agreed that we would go home the day after my last class and I would return to the city to write my final exams.

Again Elvira packed the boxes and made the necessary arrangements, dealing with the leasing agency, transferring Marjorie back to her school in Steinbach. Marjorie was ecstatic and relieved to be going home to her friends and classroom. She hollered out instructions to the piano movers as they hauled her prized possession down three flights of stairs and into their truck, on its way back to its rightful place in the pink house on First Street.

There was, however, one small glitch. Diana and her family would not be leaving the house, our house, until June. That was the plan, after all, and whose fault was it that we had returned early if not mine? Elvira and I arranged to
live in the parsonage of the E.M.B. church, which just happened to be vacant at the time. Marjorie, wishing not to inconvenience Diana by showing up daily to play her piano, made the trek across town to her aunt Mary’s house instead, where she was allowed to play to her heart’s content.

I had believed, of course, that I would be back at Southwood in the fall, and if there was anything that had gotten me through my period of depression in the city, it was that.

But I was informed, shortly after moving back to town, that my contract at Southwood would not be renewed, in spite of their verbal agreement to the contrary. I realized that the school board, hearing of my breakdown and my hospitalization, had lost confidence in me, perhaps not as a teacher but certainly as a principal whose job it is to keep everything running smoothly, whose job it is to be reliable. And one doesn’t run an elementary school from one’s hospital bed.

There’s a verse in chapter 16 of Job: I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. Years earlier, my psychiatrist had used the same words to describe me: Mel, he said, you’re a mark. Suffice to say, I’d never work as a principal in that town again. Or in any town, for that matter. But I did, eventually, get my house and flowers back. And that fall, I started where I had left off years ago, teaching grade six at Elmdale Elementary. They had always hoped I’d return.

There’s a verse in Psalm 16: Thou wilt show me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. This is the verse I chose to underline in my Bible that summer and recite to my reflection every morning as I shaved. In order to maintain a positive attitude, to get out of bed every weekday morning and do my job, I told myself that, if nothing else, God loved me, and that by being good, by being decent and civil and by working hard, I would one day experience the fullness of joy.

Never, ever did I admit or acknowledge even to myself that I was sick. My lapses into depression, I felt, were due to a weakness in my character, and my disappointments and failures in life, though they were rather typical of any average life, were what I felt I deserved. And so I resolved, with steely determination, to become a better human being.

That summer I spent hundreds of hours preparing my classroom for the fall, enlivening it with colourful paint and plants and cushions and curtains and posters and supplies, researching aspects of Canadian history and politics that I had previously overlooked, brushing up on my math (my least favourite subject), planning assignments, group projects, field trips, seating orders, and study guides. Every evening and late into the night I read and reread the biographies of great men and women, hoping to learn something about living one’s life to the fullest and leaving one’s mark (as opposed to being one) on this Earth. I filled boxes and then filing cabinets of notes to myself on living and
teaching, and in no time the lines between the two subjects blurred. Living was teaching. Teaching was my life.

I didn’t just want to be a good teacher. I wanted to be a great teacher, and in order to become one, I felt I had to act as a filter. That is, I had to absorb the negative energy in the classroom, the hurt, the sadness, the confusion in my students. Whatever it was that blocked the mind from understanding, from absorbing information, and from experiencing the exhilaration of learning.

When I returned to Elmdale I was on fire. As I would be for the rest of my teaching days. At home, of course, unless I was manic, I rested. Marjorie was now in grade six and I was her homeroom teacher, a situation requiring some delicacy in how we treated each other, as student, daughter, teacher, or father. But generally it worked out well. Marjorie was a conscientious, clever, well-liked student. In fact, she was one of my brightest students ever, but I waited until she was almost forty before I told her as much. We tended to stay out of each other’s way as much as possible. Sometimes her presence would startle me. I would look up from my desk and see her staring at me with those large green eyes she inherited from yours truly and I’d wonder what she was thinking.