The telegram said: YOUR MOTHER DIED YESTERDAY, RETURN PLEASE, FATHER.
I read it three times. At first I decided it was a trap: my mother had sent it herself, she'd got the address off one of my postcards left carelessly lying around by my father, she was trying to lure me back within striking distance. But in that case she would have said YOUR FATHER DIED YESTERDAY. However, she might have realized that I wouldn't want to return while she was still alive, and sent the telegram as a false all-clear signal.
But what if she really was dead? In that case she'd turned up in my front parlor to tell me about it. I didn't at all want this to be true, but I suspected it was. I would have to go back.
When I reached the flat, the Indian radical was sitting cross-legged on the floor, explaining to Arthur, who was on the sofa, that if he had sexual intercourse too much he would weaken his spirit and thereby his mind, and would become politically useless. The thing to do, he said, was to draw the seminal fluid up the spinal column into the pituitary gland. He used the example of Gandhi. I listened to this conversation for a couple of minutes through the half-opened door (listening outside doors was a habit I'd retained), but since I couldn't hear what Arthur was answering, if anything, I walked in.
"Arthur," I said, "I have to go back to Canada. My mother died."
"If she's dead already," he said, "why go back? There's nothing you can do."
He was right, but I needed to know she was really dead. Even if I phoned the house long-distance and spoke with my father, I couldn't be sure.... I would have to see her. "I can't explain," I said, "it's a family thing. I just have to go back."
Then we both remembered that I didn't have any money. Why hadn't my father sent me some? He'd assumed that I was competent and solvent; he always assumed that there was nothing the matter with me, I was a sensible girl. My mother would have known better. "I'll think of something," I said. I sat on the bed and chewed my fingers. My typewriter was in hock, Escape from Love was locked in my suitcase, untouched since I'd moved in with Arthur; it was only half done. I had hardly enough money for the paper to complete it. I could write my father for money, but that would be a precious pound, and besides, my bank account here was in the name of Louisa K. Delacourt. That would be hard to explain to my father, especially by telegram. It might hurt his feelings.
I slipped the manuscript into my bag. "I'm going to the library," I told Arthur. Before I left, I pinched one of the New Zealander's cheap yellow notepads and a ballpoint pen. No use to borrow: there would have been an inquisition.
For the next two days I sat in the library reading room, laboriously block-printing and tuning out the rustlings, creakings, wheezings and catarrhal coughs of the other occupants. Samantha Deane was kidnapped precipitously from her bedroom in the house of the kindly guppy man; threatened with rape at the hands of the notorious Earl of Darcy, the hero's disreputable uncle; rescued by the hero; snatched again by the agents of the lush-bodied, evil minded Countess of Piedmont, the jealous semi-Italian beauty who had once been the hero's mistress. Poor Samantha flew back and forth across London like a beanbag, ending up finally in the hero's arms, while his wife, the feeble-minded Lady Letitia, died of yellow fever, the Countess, now quite demented, plunged to her death off a battlement during a thunderstorm and the Earl was financially ruined by the Pacific Bubble. It was one of the shortest books I'd ever written. Fast-paced though, or, as the jacket put it, event followed event to a stunning climax. I picked up a copy in Toronto when it came out. Samantha was charming in blue, her hair rippling like seaweed against an enormous cloud; Castle DeVere turreted with menace in the background.
But I got less for it than usual, partly because of the length - Columbine paid by the word - and partly because the bastards knew I needed the money. "The conclusion is a little unresolved," said the letter. But it was enough for a one-way airplane ticket.
My mother was dead, all right. Not only that, I'd missed the funeral. I didn't think to telephone from the airport, so as I walked up the front steps of the house in Toronto I didn't know whether or not anyone would be there to welcome me.
It was evening and the lights in the house were on. I knocked; no one answered so I tried the door, found it open, and walked in. I could see she was dead right away because some of the plastic covers were on the chairs and some were off. My mother would never have done a thing like that. For her, they were either on or off: the living room had two distinct and separate personalities, depending on whether or not she was entertaining. The uncovered chairs looked faintly obscene, like undone flies.
My father was sitting in one of the chairs, wearing his shoes. This was another clue. He was reading a paperback book, though abstractedly, as if he no longer needed to absorb himself in it completely. I saw this just for an instant before he noticed me.
"Your mother's dead," he said. "Come in and sit down, you must have had a long trip."
His face was more furrowed than I'd remembered it, and also more defined. Previously it had been flat, like a coin, or even like a coin run over by a train; it had looked as though the features had been erased, but not completely, they were smudged and indistinct as if viewed through layers of gauze. Now however his face had begun to emerge, his eyes were light blue and shrewd, I'd never thought of him as shrewd; and his mouth was thin, even a little reckless, the mouth of a gambler. Why had I never noticed?
He told me that he'd found my mother at the bottom of the cellar stairs when he'd returned from the hospital one evening. There was a bruise on her temple and her neck was oddly twisted, broken, as he recognized almost immediately. He had called an ambulance for form's sake although he knew she was dead. She was wearing her housecoat and pink mules, and she must have tripped, my father said, and fallen down the stairs, hitting her head several times and breaking her neck at the bottom. He hinted at the amount she had been drinking lately. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death. It could not have been anything else, as there were no signs of anyone having been in the house and nothing had been taken. This was the longest conversation I ever had with him.
I was overcome by a wave of guilt, for many reasons. I had left her, walked out on her, even though I was aware that she was unhappy. I had doubted the telegram, suspecting a plot, and I hadn't even made it back for the funeral. I had closed the door on her at the very moment of her death - which, however, couldn't be determined exactly, as she had been dead for five or six hours at least by the time my father found her. I felt as if I'd killed her myself, though this was impossible.
That night I went to the refrigerator, her refrigerator, and gorged myself on the contents, eating with frantic haste and no enjoyment half a chicken, a quarter of a pound of butter, a banana cream pie, store-bought, two loaves of bread and a jar of strawberry jam from the cupboard. I kept expecting her to materialize in the doorway with that disgusted, secretly pleased look I remembered so well - she liked to catch me in the act - but despite this ritual, which had often before produced her, she failed to appear. I threw up twice during the night and did not relapse again.
My suspicions began the next day, when my father said to me at breakfast, looking at me with his new, sly eyes and sounding as if he'd rehearsed it, "You may find this difficult to believe, but I loved your mother."
I did find it difficult to believe. I knew about the twin beds, the recriminations, I knew that in my mother's view both I and my father had totally failed to justify her life the way she felt it should have been justified. She used to say that nobody appreciated her, and this was not paranoia. Nobody did appreciate her, even though she'd done the right thing, she had devoted her life to us, she had made her family her career as she had been told to do, and look at us: a sulky fat slob of a daughter and a husband who wouldn't talk to her, wouldn't move back to Rosedale, that stomping ground of respectable Anglo-Saxon money where his family had once lived, was he ashamed of her? The answer was probably yes, although during these conversations my father would say nothing; or he would
say that he hadn't liked Rosedale. My mother would say that my father didn't love her, and I believed my mother.
Stranger still was his need to say to me, "I loved your mother." He wanted to convince me, that was clear; but it was also clear that he hadn't really been expecting me to come back from England. He'd already given my mother's clothes to the Crippled Civilians, he'd made footmarks all over the rug, there were dirty dishes in the sink at least three days old, he was systematically violating all the rules. He said an even more suspicious thing on the second day. He said, "It isn't the same without her," sighing and looking at me as he did so. His eyes pleaded with me to believe him, join the conspiracy, keep my mouth shut. I had a sudden image of him sneaking out of the hospital, wearing his white mask so he would not be recognized, driving back to the house, letting himself in with his key, removing his shoes, putting on his slippers and creeping up behind her. He was a doctor, he'd been in the underground, he'd killed people before, he would know how to break her neck and make it look like an accident. Despite his furrows and sighs he was smug, like a man who'd gotten away with something.
I told myself, in vain, that this was not the sort of thing he would do. Anything is the sort of thing anyone would do, given the right circumstances. I began to hunt for motives, another woman, another man, an insurance policy, a single overwhelming grievance. I examined my father's shirt collars for lipstick, I sifted through official-looking papers in his bureau drawers, I listened in on the few phone calls he received, crouching on the stairs. But nothing turned up, and I abandoned my search a lot sooner than I would have if I'd been convinced. Besides, what would I have done if I'd found out my father was a murderer?
I switched to speculations about my mother; I could afford to speculate about her, now that she was no longer there. What had been done to her to make her treat me the way she did? More than ever, I wanted to ask my father whether she was pregnant before they got married. And what about that young man in her photograph album, with the white flannels and expensive car, the one she said she'd been more or less engaged to? More or less. Some tragedy lurked there. Had he thrown her over because her father had been a stationmaster for the CPR? Was my father second-best, even though he was a step up for her?
I got out the photograph album to refresh my memory. Perhaps in the expressions of the faces there would be some clue. But in all the pictures of the white-flanneled man, the face had been cut out, neatly as with a razor blade. The faces of my father also were missing. There was only my mother, young and pretty, laughing gaily at the camera, clutching the arms of her headless men. I sat for an hour with the album open on the table before me, stunned by this evidence of her terrible anger. I could almost see her doing it, her long fingers working with precise fury, excising the past, which had turned into the present and betrayed her, stranding her in this house, this plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit. That was what she must have felt. It occurred to me that she might have committed suicide, though I'd never heard of anyone committing suicide by throwing themselves down the cellar stairs. That would explain my father's furtiveness, his wish to be believed, his eagerness to get rid of her things, which would remind him perhaps that he was partly to blame. For the first time in my life I began to feel it was unfair that everyone had liked Aunt Lou but no one had liked my mother, not really. She'd been too intense to be likable.
It was partly my failure as well. Had I been wrong to take my life in my own hands and walk out the door? And before that I had been the fat mongoloid idiot, the defective who had shown her up, tipped her hand: she was not what she seemed. I was a throwback, the walking contradiction of her pretensions to status and elegance. But after all she was my mother, she must once have treated me as a child, though I could remember only glimpses, being held up by her to look at myself in the triple mirror when she'd brushed my hair, or being hugged by her in public, in the company of other mothers.
For days I brooded about her. I wanted to know about her life, but also about her death. What had really happened? And especially, if she'd died in her pink housecoat and mules, why had she turned up in my front parlor wearing her navy-blue suit from 1949? I decided to find Leda Sprott and ask her for a private sitting.
I looked her up in the phone book, but she wasn't there. Neither was the Jordan Chapel. I took a streetcar to the district where it had stood, and walked up and down the streets, searching for it. Finally I found the house; no doubt about it, I remembered the gas station on the corner. But a Portuguese family lived there now, and they could tell me nothing. Leda Sprott and her tiny band of Spiritualists had vanished completely.
I stayed with my father for nine days, watching my mother's house disintegrate. Her closets and dresser drawers were empty, her twin bed stood made but unused. Dandelions appeared on the lawn, rings around the bathtub, crumbs on the floor. My father did not exactly resent my presence, but he didn't urge me to stay. We had been silent conspirators all our lives, and now that the need for silence was removed, we couldn't think of anything to say to each other. I used to imagine that my mother was keeping us apart and if it weren't for her we could live happily, like Nancy Drew and her understanding lawyer Dad, but I was wrong. In fact she'd held us together, like a national emergency, like the Blitz.
Finally I got a room by myself, on Charles Street. I couldn't really afford it, but my father told me he was planning to sell the house and move into a one-bedroom apartment on Avenue Road. (He eventually married again, a nice legal secretary he met after my mother's death. They moved to a bungalow in Don Mills.)
For a while after my mother's death I couldn't write. The old plots no longer interested me, and a new one wouldn't do. I did try - I started a novel called Storm over Castleford - but the hero played billiards all the time and the heroine sat on the edge of her bed, alone at night, doing nothing. That was probably the closest to social realism I ever came.
The thought of Arthur contributed to my depression. I should never have left, I told myself. We'd kissed goodbye at the airport - well, not the airport exactly, but he'd seen me to the BOAC bus terminal - and I'd told him I'd come back as soon as I could. I'd written him faithfully every week, and I'd explained that I couldn't return just yet as I didn't have the money. For a while he'd answered; odd letters, full of news about his leaflet activities, which he signed "Yours sincerely." (I signed mine, "Love and a thousand kisses, XXXX.") But then there was silence. I didn't dare to think about what had happened. Was there another woman, some pamphlet-distributing chippy? Maybe he'd simply forgotten about me. But how could he, when I'd left most of my luggage in his apartment?
I got a job as a makeup demonstrator at the cosmetics counter in Eaton's, selling mascara. But I cried a lot at night and my eyes were puffy, so they switched me to wigs. Not even the good wigs, the synthetic ones. It wasn't very interesting work, and the customers' fruitless quest for youth and beauty depressed me. Occasionally when no one was looking I would try on the wigs myself, but it was mostly the gray ones. I wanted to see how I would look when I was older. I would soon be old, I felt, and nothing would happen to me in the meantime because I wasn't interested in anything or anyone. I'd been deserted, I was convinced of it now. I was miserable.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I sat in exile on the Roman curb, on top of my portable Olivetti in its case, and wept. Pedestrians paused; some said things to me. I wanted Arthur back, I wanted him right here, with me. If I explained, how could he be angry? I'd handled things very badly....
I stood up, wiped my face with a corner of my scarf, and looked around for a newsstand. I bought the first postcard I could find and wrote on the back of it, I'm not really dead, I had to go away. Come over quickly. XXX. I didn't sign my name or put any address: he would know who it was and where to find me.
After I'd mailed it I felt much better. Everything would be all right; as soon as he got the postcard Arthur would fly across the ocean, we would embrace, I'd tell him everything, he would forgive me, I wo
uld forgive him, and we could start all over again. He would see that I couldn't possibly go back to the other side, so he would change his name. Together we would bury all his clothes and buy new ones, once I'd sold Stalked by Love. He would grow a beard or a moustache - something distinguished and pointed, not the amorphous frizz that made men look like out-of-control armpits - and he might even dye his hair.
I remembered the hair dye. I located the equivalent of a drugstore and spent some time going through the rinses, tints, washes and colorings. I finally settled for Lady Janine's "Carissima," a soft, glowing chestnut, autumn-kissed, laced with sunlight and sprinkled with sparkling highlights. I liked a lot of adjectives on my cosmetic boxes; I felt cheated if there were only a few.
To celebrate the birth of my new personality (a sensible girl, discreet, warm, honest and confident, with soft green eyes, regular habits and glowing chestnut hair), I bought myself a fotoromanzo and sat down at an outdoor cafe to read it and eat a gelato.
If Arthur were here he'd be helping me to read the fotoromanzo. We practiced our Italian that way, reading the speeches from the rectangular voice balloons out loud to each other, looking up the hard words in our pocket dictionary and figuring out the meanings from the black-and-white photos. Arthur found this faintly degrading; I found it fascinating. The stories were all of torrid passion, but the women and men never had their mouths open and their limbs were arranged like those of mannequins, their heads sat on their necks precise as hats. I understood that convention, that sense of decorum. Italy was more like Canada than it seemed at first. All that screaming with your mouth closed.
In this one the mother was secretly the lover of the daughter's fiance, fidanzato. "I love you," she said, plaster-faced; Ti amo. She was wearing a negligee. "Do not despair," he said, gripping her shoulders. They never seemed to say anything I really needed, like "How much are the tomatoes?" In the next square the woman's negligee was slipping off her shoulder.