Stones

  Then—or shortly thereafter—our father did indeed arrive, but he said he wasn’t hungry and he wanted to be left alone with Mother.

  In half an hour the children were called from the kitchen where we had been doing the dishes and scooping up the remains of the meal. I—the child my mother called The Rabbit—had been emptying the salad bowl, stuffing my mouth with lettuce, tomatoes and onion shards and nearly choking in the process. We all went into the sitting-room with food on our lips and tea towels in our hands: Father’s three little Maxes—Cy and Rita and Ben. He looked at us then, as he always did, with a measure of pride he could never hide and a false composure that kept his lips from smiling, but not his eyes. I look back now on that moment with some alarm when I realize my father was only twenty-seven years old—an age I have long survived and doubled.

  “Children, I have joined the army,” he said—in his formal way, as if we were his customers. “I am going to be a soldier.”

  Our mother had been weeping before we entered the room, but she had dried her eyes because she never allowed us to witness her tears. Now, she was smiling and silent. After a moment, she left the room and went out through the kitchen into the garden where, in the twilight, she found her favourite place and sat in a deck-chair amidst the flowers.

  Cy, for his part, crowed with delight and yelled with excitement. He wanted to know if the war would last until he was a man and could join our father at the front.

  Father, I remember, told him the war had not yet begun and the reason for his own enlistment was precisely so that Cy and I could not be soldiers. “There will be no need for that,” he said.

  Cy was immensely disappointed. He begged our father to make the war go on till 1948, when he would be eighteen.

  Our father only laughed at that.

  “The war,” he said, “will be over in 1940.”

  I went out then and found our mother in the garden.

  “What will happen to us while he’s away?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. And then she said: “come here.”

  I went and leaned against her thigh and she put her arm around my shoulder and I could smell the roses somewhere behind us. It was getting dark.

  “Look up there,” she said. “The stars are coming out. Why don’t you count them?”

  This was her way of distracting me whenever my questions got out of hand. Either she told me to count the stars or go outside and dig for China. There’s a shovel in the shed, she would tell me. You get started and I will join you. Just as if we would be in China and back by suppertime.

  But that night in August, 1939, I wasn’t prepared to bite. I didn’t want to dig for China and I didn’t want to count the stars. I’d dug for China so many times and had so many holes in the yard that I knew I would never arrive; it was much too far and, somehow, she was making a fool of me. As for the stars: “I counted them last night,” I told her. “And the night before.”

  “Oh?” she said—and I felt her body tense, though she went on trying to inject a sense of ease when she spoke. “So tell me,” she said. “How many are there?”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said. And sighed. “Just twelve. I thought there might be more than twelve.”

  “I mean twelve zillion,” I said with great authority. “Oh,” she said. “I see. And you counted them all?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  For a moment she was quiet. And then she said: “what about that one there?”

  One week later, the war began. But my father had already gone.

  On the 14th of February, 1943, my father was returned. He came back home from the war. He did this on a Sunday and I recall the hush that fell upon our house, as indeed it seemed to have fallen over all the city. Only the sparrows out in the trees made sound.

  We had gone downtown to the Exhibition Grounds to meet him. The journey on the streetcar took us over an hour, but Mother had splurged and hired a car and driver to take us all home. The car, I remember, embarrassed me. I was afraid some friend would see me being driven—sitting up behind a chauffeur.

  A notice had come that told us the families of all returning soldiers would be permitted to witness their arrival. I suspect the building they used for this was the one now used to house the Royal Winter Fair and other equestrian events. I don’t remember what it was called and I’m not inclined to inquire. It was enough that I was there that once—and once remains enough.

  We sat in the bleachers, Cy and Rita and Mother and me, and there was a railing holding us back. There must have been over a thousand people waiting to catch a glimpse of someone they loved—all of them parents, children or wives of the men returning. I was eight years old that February—almost nine and feeling I would never get there. Time was like a field of clay and all the other children I knew appeared to have cleared it in a single bound while I was stuck in the mud and barely able to lift my feet. I hated being eight and dreaded being nine. I wanted to be ten—the only dignified age a child could be, it seemed to me. Cy, at ten, had found a kind of silence I admired to the point of worship. Rita, who in fact was ten that year and soon to be eleven, had also found a world of silence in which she kept herself secreted—often behind closed doors. Silence was a sign of valour.

  The occasion was barely one for public rejoicing. The men who were coming home were mostly casualties whose wounds, we had been warned, could be distressing and whose spirit, we had equally been warned, had been damaged in long months of painful recuperation. Plainly, it was our job to lift their spirits and to deny the severity of their wounds. Above all else, they must not be allowed to feel they could not rejoin society at large. A man with no face must not be stared at.

  Our father’s wounds were greater by far than we had been told. There was not a mark on his body, but—far inside—he had been destroyed. His mind had been severely damaged and his spirit had been broken. No one had told me what this might have made of him. No one had said he may never be kind again. No one had said he will never sleep again without the aid of alcohol. No one had said he will try to kill your mother. No one had said you will not be sure it’s him when you see him. Yet all these things were true.

  I had never seen a military parade without a band. The effect was eerie and upsetting. Two or three officers came forward into the centre of the oval. Somebody started shouting commands and a sergeant-major, who could not yet be seen, was heard outside the building counting off the steps.

  I wanted drums. I wanted bugles. Surely this ghostly, implacable sound of marching feet in the deadening sand was just a prelude to everyone’s standing up and cheering and the music blaring forth. But, no. We all stood up, it is true, the minute the first of the columns rounded the wooden corner of the bleachers and came into sight. But no one uttered a sound. One or two people threw their hands up over their mouths—as if to stifle cries—but most of us simply stood there—staring in disbelief.

  Nurses came with some of the men, supporting them. Everyone was pale in the awful light—and the colours of their wounds and bruises were garish and quite unreal. There was a predominance of yellow flesh and dark maroon scars and of purple welts and blackened scabs. Some men wore bandages—some wore casts and slings. Others used canes and crutches to support themselves. A few had been the victims of fire, and these wore tight, blue skull-caps and collarless shirts and their faces and other areas of uncovered skin were bright with shining ointments and dressings.

  It took a very great while for all these men and women—perhaps as many as two hundred of them—to arrive inside the building and make their way into the oval. They were being lined up in order of columns—several long lines, and each line punctuated here and there with attendant nurses. The voices of the sergeant-major and of the adjutant who was taking the parade were swallowed up in the dead acoustics, and—far above us—pigeons and sparrows moved among the girders and beams that supported the roof. I still had not seen Father.

  At last, because my panic was spreadi
ng out of control, I tugged my mother’s elbow and whispered that I couldn’t see him. Had there been a mistake and he wasn’t coming at all?

  “No,” she told me—looking down at me sideways and turning my head with her ungloved fingers. “There he is, there,” she said. “But don’t say anything, yet. He may not know we’re here.”

  My father’s figure could only be told because of his remarkable height. He was six feet four and had always been, to me, a giant. But now his height seemed barely greater than the height of half a dozen other men who were gathered out in the sand. His head was bowed, though once or twice he lifted his chin when he heard the commands. His shoulders, no longer squared, were rounded forward and dipping towards his centre. His neck was so thin I thought that someone or something must have cut over half of it away. I studied him solemnly and then looked up at my mother.

  She had closed her eyes against him because she could not bear to look.

  Later on that night, when everyone had gone to bed but none of us had gone to sleep, I said to Cy: “what is it?”

  “What?”

  “That’s happened to Dad…”

  Cy didn’t answer for a moment and then he said: “Dieppe.” I didn’t understand. I thought it was a new disease.

  We were told the next day not to mention at school that our father had come back home. Nothing was said about why it must be kept a secret. That was a bitter disappointment. Other children whose fathers had returned from overseas were always the centre of attention. Teachers, beaming smiles and patting heads, would congratulate them just as if they had won a prize. Classmates pestered them with questions: what does he look like? Have you seen his wounds? How many Germans did he kill? But we had none of this. All we got was: what did you do on the weekend?

  Nothing.

  All day Monday, Father remained upstairs. Our parents’ bedroom was on the second floor directly over the sitting-room. Also, directly underneath the bedroom occupied by Cy and me. We had heard our mother’s voice long into the night, apparently soothing him, telling him over and over again that everything was going to be all right.

  We could not make out her words, but the tone of her voice was familiar. Over time, she had sat with each of us, deploying her comforts in all the same cadences and phrases, assuring us that pains and aches and sicknesses would pass.

  Because we could not afford to lose the sale of even one flower, neither the single rose bought once a week by Edna Holmes to cheer her ailing sister, nor the daily boutonniere of Colonel Matheson—our mother had persuaded Mrs Adams, the grocer’s wife, to tend the store while she “nipped home” once every hour to see to Father’s needs. It was only later that we children realized what those needs entailed. He was drinking more or less constantly in every waking hour, and our mother’s purpose was first to tempt him with food—which he refused—and then to make certain that his matches and cigarettes did not set fire to the house.

  On the Wednesday, Father emerged from his shell around two o’clock in the afternoon. We were all at school, of course, and I have only the account of what follows from my mother. When she returned at two, Mother found that Father had come down into the hallway, fully dressed in civilian clothes. He had already donned his greatcoat when she arrived. She told me that, at first, he had seemed to be remarkably sober. He told her he wanted to go outside and walk in the street. He wanted to go and see the store, he said.

  “But you can’t wear your greatcoat, David,” she told him.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in civilian dress. You know that’s not allowed. A man was arrested just last week.”

  “I wasn’t here last week,” said my father.

  “Nevertheless,” my mother told him, “this man was arrested because it is not allowed.”

  “But I’m a soldier!” my father yelled.

  My mother had to play this scene with all the care and cunning she could muster. The man who had been arrested had been a deserter. All that winter, desertions had been increasing and there had been demonstrations of overt disloyalty. People had shouted down with the King! and had booed the Union Jack. There were street gangs of youths who called themselves Zombies and they hung around the Masonic Temple on Yonge Street and the Palais Royale at Sunnyside. Some of these young men were in uniform, members of the Home Guard: reserves who had been promised, on joining up, they would not be sent overseas. They may have disapproved of the war, but they did not disapprove of fighting. They waited outside the dancehalls, excessively defensive of their manhood, challenging the servicemen who were dancing inside to come out fighting and show us your guts! Men had been killed in such encounters and the encounters had been increasing. The government was absolutely determined to stamp these incidents out before they spread across the country. These were the darkest hours of the war and morale, both in and out of the Forces, was at its lowest ebb. If my father had appeared on the street with his military greatcoat worn over his civilian clothes, it would have been assumed he was a Zombie or a deserter and he would have been arrested instantly. Our neighbours would have turned him in, no matter who he was. Our patriotism had come to that.

  “I don’t have a civilian overcoat,” my father said. “And don’t suggest that I put on my uniform, because I won’t. My uniform stinks of sweat and I hate it.”

  “Well, you aren’t going out like that,” my mother said. “That’s all there is to it. Why not come to the kitchen and I’ll fix you a sandwich…”

  “I don’t want a goddamned sandwich,” my father yelled at her. “I want to see the store!”

  At this point, he tore off his greatcoat and flung it onto the stairs. And then, before my mother could prevent him, he was out the door and running down the steps.

  My mother—dressed in her green shop apron and nothing but a scarf to warm her—raced out after him.

  What would the neighbours think? What would the neighbours say? How could she possibly explain?

  By the time she had reached the sidewalk, my father had almost reached the corner. But, when she got to Yonge Street, her fears were somewhat allayed. My father had not gone into Max’s Flowers but was standing one door shy of it, staring into the butcher’s window.

  “What’s going on here?” he said, as my mother came abreast of him.

  Mother did not know what he meant.

  “Where is Mister Schickel, Lily?” he asked her.

  She had forgotten that, as well.

  “Mister Schickel has left,” she told him—trying to be calm—trying to steer my father wide of the butcher’s window and in towards their own front stoop.

  “Left?” my father shouted. “He’s only just managed to pay off his mortgage! And who the hell is this imposter, Reilly?”

  “Reilly?”

  “Arthur Reilly the bloody butcher!” My father pointed at and read the sign that had replaced Oskar Schickel, Butcher in the window.

  “Mister Reilly has been there most of the winter, David. Didn’t I write and tell you that?” She knew very well she hadn’t.

  My father blinked at the meagre cuts of rationed meat displayed beyond the glass and said: “what happened to Oskar, Lily? Tell me.”

  And so, she had to tell him, like it or not.

  Mister Schickel’s name was disagreeable—stuck up there on Yonge Street across from Rosedale—and someone from Park Road had thrown a stone through the window.

  There. It was said.

  “But Oskar wasn’t a German,” my father whispered. “He was a Canadian.”

  “But his name was German, David.”

  My father put his fingers against the glass and did not appear to respond to what my mother had said.

  At last, my mother pulled at his arm. “Why not come back home,” she said. “You can come and see the shop tomorrow.”

  My father, while my mother watched him, concentrated very hard and moved his finger over the dusty glass of Oskar Schickel’s store.

  “What are you doing, David?”

&n
bsp; “Nothing,” said my father. “Setting things right, that’s all.”

  Then he stepped back and said to her: “now—we’ll go home.”

  What he had written was:

  Oskar Schickel: Proprietor in absentia.

  Mother said that Mrs Reilly rushed outside as soon as they had reached the corner and she washed the window clean.

  This was the only remaining decent thing my father did until the day he died. The rest was all a nightmare.

  I had never seen Dieppe. I had seen its face in photographs. I had read all the books and heard all the stories. The battle, of which my father had been a victim, had taken place in August of 1942—roughly six months before he was returned to us. Long since then, in my adult years, I have seen that battle, or seen its parts, through the medium of documentary film. It was only after Cy and Rita had vetted these films that I was able to watch. Till then, I had been afraid I would catch my father’s image unawares—fearful that somehow our eyes would meet in that worst of moments. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him destroyed. So, I had seen all this—the photographs, the books, the films—but I had never seen the town of Dieppe itself until that day in May of 1987 when I took my father’s ashes there to scatter them.

  Before I can begin this ending, I have to make it clear that the last thing I want to provoke is the sentimental image of a wind-blown stretch of rocky beach with a rainbow of ashes arching over the stones and blowing out to sea. If you want that image, let me tell you that had been the way it was when Cy, my brother, and Rita, my sister, and I went walking, wading into the ocean south of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia—where our mother had been born—to cast her ashes into the air above the Atlantic. Then there was almost music and we rejoiced because our mother had finally gained her freedom from a life that had become intolerable. But in Dieppe, when I shook my father’s ashes out of their envelope, there was no rejoicing. None.