She opted for the worst cases-men who were not (said Reenie) likely to win any beauty contests-and from these visits she would return drained and shaken, and might even weep, in the kitchen, drinking the cocoa Reenie would make to prop her up. She did not spare herself, said Reenie. She ruined her health. She went beyond her strength, especially considering her condition.
What virtue was once attached to this notion-of going beyond your strength, of not sparing yourself, of ruining your health! Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn't try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.
As for Laura, she was not selfless, not at all. Instead she was skinless, which is a different thing.
I was born in early June of 1916. Shortly afterwards, Percy was killed in heavy shelling at the Ypres Salient, and in July Eddie died at the Somme. Or it was assumed he had died: where he'd been last seen there was a large crater. These were hard events for my mother, but much harder for my grandfather. In August he had a devastating stroke, which affected his speech and his memory.
Unofficially, my mother took over the running of the factories. She interposed herself between my grandfather-said to be convalescing-and everyone else, and met daily with the male secretary and with the various factory foremen. As she was the only one who could understand what my grandfather was saying, or who claimed she could, she became his interpreter; and as the only one allowed to hold his hand, she guided his signature; and who's to say she didn't use her own judgment sometimes?
Not that there were no problems. When the war began, a sixth of the workers had been women. By the end of it this number was two-thirds. The remaining men were old, or partially crippled, or in some other way unfit for war. These resented the ascendancy of the women, and grumbled about them or made vulgar jokes, and in their turn the women considered them weaklings or slackers and held them in ill-disguised contempt. The natural order of things-what my mother felt to be the natural order-was turning turtle. Still, the pay was good, and money greases the wheels, and on the whole my mother was able to keep things running smoothly enough.
I imagine my grandfather, sitting in his library at night, in his green leather-covered chair studded with brass nails, at his desk, which was mahogany. His fingers are tented together, those of his feeling hand and those of his hand without feeling. He's listening for someone. The door is half-open; he sees a shadow outside it. He says, "Come in"-he intends to say it-but nobody enters, or answers.
The brusque nurse arrives. She asks him what he can be thinking of, sitting alone in the dark like that. He hears a sound, but it isn't words, it's more like ravens; he doesn't answer. She takes him by the arm, lifts him easily out of his chair, shuffles him off to bed. Her white skirts rustle. He hears a dry wind, blowing through weedy autumn fields. He hears the whisper of snow.
Did he know his two sons were dead? Was he wishing them alive again, safe home? Would it have been a sadder ending for him, to have had his wish come true? It might have been-it often is-but such thoughts are not consoling.
The gramophone
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is still raging. Raging is what they used to say, for wars; still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end-I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write: 1918. November 11. Armistice Day.
There. It's over. The guns are silent. The men who are left alive look up at the sky, their faces grimed, their clothing sodden; they climb out of their foxholes and filthy burrows. Both sides feel they have lost. In the towns, in the countryside, here and across the ocean, the church bells all begin to ring. (I can remember that, the bells ringing. It's one of my first memories. It was so strange-the air was so full of sound, and at the same time so empty. Reenie took me outside to hear. There were tears running down her face. Thank God, she said. The day was chilly, there was frost on the fallen leaves, a skim of ice on the lily pond. I broke it with a stick. Where was Mother?)
Father had been wounded at the Somme, but he'd recovered from that and had been made a second lieutenant. He was wounded again at Vimy Ridge, though not severely, and was made a captain. He was wounded again at Bourlon Wood, this time worse. It was while he was recovering in England that the war ended.
He missed the jubilant welcome for the returning troops at Halifax, the victory parades and so forth, but there was a special reception in Port Ticonderoga just for him. The train stopped. Cheering broke out. Hands reached up to help him down, then hesitated. He emerged. He had one good eye and one good leg. His face was gaunt, seamed, fanatical.
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Thus my mother and my father. How could either of them atone to the other for having changed so much? For failing to be what was expected. How could there not be grudges? Grudges held silently and unjustly, because there was nobody to blame, or nobody you could put your finger on. The war was not a person. Why blame a hurricane?
There they stand, on the railway platform. The town band plays, brass mostly. He's in his uniform; his medals are like holes shot in the cloth, through which the dull gleam of his real, metal body can be seen. Beside him, invisible, are his brothers-the two lost boys, the ones he feels he has lost. My mother is there in her best dress, a belted affair with lapels, and a hat with a crisp ribbon. She smiles tremulously. Neither knows quite what to do. The newspaper camera catches them in its flash; they stare, as if surprised in crime. My father is wearing a black patch over his right eye. His left eye glares balefully.
Underneath the patch, not yet revealed, is a web of scarred flesh, his missing eye the spider.
"Chase Heir Hero Returns," the paper will trumpet. That's another thing: my father is now the heir, which is to say he's fatherless as well as brotherless. The kingdom is in his hands. It feels like mud.
Did my mother cry? It's possible. They must have kissed awkwardly, as if at a box social, one for which he'd bought the wrong ticket. This wasn't what he'd remembered, this efficient, careworn woman, with a pince-nez like some maiden aunt's glinting on a silver chain around her neck. They were now strangers, and-it must have occurred to them-they always had been. How harsh the light was. How much older they'd become. There was no trace of the young man who'd once knelt so deferentially on the ice to lace up her skates, or of the young woman who'd sweetly accepted this homage.
Something else materialised like a sword between them. Of course he'd had other women, the kind who hung around battlefields, taking advantage. Whores, not to mince a word my mother would never have pronounced. She must have been able to tell, the first time he laid a hand on her: the timidity, the reverence, would have been gone. Probably he'd held out against temptation through Bermuda, then through England, up to the time when Eddie and Percy were killed and he himself was wounded. After that he'd clutched at life, at whatever handfuls of it might come within his reach. How could she fail to understand his need for it, under the circumstances?
She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.
However, my father wasn't so healthy as all that. In fact he was a shattered wreck, as witness the shouts in the dark, the nightmares, the sudden fits of rage, the bowl or glass thrown against the wall or floor, though never at her. He was broken, and needed mending: therefore she could still be useful. She would create around him an atmosphere of calm, she would indulge him, she would coddle him, she would put flowers on his breakfast table and arrange his favourite dinners. At least he hadn't caught some evil disease.
However, a much worse thing had happened: my father was now an atheist. Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel. What had been served by the gallantry of Percy and Eddie-by their bravery, their hideous deaths? What had been accomplished? They'd been killed by the blunderings of a pack of incompetent and criminal old men who might just as well have cut their throats and heaved them over the side of the SSCaledonian. All the talk of fighting for God and Civilization made him vomit.
My mother was appalled. Was he saying that Percy and Eddie had died for no higher purpose? That all those poor men had died for nothing? As for God, who else had seen them through this time of trial and suffering? She begged him at the very least to keep his atheism to himself. Then she was deeply ashamed for having asked this-as if what mattered most to her was the opinion of the neighbours, and not the relationship in which my father's living soul stood to God.
He did respect her wish, though. He saw the necessity of it. Anyway, he only said such things when he'd been drinking. He'd never used to drink before the war, not in any regular, determined way, but he did now. He drank and paced the floor, his bad foot dragging. After a while he would begin to shake. My mother would attempt to soothe him, but he didn't want to be soothed. He would climb up into the stumpy turret of Avilion, saying he wished to smoke. Really it was an excuse to be alone. Up there he would talk to himself and slam against the walls, and end by drinking himself numb. He left my mother's presence to do this because he was still a gentleman in his own view, or he held on to the shreds of the costume. He didn't want to frighten her. Also he felt badly, I suppose, that her well-meant ministrations grated on him so much.
Light step, heavy step, light step, heavy step, like an animal with one foot in a trap. Groaning and muffled shouts. Broken glass. These sounds would wake me up: the floor of the turret was above my room.
Then there would be footsteps descending; then silence, a black outline looming outside the closed oblong of my bedroom door. I couldn't see him there, but I could feel him, a shambling monster with one eye, so sad. I'd become used to the sounds, I didn't think he would ever hurt me, but I treated him gingerly all the same.
I don't wish to give the impression that he did this every night. Also these sessions-seizures, perhaps-became fewer and further apart, in time. But you could see one coming on by the tightening of my mother's mouth. She had a kind of radar, she could detect the waves of his building rage.
Do I mean to say he didn't love her? Not at all. He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.
What would that be like-to long, to yearn for one who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? I'll never know.
After some months my father began his disreputable rambles. Not in our town though, or not at first. He'd take the train in to Toronto, "on business," and go drinking, and also tomcatting, as it was then called. Word got around, surprisingly quickly, as a scandal is likely to do. Oddly enough, both my mother and my father were more respected in town because of it. Who could blame him, considering? As for her, despite what she had to put up with, not one word of complaint was ever heard to cross her lips. Which was entirely as it should be.
(How do I know all these things? I don't know them, not in the usual sense of knowing.