Introspection, Memory, and Cerebral Integration have social implications.
With the referendum question again looming over our heads it was not remarkable that I awoke that October morning having dreamed of my maternal grandmother’s house in Quebec. We had become so familiar with the idea of Canada tearing itself apart that most citizens remained calm. My husband, who is politically astute, said if he were a Québécois he would vote “Yes.” I found that idea intolerable. Some profound sorrow to which I had awakened originated with that house. The work shortage—well, to be honest, the complete absence of paying work—gave me the opportunity to ponder this shadow on my heart.
I knew my father’s parents best: we frequently spent Sunday afternoons in their neat-as-a-pin Swansea bungalow in Toronto’s west end. They were about as English-Canadian as could be. My paternal grandmother Lily, a tailor’s daughter, had married Arthur Mohun, a remote scion of an ancient, noble English family. At the time of the Conquest “Mohun” had been Normandy’s “de Moyen,” so, then, to be English meant also to be French, a reversal of the dominance of cultures my father and mother represented to me, and yet in retrospect, like them, a unity.
Our visits to the Clement home in Quebec were necessarily a fortnight at the least. During the 1940s, getting there by train or car from Toronto was a two-day adventure. Moreover, my parents’ high ambitions and modest means made visits a rarity, though Mother often talked about her brothers and sisters to me and I felt her keen longing to be with her family.
To my surprise I can see the house, re-enter, and walk through it. It was a frame and clapboard storey-and-a-half similar to the farmhouse where I live in southern Ontario but perched, rather, on a corner double lot at the very edge of Buckingham so that both the paved streets in front vanished into dust on its west side. I can see us arriving across the low, el-shaped veranda, pushing through a lace-curtained door into the front room where we are met by my grandparents Victoire and Aurèle with a great welcoming fuss replete with hugs, tears, and laughter (doubtless at my father’s horrible French) while a torrent of conversation erupts that will hardly cease until far into the night.
Before then, of course, my younger sister and I are led up the kitchen staircase, its wall hot to the touch from the wood stove on the other side, and across the large hallway to a room so stuffed with boxes and bundles that considerable shifting has to be done to make room for us in the bed. Its enormous solid headboard, curved and decorated like a tombstone, intimidates us and the room hasn’t electricity, which is odd. But no, that is not the shadowed, airless memory whose source eludes me. Grandma reveals that this had been Mummy’s room (and Florence’s, Celima’s, Annette’s, Lucille’s, and Stephanie’s) and we were allowed to sleep in the very same bed. I am sure we snuggled, marveling, under the faintly musty quilts and slept like lambs.
In daylight, I continue my search, past spooky curtained alcoves piled with the remains of the rummage that had provided for a family of 11 through the Great Depression when money was less than scarce. Avoiding the stark and repellently rusty bathroom, I cross the hall to the parlor stairs. We especially liked these stairs because they had a “lid.” From the upper floor, you could lower a sort of door that was hinged along its length to the wall so that when flat it filled the stairwell and could be walked upon—gingerly, not both children at a time, no jumping—to access an admirable bookcase. Its shelves were fronted with glass doors that lifted and slid back across the top of each opening to reveal treasures such as old books, and china, and a conch shell, and a robin’s nest. It surely rivaled the Royal Ontario Museum in stimulating my appetite for antiquities, I suppose because it was harder to access and I was allowed to touch.
Down these stairs is the front parlor, chilly so far away from the stove, with its door shut and because the entry from the veranda lets in the cold draught. You can feel it running across the linoleum and chasing you up onto the horsehair upholstery that is both wonderfully satin and aggravatingly prickly to young thighs. I can smell the varnish of the upright piano that suffered the lessons and practicing of all nine children. I am allowed to wind up the Victrola and change its Decca records so that Deanna Durbin’s thrilling alleluias bounce off the faded wallpaper alternately with a hilarious French “deedel dorndel deedel dorndel deedel dorndel deedel dorne” refrain of Mary Thompson.
I remember a Christmas when this room was so hot and crowded with relatives that it had the energy and racket of a country fair. Through marriage, the Clements had knit together the Dominion. From the Okanagan Valley, the Gaspé, Montreal, Sherbrooke, and Ottawa aunts and uncles arriving with gifts and food leaned down to talk to me, praising my dress, my manners, making me feel special and shy at the same time, then turned to tell one another how like Mother or another I seemed—I flirted like Marie, but didn’t I have Peter’s eyes? As the commotion mounted my sister and I could count on being ignored and filched goodies, which we ate surreptitiously in the corner by the stairs. The lace-curtained window, heavily shaded lamps, and thick, tasseled tablecloths make it hard to see into corners, but I can touch the velvet of dried bulrushes in a flowered vase, the slippery naked plaster nymph gazing down into a bowl empty of water or goldfish, feathery stacks of sheet music, and stiff silk umbrellas with brass and ivory inlay handles standing in a tall, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain jar. Dimness, but no secrets here.
The smell of fruit pies baking draws me back towards the kitchen where the women’s conversation weaves an undulating tapestry of family, neighbors, friends—their health, their illnesses, their cures, their hopes, follies, and victories. Meals are rather haphazard here, but there are sporadic feasts. The essentials are crusty brown and white loaves on the big cutting board on the kitchen table to be sliced only by a grownup wielding an enormous knife. Strong yellow cheese under its square pink-and-white china cover is an acquired taste. But out in the yard, our soft-spoken, beautifully mustached Swiss Grandpère feeds us buttered slices of bread spread thickly with brown sugar, while he spoons down a big bowl of sour milk, likewise sugared. Wartime rationing had been in effect all our young lives and sugar is an inconceivable extravagance. Mother finds us out and protests but he offers in defense his privilege to indulge so we swallow guilt and astonishment along with this unparalleled delight. We are not allowed to repeat the treat indoors, however, and content ourselves with handfuls of the oatmeal to be found in a deep drawer in his handmade breakfront desk.
Flies are buzzing over the cheese-cloth netting on the cradle grandmother’s step-father built, where my little sister is being rocked to Grandma’s song about “un petit cochon.” I am entertained by the song about “the little pig” but I pester her by trying to climb into the cradle. She holds me at bay, not with a simple command but with questions (Wasn’t Mother calling me from the woodshed?) and innuendo (Didn’t I like to be told I was a sweet little girl?) and veiled threat (Did I know what happened in her house to little girls who wouldn’t obey?). She has opened Pandora’s box. In a flash I see not only that language can be manipulative but, more awesomely, that an indeterminate proportion of my mother’s words to me should be reinterpreted accordingly. The dark implications of this epiphany would not fully unfold to me for many years. I simply was charmed to have intuited “a second mother tongue.”
Across the road into the sun and down a steeply sloping lawn was a house most of whose roof you could look down on from the road. Of the children playing around it, one boy was close enough in age to call to us, and so I interrupted the account of Mme. Milkey’s breast fever and the poultice that saved her life to let Mother know we wanted to cross the road. She raised an eyebrow to Grandma, wasn’t the family Catholic? (Ah the pride of the Calvinists, French against French!) Well, yes, but . . . and she offered in French some neighborly confidence of Mme. LeBlanc. This was my grandmother’s idea of principles: draw firmly a line of demarcation so that you could graciously step over it at will. Mother lowered her eyebrow. We were allowed to cross the road.
No English child I knew had Norman’s open, sweet nature. We offered our tidbits of French and he was as uncritically accepting as though we had proffered seashells and surf-polished stones. Soon we were chattering a mixture of French and English—he, of course, was growing up bilingual as had my mother and her kin. Didn’t I ask him, was he Catholic? What was that? Did he shrug uncomprehending and say something about Mass? What was Mass? A l’église, the church. Well, we went to church, too. Evidently the mothers in the kitchen couldn’t sort things out as thoroughly as we children. We spent an entire lovely afternoon as he taught us to capture grasshoppers in glass jars and to find horsetail weeds, among the tall grass in a wet gully, to dissect and rejoin. Later, Mother was not favorably impressed with the expansion of our French—something about the way we pronounced the new words as though they were not words at all. Confusion was thus sown deep in my ability to absorb new language, though I earnestly studied French through my undergrad years, and I did not recover, except for one or two perfectly fluent dreams. But that lovely, unspoiled Québécois, his unfettered friendship, our happiness, our sunlit afternoon . . . .
I seem to have missed something upstairs. The grandparents’ room with a painted iron bed, plain dresser, a wicker chair, and rag mats is forbidden but not forbidding. Then there is another bedroom, the one where Mummy and Daddy sleep when he finally returns to take us back home. It was the boys’ room: Henry, Peter, and Adrian. Oh. And Albert. He was four when he died. I am four. Mummy has tears in her eyes when she tells me about her little brother. I have no brothers because a baby boy died before I was born. Mother and Grandma are leaving this room. Does Grandma say something when Mummy mentions Albert? No, even for such an old sorrow words fail. Did Albert die here? No, I saw a photograph of him after he died and I think he was in the kitchen. I hope not in the cradle. Now I am standing in his room and I am freezing cold. It’s not that Daddy won’t let me into bed—he and Mummy always let me cuddle and warm myself between them. No, Daddy says we have to go home and we can’t take Norman with us. There is my sorrow: separation superimposed on permanent losses.
Thirty years later, when I crossed another road into the Catholic Church, my mother suffered a near-fatal heart attack. She had by then absorbed the principles of the English side of the family for whom drawn lines were never to be crossed. Had her love for me and her unexamined horror of Catholic doctrine, which I had first glimpsed in relation to her Quebec neighbors, literally torn her apart? Mother miraculously recovered, perhaps finding healing for the loss of both her babies in unburdening herself to “my” priest when he visited her in the cardiac ward, which had been renovated from the nursery where one of her babies had become terminally ill. She took religion courses at St. Michael’s College and came to the conclusion that our churches were the same. One day in Toronto on the Sherbourne bus, to my astonished pleasure, I heard her sling a patois response to a question of one of the children from the French school. With blushing cheeks and a rueful grin, she acknowledged to me her duplicitous, layered use of her tongue.
After my long-widowed grandmother died, the nine children divided her amazing collection of stuff. Mother passed on to me things the others didn’t want: the old cradle, the bed from the girl’s room, the breakfront desk Grandpère built, the kitchen table, covered cheese dish, the conch shell, and the breadboards—there are reminders of my heritage in every room in the house. Et vous aussi, mes amis, quoi que vous considerez la séparation, n’oubliez jamais que nous sommes tous une famille. And you, my friends, if you contemplate separation, never forget that we are all one family.