Just Once, No More, page 5
Sometimes you think you should talk to the women about the birds. Though their view of the pigeons is more earthbound, these women see what you see; perhaps they also feel what you are feeling. They too may be worn out and heart-sore, humbled by all the things they can’t change and keen to understand how those things connect.
Here is what you imagine saying to them. You know and I know what is happening here. Those may not be the same pigeons feeding in the square or perched on the ledge as last year. Next year many of the birds will be different again. Constant are the flights themselves—bodies in motion, bodies in time. You know and I know about ourselves as well. We are here now, and the world needs us, to a point, doing whatever it is we do. It certainly calls us to experience, to participate, to sing the abiding beauty and mystery. But then we too go away and are replaced by others who are—and are not—just like us. Constant are our songs and stories, drawings and dances, the prayers we create to the gods we fashion out of weather and mountains and animals and trees. They don’t disappear.
But you don’t say that to the women on the square. You don’t say a thing, remain silent out of respect for the weight and the cold, the weight of the cold dead. Only those birds on the square care enough to respond to our shared entreaties. Twice, three times, a day we scatter our bread and sorrows before them. They answer us with cooing sounds of oh-oo-oor and oorh-oorh. But then they too flutter up into sky, doing who knows what and bound who knows where.
10
One Saturday in late October 2017, I drove to the hospital to see my father. I had intended to get there each of the three previous weekends, but work and travel had held me back. As well, I had recently learned distressing news about our extended family. The news had triggered a protracted rage in me, one I could neither source nor anticipate. It could surge through my veins at any given moment and, because of this unpredictable irritation, I sensed I might not be the best company for him. But my father was also just weeks, or perhaps just days, from the end, and the immediate family had been put back on notice by medical staff. Visit soon, they advised us. Stay longer. Say whatever words you must say.
The ride north from the city, in a downpour that muted the autumn colors, did not augur well. I drove fast over those country roads, spitting stones up into the wheel hubs and spilling coffee on my shirt, and roaring by the collapsed barns, now individually tagged with family case histories. All were up in flames as I called out the names I had assigned each conflagration eighteen months earlier. Charlie Foran! Ruthie Foran! Shirley Foran! Barb Norton! Had a rural traffic camera caught me, I might have been mistaken for a drunk driver. Or a driver who was high. Or, more accurately, one who was low.
My father, too, was sure low. He had been in and out of hospital since the summer. Ailments, complications, treatments and consequences were on a repeat cycle. The stents in his kidneys would fail again, and doctors would ask if he wanted—really wanted—to go through another operation. He would reply, no thanks, why would he do that, there was nothing left for him. To us, he would say, “Why won’t they let me go?” Then he would agree to the operation. Afterward, doctors would offer their refrain: “One tough hombre, Dave Foran. A born fighter.” To me, he would say, “I did it for your mother. She still wants me around.”
That was his spirit talking, or his fear, given his conviction that nothing lay beyond the last gasp—the sigh of the bear in the bush killed by the man with the Winchester 44-40. His body was, if possible, less equivocal about its prospects: there weren’t any. No comebacks, no partial recoveries, regardless of how many additional thugs—sorry, machines—surrounded his bed with each visit. The machines were exactly the excess muscle added during the final hours of the supreme leader, in order to block weepy confessions of mass graves or hasty succession plans with idiot offspring.
He looked like a fearful old man. His brief hair revivification had come and gone, and his freckles had faded once more to parchment, the contents unreadable by the most expert archeologist. His skin had soured to skim-milk pale with patches of yellow seeping through. Even his skull appeared diminished, the melanin spots widening and the skin pulling taut, as though the rictus of a final, likely unflattering expression was already in the works.
On my walk from the parking lot to the hospital, I vowed to talk only of my father’s accomplishments, the duties he had fulfilled, the people who loved him. I would boost that spirit and ease those fears. My anger would stay within my veins and off my face. The news that had triggered it would remain either unspoken—his preferred outcome, I knew—or discussed calmly and without judgment. Lifelong shame, and its generational impact, would not be on the table—and might never be, I was coming to accept. It was too much for him. It might be too much for us.
At the same time, I was carrying photos from the albums my sister and I had salvaged from the house where Shirley Foran died. My father had taken a cursory look at the albums during a spell at home in the spring—I had watched intently as he turned the pages—lasting maybe ten minutes with the faded visual records of his childhood, among them the multiple snaps of his look-alike sister, our Aunt Barb. Then he had closed the album and told me he did not care to see the photos again. Period.
In my pocket, meanwhile, was an article I had published in a newspaper a year before, in conjunction with the job I was doing from the top floor of a building in downtown Toronto. I was thinking we could talk about the piece, the job, instead of family. Better, easier material—although we’d rarely talked about what I did for a living either.
Five minutes into the visit, I abandoned the plan. “I brought along a couple of those photos from the albums,” I said, from the chair beside his bed. “You may have missed them the other time.”
“I saw them,” he said. “You watched me look.”
I held the photos out. “Do you want to look again? There are some sweet ones of you and Barb. Also, the photo of your mom and dad walking down the street. He’s in his uniform and she’s wearing mink. What city is that, by the way?”
My father’s right hand, resting on his belly, did not move. Nor did he turn to me. He stared ahead, his other arm clinging to the pulley over the bed, a passenger on a crowded bus avoiding eye contact with strangers. The photos hung in the space between us until I withdrew them.
“You don’t remember your grandmother, do you?” he said.
“I remember our last visit to her apartment.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“What do you remember?”
I repeated the story, which was more my sister’s memory than mine. We’d rarely seen our Grandma Ruthie during her final years. But when I was twelve, our family had piled into the car to visit her in a tiny apartment in the city’s west end. We found her in a strange state, stiff to our hugs, her body protruding bones and cigarette stink, the clingy stench of sherry or port. Her underwater eyes could not hold anyone’s gaze; words slurred from her mouth, making no connection either. After she fell from her chair to the floor, my father said, “That’s it,” and ushered us back to the car. No explanation. No good-bye. We waited a half hour for him to reappear.
“What she said to Debbie?” my father said. “Want me to remind you?”
I shook my head.
“She asked her if she was my whore,” he persisted. “My fifteen-year-old daughter. Her granddaughter. ‘Are you his whore?’ she said.”
“She had a disease.”
“Anna doesn’t look like her,” he said, refuting what I had observed of my oldest daughter. “I know you said that once. Not one bit, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know where you got that idea.”
I attempted a final defense of my grandmother. “Maybe some people don’t know how to live,” I said.
He shot me a glance, hoping to summon the old Dave Foran stare. But with no blue left, there was no burn, no velocity.
“I’ve been thinking about this lately,” I said. “How some people never seem to acquire the basics. To do right by their own. To protect those dearest. Nurture them,” I added, studying his profile. “Love them, even if…they can’t love themselves.”
“Maybe no one taught them,” my father said under his breath.
I asked him to repeat the remark.
“I said, maybe no one teaches you. My parents never taught me a single good thing.”
I should have paused there. But I did not. “When I saw—when Debbie and I saw—how Shirley ended her days…” I said.
He bristled at the name. “Shirley? I thought we were talking about my mother.”
“Maybe we’re talking about both…I don’t know.”
“Forget Shirley. Ruthie never loved me or my sister, her own children,” he said. “Plain and simple. Should I care if she loved herself any less?”
“Did you love Barb?”
He shifted in the bed, staring ahead. Had his body allowed, he would have got up and walked out the door. But I had him cornered.
“Barb is dead, eh?” I said.
Silence.
“Your sister…” I finally delivered the family news that had sent me into that rage. “She died a few weeks ago.”
“Guess so.”
“And no one thought to call you and Mom?”
“Guess so.”
“Was there a funeral?”
“Don’t know.”
“Was she cremated?”
“We didn’t talk very often.”
“Not for four years, right?”
“We weren’t that close.”
“So you didn’t know she had Alzheimer’s the final two years?”
“She didn’t call me either.”
Why was I doing this? There was no point; it was cruel. “We could have gone as a family,” I said anyway.
“Gone where?”
“To pay our respects…To Aunt Barb.”
He waited, still clinging to the pulley, a stranger on a bus. “Her boy…” he finally said.
“I heard about that,” I said. One of Barb’s sons, my cousin, a quiet man who ended up living with his widowed mother, had taken his own life some while ago.
“He was always so blue,” my father said. “There was something not right with him…Family curse, I guess.”
“Depression?”
He shrugged.
“Like your mom?”
“No idea.”
“On learning about Barb’s death,” I said, “I felt, I don’t know, devastated.”
Finally, my father fought back. “That’s pretty dramatic.”
“On fire,” I added.
“What’s it even got to do with you?”
“What?”
“My sister…what’s it even got to do with you?”
He was furious now, the pulley rattling. Too late, I realized the cowardice of my behavior. The machines, beeping and pinging, should have escorted me out twenty minutes ago. Thrown me to the floor in the hallway, boots kicking my ribs and head.
“You’re right,” I said. “Sorry. I have to go. Long ride back.”
In the doorway, near the foot of his bed, my father gave me a look that was devastating. I supplied the expression with meaning: This is just how it is. How fucked up people are.
I gripped the door handle, scrambled for something kinder to say.
He did the same. “I dreamed about my old man last night,” he said. “Figured you’d want to know.”
“Again?”
“What do you mean, again?”
“ ‘Wake up! Wake up! Don’t sleep so much!’ ” I said, quoting the earlier dream. A dream, it was now clear, he had forgotten—both having dreamed it, and having shared it with his needy, greedy eldest son. I moved on quickly. “What did your dad say?”
“Not a thing. I did all the talking. But I couldn’t hear any words coming out of my mouth. We were walking along a street. He was in uniform.”
“Were you in the war with him?”
“I was a boy during the war. How could I—?”
“In the dream.”
“It was Ottawa. I was a kid, maybe ten. He was there, not sure why. I saw him.”
I thought of the photo in my pocket of his parents walking along a street together.
“What else?” I said.
“Nothing else.”
I nodded, then told him I loved him, as I had been doing at the conclusion of each visit. He told me he loved me too.
“One more thing,” he said, as I turned to go.
I waited.
“You really don’t look great,” my father said. “Something going on?”
I’d had no intention of sharing this, but now the words slipped out. “I have an appointment with a cardiologist.”
“You do? Why?”
“A precaution.”
“Losing some weight might help.”
“Is that the one more thing you wanted to tell me?”
“Listen,” he said, waving me back to his side. I stood beside the bed again, my hand out. “I’m not going into the ground, all right? Into the flames, please and thanks. Your mother knows it. Don’t let her forget.”
“Okay.”
“Never visited my own parents’ graves, not once. Why would you kids bother with mine?”
A dozen objections, arguments and scolds came to mind. “Sure,” I said.
“And she wants a church funeral with a mass and one of those celebrations of life afterward.”
I nodded.
“Don’t let her.”
“No?”
“No one will come.”
“Of course they will.”
“You think I don’t know?” my father said.
I think you don’t know, I said to myself. But I took his hand and held it, freckles on freckles, for a minute, maybe longer. His eyes welled. So did mine.
This was hard for us both, two shy, self-conscious men, not so comfortable in our bodies. With one difference: besides an eternal fascination, the son found unceasing change and unexpected possibility in human affairs; the father, only broken things that couldn’t be fixed and people who couldn’t be forced to love you.
11
Recently I tried explaining a change within myself to a friend. Starting a few years ago, I began registering strangers with an intensity that felt new to my nature. Like many, I had people-watched all my life, sometimes because of their beauty, sometimes because of an interesting countenance or expression. I had done so reflexively, and assumed others, including those subjects, were doing the same of me, for the same reasons. It was, I always supposed, about bodies: animals with similar gazes, appetites and predilections, sharing tight spaces, and being only too aware. No insult was intended by the watching, and none, I hoped, was given.
On the subway, a middle-aged woman resting her cheek against a pole, eyes shut and features hollow. In the park, an older man on a bench, staring at nothing while his lips move to a song on the radio in his lap. In the café, a young man, earbuds in, checking the mirror behind the counter, and the face of the barista, to see if he is making an impression. On the bus, the teenage girl curious about the boy across the aisle, her eyeballs like balloons on strings, floating up and then pulled down, over her iPhone.
At some point, however, this stopped being enough. I began to want to apply stories to these people. Where were they from and what had shaped them? How had they gotten from there to here, then to now? I wanted to know the dilemmas they were pondering, as we are all pondering dilemmas, all the time. I found I did not need to watch strangers for a longer period to widen my engagement. A snapshot—on that bus and subway, in that café and park—remained enough. After that, I could close my eyes and let the stories take shape.
But the fleeting presence of others behind my eyes wasn’t the change I was attempting to explain to my friend. Not exactly. “These last couple of years,” I said to her, “I’ve been closer to tears, or actually shed them, than at any time in the previous four decades. Since I was a kid, really, strapped at school by teachers or spanked by my dad. The stuff that causes my eyes to well up…” I added. “You won’t believe it.”
“Try me,” she said.
“Those Falun Gong ladies who protest in a square on Spadina Avenue. What they’re doing is hard and they’re very sincere about it. Yet people pay them no attention. If anything, they seem annoyed by their presence. Except for the pigeons,” I added uneasily. “And who knows where they go, once they fly away.”
“Pigeons?” my friend said.
I thought of a better example. “A homeless man defecating in the laneway behind our apartment one night. Our headlights pinned him, and his face collapsed in shame. I recognized the guy. He sleeps sometimes in the lobby of the building where I work, or in the park behind the art gallery. We’d talked a few times, including one conversation where he monologued for fifteen minutes about notions of the self in eastern philosophies. He was so obviously intelligent, and so messed up.”
“What else?”
“Pretty much every frame of the movie Little Women,” I said. “The version with Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon. We watched it twice a year as a family, and I used to squirm while the females around me sobbed. Now I pool up at the opening credits and never quite dry out. The look on Beth’s face when she realizes she’s caught scarlet fever from the German family she’s been helping? Poor, sweet Beth. She doesn’t live to see Jo and the professor get together, you know.”
“Stop,” my friend said.
“Or YouTube videos,” I said, forgetting myself. “Especially of animals from different species befriending each other. So touching, and a reminder of the great, wider planet unrelated to the narcissism and violence of our species. Dogs hanging out with cows. Cats licking the feathers of wounded birds. There’s one video of a rabbit—”
