Volkswagen through a supermarket window after my foot slipped off the brake pedal and hit the gas as I zipped through the supermarket’s parking lot. Bwam! The others were lapses of attention: I’d decided it was more interesting to do or think about other things. Bwam!
The second memory is wholly fabricated, because I was only told it happened, years later, and it subsequently burned into my brain as an event I’d witnessed. The night before she flew to Vancouver for the mastectomy (Did I go the airport to see her off? Did I try to reassure her before she left?) my father sat her down at the kitchen table and had her sign a dozen blank cheques.
I understood what this was about the instant I was told about it. I was in my twenties at the time, and when I asked, rhetorically, why my father would do such a thing, my mother rolled her eyes and said, “Guess.”
Nah, there was no guessing needed. He’d wanted to be able to clean out her private bank account and the several joint accounts in case . . . Well, I’m sure you get it. It was a horrible thing to do, and it was wholly in character. A sensible woman today would leave a marriage over such a stunt. My mother, a deeply sensible woman, didn’t, and not just, I think, because it was a different era.
The third memory is tactile, and not quite so spare. Several months after she returned home from the operation, she called me into her bedroom.
“It’s time you had a look at this,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. I was standing just inside the bedroom door as she slipped her nightgown from her left shoulder to expose the vast plate of scar tissue for me to view. I was horrified, by its extent and by the incontrovertible injury of it. Not only was the breast gone, but there was a cavity in her upper chest where the doctors had removed the lymph glands from her left armpit, taking with it elements of her shoulder musculature. The scars were still red and raw-looking, the remaining muscle tissue twisted and cobbled with keloid. (Twenty years later—the next time I had a close look—the scars had changed little.)
“Come here so you can touch it,” she ordered.
I sat on the bed beside her, and I remember caressing her cheek—good for me!—before I ran my hand over the scars. The muscles in my groin contracted as I did, as they do to this day when I recall that moment. Probably, I asked her shyly if it still hurt, and probably, she said “no,” or, “not anymore,” or, “only sometimes.” But maybe I didn’t ask.
What I should have recognized, and didn’t, was how unnecessarily searing an experience it had been for her, both physically and emotionally, and how tough and decisive she’d been through it. My father, never much help when anyone was in physical pain or discomfort, withdrew from her with cruel swiftness the moment he found out about it.
At the end of that conversation with my sister Nina I had to have so I could pinpoint the dates, Nina recalled two extra details. She had a vivid memory of my mother looking frightened as she boarded the plane to Vancouver. The other was much darker. Dr. Jaron, when he got the results of the biopsy, had phoned my father, not my mother. He phoned on Saturday morning, but it was late Sunday afternoon before my father could work up the nerve to reveal what he’d been told. Fifteen minutes later, he left and went down to the plant. He didn’t return home until after ten in the evening. The phone conversation I recorded at the beginning of this took place the next day, and Dr. Jaron had left it to the end of the day to return the call my mother would have made that morning.
My father stayed clear of her for the duration. After the cruelty of the cheques-signings, he delivered her to the plane when she flew to Vancouver for the operation, bringing my sister to the airport to deflect any sharp emotions. He didn’t accompany my mother to Vancouver, excusing himself, no doubt, because his business needed him, and anyway, she’d be in good hands down there, right?
She’d had to arrange her treatment by herself, and now she would see it through on her own: the operation, and then the several further trips south for the radiation treatment that were then customary. I try to imagine what she felt when she arrived at the airport in Vancouver that first time, see her hire a taxi to go to the hotel she’d booked, and I try to imagine what went through her mind as she walked into the hospital with her suitcase, and approached the information desk in the hospital lobby to announce who she was, and what she was there to have done to her.
The follow-up radiation treatments likewise, a process that leaves people poisoned and exhausted for weeks afterward: the same flights on the plane alone, the same terrified entry into the hospital lobby. Each time she must have imagined what should have happened: a car ride across town with her husband holding her hand and her children to care for her while she convalesced.
In the fall of 1962, I took off to Europe with a one-way boat ticket in my pocket and $300 in American Express traveller’s cheques. My urge to get out of town had acted like a giant slingshot, and it sent me 9500 kilometres before I felt the slightest tug in the other direction. I might not have felt any tug at all, but I was in mid-Atlantic when the Cuban Missile Crisis peaked, and it scared the hell out of me. My travelling companions and I spent most of the crisis in the ship’s radio room, watching the captain agonize about whether he ought to turn the ship toward the south Atlantic. I spent several days in that radio room thinking about all the things I was going to miss if the Russians and the Americans blew up the world, and somewhere in the top ten, but not in the top five, was my mother.
When I arrived in London, there was a letter from her worrying that I was okay. I answered the letter, but I wrote just one more letter to her in the next eight months, even though I had to be bailed out of money trouble twice, once by my father and the second time, on the sly, by her. No doubt I missed one of her radiation treatments, and yeah, yeah, kids are always self-centred.
When I returned from Europe, my always-uneasy relationship with my father bloomed into open hostility. Since he’d rescued me when I was in Europe, in his mind that meant that I owed him. He announced that I’d had my fun, and now it was time for me to get serious: come to work for him, get on with my life as a businessman, his assistant CEO, like my older brother.
If I was ever tempted by that, I don’t remember it. But I was tempted by other things—money, cars, the usual things that come with money. When I decided that I needed a car, my mother stepped in.
“No,” she said. “You don’t want a car. If you need one, you can use mine. Owning a car will trap you, and soon you’ll be working for your father, and all those plans you have for your life will go up in smoke. And you don’t have to pay your father back. I will, if it comes to that. You go out and do something with that brain of yours. Be yourself.”
I did exactly what she said, and the battles with my father escalated, occasionally into physical confrontations. As the fights grew more intense, my mother interceded more frequently, and more openly on my side, even when I was just being a jerk. I had no clear idea how I was supposed to “be myself,” but I learned that if I got in my father’s face, I was able to improvise, and the results were dramatic. So when he said yes, I said no. If he said the sky was blue, I countered that it was green, or grey, or black. If I didn’t know who I was, at least I discovered that it was something to not be him, and the more I wasn’t him, the more exhilarating life became.
My mother let me know, never quite directly, that she approved, and I was having too much fun to think about her motives. At one level, I trusted her, so she must have had good reasons. At another, our clandestine alliance served my half-cooked agenda, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t see that it served some needs she had. When she argued with my father, it usually took the heat off me, at least until the next confrontation. Their arguments escalated, as mine did with my father, although theirs never quite got to physical violence. Some of the arguments centred around me, but not all, and maybe not even most. They were at war and I’d chosen my side in it.
