Somewhere Else

I had taken my white-haired mother to the Atlantic, and now we walked along it.  Mom had diarrhea a bit, every few hours.  She ate a bird’s ration and she couldn’t walk very far, but I had taken her to where she and I wanted to be, an island called Big Harbour Island, four hours’ drive from Halifax.  Here I, in that very European syndrome, returned to “the Nature,” because you cannot return to “the Nature,” or what should we call it? – “the great outdoors”? – in Toronto.  Of course I’d taken Wendy.  The mention of Kenny had done it.

I’d applied my weight to the see-saw of power when I asked her to nurse my mother like she’d done Kenny.  I’d brought my will down to the ground, leaving her suspended.  Wendy knew I could have my hours then, without Mom, to walk round the island while she spent more or less the whole time with her.  Mom could manage small walks, though, so now we had agreed to go out together for half an hour.  Wendy was back in the house

Funny thing, that – the see-saw.  I mean there’s the love part in our marriage and also the see-saw.  And she’s strong.  She gets what she wants a lot.  Kenny, our second son, is now twenty-two and finishing a science degree in Ottawa.  But when Kenny was sixteen, his weak kidneys got to him and she gave him one of hers.  I have never done anything like that for one of my kids.  There were selfish reasons and unselfish reasons for being here out of the normal season.

Let’s turn to Mom now.  She was walking slowly, with her hair whiter than the seagulls’ wings and her stark aristocratic face turned to the wind, wrapped in a white cardigan.

“It is good you brought me here.  Perhaps it’s the last time I’ll see it.”

“You don’t know,” I countered.

“I’m fading,” she said with the old quizzical smile, and although my father had left my mother, so naturally I would be biased, I thought of how much more breeding she had than him.  Class.  I only thought of how that was an essentially European thing when I met Magda.  My mother, who left Prague at twelve, always had Old World manners, whereas my father belched a lot and didn’t have that reserve, class, call it what you will.

“The thing about me, Ricky, is, even here, I always felt I came from somewhere else, as if there could be no place for me.  I wonder if that’s something particularly Jewish, or maybe just coming here at ten.  I wonder whether it is just a feeling an emigrant has.  I wonder how many people have this feeling.  I really do wonder how many people do, you  know, feel different.  Is it normal, Richard?  Would you say it was normal to feel that way?  I always felt it, through all the parties we had down on the beach, the whole time I woked in the library.  I tried to look the same.  My accent soon went.  But I always felt as if I had this secret and no one else knew about it.”

Her voice trailed off.  Maybe some people have this feeling.  Maybe writers have it.

“Most of the people I have seen my whole professional life felt different,” I said.  “Some people are different.  Nationalism is a nasty force; look at Yugoslavia.  After Dayton there’ll be Kosovo.  There’s nationalism, and then there’s what Hal Dyer has.  I run with this guy every week.  He’s always calling himself a Canadian, going on about the Blue Jays, making jokes about Mounties, talking about some award won by the Canadians at Cannes.  I personally think there is not enough about Hal Dyer, so he has to get enthusiastic about a national identity.”

“Mmm.  But it’s coming from somewhere else.  I used to hate your father and his certainty, actually.  And the funny thing is, you were always like that from the outside, but somewhere inside you were more like me.  Your father’s grandfather sailed over and rubber-stamped this whole island.  This is mine.  It belongs to me.  I used to dream, not about anything so terrible, during the war, just that we had to go somewhere and we couldn’t get there.  Don’t you see how attractive Mr. McIntyre was to me?  He owned an island.  There wasn’t somewhere he had to get to that he couldn’t get to.  No one had sent him away from where he lived.  He was here.  McIntyre and Zweimann.  When we got divorced, I gave you my name.”

“Yes.  I remember our doorbell sticker even before the divorce.