Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [87]
This ritual – the walking along the hillside, the uncanny red plinth, the waiting, the leaning, the keeping very quiet – all of this was surely what caused our father to appear, silhouetted against the sun, getting bigger and bigger as the boat neared our dock.
Once in a while a couple of the boys at the Lab would come back with my father to our house and have dinner with us. Most likely the main part of the dinner would be fish. The only other choices were Spam or corned beef, or bacon, or – if we were lucky – something made with eggs and cheese. It was the War, anything in the way of meat was rationed, but fish were easily come by. My mother – when she still had hold of the plot – used to say that if they were expecting company she would just take a fishing rod down to the dock and make a cast or two. That was all it would take. She could catch enough pickerel for dinner in half an hour.
“Then I’d whack them over the heads,” my mother would say to her later friends – her city friends – “and presto! Then we’d throw the innards in the lake, so the bears couldn’t smell them.” She’d be showing off, just a little: the friends thought she’d been crazy to go way up there into nowhere with two small kids. They didn’t say crazy, though, they’d say courageous. Then she would laugh. “Oh, courageous!” she would say, implying that it hadn’t taken courage because she hadn’t been afraid.
Maybe Cam and Ray came to dinner, and had fish. I certainly hope so. The two of them are characters from a novel, a novel I’ve never read. I have no real recollection of them, but I fell in love with their pictures when I was twelve or thirteen. Cam and Ray were much better than movie stars because they were more real, or their photos were. I had no word for sexier, but they were that as well. They looked so full of life, so adventurous and amused, the two of them.
They’re upstairs now, in my house. I took them into my care along with the rest of the photo album once my mother had gone completely blind.
All the photos are black and white, though the earlier ones have a brownish tinge; they cover the years between 1909, when my mother was born, to 1955, when she seems to have given up on the whole idea. Between those years, however, she was meticulous. Despite her letter-burning and diary-destroying, despite the way she covered her tracks, even she must have wanted a witness of sorts – a testament to her light-footed passage through her time. Or a few clues, scattered here and there along the trail for anyone who might be following, trying to find her.
Underneath each photo is my mother’s careful handwriting, in black ink on the grey pages. Names, places, dates. At the front are my grandparents in their Sunday best with their first car, a Ford, standing proudly outside their white-sided Nova Scotian house. Then there are several aging great-aunts, in print dresses, the shadows cast by the sun deepening their eye sockets and frown lines and making little moustaches underneath their noses. My mother enters as a ribbon-covered baby, then changes to a little girl in a lace-collared dress and ringlets, then to a tomboy in overalls. The sisters and the brothers have appeared by then, and grow larger in their turn. My grandfather sprouts an army doctor’s uniform.
“Did you have the 1919 flu?” I ask my mother’s ear.
A pause. “Yes.”
“Did your mother have it? Did your sisters? Did your brothers? Did your father?” It seemed they all had it.
“Who took care of you?”
Another pause. “Father did.”
“He must have been pretty good at it,” I say, because none of them died, not then.
An interval, while she considers. “I suppose he was.”
She fought against her father, whom nevertheless she loved. He was a stubborn man, she used to say. He had a strong will. She told me once that she was too much like him.
Now my mother is a teenager, joking around in a line of girls at the beach, wearing suits with long legs