The Time Has Come the Walrus Said

The end of childhood on the borderline

The same spring my dad wrote me about my stepmother’s death, my mom got two other letters in the mail. Both of them were from attorneys. They’d been given her address by my father, after having searched for her without success for over a year.

I walked in the door from school. Stomping the snow off my boots. It snows in Edmonton well into May. “My sister and my father have died,” Mom said. Her voice cracked when she said, “my sister.”

I knew not to say anything; to leave her be and make supper.

A few weeks later, she said, “I’m going to send you to your father’s this summer; it’s time he did something for a change.”

I was careful not to show any expression. If I was happy, she might take it back. I just said, “Okay.”

In June, I took a plane to Vancouver to meet my dad. That way I didn’t have to cross the Canada-US border alone. I hadn’t seen him in two and a half years. I was 14.

I didn’t know what to call my father when I saw him. Was I too old to say “Daddy?” Nothing else seemed to fit. When he picked up my suitcase, I said, “When we’re in a public place and I have to call you from across a room, could I call you Bill?”

He held me very tight. We went to Denny’s Coffeeshop for pancakes, which I thought was the height of luxury. Bill said I could order whatever I wanted. There was a customer feedback form on the bill, and they asked you what you thought of their eggs. He wrote “execrable,” and the new word made me laugh so hard tears rolled down my face.

Bill didn’t lose his temper about anything. His eyes crinkled when I apologized, as I did about everything, every five minutes. If you were to ask me the happiest days of my life, I’d say it was the day my daughter was born and the first week I spent reunited with my dad. We went to the Empress Hotel for high tea. We went to smell the roses in Butchart Gardens. We took a ferry, and then a small boat, to a little island where we picked clams and blueberries and made a huge fire at night. We stayed with his late wife Marcia’s brother, who looked like my dad with his long hair and beard. Everyone talked to me as if I was interesting and pretty soon I couldn’t stop talking. Making up for lost time.

At the end of a week, I told Bill about the letters my mother had received. I wanted to know what he knew. What had happened to my Aunt Fannie?

Bill winced. “She hung herself. She lost her kids to your uncle, because of alcohol and pills and she’d been very sick.” He paused. “I know your mom tried, a long time ago, to help her— your aunt Fannie was the sweetest kid, the nicest one in your mom’s family— she’d give anyone the shirt off her back.”

He came over to hug me. “I’m so sorry, honey; I don’t know what happened.”

Many years later, when my mom was dying, in hospice, I finally asked her a question about Frances. I took a chance because she was high on pain meds.

It came up because my mom was talking about how fast she used to be, how she could outrun everyone when she was a girl.

I asked her, “ Mom, you ran, Molly ran, Bud ran, why didn’t Fannie run?”

Ordinarily, Elizabeth would’ve looked daggers at me. No questions allowed. Was I trying to make her cry? But she was hospitable on her morphine.

“Fannie got the worst of it. Dada beat her over and over with an electric cord. She hung herself in his apartment on 3rd Street. Her son, your cousin, he found her.”

She looked at me, cross. “Why can’t you get me some butter for my bread?”

That’s morphine for you. We needed these little interruptions.

“Make it snappy!” she called out after me, and laughed, like we used to laugh when she was young.

My dad told me everything that summer he knew about my mom’s family, as well as his own. It was like a blank book suddenly ablaze with story after story. We’d take a long walk, to pick those berries, or hunt for clams, and the whole family tree came to life.

At the end of the British Columbia visit, he asked me if I wanted to come to California with him.

Yes. I didn’t ask to speak to my mom— I didn’t wish her bad fortune, but I flinched. I was afraid I’d be put back on a plane, that the spool would reel back.

The first year we lived together, my dad started going to group therapy, an exercise I found fascinating. I asked him every night he came home about what each person said. One night he came home stunned. He said the group’s leader, and all the participants, had encouraged—insisted— that he pick up one of those soft foam “encounter bats” and bop one of the other big men in the group as hard as he could, give him a good wallop!

My dad was big as well— 6’2”. But he didn't want to do it. He felt like crying. “I don’t have any quarrel with this man!” he said.

“Of course you don’t!” the others replied. “That’s the whole point!”

“But I’m weak! I’m small,” he protested. Of course everyone laughed and said, “You need to learn how wrong you are. You need to know it in your body.”

He gave into their cajoling and whomped his fellow mountain man a good one, which made them all laugh except my father, who laughed first— and then cried. The discovery that he was not a weakling was potent, to be sure. But he felt something swinging that bat, feelings that had nothing to do with anyone in the room.

“In my family, you never got angry,” he said.

“Well, what did you do with my mom?” I asked. “She let loose all the time!”

“I know,” he said, “ I always thought I’d done something wrong.”

“And now you know.”

“Yes. I didn’t understand it then. I knew she was depressed, and that was not so different from my mom, that yearning to make her happy, the fear that she would go away.”

“When did your mom ever leave you? Grandma Ethel?” I couldn’t imagine Grandma doing anything of the sort.

“She had what they would call a ‘nervous breakdown’ today,” Bill said, “but I was just a toddler and so no one called it anything to me. I don’t know where she went, no one said good-bye. When she returned, there was nothing said then, either. My aunts folded me into their care while my dad was working, and some months later, she came home as if nothing had happened. They told me she couldn’t have any more children.”

In 1990, when I became a mother myself, my dad explained to me that that year I’d moved in with him, 1972, Elizabeth had asked him to take custody of me permanently, before she made arrangements for me to leave Edmonton for good. It wasn’t just a “visit” in her mind.

When my own daughter turned twelve, I remembered that revelation. My mother’s mother had died when Elizabeth was thirteen. Mom had let me go, at fourteen. No one in our maternal line had mothered their daughter through adolescence for a couple of generations — what made me think I could do it?

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