The gramophone

Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.

Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is still raging. Raging is what they used to say, for wars; still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end-I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write: 1918. November 11. Armistice Day.

There. It's over. The guns are silent. The men who are left alive look up at the sky, their faces grimed, their clothing sodden; they climb out of their foxholes and filthy burrows. Both sides feel they have lost. In the towns, in the countryside, here and across the ocean, the church bells all begin to ring. (I can remember that, the bells ringing. It's one of my first memories. It was so strange-the air was so full of sound, and at the same time so empty. Reenie took me outside to hear. There were tears running down her face. Thank God, she said. The day was chilly, there was frost on the fallen leaves, a skim of ice on the lily pond. I broke it with a stick. Where was Mother?)

Father had been wounded at the Somme, but he'd recovered from that and had been made a second lieutenant. He was wounded again at Vimy Ridge, though not severely, and was made a captain. He was wounded again at Bourlon Wood, this time worse. It was while he was recovering in England that the war ended.

He missed the jubilant welcome for the returning troops at Halifax, the victory parades and so forth, but there was a special reception in Port Ticonderoga just for him. The train stopped. Cheering broke out. Hands reached up to help him down, then hesitated. He emerged. He had one good eye and one good leg. His face was gaunt, seamed, fanatical.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

Thus my mother and my father. How could either of them atone to the other for having changed so much? For failing to be what was expected. How could there not be grudges? Grudges held silently and unjustly, because there was nobody to blame, or nobody you could put your finger on. The war was not a person. Why blame a hurricane?

There they stand, on the railway platform. The town band plays, brass mostly. He's in his uniform; his medals are like holes shot in the cloth, through which the dull gleam of his real, metal body can be seen. Beside him, invisible, are his brothers-the two lost boys, the ones he feels he has lost. My mother is there in her best dress, a belted affair with lapels, and a hat with a crisp ribbon. She smiles tremulously. Neither knows quite what to do. The newspaper camera catches them in its flash; they stare, as if surprised in crime. My father is wearing a black patch over his right eye. His left eye glares balefully. Underneath the patch, not yet revealed, is a web of scarred flesh, his missing eye the spider.

"Chase Heir Hero Returns," the paper will trumpet. That's another thing: my father is now the heir, which is to say he's fatherless as well as brotherless. The kingdom is in his hands. It feels like mud.

Did my mother cry? It's possible. They must have kissed awkwardly, as if at a box social, one for which he'd bought the wrong ticket. This wasn't what he'd remembered, this efficient, careworn woman, with a pince-nez like some maiden aunt's glinting on a silver chain around her neck. They were now strangers, and-it must have occurred to them-they always had been. How harsh the light was. How much older they'd become. There was no trace of the young man who'd once knelt so deferentially on the ice to lace up her skates, or of the young woman who'd sweetly accepted this homage.

Something else materialised like a sword between them. Of course he'd had other women, the kind who hung around battlefields, taking advantage. Whores, not to mince a word my mother would never have pronounced. She must have been able to tell, the first time he laid a hand on her: the timidity, the reverence, would have been gone. Probably he'd held out against temptation through Bermuda, then through England, up to the time when Eddie and Percy were killed and he himself was wounded. After that he'd clutched at life, at whatever handfuls of it might come within his reach. How could she fail to understand his need for it, under the circumstances?

She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

However, my father wasn't so healthy as all that. In fact he was a shattered wreck, as witness the shouts in the dark, the nightmares, the sudden fits of rage, the bowl or glass thrown against the wall or floor, though never at her. He was broken, and needed mending: therefore she could still be useful. She would create around him an atmosphere of calm, she would indulge him, she would coddle him, she would put flowers on his breakfast table and arrange his favourite dinners. At least he hadn't caught some evil disease.

However, a much worse thing had happened: my father was now an atheist. Over the trenches God had burst like a balloon, and there was nothing left of him but grubby little scraps of hypocrisy. Religion was just a stick to beat the soldiers with, and anyone who declared otherwise was full of pious drivel. What had been served by the gallantry of Percy and Eddie-by their bravery, their hideous deaths? What had been accomplished? They'd been killed by the blunderings of a pack of incompetent and criminal old men who might just as well have cut their throats and heaved them over the side of the SSCaledonian. All the talk of fighting for God and Civilization made him vomit.

My mother was appalled. Was he saying that Percy and Eddie had died for no higher purpose? That all those poor men had died for nothing? As for God, who else had seen them through this time of trial and suffering? She begged him at the very least to keep his atheism to himself. Then she was deeply ashamed for having asked this-as if what mattered most to her was the opinion of the neighbours, and not the relationship in which my father's living soul stood to God.

He did respect her wish, though. He saw the necessity of it. Anyway, he only said such things when he'd been drinking. He'd never used to drink before the war, not in any regular, determined way, but he did now. He drank and paced the floor, his bad foot dragging. After a while he would begin to shake. My mother would attempt to soothe him, but he didn't want to be soothed. He would climb up into the stumpy turret of Avilion, saying he wished to smoke. Really it was an excuse to be alone. Up there he would talk to himself and slam against the walls, and end by drinking himself numb. He left my mother's presence to do this because he was still a gentleman in his own view, or he held on to the shreds of the costume. He didn't want to frighten her. Also he felt badly, I suppose, that her well-meant ministrations grated on him so much.

Light step, heavy step, light step, heavy step, like an animal with one foot in a trap. Groaning and muffled shouts. Broken glass. These sounds would wake me up: the floor of the turret was above my room.

Then there would be footsteps descending; then silence, a black outline looming outside the closed oblong of my bedroom door. I couldn't see him there, but I could feel him, a shambling monster with one eye, so sad. I'd become used to the sounds, I didn't think he would ever hurt me, but I treated him gingerly all the same.

I don't wish to give the impression that he did this every night. Also these sessions-seizures, perhaps-became fewer and further apart, in time. But you could see one coming on by the tightening of my mother's mouth. She had a kind of radar, she could detect the waves of his building rage.

Do I mean to say he didn't love her? Not at all. He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.

What would that be like-to long, to yearn for one who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? I'll never know.

After some months my father began his disreputable rambles. Not in our town though, or not at first. He'd take the train in to Toronto, "on business," and go drinking, and also tomcatting, as it was then called. Word got around, surprisingly quickly, as a scandal is likely to do. Oddly enough, both my mother and my father were more respected in town because of it. Who could blame him, considering? As for her, despite what she had to put up with, not one word of complaint was ever heard to cross her lips. Which was entirely as it should be.

(How do I know all these things? I don't know them, not in the usual sense of knowing. But in households like ours there's often more in silences than in what is actually said-in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight. No wonder we took to listening at doors, Laura and I.)

My father had an array of walking sticks, with special handles-ivory, silver, ebony. He made a point of dressing neatly. He'd never expected to end up running the family business, but now that he'd taken it on he intended to do it well. He could have sold out, but as it happened there were no buyers, not then, or not at his price. Also he felt he had an obligation, if not to the memory of his father, then to those of his dead brothers. He had the letterhead changed to Chase and Sons, even though there was only one son left. He wanted to have sons of his own, two of them preferably, to replace the lost ones. He wanted to persevere.

The men in his factories at first revered him. It wasn't just the medals. As soon as the war was over, the women had stepped aside or else been pushed, and their jobs had been filled by the returning men-whatever men were still capable of holding a job, that is. But there weren't enough jobs to go around: the wartime demand had ended. All over the country there were shutdowns and layoffs, but not in my father's factories. He hired, he overhired. He hired veterans. He said the country's lack of gratitude was despicable, and that its businessmen should now pay back something of what was owed. Very few of them did, though. They turned a blind eye, but my father, who had a real blind eye, could not turn it. Thus began his reputation for being a renegade, and a bit of a fool.

To all appearances I was my father's child. I looked more like him; I'd inherited his scowl, his dogged skepticism. (As well as, eventually, his medals. He left them to me.) Reenie would say-when I was being recalcitrant-that I had a hard nature and she knew where I got it from. Laura on the other hand was my mother's child. She had the piousness, in some ways; she had the high, pure forehead.

But appearances are deceptive. I could never have driven off a bridge. My father could have. My mother couldn't.

Here we are in the autumn of 1919, the three of us together-my father, my mother, myself-making an effort. It's November; it's almost bedtime. We're sitting in the morning room at Avilion. It has a fireplace in it, with a fire, as the weather has turned cool. My mother is recovering from a recent, mysterious illness, said to have something to do with her nerves. She's mending clothes. She doesn't need to do this-she could hire someone-but she wants to do it; she likes to have something to occupy her hands. She's sewing on a button, torn from one of my dresses: I am said to be hard on my clothes. On the round table at her elbow is her sweetgrass-bordered sewing basket, woven by Indians, with her scissors and her spools of thread and her wooden darning egg; also her new round glasses, keeping watch. She doesn't need them for close work.

Her dress is sky blue, with a broad white collar and white cuffs edged in piquet. Her hair has begun to go white prematurely. She would no more think of dyeing it than she would of cutting off her hand, and thus she has a young woman's face in a nest of thistledown. It's parted in the middle, this hair, and flows back in wide, springy waves to an intricate knot of twists and coils at the back of her head. (By the time of her death five years later, it would be bobbed, more fashionable, less compelling.) Her eyelids are lowered, her cheeks rounded, as is her stomach; her half-smile is tender. The electric lamp with its yellow-pink shade casts a soft glow over her face.

Across from her is my father, on a settee. He leans back against the cushions, but he's restless. He has his hand on the knee of his bad leg; the leg jiggles up and down. (The good leg, the bad leg-these terms are of interest to me. What has the bad leg done, to be called bad? Is its hidden, mutilated state a punishment?)

I sit beside him, though not too close. His arm lies along the sofa back behind me, but does not touch. I have my alphabet book; I'm reading to him from it, to show that I can read. I can't though, I've only memorised the shapes of the letters, and the words that go with the pictures. On an end table there's a gramophone, with a speaker rising up out of it like a huge metal flower. My own voice sounds to me like the voice that sometimes comes out of it: small and thin and faraway; something you could turn off with a finger.

A is for Apple Pie, Baked fresh and hot: Some have a little, And others a lot.

I glance up at my father to see if he's paying any attention. Sometimes when you speak to him he doesn't hear. He catches me looking, smiles faintly down at me.

B is for Baby, So pink and so sweet, With two tiny hands And two tiny feet.

My father has gone back to gazing out the window. (Did he place himself outside this window, looking in? An orphan, forever excluded-a night wanderer? This is what he was supposed to have been fighting for-this fireside idyll, this comfortable scene out of a Shredded Wheat advertisement: the rounded, rosy-cheeked wife, so kind and good, the obedient, worshipful child. This flatness, this boredom. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?)

F is for Fire,

Good servant, bad master.

When left to itself

It burns faster and faster.

The picture in the book is of a leaping man covered in flames-wings of fire coming from his heels and shoulders, little fiery horns sprouting from his head. He's looking over his shoulder with a mischievous, enticing smile, and he has no clothes on. The fire can't hurt him, nothing can hurt him. I am in love with him for this reason. I've added extra flames with my crayons.

My mother jabs her needle through the button, cuts the thread. I read on in a voice of increasing anxiety, through suave M and N, through quirky Q and hard R and the sibilant menaces of S. My father stares into the flames, watching the fields and woods and houses and towns and men and brothers go up in smoke, his bad leg moving by itself like a dog's running in dreams. This is his home, this besieged castle; he is its werewolf. The chilly lemon-coloured sunset outside the window fades to grey. I don't know it yet, but Laura is about to be born.