I Loved Him, You Know

They met at the Badminton Club in Toronto and married in the BSS chapel on Friday, March 14, 1941.  I have a Globe and Mail photo of them, standing in the chapel doorway.  They make an elegant couple.  Dad was six foot four – an extraordinary height in those days, and he was very, very good looking:  dark, dashing, with roguish eyes and a dimpled smile and a rugged strong face.  But he’s just background. It’s my mother who steals the show.  

She’s wearing a very simple floor-length white dress with long sleeves and a wide-brimmed floppy hat over a mass of rich dark hair.  The upper part of the dress is cut like a V necked jacket and edged with satin ribbon; her throat is bare.  Her right arm is hidden in the crook of his elbow but she’s not leaning on him, and with her other hand she holds a mass of white flowers in a relaxed downwards gesture, not so much holding them as letting them hang, almost falling, in front of her skirt.  Her beautiful mouth is wide open as if in mid-laugh, and her eyes are closed.  Dad looks controlled:  he’s flashing a practiced smile at the camera as if it were a mirror.  She just looks joyous.  

“I think it was quite passionate at first,” she told me, in one of her sudden illuminations toward the end of her life, after her memory was mostly gone. 

Of course it was.

They seemed like such a successful couple. They were liked and admired by neighbors, and acquaintance—always well-dressed, always well-mannered, Dad something of a character with his famously “booming” voice, my mother with her sudden laugh and continual empathy. They gardened; they conducted vigorous Sunday walks, sticks in hand, through fields and along riverbanks; they constantly. entertained—desserts and drinks (always drinks) on Saturday or Sunday evenings in their pleasant large living room, often before a roaring fire, everyone talking over each other, shouting louder and louder as the drinks went on into the night, my father booming over them all.

**

Their letters tell the story. I still have weekly missives from each of them, stretching over three decades. Here’s a note from him, typical both in its concern for my temperamental mother, and also in his sense of his own role toward me, his only son. I was living in England on June 13, 1971, when he wrote this: 

Mother is not very well.  Write her a cheerful note.  I am trying to get her to see a doctor.  That tendency to see in everything the useless aspect; I used to praise her realism but now I wonder whether it is not something closer to pessimism.  So write her a short private loving letter.  

Love,

Dad

Or, a year or so later (January 9, 1972): 

My first letter in the new year, so I’m starting badly by being tardy…. Why this obligation to write cheerful letters?  Obligation! Nonsense. As soon as one begins doing something, lethargy (half the source of gloom on such a day) melts away, good nature returns and then thinking of you two [the letter is addressed to both me and my former wife] I am suddenly cheerful.

Four years later (January 3, 1976) he hits the same note: “My first letter in ’76.  I have the proper priorities.” And he proceeds to share an entirely typical account of his success in finding a presentation gift for a retiring employee:

The next morning I drove down town to buy the oil painting for presentation that evening. I had changed my trousers and forgotten to transfer my money to the new clothing. Do you know I found a meter with free time on it – literally ran down to Nash’s galleries. Within ten minutes I found a nice little oil for $150, asked whether I might take it away on credit, was most graciously told I was welcome – I offered to sign at least, this was waved off and off I went to my car which by then had just run out of time – but I was there before the meter inspector – drove home in triumph. Hours later at the banquet when I presented it, it won the heart of Mrs. Borho.  Great success.

The same year (April 25, 1976), my mother shares a different side to his self-presentation in what seems an attempt to reassure me:

I think Wray is not nearly as depressed as he was last year. He tends to try to live vicariously through you because he thinks he has so wasted his opportunities. It grieves him that he was so overlooked in the Larkin Hierarchy and he does find the grind at Cashway depressing…. He is much happier now that he has been given a responsible job in the church, I always thought he was overlooked there too. He is getting a lot of spiritual consolation and doing a really good job with the organization part as well. So don’t worry about him. He is doing some outreaching.

And then, the following year (July 10, 1977), the first premonition:

I have developed a tremble. Dr. Judson puzzled.  It comes and goes. I think it is Parkinson’s disease, but I have always been a pessimist. And yet I walk and drive and cut the lawn normally.  As I do this typing the shaking has begun again. Most unpleasant.

It was indeed Parkinson’s and its arrival shattered the delicate balance of their long relationship. 

**

Laid out on a time line, the destructive trajectory of the disease was probably quite normal. For the first eight or nine years, Dad struggled to function with considerable success. His job had always been a humiliation to him. It was, he felt, beneath his education and capacities—but he did it, faithfully and bravely, and on the basis of that modest income he built a large house in a classy suburb and assembled a portfolio of stocks that saw him and my mother through a comfortable retirement. In that initial phase, he took courses in history at Western; he got several reviews and travel articles published in the London Free Press; together they kept up the garden—about a third of an acre—and maintained the house; he was also a warden at his Anglican parish.

There was, however, a side of that life that outsiders did not see. At first it seemed that my mother was the more vulnerable of the two. And in fact, that was her established role in the relationship: she was prone to depression, to moods, to flashes of irrational anger. She was a “difficult” woman, while he was the protector who solved problems and navigated the world around them with a continual barrage of talk. Here is a typical letter from her:

May 13, 1980

Dear Jerry:

I think this mental depression is bad. I cannot go into the kitchen without serious nausea, and to shop at Loblaws meat counter sends me leaning on the counter and shaking like a leaf, let alone making decisions…. Is it a lifelong ‘getting of meals’?

Whenever Wray gets really mad at me, which he does often these days, he suggests that I take a trip to Vancouver, ‘to get out of his hair’ I assume.

Instead of visiting us in Vancouver she spent some dividends (she had a small portfolio of her own, inherited from her mother) financing a trip to France for him—and he managed on his own, triumphantly—taking an immersion course in French in Saint Michel and spending a few days at the George V in Paris. 

However, the relentless decline continued. 

May 23, 1983

Wray is so ill and so miserable, he collapses nearly all day, and then worries about dying all night.  Why should he worry so much about dying, when he is so miserable all day?

He is completely absorbed with his health, and it is surely a miserable affliction, but gosh he should get some kind of hold if he is so keen on going on living. The constant depression is driving me crazy, and I am so tired of my cheerful voice going on and on with nothings, from the Globe and Mail, from Newsweek, from shopping, from the garden, I am driving myself crazy.

And an undated letter from him, from the same period:

Wed A.M.  Instead of hoping for sleep I have decided to finish this letter.  By the way I suppose the reason I FEEL FRUSTRATED ABOUT YOUR GENERAL FAILURE to comment on any feature of my letters is the knowledge that despite sloppy typing, I know there is always something there worth thinking about.

For example, there is implied in all of them the necessity for you to come up to your potential. Your uncle Jack was born with about a D mind yet he has made himself a huge success, I was born with a B mind and for lack of concentration [am] a B or B-minus person. You were born with a A or at worst a A minus mind.  It is therefore incumbent on you to contribute as an A. Of course it’s not a stupid thing like the acquisition of money. It is the development of excellence and the higher your initial advantage the wider your choice of ways to seek it…..

I am convinced the pills are slowly killing me. When I stroll to the bottom of the garden, I negotiate the return to the house with the most painful labor – a great hammering inside the chest….

June 26, of the same year, from my mother:

Dear Jerry,

Jerry I am really frightened. I can hardly see, when Wray is in the car, because he says do this do that, a great red light staring me in the face, I would like to dump the car in the nearest ditch, which I may do. He clutches the upholstery until it is worn thin. I have never got lost in London, until the last few days.

He is so unhappy, yet expects me to make him happy, because it is my bounded duty as a wife, ‘till death do us part.’

And further, undated:

I am really desperate, Wray keeps saying he is not going to last a year, or even this night, Jerry he is so frightened and so incapacitated, he can hardly get up from the floor, where he likes to sleep, he hasn’t been falling lately, but he is so frail….. He struck me violently three times in the last 2 weeks. I was surprised at the strength – Now I stay out of reach. We are tearing each other apart.  When I cannot help him up he calls me “wicked woman” no compassion, cannot understand how I can be so cruel, which in turn makes me mad. His favorite slogan is, “I need tender loving care”, which I know he does, but he is so disagreeable I cannot dish out “tender loving care”. No love anywhere!!

**

I was a long way away, in Vancouver, struggling with the collapse of my own marriage, but I managed to visit three or four times a year. They sold the big house and moved, against advice, to a townhouse (a lot of stairs), and then, barely a year later, to an assisted living residence where Dad had a fall and brief hospitalization. He was becoming delusional by this time; when I visited him in hospital he announced that George Steiner was about to call from The New Yorker about a piece that he had written. The residence refused to take him back and the hospital would only release him into a controlled environment—so I established them in newly constructed mixed complex, which offered nursing home care for him along with an independent apartment for my mother in a separate building with only a driveway between them. He was still sufficiently mobile to walk over every day and visit. The arrangement provided stability for a couple of years and relieved pressure on her. 

January 2, 1987:

….Wray hasn’t been well the last few days.  I haven’t been able to push him or attempt to get him to his feet because of the eye.  He feels like such a prisoner in the nursing home and he gets so upset with the staff, who mostly like him, but get impatient with his imperious demands….

New Years Day was a disaster. He wants so much to do normal things and is horribly frustrated when he can’t. Yelling at the waitress because someone had pushed ahead. Demanding his rights plus consideration for his condition. We were seated with a very nice couple who certainly didn’t want all this unpleasantness for their New Year’s dinner. Finally got him into the wheel chair, with the help of staff and another diner, shouting at me all the way down the passageway how horrible I was, love, kindness, he deserves which he never has….

His last letters to me were, as always, written on a portable typewriter, full of extra letters and odd spaces which I have corrected for this account.  They must have taken great effort.

.…Think of him [his brother Jack] when you assess your own career, for you are rotting your brain with alcohol. Are you ...[indecipherable]… like two persons, one good and achieving, the other rotten and at 42 declining.

I have failed to live up to my full potential but am steadily improving. I am making good progress on the Malay History of Malaysia …[indecipherable]…a famous magazine (accepted).  Making some progress in mastering my disease.

I then called Hugh, my favorite [brother]. Hugh is a millionaire too. Miserably unhappy he hates to see me because of my loathsome disease. So instead of helping me he guiltily avoids me. Does this ring a bell?

When his care became too much for the nursing home, we transferred him to an extended care hospital. At that point, all their letters ceased.

**

During his last years my mother visited him three times a week, going to the hospital by taxi and feeding him his favorite ice cream from a thermos. She would croon over him while massaging his stick-like, hairless leg, murmuring phrases of sad comfort—Are you better today? Poor Wray, poor baby, is it too hard to bear? Is that better? He would avert a stony face, while determinedly talking over her, with a stream of imprecations and demands: Get me out of here, you’re a wicked, wicked woman. Take me to the Royal Bank, right now, I have a white Lexus in the parking lot and six million dollars on deposit, drive me to Toronto where I have a seat on the stock exchange, right now, right now. You’re a wicked, wicked woman. Take me now.

She always left in tears.

My own visits were marked by the same intense demands, or long silences, as I wheeled him along corridors in his complicated wheel chair, or took him to the garden, or sat by him, feeding him sentences that I hoped might catch his interest—fragments of family history, news about his grandchildren or his siblings, political events of the day, all of which he met with stony silence, just as he responded – or failed to respond – to my gestures of physical affection, the touches, the parting kiss on his glistening slightly damp, blue-veined forehead.  He would fall utterly still when I kissed him, and said that I loved him – and then he would start talking about the white Lexus the non-existent money at the Royal Bank.  

For several years, my mother had arranged for a male companion to visit him three times a week, for two hours at a time, first in the nursing home, then in hospital.  His name was Clovis.  He was originally from Jamaica, and he remembered Dad from the days when he managed the retail lumber business and Clovis was a customer. Clovis would wheel him around those same corridors, pausing at the non-denominational chapel to recite a rosary—something I would never venture to impose. But from Clovis, it was OK. 

“This is a Roman Catholic chapel,” Dad informed me.

Dad hated Catholics, and homosexuals; his son was both. 

In his final year, Dad confided to me that he loved Clovis and that Clovis loved him. Clovis was a fine man, a faithful one. I was grateful to him for what he gave my father. But he never spent a moment in Dad’s presence for which he was not paid. 

**

“I loved him, you know,” my mother told me, speaking of Dad, after she lost her memory. And she did, as best she could—despite her own struggles with health and what we would now term undiagnosed mental illness. 

He died suddenly, while being prepared for a bath. She was immobilized by the shock and the loss and consumed by blind, hopeless, unremitting guilt, stumbling around without any of the old flashes of fury or wit. She lost her way returning from the bathroom at the funeral home, her hairpiece awry. 

“Your mother’s not doing well,” the counsellor told me quietly—clearly expecting that she would soon follow my father.

But she didn’t. 

Little by little, she rallied. She had friends in the complex at Chelsea Park, along with a flower garden. She decorated her apartment. Two years later she took the brave decision to move to Ottawa, ostensibly to save me the long seven-hour drive to visit her: she would never invoke an obligation on my part. 

And once installed in Ottawa, before her memory really ebbed away, she astonished me one night when I opened her door and discovered her in the lap of a new boyfriend named “George”.