“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go?”
Grace met his eyes. “No,” she said.
In the lamplight her face was burnished and sallow. She looked both hopeful and sad, so much like she had when they were younger, and he drew closer to her, drawn by memory or habit or some instinct that would never die in him as long they both lived.
She put her hand on his arm. “It isn’t going to be like that,” she said firmly.
He nodded, and kissed her cheek like a brother or a friend, then arranged a blanket over her on the couch and left.
He woke up the next morning feeling better, if not about himself then about the world. Lying in bed, the phrase old flame came to him, and he considered how little it described the truth of the situation. Between him and Grace there was nothing burning, which his gesture last night had only confirmed. But there was something else, solid and enduring, that was more like old furniture, with the steady reassurance of lasting objects.
Since returning to Montreal he had sprung out of bed most mornings and gone for an hour-long run, hoping to purge his body of unwanted and disturbing thoughts. It was both discipline and penitence. But today he stayed in the apartment, drinking tea and reading the newspaper.
“Are you having a slow burn?” his mother used to say, trying for the second or third time to wake him up for school. As a special treat, every few weekends they’d have a slow-burn morning as a family, and she would let Malcolm and Mitch hang around the kitchen while she made pancakes and bacon.
His mother was an ample, competent woman who had raised them on her own. She worked as a secretary at CN Rail, and every morning after they left for school she’d take a bus downtown. Mitch could still remember the perfume she wore, and the hideous orange lipstick she seemed to consider a professional necessity. She had left school at sixteen to work in her family’s restaurant, but never expressed any sadness at having missed out. Nor did she complain about coming home after a full day’s work to cook dinner, do the laundry, help with homework. “You’re my good boys,” she’d say, tucking them into bed.
And they were. They both did well in school, and in this she said they took after their father. Mitch was five when he died. Malcolm, who was two years older, claimed to have memories of him, and at night after the lights were out, Mitch would sometimes beg to hear them; but these stories shifted and changed so much, often borrowing from whatever TV show or comic book Malcolm was into at the time, that Mitch was doubtful even as he hoped to believe them. What they knew of him was this: he’d been born in 1921, in Winnipeg, and served in the Canadian infantry during World War II. He’d become an engineer, also working at CN, met Rosemary in the family restaurant where she’d been waitressing, and whisked her off to Montreal and marriage. He was smart as a whip (another of their mother’s favorite sayings); and he died, much too young, of a heart attack, which was why they should listen to her and never, ever start smoking.
All this Mitch accepted as gospel throughout his childhood and adolescence, as Malcolm, too, became an engineer and moved to Toronto. Not finding himself inclined to engineering, Mitch took a degree in psychology. But at Christmas one year, when he told his mother his plans to pursue this in graduate school, she burst into tears.
They were sitting at their tiny kitchen table, and he stared at her, dumbfounded. He wasn’t used to disappointing her, and had expected she’d be pleased; she was always proud of his success in school. “It’s almost like a doctor,” he said, pathetically.
Rosemary was shaking her head. “This is because of your father, isn’t it?”
Mitch had no idea what she was talking about, and by now he rarely even thought about his father.
Tears poured down his mother’s face. “I knew it,” she said. “I kept watching you, knowing it would come out. And here it is.”
He stood up and put his arm around her. “This is just what I’m interested in,” he told her. “What I care about.”
She took his arm and guided him back into his chair, then held his hands and looked into his eyes. “This fascination you have with people’s minds, all your curiosity. It’s because you want to understand what made him do a thing like that. But you aren’t like him. You know that, don’t you? And some things can’t ever be understood.”
In that moment he felt something tilt inside him, as if a picture that had been hung upside down was suddenly righted, and he saw clearly what it showed.
Heart attack was what they told the neighbors, because Rosemary didn’t want their pity, didn’t want stories to surround her boys. Protecting them was always her first and overriding instinct. But the truth now came back to him with the shock of recognition: his father in the basement, on a sleeping bag, with an empty bottle of pills on the floor next to an empty bottle. He remembered a rancid stench that was mixed with the odor of bleach, because his mother had cleaned everything up before calling the doctor and asking him what to do.
Rosemary dried her tears, carefully and quickly; she never indulged herself in anything, even crying. “He was a sweet man, really,” she said. “But he had such a darkness in him. His parents told me he was never the same after he came back from fighting. It weighed on him, the things he saw in France.”
Mitch squeezed her hands.
“I always hated that he left us,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t enough for you boys.”
“That’s not true,” he said. He would have liked to say, You’ve given me everything I need. He would have liked to say, Feel how much you are loved. Instead he sat with her, and let her talk about his father.
His mother wasn’t sure about Grace at first. She was so young, so excited about psychology. She had no idea how to cook and no immediate plans for a family.
“That’s just fine,” Mitch’s mother said. “You take your time.”
But it was clear she was reserving judgment. Partly this had to do with psychology, which she had always distrusted; she didn’t truly believe anything could be achieved by all this talking. Compared to Malcolm’s work — he consulted on bridges and roads, projects their mother would have liked to put plaques on — Mitch’s was invisible, intangible, and, quite possibly, nonsensical. Usually, when he came home to visit, he’d give her the briefest possible update and then change the subject to the news or the weather.
Snow was the great equalizer of their family. They all hated it, the three of them having shared the task of shoveling for years. They could talk about it for hours — when it would start, how much was coming, when it would end. Nothing bonded them so completely as snow.
But Grace. The first time she heard them ranting about snow, she said, “You just have to get out in it!”
Rosemary smiled at her and lit a cigarette; for all she had warned the children against smoking, she herself was never able to quit. “Now why would I want to do that, dear?”
“You have to embrace the snow. Have fun with it. Go skiing, build a snowman, throw snowballs. That’s what you should do,” Grace told her, her eyes shining. “I promise you, it’ll change your life.”
“Ah, well,” Rosemary said. “I suppose I like my life the way it is.”
In the brief pause that followed, Grace’s cheeks turned red and she looked down at the table until Malcolm’s wife, Cindy, who was good-hearted, changed the subject by telling Rosemary that she was going to start selling Avon.
“We have such pretty lipsticks. I’ll bring you some.”