Against his bleak forecasting is set my mother’s cheerfulness, in retrospect profoundly willed. We start on the steamer trunk. It’s the one I remember from our Toronto house; I still think of it as mysterious, the repository of treasure. My mother too views this as an adventure: she says she hasn’t looked into that trunk for years, she has no idea what’s in there. She is no less alive because dying. I open the trunk, and the smell of mothballs blossoms upward. Out come the baby clothes folded in tissue paper, the pieces of flowery silver, yellowy-black. “Keep these for the girls,” she says. “You have this one.” The wedding dress, the wedding pictures, the sepia-colored relatives. A packet of feathers. Some bridge tallies with tassels on them, two pairs of white kid gloves. “Your father was a wonderful dancer,” she says. “Before we were married.” I have never known this. We go down through the layers, unearthing discoveries: my high school pictures, my lipsticked mouth unsmiling, somebody’s hair in an envelope, a single knitted baby sock. Old mittens, old neckties. An apron. Some things are to be kept, others thrown out or given away. Some things I will take back with me. We have several piles.
My mother is excited, and I catch some of this excitement from her: it’s like a Christmas stocking. Although not pure joy.
Stephen’s packets of airplane trading cards, held together with rotting elastic bands. His scrapbooks, his drawings of explosions, his old report cards. These she sets aside.
My own drawings and scrapbooks. There are the pictures of little girls I now remember, with their puffed sleeves and pink skirts and hairbows. Then, in the scrapbooks, some unfamiliar pictures cut from magazines: women’s bodies, in clothes of the forties, with other women’s heads glued onto them.
“You loved those magazines,” says my mother. “You used to pore over them for hours, when you were sick in bed.”
Underneath the scrapbooks is my old photo album, the black pages held together with the tie like a shoelace. Now I can remember putting it into the trunk, before I went to high school.
“We gave you that,” says my mother. “For Christmas, to go with your camera.” Inside is my brother, poised with a snowball, and Grace Smeath crowned with flowers. A couple of large boulders, with names printed underneath them in white pencil. Myself, in a jacket with the sleeves too short, standing against a motel cabin door. The number 9.
“I wonder what happened to that camera?” says my mother. “I must’ve given it away. You lost interest in it, after a while.”
I’m aware of a barrier between us. It’s been there for a long time. Something I have resented. I want to put my arms around her. But I am held back.
“What’s that?” she says.
“My old purse,” I say. “I used to take it to church.” I did. I can see the church now, the onion on the spire, the pews, the stained-glass windows. THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.
“Well, what do you know. I don’t know why I saved that,” says my mother, with a little laugh. “Put it on the throw-out pile.” It’s squashed flat; the red plastic is split at the sides, where the sewing is. I pick it up, push at it to make it go back into shape. Something rattles. I open it up and take out my blue cat’s eye.
“A marble!” says my mother, with a child’s delight. “Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?”
“Yes,” I say. But this one was mine.
I look into it, and see my life entire.
Chapter 70
I’ve never got used to the Queen being grown up. Whenever I see her cut-off head on the money, I think of her as fourteen years old, in her Girl Guide uniform, her back as straight as ours were supposed to be, looking down at me from the yellowing newspaper clippings on Miss Lumley’s Grade Four blackboard; standing in front of the clumsy diamond of a radio microphone, frowning with earnestness and well-concealed fear, rallying the forces as the bombs fell on London, as we sang “There’ll Always Be an England” to the waving of Miss Lumley’s life-threatening wooden pointer, in a time warp eight years later.