uitar Lullaby

 © Judith Lawrence
(First published 1999 in Wordscape 6 Anthology)

Until I was ten, I spent my childhood summers with my mother at the family cottage on Rock Pine Lake in Muskoka. My father worked in Toronto during the week and joined us at the weekend. I took his life in the big city for granted and unquestioned. Curiosity was not encouraged in our family and as a result, my later discovery was pieced together from circumstantial evidence and not from anything concrete.

I loved every minute of every summer’s day, but the weekends with my dad were special. Each Friday afternoon I set out for the place where the back road joined the Provincial highway. There I sat on the roadside among the pungent weeds and bracken, the scurrying bugs and occasional green snake, to watch and wait for my dad’s car. As soon as he turned the corner I jumped up and waved and he pulled the rusted blue station wagon on to the sandy shoulder. I ran after, choking in the dust that flew up from the wheels and laughing with excitement. When I caught up to it I leapt into the front seat still laughing and gasping for breath.

I chattered like a stream released from a broken beaver dam, stopping the flow of words only long enough to get the week’s ritual ice cream treat, bright pink and filled with cherries, from Mary’s Sodas and Fries. By the time we got home he knew just about everything I’d done since the previous weekend. My mother always cooked spaghetti for supper on Fridays, hot and spicy the way my father liked it. After supper, dad walked around the property checking for problems while my mother and I cleared up in the kitchen.

“Time for bed,” my mother said then.

Every Friday the same words and every Friday I went to my loft room without hesitation, hoping that this obedience would absolve me from the sins she tallied through the week under the heading of “Wait till your father gets home”. I snuggled under my quilt, scented with pine from its frequent outdoor airings under the sun, and waited for the first notes of the classical guitar to sound from my father's instrument. When I heard them, mellow and resonant, I knew that all was well and I slept like a child held in love's arms.

My mother wasn’t pleased when my father brought Tom from Toronto on his first weekend trip of the summer of 1979. I know she was prepared for Tom’s coming for she opened the windows and aired the spare room; she warmed the damp mattress with ancient stone hot-water bottles, and made up the bed with clean sheets and one of grandma’s quilts.

No, she was not unprepared, but it was as if she resented Tom’s intrusion into our lives. There was no open quarrel between my father and mother, Uncle Ed and Auntie Sadie as Tom called them, but things were not right. That night my father didn’t play the guitar. When I got to sleep at last my uneasiness was reflected in dreams of Skokie, the Pine Lake monster, overturning my canoe far out from shore.

Tom and I got on fine, there seemed to be a kinship between us. I was happy to have a companion to share in my adventures and I introduced him to the summer pleasures of Muskoka. I felt the earth pound through the soles of my feet as we ran barefoot over the rocks. We canoed and fished in the lake vying with one another for the biggest fish. We camped out in a tent and I tried to talk him into skinny-dipping under the stars but he refused saying he would never do that with a girl.

Mum fed Tom, of course, and made sure he had clean clothes but she didn’t make any effort to entertain him. It wasn’t like her to be so inhospitable but when I asked her what was wrong she pursed up her lips and shook her head. From time to time, people referred to us as brother and sister, Tom and Alice, the Davies children. My mother was quick to correct them whenever she heard it, making sure that people knew that Tom Morton was a visitor and no blood relative. "Well, you have to admit, love, they do look alike," one cottager said.

Tom told me a little about his life in Toronto and through this I learnt something of my father's summer life. Mrs. Morton, Tom’s mother, kept house for my father while mum and I vacationed in Muskoka. She went to the house each day to clean, do the washing and prepare his meals. My dad was no housekeeper and I was glad to know he was being looked after. They sometimes even stayed overnight Tom told me, actually they often stayed overnight because it was more convenient and practical. He and his mother went home on the weekends to what Tom described as a small dingy flat.

The reason for Tom’s stay with us this particular summer was his mother’s admission to hospital for an operation. He worried a lot and wished he could be near her. Also he was unsettled away from his friends and familiar environment. He missed the city noises and smells, the rides on the streetcar and subway, and the baseball games at Christie Pits.

Each week, my dad brought bulletins of Mrs. Morton’s progress but it wasn’t enough for Tom. In the end he got so homesick he begged my father to take him back to Toronto with him. Dad tried to put him off but when Tom found out that his mother was home from the hospital and coping on her own, he refused to stay any longer. My mother made no protest; it was almost as if she was glad to see him go. I know now that this was true.

The following summer, my mother decided to look after my father’s needs in Toronto and we went to Muskoka only on the weekends. We suffered the traffic with the rest of the weekenders. I didn’t understand why things couldn’t continue as they had done for so many years, but there was no changing mum’s mind.
Tom and I lost touch. I went on to the next thing in my life and I'm sure Tom Morton did the same. It was years later when I met up with him. I was in Africa working as a nurse and he joined the same medical team. Now, that was chance.

As soon as I saw Dr. Tom Morton I knew him right away, though his cobalt blue eyes were more intense than when he was younger. His short hair was no more manageable than when he was a kid and was almost the same colour as my dad’s was. Mine was that same unusual cornstalk-yellow too but my eyes were dark brown like my mother’s.

We soon fell back into the easygoing relationship we had that summer 15 years ago. We were the only Canadians in the group and the only single people of our age. We were together a lot, on duty and off. Tom and I got married about a year later when the jacarandas were in purple bloom. We sent notices of our wedding to our parents after the fact; no one could have made a trip to Africa so we saw no point in sending out invitations.

Dad seemed to be pleased enough at our news, but our mothers’ lack of understanding surprised us. We didn't take it too much to heart; we were in love and were interested in the same things and shared the same concerns. It was a good base for a marriage we thought.

The oranges and lemons were ripening on the trees when our baby was born a little over a year after our wedding. Being trained medical people we both saw the obvious mongoloid features at once, but I knew more. With the aid of that sixth sense of feminine intuition, I experienced a startling insight when the nurse placed the baby in my arms. Tom’s father and my father was one and the same person, our baby had received a double dose of a bad gene. My heart went out to her.

“So sorry, dear heart,” I said.

Why neither Tom nor I suspected earlier that we had the same father, I don't know. Why our parents never saw fit to tell us, I don't know. Tom didn’t suspect it even after the baby’s birth. Men are not as observant or as suspicious as women tend to be.
I decided not to tell him.

At first Tom and I were devastated by Lucy’s handicap. But she was such a loving, happy child that we soon couldn’t imagine our lives without her sunshine, sunshine as warm as that which fell on our African home. She brought us so much joy that Tom and I never discussed the possible cause of her condition. Was it just one indiscretion that resulted in Tom? Did Tom’s mother try to tell dad that Tom was his son and not her husband’s? I could see that my dad, like Tom, wasn’t aware of the situation. If he had known, I think he would have told us. Should I now break the code of silence passed from woman to woman?

What purpose would it serve?

It would serve Lucy nothing. It would serve Tom nothing, except heartache and anger. It would serve Lucy’s grandfather nothing, except guilt. It would serve me nothing, except retribution. As for the two grandmothers, what would it serve them? If it would have served them anything, they would long ago have broken silence.

That was what I thought when we were still in Africa and I was happy in the warmth of the sun.

When Lucy was two years old we returned to Toronto. It was winter. The biting cold winds at the corner of Bloor Street and University Avenue and the black-pitted gray snow banks filled me with self-pity. The merciless city with its homeless men huddled in tattered blankets and begging for money with outstretched purple hands in fingerless gloves made me feel guilty for my silence. This guiltiness stoked the fire of blame and reproach I felt for the secret held deep in my heart.

It was the adjustment that unsettled me, I reasoned, the adjustment from hot to cold weather, from fresh green to dirty gray, from peaceful countryside to noisy city. But, more than this, it was Tom’s inability to share my unhappiness. He loved the city. Its speed and its noise excited him. He was happy and I was not. I wanted to force him to share in my unhappiness and revelation of the secret would do just that.

Nevertheless, I kept the silence.

Tom asked me to consider having another child. I explained that I didn’t want to risk more heartache, and even if we should take the available tests and find out that the child would be the same, I couldn’t bear to have an abortion.

He pressed me on the issue. I continued to refuse. He got angry at my stubbornness. I got angry at his blindness. Lucy began to cry.

“I will not visit a father's sins on the next generation,” I said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We cannot have another child,” I said.

“Why not?” Tom said. “You’re a nurse, you know there are tests you can take. If it’s another Down’s baby you can have an abortion.”

“You’re so blind,” I said.

“Oh, now I’m blind. What d’you think I’m blind about? I’m a doctor. I know a hell of a lot more about this than you do.”

“Is that so? Then you know, do you, that Uncle Ed is your dad? That my dad is your dad?”

“What?”

“We can take a test for that if you want,” I said, “but if you just opened your eyes you’d see it for yourself. I won’t have another child.”

“How long have you known about this? How could you let us have even one child knowing this? How could you let us get married? And what about Lucy, what can we do about her?”

“What do you mean, what can we do about Lucy?” I said. “We can love her, that’s what, the same as we’ve always loved her. She’s the same child, your child, my child.”

“Yes, the same child, the child of step-brother and step-sister. How could you?”

In the quiet that came after Tom packed his bags and moved out, I realized that I had been right earlier. It served no purpose to break the code of silence maintained by the women in our family for so many years.

We’re divorced now. Tom’s anger is over. He came close to speaking to the family that night. I think that the only reason he didn’t do so was because he felt like a fool for not seeing it sooner.

Tom married again. He has a healthy son. He is happy to know that Lucy wasn’t his fault and the child of his second marriage reassures him of this. He comes to Muskoka to see Lucy at Christmas and on her birthday. He loves her, how could he not? Lucy, the child of pure innocence, happy and loving as ever. She is drawn to the music of the guitar. Her grandfather lives with us, he moved in after my mother died. At night he plays a guitar lullaby for Lucy and she falls asleep to its music like a child in love’s arms.

Lucy is the granddaughter of a guitar lullaby maker, maternal and paternal grandfather one and the same. He has no idea of the havoc he caused to so many lives by one night’s indiscretion. The women in our family never broke their silence of this matter to him. My mother and mother-in-law both died this past year without having told him, and I will never tell him.

What purpose would it serve?

Women have been keeping silence for centuries and have learned their lessons well. I only wish that I’d learned mine before I broke Tom’s heart.