That's My Baby Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Phyllis Bruce

  EPIGRAPH

  Ah! now

  in the twilight

  I’m catching something of you

  (a relenting in your absence),

  an outline, a quickening: shoulders

  half turned, head in profile,

  you’re swinging round

  towards the camera

  as if recalled.

  —“Recalled,” Florence Treadwell

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  “The ‘C’ Jam Blues”

  Lost Luggage

  Billie’s Photos

  Lost Identity

  In the Rowboat

  Nightmare

  The Test

  There Once Was a Child

  Jitney Dance

  Facts About Cheese

  Attempts

  On the Train

  Aunt Zel’s Photo

  Kenan’s Photo

  Switched Identity

  The Move

  What She Finds

  The Lady Champlain

  Mariah Bindle’s Early Diary

  Digging Up Old Things

  The O’Neill Auction

  Tobe

  Mariah’s 1903 Diary

  Invitation

  Filmore

  Preparations

  Coventry

  Last Word

  Mariah’s Final Diary

  Belleville Station

  That’s My Baby

  Mistaken Identity

  Seaman’s Chest

  That Bless’ed State

  Identity?

  “Air Conditioned Jungle”

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Frances Itani

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  “THE ‘C’ JAM BLUES”

  WHEN SHE THINKS OF DUKE’S MUSIC, A favourite comes to mind.

  “The ‘C’ Jam Blues,” an early recording. Every note, every nuance, in the vein, in the tapping heel, in the heart, in the bone.

  This is what it says to her; this is how it goes. Duke on piano, basic start, plain enough, two notes, steady beat. A touch of bass, a tap of drum.

  This is what I say, say, say

  Do you hear, do you hear?

  We hear, all ears, we hear, we hear

  Let’s have the news, the news

  Sax next, piano riffs off this, theme pursued. Talk gets fast and spicy. Violin strolls in with confidence, sure of the information. Cornet adds joy, voices light, voices deep, echoes, reminders, two cents’ worth. The news is spreading, get it, love it, wallow in it. Someone adds an unexpected detail. Ah, we knew that all along. Listen to this, then; I know something, too. “Tricky Sam” Nanton mellow on trombone, then talk, talk, talk; Bigard, clarinet; Sonny Greer, drums; they’re all here, partaking of the news.

  Just under three minutes, that’s all it takes. Each becomes a part, owns a part of the whole.

  Belongs. Settles in. Stretches the news until the topic changes. Owns the news, even after moving on.

  Owns. Belongs. Belonging. Longing to belong. Must she do this to herself?

  She’s the one who turns on the music, adjusts the volume, sits there and listens.

  She’s the one who yearns to be part of the conversation.

  1998

  LOST LUGGAGE

  HANORA’S DREAM HAS RETURNED. SHE HAS left her luggage on a train and the train has departed. The luggage is on a high rack. Elusive, invisible, sometimes seen but not reached, sometimes narrowly out of sight. She searches frantically before thinking to look up, but by then it’s too late. She wakes in sadness. It is truly gone.

  Wake up, she tells herself. I am not travelling, I’m home.

  And remains in bed awhile longer. Dream luggage makes her uneasy. She is uncertain of ownership. Does the luggage belong to her or to someone else? The real concern is that the dream returns when loss threatens.

  Loss of something or someone. She’s been around long enough to know the signs.

  The worry stays with her all morning, so she pays attention, later, when she takes the elevator to the lobby to retrieve the mail and finds an envelope containing five photos of Billie’s newly painted kitchen.

  Why would her cousin send photos of her kitchen? Is this, too, a sign? She lives three blocks away. Because of Billie’s problems, Hanora visits almost every day.

  Billie is losing her mind. Her memory is perforated with holes. Blanks. Synapses won’t work.

  Prends garde.

  Hanora thinks of the book she is trying to work on and wants to weep. Billie’s problems have taken over her life. Gradually, at first. As weeks and months have passed, demands have increased hour by hour. There is always a new crisis looming, an unexpected event landing on her doorstep—or, more realistically, shrilling through her phone.

  Once upon a time, Hanora called herself a writer, a journalist. Hasn’t she travelled the world and written about those travels? Hasn’t she covered elections, coups, celebrations, invasions, wars—and once, peace? Hasn’t she written a shelf full of books, two of which were awarded international honours? Well, not a full shelf—six. But months have passed since she’s written anything. Seven months, exactly. Which makes her feel as if she isn’t a writer at all. When a writer isn’t writing, uncertainties bubble to the surface, uncertainties expand.

  The research she has been doing is about a painter and diarist, Mariah Bindle, whose memory also began to fail, but at a younger age. The book will focus not on memory or memory loss, but on the artist’s life and work. For a time, between wars, Mariah was celebrated in art circles. After the Second World War, interest faded and her art was overlooked. Most traces of her disappeared. Half a century later, her paintings have begun to attract attention once again. They are turning up in galleries and at private sales. The National Gallery recently announced the purchase of two of her larger oils.

  Hanora became interested and began to make inquiries. What draws her to the art is Mariah’s sense of inclusivity, her soothing juxtaposition of colours, especially when the colours are stark and bright. The earliest drawings depict the rugged beauty of the Canadian Shield. The land early settlers loved and hated: its stubborn resistance to being tamed; its formidable presence invading spirit and memory and bone.

  After much tracking, after many phone calls and several blind leads, Hanora met with Mariah’s family—great-grandchildren of an older brother—and was permitted access to the artist’s papers. Diaries, journals and sketchbooks had at one time been shelved in an upstairs closet in the original homestead south of Madoc, Ontario. When the house and adjoining land were sold while Mariah lived abroad, the closet was cleared, and at least some of the diaries and papers were stuffed into boxes and passed on to her brother’s family, forty miles away. For many years they were stored in a shed, and it was there that they were later discovered. Storage arrangements were less than ideal, but somehow, two bulging cardboard boxes survived, though not in the best condition. No value was ever placed on these by generations of family. Mariah had been the spinster artist, the eccentric relative who disappeared for years at a time and wandered about the world. No one knew what to do with the material. The boxes were kept but ignored.

  How much has been destroyed or thrown away can only be guessed at, but Hanora believes that what remains is of value to the country. When she interviewed the present members of the Bindle family, they greeted her with what she recognized as modest relief. They were unsure of how to dispose of the papers that were in their possession. Hanora was a writer, a researcher, someone who was interested. She knew what to do and where the documents should eventually be housed. They coul
d not conceal their pleasure.

  When Hanora first came across the paintings and learned that the artist had spent her childhood years an hour’s drive, more or less, to the north of her own hometown of Deseronto, she knew with certainty that Mariah would be the subject of her next book. The attraction became more intimate after she riffled through some of the letters and diaries, and began to understand Mariah’s experience as a female artist travelling alone in the world during important eras. Mariah’s personality is captured by the recording of her own activities—the details intimate and conversational, at times.

  So far, Hanora has read only a portion of the contents of the boxes. Apart from working with oils, Mariah created hundreds of drawings in pencil, pen and ink, wax crayon, coloured pencil, and charcoal, in diaries, journals and sketchpads, over a period of almost half a century. The body of work amounts to a visually recorded history. Not only of the rural area south of Madoc, where she began to draw people and places around her, but of the larger world between the wars, and during the Second World War in Coventry. Hanora is the first researcher to examine the boxes. These are safely stowed in her apartment, and the contents await inspection. The family is eager for the book, as is Hanora’s publisher. She’ll get the work done, but she has to read every one of the documents. She also wants to examine the drawings carefully. She has access to many of the oils, because she has tracked these to various galleries and has been permitted to photograph them for research purposes.

  Her deadline has not changed. What has changed is that she’s had to put the project on hold while she attempts to solve her cousin’s problems. She doesn’t have the energy for both. Not today, not yesterday, probably not tomorrow. Rather than be completely frustrated by her inability to work, she has set everything aside until she can get to it, at least part of the time.

  But a writer writes, she tells herself, determination rising. And this is the moment when she decides that she will remember, record, get facts on paper. Not everything, but items of importance only—to Billie and to her. She may not be able to get to her own project, but she can still pick up a pen and tap at a keyboard.

  INSTEAD of Mariah’s story, Hanora will tap memories of another kind: her own, and Billie’s, too, whatever her cousin has left. This used to be a joke between them. One rapped a finger against the side of the other’s head. Anybody home?

  A joke no longer. Billie has first-hand experience with nobody being home. Problem is, she doesn’t realize how scrambled things are; or she does, but only partly. Hanora finds herself in the position of having to make decisions for her. Not all, but many, most. Some days she curses the moment she agreed (eight years ago, after Billie’s husband, Whitby, died) to take on the responsibilities as executor and power of attorney for her cousin’s affairs. This now means power of attorney for Billie’s life. At the time, the request seemed sane enough. Billie has no children. She and Hanora both live in Ottawa. Billie’s older brother, Ned, who is a widower, has lived in Rochester, New York, his entire life. Ned has a daughter, also in Rochester. Both believe that Billie, up there in Canada, is just fine. Both complain, sometimes rudely—even crudely—to Hanora. Both are far away and talk to Billie by phone. (Billie’s half of the conversation: “Oh, hello. Everything’s good. I’m fine. I’m sitting here watching TV. Hanora is with me. How are you?”)

  Neither Ned nor his daughter is helpful, and neither is realistic; neither understands the immensity of the problems presented by quotidian tasks or has offered to lend a hand. Ned retired years ago, and Hanora wonders if he is suffering from memory losses of his own. The nursing coordinator asked, earlier in the week: “Do you think Billie’s brother also suffers from dementia? From what she’s told me, he seems to have an insight problem.”

  What Hanora knows is that criticism from the sidelines is not helpful. But she has no time to waste on Ned’s problems or his daughter’s grudges.

  “Medicate me, Hanora,” Billie said, the day she signed over power of attorney. “If I lose my mind, don’t hold back.” The witnesses laughed. Everyone laughed. Billie laughed.

  Billie lives alone in a two-storey house with three upstairs bedrooms, all of them unused. In 1953, she and her husband, Whitby—everyone called him Whit—bought the place on a street dense with old maples. They paid $12,000 for the property, then painted hardwood floors red, walls and furniture white. The house remains red and white, accented with greys and blacks. They converted a backyard shed into a studio for Whit. Given the severity of winter, the studio was insulated after the first year. Whit painted in his studio and taught art at the local high school in the evenings, as part of a continuing education program for adults.

  Shortly after the war, Billie decided to train as a teacher of the English language. She moved to Canada from New York, and for decades taught English to new arrivals to the country. When she was thirty-one, she met and married Whit, who had served in the war as a stretcher-bearer. As fast as postwar camps in Europe emptied out, immigrants and refugees arrived in the country and filled the city’s language classes to capacity. Many students, if not most, were traumatized by their experiences. Billie was determined that her students would find work, would be capable of buying streetcar and bus tickets, reading grocery labels, receiving medical attention, getting their children to school. She fought for their right to be part of society. She was the first person her students phoned in emergencies. She attended their ceremonies when they became citizens. The extra bedrooms upstairs were sometimes full for weeks while alternative accommodation was found. Some students moved to other towns and cities after learning English. Billie and Whit wanted to have children, but Billie never became pregnant. They turned their energies toward community; they helped everyone around them.

  All of that changed in 1990, when Whit died. He had stopped teaching entirely by then, and was preparing a solo exhibit for a new gallery in the west end. He was standing by a chair in his studio when he slumped to the floor. Billie, at home and also retired, sensed that something was wrong and called out from the side door. There was no reply. Neither knew he had a heart condition. Whit had avoided doctors, evaded checkups. Perhaps he knew something after all.

  Billie managed well in her home until memory problems started, about a year ago. Perhaps a year and a half. She abruptly stopped using the second storey of her house because she said she could no longer manage the stairs. Some of her furniture was cleared from the room she loved best, the red-and-white living room, and banished to the basement. On her orders, a bed was carried downstairs by two workmen hired from a shrinking list of people she had taught, the students of her past. Many were old themselves, or had moved away or lost touch.

  There is a full bathroom on the main floor. Billie sometimes uses a cane to move from bed to bathroom to armchair. She sits, mummified, all day and evening, before a large TV, her phone at her side. She wanders into the kitchen, a land of hazards. She pretends to prepare food, though a volunteer from Meals on Wheels arrives daily to deliver a main meal. Billie does not leave the house, though she could. Occasionally, she makes a list and has groceries delivered. Carrots and turnips rot in the fridge. Half-eaten meals have to be thrown out. Bread is coated with mould. Hanora has seen more than a few wine bottles in the recycling box at the back door.

  During the past four weeks, Billie has melted the inside of her microwave (now replaced and used only by caregivers to heat meals), placed newspapers on top of the electric range (now unplugged) and flooded the cupboards beneath the sink (nothing to be done except mop the water after another increasingly grim phone call—Hanora, come right now. I need you! I left the tap on and there’s a flood. I think I forgot!).

  Every step Billie takes is a step into panic, depression, paranoia, anger. Especially anger. Each of these emotions has its companion, sorrow. Hanora can no longer manoeuvre her way through the obstacles Billie erects. Solving her problems has become exhausting. The interaction is wearing them both down. The phone rings night and day. If Hanora had
n’t known what Billie was like before her mind began to slip away, she’d now believe that her cousin’s lifelong ambition has been to thwart her.

  Hanora has never owned a house. She has travelled about the world so many years while writing for newspapers and journals and while researching her books, she hasn’t settled long enough to consider buying a house. Nor has she any desire to look after roof repairs, eaves-troughs, grass cutting, leaf raking, snow removal, leaking basements, window washing, replacement of garage doors, general upkeep. Because she lives alone, apartments suit her well, and she has lived in many. In her present building, she has created an office where she loves to work. From her apartment, she can move about, travel, return, work, travel again.

  She tells herself that she has choices. She can carry on until she resolves Billie’s issues, or she can return to her book about Mariah and abandon responsibility. But how can she abandon Billie? Her own history, intertwined with her cousin’s, stretches back too far. Ties cannot be disregarded, which means there is no choice after all. How does one desert someone who is loved? If a younger relative were to appear from miracle-land—if Billie’s niece were to move to the city—she would gratefully hand over responsibility. But no miracle takes place; no one appears. The real decision is about providing safety, about finding a place where Billie can live out her days while receiving care and support. But Billie does not want to leave her house. She refuses to make decisions. Or rather, her decision is to do nothing and hope for the best.

  These are the consequences of her refusal: she has waited so long to make plans—there was never any intention of making a plan—she is now incapable of looking after herself. She has become dependent, and the person she depends upon is Hanora. Hanora! Come quick! I need you!

  When Hanora lies in bed before falling asleep, she wonders about her own strength and how long it can last. Billie’s problems scroll through her mind. Did her cousin truly believe that by taking no action, she would die peacefully in her bed at home? Surely not. That is not part of reality.