Subtext

I learned early on to hold my cards close to my chest. Children, especially teens, are cruel, and I’ve found that there are more than a few people out there who’d use aspects of someone’s life to hurt, to ridicule. You might say that I’m imagining that, but I don’t think so; I’ve fielded my fair share of cruelty over the years. Maybe it’s our not wanting others to know our personal and family secrets, unsure how those others will react to them, fearful that we will be rejected. We all have secrets. We all hold our cards close to our chests, all those secrets bottled up and suppressed, setting the subtext to our lives.

Is that cynical? Maybe, but I’ve noticed how my own family’s history, its subtext, has painted how we view the world. I have said on many occasions that we should be kind to all the people we meet, for we are all fighting a hard battle for the full measure of our lives. That’s an old piece of wisdom. There’s debate on who actually said it first.

I’ve never learned much about my father’s family. My dad was not particularly curious about his extended family, not even that curious about his parent’s history before he was born, so what I did learn came from snippets told by my mother and my grandmother. There was Blanche’s brother, whom she had sent quite a bit of money to over the years my father was growing up, supposedly to keep him out of jail for embezzlement (see earlier memories). There was a history between her and her sisters, I gather; I always had a sense of it when they visited. As to Jules’ family, I have few details except that there was a brother, Leo-Paul, in Quebec. I’d met Leo-Paul Jr, once, but have no memory of him except that he wore a jet-black handlebar moustache. I’ve learn aspects of the narrative that flowed beneath my father and his siblings, a somewhat rocky narrative at times, replete with grudges that have festered for decades. But compared to my mother’s family, they appeared an oasis of fun, and hugs and kisses.

My mother’s parents were born eleven years apart, and I don’t know if Hilda ever loved Mec, or if she hooked up with him because her mother pushed her on him, the good catch, the pharmacist. I don’t know if she married him just to get away from her mother. I’ve heard this potential meme suggested. I also recall it inferred that they spent their marriage inflicting harm on one another, and only adopted my mother to save their marriage. That would make for a cold, unemotional household. There may have been infidelity on Hilda’s part, certainly the onset of alcoholism on Mec’s. During the ‘40s, Hilda left Mec, taking my mother with her to Toronto, to live with her sister; and Mec let her go, but he would not support her or my mother so long as they did not live in his house; he was firm on that. But he did tell Hilda that the door was always open for her return; and when she did return, he was true to his word. Nothing was ever said about her leaving again. Not that it was forgotten, either, I imagine. Not that its memory didn’t linger; not that their marriage was ever salvaged by Hilda’s return. My mother has memories of Hilda finding bootleggers serving beer to my grandfather in their house, and Hilda throwing the bootlegger out. Hilda was no angel, either, from what I gather. My mother once told me that she’d had to wait in the car while Hilda “visited” a friend for an hour or so. I suspect that was why Mec retired to his bed, as a punishment to his wife who had never cared for him, but would have to now that he’d retired. She didn’t, of course; she continued to work into her late 70s, long after Mec had passed away. Was there love in the house? Poppa loved my mother. He was devastated when we moved to Timmins. Nanny didn’t like that we moved, either, but she visited often, even more so after Poppa died. And she was always a sympathetic ear for my mother’s troubles, never judging. Don’t judge my grandparents. People are complex, at the best of times. I do know, though, that my Poppa and Nanny doted on my sister and me. I choose to see the good in them.

Long prior to these events, my mother’s grandparents were of similar mind. Susan may have stepped out across the street to dally with Alf Cheeseman, Robert’s friend and neighbor. There must have been such a row following the discovery that both Alf (41 at the time) and Robert (37) thought it preferable to brave the trenches and join the CEF in 1916. Alf was in the artillery and returned after being gassed. He eventually took up with Susan, and they married after their divorces were finalized. Bob fought the rest of the war, at Vimy, at Passchendaele, and throughout the final 100 days when casualties were at their fiercest, and presumably never suffered more than a scratch. When he returned from the Great War, he never remarried, content to spend the rest of his life with his new “landlady.”

I see the subtext of my grandparents’ relationship, running through my mother, those memories close to the surface, remembered vividly 80 years on like they were yesterday. She wanted more for her own family. Where she was an only child, she wanted her children to have siblings, so she set about having her own.

Joseph-Arthur Bradette

She had only one. Karen and I were adopted. Her son Dean was born with extreme deformities and developmental issues. My parents unable to cope, Mec stepped in and made arrangements with his friend, Joseph-Arthur Bradette, the Ontario Senator for Cochrane District, who pulled some strings to have Dean placed in a care institute. This sort of thing isn’t done anymore, but it was then, and I doubt that my parent’s marriage would have survived caring for Dean. Despite his having been sent away, Dean had left a mark, a subtext that lurked beneath the surface of my family for decades, the living ghost of the boy who no one talked about. I discovered my first evidence of Dean when I was routing through the cupboards, looking for hidden chocolate, and I found some toys, dinky cars. Being a kid, I thought they were for me, so I took them down and played with them. My mother was livid when she saw me with them. I was terrified by her reaction. She spanked me for taking what wasn’t mine. It wasn’t until much later that I pieced together the truth, that I had taken what was a gift for Dean, and that I had peeked behind the curtain of her subtext. When she did tell Karen and me about Dean, we were told to never talk about him.

I learned to never talk about other things, too. I won’t mention what those things are. They’re not my story to tell. Let me be clear, though. There was no abuse. My parents were loving, affectionate, but I also don’t remember my family being overly tactile, either. But for all their warmth and love, there has always been the chill of subtext. I’d learned that there were things that were private, family things that the world had no right to know. I was learning my lessons. Keep it to myself. Don’t talk about it. More cards to hold close to my chest. Subtext.

That subtext leaves a mark. In 1982, we saw two artists in the Timmins Square. One penned caricatures with a Sharpie black marker; the other, a large, redheaded woman named Skye, who sketched colour portraits. I was fascinated. I loved to draw and these two were producing actual portraits of people. My mother asked us if we’d like to have our portraits done. We did, so we approached Skye to see about getting them done. She was busy, it took some time to produce each portrait, and she had a backlog of potential clients, so we had to make appointments for the next day. Her male counterpart, on the other hand, was much quicker, rendering far more simplistic profiles (probably from a stencil laid underneath), and was able to take Karen and I right away. When our sittings with Skye did happen, Karen had her portrait sketched first, and me afterwards. Each took about an hour.

While I sat for mine, I noticed and covertly watched the crowd observing Skye’s work resolve. A woman commented on how good it was, how she had captured me. She also noticed how I kept her within my view while keeping still, as instructed. She said. “She’s especially got the eyes right. He has very serious eyes.”

What she saw in them was subtext.

Lessons Learned: The Perils of Gambling

After Grampa died and his service was complete, his casket stacked in storage, the family convened at Gramma’s house for supper, and the wake. There was loads of food, of course; where it all came from is beyond me. Both my grandmothers were active in the Catholic Woman’s League, so I suppose the CWL pitched in to feed 50ish people. Beer and wine were served, liberally. It was 1980, and my relatives drank more than now, I believe. Not me, I was 15. Had I drank by then? What do you think? I’m from Northern Ontario. Most teens I knew had drank a beer, by then. But publicly, under the gaze of my relatives, not a chance. Not at first, anyway.

Someone suggested for us to play cards, poker, if I remember correctly. I ask you, who plays poker at a wake? A group collected around the kitchen table, and Uncle Frank asked Keith and I if we wanted to play. I begged off, telling Uncle Frank that I didn’t have a clue how to play poker, but Uncle Frank insisted, telling us that he'd “help.” That he'd explain the game to us. So, we agreed. We wanted to hang out with the adults, to finally graduate from the kids’ table. We sat at the foot of the table, at Gramma’s end by the kitchen, Uncle Frank between us. Keith held the cards. I leaned in to see them. I took care of the money.

Uncle Frank was the one actually playing. Obviously. He’d ask us what we thought, how many cards we should discard, and so on. But when it came time to actually discard, it was Uncle Frank who pointed out which cards to keep, and more importantly, what to bet, and when to fold.

The game was small stakes, nickels, dimes, the pot rarely rising above two bucks. Keith and I were up; I doubt we were the big winners, hand by hand, or even throughout. But we were definitely up, the small stack of coins before us steadily growing. We were thrilled.

Someone suggested that Keith and I were old enough to have a beer with the family. I looked up at my Dad, up at the head of the table. He nodded, so I had one. Not used to drinking, I sipped at it. It rose to my head fairly quickly, so I didn’t drink much, or that quickly. Not so others around the table. It was a funeral, after all. For some, their father had just been “buried.” Emotional states were fragile at best.

“Keith and I” won yet another hand. We whooped it up, I gathered in the next haul, and we laughed.

And then it happened. We were accused of cheating. Cheating?! How could we be cheating? We didn’t have a fucking clue what we were doing. Uncle Frank was running the show. But Keith held the cards, and dealt them when our turn came. And I collected the money.

Keith and I were dumbfounded. Uncle Frank told everyone to calm down. But they didn’t. Tension rose. Voices rose. And our accuser advanced on us. Uncle Frank rose up and stood before Keith and I, but come on, Uncle Frank was about 80, and not a big man by anyone’s imagination. A slight breeze might have floored him. My father shouldered his way between us and our accuser. They were nose to nose. Shoving began. Bodies entered the fray.

But before fists flew, the women were rushing into the room, and my grandmother was between the combatants, holding them apart at arm’s length. Giving them hell, telling them to grow up and behave themselves. And they regressed into little boys, staring at their feet. Eventually separated.

There were muted conversations, much milling about, more than a few tears welled up and the sobbing was renewed, here and there, then everywhere. The gathering began to break apart after that.

My mother rushed us into our coats. I didn’t want to go. I’d been given my first family beer and had been having a good time up till then, and I didn’t want to be separated from Keith, whom I’d begun to see less and less of. I was also drunk. And I think my mother knew that.

Herded into the car, she drove us back to Nanny’s. She set me aside, consoled me. I wanted to push her away. I was an adult, now, for Christ’s sake!

In the quiet of Nanny’s house, I began to cry, then to sob uncontrollably for the first time that day.

Grandpa’s Funeral

All things come to an end. That's a hard lesson to learn, but we must all learn in our own time.

We all remember our first funeral. The first I ever attended was my grandfather’s. I did not attend my Aunt Hazel’s (I was 9; I must have been, because Keith was nine when him mother died, and Keith and I are the same age), or my Uncle Ron’s (I was 12). My parents thought I was too young to attend those, too young to process the death, maybe. I believe we think differently now; children need to experience life’s passing, and the rituals we hold to help us mark the transition. I remember them passing, though, and why, and the sense of loss. I believe should have gone; children shouldn’t be shielded for death.

My grandfather’s funeral was special. Why? Because it was the first, and last time I was a pallbearer. The eldest male grandchild from each of the 6 branches of the family were chosen for the task, and although I was still fairly young (15), and many in my family thought too young, and maybe too short, or not physically strong enough, for the task, my father insisted that I was to be one.

Sadness prevailed. But the ritual was a comfort--it oght to be; it was a mass, much like every one I'd attended each and every weekend for as long as I could remember, even if the readings were different, and there were eulogies given as well as the expected sermon. The funeral Mass complete, we escorted the casket to the back of the church, sliding that beloved soul into the back of the hearse, and then to the cemetery grounds, we pallbearers following behind in a cousins station wagon. Cigarettes were passed around. I declined. Windows were cracked open, allowing the smoke to escape, and the chill air access. None followed. The graveside service has already been held at the back of the church. There would be no internment that day as the ground was still frozen.

We pulled into the cemetery grounds. I spilled out with my cousins, following, unsure what was expected, if anything. The casket was retrieved, and as one, we hoisted my grandfather on to a shelf atop the other caskets in storage, to be buried later. I’ve never forgotten that, lifting him up onto a rack where he would wait out what remained of the winter until the spring. It felt wrong, incomplete. I bit back tears. I resolved not to cry. I was a man now, after all. Maybe the others did as well. If they did, they did a better job at hiding it.

Winter passed. Spring sprung. We returned for a further gravesite service later in the summer.

That felt better. For me, anyway. Not for my cousin Carol, who wept openly upon passing her mother's headstone. She wept. Was comforted. Composed herself, only to cry again.

Closure is important.

Grandpa, Part 2

The last missive concerning Jules, my grandfather, was anecdotal, myself repeating what stories I’d been told. Even as I wrote it, I knew I ought to write a follow-up, sharing some of my more personal experiences.

My grandfather was a tease. He could be gruff too, somewhat short of temper, I’m told; but he was always kind and gentle, all the times I ever saw him. And a tease. Anyone who knew him will probably say as much. My father was the same, and, I think, I suppose I don’t fall far from that tree.

I recall sitting on my grandfather’s lap. He asked me if I wanted a sip of ginger ale, his voice somewhat raspy, that of a long-term smoker, which he was. His face lit up with mischief as he asked, an expression I knew all too well. I was having none of that. I knew it wasn’t ginger ale, and told him so. “That’s beer,” I told him.

“No,” he said, trying and failing to sound serious, “it’s ginger ale. Here,” he said. “Taste it.” And he’d place the glass under my nose.

“Look at it,” I said, gentle pushing it away, leaning back. I did not like the small of beer. Too sharp. And it stung my nose. “Look at the suds.”

“That’s whipped cream,” he explained.

“No it’s not!” I said.

I did eventually plunge my nose into his glass, to confirm to myself that he was teasing me. When I came back up for air, my nose was wrinkled. “That’s beer,” I said, my nose still wrinkled. Of course, he laughed.

Somewhat later, when his flexibility was less than it had been, I used to kneel down in front of him to help him put on and take off his shoes. The elderly imp used to curl his toes while I did it, making the effort difficult, if not impossible. Once I figured out what he was doing, I’d look up into his eyes to see if I could see that mischievous glint in them. It was. “Stop that,” I’d command him. He’d just laugh, and do it again. Exasperated, I’d call out, “Mom! He’s doing it again.”

“Grandpa, stop curling your toes,” she’d tell him, expecting that he’d do as he pleased, would do what he would, regardless what anyone said. And that he would, eventually. Of course, that just made him laugh all the harder, that raspy chuckle shaking him.

I remember him in his place, in his chair in the dining room, the cards set out before him in solitaire. Listening. Calling out to my grandmother. Holding court at Christmas time. He’d call me to him, to that chair. I’d come close, and he’d gather me up, and then he’d pass me a two-dollar bill, slipping it covertly into my palm. He always seemed to have a two-dollar bill ready when we came to visit. This is for you, he’d say. Don’t tell anybody. Everyone saw. Everyone heard. But it was our little secret, just the same.

Grandpa

"Good old grandsire ... we shall be joyful of thy company."

William Shakespeare

Jules Leonard. My father’s father. Jules emigrated from Belgium at a young age. Born in Brussels, he came to Canada in 1906 at the age of 3, and his family settled in Saskatchewan. You’ll have to forgive any errors I make, my father was not the most curious of creatures, certainly not in the case of his family’s history, so I’m threading together the few facts I know, just about all from my Grandmother when I’d grown older, and asked her about her past (Gramma, was always brief about such things; I wonder if she thought that the past not something to dwell on, the present and her family always her primary concern), a couple from my mother, from what little she knows and related me over the years.

Jules worked for the railroad when he was a young man, and at some given time within those younger years, he attended a cotillion. That’s a French country dance for we young’uns. And as fate would have it, he met a young lady there, a young woman named Blanche, and though he managed to dance a couple times with her, she insisted that she be escorted home by the gentleman she’d arrived with, and not by Jules. But persistence wins the prize. Jules set his eye on Blanche and began to court her, and a while later, the two settled in Timmins, Ontario, where Jules worked at the MacIntyre Mine, along with his brother-in-law Frank, and Blanche set about bringing 6 kids into the world: Lorraine, Laverne, Ronald, Jerome, Edgar (my father), and then, after a brief span of 9 years, Derek.

Jules worked underground for about 10 years (total guess), Frank in the bit shop. Both decided mining was a death sentence, as it was in those days, it was—most miners bled out into their lungs and drowned in their own blood by their early 40s from silicosis, black lung, as they liked to call it.

Frank bought a motel in North Bay, never had any kids, but embraced his sister-in-law Blanche’s, and her grandkids, as his own, as much as anyone could.

Jules struggled to make ends meet. Five kids (as there were then) were financial burden enough, but he also had to contend with Blanche wiring money back home to Saskatchewan, back to a brother who’d been caught red-handed embezzling from his company and had only been spared prison under the promise to pay back the amount in full, money he apparently did not have.

Jules eventually moved to Cochrane, and re-entered into service with CN, and pulled more than his share of overtime while with them. Blanche had taken ill upon the onset of her change of life, and had been so ill that she’d received the last rites in her 40s. Times were tough. The future dire.

Enter Mec Gauthier (Poppa). Poppa sold medicine to Jules at a hefty discount, and told Jules that he had to get out of the house they were living in. There was an open sewer running alongside their property, not a particularly healthy place to live. So, when my parents married, and moved to Toronto for a brief period, Jules bought their house on 16^th Avenue, the much beloved house I remember as theirs. Blanche remained in poor health, always had need of medication, even after Jules had retired. But she did improve. I remember her suffering headaches, Jules never too far from her side.

Nanny

Hilda Gauthier, my mother’s mother. My Nanny was a career woman. She had always worked. She didn’t do housework, not really, she puttered on occasion, and straightened papers, but she didn’t have time for such things, so she hired live-in maids when my mother was young, and then housekeepers and cooks later on, the last of which was Mrs. D., who worked for her for years, the only one I’d ever known.

As you might expect, Hilda had not been a hands-on mother. Not that she was distant. She wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to express her love. I think that may be why she was never a tactile grandmother with Karen and I. We knew she loved us, adored us, but she was more comfortable in the company of adults. And yet she was always happy to see us, was always generous and lavished us with gifts, and visited us with regularity in Timmins, usually for a week at a time.

Back in the ‘20s, Hilda had begun working at Bell, the telephone company, when her mother, Susan, took in Mec, my grandfather-to-be, as a boarder, and saw an opportunity for her daughter in him. Mec would be a pharmacist, not a working man living from paycheck to paycheck, but a proper professional. I’m not sure what Hilda thought of Mec in those first years, he was 11 years her senior, but she eventually did marry Mec, despite their age difference. And moved north with him to Matheson. Which must have been a shock. Matheson was not Toronto. Matheson must have seemed the savage frontier, the very edge of habitation and barely civilization. And Matheson was French. There were very few people for her to talk to, I imagine. So, moving to Cochrane was probably a wish come true to her. English. A railroad town. And their own business. Their money. Her own money. While in Toronto, Susan used to meet her at Bell, palm out for her paycheck.

In time, they flourished, prospered, bought and drove a car back up north when the road from the south to the north was completed, and later still, they adopted my mother, raised her, or reared her, in any event. The housekeepers and later Mrs. D. may have had more than a hand in raising my mother.

Hilda may not have been an overtly tactile and lavishly emotionally loving mother, but she was always there for my mother. She and Mec helped my parents when they married; financed a house for them; used their social and political connections to make arrangements for my parents when their first, developmentally challenged child was born. She was a live-in babysitter for my sister and I when needed, no matter how harrowing the experience of dealing with me may have been for her, at times. She was there to listen whenever my mother needed to talk, never judged. She bought my parents a Caribbean vacation for their 30th anniversary.

She may not have lavished us with hugs, she may not have said “I love you” often, but she found her own ways to express it.

Poppa

Joseph Meclea Gauthier, Mec to his friends. My mother’s father. Poppa had retired to his bed, and all my memories of him were in that bed.

When we came to Cochrane to visit, we always stayed at my mother’s parents. Karen and I would get out of the car and run up to the house, a large green painted, cinderblock building, mount the stairs two at a time, and greet Nanny at the door. We’d leave our bags to our parents to carry. They were probably heavy for little kids, you can’t convince me otherwise. Having kissed Nanny, we’d race up the flight of creaky stairs to our Poppa’s room. I’d jump onto the bed with him, hug him and kiss him. He was a small man, rail thin, sporting a somewhat longish beard, making him a new age hipster, way before his time. He was the only man I knew with a beard. I’d seen others, it was the early ‘70s then, so they were scattered about, but it was also Northern Ontario, and barely out of the ‘50s despite the date.

Poppa should not be judged by his largely unkept state, or his having retired to his bed. He cut quite the figure in his time, despite that small frame. Born in Quebec, he mostly grew up there before his family moved to Ontario. It was rustic here, then. Matheson, Cochrane, and Timmins hadn’t been around that long. There were few roads, none of them connecting the North to the South. Indoor plumbing may have been a luxury when he was young. His father bought the Stanley Hotel in Matheson, his mother was a school teacher, a family of note in the North, middle-class. They valued education in a time when most people in the North quit school after grade 7. They insisted on it, sending their boys south to school in Toronto, a rare occurrence in those days.

Mec and his brother became pharmacists, graduates of the U of T. He met my grandmother while in Toronto, married in 1926, and settled back in Matheson first and then in Cochrane once he’d bought a pharmacy there. He was one of the first people to drive a car north from Toronto to Cochrane once the road north was finally completed in 1927, a trek that took 9 days, I’m told, 3 to North Bay, then 5 to Cochrane. He was an important figure in his community, never turning people away without their prescriptions, medicines he had to mix and dispense, himself. He kept a book of what was owed him, but he was paid in eggs and chickens and cut meat on occasion, often probably. He was in charge of rationing in Cochrane during the Second World War. He counted Judges and the leaders of the town among his friends, and a certain railroad worker named Jules Leonard, as well.

His memory and his welcoming hugs warm me still.