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.