Thirteen crucifixions 11

                                                2001

 

Sheila called this the “Perfect Meal”: lentil soup, salad, bread and cheese. The cheese was a ripe Swiss that she’d purchased at an Italian market nearby, as well as the bread, which was Italian with generous broad slices.  The lentil soup was meatless, savoury and rich with garlic and butter, a recipe that had taken her years to perfect.  The salad was a mock caesar, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice, and an abundance of grated parmesan, romano and ripe provolone, all purchased at the same Italian market.  Sheila had always taken the greatest pains over food, since she regarded eating as a sacrament.  So she took exquisite care over procuring and buying groceries, always from the abundant markets in the neighbourhood, taking care to balance quality with economy.  She never hurried over preparations, taking time to chop, grate, saute, stir-fry, peel, bake, steam.  She only used the microwave for heating drinks.  Through this sacrament of food shared in the common meal, Sheila best poured forth the contents of her heart.  She loved food, and she loved unconditionally all those whom she fed.

It was a silent meal, there was almost a monastic flavour to their fellowship.  They required only a reader.  Sheila had taken several retreats in recent years at a monastery with Madge, who was Catholic.  Sheila was United Church, by upbringing.  She seldom went to church, but almost, while on retreat, did she choose to become Catholic.  Not through the ritual of the mass, but the silent common meal.  A brother read from a biography of Gandhi, while everyone else silently clinked cutlery against porcelain as they dished into their hushed mouths the simple and wholesome fare.  She might easily have lived there, for the idea of living among celibate men devoted to God she had come to find appealing.  She couldn’t imagine doing so among women.  Perhaps with Madge, but there was never a time that Sheila and Madge had not been friends.  They had grown up almost as sisters.  She was the only close, consistent friend that Sheila had ever known.  She was perhaps her only friend.  She couldn’t think of anyone else.  Bill?  He was an ex, and mentally ill.  She still suffered over him, struggled against blaming herself for his illness.  Glen was rather like a friend.  But too young.  More her son’s friend.  Sheila had known him for some twenty years, since he was a shy youth living in the blue house near the corner.  A home similar to Sheila’s, and almost as grand.  It was now divided into suites.  She could recall the last family who’d lived there.  Madge and she, just after the war, had played hopscotch, and jacks, with their little girl.  They moved, it was cheaply renovated, and soon the beautiful completeness of the place had been dissolved into inadequate suites and house-keeping rooms, hosting various poor lost souls, drifters, drinkers, the working poor, and then artists and musicians, and finally Glen and that whole motley horde of straggling young people who, try as they might, could never be cut, shaped or trained to really fit in anywhere.  She had always liked Glen, who had what she deemed “good energy”, though at first a little wary of the interest he was showing in her son, especially after he’d come out to her.  But then she began to worry more about Glen, who she was certain had become an object of unwanted desire from Michael.  How she could tell, she couldn’t say.  These were things that Sheila always had simply “known”.  In spite of Michael they began to visit, becoming acquainted.  She honestly liked Glen, always a bit shy and deferential, but very intelligent, sensible.  Good company.  An attentive listener. Once a week or so he would stop by the house.  And now he was back.  Living with her.  It was all right.  There was room.  He didn’t seem to demand space or attention.  She imagined that Glen wouldn’t prove more obtrusive a presence here than a friendly cat, or a philodendron.  Yes, she thought, she could consider him one of her friends.

Sheila had a dream of filling her house with people, that they would be daily breaking bread together in the most sublime spirit of community.  Here, at this chrome and arborite table that she and Frank had bought at Eatons in 1958, just as they were buying the house.  Sheila had never lived anywhere else outside of her childhood home, which stood still around the corner, now renovated beyond recognition.  But this house she had always…wanted?  Or the house had wanted Sheila.  It had had a reputation for being haunted.  It was once the domicile of an ancient Portuguese widow, who was disparagingly known as “The Hag.”  Madge’s mother, alone, had taken the pains of becoming acquainted with Mrs. De Souza, bringing her groceries, and helping her around the house and yard.  It had been built in 1905 by Mrs. De Souza’s husband.  They had immigrated together, as pioneers, from the Azores in the 1880’s.  Children would throw rocks in her yard, then run away screaming.  Madge’s mother had had to work hard to break her and Sheila both of this habit.  It was just when Sheila’s father was blown to bits in Korea that she had also learned of the mysterious demise of Mrs. De Sousa.  In the back garden, underneath the apple tree, were found her clothes.  But no human remains.  As though she had been pulled out of them.  The house stood derelict, and then the public trustee took possession.  Five years later, Frank and Sheila, newly married, were able to purchase the house from the city at an outrageously low price.  There was a lot of work ahead of them, cleaning, painting, restoring.  At that time, wood interiors were considered unfashionable and unmodern.  Still, on Sheila’s insistence, they lovingly stripped the wood beams, trim and wainscotting down to the original grain, which they carefully varnished and polished to perfection.  Sheila was determined that this house look exactly as it had been intended.  She had never lived in a place so large and grand.  They seemed, she and Frank, really too young and inexperienced to properly enjoy it.  It seemed an ideal venue for entertaining, though they didn’t have that many friends, thus ruling out parties, much less elegant soirees.  Frank and Sheila were not elegant.  They could put on extended family dinners, particularly during Christmas and other holidays, but the house remained otherwise under-utilized, especially as Frank’s business trips became increasingly lengthy.  There was plenty of room for the children to play in, and their friends.  Then Sheila began to take in boarders.  Then refugees.  She felt guilty about having all this wasted space to herself. 

Madge had tactfully asked her if that was her reason for marrying Bill.  He was a buffer against all this solitude, protection against her having to inherit the mantle of the widow De Souza.  Within a week of returning from their honeymoon in Jamaica he was already becoming withdrawn, temperamental.  Soon he wasn’t showing up at the West Wind.  Instead of going to sleep, he would sit up in bed, muttering to himself.  Sheila thought that he was seeing things, not necessarily having hallucinations, nor a psychotic episode, but that Bill was actually seeing things in the house that simply weren’t…there?  Or perhaps were invisible to everyone else.  Everyone but the cat, who often seemed to be observing and following the movements of something.  You don’t see them, do you? He had once asked her.  See whom?  But he didn’t answer.  After he was hospitalized, following his failed attempt at gassing himself in his car, Bill said to Sheila that they had ordered him to kill her, that that was why he came after her with a butcher knife, that they would otherwise go on tormenting him.  Who?  She asked, but he didn’t answer.  He was diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia, and on Bill’s insistence Sheila consented to a divorce.  Since then, she had lived in this house, alone.  Four years of solitude.  Only Sheila.  Only her children, and Madge visited her.  Having a restaurant to run left her with very little time or energy for feeling lonely.  She wasn’t lonely.  Her children had become her friends, for Sheila had succeeded against alienating them.  She was one of those “cool” moms.  Always she appeared to regard her offspring with an ironic mixture of respect, detachment, affection and humour.  She had always been careful to not love them too much—or to forbid them from noticing the gaping wound of love they had each ripped into her.  With meticulous care and finesse Sheila had tamed and caged her own maternal dragon.

This house, which was the grandest of the neighbourhood mansions, alone had not been tampered with, it had not been subjected to the indignities of bad renovations, or ugly aluminum windows, or hideous paint jobs.  This house alone remained intact, a single family dwelling.  It had never been subdivided into suites or housekeeping rooms, it had never deteriorated into rooming house squalor.  It remained whole, it had kept its integrity.  Sheila felt that she was its custodian, its keeper.  Maintaining this house for her was a sacred trust.  She was its steward, but not its owner.

She hadn’t felt compelled to explain to Michael her son Bill’s visit.  Simply it was none of his business.  Bill stopped in at the café again at closing time.  Sheila invited him back for a cup of tea, making it clear that she was expecting company for dinner.  The visit had gone well, he was clearly improving.  She was determined as well to protect Bill from the judgment of her censorious progeny.  She was sure that she would be safe alone with him.  Sheila had never before or since been threatened by a knife.  Glen felt like a welcome diversion; once Sheila was alone with her son, Michael, he would be grilling her, he would be giving her the third degree, and he would be lecturing her all the while about her wrong-headed stupidity in having put herself at risk again.  Sheila was also embarrassed to admit how much she enjoyed her son’s lectures and reproaches, all these cumulative small evidences that she, the care-giver, was also being cared for.  Still, she would never trouble to explain anything to him.  And this was the basic truth about Sheila Watson: nobody knew her.  Not even her children, not even Madge.  She had never been one for self-disclosure, which she’d always thought of as vulgar.  No longer in love, she still felt protective of Bill.  Briefly, he had been the love of her life. No other man had ever brought Sheila there, to that state of being which she could only compare with the birth of her first child, Michael, when the doctor had lain his perfect new little body on her naked stomach.  Bill still summoned in Sheila a kind of phantom pain, which she cared not to try to name or identify.

They’d first met at her first husband’s funeral. There he was, dating Frank’s cousin, and Sheila, shaking Bill’s hand in the receiving line, felt a certain voltage pass through her.  A widow on the rebound, she found out quickly that he owned the West Wind, where she began to appear regularly with Madge for lunch.  The drop-in centre they had been operating in the neighbourhood together was being phased out.  Sheila was being faced with the challenge of having time on her hands.  Frank had left her with enough money to keep her comfortably.  In the West Wind Bill began to sit with them both, flirting equally between Sheila and Madge.  Eventually he talked them into going into partnership with him.  Unable to stand him, Madge quickly bowed out.  They became lovers, Bill and Sheila, and it wasn’t long before they were married.

The onset of Bill’s illness was still a puzzle to Sheila, as it was even to the doctors.  Soon Sheila was single-handedly operating the West Wind while Bill would spend hours in all kinds of weather standing in the backyard, muttering or shrieking at the apple tree in an unknown tongue.  His hygiene went rapidly downhill, prompting Sheila to move upstairs to Michael’s room, where she still slept.  Then he tried to kill her.  Sheila escaped, took a cab to her daughter Suzanne, from where the police were summoned in time to prevent Bill from asphyxiating to death in his BMW.

Sheila had since become rather nervous around knives.  For this reason she nearly fired Walter, her cook.  This had surfaced a year after Bill’s aborted attempt on her life.  Almost to the day.  Walter, a childhood survivor of the German refugee camps after the war, Sheila had inherited from Bill.  A short, loquacious man who tended to gesticulate wildly while chirping loudly in his heavily accented English. While explaining to Sheila why he was late with the potato salad, he seemed unaware that he hadn’t put down the knife he was using to slice mushrooms.  For two weeks after Sheila could not cease to find things wrong with his work performance—he was sloppy, dirty, uncooperative, irritating.  Just irritating.  Madge, herself a trained counselor, told Sheila what she was really feeling, or refusing to feel.  Acknowledging her friend’s astuteness, Sheila went home, where she cleaned top to bottom the bedroom she had shared with Bill, sweeping, scrubbing, scouring, dusting, turning the mattress.  Then she sat on the bed and wept.  Only now had she decided that she was going to move back to the master bedroom, leaving Michael his old room, if he wanted it—she was sick of climbing so many stairs.  Or maybe Glen would want it.

Did she really want both of them together, up there in the attic?  But why not?  Even should they become more than friends, was it any of Sheila’s business as long as they were both quiet and discreet about it, and Sheila would be sleeping directly downstairs from whatever business they might get up to and noise traveled very easily in this house.  Never, in Sheila’s memory, had her son brought any of his boyfriends home…for that.  And her other two children, both of them conventionally heterosexual?  There was Jason’s girlfriend, that nice blond thing, Elizabeth, whom one Christmas stayed over, upstairs from Sheila, who heard every creak and groan emitting through the floorboards, bedsprings and conjugating young bodies…Sheila had scarcely batted an eye at her own hypocrisy.  Michael had never even had Matthew here for a night.  Not that she never would have countenanced the arrangement.  But the age difference, Michael could nearly have been that man’s offspring.  Even now, Sheila was fully conscious of her hypocrisy, considering the eighteen years between her and Bill, but…that was different?  Was it really different?  Did it matter really worth a damn that her son should prefer men over women, and older ones at that?  She had always prided herself in being open minded.  With admirable equanimity she had accepted her son’s disclosure about his sexuality.  He would never make her a grandmother.  Suzanne had.  Twice already, popping out two delightful, robustly beautiful little girls.  And Jason still might, one day.  But Michael, her first and most beautiful?  But Suzanne was lovely, and Jason was handsome… Michael outshone them both, and his inability to breed normally and provide Sheila with equally luminous grandchildren left her feeling absolutely barren.  She would never dare disclose this to anyone, not even to Madge.  This secret umbrage Sheila carried like a discreet deformity.  She felt bitterly ashamed.