Read Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Online
Authors: Alison Wearing
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (25 page)
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Directions
: a publication for Canadian gay men
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The Globe and Mail
, March 30, 1978
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My mother became ill shortly after they were married, eventually having both her gall bladder and appendix removed.
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On a trip to New York when my father was twenty-one, he was waiting for friends in a bar when he got into conversation with a man who invited him to a place “where men danced with other men.” My father remembers being simultaneously excited and terrified. He told the man he was waiting for friends and the man moved on, but my father never forgot the incident.
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“Family week” at Camp Ahmek in Algonquin Park
â
My father first met John Snell when they were both counsellors-in-training at Camp Ahmek. John was, in my father's recollection, “the first guy I had ever met who was unashamedly interested in the arts, but not a weirdo.” They are still good friends today.
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A showcase sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council to give young musicians the opportunity to perform before representatives of arts organizations that might engage them. My father was representing Town & Gown, a classical concert series he organized in Peterborough.
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A dear friend of my father's, Arthur was a professor of English and drama, and an inspiring and influential figure to many of his students, among them Michael Ondaatje, who credits Arthur as being the person who first encouraged him to consider dedicating himself to writing.
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Arthur and his wife had two children.
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At the time, Richard Monette was a well-known Canadian actor and director; he would later become known for his fourteen-season tenure as artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada (1994â2007).
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Hosanna
by Michel Tremblay features a flamboyant transvestite in the title role, one of the first openly gay characters in Canadian theatre.
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Dot's daughter, my father's niece; my father had yet to tell them that he was gay.
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my mother's family
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friends of my parents in Peterborough
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Newly elected mayor John Sewell attended a Free the Press rally for
Body Politic
after it had been charged with using the mail to distribute “immoral, indecent or scurrilous” material; it was later found not guilty. Mayor Sewell made a speech at the rally in which he called for the legal protection of gays.
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a gay friend and colleague from Trent University; later a roommate in Toronto
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a history of the Liberal Party of Canada
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St. Andrew's College, where my brother Paul did one (unhappy) year of high school
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the eponymous protagonist in the novel by John Fowles
I
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Kyrie
At age twenty-nine, I went to live with my mother.
It had been twelve years since I'd fled Peterborough and I had spent the time riding inspirations and whims around the world. Trudging homeward only for occasional visits, I would feel a haughty curl forming on my lip the moment I veered off the highway onto familiar ground. I had spent years quietly despising the place and my history there, unaware that until we make peace with our homes, we can never quite make peace with ourselves.
After spinning across continents, through innumerable borders and languages, what finally propelled me back home was nothing more exotic than heartbreak, that sensation of a quilled wreckage in my body. By the time I returned to “mend my heart for a while,” my mother was living on a farm several miles out of town to which she and Mel had moved and where he had died of a sickness in his bones.
And so my mother was newly widowed after thirteen years of marriage; I, freshly severed from love. It was a beautiful pairing at an unusual time of life, and we were a good match for each other. The first night we sat out under a shatter of stars, back to back, holding each other up as we talked.
As a young girl, I had suffered asthma, a self-suffocation that is difficult to describeâmore difficult still to endure. If it got serious when my mother was out, I would curl up on the floor and prop myself up with pillows, wheezing and gasping until she got home. While my dad was there, sympathetic and
caring, hers was the comfort that allowed me to relax enough that the air could find me. The same was true at twenty-nine, with a constricted heart instead of lungs.
My mom lived with two greyhounds, both rescued from southern racetracks, their faces and bodies pulled into the permanent shape of wind. There were also two blind and bedraggled Bichon Frisés, and I added to the household a cat I'd found the day my heart became imprinted with the tread of my lover's indifferent shoe.
I had been emptying myself of our common-law marriage, raggedly packing the last of my boxes into my car, when I heard a kitten squeaking in the alley. It was alone, a creature smaller than my hand, eyes blossoming with pusâdead if I did not pick it up. I tucked it into my coat pocket, put the final few boxes in the car, and blew a kiss to my old life. Then I sped to a friend's house, where I spent the evening sobbing and drizzling drops of camomile across the kitten's swollen eyes. It was so fragile, I remember thinking as I sat in that chilled hollow Montreal kitchen, that I could easily have closed its throat with my thumb. That night the kitten slept on my pillow, rooting through my hair, its thimble lips desperate to suckle my scalp and the quiet cove behind my ears. If anything got me through that first pain-soaked, lonely night, it was that begging of one life for another.
At dawn, I put the kitten in a box and pulled out of town, leaving trailings of myself along the streets and neighbourhoods that had becomeâbrieflyâmy home. On the highway
back to Ontario, I let my foot fall heavy, imagining the ease with which I could twitch myself into oncoming traffic and leave my heart scattered on the road. When I arrived at my mother's farm, I got out of the car and lay down fully clothed in the creek next to the house. As I pressed into its pebble-bed cradle, feeling liquid winter purling against my ears and a cold so intense it pounded through my bones, I asked the water to find mercy enough to swallow me.
Then came my mother's voice, calling out from the cedar twig bridge that arched over the water: “Wouldn't you prefer a warm bath?” She was smiling with the kitten rescued from the car and tucked into the front of her jacket, his opal eyes blinking out tentatively. The three of us taking in the peculiar shape of our new lives.
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Dies Irae
In the years since her second marriage, my mother and I had been both distant and close, caring for each other from opposite ends of the globe, through letters and family occasions. We had never really talked about my father except in practical termsâ
Christmas Day is with Dad this year, so we'll see you on Boxing Day
âand aside from one laughter-filled backpacking trip through Sicily together when I was twenty-one, my mother and I had never had time on our own to pull ourselves back through family history and sort it all out.
Until time was all we had. And a farm. Some animals to care for. Silence. And two raw hearts swollen with pain.
“When everything started falling apart during the divorce, I remember thinking I was never going to get over it,” my mom said one night by the fireplace, a scratchy mohair blanket tucked in around her legs and my little alley-kitten, Figleaf, resting on her lap. “Do you remember that time you were in
West Side Story
in high school and we all ended up going on the same night?” She shook her head and ran her fingers across her eyes, the way her own father used to when he recalled something he preferred not to see. “Your dad made such a
scene
during the intermission, trying to get Dot to talk to him. Oh, it was so awful. I was just standing there thinking,
I'm never going to get over this. I'm just
never
going to get over this
.”
I leaned my head back, flung myself back a decade. “Yeah, I remember being backstage and wishing I were deadâ”
“I think we all did,” Mom interrupted, as Figleaf crawled up her sweater and settled himself on her shoulder.
More silence. A few more stars lighting up above the tree-line. “But eventually I did,” she continued, almost serenely.
“Eventually you did what?”
“Eventually, I got over it,” she said, smiling tenderly in my direction. “And you will too.”
More stars. Wisps of an imminent moonrise over farmland. A gouging in my chest. Visions of the man I'd just left, echoes of his voice, the infectious laughter we had shared, the passion for words, travels, warm gingerbread savoured together on cold Montreal days.
And thoughts of Mel, his dreams of retiring here, pruning apple trees, stacking firewood, gradually growing old. Before cancer crawled through his bone marrow and pulled him to his knees. Before it elicited his humility and made him the tenderest, kindest of men. A man I grew so fond of, whose sparkling-eyed smile now filled the sky.
“And you will too,” I said.
My mom looked away and squinted, the moon spilling softness across her face.
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Sanctus
The farm became Mel's gift to my mother, and to me. A way back to each other, and to natureâone providing passage to the other.
It started with breakfast, the sharing of early company, that vulnerable honesty of mornings. The vulnerable honesty of mourning.
We did it our own ways: she, at the piano; I, with a fountain pen. Tea by the fireplace. The Fauré Requiem. Yoga.
And at some point every day, when the last of my mother's piano students had left, we would head out the back door together with the half-blind gaggle of dogs and an alley cat, and walk.
While the land was not the same piece of music I had grown up on, it had the same key signature: hardwood forests and fields dancing free after decades of fallow release. So it was new, but familiar, including the marsh with its murky minor keys and cadences of lilies, rushes and marigolds that flowered out of darkness.
Daily, and in every weather, we padded the same path: past the garden, alongside the pond, across acres of old pasture, over the shoulder of the wetland and into the forest. Day after day, we circled its same loop, breathing its geography until it swept into me and became part of my own. Until my sorrow was held in the palms of buttercups, under the cool skirts of the cedars, and in the hollow hairs of nettle that both stung and soothed my throat.
“So was it music that brought you and Dad together, do you think?” I asked one morning as the dogs doddered around us and Figleaf followed us behind nearby trees like an elfin spy.
“I guess so. That was the main thing. But we had a lot of common interests.” She paused. “And, at the beginning, at least, we had a lot of fun. We travelled, went to concerts, out with friends ⦔ Her rubber boots squelched as we skirted the edge of the swamp.
“But you never suspected he was gay,” I said, rather than asked.
She kicked some of the mud from her boot. “No.”
It was a tired answer; I felt the heaviness in it and wished I hadn't brought it up at all.
A few steps later, she continued: “These days, you hear it everywhere: he's gay, she's gay. Every time I turn on the television it seems someone's gay, but in those days, people didn't talk about that.” She shook another clump of mud from her boot. “I just thought he was selfish.”
I laughed. “Selfish? What does that have to do with it?”
“Well, he
was
selfish. That was the kind of thing I thought about.” She spied a red-tailed hawk and followed its flight across the sky with her eyes. Then she smiled. “But we did have a lot of fun.”
I smiled back, then felt myself buckling, nauseated with grief about my own recent breakup. “We had a lot of fun too,” I whispered, the tears coming so fast to my eyes that I couldn't imagine a time when I would ever be empty of them.
“I know,” my mother said, her face melting into one of her great wise smiles. “Mel and I did too.”
We turned and followed the path into a grove of cedars, the air suddenly cooler for their presence. At the top of the hill, the forest changed to hardwoods, maples that Mel had tapped one spring, boiling the sap down and smacking his lips proudly at the taste of his own caramelly maple syrup soaking a plate of pancakes.
“So, was Mel the reason that you and Dad didn't stay friends?” I asked.
