from

The Prologue

For years, I was afraid that I would turn into my mother.

As soon as I could, I left home: struck out in the opposite direction, traveled on. By design and nature, I became my own woman—nothing like her. Still, I remained vigilant, examining my responses to my daughters, monitoring my tone when I spoke to my husband. I feared that if I were not rational and collected, if I did not squelch my anger and emotions, I would become her.

It’s an old story. What turned me around, drew me back, was incipient loss. As I observed my mother’s mind, then her body, fail, I began to want to know her, Rosa Pia Pagan Edwards—to know the woman she used to be.

At her funeral, in 2001, the presiding priest confused my name with hers. “In Baptism, Caterina received the sign of the cross…”

It wasn’t the usual case of the celebrant’s not knowing the deceased. Our family had been among the original parishioners of this church, almost forty years ago.

“Let us pray for our sister, Caterina…”

In the last few years, I had brought my mother to mass when I was able. And afterward Father John would usually stop at her wheelchair and greet her. “The terrible Rosina,” he would smile, then make the sign of the cross on her forehead or pat her cheek. So why was he confused now? I looked at my sister, Corinna, who was standing on my right. She was suppressing a giggle.

I considered signaling Father John, but how? He never looked at me but focused on the coffin or the mid-distance. He continued to make the mistake. Over and over. “Your servant, Caterina… The soul of Caterina…”

I glanced over my shoulder. Deaths, relocations, and my mother’s dementia had thinned out the ranks of her friends. Besides the immediate family, nearly all the mourners (and there were precious few of them) were there to support me, my husband, or our girls. I suspected that between Father John’s heavy Italian accent and the foreignness of the service, most of them weren’t following what he was saying. Still, two of my friends rolled their eyes and smiled at me.

I was starting to giggle, too. Was the priest losing his memory, as my mother had lost hers? The blind blessing the blind, so to speak. Or—and I felt uneasy at the thought—did the use of the wrong name mean that the blessing and the laying to rest would be misdirected and not take?

Corinna took my hand and squeezed it. My husband whispered, “Doesn’t matter.” But I suddenly felt more anxious. What if it were a sign? A warning that I was next? The last four years with my mother had been so taxing that I had often wondered who was going to bury whom. And now I felt as if death were being called down upon me.

“O God, to whom mercy and forgiveness belong… command that Caterina be carried safely home to heaven…”

Not me—not yet. I was still searching for the truth of my mother’s life. By this time I was beginning to find my way through the lies and the legends. And reconstructing lost memory had brought me to lost history. I was arriving at the forgotten, suppressed, denied history of her homeland and her people.

Not me, please—not yet.

from

Chapter 1: Hurricane Rosa

I found mum in my closet. She was holding up a black, backless sundress and shaking her head.

“What are you doing?” I said. Mum shot me one of her looks. “You may as well go naked.” She extended her arm and dropped the dress onto a pile of clothes between her and the bed. My clothes—which had been hanging neatly when I left that morning for work.

I was twenty-three years old, and Marco and I were newly married. I’d thought that my new circumstance would make a difference, that Mum would stop treating me like a little kid.

“Stop it,” I said.

“Save your breath,” Marco said to me. “I’ve been telling her to stop for the last twenty minutes.”

Mum pulled a couple of pairs of jeans off their hangers. “Disgusting.” She tossed a white filmy blouse over her shoulder. “Wasting your money.”

“Mum, you must be tired after such a long trip. How about a cup of coffee? Dad’s having some tea and a biscuit.” I’d seen and greeted my father on my way through the living room. Marco, who was home studying for his PhD comprehensives, had called to warn me they’d arrived three hours early, and I’d rushed home.

Mum held up a high-necked yellow dress she’d made for me. “Do you wear this? It looks so nice on you.”

If I’d been forty-three instead of twenty-three, maybe. Still, I lied. “Of course I do.”

She hung it back up in the now almost-empty closet. The top drawer of my dresser was pulled out, but she hadn’t upended it yet. “This is my house,” I said. I suppressed the urge to stamp my foot.

“As my mother used to say, your nightie still has shit on it,” Mum said. “Come on. Help me clear up this mess. Pants on the left, dresses right.”

I could feel myself flush. “You made the bloody mess. It was fine, fine, as it was.” My voice came out loud and squeaky. “You have to stop.” Marco put a hand on my arm.

“Rosina, please.” Dad was standing in the doorway. “Didn’t I say?”

“Poor me,” she said. “Poor, poor me.”

The next time they drove up from Calgary for a visit, it was summer, so I was home, ready and waiting. I’d cleaned our tiny apartment, I thought, top to bottom. I was determined: Mum couldn’t continue to act as if my place were hers. And, except for a comment on the placement of the hand-me-down sofa, she behaved. While we ate lunch.

As soon as I started the dishes, she was up checking out the counter. She pulled out the toaster and found a few crumbs. “Poor me,” she said. “Povera me.” Fifteen minutes later, dishes, foodstuffs, and pots were out of the cupboards and on the counter. Mum was scrubbing the shelves. “Quando diventeri donna?” she repeated between enumerations of my inadequacies, not expecting me to answer. “When will you become a woman?” By the time Marco arrived, Mum had scrubbed the oven and was attacking the fridge.

It was the same each time Mum and Dad came to visit in those first years of our marriage. I was young and insecure: nothing I said or did stopped or even tempered my mother. She was in her sixties then—a short, round plug of energy, heavy but not soft or fleshy, with strong arms, well-defined calves, and a head of springy black curls. A force of nature, Hurricane Rosa would blow into town three or four times a year and devastate me and Marco and our apartment.

Looking back, I see that she thought she was doing her duty, protecting us from disorder and decay. She hid mothballs in desk drawers, under blankets, between our sweaters. Once Marco found one in a shoe. Through overexposure, we became almost oblivious to the sharp stink of naphthalene. By most standards, our home was clean and tidy. But Mum saw impending ruin. A remengo. We were going to hell.

In the fourth year of our marriage, we moved from the latest walk-up apartment (mustard-colored linoleum and an avocado-green stove) to a charming old house. The owners, our friends Brian and Nancy, had the main floor; we took the upstairs. More than thirty years later, Nancy remembered Hurricane Rosa and her storm surges. “You had to see her in action to believe her,” Nancy said. “And the criticism! I didn’t understand a lot of what your mother said, but I’d get the gist: she was tearing you down.”

“Endlessly,” I said.

“Once you and Marco were away,” Nancy said. “And you’d both insisted we weren’t to let your parents in. You suspected they might try and replace your bed, even though you’d said no. Well, of course, they turned up, then a delivery truck was out front, and Brian and I tried to stop them. But what could we do or say? Lay ourselves across the stairs? I remember your father bringing up the rear, smiling apologetically. That was what he did, wasn’t it? And your mother rewarding the delivery men, who had to carry the new bed up those narrow stairs and the old bed down, tipping them with bottles of whisky. They gave us a bottle, too.”

Neither Marco nor I can recall why we’d refused a new bed. We were standing our ground, I suppose. The one time Marco acted uncharacteristically, he got through to Mum. Several years and a house of our own later, Marco came home to the usual scene of Mum ranting and me crying. Perhaps because I was eight months pregnant, Marco screamed (even louder than Mum): “You will not do this.” When he threw his keys down for emphasis, they left a dent in the hardwood floor.

Marco’s gesture made an impression on more than the floor; Mum changed course. She toned down her criticisms and stopped reorganizing our things. (Still, for years afterwards, she alluded to Marco’s “terrible temper,” which was particularly unjust, since he is mild mannered and patient.) I suspect the arrival of her granddaughters, first Tatiana and, four years later, Antonia, sapped her fury. At least for a while.

When my father retired from his job at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, he and Mum left Calgary and its harsh winters for Nanaimo, British Columbia, and a milder climate. Now they were a thousand rather than three hundred kilometers away from my home, which suited me fine. I was teaching at a local college and then at a university, looking after my little girls, and finding a spare hour here and there for my husband and my writing. In the spring of 1984, I faced a further complication: I fell ill with a systemic arthritic disease. The pain slowed me, aged me. To my surprise, Mum took no notice of my illness. When she saw me walk with a cane, she told me not to exaggerate. And later she denied ever knowing that I had been ill.

The distance, the sea channel, and two major mountain ranges did not protect me. My parents were isolated in their new town, and since Dad was no longer working, they had the impetus and the time to take the two-day trip by boat and car. They may have visited less often, but it was still too often for me. I preferred going to their house and keeping them away from mine. The respite that had come with Tatiana’s and Antonia’s early years was over. Mum had delighted in everything about her granddaughters until they grew more individual and less malleable.

Hurricane Rosa surged again. But by this time she was more category one than five. Even so, as my parents’ Dodge swung into our driveway, my shoulders would slump. Mum would haul herself out of the car and up our front steps, leaving Dad to unload. Before she got through the door, she would start complaining about her knees, her back, Dad’s driving, and the car. We would exchange pecks on both cheeks. Mum was on to the landscape—mountain and prairie—endless, the heat or the cold, and the condition of our front yard. Dad and I would wave at each other; most expressions of emotion embarrassed his British soul. Mum was already on a circuit of the main floor, checking. “But why do you insist on living in such a godforsaken place anyway? Too far; too, too far.”

Dad always took several trips to the car to unload. Besides suitcases, my parents brought a cooler and a box filled with Mum’s cooking: bread, egg noodles, biscotti, lasagna, apple pies, glass jars of peach preserves and tomato sauce. For their granddaughters—endless socks, underwear, nightgowns, now and then a frilly dress (which the girls usually refused to wear), and, doled out over the year, souvenirs from their annual trip to Hawaii—paper leis, puka shell necklaces, and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. For Marco and me—sofa cushions, towels, coffee mugs, Wicked Wahine body cream, and an inordinate number of flower-patterned sheets, none of which were to our taste.

No matter how carefully I’d cleaned, Mum still found a corner or a kitchen appliance not up to her sparkling standards. But she was in her mid-seventies by now, and her age was starting to show. She’d let her hair go gray; she suffered from osteoporosis and sciatica and could not stand for long. Since she found the steep stairs to the second floor a strain, my closet remained unmolested.

On their visits, Mum and Dad took over Tatiana’s large basement bedroom, so Mum had free rein to root through her granddaughter’s drawers and desk. She did so without the high-velocity anger she used to aim at me. Mostly she snooped, lingering (for example) over the tiny school photos of Tatiana’s friends. Tatiana would try to stop her—fat chance—then she’d run up the stairs to me. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Nonna’s touching all my things, and she won’t listen.”

“She may not have heard you,” I’d say. “You know she’s getting deafer by the day,” thinking, she won’t listen to me either.

Perhaps because I wasn’t paying attention, Mum’s decline seemed sudden and precipitous. During our weekly phone calls, she sounded like her usual self. She blamed her health problems on Nanaimo, the gray skies and rain, and the vulgar people: villani. But when I saw her, she was no longer a force of nature. She was spent, almost immobile. About two years later, Dad announced they were moving again, this time to Edmonton. They had reached that time in their lives, he made clear, when they needed family, needed help.

I was apprehensive when they settled in a condo about six blocks from our house. I was prepared to help. If I didn’t, who would? But Mum and Dad could expect only so much from me. Tatiana, who by this time was in high school, took on the cleaning of the condo for a small allowance. I dropped by or phoned every day, ran a few of the necessary errands, and had them over for dinner on Sundays.

But Mum was my father’s responsibility, not mine. After all he, Frank Edwards, had married her; he had sworn to be true to her in sickness and in health. I had never had a choice. And for a man in his seventies, he seemed, though somewhat slower and creakier, as able, as competent as ever. He still served on committees for the Association of Science and Engineeering Technology Professionals. He read Scientific American and solved math and logic puzzles for entertainment. He managed his wife. He managed his diabetes, weight, and angina pectoris.

Only his eyesight, never good, was getting worse: he had glaucoma and macular degeneration. He probably should not have been driving, though miraculously he never had an accident in those last years. Tatiana, who is a worrier, would tell me once a month that I should do something; I should take away the keys to the Dodge. “He doesn’t go far,” I’d reply.

“That’s not an answer,” Tatiana would say, shaking her head at the irresponsibility of middle age.

“I don’t have time to drive them to their appointments and to Safeway every five minutes. I’m a working woman. And I know I’d be forced into it. I know it.”

“Mommy, really—”

“I’d like to see how often you’d end up chauffeuring them around town. Didn’t you promise to go over yesterday and vacuum?”

I had no doubt that my father would outlive my mother: after all, she was older. I even wondered if he would remarry and if I would like my stepmother. He was so gregarious; he would find someone. None of us had any idea of how hard caring for my mother had become for him. He didn’t complain much; it wasn’t his way to make a fuss. He was from a village in the Midlands of England; he had escaped through his intelligence: scholarships (which must have been rare in the thirties) and the Royal Engineers in the army. But if his situation had changed, his manner—modest, cheerful, and down-to-earth—did not. He’d been raised to grin and bear it, and he did; he joked, he smiled, and he bore it and bore it.

I saw some signs of Mum’s mental as well as physical decline. Although once she had been almost as sociable as my father, now she never wanted to go out except to church or to our house for dinner. And even then, they would arrive late because she balked or delayed. I practically had to beg her, my father would say. Please, Rosina. And if he did manage to get her out to visit an old friend, she’d ask Dad to take her home soon after they arrived. Or would sit and fall asleep. I accepted her excuses: the pain from the collapsed vertebrae in her back and the everpresent fatigue, but Tatiana suggested that her grandmother was depressed.

Mum would ask the same question over and over again. But she’d done that for a long, long time, Dad said. Whenever she saw Tatiana and her limp hair, she asked her if she conditioned her hair. And Antonia’s bountiful curls triggered the question: “Did she have a perm?”