Almost a Great Escape Read online

  Her chequebook was written in paragraphs with words she’d discovered. Dishabille — a lost Jane Austen word. Late 1700s. Dressed in a deliberately careless or casual manner. What did we like about Jane’s books? So polite. So restrained. Unrealistic, she said and we kept reading.

  I didn’t attend the irrelevant family burial of her ashes at Eden Brook. But I was drawn to her grave when the sun turned the mountains close and clear. Stopping by now and then to say hello. Not expecting a reply.

  In September, a time of dread for me who lives brightest in summers of flowing fast rivers, horses, and the smell of spruce, I opened the soup box.

  A disorganization of time and places. A photo of me in a silver and leather frame age six on a pinto pony. A wallet sized photo of Tyler and Alice blonde thin and smiling. Another of me on a horse.

  Bundles of You’re So Beautiful letters rolled tight with elastic bands. I peel off a letter: 1940. Before Me. The war years 1939-1945. Young swains writing Alice Tyler. Quite a few from Don tied with a frayed blue ribbon. Very chatty. He’s sure of something. Who is he? Is it the war that makes these young men write you age 16 or 17 with hope. Imagine keeping these letters for 60 years. Maybe it was reassuring to know those days had once been yours.

  And then I found the Jens Album. On the bottom of the box. Love dressed in dishabille.

  A TYLER STORY

  THE RESURRECTION

  At first I thought the crumbling, hand tied album had been inheritance included by mistake. It couldn’t have belonged to Alice. She wouldn’t have had the patience to meticulously organize its hundreds of letters, telegrams, and photographs.

  But the letters were addressed to My Dearest Alice and signed Your Jens. Second Lieutenant Jens Müller. Royal Norwegian Air Force. His 1941 fighter pilot letters of love begin while he is stationed at Little Norway, a training field outside Toronto for the young Norwegians who had escaped the Nazi occupation. Recruits without a homeland. Preparing to be shipped overseas. Then letters from England. Hurricanes and Spitfires. Flying combat missions over the British Channel. Precise thinking. Precise handwriting.

  Photos. Alice and Jens skiing. Jens’s portrait in uniform signed With All My Love. Tall. Fair-haired. Slender. A skier. A motorcyclist. A pilot. His Hurricane fighter aircraft named Odin. The heroic Norseman. She is his Dearest Alice. When the war is over, he will return for her. She can be sure of it.

  I believe him.

  I read letters at random about Before Me Jens. He has just returned to his training camp. He’s been skiing at the Tyler family’s resort, the Alpine Inn, in St. Marguerite’s, north of Montreal. He has crashed in flight training. Unauthorized. Under power lines. He sends this photo. His plane nosedived into the trees. Reprimanded. He spends his nights in an air force jail and his days flying. He doesn’t mind. He has time to think. The other pilots have nicknamed him Poker Face. He is cautious about the future. No commitment except his love for you. Distant cool.

  “With all my love.” Alice kept this portrait of Jens hidden with her album. Photo courtesy of the author.

  He writes I cannot promise you anything Alice except I will always love you and I will come back for you after the war. I am a fighter pilot. I have no education. I will wear your pin inside my flying helmet. I will not hold you to your promise.

  I can see Alice alone in her bedroom, oxygen tubes coiled beneath her recliner. A Smirnoff bottle under her New Yorkers. The album across her lap. She remembers love.

  At least she has kept that. It is hers. Forever.

  My Dearest Alice received 99 letters, cards, and telegrams from Your Jens. I assume she wrote as many, as he often thanked her for sending two and three letters a day.

  The letters were written to an Alice Tyler aspiring to be a writer. An Alice unable to tell her parents she was engaged to a Norwegian fighter pilot flying Spitfires over the British Channel. An Alice Tyler who would be My Goodbye Mother.

  Until I read the Jens Album, I had never known my grandmother’s name. That was how seldom Alice had talked to me about her parents, her brother and her sisters, about her life before she married Ted, my father. It was as if she had taken the first 20 years of her life and stuffed them into a Campbell’s soup box for me to separate from her ashes.

  Now her Alice Tyler years are on my desk. Elastic wrapped rolls of letters. Bundles of clippings, photos, and telegrams. The Jens Album. I have found her Before Me.

  I am hesitating and almost criss-cross close this box of good intentions when My Goodbye Mother reminds me that, if I want an answer that is my own, I have to figure it out for myself.

  I leave the Jens Album open on my desk.

  I am so much like her.

  A TYLER STORY

  MANOLIN

  There is more in this soup box than an album love story; although I am fascin­ated by my wanting to know the why of that story’s ending. The box has become unique — of special significance — in my thoughts. It has a title — The Campbell’s Soup Box — just as the album is now The Jens Album.

  What else of My Goodbye Mother is hidden?

  Much more, I suspect. Too much for The Campbell’s Soup Box to hold.

  I will need a suitcase. I choose one of hers. Navy blue with brass zippers. “I’m staying put now,” she had said, bequeathing it to me before Eden Brook, full of mag­azines and empties from beneath her recliner.

  My list of mnemonics increases: My Goodbye Mother, The Jens Album, The One Good Thing, The Campbell’s Soup Box, and now Alice’s Suitcase. I begin filling the suitcase with messages from My Goodbye Mother’s no going back life: postcards, Christmas cards, lists of unusual words, letters, portraits of rarely mentioned parents and grandparents, The Old Man and the Sea.

  I am again the boy in pyjamas reading with her Jane Austen’s marry well novels. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. She wanted life with the skin peeled away, and these writers peeled it back with language she understood. Baptism language.

  I remember her reminding me, “It’s a fuck of a life if you don’t live it your own way.”

  I had forgotten but remember the horse she gave me. I might have been eight. She tells me I will have to learn to ride that horse on my own. If I do, I will always be able to go anywhere. Do anything.

  Too late now to thank her for this metaphor.

  I had forgotten but remember now lying across a deep stuffed armchair, my feet hanging over the side. I am ten or eleven. I’m holding a book open while I am thinking about my mother. I think she has a secret.

  She is leaning back in the deep stuffed couch beside me. She has her feet up on a low wooden table and a glass of vodka in her hand.

  We are alone in the house and it is quiet.

  She is looking into her glass as if it holds her secret.

  “This isn’t the time to be thinking,” she says, keeping her blue eyes to herself. “This is the time for knowing.”

  “Knowing what?” I ask, wondering if she will tell me her secret.

  She turns toward me. “To want nothing and to expect nothing. To live a good for nothing life.”

  I am used to her talking to me in a way nobody else does.

  She revolves the glass slowly in her hand and takes a drink. “It is tempting to be important and want everything.”

  She is holding me gently in her blue eyes. “Try not to forget your good for nothing mother.”

  Suddenly I feel like crying and in my holding back I guess her secret. She is going to leave me. I will be alone.

  She takes another long drink of vodka and then it is quiet again.

  I begin talking to her in the quiet at Eden Brook. I open Alice’s Suitcase on yesterday’s machine grazed grass and show her what I have found. I read aloud My Goodbye Mother memories I began writing after I opened The Campbell’s Soup Box and found The Jens Album: The Horse Dance, Before the Forgetting Came. I will write more, I tell her. When I have more words.

  Call me Alice, she reminds me here when
I call her Mum. You’re not a boy. Write the way you think. Let me hear your voice mixed up in tenses of second and third persons. At Eden Brook we don’t expect report card grammar.

  I tell Alice we have a suitcase of messages to discuss: Jens, the Alpine Inn, Westmount, the Flanagans, Venezuela, the Tylers, Canmore, and a lot of fragments that I still don’t know where they belong, such as why you forgot so many days but never my wife Judy’s birthday, March 24, and the day Pierre Trudeau said Hello Alice as you stepped into the elevator of a Calgary hotel.

  I understand the you and I of those moments, she answers. You will find the impossibleness of my forgetting March 24. You will find Pierre’s crossing place.

  Finding begins with remembering. Talking. Reading. Together we loved Santiago who despite his 84 days of bad luck rowed into the unknown and caught a marlin so alive and so powerful that the old fisherman has to slow the line screaming through his hands each time the fish surges. Admirable, you said. It’s a giving up life if you let go. We loved his fish.

  In my flannel pyjamas I chose to read aloud for us the final scene where a tourist sees the marlin’s 18 feet of skeleton drifting in the harbour but has no idea what Santiago has caught. Is it a shark? How would a tourist know the alone triumph of Santiago raising the patched sail of his skiff to guide the flesh ripped high finned marlin onto the night shore?

  Your blonde hair drifting across my pillow. You read an earlier scene. It is the still dark morning of Santiago’s third day at sea. The marlin surfaces and from the splash Santiago knows how big the fish is and knows he must show the fish he loves how much pain he is willing to endure.

  And all I had ever caught were Bow River cold Dolly Varden. Big to me fish dancing silver twisting high above the rapids.

  Not many years later, I pull the blankets over your cancer fatigued shoulders. We lean against each other on the couch like mother and son sharing again The Old Man and the Sea.

  While you sleep I remember for us the first pages. Manolin wonders whether Santiago, his teacher, should sail alone onto the Gulf Stream. What if you catch a too big fish?

  Santiago replies with quiet confidence. He is still strong and has a lifetime of tricks to rely upon.

  In the last pages, Manolin sees how much he still has to learn about fishing. About life.

  I know you will wake on this couch with pain. It is an always with you shark, tearing away your possibilities. I have learned now too late how much you could endure. More than Santiago I believe. You sleep sailing Your Jens Album to a shore I cannot see.

  How could a tourist of life know the value of this remnant won from the deep of your being?

  For an hour you wash like repeating waves against my skiff. I am quiet. Fishing on a rhythmic sea. My hook drifts in fathoms of darkness where a marvellous something swims. A silent never come again possibility. My One Good Thing.

  So now I write and cry our saltwater yesterdays. For us I will remember everything before the forgetting came.

  LETTERS

  “FOR KEEPS”

  At Eden Brook, I am reading graveside letters aloud from your Jens Album. I particularly like reading this to the point letter written by Jens four months after you met at your family’s ski resort. I find him honourable in his two promises: he will always love you and he will return for you after the war.

  I worry about you loving a fighter pilot with rare chances of living long enough to keep his promises.

  I find honest his reminder that, as a pilot without an education or money, he can only do his best to “make good” when the war is over. He knows that, in your debutante Montreal, education and money count for more than a Norwegian pilot’s promises.

  April 6, 1941

  Dearest!

  Back again after a nice trip to Montreal. I miss you so very much Alice. I never even dreamt I could love anyone so much as I love you. Perhaps you don’t think I act as if I do when we are together. But I assure you darling, I would do anything for you, and to be able to be with you. I wish I could find the words to thank you for the lovely time we spent together. I shall never forget it as long as I live. Please Alice remember that I’ll come back to you some day in the not so very distant future, and that will be “for keeps,” please remember that when the “competitors” turn up too. My only thought from now will be to find some way to be able to make good after the war is over, and I will.

  Although you don’t like it I’ll close now. I wish I could hug you Alice. I’ll have to imagine I do.

  Remember I love you Alice, with all my heart.

  Jens

  AN ALICE AND TYLER STORY

  EDEN BROOK

  October. It is your birthday this month. I happen to be driving by. It has been six months since the Christ Church funeral. I sit with the suitcase where you said you would like to watch the sun brushed mountains.

  On the grass I do not ask why, after 60 years of waiting for the impossible to change, you still chose ashes to ashes husband and wife side by side forever. What about Your Jens? I do not ask.

  Your gravestone questions me. Shouldn’t it read Alice Patricia?

  I walk to the graveyard office, where they don’t ask about the suitcase. They explain politely that the gravestone is a Memorial, and I am asking about the Memorial Inscription. Thank you. Tell me more. They are very nice and after a little discussion they photocopy the form you signed. There it is, your signature. This is what you wanted. Not your given names. Alice Patricia. You chose your maiden name. Alice Tyler. To be remembered that way. My name too. Tyler. We are linked inexorably. Wrong, you say. Inextricably.

  After I add the Memorial mnemonic to my list, I thank you for leaving me a simple estate to take care of. Before you checked into the hospital you lined up the artifacts of your children’s lives on the dining-room table as if we would all choose the same day to run away from home. Go. Have a nice life. Remember when I packed my important stuff and ran away. You made me a jam sandwich in case I got hungry and let me go down 38th Avenue in my blue jeans and red shirt with gold horseshoes and silver lariats never to return. No more Christopher Robin school for me. Then you happened to be driving by in the wood panelled station wagon. What confidence I had in you. You let me figure things out for myself.

  Alice’s Memorial, Canada. Here, at Eden Brook Memorial Gardens overlooking the Rocky Mountains, Tyler brought a suitcase of keepsakes to show Alice. Later, he began reading his Goodbye Mother stories to her. Photo courtesy of the author

  It would have been a nice touch if you had packed a jam sandwich in my Campbell’s Soup Box of memories before you died. Except it was you who was doing the leaving.

  Dad manipulated. He wanted to keep our childhoods on the table awhile longer. Afraid without that hold we would desert him. It looked unseemly for us, he said, to be looting the house the day after the funeral. Ted Jr. called him churlish. Good word and Dad relented. The candlesticks and spoons clinked and clunked out to the cars. Me walking wondering if you might happen to be driving by.

  I sit on billowing grass inside a Bow River meadow. Lost without you. Wondering if you will just happen to ride by. Will you hold me in your blue eyed nothingness? Open the silence. Help me understand my loving you.

  A GOODBYE MOTHER STORY

  THE HORSE DANCE

  They are waiting for us. Corrals of hot dust horses stamping morning flies. From McBride’s, the outfitters on the east side of Old Canmore. Belle chewing oats in a feed bag. Geoff crawls under her and there she stands front leg in the air waiting for him to move on. Your nobody get excited look as you pick him up.

  Pack horses, trail horses. They come and go. A week, a day. Next time can we get Belle? I listen to you asking tobacco chewing Mrs. McBride her silver belt buckle shining in my eyes.

  And horse sale horses. The Calgary auction: $40 . . . $60! Some too wild to ride and then they are gone. Replaced. You ride them and then I can try.

  Twinkle. The first beautiful horse and $65 at the auction. Untried and eleg
ant. No wonder you bought her. Black with a white star hidden under her forelock. Fine legs, small feet. Maybe Teddy could ride her one day. I still ride plough horses. Old horses. Tired horses. Always eating grass horses. Twinkle never stopped. You circled and circled her on the golf course. Sweating. And she sidepasses along the trails, ready to run, wanting to run, and at night she is over the corral fence. And I watch you from the yard rail. You ride straight as a young man. Your destiny as right as your smile of excitement. You and Twinkle shine. The moment of mystery. It is the horse dance in wet heat.

  When I was alone, I saddled her. Not scared at all. Just wanting to know if I could. Alone. The boys . . . you are taking them to visit friends. I’m small and climb on from the fence and suddenly she ran. Straight and I’ve never felt so much fast. I pull until she turns to the left. And then we circle cantering to a trot and I’m wondering how I’m getting off. She won’t walk. She won’t stop.

  Maybe I’ll drop inside the circle when she slows. I kick the stirrup from my right foot and swing up my heel. And her back feet go sliding under her and she is stopped. I put my foot back in the stirrup and we’re trotting. I try it again, lifting my foot and her back feet slide under her and she is stopped.

  I understand. She’s a cowboy’s roping horse. My foot coming out of the stirrup is a sliding stop signal after the calf is roped. I play with her like that for a while. I start to ride her with one hand. She neck reins and not just a little. She can spin and be gone the other way at a loose touch.

  Then you are driving up in the station wagon. I see your don’t get excited walk as you tell me to stop. Back feet sliding under her and you don’t reach for the rein. I do it alone. That’s a knowing we have. I do it alone.