Look at it this way: the three most influential public figures of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, ordered—sometimes directly—the deaths of about 35 million people, and were indirectly responsible for 40 or 50 million more. No instrument can accurately calculate the pain and misery that these and a depressingly long list of other “exemplary” people have spread, and no language can articulate the affront to life itself those wasted or prematurely terminated lives constitute.
This is therefore unapologetically a narrative about how some ordinary people made their way through a world that changed much more than they did, and about how they adapted—or didn’t. It will be an account of cruelties and kindnesses, commitment and broken commitments, stupidity and wisdom, cunning and obliviousness, selfishness and sacrifice: the human condition, lower case, and close up.
Am I making everything sound bleak? It wasn’t. Not for them, and not for anyone who came in contact with them. And that brings me to my other ambition for this story, which is that, despite all the grim darkness that surrounds us, my parents’ lives were filled with life-affirming decencies and sweet, comedic interludes. Small, decent lives like the ones in this book might be the best accomplishments of the twentieth century. These were people who lived without violence, people who ignored the vaunted programmatic ideologies that shattered nations and laid waste to entire continents. They lived with grounded common sense, which they exercised without causing notable harm or displacement to anyone, including themselves, and they stumbled and fell a lot while they were exercising, almost as if they were reminding themselves of how inexact the instruments they had to work with were.
My mother, one of the two primary players in this comedy, lived her entire nine decades within the century she was born in, always distant from the furnaces of violence. She lived her life without spectacular ambitions or accomplishments. But what she did do during her life was create more laughter than misery, and she was capable of outbursts of brilliant, calming happiness that she recognized and learned to articulate so that others could be warmed and illuminated by it. Some of us were, when we weren’t stumbling around and tripping over things and otherwise getting mired in the mess.
My father, who spent nearly 93 of his 100 years in the twentieth century, had, well, a thorough if often selfish good time. Then— not to give the punchline of this entire affair away—he spent his last eight years making whatever restitution was needed, and in the process, changed himself and everyone who was close to him.
There’s something else that makes all this worth the telling: the two central figures in this story literally couldn’t have imagined that a story could be written about their lives. They both had the sort of modesty of expectation that prevented them from seeing themselves as central to anything, even, at times, their own lives. They didn’t see their marriage as drama, or their lives as a narrative that had a fireworks-and-orchestra beginning followed by plot-point catastrophes and epiphanies, and they didn’t see its ending coming until it was on them even though they both prepared for death in exquisite detail. They saw their individual lives and their marriage through the lens of a plan, one that they pursued relentlessly without talking about it very much, and except in moments they thought of as weakness, without looking back to see what had worked and what hadn’t.
This is also about the desire to find a human and humane happiness, about the goodness of the human spirit, about the unappreciated comedy of our expectations and it is about the will we don’t hear very much about these days. Not the will to dominate others, or make life about ourselves, but the often-interrupted will to love and be loved, and the contagious decency that arises from it.
My private motives? Like most people born in North America during and just after the Second World War, I grew up without the faintest curiosity about the people who’d brought me into the world, and even less about the ancestors who had gotten them to our staging grounds. Toward the end of my parents’ lives I began to understand that this lack of curiosity was a serious mistake, and in part, this book is my attempt at restitution: this is about them, but it is also for them.
IN 1945, my parents’ marriage, then in its tenth year, was as troubled as it was solid. My father, who’d been forced to quit school in the seventh grade when he left home, had a first-rate brain, courage, and an eye for making money. He’d worked his way from the delivery trucks of a meat-packing company to travelling salesman, and by the end of the war he held the largest territory his company covered, and was looking for other ways to build up enough capital to buy a business of his own. Within the definitions acceptable at the time, he was an excellent provider, and a capable if emotionally limited parent and husband. My mother suffered from mild bouts of depression even though that wasn’t a recognized affliction at the time, socially or clinically, and she harboured profound resentments toward my father. Some were private and specific, some were generic enough that they might have been found in a sociology textbook 25 years later.
Part of the conflict between them was larger than they were. It was the product of the Second World War. Yes, the war lifted North American women’s horizons. But it had made their men heroic, whether they’d been soldiers or not. In 1945, unless you’d spent the war in a jail or under a rock, you were a hero, man or woman. Everyone’s sightlines were elevated. The just and logical gender goals of women like my mother were soon enough cancelled out by the elevated personal outlook—mostly aimed at business goals— of men like my father. This served to turn postwar domestic life, for many married couples, into small, intense contests of will and barely perceptible wars of attrition.
Yet sociology depersonalizes too much. To my mother, her situation didn’t feel like a bloodless element in a statistical formula. Her circumstances were oppressive, and she was distressed by them. By the beginning of the 1940s, she had birthed three children within 18 months of one another, and then she’d had to care for them with little help from my father. She felt abandoned by the man with whom she had chosen to make a life, and she was angry at him— angry enough to have gotten pregnant without his consent, and initially, at least, against his will. She had the right, and she exercised it, but even a fourth child, one she had time to enjoy, hadn’t cooled the anger. It was there, an undertow hidden in the calm currents of their outwardly happy life. Months and sometimes years passed without its poisonous stream reaching the surface. Yet it was there, and it would remain.
Let me try to disentangle this back eddy with a very specific vignette, one without a shred of slapstick in it. My father, in the spring of 1940, returned home late one Friday night after a week of selling on the muddy roads of mid-eastern Alberta. The next morning, he ate a hearty breakfast that my mother made for him, and then took off for the day to play golf with some business friends.
They’d only recently moved to Camrose, then a dusty farming town 80 kilometres southeast of Edmonton. They’d been married in Edmonton in 1936 and both of them had spent most of their adult lives in that city. My mother knew no one in Camrose, and she had, with little domestic help or adult companionship, three children under the age of 2 1/2: my twin sisters, born in April 1938, and my brother, born in October 1939. She wasn’t used to the isolation, and she found herself carrying a domestic load that was heavy and more than a little frightening.
Try to imagine the exchange between the two of them when he returned from the links late that afternoon.