Now, I believe that all marriages begin with a fund of goodwill that, once spent, is difficult to regenerate. If there is too much inattention or lying or if there is infidelity in a marriage, it devours a portion of the goodwill that can’t be regenerated. The marriage might survive—less frequently today than in past generations—but it will do so with reduced passion, and commensurately decreased trust.
As husbands go, my father had strong virtues. He was financially responsible, he didn’t drink or gamble or hang out with the guys unless it was business, and he didn’t chase around, come home late or not at all. He was a man focused on financial security and on business success, he saved money, and was unusually competent at the things husbands of his era needed to be good at: he could bang boards together, fix anything around the house, and he was a genius with mechanical devices. What more could a wife ask for?
Quite a lot. By nature, my father wasn’t a physically affectionate man, although he seems to have tried to be during the first years of the marriage. According to my mother, he was a clumsy and inattentive lover who grew less attentive as he got older. He also carried never-to-be-examined beliefs that men were superior to their women and that he had to be the boss. Even in the last months of his long life, he still hadn’t wavered on either.
In the 1930s and 1940s his shortcomings were hardly villainous, and they certainly weren’t unusual. But to my mother, they caused frustrations, irritations, disappointments that chipped away at both her self-respect and her affection for him. But she had settled on my father as well as settled for him, and that was not something that ever really occurred to her to reconsider. Yet she wanted a good marriage, and that meant good in the less tangible ways too: she believed, well before its time, that sexual happiness was her right. And so, subtly and unconsciously as the goodwill between them began to dissipate, she turned away from him, shifting her focus to her children, and my father’s focus shifted to business—getting her that Cadillac he’d promised her.
Understanding my father’s perspective is more difficult because he was, as most men are, less articulate about what he wanted from his wife and from marriage. I think he got most of what he wanted: a competent homemaker, a healthy mother for his children, one who cared for them as they grew up. In my mother he also got a couple of bonuses he likely found useful without being able to admit it. He got a wife with the social graces he lacked, and one with a better head for figures than he possessed. She kept the family books until she was in her mid-eighties, and during the 1950s when his business was touch-and-go, she kept her finger atop the accounts.
But what didn’t he get? I can hear my mother’s snorted answer: “Someone who’d take his bloody orders without questioning them. And it’s a good thing I didn’t take his orders. He’d have put us in the poorhouse several times with his stupid schemes.”
That’s not wrong, but it isn’t complete. He didn’t get much sweet goodwill from my mother, either, not that he’d earned it. And so he lived without it, just as she did. The marriage went on, always a functioning partnership, but it was not the stuff of sweet dreams. My mother rode in the Cadillac, eventually. But she never once got to drive the damned thing. Not even after she’d had a driver’s licence for 40 years.
And so the years begin to pass. My father quits his safe job, buys his business and begins to work 14 hours a day. My sisters grow into teenagers, get pregnant and are both married by 18, my older brother buys his first car and I don’t make the Little League all-star team. I do acquire a star-shaped scar on my forehead, which I earn by filling a small jam jar with gunpowder I collect by taking a knife and screwdriver to my father’s shotgun ammunition, poking a firecracker fuse through the jam jar’s lid, lighting the fuse, and then standing in a circle with my friends to watch the explosion from 3 metres away. A shard of glass nails me in the forehead hard enough to knock me cold for a few seconds, and my closest friend catches another shard in his leg just below the knee. Two weeks later, he and I will blow up his mother’s concrete washtubs with gunpowder we’ve manufactured from scratch.
In other people’s lives, a second railroad arrives in Prince George; politicians deposit tons of bullshit about all the wealth the railroad will bring when most of what it brought were empty railcars to haul away the trees and hungry people looking for jobs. A P-38 Lightning crashes into the sandbanks across the river at 500 kilometres per hour after buzzing the main street of town at 30 metres; the city’s population doubles, the roads improve and pavement multiplies; my father’s business prospers; and trees, many trees, come down. Life in northern British Columbia, in other words, is normal.
IN THE SUMMER of 1960, a few months after my parents returned from three weeks travelling in Europe because my father had won a North American sales prize for selling Pepsi-Cola, my mother found a hard lump in her left breast. Having been warned, even in those distant days, what the lump might be, she booked an appointment with our family doctor, a man named Peter Jaron I remember mainly for having skin rashes on his neck and hands. In a leisurely sort of way, Dr. Jaron arranged for a biopsy, and about a month later called my mother on the phone just as I was arriving home from school. The biopsy, he told her, “was positive.”
“Positive?” I hear her say, with such careful calm that I should have been instantly alert. “What do you mean by positive?”
Peter Jaron’s answer is equally calm. “The growth in your breast is malignant. You have breast cancer. You should come in sometime this week, so we can get the process going.”
“Process?” my mother asks, disturbed by Jaron’s matter-of-fact tone. “What process are we talking about? The process of dying?”
“The treatment process. There’s some urgency about this,” Jaron admits.
“When can I come in?” she says.
There is some fumbling at the other end of the line. “Let me see when I’ve got an open spot.”
My mother slams down the phone, and bursts into tears. I ask her what is wrong. “Nothing,” she says, gathering herself together. “I’ll be fine.”
Satisfied, I wander downstairs to my bedroom, close the door, and begin to work on the 1/25th scale model car I’ve been customizing, a late-model Ford I’ve painstakingly decorated with several coats of maroon candy-apple paint. It looks fine.
But my mother isn’t fine, and over the next several days, she does something about it. She contacts a family friend, Larry Maxwell, a doctor who has recently taken a sabbatical from the local hospital to improve his oncological expertise. He agrees to take her on as a patient, and the worst three years of her life begin.
There are several things about the above tableau you should know. The first is that it is a fabrication drawn from the wispiest shreds of fact and memory. When this reconstruction started, I had just three ciphers to work with, other than the knowledge that my mother contracted breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy of her left breast at some point between 1956 and 1966. I had to call my sister Nina to get the dates straight, and we were able to pinpoint 1960 by cross-referencing events in Nina’s life: the breakup of her first marriage, and the subsequent year she and her infant daughter spent living with my parents. It took us a while to sort out the few certainties we could muster between us.
One of the certain ciphers is a memory fragment of mine in which my mother is telling me that I will be going to a new doctor.
“Why is that?” I asked.
She grimaced. “I don’t think,” she said, choosing her words deliberately the way she did when something was difficult, “that Dr. Jaron pays proper attention to his patients.”
The thought of having a new doctor interested