In 1952 the union of a Canadian-born Anglican and a Hungarian-born Roman Catholic was considered a mixed marriage. My parents were not allowed to marry in a church, and instead were wed in the modest clergy office of Saint Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church in Oshawa. I was born a few years later, and my brother eighteen months after that.
I was fascinated by my mother’s Hungarian Catholic heritage, but it was a subject that was not discussed outside our home. My young and fertile imagination determined that this was because my mother was a spy, a thought that was amplified whenever I heard her and her kin speaking Hungarian.
I was amazed, proud in fact, at how my mother could toggle effortlessly between English and Hungarian. To the average North American in those days, Hungary was a vaguely gray, heavily shelled Eastern Bloc country of people who used paprika when they cooked. To me, it was exotic, mysterious, and dangerous. At family gatherings, one of my mother’s cousins would roll up his pant leg to show off the bullet wounds he received from the Russian soldiers in 1956 when he and his young bride were escaping on their bellies through a farmer’s field during the Hungarian Revolution. A little thrill would rise up in me whenever he recounted that story, and I would sit on the floor, my arms clasped around my knees, and beg for more details.
On rare occasions my mother would allude to her heritage proudly. “Don’t forget the definition of a Hungarian,” she would remind me. “A Hungarian is someone who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead.”
My mother rarely talked about her past, either because there had never been time to do so or because she didn’t think it was interesting enough to share with me. But her anecdote about refusing to date the Hungarian couple’s son was an eye-opener for me. When I was growing up, she would despair at my single-mindedness, and yet here she was relating an episode that illustrated a much stronger will than mine. Why don’t parents ever notice themselves in their children, and why do they have such a hard time cutting their kids some slack? Perhaps for the same reasons we have such a hard time cutting our parents some slack.
I was about to voice this observation, but she interrupted.
“Now you, you are too permissive a parent,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at me. “You need to drill into your children about not getting involved [that’s Mom code for “not having sex”] with nonwhites. I can be flexible now—they can marry Europeans, but they have to be white Europeans.”
I imagined sharing this news flash with my children. When they were much younger—long before they were near dating age—they would return home from a visit to their grandparents and inform me of their Nana’s strict rule about dating nonwhites.
“She said she would cut us out of her will if we did,” they would say in earnest little voices.
Still, my mother is entitled to her opinions and prejudices like everyone else. Not wanting to get into a heated argument about it, I replied, “My children’s preference for a mate is really none of my business. I know you think it should be but it isn’t, nor will it ever be. I do not control their sex lives.”
“I DON’T WANT TO IMAGINE ANYONE HAVING SEX!” Mom shouted. Then, in a softer voice, “Has it stopped raining?”
HOW ARE you feeling today?” I asked, poking my head into Mom’s bedroom the next morning. Her pine bed “ was festooned with a pretty white lace canopy that suited her often queenly demeanor.
“I feel OK ,” she mewed, pulling the covers closer to her.
“But I just want to sleep.”
In the planning stages of our trip I had fantasized about Mom and me lounging poolside in our swimsuits on the sun-soaked patio of our trullo, sipping wine and amiably chatting about our dysfunctional relationship. We would raise a thorny subject, discuss it with civilized, wasplike, faux nonchalance, and then laugh hysterically at the folly of our past foolishness. With a clink of our wine glasses we would bury the hatchet, take another sip, and stare dreamily into the distance as the toll of a church bell and the light rustle of olive leaves provided a soothing soundtrack. When we weren’t sipping vino by the pool we would be off on day trips exploring towns and cities in the vicinity.
The reality was that we stayed cocooned in our separate rooms, warding off the cold and trying to ignore the rain pounding incessantly on the windows. Mom would sleep or read; I would study a road map of Italy, work my way through a book of Sudoku puzzles, or practice Italian from the little phrase book my daughter had slipped into my stocking the previous Christmas.
The phrase book turned out to be a small delight. It carried the curious warning that travellers to Italy should steer clear of three topics of conversation: the Mafia, Mussolini, and the Vatican. That just made me want to raise those topics with someone immediately. The book also contained a number of rather salacious offerings, which I read and reread with intense interest. What else was there to do?
Curled up in bed, I sounded out such provocative sentences as: Non lo farò senza protezione (I won’t do it without protection); Toccami qui (Touch me here); Andiamo a letto (Let’s go to bed); O dio mio! (Oh my god!); and the ever-handy Calma! (Easy, tiger!)
In the evenings, Mom and I fell into a lazy routine. We made our own dinner—usually pasta and salad followed by yogurt or an orange—then watched the bbc’s World News or a movie from the small video library stacked in a corner niche of the living room.
“Watched” was a bit of a misnomer: My mother didn’t actually listen to the movie; she more or less conducted a running commentary that began before the dvd was loaded into the player.
Here’s an example.
“What shall we watch tonight?” she asked one evening.
“Have you seen Bridget Jones’s Diary? It’s a comedy,” I said.
“No I haven’t,” she replied. “Who’s in it?”
“Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant.”
“Oh, I can’t stand Hugh Grant,” she said. “What an awful, disgusting creature.”
“You don’t have to like him—in fact, he plays a jerk in the movie anyway, so it’ll make it easier for you to watch,” I offered.
The movie began.
“Who’s that nice young man with the dark hair?” Mom asked about five minutes into the action.
“Colin Firth.”
“He’s a handsome one, isn’t he?” Mom said admiringly.
“He’d be nice for you, Jane. I do like his hair. Oh, now look at that dreadful Hugh Grant. Ewww! Look at him. I don’t see what anyone sees in him. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded eagerly so as not to prolong the discussion.
When she wasn’t critiquing the actors’ off-screen lifestyles or on-screen hairstyles she insisted I recap the plot for her—every five minutes. A volume setting of one hundred is apparently not loud enough for her to glean comprehension on her own.
“HE’S SLEEPING WITH HER BUT HE’S ACTUALLY ENGAGED to someone else!” I yelled over the tv volume and into her deaf ear.
“I don’t like it when people sleep around like that,” she replied with much tutting and shaking of her head, as if it were my fault that Hugh Grant was bonking Renée Zellweger, or as if I somehow had the moral authority to call a halt to the action and redirect the players to a more appropriate pastime, such as antiquing in the Cotswolds.
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