by Lynn Strongin

I.

CE N’EST PAS MON PAYEE

An engraving—the writers I met in Canada, winter country. They revolve around Jane Rule. I see Jane at her fiftieth birthday party on Galiano Island at The Pink Geranium. Marie-Claire Blais and Mary Meigs had flown in from Montreal, Eleanor Wachtel was there, early in her days at CBC ( Eleanor’s charisma struck me from the first), Audrey Thomas sat at the table where I sat, telling colorful stories. Donna Dietch, the film-maker who was turning Jane’s Desert of the Heart into Desert Hearts had come with Judy Bacca from Southern California, the muralist who was doing a mural on a highway underpass in Lost Angeles.

In those, my early days in Canada on the West Coast, it rained and rained and rained. It was mirror-land.

Jane’s home with Helen Sonthoff was the hub of the writers I met early in Canada. It housed a conviviliality which reminded me of Samuel Johnson’s London. A simple home on Galiano, which overlooks Active Pass, filled with light. Here was an ambiance of arts like Elizabethan England which was a nest of singing birds. It was a time of ferment, converse, laughter, song, the early eighties in Canada.

Jane had a profound ability to celebrate life: her own and others. They were mainly women’s women, every one. Each vividly different from the others. Mary Meigs was the perfect portrait of an older Lesbian: tall, wide shoulders, wearing loose shirts gracefully, folding easily into chairs, a Puritan, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts. When she and Marie-Claire Blais visited Jane and Helen, despite being guests, each insisted upon maintaining her work schedule, Marie writing in one part of house, Mary painting. Not a single woman present at Jane’s fiftieth birthday lacked integrity, was not imbued with the work-ethic. I considered Judy Bacca’s courage, painting that mural on the highway; Donna’s bravery in making a film from the book which was banned and caused a furor in the establishment upon its publication. Marie-Claire Blais had a nervous throat. Would she be able to attend the dinner? Jane spent some time at each of the tables. What a glorious way to mark half a century.

I remember the picnic lunches in a shoebox which Jane and Helen pack us for the ferry: delectable sandwiches--leftover turkey with a dash of Poupon mustard--always something surprising thrown in, "like water on a picnic." We saved them for the ferry laughing over Jane’s story of getting so hungry they used to eat picnics at the end of the driveway. The house itself was filled with books, music, art, friends, laughter. Ava remembers that they played Winton Maraslis on the sound system Jane’s father had rigged her. One of Takeo Tanabi’s prints hung on the wall. One Christmas, Ava sent Jane Mary Oliver's House of Light. Jane wrote Ava, "This is one writer I really feel I could share the eagles with." Our lives are elusive, slippery, but these lines, this art nails them in flight.

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

The wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

I waited to hear the coffee perking, just as at home on Cook Street, I waited for Ava to press the button of her red Braun and count "one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand." So many days had gone by, so many birds shot down and autumn had now melted into winter, solid frozen.

Jane liked faces which became more readable with the years, which is how she spoke of Helen: a woman whose face has become even more readable with time.. She felt it one of the requirements of love—"the most difficult sweet work in the world" to read the meanings of the face of the beloved. "What Helen thinks of a book always interested me," she said. Of their thirty year relationship each would say, "It hasn’t been easy." These American women, tall, with dark, intelligent eyes brought me a flavor of my homeland. When they met both were getting free from other relationship. "How will I recognize you?" wrote Helen to Jane. ‘I’m tall, six foot, have dark hair, dark eyes and glasses. How will I recognize you?" "I’m tall," said Helen "and have dark hair, dark eyes, and glasses."

Neither was particularly interested in a long-term relationship. Jane wrote me after Helen’s death several years ago, "A friend said that my going second was my final gift to Helen."

We slept in twin beds, Ava and I, at their Galiano home. There were prints at the foot of the beds. When I couldn’t sleep I’d look at a print identifying with Helen’s spirit in the next room, Helen who often could not sleep. Helen who had a simple prayer hung on the wall and several of Jane’s pictures as a handsome, dashing a young woman, in her study which had a skylight. When Helen’s mother had died she said to her daughter "This one I want to take with me." They both commented upon aging handsomely. "She was a beautiful old woman," they’d say. I entered Helen’s workspace and felt I was entering a wood chapel. When Jane went to a conference, Helen wrote me she looked forward to "work-dream space of my own." Each was a lone liver. Sleeping next to this room, I thought we are sisters of the blackness, of the night, both of us unable sleep for thought. When you cannot sleep, Helen, and you lie in this bed in which I am now lying, do not your eyes alight on the same print as dawn approaches?

Libby Hopkins, the painter, who’d also been at the fiftieth birthday part, had a special relationship with Helen and Jane. She lived in a gardener’s cottage filled with vivid paintings she did in her old age, right next door to Helen and Jane. They shopped together Saturdays. A film was being made of Libby doing her enchanted paintings. Born in England, she had been a nurse there. She never had children, but discovered in age that she could enchant herself—and others—by doing whimsical watercolors of such things as monkeys smiling, wearing little outfits like the monkey Zephyr in Babar. One new year Helen and Jane gave us two of these charming watercolors, "May you ride this elephant into the new year."

Jane understood small people, children, she read them deeply, and wrote about them perceptively. She had taped many children’s photos around their fireplace. When she felt heard by a review, she said, "I feel deeply companioned by all she has said." Both women were excellent cooks, both smoked heavily and enjoyed their Scotch. In their surroundings, we found the acceptance and nurturing which we felt we had left behind. At dinner, when a bird appeared, Helen exclaimed, "It’s our towhee, darling."

The night they came over from Galiano Island to Cook Street for supper and theatre, I remember looking out the window of our apartment onto Burdett Street every five minutes. When a blue Volvo pulled up, and two women surged out of it, I knew it was them. I’d cooked sweetbreads in our galley kitchen which Ava’s father used to one could pull down by a chain. The moment before serving, Ava discovered that she’d forgot to put the heat under the green peas. She said dinner would be five minutes late. She raced to run them under the scalding tap, plunged them into boiling water till they were practically blanched and served them. We didn’t tell Helen and Jane what had happened until afterward. Later, we went to see a play at the Bastion theater, an old imitation medieval fortress in Victoria’s Fernwood District where Ava worked—a rundown area of town. The play was Margaret Hollingsworth’s Ever Loving, one of their friends. They had a genius for friendship. It was like an essence in the air one breathed in their presence, an incense. I grew high on this ambiance over the years. Josephine Miles had been their guest. She was the one who told me about the pair before I met them:" Helen is the wise aunt," she observed, ‘Helen steered, Jane rowed." In summer, all the neighborhood kids were invited to swim in the pool. Jane studied dynamics among kids and between them: these observations went into her stories. It was an enchantment to listen to either woman tell a story. Both were born racounteurs. The evening drink helped the talk flow. I remember one time when a neighbor had dropped in for tea. As soon as she left, Jane said, "Now we’ll get down to the serious stuff." They had the spirit of the old boys, but they were old girls—women with all the bonhomie of people who share food, wine, language with passion Helen would always open a large art book, displaying a double spread on the bookstand in their living room. She changed it periodically. Once when we visited it was opened to two Georgia O’Keeffe. One felt that as much as the salt air and companionship nourished them, art was a confrere of their waking, their dreams.

This was not my country, but I wanted to move to new, sustained heights here. I wanted to spread my wings. I could feel my uprooted tree beginning to re-root. One truth. Another that my roots have remained South of the border, while my tree has leafed and flowered up North.

II.

GARLIC’S TOES

The engravings of the women writers at Helen’s and Jane’s have a parallel set of engravings, in a sense are balanced by these other pictures which they depict a curious and wondrous opening into existence to occur to Rachel and me in our sixties. She has taken up my first passion, musical composition She has begun improvising with a Yoga master. "You came in at the high end," I laughed. "That’s elevated, very spiritual."

Rachel’s life will always be an inquiry and fervent affirmation of life whatever the spiritual turmoil she is going through. Her blessings are bestowed in dark circumstance, their cumulative effect, piled upon her earlier blessings creates her sustained strength. Like Blake. Like The Book of Revelation. (On the heels of Rachel’s phone call, I learn from my Bavarian guest at lunch that in German garlic has toes, tzele. This sets the call in comic relief.)

Life is enormously complicated and nothing washes it like a Downeast rain. Rachel is back with saltboxes in New England. saturated in Joel Meyerowitz’ Cape Light. I read Mary Oliver, thinking of Jane Rule’s comment she can watch eagles with this writer: "The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus." I grew up with a kid sister whose face was as sad as that of Jesus. What could I do? "Did they tell you what I had when I was sick?" "Of Course." "Because they didn’t tell me at first." "But they had to tell you." "Rachel, at first, I was too sick. Tell me now, was that a sad time for you?" I was with Grandmother, I was O.K." IT is the first time we have talked this over: it’s been fifty-two years. I open Oliver, Mary Meigs, Jane Rule, and make a montage of our lives which will be left out like an old love-letter gather a patina in the rain. The soul:

"Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me. . .

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?"

                --Mary Oliver

What if Jane should end up with only one lung like the scallop? Possibility. "Conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness." Truth. Desert of the Heart possess an opening as classical in its symmetry, balance, and resonance as any by Jane Austen.

"That is why, for any woman, marriage is the idiom of life. And she does not give it up out of scorn or indifference but only when she is forced to admit that she has never been able to pronounce it properly and has committed continually its grossest grammatical errors."

                --Jane Rule

Rachel: To get through a glass door, we must walk up to our image in that glass door. Authored by the same two parents, we bring forth similar flowering even in late age, as in your case with composition. "I hated it," I confess to you, "It gave me grief—Those hours I spent as a girl of seventeen, bent over the drawing board copying scores by Brahms and Haydn in our living room, the Steinway, shiny as a mirror in wintry light became a glossy casket to me at times. Tell me, in composing, have you a favorite key?" "Yes. D minor. I have trouble with development."

"Some composers do. Like Schubert and Dvorak."

"Schubert’s are pretty long."

"They’re melody after melody. How are your melodies?"

"My melodies come." Picture: small grids, locks of a wheel. Like a photograph. Click. Now it’s gone into the camera to be printed indelibly on film.

*

When a storm was brewing. . .the boat becomes as invested with whiteness as Moby Dick, tethered motionless at the dock, while a faint ruffling of the water signaled the march of raindrops across the harbour, which gradually enveloped the whole landscape, including the boat, in a gauze scrim." (Mary Meigs, The Medusa Head)

This is not a pretty book. But it is a lovely one. A book about a triangle of women. Meigs has the painter’s eye, the artist’s training. She speaks of their plot of land in France which "sloped up from the beach and had the same kind of sweet-smelling ground cover as that of Val David. . .a boat tied up, destination Anticosti, which materialized or disappeared like a ghost, depending on the weather. This white boat. . ."

A gauze scrim. Will your composition, Rachel, be a ghost, enveloped in mist? Or will it—like Mary Oliver’s soul—be solid like iron? Like the closing image of Evelyn in Desert will it ascend the steps to be mirrored in glass doors? Poets are beautiful thieves of things. Chastened by the North at first, I sprang back: now I am at home, without a frost bloom. Meigs discovered that triangles are never equilateral for long, that she had a Puritan heart. These revelations were to come to me too in time. Once you said, when you came up to Canada after I had gone through a long illness, "It’s slow suicide." I believe now you see I was a tethered birds, a raptor on a chain, uttering cries for help even though that voice was at the time as muffled as Jodi Foster’s in Silence of the Lambs.