THE DEARS

Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend, my brother John followed through on the invitation he had extended outside Centro’s restaurant in August and “convened” a family gathering at his farm in the rolling hills south of Collingwood, Ontario, Beinn Tighe the Gaelic name (“house on the hill”) given to it by the previous owner Murray Davis. Murray had bequeathed it in his will to a lover he’d had many years ago, who was then living in Spain. As it turned out, the man had passed away some years before; his partner, with no use for a 750-acre farm in Ontario, Canada, asked Murray’s executor, his sister Barbara Davis, if she could sell the property and send him the money; not that he needed it, but it was in fulfillment of Murray’s wishes, so he wanted to follow through.

John handled Barbara’s investments for her, had known Murray and been to the farm many times over the years. Creating Beinn Tighe, which he had begun in 1960, disassembling a large circa-1830 log house he discovered near Guelph, Ontario and reassembling the hand-hewn oak beams on a scenic piece of land he’d bought south of Collingwood, had been Murray’s life’s work. Barbara wanted to honour that by keeping it in the family if at all possible. With no children of her own, she appealed to John as the next best thing, a close family friend. He bought the place as is, kept Peter the farm manager (fifty head of prize Black Angus beef cattle to tend) and Holly the gardener (there were seven gardens around the property) on as employees, everything inside the house left exactly the way it was the day a friend drove Murray to the palliative care hospital in Toronto, never to return.

John’s wife Ellen and their three teenage girls arrived at Beinn Tighe a few minutes before Jill and I and our three children, several years younger than Ellen’s girls, who went off together for a swim in the spring-fed pond, while Ellen gave us a Cook’s tour of the estate, which is what it really was—like something you might see in Architectural Digest or Better Homes and Gardens: a large, two-story 19th century log house with substantial wings on either side of the main building, fieldstone chimneys at each end, towering oaks overhead, a wide, well-treed lawn sweeping down to a pond, the barn just below, the Black Angus herd grazing in the adjacent fields, the blue waters of Lake Huron sparkling in the near distance.

Though my brother Peter and his wife Debi couldn’t make it (they’d gone to Algonquin Park so Peter could photograph the autumn colors for an upcoming show), my sister Judith, who lived fifteen minutes north in the town of Collingwood, showed up as the tour ended. She left her golden retriever Duncan outside to play with my kids, joking, when she came in the kitchen where Ellen, Jill and I were having drinks and putting together lunch, that it was so typically John: ‘Come up to the farm for lunch—and bring the lunch if you wouldn’t mind.’

Judith wondered why, with John’s high-speed driving, he and my mother wouldn’t have arrived yet. He’d gone to Niagara Falls first thing in the morning to pick her up . . . in his Porsche. The four of us cracked up at the thought of how a seventy-eight year old, headstrong woman with bi-polar disorder cooped up in a high-performance, two-seater convertible turbo Porsche for three hours would fare. The consensus was that she’d be breathing fire by the time she stepped out of RSKY BZNS, the name John had bestowed on the Porsche to go with its personalized license plate.

And indeed she was. Twenty minutes or so after Judith arrived, my son Carson, twelve, opened the sliding-glass door to the kitchen, poked his head in and wryly announced: “They’re heeeeere . . .”

Ellen, Judith, Jill and I hastily drained our glasses, steeled ourselves for “show-time” (our term for the drama that Bev never failed to bring with her to family functions) then left through the sliding-glass door following Carson around to the front of the house.

The passenger door of the black Porsche open behind her, my mother, massaging her legs with one hand, the other favouring her back, came around the front of the car holding forth to the six grandchildren dutifully assembled beside the car to welcome her. Wincing, one hand still favouring her lower back, the expression on her face was one of peeved indignation as she griped, “I’ll tell you one thing, children, I’m never riding in a Porsche again! The worst drive of my life. The seats are so low I could barely see out the front window. The engine was SO loud! And your Uncle John’s reckless driving—running up behind cars in front of us so the bumpers were practically touching—I don’t know where he thought he was going. Grandma Illidge is lucky to be here in one piece!”

John’s eldest daughter Rebecca spoke sympathetically, “We’re glad you are, Grandma.” The others echoed the sentiment.

The kids dispersed, except Nicky, who hurried over to admire the Porsche. He was ten, loved sports cars and idolized his Uncle John.

John held the driver door open, let him sit behind the wheel, closed the door then said if he wanted he could come with him in the Porsche when they reconvened at Judith’s for dinner later on. A dream come true, Nicky hopped out of the car and ran off to tell his brother.

Ellen, pointing out various features of the property along the way, led my mother up the flagstone walk to the house, Judith and Jill following.

I kidded John as he lifted an overnight bag from behind the driver’s seat, that he seemed remarkably stress-free after his three-hour ordeal. Slinging the overnight bag’s strap over his shoulder, he put a hand up to one ear and then the other, pulling out ear plugs. “What was that?” he mugged.

Jill let me know afterwards that my mother had rattled on irascibly criticizing just about everything in the house throughout the Cook’s tour. “Like she was jealous and resentful of the place, even suspicious,” so Jill thought, “that John would have had the money to buy such a magnificent property. The Porsche trip seemed to have put her in a foul mood and she was pretty clearly furious with him.” Jill wondered if that was it.

“It wasn’t the ride,” I explained. “On the one hand he wanted to impress her with the Porsche and the estate-farm worth, by his estimate of course, $10 million or more if you included the Angus herd, but to show her as well that if she keeps her money with him, in spite of what her accountant recently identified as numerous questionable if not illegal transactions, the sky’s the limit on how much money he could make for her. He keeps telling her that her money is in the best hands at his firm, hands that he’s always boasting are making fortunes for him and those lucky enough to be his clients. According to John, she won’t find anyone else on Bay Street making the kind of money for her that he is. At the same time, it’s his way of getting back at her. As I’ve always told you, John enjoys nothing more than exploiting Bev’s guilt over the middle-child abuse he feels she treated him with as a boy. Besides, switching to another investment broker is one thing. Getting the money back from the fired one is another matter. Did you talk to him?”

“Not really,” Jill said. “The dears were driving me crazy. It’s gotten worse. Though not as bad as the mothers he uses with Ellen. Where does that even come from?”

“No idea. I never heard either word from any of the men in my mother’s or father’s family. I know Ellen’s father Ed had always called his wife Evelyn mother.’”

The problem for Jill was that whenever our families got together, John would refer to any younger or older females present other than his wife and daughters, as dear. His daughters he called by their names. To Jill it was always: “Nice to see you, dear,” the same way he’d talk to our seven-year old daughter Hannah. “Could you pass me the butter please, dear?” or “Watch your step going down the stairs, dear.” In a manner that would catch the interest of Freudians, John spared Ellen the dear treatment in favour of Mother. “Mother, why don’t you and Paul sit over here?” “I’d take another slice of roast beef, Mother” or “Mother, you better let the dog out.”

It had offended Jill since the first time she met John. He never spoke personally to her, never called her by her name, never asked how she was doing, how things were going at Sick Children’s, the hospital where she worked in neonatal intensive care, never inquired how our kids were doing, how Jill’s parents and her two sisters were doing.

As far as Jill could see, he had absolutely no facility for normal small-talk, no banter, no basic conversational skills, at least with women. He seemed to her cold, aloof, condescending, an overbearing sexist always in control, playing it socially safe by limiting what he said to formalities and glib trivialities, or speaking polite but cliché niceties.

Jill felt insulted, intimidated, ashamed, so much so that she’d never been able to come to terms with what she felt was demeaning, if not abusive treatment of women. She had never confronted him about it, never even kidded him—had never been able to because, as she admitted to me, she felt such incredible hostility toward him that she’d like nothing better than to take him aside and pop him in the face with her fist, something she would never do in front of his children or ours.

And Ellen didn’t seem bothered in the least by John’s Mother this and Mother that—even when they were now effectively separated he kept doing it, more than ever that afternoon Jill and I agreed. Mother this, mother that. Maybe she’d given up. What was the point of fighting about it after all, dear?

As twelve of us prepared to sit down to lunch at the long pine table in the sky-lit, open-concept dining room with the eight-point, elk-antler chandelier hanging above us from the cathedral ceiling, I told Jill I knew how demeaned she felt, but reminded her, as we’d discussed before on numerous occasions, that The Dears wouldn’t stop until she got the message through to John about how she felt. She understood that, however it was hurtful in the meantime: insulting, humiliating, just wrong. What made it worse, as far as she was concerned, was that John seemed oblivious to the belittling effect the term had on her or anyone else. How could he not know that—with three daughters?

We made a point of sitting at the opposite end of the table from him, well out of dear range.

My mother grew less agitated as we ate (she’d never really liked cooking; living alone now that my father had passed away, she liked it even less), appreciating Jill’s and Ellen’s delicious Thanksgiving lunch, inquiring of the different grandchildren what they were up to, tossing in some history of Murray and Barbara Davis: the Davis Leather Company had started in Toronto in the 1830s, she informed us, Davisville Avenue near Yonge and Eglinton was named after the pioneer family. They made all the boots, saddles and leather goods for the Canadian army in World War One. The Davis family were millionaires, Barbara, Murray and Donald founding the Crest Theatre in Toronto in 1954. It ran until 1966. A Who’s Who of Canadian, British and American actors, writers and directors starred there. The Davises put Toronto on the cultural map. Everyone went to the Crest—”

“That reminds me,” John said to me across the table. “Barbara wants to commission a book about the Crest Theater. I’ll call you next week and we can talk about it.”

He then brought up the subject of his new wine fridge over by the antique wood stove. He wondered if we’d noticed it.

Yes, we had. Ellen pointed it out giving us the Cook’s tour.

Jill asked how you could keep red wine in a refrigerator.

“It’s a dual-zone unit,” John explained. “It has two separate spaces with their own temperature controls. The reds are kept mildly cool as if they’re in a wine cellar. The whites get chilled to perfection.” The fridge, he informed us, was full to capacity: fifty-two bottles, two-thirds of them white, the rest red for guests. John only drank white.

After lunch he hitched his tractor up to a wagon and took the kids and anyone else who was interested on a hay ride. The kids urged my mother to come along. She was reluctant because her back was still sore from the ride in the Porsche. But everyone else was going. “You won’t have any fun staying home by yourself, Grandma,” one of the kids said in appeal. “It’s Thanksgiving!”

She relented.

A sunny autumn afternoon, John drove for a few minutes on a sloping trail through spruce and pine woods behind his house. We came out in a grassy pasture part way up the hillside, the house about a hundred yards below, grazing Black Angus, several of them with calves, quietly watching as John turned to head us higher still: the wagon bouncing wildly over furrows and gopher holes, the hay bales we were sitting on bouncing just as wildly, everyone laughing trying to hang on, the kids screaming with delight, John turning to me after a burst of gleeful whoops from his passengers, winking, smiling, appreciating the moment, happy.

We left for Judith’s house at four-thirty, Nicky, as promised, riding with John in RSKY BZNS. My mother went with Ellen and the girls in their SUV.

Judith’s house in Collingwood had a large backyard. She had set up her net for some late-afternoon badminton, a game that had always been popular in our family. Once drinks and snacks were organized on the back patio, John drew up and announced, only partly tongue-in-cheek, a roster of elimination matches he assured us was based on the same scientific ranking system that he had developed when scheduling games for the Madawaska County Badminton Championship (Madawaska was the lake where Ellen and John had owned their first cottage when their girls were young) of which he was the long-time reigning champion. After a chorus of boos and catcalls from some of the younger competitors that John had rigged things in his own favour (“Who else’s favour am I going to rig them in?”) the family badminton championship got underway.

My mother, who had been a very good badminton player in her day, joined in the spirit of things, winning her first game against my daughter Hannah, losing the second to Ellen, but not by much. John as convener of the competition provided humorous play-by-play commentary during games, tossing in plugs for himself here and there as the reigning and still undefeated champion.

“You’ve been defeated!” his youngest daughter Sara called out, “by me!” She almost beat John in one of the semi-finals. Jill beat me in the other. She would play John for the championship, best two out of three—two of the most competitive people I knew about to battle it out in front of the whole family. Both were good players with strong serves, smart clears, hard drives, sly drops, powerful kills. For both, winning wasn’t everything; it was, as a famous coach once said, the only thing.

Jill started strong, was leading by four points—a solid lead in badminton—when John began working dears into his play-by-play commentary. Every few points at first, then between points. Heckling, teasing, razzing—“Bring it on, dear!”, “It’s no use, dear!”, “I could play you blindfolded, dear,” pulling ahead fast as Jill’s anger grew until at game point—he jumped in the air, smashed the bird so hard it landed at her feet before she had time to clear, John taking the first game.

Jeers and taunts for John, clapping and whistles for Jill as they changed sides. “Don’t give up mommy!” “Don’t let him get to you, Auntie Jill! Make him hit backhands. It’s his fatal flaw!”

And it was. Jill leapt out to an early lead in game two, moved faster, caught him off guard; varied the placement of her shots so that he had no choice but to hit backhands, only half of them well. He seemed to clue in to the fact that her go-for-the-jugular play had something to do with the dears. So he stopped them. He grew more and more rattled by her intensity, began struggling to keep up with her moves . . . then when she took the game by a comfortable five points, he went psychological on her and announced that he had let her win to make things more interesting in the third game. “You ready, dear?” he asked Jill as she prepared to serve.

Not taking the bait, she said nothing, made her serve a sky shot, ran to the net and peppered her return at his head, the bird hitting his glasses with a thwock. “Sorry about that, dear!”

Cheers and applause from the spectators. “You rock, Auntie Jill!”

She kept on rocking, but John did too. Neither went ahead by more than a point in the third and deciding set. Eight times they were tied, both of them intently focused and concentrating on every shot, playing superb badminton, the game too close to call until John, who could play right or left, switched the racquet to his other hand, throwing Jill off. She tried but for some reason couldn’t get him to hit backhands. He capitalized, made six points in a row, and won.

Boos, whistles, jibes, laughter, John dancing a little jig on his way to the net, ducking under it, putting out his hand to shake. “Excellent game, Jill. Really excellent.”

Though she’d lost, it seemed to me that the smile she gave him as they shook hands had a look of victory to it.

There would be no more dears . . .

PAUL ILLIDGE lives and works in a small city north of Toronto, Canada. His fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published in The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Open Minds Quarterly, New English Review, Toronto Life Magazine, Mental Health Talk, Dumbo Press, Exile (upcoming), Sybil Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine.