The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Qupperneq 28

138
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SPRING/SUMMER 1995
AGE
CANNOT
WITHER
By Betty Jane Wylie
In the spring of 1965 Catherine is still re-
covering from the accident that killed her
husband and left her with two broken arms
and a broken head. Head patched and
both arms still in casts, but home from the
hospital, she has been unable to refuse her
mother’s offer to come and stay with her
to help with the children.
Catherine sits for hours, doing nothing,
eyes sightless as she gazes inside herself
down a tunnel of time to a sunlit place in
the past when she was whole and fearless
and never thought to question life. Yes, but
there had been fears.
Fear was in other people. They put it
into her. Looking back, Catherine can’t
remember Kate — herself as a child — be-
ing afraid of death, but she still remembers
the first fear of age that Kate encountered.
Aunt Lorna had given it to her, no gift.
Lorna was Kate’s aunt by marriage, un-
cle Hans’s wife, a strong, beautiful woman
who wanted more than she realized she
had. Kate didn’t know that, Catherine re-
bukes her own present editorial judgment.
If this trip down memory lane with her
childhood self is to have any value at all,
Catherine must not impose her adult con-
sciousness nor her hindsight knowledge on
any of these early lessons Kate was learn-
ing. Kate has something to teach her now.
Catherine can reconstruct and supply later
information — facts only, for clarity’s sake
— but she must not interfere. She knows
that. Let the child Kate unreel the past on
a private viewing screen. Let Catherine
make of it now what she can, without shad-
owing Kate’s world with her own dark
present. Time enough. World enough.
Dark enough.
So — Lorna.
Kate’s mother Anna said that Lorna was
a jealous woman. Maybe that explained
something to her, but it did not mean any-
thing to Kate. Aunt Lorna lived in a tiny
house that was a duplicate of the summer
cottage next door that Kate and her family
occupied each summer, except that Lorna’s
house was winterized and crowded, with
plastered, painted walls and real curtains
and good carpets and an indoor bathroom.
On the other neighbouring side of the
house, but farther away, across an expanse
of lawn, stood the Big House, the one
Lorna’s husband, Hans, and Kate’s mother,
Anna, had grown up in, still occupied by
Kate’s grandparents, Petur and Anna, and
by their eldest child, the widowed Karin,
and their unmarried sons, Svenn and
Johann.
When Svenn married, he built a mod-
ern two-story house across the street for
himself and his bride, and drove a car to
work. Hans continued to walk with his fa-
ther and Svenn. In bad weather he would
drive the store delivery truck and act as
chauffeur. If he minded that he had never
left Paradise to go to university as Svenn
and Johann had done, he never said.