I had seen the pictures.
Once when I’d been searching through the closet where we kept our family photos, on the hunt for baby pictures of myself with which to illustrate my “All About Me” project in third grade, I’d asked Niels to help reach a box down from a higher shelf, and we’d dislodged an album I had never seen before. A small black photo album that had tumbled down and hit me on the head.
“Ow!” I’d said. Then, as I’d looked inside the album, “Hey, it’s you! What house is that?”
My brother had looked, too. “I don’t know.” He’d bent closer. “That’s not me.”
“Is too.”
My brother had been twenty, home to visit us that week from university, but he’d still answered back, “Is not.”
“Who is it, then?” Frowning, I had flipped the pages, looking at the boy who had a face just like my brother’s.
Niels had guessed the answer first. “It’s Dad.”
We’d stood there in the closet looking through that photo album with a growing sense of wonder until Niels had reached to take it from my hand. “We shouldn’t have this,” he had said. He’d put it back where it had been, up on the shelf. “Dad wouldn’t want us looking at it.”
“Why?” I’d asked.
Niels hadn’t been specific. “He just wouldn’t.”
But I’d gone back to that closet later, used a chair to stand on, and retrieved the album from the shelf to look at it more carefully. I’d seen the photos of my father, sometimes with another boy who looked like him, but taller; sometimes with an older woman, or an older man, or both. And very often with that house—that mansion, really—in the background.
I’d gone back to look at it the next day, and the next, until my mother had asked why I had been standing on the chair. I’d been a truthful child. I’d told her.
“Oh,” she’d said. I could still remember. She’d been dusting. She had kept her back towards me for a moment while she’d concentrated on the bevelled edge of the long mirror in our hallway. Then she’d said what Niels had said. “Your father wouldn’t want you looking at that. It would make him sad.”
“That other boy who’s in the pictures with him. Is that Uncle Jack?”
“Yes.”
“And are those his parents?”
“Yes.”
My grandparents, I’d thought. It had seemed strange, because I’d only ever known one set of grandparents.
“And is that house the house where Dad grew up?”
“Yes. No more questions, now,” she’d warned me, as we’d heard my father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. And when I’d looked to find the album next time, it was gone. I never saw it after that.
My mother hid things like an expert.
But that didn’t matter. I had seen the pictures. I’d remembered what was written on the sign above the gateposts. And the next time I’d been at my best friend’s house, I’d looked it up on her computer: Bridlemere.
That’s how I’d learned that the house had been built in the late 1940s for my father’s father—my grandfather—Werner Van Hoek, on a piece of land that had belonged to my grandmother’s family—my family—for six generations.
The driveway had come into view now, the gates framed by red brick posts standing like guardians, the name of the house wrought in iron above them. I couldn’t have counted the number of times, from my childhood till now, I’d imagined myself driving up to those gates and demanding they open to let me pass through, so that I could see with my own eyes where my father had come from. The home he had left behind.
This evening, given that chance, I did nothing. I simply drove by. And if Bridlemere’s gates even noticed my passing, they didn’t let on.
? ? ?
“What I don’t understand,” said Rachel, scooping out the last piece of lasagne, “is how anyone could do it.”
She was sitting at the breakfast bar and watching while I tidied up the kitchen counter, tucking takeout menus behind canisters and sweeping all the other papers into one of the deep bottom drawers, beneath the folded tea-towels.
“I mean,” said Rachel, holding to the subject like a pit bull, “Dad would never have disowned me.”
“I don’t know. That time you broke curfew and ended up getting in trouble with . . . what was her name?”
“Amy. And the policeman was really nice.”
“I’m sure he was. I’m just saying, you came pretty close, there, to being disowned.” We both knew I was only teasing, but I raised my glass to hide my smile so I’d at least look serious. I’d skipped the lasagne, myself, and gone straight for the wine. It was helping. “The only thing that saved you was the fact your dad had done the same thing when he was a teenager.”
“My dad? My strait-laced, keep-it-legal father?”
“That’s the one.” I told her all about it, then, because I’d found it did us both good when I told these stories—sharing all the little parts of Niels that I held close, and passing them like legacies to Rachel. She was laughing when I’d finished, and that, too, was good. “Your grandfather,” I promised her, “was furious.”
“I can’t imagine Grandpa being furious.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
“But see? That only proves my point. Your kids might make you really mad, but you don’t go and cut them off. You don’t stop talking to them.”
“Well, I think with Grandpa and his parents, things were just a bit more complicated.”
“How?”
I couldn’t form an easy answer. Reaching for the wine bottle, I filled my glass again and thought about it, searching for the proper words.
There wasn’t any simple way to talk of how wars had divided people’s loyalties and shattered family ties down through the centuries. I thought of Joseph Wilde, the brother Frank had told me no one really talked about, not even now, his name and birth date all that had remained of him within the family record. When he’d taken sides against his brothers in the Revolution, I didn’t doubt he’d been cut dead by all his family, as my father had been. Like my father, Joseph Wilde had travelled north to start a new life in another country. Like my father, probably he’d never seen his home again. A heavy price to pay, I thought, for following your conscience.
My father’s conscience hadn’t made him fight against his family. But it had made him refuse to fight the war they’d wanted him to fight; the war that had already killed his older brother, Jack.
My father’s conscience had been speaking louder to him, I supposed, than any threats or arguments his parents might have made. And so he’d let it lead him north, to Canada, and they had not forgiven him.
It hadn’t been a secret in our house, when I was growing up. My parents had a lot of friends who also had been draft resisters; who’d come up to Montreal the same year as my father, and who’d formed their own community around the same shared neighbourhood. And even when my parents moved the family to Toronto after I was born, they all still stayed in touch and visited.
My mother had explained to me, the year I’d started school, in simple terms.
“There was a war in Vietnam,” she’d said. “Your father’s brother died there. Lots of people didn’t think it was a good war to be fighting. If you didn’t want to fight the war, you had to come to Canada, or go to jail. Your father’s parents didn’t think that he should come to Canada. They told him if he did, they’d never speak to him again.”
“What did he do?” I’d asked, although I had already known the answer.
“He came anyway.” She’d looked at me. “Sometimes, you can’t make everybody happy.”