Life lessons

I always seemed to be falling in love when I was in my twenties, as good a time as any, I think, for pursuits of the heart.  Dorothy would tell me that I shouldn't be searching for love.  She didn't have a man in her life at the time, but loved cats, and "just like a feline," she would say, "love usually arrives when you are not seeking it out."  She told me not to look for it.  "It will come to you," she said.

She came to me before I knew who she was.  I had heard a fellow student speaking of a hard ass professor. "Heaven help you," he said, "if you end up in her class."  Forewarned is forearmed.  She held a special disdain for SPAD students who needed an arts course to round out their degrees as future coaches or what have you - and would take her class simply to get the grade.  She recognised their lack of passion for ideas, and in turn they labelled her a bitch.

She had come by way of Budapest to Vienna, then to London, to be a professor in northern Ontario by the time we fell into each other's company in 1990.  To escape the Soviets she and her mother crossed the Danube and made it clandestinely to the West, arriving in Canada when she was ten years old.  Her family had owned a chocolate factory in Hungary during the interwar period.  She showed me a photo of her parents' wedding, everyone standing formally in the ballroom of what must have been quite an ornate pile.  Large reflecting mirrors.  Floating putto in the corners of the room.  Tuxedos and lots of flowing taffeta.  Chocolate did them quite well until the Nazis came.  By the time the Soviets had established themselves in eastern Europe, the chocolate factory had passed to state control and they had lost everything.

She happened to show me a photo of her father, the only one I ever saw.  He stayed behind the Iron Curtain.  He stood, handsomely, in a Magyar landscape beside a very fast sports car.  He was in a swank uniform, and on his face, a pencil moustache.  Above his visor, on the frame of his cap, a lightning bolt.  For the life of me, I thought it was Oswald Mosley.  I got the distinct impression that had he dabbled in the Arrow Cross Party, he would have been of use to the Soviets - and stayed behind with guaranteed privileges that secrets can afford one's existence.  I could only speculate.  I never pressed.

Our first meeting, she and I, was anonymous.  There was a crowd, waiting for a bus at the university.  It was cold and people were impatient when the bus finally arrived, the crowd without order, with more like a mob mentality, pushing into the thing to warm up.  There was a ripple and I stepped back, and, I knew, onto someone's foot.  I turned to apologise and was met with a fierce stare of annoyance by a smartly-dressed 40-something female.  Her withering look made me apologise once again.

By second year I had switched out of Social Work into English and History.  Victorian studies would be a challenge, lots of fat books to be gotten through.  We sat waiting, just a bit.  Just enough.  Like a diva she arrived, but not really, for if she ever were it was only when finding her seat at an opera in an appropriate outfit.  And I realised the professor my friend had warned me about was the same woman whose toe I had crushed that cold afternoon.  "Woe is me," I thought.

About a month into my studies I had a question about an essay we were assigned, so I decided to go to her office and ask her for some specifics.  The door was ajar.  I rapped politely.  She looked up from her work and smiled.  We spent five minutes talking about the essay and a further hour discussing books.  So began my matriculation from farm boy to gentleman.

There are people in your life whose importance you may only half-realise while you are with them.  When they are gone the blank spaces, left unfinished, ache.

We slowly became a pair, enjoying her homemade dinners, with music afterwards.  Ruggero Raimondi  as Don Giovanni was an especial crush of hers.  We arranged weekends and car trips to small obscure bookshops across the north in that bygone age before the internet.  We would talk late into the night.  She hinted to me about Maurice Ravel, her code, she said later, for questioning my sexuality (she was on the mark).  I was in my 20s and she was close to 50 at the time, but it didn't matter.  I fell in love with her, and she held me in great affection.

I can't begin to recount all the small beneficences that her taste had on my character.  She took a sabbatical in my third year, travelling to Venice to continue a book she was writing on Henry James.  While she was away I lived at her apartment and received letters about the progress of her book and stories of her wanderings in the city that she loved.  She returned to Toronto a few months later and it was through university gossip that I heard that she suffered an aneurysm and was hospitalised.  This was a Thursday.  An operation was scheduled for Monday.  After it, a seeming success, her blood pressure spiked and she died the next day, in her 48th year.

At the request of her family I stayed at the apartment for some weeks, they happy that someone was watching over her belongings before they could make arrangements and send trucks.  I remember, in grief, going into her closets to smell her clothing.

I suppose the most difficult thing was the fact that she had gone away, never to return to me.  I was surprised later to discover that she named me in her will and I received my choice of her books.  She made a special arrangement that I take possession of her Waterford, but these things, as cherished as they are, can never make up for her disappearance from my life.