“I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something and then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I may go home.”
“Have I done something wrong?” said Almeyer. “No,” said his mother. “No. Just listen…”
Almeyer sat with George’s head in his lap and listened. His mother’s face was tilted down towards the table where her hands were wrapped around her glass and the cigarette smoke was rising into her swept-back hair. He thought he had never seen her quite so bereft of poise. She seemed immensely old and worn.
“Here,” she said. “Undo the package. Look…”
Almeyer received the brown-paper parcel handed across the table. The minute he touched it, he knew it was a picture frame—perhaps with a picture inside. He pulled the paper away and threw it into an empty chair. Then he stared. Puzzled.
“Beautiful, isn’t it,” his mother said, her eyes on his.
“Yes. But I don’t understand,” said Almeyer. “Who are all these people?”
Resting in his hands, inside an imitation bamboo frame, there was a photograph. In the photograph, he recognized only his mother. She might have been as old as fifteen or as young as twelve and she was standing in a yard somewhere on a day in summer beside an older man who might have been—who must have been—her father. Both of them were smiling, each one looking at the other with almost alarming affection. Almeyer had never seen his grandfather before. His mother had said that pictures of him did not exist. Now, there he was and the sight of him—gazing down at his daughter—was so disturbing, Almeyer looked away. Photographs that reveal such intimacy should not be taken, he thought. It isn’t right.
But he did not mention this. Instead, he ran his finger along the faces of the others in the photograph: two young men and a woman leaning against a motor car. Almeyer thought he had never seen such beautiful boys, nor such a handsome woman.
“Is this your father?”
“Yes.”
“Who are these other people, then?”
“Those are my brothers,” his mother told him. “That was my mother.”
Almeyer was astonished. The only brother he’d ever heard of was Uncle Charlie Walker, and though he could recall his grandmother—just—he could not reconcile the woman he remembered with the woman standing there before him in the photograph. The woman he remembered had lived in a house on St George Street and had been appallingly bad tempered and always dressed in black. She had died when Almeyer was four. “I don’t understand,” he said, his finger passing over the two young men. “Neither of these is Uncle Charlie.”
“That’s right,” his mother said. “Uncle Charlie wasn’t born yet. Even if he had been, he never could have stood there with us. My mother would not have allowed it.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Mrs Almeyer smiled. She was nervous. “Uncle Charlie wasn’t her son.”
Almeyer did not know what to do or where to look. “How do you mean that?” he said. “Isn’t he your brother?”
“Yes.”
Almeyer waited.
Mrs Almeyer sipped her drink and let the glass go down towards the table, holding it just above the surface.
“I was thirteen,” she said, “that summer. I had two brothers: there—the two you’re looking at. One of them was older than me and the other one was younger. Harry was older. Tom was younger. Harry came of age the day that photograph was taken. Father had bought him that motorcar. Blue. It was a Chevrolet. This was in 1926. How long ago is that, now?”
“Sixty-two years.”
“Sixty-two years. Yes. Well…The long and the short of it is, my father had forbidden Harry to go out driving after dark. But Harry was young—and he had these friends—and he had to show off his motor car. Did I say it was a Chevrolet?”
“Yes.”
Mrs Almeyer continued: “I’m sure you can guess what happened. There was an accident. Harry was killed. No one knew at first who he was. Nor did they know who the other person was—the person who was killed beside him. Harry’s motor car had been hit by a train and dragged for half a mile along the track. Someone, at last, found something of Harry’s that gave his name and address and they came at seven in the morning, ringing the bell and pounding on the door. Agnes, our maid, went down and let them in and when my father was told what had happened he ran upstairs for Tom. And he called out Tom! Tom! Wake up quick! We have to go and bring your brother home. He’s dead…And then there was a long, long silence and Tom could not be found because, of course, he had gone with Harry the night before. They both had disobeyed my father and they died.”
Mrs Almeyer put more scotch in her glass and placed the bottle away from her over towards her son. Her cigarette had gone out and she tried to re-light it and could not and threw it down in the ashtray. Then she said:
“My parents did not recover. I was now their only child. My memory of it is that I used to hear them late at night—beating at each other with their fists. I’m sure this can’t be right—but it seems to be what I remember. My father begged my mother for another child. He wanted another child. My boys! My boys! he would say. I want my boys! It was awful. I have never, never seen such pain. We really thought that he would die of grief. But then…” Mrs Almeyer sighed. “Time passed. A week. A month. A year. And my father lived. We saw him less and less at home, and they saw him more and more at work. It seemed, for a while, to be all he did. He’d go downtown to the office—work until midnight—come home and fall into bed. My mother refused to sleep with him. Don’t ask me why. That was her reaction. Perhaps she was afraid of having more children. All I do know is, she locked her door. Father took up another life. He was seen—he began to be seen in another part of town…”
Outside Almeyer’s house, the sun had begun to set and all the stones in the wall were turning red and blue and the maple trees were mottled with orange. A breeze had risen and the swing beyond the porch was moving slowly back and forth and Almeyer’s mother watched it—almost putting her fingers out to touch it.
“Friday, one week—it was April, now, and the rains had started and the birds were coming back—I heard my father talking for hours down in the library with my mother. Mother hardly spoke at all. My father went on and on and I wondered what it was. When my mother came upstairs to bed, she wept so long I thought she would never stop. Then, in the morning, my father said: you’re coming with me. Put on your overcoat, bring your umbrella and wear your rubber boots…”
Mrs Almeyer smiled and lingered over the words a second time. “Put on your overcoat. Bring your umbrella. Wear your rubber boots. We walked and we walked. We walked in perfect silence, all the way into the other part of town where my father had been going alone for all those weeks and months after my mother locked her door.”
Mrs Almeyer paused just long enough to select a Players cigarette from her pack, put it in her mouth and light it.
“We came to a charming little house that had a fence. It belonged to one of the men my father had befriended in the war. His name was Jerrold. Patterson Jerrold. And his house was set far back from the street beyond a lawn and trees. Just as we arrived, the sun came out and the air was warm and it smelled of rain and grass and daffodils. There were daffodils in Mister Jerrold’s lawn. Then my father said you wait here. And he went away and I was left standing out in the side yard—just like your yard, there beyond the window. And there was a swing: a swing like yours—and the swing, the yard, the view of porches—it was all like that out there. All like that: exactly.”
Almeyer was frightened. He wondered what his mother might be going to tell him.
“I sat,” she said, “on the swing and I faced the house and I wondered why I was there. My father had not explained, except to say we were going to see Mister Jerrold who had been his friend in the war. I sat there half an hour and then—I heard a person moving on the porch behind the screens and the glass. I can’t, I heard this person say, please don’t make me. I can’t. And I could see, bey
ond the reflections in the glass, two people moving—my father and another. And then, my father opened the door and he was smiling at me. Smiling,” said Mrs Almeyer. Then she said: “the porch, of course, was raised above the ground about a step—two steps—like yours. And just like yours, the door opened inwards so my father had to pull it towards him before he could come through. And he stepped down onto the grass, I remember, and he smiled and he said…Edith, dear: there is someone here I want you to meet…”
Mrs Almeyer placed her fingers in the air before her lips and she made a waving, brushing gesture, as if she was making room for someone to come and stand there between herself and her son: someone actual and real, of flesh.
“He put his hand back in towards the house and I saw another hand slip into his and this shadow figure moving forward into the light and…it was a girl. A girl with long, fine hair like mine and an oval face and shining eyes and she was beautiful. Beautiful. Lovely. And she stepped down onto the grass—wearing a pair of shiny new boots—and she wore an apron over her long, dark dress and my father said to me Edith, this is Lily Jerrold…I stood up, then, and I could see that Lily Jerrold was just my age—fourteen—fifteen—no more. And as she came towards me, proffered like a gift from my father, I suddenly saw that she was…She was pregnant.”
Almeyer’s mother looked at the swing in the yard beyond the window. Slowly, the breeze was dropping and it was still.
Then she said: “the long and short of it was, my father wanted to marry her. The child would need a name, he said. And I wondered, did he mean the child who stood before me, or the child she was carrying. Which?”
“And the child Lily Jerrold carried was Uncle Charlie Walker?”
“Yes. The child was Uncle Charlie Walker.”
Almeyer and his mother sat for five or ten minutes drinking at the kitchen table. Mrs Almeyer kept her eye on the garden, watching it disappear into the growing darkness and watching the windows fading one by one across the length of the screened-in porch—and the wall with all its stones going out like a picture being erased.
“Why have you hidden this all this time?” said Almeyer. “Did you think I wouldn’t understand?”
“You don’t understand,” his mother said. “Look at the photograph. Look at my father’s eyes. You’ve always wondered why there were no pictures of him. I destroyed all the rest, but I kept this one because I had to be able to look at him. But I couldn’t bear the way he looked at me…”
The clock ticked.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “If it hadn’t been for Lily Jerrold—what might have happened to me?”
Almeyer gave no answer.
Later that night, Almeyer went outside with George and looked at the moon.
His mother’s new car was parked like a ghost in the courtyard. Uncles he had never known existed before hovered in the air above it. George went away in search of trees. Almeyer looked up past the car and saw his mother’s light go out. He wondered if she had ever told her father how she had been afraid of him. He wondered if her father had ever been reconciled to that. And he wondered if Lily Jerrold had ever become her friend.
After a while, he called the dog and they went inside.
The next day was Sunday, but when Almeyer awoke, his mother and her car were gone.
I don’t know where I’m going, she wrote in the note she left on his kitchen table. When I get there, I’ll let you know.
She signed this:
E.M. Almeyer,
Your mother.
Something in the signature informed him she would always be alone. There was nothing he could do.
STONES
We lived on the outskirts of Rosedale, over on the wrong side of Yonge Street. This was the impression we had, at any rate. Crossing the streetcar tracks put you in another world.
One September, my sister, Rita, asked a girl from Rosedale over to our house after school. Her name was Allison Pritchard and she lived on Cluny Drive. When my mother telephoned to see if Allison Pritchard could stay for supper, Mrs Pritchard said she didn’t think it would be appropriate. That was the way they talked in Rosedale: very polite; oblique and cruel.
Over on our side—the west side—of Yonge Street, there were merchants—and this, apparently, made the difference to those whose houses were in Rosedale. People of class were not meant to live in the midst of commerce.
Our house was on Gibson Avenue, a cul-de-sac with a park across the road. My bedroom window faced a hockey rink in winter and a football field in summer. Cy, my brother, was a star in either venue. I was not. My forte, then, was the tricycle.
Up at the corner, there was an antique store on one side and a variety shop on the other. In the variety shop, you could spend your allowance on penny candy, Eskimo pies and an orange drink I favoured then called Stubby. Stubby came in short, fat bottles and aside from everything else—the thick orange flavour and the ginger in the bubbles—there was something wonderfully satisfying in the fact that it took both hands to hold it up to your lips and tip it down your throat.
Turning up Yonge Street, beyond the antique store, you came to The Women’s Bakery, Adam’s Grocery, Oskar Schickel, the butcher and Max’s Flowers. We were Max’s Flowers. My mother and my father wore green aprons when they stood behind the counter or went back into the cold room where they made up wreaths for funerals, bouquets for weddings and corsages for dances at the King Edward Hotel. Colonel Matheson, retired, would come in every morning on his way downtown and pick out a boutonniere from the jar of carnations my mother kept on the counter near the register. Once, when I was four, I caused my parents untold embarrassment by pointing out that Colonel Matheson had a large red growth on the end of his nose. The “growth” was nothing of the sort, of course, but merely the result of Colonel Matheson’s predilection for gin.
Of the pre-war years, my overall memory is one of perfect winters, heavy with snow and the smell of coal-and wood-smoke mingling with the smell of bread and cookies rising from The Women’s Bakery. The coal-smoke came from our furnaces and the wood-smoke—mostly birch and maple—came to us from the chimneys of Rosedale, where it seemed that every house must have a fireplace in every room.
Summers all smelled of grass being cut in the park and burning tar from the road crews endlessly patching the potholes in Yonge Street. The heat of these summers was heroic and the cause of many legends. Mister Schickel, the butcher, I recall once cooked an egg on the sidewalk outside his store. My father, who was fond of Mister Schickel, made him a bet of roses it could not be done. I think Mister Schickel’s part of the bet was pork chops trimmed of excess fat. When the egg began to sizzle, my father slapped his thigh and whistled and he sent my sister, Rita, in to get the flowers. Mister Schickel, however, was a graceful man and when he placed his winnings in the window of his butcher shop, he also placed a card that read: Thanks to Max’s Flowers one dozen roses.
The Great Depression held us all in thrall, but its effects on those of us who were used to relative poverty—living on the west side of Yonge Street—were not so debilitating as they were on the far side in Rosedale. The people living there regarded money as something you had—as opposed to something you went out and got—and they were slower to adjust to what, for them, was the unique experience of deprivation.
I remember, too, that there always seemed to be a tramp at the door: itinerants asking if—for the price of a meal, or the meal itself—they could carry out the ashes, sweep the walks or pile the baskets and pails in which my father brought his flowers from the market and the greenhouse.
Our lives continued in this way until about the time I was five—in August of 1939. Everyone’s life, I suppose, has its demarcation lines—its latitudes and longitudes passing through time. Some of these lines define events that everyone shares—others are confined to personal—even to secret lives. But the end of summer 1939 is a line drawn down through the memory of everyone who was then alive. We were all about to be pitched together into a melting pot of
violence from which a few of us would emerge intact and the rest of us would perish.
My father joined the army even before the war had started. He went downtown one day and didn’t come back till after suppertime. I noticed that he hadn’t taken the truck but had ridden off on the streetcar. I asked my mother why he had worn his suit on a weekday and she replied because today is special. But that was all she said.
At the table, eating souffle and salad, my brother, Cy—who was nine years old that summer—talked about the World’s Fair in New York City and pictures he’d seen of the future in magazines. The Great World’s Fair was a subject that had caught all our imaginations with its demonstrations of new appliances, aeroplanes and motor cars. Everything was “streamlined” in 1939; everything designed with swept-back lines as if we were all preparing to shoot off into space. Earlier that summer, the King and Queen of England had come to Canada, riding on a streamlined train whose blue-painted engine was sleek and slim as something in a silver glove. In fact, the King and Queen had arrived in Toronto just up Yonge Street from where we lived. We got permission from the Darrow family, who lived over Max’s Flowers, to stand on the roof and watch the parade with its Mounties in scarlet and its Black Watch Band and the King and Queen, all blue and white and smiling, sitting in an open Buick called a McLaughlin—built, according to Cy, right here in Canada! For one brief moment while all these symbols of who we were went marching past, the two communities—one on either side of Yonge Street—were united in a surge of cheering and applause. But after the King and Queen were gone, the ribbon of Yonge Street divided us again. It rained.
Now, Cy and Rita were arguing over the remnants in the souffle dish. Cy held the classic belief that what was in the dish was his by virtue of his being the eldest child. He also held the classic belief that girls were meant to be second in everything. Rita, who was always hungry but never seemed to gain an ounce, held none of these beliefs and was capable of fighting Cy for hours on end when our parents weren’t present. With Mother at the table, however, the argument was silenced by her announcement that the souffle dish and all the delicious bits of cheese and egg that clung to its sides would be set aside for our father.