the summons. The creation of such a condition of poor health for my mother and greater wisdom regarding my grandfather were the subjects of my prayers throughout the summer of 1907. That July, both prayers were answered, though in neither case did I obtain what I actually sought.
It started with a sneeze. It was a Thursday afternoon, Mother’s at-home day. Ina, Frances Hudson (my dearest friend), and I sat in my family’s sitting room while Mother entertained her last remaining guest—Frances’s mother—in the parlour beside us. Ina sat on the sofa under the window reading a book. Frances and I sat on the floor, dolls in hand. Frances’s doll beckoned my doll to look at the bird beyond the window, and so I happened to be looking at Ina when we heard a sneeze from the parlour. I saw Ina’s instant recognition of the sound and her immediate reaction as she slammed her book shut and jerked her face toward the parlour. The big pocket-sliding solid elm doors between the two rooms were nearly fully drawn, so although we could hear the sneeze, we could not instantly discern from whom it issued.
On hearing Mother utter the customary “God bless you,” Ina breathed a sigh of relief. Then she turned on Frances. In a tone a crown attorney might reserve for the examination of one accused of a capital offence, Ina demanded to know the nature of the illness from which Frances’s mother was suffering; the primary and secondary symptoms; the hour her mother had first detected them; the extent to which Frances was experiencing any of the same conditions; and why Frances and her mother had knowingly entered our home and contaminated our family. Frances denied any knowledge of ill health on her mother’s part. While she timidly confessed to sneezing herself just that morning at breakfast, she assumed it resulted from the pepper her father had liberally applied to his eggs. Her sheepish acknowledgement that she had given no thought as to whether she might on this day infect others brought both girls to tears. Frances flew to the parlour and into her mother’s arms. Ina, wrapping her baggy sweater tightly around her, ran to our bedroom, where she stayed for three days.
They were a long three days. Though they began with Father’s reprimands uttered through the door regarding Ina’s treatment of Frances, they ended with entreaties for her to vacate the room. But whether those entreaties were expressed as a hopeful wish by Jim (who promised her an outing with his friends), a demand for access to my own room and belongings (resulting in an unceremonious dumping into the hallway of many of my worldly goods), a bribe by Mother of Ina’s favourite foods, or a demand by Father, Ina would not end her confinement.
To be fair, the self-imposed internment might have ended earlier if the contagion that Ina so feared had not actually materialized. While Mother was, on the first day of Ina’s confinement, able to assure Ina that she felt perfectly fine, the next day, at the very moment that Ina took one of her three daily trips to the bathroom across the hall from our room, Mother had the misfortune to sneeze. The following day she woke with a sore throat and a congested chest. By that afternoon she had an earache as well. A fever set in that night, and the next day it was so high that Dr. Heggie had to be summoned.
Dr. Heggie prescribed cold compresses, a special elixir, and plenty of bed rest for Mother. Having been apprised of Ina’s state, Dr. Heggie also prescribed treatment for Ina: a trip to Toronto for her and me, the duration of which was to last until Mother was well. He examined my throat and ears, ran a stethoscope over my back and chest, and repeated the procedure for Father, Grandpa, and Jim. Through the door to our bedroom, Dr. Heggie proclaimed us to be in perfect health. He then left our house with a jar of strawberry preserves in one hand and the famous black bag in the other. To my great dismay, the black bag was the same size and apparent weight when it left our house as it had been when it entered it.
On the condition that we would immediately leave for Toronto, Ina agreed with the proposed arrangement. Father cabled his sister, Lillian, the only member of our family who resided outside of Brampton, and a few hours later walked Ina and me to the train station. As we walked, he reviewed the arrangements he had made. If Lulu—or Aunt Lillian, he corrected himself—was not at Union Station to meet us when our train arrived in Toronto, we were to walk to Spadina Avenue and take the horseless streetcar to her home just south of Bloor Street. He handed Ina some money just in case his sister forgot to feed us and promised to see us in a week, by which time he was confident Mother would be restored to good health.
My worry for Mother’s health was profound, and my disappointment regarding the contents of Dr. Heggie’s black bag great, but as the train neared Toronto, thoughts of those matters were replaced by the prospect of spending a week with our beloved Aunt Lillian. This was an adventure that Ina, Jim, and my cousins had each enjoyed every summer since they turned eight years of age. The annual excursion was particularly enjoyable for Ina, who, for one week a year, was able to live like an only daughter again. I am sure my presence on this sojourn would have resulted in her defection from it but for her great relief at being removed from our infected house.
Aunt Lillian was the eldest of my father’s three sisters. She was without a doubt the least conforming member of our family. As a child she chose pants instead of skirts, sports instead of dolls, the company of her father and brother over that of her mother and sisters. As an adult, she rejected religion, politics and, eventually, the epitome of the two—in our family at least—Brampton itself. At twenty-four years of age, she moved to Toronto and purchased a house in a heavily leveraged transaction funded in small part by her savings of the previous five years but completed largely on the guarantee of payment made by her brother and by the promise of the income to be generated from the use of her house by boarders. She lived a happy life as a single woman running a boarding house for male university students and teaching history at the nearby Toronto Central Technical Institute. Her high school students routinely judged her their favourite teacher for the way in which she brought historical figures to life.
Aunt Lil’s looks were, naturally, unconventional. Her lips were slightly fuller than the fashion. Her flawless cream-coloured complexion accentuated her eyes, which sparkled beneath lids slightly too heavy. In an era when a woman’s hair was always pinned back to her scalp, she wore a red, curly mane down her back. When it was covered, which was infrequent, it was rather adorned, generally by an ostentatious, oversized, brightly coloured headpiece. Her favourite colour, green, was almost the only colour she wore. Father said she looked like an upside down carrot. Tall and thin, he remarked that if someone picked her up by the toes of her green-coloured stockings and let her loose red hair fall below her head, she would be a perfect imitation of that root vegetable. Green was the colour of her eyes, the colour of the ink with which she wrote, the colour of the walls in her home. Her choice of the colour whenever an opportunity for a choice presented itself marked almost the only predictable element of Aunt Lil’s life.
Our extended family visited Aunt Lil twice a year, once in late August, when we went to Toronto to attend the Canadian National Exhibition and to buy clothes for school at the Eaton’s department store, and once in the spring at Easter, when most of her borders were with their own families for the holidays. We children took bets as we rode the train from Brampton as to whether on this occasion Aunt Lil’s house would be so cluttered as to prevent any of us from finding a place to sit or so bare as to lead us to wonder whether anyone at all lived in the home; or whether it would be so hot so as to have each of us shedding our clothes, although it was cold outside, or so cold that each of us would seek blankets from the boarders’ beds.
One Easter Sunday, fourteen of us appeared on her doorstep. The table had not been set; there was no food on the sideboards; the kitchen was cool and the cupboards bare. No one had the heart to ask where dinner was, and we all left ravenous three hours later. The next year we went laden with hams, potatoes, pies, and peas, but detecting the aromas of beef, fish, and yams wafting out her front screen door, we quickly hid our provisions under the front porch and carried them all back home at the end of the day. Our parents reprimanded us children for engaging in wagers regarding Aunt Lil’s likely conduct, a practice they deemed unchristian on multiple accounts, but I could tell that Father at least was placing his own silent bets.
Aunt Lil had no regard for conventional rules. She had her own rules.
