out for her but he was too young and inexperienced at the time for them to pay attention to him. But despite the incongruity of ministers and brothel keepers in the same family, and both sets cheating their sister, everyone got along in lively and affectionate fashion, the hypocrisy of the era serving them well. It was all rather like an Ibsen play, except nobody got the comeuppance the playwright would have arranged for them.
There were other stories, set long enough ago that they had lost any sting they might once have had, that my grandmother used to tell us. When she was a small girl living in the family farmhouse, situated more or less at the corner of St Catherine Street and Metcalfe Street in present day Westmount, her own grandmother lived with the family. Her husband had been a sea captain, supposedly. Rank is sometimes enhanced in old tales. He may have been a common seaman. He rarely returned to his homeport of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a drinker and his wife may also have suspected he had wives in other ports. In any case, after one long absence of his she determined to emigrate with her grown children to Canada, and did so. Years passed.
“One winter’s night there came a knock at the door.” These are Grandma’s exact words. This sort of story is always told in precisely the same ones. The rest of the family being occupied, the old lady went to answer the knock. Outside in the snow stood “an old fella.” For some reason for the purposes of this tale it had to be “fella,” not a normal word for her. He was clearly an old bum and she made to close the door on him. But he had thrust a foot forward and over the threshold. “Janet, don’t you recognize me?” he said.
Looking down, she saw the broken boot he had thrust forward. I picture her cringing with shame at the sad sight of that boot, unsure if the shame was for him or for herself.
“No. I do not recognize you,” she said, trying again to close the door.
“But Janet! I’m your own husband!”
“I have no husband. I’ve been a widow for years.” And she struggled with the door again. At this point one of her children heard the commotion and hurried forward to sort out the situation.
There was no escape from the facts for poor Janet: the old man came in, and stayed, for the rest of his life. However, until the day she died, she maintained that he was no husband of hers. My grandmother remembered him well, how he sat in his nook by the fire and pretended not to like the whisky he had to be allowed. He would purse his lips, pretending distaste, and say, “Oh my nasty medicine.” And he would take her side and save her when a brother teased by pretending to be a bear under the bearskin rug.
How the stories in my mother’s family could have been taken as any sort of lessons is less clear than the ones in my father’s. The moral lines are more blurred; rascals are not necessarily cast out. There was more kindness, seemingly, also cheating and probably criminality. There was considerable hypocrisy. But moral lessons, or any lessons, are not overtly passed anyway. It’s more subtle than that.
I keep returning to the same theme and images. I always felt, almost no matter how taxing or even dreadful and frightening a situation might be, that my life was richly interesting and I was its heroine. And I would survive. Yet those myriad generations, all those crowds of people, hang in the branches of a towering, hugely towering, family tree — those owls, as well as larks and wrens and woodpeckers, vultures even — and something of them funnels down into me. They were. I am. I am, at the moment. One day I will be past tense too.
One of the most fascinating things of having lived this long and having known several generations is seeing personality traits and talents, as well as physical characteristics, pop up, sometimes skipping a generation or even two.
My elder granddaughter not only has legs like mine but also has my sort of shyness. For both of us our shyness lasted until university when overnight it disappeared. Each in our generation had sat mostly quietly in our school classes and preferred listening to participating. Teachers’ reports always suggested more speaking up. At age seventeen, fifty-odd years apart, suddenly each girl began to talk, sometimes to engage professors and often to hold forth with classmates in debate. Something had clicked on like a light switch and empowered speech. Sarah also has my sort of bookishness and my way with words. We both speak rather loudly and often “know best,” and must check ourselves for bossiness.
My oldest grandson’s mind also works in ways very familiar to mine. He is a writer too and also has the luck of his Molnar grandfather’s athleticism. On the other hand, I see in my oldest great-grandson the same intense, thoughtful consideration before he enters any activity that I saw in my son’s face at the same age. I also see the optimism of my mother moving through me and on to some, while others of my descendants have to struggle at times with shadows.
My mother’s life, apart from the periods of intense grief at family deaths, was very secure and happy. She was dearly loved, tall and beautiful, musical, a reader, clever with her needle. After high school she took a year of teacher training at Macdonald College. It was there that she met my father who had come with some other boys from McGill out to Macdonald to a dance. He was immediately struck by the sweetness of Jennie Ireland — as her name then was. After their marriage he changed not just her last name as was normal, but also her first. Jennie became Jane, his way of establishing that she was his now. And he took her away to southern Africa where they spent the first five years of their marriage.
The African years had an impact on all of us, not just on Ruth, who was born there. The stories of their life there became family mythology: our father’s long stretches out on the bushveldt with his “boys,” really men, of course, but everyone used the colonial terminology. Africans were “boys.” Children were “picannins.” He had encounters with lions, water buffalo and rhinos. Urged on by his “boys” he shot an elephant. He became thin and brown and wore two hats to ward off the sun. He contracted malaria over and over, and suffered worms that burrowed under the skin. At night he gazed at the sky to plot the next day’s trek by the stars. He once walked a hundred miles, trying to save a man mauled by a lion. The man, an American would-be Great White Hunter who had somehow at one point insisted on tagging along, wounded a lion and then refused my father’s advice to “never, ever follow a wounded lion into the long grass.” His torn body — my father had to shoot the lion in order to rescue the dolt — was increasingly consumed by gangrene over the days it took my father and his “boys” to carry him to a hospital. He died just before they got there.
That was a warning all his children took seriously and we keenly awaited our chance to follow it.
Mother went out to him eighteen months after he went himself, when at last he was able to have a sort of home base even if he was still mostly out on the veldt. She kept house for him, with the help of a “boy” called Gibson, in a shack with furniture they made themselves out of dynamite boxes. She had her first baby in a tiny rondavel hut with a midwife in attendance. She always claimed it as her favourite birthing experience, much richer than her later ones, knocked out and oblivious in Montreal and Toronto hospitals and in bed for two weeks afterwards, a nurse sitting by the bedside. I imagine she also must have relished creating her role as a mother far from the influence of her own mother whose Victorian anxieties about a baby’s feeding and (especially) bowels, and essential fragility, inevitably would have intruded. She didn’t even tell her mother a baby was expected, writing of her pregnancy only when she knew the cable announcing the birth would have arrived. Letters took six weeks. When the baby was a little older, mother had another houseboy, a “picannin” called Saucepan, to help her. His task was to return toys the baby threw out of her cot.
It was that first experience of hers that made me insist, in 1958 when it absolutely was not done, on having as natural a birth as I could arrange in Montreal. I found what I later learned
