some larger ones almost like woods and a big patch of wild rose bushes, and lots of other wildflowers, and there are zigzagging cow paths that we follow one after another, a different one each day until we know the whole pasture. At first there don’t seem to be any cows in the pasture but then we discover two, and also the farmer, who tells us the cows’ names are Dolly and Daisy. He tells us we can come back when he is milking and we can watch him and maybe he will teach us how to do it.
As we three girls got older there was a kind of withdrawal of our father’s natural warmth, or the expression of it. I always sensed the warmth was there, but somehow he no longer knew how to talk to his daughters as we became, one after another, adolescents. Unlike his younger brother, our Uncle Bunny, who kept the conversational channels open with his children as they matured, our father lacked confidence in himself and in us. Or that’s how I see it now.
He was a complicated and vulnerable person. He had to become the man of his family at eleven years old. And having to fill that role, impossibly taxing for a child, must still have been an improvement over the frighteningly uncertain life that had come before. His difficult childhood ensured that he locked down a great deal. Even so, such was his strength that he had taken from what small offerings of love came his way — affection, perhaps, from one grandmother, and definitely from a servant in that grandmother’s house — enough to forge a loving personality. His mother surely loved him too but my sense is that she was so beaten down — figuratively and maybe literally as well — by her situation, the situation created by her husband, that she could not protect her son. He may have found it hard to trust her love’s worth. But I mentioned the servant because I have a sudden memory of a visit our father, Carol and I paid to an old, old lady when just the three of us were driving through Montreal.
Unaccountably we three had gone to Quebec City to a wedding of some cousin of our father’s whom we’d never met before nor ever met again. Why Carol and I, and not Mother and Ruth, say, were chosen to accompany him, I have no idea. But it was an adventure and we loved being with him, hearing stories of his African adventures and even explanations of things like road signs and markings. I don’t know why I remember that last piece of trivia, but his voice explaining the meaning of the lines on the road has remained with me forever. We stayed at the Château Frontenac. I was eight or nine, and that early hotel experience made me richly enjoy hotel life ever since. This trip was before our father became uncomfortable with us, and having him to ourselves, as Carol and I did that week, made the experience a magic island of time.
Then on the way back from Quebec City we stopped in Montreal at an old stone house. I’ve no idea now where exactly in the city it was. By that time the house on Beaver Hall Hill our father had told us about may have been destroyed. Or it may have been that house.
~
It is an old stone house. We know it is old from the smell. It’s stuffy and there is a nasty smoke undertone that isn’t nice, not like the cottage’s wood smoke smell. It’s a house unlike any others we’ve been to. For instance, there are two staircases. We see one at the front of the house. It goes up right across from the front door, with a dark red carpet all the way up it to a landing, and the stairs turn so we can’t see if the carpet goes on. But we don’t go up that one, and instead go down a long dim hall, through a big chilly kitchen, and there is a second staircase. It is just wood, with no carpet, and steeper. Our father goes up first and fast and Carol and I try to keep up.
Finally we get to the top of the house and are in what we know is an attic because when we look into the small rooms off the hall, the ceiling slopes steeply so that in parts of the room a grownup couldn’t possibly stand up, maybe not even a child.
Daddy goes into one of these rooms and we follow him closely and peer around him to see the person we have come to see. He has told us almost nothing about who this person is, just that her name is Hattie and she is very old and weak now and it is important that we stop and visit her. We drive through Montreal every time we go to and from North Hatley but have never stopped at this house before. I wonder if maybe Hattie is dying and that is why Daddy is making this visit.
I find looking at very old people frightening. I dread seeing something terrible, something horrible for the old person having it, and — this seems mean and makes me sad about myself — disgusting for me to have to see. I don’t know what might happen to a human body just before a person dies and I don’t want to know. I even get a little of that feeling sometimes when Grandma visits. I love Grandma and she is not so old that she’s about to die but I sometimes come upon something I wish I hadn’t. For example I once saw a strange, sort of flat, pink rubber bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. It definitely was not a hot water bottle. I asked Mum what it was and she said it was an enema bag and explained what it was for as if it was quite an ordinary thing. It wasn’t a bit ordinary to me. Anyway, I don’t want Hattie to die right this minute while we are there. I hardly want to look at her but I do. Daddy takes my hand and we go forward to stand close beside the bed so she can see us. If she can look. I’m not sure if she sees us or not.
Her face is very, very small. Her skin is wrinkled and looks like a walnut’s shell and is the same colour. Above her face is a small clump of white hair brushed to the side. There’s so little of it that I can see bits of her walnut head through it.
“It’s Charlie, Hattie,” Daddy says. “I’ve brought my little girls, Carol and Anne, to meet you.”
I try to smile. I know Daddy wants us to be friendly and I want to be kind. I can’t help looking at the rest of her, or as much as can be guessed at because she’s covered right up to her neck with blankets. A white sheet is folded down over the top one so the blanket doesn’t rub against her face. Someone must be looking after her, and carefully. I can see a potty under the bed, but it is empty and clean. Even so there is a smell that makes me feel a bit sick. Is it just oldness? There’s an on-top smell of some sort of not very nice soap, but underneath it is something else a bit like poo. I try not to breathe in very often. Which doesn’t work. Hattie’s whole self is really tiny; the covers barely rise over her body. It could be just a cat stretched out under there, and where what must be her feet poke up is not at all far down the bed. She is much smaller than I am. I suddenly think of the Egyptian mummies in the Royal Ontario Museum. Ruth always makes us have a good long stare at them whenever we go. It is almost impossible to believe they were once humans, in fact not really possible at all. I always think of them as female because of the name. Ruth says they weren’t necessarily but I never can bear to connect them with real humans, somehow especially women. They always give me a sort of shivery sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach but seeing Hattie is worse because she is actually still alive, even if barely, and I can’t pretend to myself she isn’t a human.
When we leave that house and are driving away, our father tells us as much as he knows about Hattie’s early story. It is just like a story in a book, as many of the stories in our family are.
One day my father’s maternal step-grandfather went to the railroad station in Montreal to collect something sent to him. He also found there a little girl whom no one had come to meet. He had arrived a little while after the train came in, to give the porters time to unload parcels. Everyone had already left the station. That is, not quite everyone: standing all alone in the middle of the huge, echoing waiting room was a tiny girl-child. She didn’t move at all, just stood there like a teeny statue.
She was wearing an old coat that came down almost to her ankles and was missing some of its hem stitching so in those places it hung even lower. A label was pinned with a safety pin on the coat, with her name in a grownup’s hand. On her head was a floppy woollen beret. In front of her, its wooden handles clasped in both of her very small hands, she carried a cloth bag. She looked about six but later the family realized she had to be more than
