her exact age. She was probably so small because she’d never been properly nourished. She had been sent over from England, as orphans or just very poor children often were in those days and even much later, to be taken into some household who wanted a child. Her story was rather like Anne’s in Anne of Green Gables, though Anne was just from another Maritime province. Unwanted children were shipped about the country and the world to help out on farm, or work as domestics in towns, or, if they were extremely fortunate, to live as family members.
But no one had come for Hattie. Perhaps someone had observed the frail little soul and decided, no, there would be no usefulness there.
Anyway, Grandfather Stewart, as he was called, and this is the only story in which he features, took her home for dinner. She stayed for the rest of her life. She had been a fixture in my father’s childhood in his visits, though rare, to the house on Beaver Hall Hill. And it was clear that day, by how badly he needed to see her one last time, and by his reaction when he saw the tiny bundle in the bed, that he had loved her. She must have been kind to a little boy who felt adrift in the world, as she had been.
My father, despite the paltry share of love he had known when young, was sensitive, loving and exceptionally kind. He hated the very idea of an adult hurting a young person. I once told him of a girl in my class at Havergal whose father made her eat in the kitchen rather than with the family in the dining room. Her pimples disgusted him and put him off his food. My father’s face was stricken at this story; he was appalled by the cruelty of that father.
My father was clever: from both his parents, despite their obvious personality weaknesses, he inherited brains, and clearly from some other antecedent a strong work ethic and strong sense of responsibility. After his father’s death my father, still a child, found jobs delivering papers, shovelling snow, any tasks for which a skinny kid could earn a few pennies. However that was inadequate and once into his teens he had to drop out of school in order to provide more. I’m not sure exactly at what age this dropping out happened, but I do know that he remained ambitious for an education. He continued his studies on his own and eventually, as an external student, took McGill entrance exams.
By then a young man he could work underground in the mines of northern Quebec and Ontario and make enough to fund university. The situation was also improved when his mother remarried, which meant he no longer had the full weight of caring for her as well as for his sister and their much younger brother. He chose a profession, mining engineering, that led to adventure and a testing of himself physically and in other ways as well. He was tall but skinny, with light brown curly hair, a narrow face and bright blue eyes. He cannot have found it a simple matter, at least at first, to take charge of teams of men more physically powerful and often older than he, as they navigated the wilderness of Africa, and then the far north of Canada, Alaska, South America. But he did so and he was successful. He had a casual air about his success. He hated pomposity or snobbery. The pick with which he had discovered the seam of gold in northern Ontario that made his fortune just hung in the back shed and was used by us children if we wanted something to dig with.
His children all loved him and we knew he loved us. But we all had difficult moments with him when communication became confounded on both sides. He could be upset by one of us, often out of the blue. It must have been that we triggered something in him that none of us, I’m sure including him, understood. His disapproval of one of us, conveyed only by the look, hung in the air for a while like a strangely stiff grey fog.
Once he came to my boarding school to take me to a film. I was fourteen and for once had felt compelled to put on some lipstick in the face of my roommates’ astonishment as I headed out without it. In the darkness of the theatre I was suddenly aware of my father looking sideways at me. Shock and distaste transfixed his face as he hissed, “Are you wearing lipstick?” Unaccountably he somehow hadn’t noticed it on our way to the theatre; maybe the light from the screen for a moment made my lips shine. I felt searing shame. But why was it so dreadful? I didn’t know. But it was. And I hadn’t even wanted to wear it.
Two key women in his early life enacted opposing but equally destructive stereotypes. This was never put into words. That would have been impossible. Underground, fear moved about in our father and inevitably infected us, his daughters. Might one of us go in the direction of the wild promiscuity and general fecklessness of his sister Ruth? Or might someone have inherited the hopeless passivity of his mother? Would that be the better alternative? What sense does a daughter make of such intense paternal emotions when they are expressed only in alarmed eyes, heavy silences, an abrupt leaving of a room? The unspoken messages didn’t stop coming even when we became adults.
~
Our Aunt Ruth was two years younger than our father. I’m sure he loved her when they were children, indeed probably always. When they were young he was her protector from the constantly shifting ground of their family, particularly the raging and erratic temper of their father. Apparently she was a creative, dramatic, volatile girl; in the rare photos I’ve seen of her she has a quantity of dark curly hair and dark eyes. She was exotic looking, unlike my fair, blue-eyed father, and she played on that. All her life any story she told was a wild exaggeration or a lie. This could be funny and exciting, but also alarming.
For my whole early childhood I knew her only through snippets of stories, vivid as snapshots, the surrounding circumstances never elaborated on enough to figure out rhyme or reason. One image is of my young mother, an Anglican canon’s virtuous daughter, being forced by her sister-in-law Ruth to hide behind a pillar in the Biltmore Hotel in New York to spy on Ruth’s first adulterous husband. Another scene also comes from the protracted collapse of that first marriage, of Aunt Ruth’s widowed, poverty-stricken mother selling her own rings to scramble the money together to pay for the divorce. The legal stipulation was that there be no marital relations between the first court action and the decree nisi. Nevertheless Aunt Ruth went down to the station to see him off to somewhere. These stories are never complete. Was this also in New York? Where was he off to? Of course she simply couldn’t resist leaping on the train with him and sharing his berth. It was much too dramatic a situation not to play out. Back to square one with the divorce, her mother’s rings sacrificed in vain.
How she then supported herself and her one child, Douglas, is another shadowy area. The details were clearly too unsavoury for us to hear much about them. She worked as some sort of actress, sang and danced in some kind of Montreal clubs; there were many men.
Who saw to the tiny boy, Douglas? It’s likely he was left alone much of the time. My very maternal mother, who was our source of any glimpses we got, was appalled at the neglect of Douglas, distressed by the worn and dirty state of his clothes on the rare occasion she saw him. His father was long lost to view when suddenly the little boy had to have an appendix operation. This was Montreal in the mid-1930s and the church, and the Napoleonic Code, ruled the law, as indeed it did for several more decades. A child or a woman could not have an operation in Quebec without a father’s (or, for a married woman, a husband’s) permission. The nuns at Hôtel Dieu de Montréal knelt in prayer around Douglas’s bed — as a child I found nuns sinister figures and I pictured their enveloping black habits, their bald heads under wimples, their severe white faces, their closed eyes — until his appendix burst and he died.
The child must have suffered agony before death took him. He was eight years old, our cousin we never met. Our mother was sure she would have snatched up any child of hers in such a mortal plight and made a dash for Ontario where saner laws prevailed.
There were also tales of how Aunt Ruth would borrow money from her brothers for some scheme of hers — money of course never paid back. One apparently typical time was when she managed to weasel her younger brother’s savings out of him, by pleading and tears. That was my Uncle Bunny, who was then working hard to save enough to start university. The savings she nipped off with he never saw again. Another case of back to square one, that time for poor Uncle Bun.
At
