I was ten or eleven, to me she was simply a distressing rumour. Mention of her brought a certain look of distaste to our mother’s usually kind face, and if we were lucky, and our father not present, she might reveal a few of the details I’ve just described, maybe adding another one.
~
And then I have a brief but clear memory of our stopping, on the way back to Toronto from North Hatley, at a rural farmhouse where the aunt-of-dark-mystery was staying.
Our mother and we children remain in the car, but I can see our father standing some distance away under a yellowing willow tree and talking to a woman. She is standing among fallen yellow leaves and talking agitatedly, her hands gesturing, then clasped. Her look is an imploring one. Is she actually crying? I am too far away to see if there are tears. I have a feeling that she is faking: her movements and expression are too dramatic to be real.
Our father is standing back from her a little. He looks uncomfortable. I know he doesn’t like someone to be crying because he’s soft-hearted but even more doesn’t like a person to exaggerate feelings or even worse, pretend them entirely. We are all consumed with curiosity but our father is silent when he gets back into the car.
~
We later gleaned — it can only have been from our mother — that our aunt was begging him for the money she needed to board at that farmhouse for a while and write a book. I suspect he gave her the funds, sent them later, that is. I’m pretty sure no money changed hands on the spot.
No book ever appeared.
Another time a couple of years on she came for a brief visit to North Hatley. I remember she started to come for a walk up the hill with us but stopped only a little way up into the pasture to sit in the grass and dream and “commune with nature.” I watched her settle herself and was sure she was simply lazy rather than having some sort of poetic moment. My sister Ruth told me afterwards that Aunt Ruth thought both she and Carol had artistic temperaments and talents but that I was a hopeless tomboy with no sort of interesting future.
Probably most family trees have a feckless Aunt Ruth figure lurking in the branches but for our father I am sure she was forever a strong and threatening example of how a girl could turn out. He had loved and protected her when they were children — and look what she had become! Feckless Aunt Ruth had three feckless husbands and, from our remote vantage point, lived a disastrous and irresponsible life. What her life was really like from her point of view is something I can never know. If her childhood family had offered her security more solid than what a brother not much older than she herself could provide, if her mother had been stronger … and as for her father! But a person in our family could put herself beyond the pale. It was a tough lesson for those who followed, and the scapegoat who provided it essentially was banished forever.
The hopelessly inadequate husband and father, my grandfather Thomas Coleman, is a man of almost total mystery to my generation. His own original family were people of consequence for several generations in Canada, going back to the Thomas Coleman who arrived in the New World from England in the late eighteenth century. He was a United Empire Loyalist who became a Captain and raised a regiment in the District of Montreal, the Canadian Light Dragoons, to fight in the War of 1812. For his services he was given over 800 acres in what became Belleville, Ontario, and built the enormous, very ugly, Italianate Coleman’s Castle there (now a funeral home; I’ve seen it). He was followed by illustrious descendants, the men all doctors, lawyers or other worthies. In my grandfather’s generation, one brother, Alfred, became a medical doctor and Thomas a dentist.
My grandmother was eighteen when she met Dr. Thomas Coleman and to that point she must have been a very clever and ambitious girl. He was her professor. He was exactly double her age.
One of seven children she graduated from Montreal High School in 1898 with the top marks in her year. That meant she earned the title “Dux.” She was the only family member to go on to university and she chose medical school.
I imagine her as a lovely looking tall girl with curly light brown hair worn drawn back in a bun, the style of the time, and large blue eyes. I have to use my imagination to create the girl Ruth as I’ve seen only two photos of her and in them she no longer looks young. In one she looks far older than she must actually have been, given that my father as a toddler is also in the picture. She can only have been twenty-one or twenty-two. She is crouching down beside him, not smiling, and is looking up at the camera. Her eyes are serious, perhaps sad. The child is solemn also. The two seem to be in a sort of tenement yard, outdoors but with walls on the three sides one can see and presumably one also behind the photographer. It looks a rather wretched place, outdoors but no blade of grass or shrub in sight. If they are in Montreal, it’s not a part of the city I know.
In the other photo she is much older and is sitting on a bench outdoors with my mother, and I think this must be in New York, just before my mother sailed for Africa to join my father. You can see that my grandmother has been a good-looking woman, indeed still is, in a rather haggard way — the large eyes, the high cheekbones — but both women have unsmiling faces. I have no idea what my mother really thought of her mother-in-law. Her loyalty to our father held her tongue, most of the time.
But how did things ever get going between Ruth and her professor? It is a puzzle. She must have worked so hard to get where she was. If she were the one who made the first move, why would she risk everything she had remarkably achieved for this man, so much older than she? It seems more likely to me that he forced himself upon her. But what sort of man does that make him and why was he unmarried at thirty-six anyway? Unanswerable questions. What we do know is that they ran away together a couple of months after she entered his class, in November of her first and only university year.
How I long to know what in the world really happened to the brave and very smart young woman who did something so unusual as get herself into medical school in 1898. Something happened to her. Thomas Coleman happened to her. And the strong, clever, capable and ambitious girl she had been up to then disappeared without a trace for the rest of her life.
We, my siblings and I, always assumed they married immediately, but a distant family connection did some research just this year and found the record of their marriage. It was a surprise. They were not wed until two years after the runaway and after the death of their first child, a son, another Thomas. His death is recorded in the family Bible, without mention of his parents being unmarried at the time. But why the delay in marrying? Did he try to get out of it? Did she? But she would have been so vulnerable, and pregnant; she would have needed marriage. Otherwise, who would have taken her in? Did my father know the truth of any of this and never reveal? I thought that over for a moment and then realized: if he’d known he would not have told us.
What possessed this man to act in a way that meant the end of his professorial position, and then to live a strange, wandering life?
All we know is that he set up dental practices in one town after another, constantly moving his family, as it grew, from one small town to another around Quebec and Ontario. This was surely unwise in a profession that usually requires building confidence in the community.
He was a sadistic man and brutal to my father: one time, at least, he administered a vicious beating with a belt soaked overnight in brine so the wounds would really smart: it was a plotted and elaborated punishment.
It was our mother who told us of that beating, and also that it was actually his sister who had committed whatever the naughtiness had been. Our father protected her and took the blame. And as with Aunt Ruth’s neglect of Douglas, here too our mother condemned. She could never forgive our grandmother for not
