when, according to my mother’s girlfriend Phyllis, “we ate a lot of sausages, carrots, and tapioca pudding because they were the cheapest.”
In the full fury of the Great Depression, 1931 was a daring time to marry. Most businesses demanded that if a woman married, she had to forfeit her job. Dad was following in the footsteps of his older brothers — all of them salesman who surely in some prior life had kissed the Blarney Stone. Selling was in his blood as deeply as his Irish love of rum. When he announced his engagement, his older brother and mentor Arnold was not impressed. “You don’t have any money to get married on.” Undeterred, these true devotees of the flapper generation were wed by Father McGrath in a simple ceremony in Corpus Christi Church at Lockwood and Queen East. In 1931, the church, now designated as a heritage property and containing a little-publicized treasure — namely a three-themed mural by famed Canadian-Ukranian artist William Kurelek — was in its second incarnation, having been expanded in 1927 to accommodate the growing Catholic population of the Beach. Velma and Neil then went on a quickie weekend honeymoon to Buffalo, financed by Arnold’s generous gift of fifty dollars. This was the same uncle who confessed to me when I was a married woman, “You know, when Neilly brought your mom to my house to meet me, I thought she was a funny-looking little thing.” His expression obviously equated “funny” with “homely.” I wondered if he’d noticed the marks on my mother’s cheeks, spaced like seed pits of a strawberry, but devoid of colour. The ones I used to dare to trace with my fingers and count, enjoying the sensation of being that close to her. “I caught scarlet fever when I was young. I almost died from it. That’s how I got all these marks on my skin,” she’d explain.
Uncle Arnold would reminisce some more. “I tried to talk your dad out of marriage, but he said he figured two could live cheaper than one. I never knew how he did arrive at that one (chuckle, chuckle). But you know, it did turn out okay after all.”
I arrived a year and a day after their marriage, the same year that the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. My parents brought me from St. Mike’s Hospital to their one-bedroom basement apartment in Howell Manor, at the southwest corner of Queen and Beech. From the building’s front door, you could look south several hundred yards and see the lake. That beautiful backdrop of water was to act as my lifelong touchstone.
One of my first memories was a ceremony of approval. I’d just turned three. My father had given my mother a Silex coffeepot for Christmas, the kind with a glass rod joining the upper and lower sections. In the excitement, the rod got lost somewhere among the crumpled wrapping paper. The search was on! Persistently scrunching up every scrap of tissue, I finally found it and proudly held it out to my father. Taking it from me, he announced in a proud tone, “Now, isn’t she smart, Velma?” I was labelled for life.
My mother didn’t have much first-hand experience with mothering. From the time she started school until she finally quit at the age of fourteen — a disobedient mischievous troublemaker whom her teachers, in spite of themselves, felt compelled to love — she had been sent away to mostly French-speaking convent boarding schools, as had her older brother and sister. None were in the same school. Her French Canadian mother was Agnes Larivière La Branche. At the time she was pregnant with my mother, Agnes already had two children — Flo and Adolphus. I was told my maternal grandfather had died while my mother was still in Agnes’s womb. Or was my grandmother really widowed? This was a family secret I grew up with. No one admitted to any recollection of my maternal grandfather — how he looked or what he was like. The only information I could elicit after great coaxing was “he worked on the railway and was killed in a train accident.” Until this day, I wonder — did he run away and abandon all of them, did he have some Native blood in him, was my mother fathered by the same man as her older siblings? When my Aunt Flo was in her eighties I’d ask her about their father.
“What do you want to know about that old stuff for, anyway? I can’t remember any of that. It was too long ago.”
When I became a mother myself, my curiosity impelled me to go to Massey and look up my grandparents’ wedding certificate. There were their names — Baptiste La Branche, farm-labourer from Bear Brook, Ontario, and signed with an X. Underneath his name were the letters A-n-g, which were then scratched out and written beside them, A-g-n-e-s Lariviere, spinster. This nervous script was followed by two witnesses who also signed with Xs. Agnes was the only literate one. Is that why she and her children were so reluctant to talk about Baptiste? How did she afford to educate her three fatherless children in convent boarding schools? How did she make sufficient income giving sewing lessons and fashioning exquisite creations as a milliner, in one small northern Ontario hamlet after another?
When I reflect from this distance, I think my mother wanted me so that she’d have someone to love the way she’d always wanted to be loved. But it was difficult because of the fragmented mothering she’d experienced. What she brought to me, her first-born, were authentic intentions, a commitment to carry out her role, and a need of her own so great that at times it threatened to create a vast desert of loneliness for me.
If any awareness of that loneliness did arise in my child-mind, I never let it linger. It was too overpowering for a small child to be able to do anything about. There are no memories of those infant hours of frustration, anger, and despair waiting for a mother to nurse me at her breast. But later, when I had children, she’d tell me, “My, it’s so different from when you were a baby. They told us only to feed you every four hours or you’d get spoiled. We had to get you on a routine, we were told. I’d listen to you cry, and I’d be longing to go to you, and there’s be tears coming down my cheeks too. But I wasn’t allowed to feed you again until the four hours were up.” Oh, yes, the convent years had done their job. Velma may have been a holy terror there, but when it came to being a mother she was going to obey the 1930s rules of child rearing and be the best mother she knew how.
One of the few memories she’d share was about the year she spent on a farm when she had scarlet fever. “Someone gave me a baby lamb as a pet,” she’d tell me as I pestered her for stories of her childhood. “I tied a ribbon around its neck and fed it with a little bottle filled with milk.”
Mother and I spent a lot of hours together from Monday till Friday in our small apartment. We’d visit my aunt and uncle in their apartment on the next street over, Balsam Avenue. My Aunt Flo, ten years my mother’s senior, had taken my mother in when she defiantly left the Grey Nuns Convent in Ottawa when only fourteen. My mother must have presented quite a challenge — a wilful, spirited, French-speaking adolescent — to Flo who, settling close to Toronto’s east end, was determined to leave everything French and Catholic behind her.
Flo’s husband Frank Byrnes was from Lunenburg, son of a sea captain. He’d served in the First World War in the 154th Canadian Expeditionary Force with the Construction Corps Signallers in France. A unit photograph hung in their hallway. My aunt claimed I eventually rubbed out some of Uncle Frank’s face with my finger, repeatedly picking him out — correctly. I never knew if it was accident or design that Auntie Flo and Uncle Frank had no children. They never dared give my mother any parenting advice. I’m not sure she’d have taken it, anyway. To her, Auntie Flo had done something shameful. She’d married “outside of the church.” My pious mother was never to be comfortable around a couple declared by the Catholic Church to be “living in sin.”
I had no notion of this dilemma. I was more engrossed with staring at Uncle Frank’s picture. One day I abandoned Uncle Frank’s dim face for another picture on their wall — a man and woman, standing in a field, heads bent in prayerful and saddened attitude. It was a print of “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet and probably the only object my aunt had that connected with her former faith. (Years later I learned that Salvador Dali had an intuition that this painting had a deeper meaning. When subjected to X-rays it was discovered that Millet’s original theme had been two peasants praying over the grave of their young child. He changed the painting on the advice of art dealers who said the subject was too morbid to sell.) Even at that young age, the
