may have supposedly expressed those views are no longer with us to refute, modify, or confirm them. For literary purposes, I have “quoted” them; quotes, other than those attributed to Frances, are, in most instances, inventions. But all these quotes reflect what the characters might easily have said under the circumstances, in words I feel could have been theirs, expressing intentions or beliefs they probably would have held. In many instances I have fabricated remarks by Frances herself that were never recorded or uttered by her, but these, too, express what I believe she could have said, given the feelings and views expressed in her volumes of correspondence and a half-century of daily records. If you feel I’m wrong in doing this, you are entitled to your opinion, and like Voltaire, I will defend to the death your right to express it.
I have assiduously tried to avoid libel in my own statements and those attributed to others. At one point Frances referred to a confrere as “a prick.” Ever on the lookout for offensive material, I deleted it. However, I am dealing with the life of a human being, with all that implies; an offensive word or phrase may have slipped through the cracks, or indeed I may have used it because I felt it was apropos. If a reader gasps with outrage, I recommend revisiting the “offensive” material; I think you will find, on reflection, I am justified.
The cold January wind sweeps down the darkened alley. At the alley’s end, a young woman stands in the doorway of a dilapidated shack. Inside the shack the temperature is below zero, the stove doesn’t work, there is no plumbing, a single light bulb hangs from the ceiling, and she barely has a chair to sit on. She has little money and no prospect of earning more. The future is unknown.
She is the happiest woman in the world.
THE WOMAN STANDS IN THE doorway of her squalid shack. Already she thinks of it as hers though she took possession only the week before. She will remember that day forever: January 21, 1957.
In front of her, across the patch of overgrown ground, is the three-storey bulk of the Studio Building, built in Toronto more than forty years before by the wealthy painter Lawren Harris for his artist friends, many of whom would later form the famous Group of Seven. The shack had been a tool shed used by the workers during the construction of the building.
Now, standing in the doorway, looking north as the late afternoon shadows creep up the wall of the Studio Building, she shivers. The cold January wind reminds her that February is yet to come, and the shack will grow even colder. The small stove will fight the plain wooden uninsulated walls — and lose. Today it had already taken six hours to coax from it a tenuous Scrooge-like heat that allowed her to remove just one of the many layers of clothing she wore.
But the previous evening, despite the fact that she could see her breath in the arctic air of the shack, she had curled up beside the stove and read a book with deep pleasure. The light from the single bulb had illuminated the paintings of the Group of Seven that hung on the walls, looking down upon her, and she had been happy.
But now, casting her eyes back to the interior of the shack and seeing there the meagre signs of a sculptor’s studio, she feels a pang of something deeper than mere concern, rather a real fear of … what? Disaster? No, not yet. Still … on the work table there is the model of the small owl. Pretty little thing; it’ll be lovely when cast. Yes … the pang of concern again. When cast. And where, she thought, do I get the money for that casting? It’s cast or eat. Okay, not quite as bad as that — yet. She sighs, a sigh that carries an edge of exasperation. There must be thousands, well, hundreds of people in Toronto, in Canada, who would benefit from my work, my talent. I’ve learned the skills given me by some of the finest sculptors in the world, and my own talents are there, right there in these hands. Isn’t that enough? Is it? Have all those years of study been for nothing? The years here in the Ontario College of Art? The years studying in New York, in Paris? All those years? My whole life?
She turns and goes inside, her mind tormented by the shadows of an uncertain future, and the shades of an often unsatisfying past.
FRANCES HOLDS UP AN OLD photograph. It’s small, black and white; the product of a Kodak box camera of the twenties. A child — a baby really — stares out. The rumpled dress, the frills and ribbons, suggest a girl. She looks dishevelled; the clothes seem never to have seen an iron. She appears unhappy, and twists uncomfortably in her grown-up chair. She stares out, a cornered animal.
Frances frowns at the photo. “I’ve got a funny expression on my face. Father had spanked me because I wouldn’t sit still.” Her voice takes on a tone of mock outrage. “Thanks a lot!” She tosses the photo on the table. “I think I was a year old, maybe. Hard to tell.”
She was born Frances Marie Gage in Windsor, Ontario, on August 22, 1924, the third of four children of Russell Gage (no middle name) and Jean Mildred Collver.
Frances had a brother and two sisters. Robert was the first-born, followed by Marion, Frances, and Barbara. Both Robert and Barbara would eventually fall victim to alcohol dependency. Frances believed that not only genetics led Barbara to alcohol, but that her father’s unrelenting attitude, almost of dislike, of constant rejection, was to a great degree responsible.
Marion, on the other hand, was the good little girl, and smart enough to realize that if she sat in the corner and did nothing, she was treated all right, most of the time.
Frances, unfortunately for her, was the adventurous one, the one who got into all the scrapes and ended up on the short end of her father’s exasperation with children in general, and Frances in particular.
Frances’s cousin Keith Collver was her lifelong friend. In her early years they got into trouble together, regularly. One day her brother had returned home with his pockets full of apples, but like big brothers everywhere, he wouldn’t give her any. “If you want some, go and get them yourself,” he had said. So she and Keith went off along the highway, two little world travellers, three or four years old, in search of apples. Fortunately word got around, and the adventurers were met along the road by their mothers — with switches. Back home the pair were denied supper and put to bed on bread and milk, which Frances thought was very nice, actually.
Years later, Keith Collver survived the “experimental” Dieppe raid of the Second World War that was mounted in August 1942, during which 6,000 Allied troops — 5,000 of whom were Canadians — landed and suffered losses of 70 percent killed or captured. Keith Collver died in his sixties of bone cancer. Frances never ceased to mourn him.
All her life Frances was drawn to music. Wherever she lived, from basement rooms and cold-water walk-ups, to homes and studios she designed herself, there was always classical music playing softly in the background. Recordings and CBC Radio shared every hour of her life. She travelled widely in Europe, and recitals, symphonies, and musical stage performances were part of every trip. She played the violin in orchestras. She had a fine voice and sang in choirs in New York and Paris as well as Toronto. As a child she sang in the family car during the roadtrips they took together. Her father had a pretty good bass, and her mother a fine contralto. Her brother Bob used to complain that Frances wandered in and out of his tenor parts, but she kept harmonizing, if “harmonizing” is the right term, regardless of his baseless objections.
Like most children, Frances loved every animal, then and forever. Again, like every child, she once brought home a cat. Her father, however, wasn’t having any
