First Person. Valerie Knowles
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The somewhat hazy picture that emerges of Jane Mackay is of a kind woman who was dominated by her husband and plagued by ill health. A family story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that Robert Mackay would dole out some money to his wife for groceries each month and then pocket any that she left on the hall table after she had made up her monthly accounts. Certainly she was no bold, high-spirited chatelaine, as this rather pathetic excerpt from a letter written in 1879 indicates:
...I regret dear Robert that home is not more happy for you. I know that you feel that you have more to bear with than a great many, but you must not forget that I have my own little troubles & I know I am not able to bear up the way I ought to. I will try in the future to keep these little things to myself & not trouble you more than I can help.21
Just what she meant by these “little troubles” is not known. But no doubt the reference alludes, in part, at least, to assorted ailments that afflicted her during her lifetime and to the demands made upon her far from robust constitution by frequent and debilitating child-bearing. The first child, a daughter, Louisa, had arrived during the first year of marriage and had died shortly thereafter. Then, in rapid succession, had come Angus Robert (1872), George Baptist (1874), Hugh (1875), Euphemia (1876) and Isabel Oliver (1878). At the time that she penned her rueful observations in a fine copperplate hand to Robert, she was pregnant with her seventh child, Anna Henrietta, who would enter the world on 25 December 1879. Mercifully for Jane, there would be a six-year interlude until Cairine arrived in 1885. Edward, the last of the children, would be born in 1887.
Cairine Mackay was born in February 1885, a month that would later prove to be a portentous one for Montreal. For it was in February that a Pullman porter from the Chicago train was admitted to the Hotel Dieu hospital with a slight skin eruption that was later diagnosed as smallpox. The disease quickly spread to other patients and before long a major epidemic was in progress. Goaded into drastic action by a public outcry for sterner measures, the city finally introduced compulsory vaccination that fall and soon the epidemic petered out, but not before some three thousand lives had been claimed and thousands of French Canadians had rioted in the streets to protest the new measure.22
Interestingly enough, the day that Cairine Mackay appeared on the scene — Wednesday 4 February — a notice appeared in the The [Montreal] Gazette advertising the sale by auction of her father’s semi-detached stone house on Edgehill Avenue off Dorchester Street West. According to the ad, this most comfortable of family residences boasted bay windows and a wide verandah in the rear as well as a “faultlessly laid out” interior and “light and cheerful” rooms. Even allowing for some descriptive license on the part of the copy writer, it must have been an inviting house, not gloomy and depressing like Kildonan. However, it was at Kildonan that Cairine Mackay was born and it was here that she would pass her impressionable years before her marriage in 1909.
Robert Mackay had moved his family into the Sherbrooke Street mansion shortly before the birth of his youngest daughter and not long after the death of his cousin, Henrietta Gordon, who, by the terms of Joseph’s will, was allowed to occupy Kildonan for a period of five years after her uncle’s death. For the next forty-five years, until its demolition in 1930, the house would be owned exclusively by Mackays or by the Robert Mackay estate.
The child born to Jane and Robert Mackay on 4 February was christened Cairine (Gaelic for Catherine, the name of Robert’s older, unmarried sister and of his beloved cousin, Catherine Gordon) and Reay (after the chief of the Mackay clan) on 23 June 1885 by the Reverend A. B. Mackay at Crescent Street Church. With this ceremonial sprinkling of water, she was formally initiated into the Presbyterian church, one of her great-uncles’ preoccupations and destined to be a major force in her own life.
The details of Cairine Wilson’s childhood are sketchy because she seldom referred to it in conversations with her own children. We do know, though, that her gruff, demanding father exercised a powerful influence and that relations between the parents and their children were punctilious, so formal as to perhaps move the wistful daughter to say in an interview granted in 1930:
I earnestly believe that parents and children both gain more by establishing a close comradeship than by the parents standing aloof and accepting the position of judge, disciplinarian and critic of their children. There is no reason why parents should not be pals of their children and still have respect and reverence and obedience from them. In fact I think they are more likely to possess these from children who feel that their parents are understandingly one with them, than are the parents who insist on implicit obedience and rigid respect without having first won the loving confidence of their children.23
The stiff relations between parents and children could not detract, however, from the basically warm, kind nature of Jane Mackay. To her children in distress, she was the embodiment of sympathy and loving attention, as young Cairine realized all too well when, on a trip to Europe, she was taken ill and longed for her mother.24
Mrs Robert Mackay, mother of Cairine Wilson.
We can assume that as the child of a wealthy family that had just become part of the elite of this young country, Cairine was raised according to the essentially bourgeois standards of her class. These called for ladies to speak softly, to not appear intellectual and to strive at all times to be decorative. Instead of sipping madeira or port at the table after dinner, as did the men, it was their lot to withdraw to spacious drawing rooms to chat about children, servants and fashion and to indulge in the latest society gossip. In 1892, in Montreal, this would probably have been dominated by revelations concerning “the most sensational elopement” the city had ever known, that of Jack, the eldest son of Andrew Allan, one of the millionaire partners in the Allan Royal Mail Steamship Line, and the wife of a bank inspector named Hebden.25
But if the latest doings in society were welcome topics of conversation, some subjects — money and sex — were taboo. Indeed, ladies were not even supposed to think about them. Probably the greatest taboo, however, was feeling. Not only did a member in good standing of the bourgeosie, especially the Scots-Canadian middle class, not express emotion, he or she did not even mention it. People whose work owed its existence to feeling — writers, artists, actors — were as declassè as tradesmen. Equally horrendous was marriage outside this bourgeoisie unless it was to someone from the British gentry or aristocracy. Anna Mackay upset her father merely by marrying an American. Robert Loring might be charming and well educated, but nevertheless he was an American and that alone placed him beyond the pale!
Like most heads of Scottish-Canadian families, Robert Mackay was a strict disciplinarian who actively supported a “spare the rod and spoil the child” regime. Since he was also a devout Presbyterian, he insisted that his children be raised according to the dictates of Scottish Presbyterianism. One of the driving forces of the Scottish character, it emphasized the duty of each Christian to manifest God’s will in everything he did or, as the more lyrical phrase has it, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Not surprisingly, this translated into a divine calling to work (the Protestant work ethic) and a God-given responsibility to demonstrate initiative, risktaking and foresight. Yet, contrary to what many people think, it did not result merely in a desire to accumulate material riches. Along with it went the concept of stewardship, the belief that individuals should use their talents and any wealth that they had to benefit their fellow brothers and sisters.26
These and other Calvinistic positions — for Presbyterianism