Phil said the Desilets moved to Superior, Wisconsin then. When he arrived there he had only a shoe in one pocket and a statue of St. Anne with the Virgin Mary in another.
In my grandmother’s house, there was an old photo of two women holding babies in arms while wading in the river and watching the flames. I heard that that was my grandmother holding my dad and his sister. The picture is long gone and we’ll never know all the truth now. Certainly fire was burned into the family memory, and I couldn’t look at the picture without imagining my mother and my friends’ mothers standing in McVicar Creek while the fire I set consumed the neighbourhood.
Later that summer we again heard the scream of an emergency vehicle on an urgent mission. This time it was an ambulance and it came directly to 402 Dawson Street. Inside, Isidore LaFrance felt ill after dinner and began pacing between the living room and dining room, rubbing his left arm and left chest with his right hand. I paced behind him, thinking it was a new game. Down to the walnut cabinet that contained the radio receiver around which we gathered at night, then back past the dining room table and down to the Queen Anne chair from which I had taken my first steps. He was grey in the face. The pain took his breath away and suddenly he collapsed from what we later learned was a stroke.
He had retired less than a year earlier, walking away from the big black locomotives that he had tended or drove for just weeks short of fifty years. His railroading days were replaced by sitting and talking at Louise’s bedside and taking us kids out for car rides to Boulevard Lake. The grey-striped engineer’s cap and overalls were set aside for suits and shirts and a fedora. No matter what he wore, he always looked massive, a neatly-dressed Paul Bunyan. And, whatever the clothes, one pocket always carried treats: hard candy for the grandchildren, Sen-Sen liquorice mints for himself.
Now he was on the floor, a huge immovable bulk. The big man who had lifted me so effortlessly into the cab of the hissing locomotive only months previous for his retirement run from Fort William to Port Arthur refused to respond to my little hands shaking his shoulders or my pleas for him to wake up. The ambulance took him away, and I never saw him again. Within a day, Isidore LaFrance was dead in a hospital at sixty-six.
For Veronica, it was more than the death of a father. It was the end of a fairytale existence in which a once childless couple devoted their lives to shielding their unexpected treasure from life’s cruelties.
5 — CURRENT RIVER
Isidore’s death opened a stress fracture in our lives at 402 Dawson Street. It widened as the reality of his death took hold over the following months, then became an abyss that we struggled to cross every day. He had been our bridge to a better life.
Louise’s condition worsened, partly because Isidore’s support was gone. She was no longer able to come downstairs to join us for meals on holiday occasions or to listen to a special radio broadcast. Her trips down the hall on crutches to the bathroom became more painful and use of a bedpan more frequent. At night, she cried out from her bedroom next to mine. I could smell wafting down the hallway the sweetness of wintergreen mixed with the sharpness of rubbing alcohol and other potions used to alleviate her pain.
The car with the Bourkes Drug Store logo came to the house more often. So did the doctor, hustling urgently into the wide front bedroom where Isidore often had stood at the windows staring into the street when Louise slept. Veronica became a full-time nurse, receiving some help from the Victorian Order of Nurses, saints who came a couple times a week and made life easier for us all. She had a second child now, Barbara, who was three when Isidore died. The heavier workload strained the household and created tension that pushed aside the easy living atmosphere our family had enjoyed.
With Isidore’s full pension gone, Ray became the only breadwinner for the household. He worked as a grease monkey on the streetcars and new electric buses at the municipal transit barns on Cumberland Street near the lake. He was not certified as a mechanic and the work was not permanent or well-paying enough to support an extended family.
The pleasantness of family life dissipated. We missed my grandfather for the Sunday afternoon car rides, the nostalgic trips to the CNR roundhouse, the candies that appeared magically from his pocket and the humorous strength that pulled us together as a family. He had helped care for my grandmother and when he wasn’t actually physically helping, just his presence helped to ease her pain. He was an anchor that held us in a calm, safe, and comfortable harbour well shielded from the misfortunes that touched other people. That’s what he had always been for Veronica, and that’s what he was for her family.
The strain of his absence showed on my father. He became irritable and did not eat well. He was impatient and one Christmas week when we were decorating a magnificent floor-to-ceiling balsam, he blew up and began throwing things. Not long after the doctor told him he had ulcers. The halcyon days at 402 Dawson Street, which included sitting around the radio at night listening to Lux Theatre, turned into times of worried looks and thin tempers.
More bad luck arrived not long after Isidore’s death. Veronica became pregnant and miscarried. A doctor injected her with penicillin and she reacted violently. Her throat swelled shut, and she nearly choked to death in bed. I watched as a doctor slammed his car door shut on College Street and raced into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. I followed and peeked through the doorway as he worked on my mother and talked to my father. Doctors did house calls then, and this one was a regular visitor to our place because he looked after Louise. He had come once for me in the middle of the night, thrusting fingers down my throat and pulling loose a suffocating blood clot that formed after a tooth extraction.
My father, looking relieved, escorted the doctor from my mother’s room and down the stairs. I crept in to look at her and ran from her room, terrified by what I saw. She lay on her back atop the bed sheets, a huge walrus-like figure with her eyes swollen shut. She had become slightly plump over the years but now appeared to be two to three times her usual size. I ran down the hall to my grandmother’s room where she sat on the edge of her bed, saddened by the agony of not being able to help her only child.
A year or so later, there was another pregnancy. This one was successful and brought Mary Jane into our lives. I was ten and a half and didn’t know what to make of it all, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because another shock followed close behind. My father arrived home from work one day and announced we were moving. It seemed inconceivable. Dawson Street was the centre of our lives. We knew every person in every house up and down the Dawson and College Street blocks. The children played together and the adults watched out for all the children. People walking the streets stopped and talked and patted us kids on the head. I walked every day to St. Andrew’s School where my mother had gone. Coming and going, I stopped at 331 Van Norman Street where Grandma Poling took something fresh from the oven and gave me pop bottles to trade for candy at Archie’s corner store and soda fountain at the bottom of the hill.
We were not going far. The new place was up over Prospect Hill, not much more than a kilometre west of 402 Dawson Street, but out of the immediate neighbourhood. I would still go to St. Andrew’s, although it would be a longer walk and not through the old neighbourhood.
The new neighbourhood was a miserable place. The house was a squat, square bungalow on Pine Street, on the edge of the northwest residential areas. It was dark, damp, and cramped. My parents and the two girls and my grandmother squeezed into three tiny bedrooms on the main floor while I descended to a homemade room in a corner of the musty basement where natural light never reached. Living there after 402 Dawson Street was a shock.
Why we left the elegant comfort of 402 Dawson Street for that backwater shack was a mystery. Perhaps it was a matter of money. Isidore’s pension left with his death. My grandmother required more and stronger drugs. There were no drug plans, and my father’s income was less regular
