pathway past beautifully tended gardens of delphiniums, daisies, daylilies, and hydrangeas to the twelve-foot-wide flagstone front steps that led to an immense wraparound veranda.
“I’d like you to meet Oscar Wolf,” she said to her parents, who were sitting on white cane furniture sipping gin and tonics and chatting with friends from nearby summer homes. “He’s a good friend of mine and I invited him to join us for brunch.”
“Why, it’s that young Indian from the grocery store. Claire is always surprising us,” her mother said, gazing unsmilingly at a place just above Oscar’s eyes and ignoring his outstretched hand.
“How’s business at the store? How’s old McCrum making out?” one of the guests blurted out. But Oscar, taken aback by the frostiness of Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s greeting, ignored the question and the conversation ended.
“Time to eat,” Claire said after an embarrassing pause, and she led Oscar to the living room where brunch was already being served. A massive granite fireplace dominated the room. The floors were polished maple. Hand-painted light fixtures hung down from fourteen-foot ceilings and a wide circular staircase with a landing and built-in window seat led up to the second floor. Prominently displayed on a panelled yellow birch wall was a large black-and-white photograph of Claire’s parents with President Wilson of the United States taken when the American leader spent his holidays at a nearby summer home before the Great War. On another wall hung a photograph of equal size of Claire’s father dressed in the uniform of Commodore of the Muskoka Yacht Club. Silver cups, awarded to Claire and her brother for winning canoe races at the club’s annual regattas, stood in a line on the mantel.
A maid handed Oscar a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a large folded starched linen napkin. Oscar tried to open the napkin with one hand after balancing the glass of orange juice on top of his plate with the other. However, his hands trembled and he spilled some juice on the floor. The older guests exchanged small smiles and chuckles among themselves when they thought Oscar was not looking. Claire’s friends, who had come to the brunch from the Muskoka Yacht Club elegantly dressed in their crisp tennis whites and cotton V-neck sweaters with navy blue trim, stared with barely concealed disdain at Oscar’s clean work pants and plaid shirt and avoided speaking to him. Later that afternoon, when Claire took Oscar back to Port Carling in her motorboat, she seemed upset, but didn’t say why. But the next day, when she went shopping for groceries at the general store, her mother accompanied her, and when Oscar said hello, mother and daughter pretended they didn’t know him.
That evening, Claire telephoned Oscar to say how bad she felt not having answered his greetings at the store. She had no choice, she said, because her family had threatened to disown her if she saw him again. But that didn’t mean they still couldn’t see each other when university started in the fall. Toronto was a big city and they could find out-of-the-way places to meet and no one would ever need to know.
Oscar let Claire speak until she finished and then hung up without replying.
No one from the village, Oscar thought, despite their ingrained suspicion of Indians and occasional racist remarks, would have treated him in such a shabby way. But to be invited and then rejected out of hand by presumably well-educated people, not because of some personal failing but because of his race, upset him. The personal snub from Claire hurt even more because she had been the first friend his own age that he had ever had. She was someone who had shared his love of poetry, novels, and ideas, and someone he had permitted to penetrate the protective reserve he maintained with the people around him. He could not understand how a person so sensitive, idealistic, poised, and self-confident could so readily have obeyed her parents’ wishes. It was always possible, of course, that she had just been pretending to like him and was just having some fun at his expense. He hoped not, because he liked her, and although he had been too upset to speak to her when she called, he fully intended to find some way of getting together with her in Toronto in the fall as she had suggested.
The other employees of the store who had been present when the brush-off took place felt sorry for Oscar, even if they were not surprised at the outcome. After all, it wasn’t the first time that outraged parents from Millionaires’ Row had put a stop to a budding romance between a daughter and a local boy, although to best of anyone’s recollection it was first time that the local boy had been an Indian. The story of the failed romance between the rich girl and the poor Indian was then repeated from employee to employee, becoming more and more distorted with each telling until a breathless sales clerk, anxious to curry favour, went into the office of James McCrum to give him all the salacious details.
“You just gotta hear this, Mr. McCrum,” she said. “Everyone in the village is talking about Oscar and the Fitzgibbon girl. And I have it from a good source that they’ve been having a hot love affair all summer long without anyone knowing about it. They apparently got together out on the porch at the manse every night after the Huxleys went to bed and did things they shouldn’t have. Poor Reverend Huxley and his wife didn’t have a clue what was going on under their noses. Sometimes, they went out in her motorboat and anchored it and continued their carryings on. Finally, her parents caught them in the act in the boathouse at their place down on Millionaires’ Row and told him to leave their daughter alone. And apparently there was a lot of drinking going on and someone said she was pregnant.”
“What a bunch of hogwash,” McCrum told her. “I don’t believe a word of it, and if I were you, I wouldn’t go around spreading rumours about a fine, outstanding boy like Oscar!”
But he immediately called Reverend Huxley to get his version of events.
“It was an innocent relationship between a young man and a young woman, and I’m sure nothing untoward happened,” Reverend Huxley told him. “But Oscar did accept an invitation to brunch at Claire’s place and her parents must have told her she couldn’t see him again.”
“I’m sorry those people on Millionaires’ Row treated you so badly,” Reverend Huxley said to Oscar after inviting him into his study and asking him to sit down beside him on the sofa. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. We all go through these crises in our lives. Sometimes we just need to put them in perspective.”
“I’ll know better the next time, if there is a next time,” Oscar said, glancing at the door and waiting for the interview to end. “But there’s no need to worry. No one got hurt.”
Reverend Huxley rose and took a book from a shelf. “Books and literature can help people overcome bad times in their lives,” he said. “It’s a truism, but I speak from personal experience. This novel, for example, is by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran, and in my opinion the best book written on the Great War. It’s called All Quiet on the Western Front. It allows us to see the war from the other side’s perspective and to understand that we are all people, that we are all human. When you read books like this, you are not an Indian, you are not a white man, and you are not a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or Italian, or rich or poor. You are a human being with the same hopes, the same fears, and the same dreams as everybody else. And when you finish this one, I want you to start on the others I’ve collected over the years. Maybe they’ll change the way you look at things. Maybe they’ll help you put the behaviour of people like the Fitzgibbons in perspective as you go through life. There are lots of people out there just like them.”
Oscar took and read the book, but it didn’t make him feel any better. And his problem wasn’t just with the Fitzgibbons and people from their social set. After five years of living with the Huxleys, doing well in school, playing hard in sports, and doing everything his benefactors expected of him, he still didn’t fit in. He was still the outsider. And now he was expected to leave for Toronto to study to be a missionary
