only a Junior Senator. Plenty of water under plenty of bridges since.
‘See here,’ he said when he returned. ‘My father taught me to be forthright and I’m proud to be so. The wind out there is beyond any storm I’ve ever seen, and in the South Pacific I saw a few. So I’ve taken the liberty of securing a room for the night.’ The look on my face as I rose to leave must have said it all. ‘No, no, my dear young lady, your own room. On a different floor than mine, in fact. Please forgive me.’ So I sat back down. He smiled, and when he handed me a key I took it. And my darling daughter, I’ll tell you why.
One: I was soaking wet and frozen stiff. Two: I was dreading the prospect of going back out there at all, let alone forcing myself downhill to the lake from the Long Branch loop to the trailer. Three: I’d just been offered a room in the Royal York, the hotel I’d fantasized about my whole life but had never, ever expected to stay in. Four: I’ll admit it, he was a most handsome man. I know what you’re thinking, dear. I knew it then too.
He suggested that we take an hour to freshen up in our separate rooms, emphasis on ‘separate’ with a grin, and then he’d meet me in the dining room. I’d had my bath and was in a panic trying simultaneously to do something with my hair while ironing the sodden brown lump that had been my tweed skirt. I was thinking, ‘Bank clothes! You’re going to dine at the Royal York in bank clothes? You’ll be a laughingstock. Better make a run for it!’ when there was a knock on the door. It was a bellhop, complete with that funny little chinstrap – a bellhop with a dress box! A dinner dress, black velvet, sleeveless: ‘For the Apple Lady.’ Where he got it, I’ll never know. It fit perfectly. I’ll admit it, this Cinderella was glowing.
The rest of the evening? I can share some of it, dear. We had dinner. We talked. You would probably want to know that he never actually lied. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, he told the truth, but he told it slant. Said he came from a large New England family and shared some funny stories about his brothers. He didn’t want to talk about the war; I didn’t want to see his wedding ring. After a few glasses of wine, he asked me to come up with some good ideas about things a man could do in bed and winked! Explained he was facing a back operation next week for an old injury and would be bedridden for months. What could he do with himself during his convalescence? Any suggestions?
When he summoned the waiter and asked for the special, the chef wheeled in a dessert cart and lifted the lid off a still-steaming apple pie. How we laughed! We toasted the Scout and agreed that everyone should have his sense of honour and courage. He said courage was something that interested him a great deal, having seen men with so much of it and also, sadly, with so little. I thought he meant the war. I said it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, so maybe he should use his recovery to write a book about courage? He called it a capital idea and ordered champagne. It got late. I’d never had champagne.
And the rest of that long-ago night is nobody’s business, my dear one, not even yours. But today of all days, how I wish I could tell you! Do you see it? Your father’s charm saved my life. If I’d returned to the trailer I’d have been killed with Gladys and Angus. I long to tell you that no, your father was not a brick-laying bumpkin with a Grade 6 education. People just assumed it was Angus, once he was dead. If only I could hold you and tell you the truth! Today when I saw your sister bury her face in her mother’s skirt and your brave little brother salute your daddy’s coffin, I longed to find a way to tell them too. But of course it’s not possible. They can never know they have a big sister. And you, you’ll never know any of us.
Why did I never come forward? Shame. Pure and simple. No good country girl can be proud of a fling with a married man, even a now famous one. I could never hold my head up in town again. Mommy and Janie were barely speaking to me as it was. It was so much easier to let my boss play Sir Galahad, to burst into tears and confess that I’d been very, very foolish with Angus when I thought I was going to die in that nasty hurricane. I assured Walter you were a dead man’s baby. He agreed to marry me on the condition that he wouldn’t have to raise another man’s child, so I had no choice. What good would it have done either you or your father to know the truth? It wouldn’t give you a family. It would have ruined his career, not to mention his marriage. And it would have robbed the world.
Because, of course, he became who he was. For years it’s been impossible to pass a newsstand and not see your father’s face, or hers. Don’t misunderstand – I didn’t, and still don’t, resent her. As impossible as it sounds, I don’t bear her any ill will at all, his pretty wife. Do you know that she and I are exactly the same age? She doesn’t look a thing like me though, so dark and fragile. Over the years, if I felt anything, it’s been pity. The year I had you, she had a miscarriage. I had such guilt, fearing she’d miscarried because he’d told her about me. A year later, she had a stillborn baby and then, after your brother and sister, little Patrick, who lived only two days. I long to tell the world, to set the record straight: your father had six children, two alive, three lost to death and one lost to life. How could I hate her? We are so much alike, loving the same man’s missing children, loving him despite his other women.
If I could tell you anything, my darling lost daughter, here’s what I’d say. I’d tell you that I loved you when we made you and every day I carried you. I’d tell you he remembered. A year to the day, a Birks box arrived. How he got my address, I’ll never know. It held a locket, pure silver, and a note with three little words: ‘Remembering our hurricane.’
When Walter finally made me give you up, the last time I saw you, I put that locket around your neck. I hope they let you keep it. I keep his book – I like to think of it as our book – under my pillow, with his note tucked safely inside. He’d see my sacrifice as a true profile in courage: ‘Ask not what your child can do for you. Ask what you can do for your child.’
My answer was to give you to the world. So today, when the known world mourns, I have in all my sorrow a place of secret joy. Imagine it! I alone, in all the world, know you are alive. My secret song. Who will you be, child of mine, child of ours, somewhere out in the world? Who will you be without us? Yourself, I hope, your one true self. That’s everything your father and I could have wanted.
So, my darling, be brave. Be kind. Be nice to Boy Scouts. Because, sweetheart, you just never know who may be standing right behind you, longing to know your name. In my heart, that stranger will always be me. Know that I love you forever, wherever and whoever you may be. For every second of yesterday, tomorrow and especially today, Friday, November 22, 1963. Say goodbye, my darling. Wherever you are, put your arms around the television set and kiss your daddy goodbye.
COLOR HIM FATHER
I know it’s merely Scottish superstition that a bad beginning seldom makes a good ending, but I often wonder if all the late and unappreciated arrivals in the early days of that summer added up to something so heavy that they pushed time out of joint, if we somehow jinxed the whole damn thing. Better late then never? Now there’s a proverb never uttered by a March.
As we came over the Rosedale Bridge and pulled off the highway on to March Road, the crunch of new gravel under Tessie’s tires announced the first thing we’d missed: the Rock Concert. That’s what the uncles had taken to calling the laying of fresh gravel on our winding road from the highway into March. By dictum of the Arrival Protocol, it got refreshed each summer at the crack of dawn on the first Saturday. We look like this: Hezzy – you’ll meet him in a minute – shows up with a load of gravel from Fenelon rock-’n’-rolling around in the flatbed of his ancient truck Bessie B. The uncles debate the division of the bill and pay him for it. Hezzy drives slowly with Bessie’s crib open. All male Marches bigger than a shovel display their shirtless manhood, flinging gravel as if the swamp were gaining on them. The scrunch of stone, the scrape of metal shovels on metal bed, the bellowing of Bessie B, all makes for some decidedly discordant music. Dad played backup shovel and he’d left his band shorthanded.
So
