as civilized as a white person. In the mornings, when he came downstairs for breakfast, she would be waiting in the kitchen with a cheery smile to serve him bacon and eggs, fried potatoes and tomatoes, toast and Seville marmalade, Port Carling–style oatmeal porridge mixed with salt and pepper and melting butter, and English tea steeped to perfection. Every Monday, she would lay out on his bed for the coming week freshly pressed pants, shirts, socks, and underwear. In the evenings, when everyone gathered around the radio in the living room to listen to Amos and Andy and Jack Benny, she would make popcorn or homemade fudge and pass the tray to him before handing it to Lloyd. She even felt more comfortable discussing questions of religion with him than with her husband.
To tell the truth, it was a relief to have someone other than her husband to talk to. Although Lloyd must have known that he had told the same boring stories dozens of times, he wouldn’t stop talking about his trip back to Canada on the eve of the Great War, when he travelled through the Middle East and the capitals of Europe. Sometimes, especially after he received letters from friends from the old days who had gone on to become diplomats, he gave the impression he was sorry he had become a minister and didn’t believe in what he preached.
From time to time, Mrs. Huxley woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of weeping followed by laughter coming from Oscar’s bedroom. She asked Lloyd what he thought might be happening. He said Oscar was probably just having bad dreams, and that was to be expected, given what he had gone through.
Oscar thus had his life in order and was happy, at least most of the time, for every so often, whatever he was doing — answering a question in class, reading a book, or eating fudge with the Huxleys in the evenings — he would remember that he was living a lie, even if he was just trying to fit in as his grandfather had wanted.
2
In his final summer at Port Carling, after he had finished high school and before he was scheduled to leave to attend Knox College, Oscar became close friends with Claire Fitzgibbon, a tourist girl from Forest Hill, Toronto, and a recent graduate from an exclusive girls’ private school. They had first seen each other when Oscar was a thirteen-year-old working during the summer on the Amick when it called at the Fitzgibbon’s summer home on Millionaires’ Row to deliver groceries and other household supplies. He was on the top deck and she was standing with her brother on the dock. He looked at her and she looked at him, and both then turned to other things. To Oscar, she was just another overweight white kid, with braces on her teeth, light brown hair, pale blue eyes, and freckles, no different than the dozens of others he had seen over the years walking down the path from Port Carling to the Indian Camp shopping for souvenirs. Claire’s eyes remained on Oscar somewhat longer, for it was not often that she saw someone with such black hair and dark brown skin.
When Claire went by motorboat with her mother the following summer to stock up on supplies at the newly rebuilt general store in Port Carling, she saw and remembered Oscar. During the next two summers, whenever she went shopping, she could not keep her eyes off the tall, exotic-looking Indian teenager who was stocking shelves in the store. The following summer, she went up to Oscar, who didn’t recall seeing her before, and said she wanted him, and no one else, to carry her groceries to her motorboat. The other students working at the store for the summer noticed and teased him.
“Looks like you got an admirer, Chief.”
“She’s too rich for your blood.”
“Watch out for her old man. He’ll set the constable on you.”
“You lucky bastard. What have you got that I haven’t?”
By the summer of the fifth year, Claire had lost her baby fat and was a tall, well-proportioned young woman with dreamy eyes and straight white teeth. She now insisted on doing the shopping by herself, and when she saw Oscar at the store at the beginning of July, she didn’t ask him to carry her groceries to the motorboat, although he did so just the same. One day after work, she was waiting for him outside the store and walked with him back to the manse, where they sat on bamboo chairs inside the screened porch until Mrs. Huxley asked Claire to stay for dinner. Afterward, she and Oscar went back outside and sat on the porch swing listening to Chopin piano music on a windup gramophone and talking for hours about things that were important to them.
Oscar told Claire his favourite piece of writing was The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It was the story of someone who wakes up one morning to find he has been turned into a giant beetle, and even though he tries hard, he can’t get out of bed to go to work. In the end, the hero accepts his new condition but has trouble communicating with his family and stops talking to them altogether. Sometimes, Oscar said, he felt like that bug.
Claire told him she was reading everything she could put her hands on by John Steinbeck and listening to the songs of Woody Guthrie to get a better feel for what the people of the Dust Bowl were going through. She hadn’t yet decided exactly how she would do it, but someday, somehow, she would help them and people like them around the world.
Oscar told her he had promised Reverend Huxley and James McCrum to study to become a missionary to the Indians in northern Ontario, even if he wasn’t sure he had a calling. But if that didn’t work out, he would find some other way to repay them and the other people of Port Carling for the help they had given him after the Great Fire of 1930.
In the weeks that followed, Claire often came home with Oscar after work and stayed for dinner. In their discussions outside later on, she told him her parents only seemed to like going to dinners and cocktail parties with their friends in Toronto and spending time with the same people on Millionaires’ Row and at the Muskoka Yacht Club. They wasted their time talking about their holidays in Europe and horse racing in Canada and the United States when people were out of work and going hungry. They wanted her to study art appreciation and home economics at university and then quickly find someone to marry from among their set, but she wanted more out of life.
At first the Huxleys were flattered that the daughter of someone from such a prominent family would spend so much time at their home with Oscar. But Reverend Huxley began to worry.
“Do Claire’s parents know she’s seeing you?” he asked. “Claire comes from a different world.”
Oscar said he didn’t know, but that it didn’t matter. “Claire doesn’t care about things like race and social position.”
“I just don’t want you to be hurt,” Reverend Huxley said.
By the latter part of August, the two friends had become so close that Claire invited Oscar home to meet her parents, Dwight and Hilda.
“Sundays are when we hold open house,” she told him. “Everybody knows they can just drop in; no formal invitation is needed. We eat, joke around, and have a good time. Some of my friends from school come right after their morning tennis games. Daddy and Mommy’s friends are always there. I’d like them all to meet you.”
Oscar was surprised and gratified. His efforts to fit in were being rewarded by an invitation to mix with the cream of Canadian and American society. Assuming Claire had told her parents he was an Indian and that her family and friends had nothing against Indians, he immediately accepted.
On Sunday morning, a member of the household staff held Claire’s motorboat steady as she and Oscar stepped onto the dock.
“I think I’ve been here before,” said Oscar, “but I don’t remember when.”
“I know,” said Claire. “I was going into grade nine and you were working on the Amick when
