Early in July 1948, Oscar reported for work with great hopes as a foreign service officer at the Parliamentary East Block headquarters of the Department of External Affairs. In Canada, he was Oscar Wolf, unclean, untouchable, outsider, Indian, forbidden by law by His Majesty’s Government from drinking a beer at the Royal Canadian Legion at Port Carling and at every other legion post across Canada despite having served his country with distinction in the front lines in the army. But Oscar Wolf, member of Canada’s Foreign Service, was someone who had gained entry entirely on his merits and was a respected insider among the architects of Canadian foreign policy when serving in Ottawa. And when posted abroad, he would be a distinguished diplomat representing all Canadians whatever the colour of their skin.
In the beginning, his expectations were fulfilled. He quickly adapted to the Department’s quasi-military, quasi-ecclesiastic culture, especially the way its members behaved as if they had been initiated into holy orders. The recruits who entered with him that summer of 1948 were mainly former servicemen who had fought in the war and they welcomed Oscar, as a fellow veteran, into their ranks. Several of the senior officers treated him with some reserve, but they were graduates of Oxbridge in the 1920s and 1930s and they looked down on anyone who had not studied in the Old Country.
In September 1948, Oscar’s staffing officer posted him to the Canadian mission to the United Nations in New York to assist Canada’s representative on the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Throughout the fall, he carried out research, wrote position papers, sent reports to Ottawa, lobbied other delegations, and to his great satisfaction was present on the historic day of December 10 when the General Assembly unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Spokesmen for the Canadian delegation told the press that acceptance by the international community of the declaration meant that victory over the evils of Nazism and Fascism was now being followed by triumph over injustice toward peoples and individuals. Soon the colonized peoples of the world would form countries of their own, which would take their places in the United Nations as members equal in status to the countries of the old imperial powers. But best of all, they claimed, the signatories to the declaration were bound to accord equal rights and freedoms to all their citizens, whatever their “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Oscar rejoiced. The Native peoples of Canada, he believed, would soon have the same rights as white Canadians. No longer would they be wards of the Crown. No longer would they be under the control of the Indian agent. No longer would they be deprived of the vote. No longer would they be forbidden to hire lawyers to defend their interests in court. No longer would Indian women who married white men be expelled from their homes on reserves and be stripped of their identities as Treaty Indians. No longer would the police come and take away their children to residential schools. And he, Oscar Wolf, had played a part, however small as a foreign service officer, in bringing this new world into being.
But when Oscar returned to Canada in 1952 at the end of his posting, he found that nothing had been done to improve the lot of his people. The Indian agent still reigned supreme on the reserves and Native children were still being separated from their families and dragged off to residential schools. Elsewhere, the other countries that had signed the declaration in December 1948 with such great fanfare were likewise not doing anything to help their impoverished and marginalized peoples. In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan was still lynching blacks. In Latin America, white settlers were still stealing the land of the Indians. In Australia, the police were still tearing babies born to Aborigine mothers and white fathers from their families to be educated in special institutions away from their families. In South Africa, the ruling Afrikaner National Party was implementing its apartheid policy to keep blacks, coloureds, and Asians in a state of perpetual institutionalized servitude.
“Don’t be discouraged,” the undersecretary told Oscar when he went to see him. “Governments around the world, including Canada, are busy fighting the Cold War, and as soon as that’s over, they’ll get around to living up to their international human rights obligations. Just be patient.”
2
In the meantime, Claire, who had played such an important part in Oscar’s life back in the summer of 1935, was facing a crisis in her marital life. She had studied Art Appreciation and Home Economics at the University of Toronto and married Harold Winston White, a stockbroker from an old Toronto family, long-time friends of her parents. After the wedding, her husband’s opinions became her opinions, his friends became her friends, and his passions for golf, tennis, and bridge became her passions. They had two children, a boy and a girl who were boarders at the same schools their parents had attended. In addition to doing volunteer work with wounded veterans at Sunnybrook Hospital, Claire was active in the University of Toronto Alumni Association and contributed used clothing, worn-out suitcases, chipped cups and saucers, discarded electrical appliances, and second-hand romance novels to the annual spring charity bazaar sale in her church’s basement.
Claire and Harold had a home in Forest Hill close to the houses of their parents and a summer home on Millionaires’ Row where they held their own Sunday brunches with family and friends and spent endless hours playing bridge and tennis at the nearby Muskoka Yacht Club. Every spring, they attended the races at Woodbine and Churchill Downs with friends who were horse breeders. Every winter, they spent six weeks at their home in a gated community in Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean where they hosted dinner parties under the stars with many of the same people who had estates on Millionaires’ Row. They went marlin fishing from their yacht and were regular guests at Government House, where the British governor held parties for the British, American, and Canadian seasonal residents, as well for the members of the white expatriate community running the sugar plantations and nutmeg and mace farms. Occasionally, Claire and Harold passed people in the streets brandishing placards calling for freedom from British colonialism, but the governor assured them that independence would not happen in his lifetime.
Then, one day, Claire’s husband of fifteen years noticed the beginning of wrinkles around his wife’s eyes and upper lip and began to worry about his own mortality. Already forty-five, and wanting to be young again, he began having affairs with women twenty or twenty-five years younger than he was. Claire knew what he was doing but said nothing, not wishing to cause a scene, until one afternoon she returned home to find his clothes gone from his closet and a note on the dresser.
Dear Claire,
I have met someone else and I want you to give me a divorce. My lawyer will be in touch with yours.
Harold
Hoping Harold was just going through a temporary mid-life crisis and would soon be back, Claire did not give her consent. But Harold didn’t come back, and she reluctantly settled for a divorce in exchange for custody of the children, the boy now aged ten and the girl twelve, ownership of the house in Forest Hill, possession of the Mercedes sedan, shared occupancy of the houses on Millionaires’ Row and in Grenada, and fifty percent of his gross income.
It was then her turn to confront a mid-life crisis. The years had passed and she had little to show for them apart from a generous divorce settlement. Although she had custody of the children, they had their own circles of friends at their schools, rarely came home on the weekends, and when they did, always gave the impression they could hardly wait to leave. With the benefit of hindsight, it had probably not been a good idea to make them boarders when the school was only five hundred yards away. Certainly, when they were little, they hadn’t wanted to live apart from their parents and there had been tears. But she had been a boarder and the experience had been good for her, or so she had once thought. Now she wasn’t so certain.
Alone in a big house with no one to care for and nothing to do, she often thought of the idealism of her teenage years when she seemed to have more compassion in her soul. In those days, she had felt sorry for the thousands, maybe even tens of
