Blue Moon (30 page)

Small, wiry, her dark hair clipped severely short, she bore a distinct resemblance to my idea of a cockney. In another life, she
might have been born within the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow; in that bestowed upon her, she was born within the shadow of the Don Jail, where her father worked as a custodian and, later, a guard. He also travelled to Kingston from time to time, where he served as the public hangman.

Lydia's first recollections were of her father, Edward Jones, and their small, drafty, smelly one-bedroom flat. Tainted as those memories were by poverty, she recalled Edward as a kindly man who always made sure his little girl—whose mother had died giving birth to her—was looked after by kindly neighbours while he was at work. Often of an age to be Lydia's grandmother, those women adored her.

A week or so after she turned 6, her father married Wanda, a strange, brooding, sometimes violent woman. Edward was always kindly disposed towards his daughter, but Wanda's conduct went from one extreme to another. One day, she would assure the child that she was the perfect stepchild; on another, she would find fault with the little girl on a constant basis: Lydia did not help her clean the tenement, Lydia's (exceedingly neat) room was a pigsty, Lydia was not of a pleasant and easy disposition. These complaints were issued to Edward, who would then tactfully list his wife's complaints to his erring daughter. One day, he informed her: “Wanda has had a difficult life. She had expectations and they were dashed. That's why she flies off the handle. We must be tolerant.” Wishing to please her father, Lydia nodded her head in sage agreement well beyond her years.

In rapid succession, Wanda gave birth to two sons, Edward and Evan. After each birth, Lydia noticed, Wanda would become listless, completely withdrawn, often talking utter nonsense. Lydia looked after the two youngsters, almost as if she were their foster mother rather than their half-sister. Then, when Evan was six months old, Wanda's “darknesses” (as she called them) completely took her over; in part, these were really severe migraines which sometimes lasted two or three days at a time; in part, the poor woman was hopelessly depressed, enclosed in a void of self-loathing. When she was not enduring the headaches, Wanda would be subject to violent mood swings. She began to drink heavily.

At school, Lydia was a brilliant student. Wanda took some pleasure in Lydia's remarkable abilities but she began to become even more harsh in her criticisms of her. Paradoxically, Wanda was thrilled
by what the young girl could accomplish at the very same time that very success enraged her.

Seven long years of praise and criticism went by. When Lydia reached the end of Grade 8, Wanda, in consultation with Edward, informed her that she had to take a job to support the family. “My burdens are very heavy,” Wanda told the teenager. “The doctor says I cannot work. Your father does not earn enough to keep us in this flat.”

Lydia quit school, took a job at a mill, and became the family's principal breadwinner. She was allowed very little free time when she returned home of an evening—she was expected to cook the evening meal and to keep the tenement sparkling clean. On Sunday—her one day off—she was expected to wash and mend clothes. Wanda interfered with the attempts of would-be boyfriends to court Lydia. “They are not good enough for you, dear. You don't want to step out with the kind of young man who works in a factory.” When Lydia pointed out that she was a young woman who worked in a factory, Wanda simply informed her that she was not really of such a place.

Wanda was far from being the traditional evil stepmother. Throughout Lydia's school years, she had praised her results highly, seeming to take pleasure in the girl's accomplishments. In fact, she had far higher expectations of her than she did of her two sons, who, when they went to school, were ordinary students. In her reading of fairy tales, Lydia was quite aware of how foster mothers often bedeviled the lives of their adopted children, usually advancing the causes of their own offspring over those of stepchildren. That's what
Cinderella
was all about, Lydia recalled. Yet, Wanda never acted in that way. She always expected the best of her adopted daughter. And unlike the evil woman who married the father of Hansel and Gretel, she did not try to abandon Lydia. Wanda certainly wanted—and needed—the money Lydia earned. But Wanda's motives seemed more complicated than simple greed.

The fettered life of the Jones family continued on a seesawing course for two more years until the day Lydia overheard a strange conversation at the mill between two workers—both elderly women—with whom she usually had little contact. She learned that Wanda was her real mother, Edward was not her real father. Edward had been infatuated with Wanda, who preferred another man—the son of the owner of the mill. During a brief affair; Eliot Drake had impregnated
her. When Wanda gave birth to Lydia, Eliot, who had been whisked out of harm's way by his family, was living in Montreal. Wanda pleaded with Edward to look after Lydia so that she could follow her lover to Montreal. Six years later—all her efforts to resume her relationship with her lover having failed—she returned to Toronto.

Wanda did not feel it “fair” that a six-year-old be burdened with the arrival of her real mother. It would be better if Lydia thought she and Wanda did not share the same blood. She offered to do her best for her abandoned child and, as was his wont, Edward went along with her proposal. Wanda's feelings about Lydia were determined by her great love and her great hatred of Eliot. Like her father, Lydia was bright and intuitive—she even looked like him. Wanda hated Eliot for the way he had abandoned her, yet in Lydia she could see reflected all those qualities that had attracted her to her lost lover in the first place.

In a flash, Lydia understood her mother's motivations. She knew she could never live up to Wanda's high expectations; she knew that her mother's angry resentment stemmed from unresolved feelings about her real father; she was aware that she had been the victim of forces that had torn her mother apart. Yet something snapped in Lydia that day. When she begged off work and returned home early that afternoon, Wanda, alarmed that her wages would be lost, began to berate her. Lydia walked calmly over to the kitchen drawer, took out the large carving knife, walked over to the woman screaming abuse, and plunged the knife into her. Wanda died almost instantly.

When the police and, later, her lawyer asked why she had committed the crime, a startled and confused Lydia could not adequately respond. First of all, she blurted out something about never being able to meet high expectations. Then, turning her face towards her interrogators, she tried to help them to understand. “I didn't have a mother. I didn't have a stepmother. I had no one. I was nobody.” She paused: “It was nobody who killed Wanda Jones.”

Officialdom was not much interested in Lydia's strange reason for killing a defenceless woman. The psychiatrists who examined her asserted nothing was wrong with her mental health. She was certainly not legally insane, although these consultants spoke of something missing in her character. Since she was adjudged responsible for her actions, she was found guilty of first-degree murder at her trial and committed to life imprisonment. When I first encountered her in
1947, she was a woman of 51, who had been at Kingston since she was seventeen years old. Thirty-four years. An inconceivable amount of time for me to imagine. What a horrible life she has endured, I thought. Those were first impressions. And yet the more I knew her, the more I realized she was very contented. I might go as far as to claim that she was one of the few genuinely happy people I have ever met in my life.

“Mum”: this was the nickname assigned by all the inmates to Lydia. If you had a problem, you asked her for help. Without my realizing it at the time (I was such an infernal blunderbuss), she had been secretly working with Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. White to overthrow the Empress and her Shadow. Although my interference produced the right result, Lydia would have succeeded eventually in ridding us of those two wretches. I later learned that my speculations about Mrs. Nelson using money from the sewing room for personal gain were completely unjustified. She and Lydia had devised the extra work in order to fund improvements at P4W.

Strange as it may seem, Lydia had the strange ability to accept people for exactly who they were. Since she was unfailingly friendly and never tried to refashion anyone, she was much beloved. Lydia was certainly not the kind of person to inform you that you had overthrown her apple cart. A year or so after the removal of the two women, she simply said: “You weren't to know other plans were afoot. Your heart was in the right place.”

Lydia and I became good friends at about the time I became librarian. She told me about the desperately sordid conditions at the women's prison at Kingston where she had been lodged until 1934, the year P4W opened. According to her, Nelson had to be seen in context: she might seem an unduly forbidding person, but she had taken over from a head matron who had locked the women up, allowed them to exercise outside for ten minutes a day, fed them spoiled food, did not allow them to work, and, basically, treated the inmates are if they were large bulky parcels languishing in a warehouse.

At first, Lydia would visit me in my room once a week after dinner. This was the only completely free time in our busy days. In the beginning our conversations centred on Nelson and White, on how, as
I sarcastically put it, they made a perfect pair—White the flunky of the authoritarian Nelson, who kept her subordinate in check.

“I think you're right—up to a point.”

“What point?”

“They work together well, they suit each other.”

“Yes, but that's because White doesn't stand up to Nelson.”

“You're still missing the point. When she was married, White obviously deferred to her husband—to his research. By temperament, she looks up to others. That is her nature. Nelson is a born dictator. She is determined to rule. When she was battling the Empress, she was dealing with a like-minded person. I became useful to her at that time—helping one tyrant overthrow another. She was furious with you because you were high-handed, acting as she might have done in a like situation. High-handed people don't like other high-handed people.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“Sorry, Evelyn. I didn't mean it quite like it sounded. Nelson is all about control, White is all about reflected glory. If you discover what really makes a person tick, you know everything about them. You know all about power because you had to adjust to it from the time of childhood. Your mother made sure of that.”

I nodded in agreement. “So I know about power but am not powerful myself?”

“I didn't say that. You made adjustments. Simple as that.”

“I'm sure you're right. I must have taken on both the Empress and Nelson because they reminded me of Mother. Maybe I was getting back at her by challenging those two.”

“I'm sure you're right. At least you had something to react against.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“As a child, I had a father. Later, I learned he was not my father. I didn't have a mother but was provided with an evil step-mother. Then, she turned out to be my real mother. I didn't really know who those people were. They said one thing, did another.

“During all my years here, I've relived my killing of Wanda over and over again. I can't bear to call her my mother. I must have been trying to be the good step-child but then that role was taken away from me. I was the child whose mother had disowned her.”

“Maybe she wasn't capable of anything else?”

“Nonsense. She was a strong enough person to have taken charge of the situation. No, she didn't want to. Her hatred of my real father so overwhelmed her that she took revenge on me, his daughter. I can never forgive her, although I obviously should not have killed her.” She stopped, looked around the room as if searching for some truth written on the blank walls, and then began again, finding it difficult to find the words she wanted. “She took revenge on me. I revenged myself. An eye for an eye.” At that point, the tears began. “A person has to know where she stands. Otherwise, what's the point? You Ye either somebody or you're nobody. There is no other choice.”

I got up, fetched a Kleenex and hugged Lydia as I dabbed her eyes. She nodded her thanks. That evening was a breakthrough in our friendship. After that, I felt free to tell her about Mother, especially my subservience to her. Whenever I raised that issue, Lydia would say one of two things. “Evelyn dear, you had no choice. Alexandra was a very controlling person, you were a young child, your father a molester.” At other times, she saw beyond the excuses. “You were raised to be passive. You suffered from that upbringing. Now, you are a totally different person. Maybe you're ready to seize the day?” At first, I didn't know what she meant. How was I to change my life, make something different of it?

Prison walls are a most effective barrier. They keep the criminal out of general circulation. They can also rob the inmate of the capacity to change. Of course, the penal system is based on the general principle that leopards never get rid of their spots, tigers their stripes. Prison did not make Lydia a better person. She had always been more than decent. It gave her an anonymity that suited the circumstances of her early life. In one completely destructive moment, she had obliterated her past. In the present, she could afford to make peace with herself. That luxury evaded me. Eventually, my mortgage to the authorities would be discharged. I would be freed. Or, if I wanted to think of it in a different way, I would be free.

Strange to think of prison as a school for writing, but that's what it eventually became for me. And in this regard, Lydia was my muse because it was she who made me aware that the lives of society's female outcasts—like myself—could be a subject for fiction that I
myself could write. Of course there was the more-than-honourable precedent of Daniel Defoe.