Blue Moon (7 page)

My mother and father did not argue about sex. They had many other causes for complaint. Both of them had left Scotland—where they met and married—with the intention of “making a go of it” (one of my mother's favourite expressions) in the New World. In a good mood, she would become philosophical. She and Donald did not believe the streets in Canada would be paved with gold, but they had expected that Canada, in the wake of the promise of renewal engendered by the end of the Great War, would allow them to become prosperous, moderately well-off. Then the mood swing
would come full circle, her face turning bright red: they had been mightily disappointed. Thus, the ensuing bickering about money. My mother would complain about my father's excessive drinking and my father would lament my mother's pretensions. He especially did not like her invention of the mysterious Lady MacLean, his aunt, who had married a peer of the realm. Since my mother did not have a fantasy world into which she could tap when inebriated, she imagined herself as having married into a family that had risen in the world. Many were the stories I was told as a child about my great aunt. At various times, her long dead husband was an inventor, a physician rewarded with a baronetage because of his exemplary service to the Royals when they were in residence at Balmoral.

Our neighbours in Hamilton—working-class Poles, Italians, and Irish—understood instinctively that my mother was mendacious, knowing full well that her anecdotes were a way of establishing some sort of dominion over them. As a result, my mother became an object of curiosity and of loathing. In effect, she segregated herself from everyone around her. In the process, she made me an outsider as well.

In my mother's view of the world, those born in any part of the United Kingdom and into any station of life there were inherently superior to those born in Canada. Soon after moving to Hamilton, she found her world-view in open conflict with the “natives.” She joined a circle of women who purchased Limoges blanks from France and then decorated and fired the various vases and plates in their own kilns. Those women, she soon discovered, were uppity. She dropped out of the group. Then Mother attempted to infiltrate The Wynn Rutty Radio Writers who wrote and performed plays on CHML. Quite soon—when her ideas about scripts were not readily received—she denounced Mrs. Rutty, Mrs. Pettit and Mrs. Fuller as prissy village tyrants, colonials unappreciative of the finer points of theatricals.

Later, my mother would maintain I was queer, shunned by other children. But she was the cranky person who made me such. In fact, my mother had her own special way of reserving me exclusively for herself. If I became friendly, as I did, with Anita, three doors down, who was of German ancestry, my mother immediately became fixated on her racial origins. Like all Krauts and Huns, my friend was overly aggressive and
warlike. Helen, a year younger than I, was a Kike, who came from a race famous for money-lending and various kinds of opportunistic cheating. Little, adorable, red-haired Bernadette, whose family had emigrated from the Emerald Isle, came from a group of rabid opportunists who had invaded England and Scotland, bred like rabbits, believed in witchcraft and made the United Kingdom uninhabitable for respectable Scots. The worse offenders—probably because they were more numerous—were the “EYE-tal-ians,” slummy dark-featured people whose men were only interested in sex, whose women—after marriage—dressed in black for the simple purpose of annoying her.

Together, my mother and father—themselves usually clad in blacks and greys—resembled those tiresome comedians, Laurel and Hardy. Like Oliver Hardy, my mother looked overstuffed, her natural expression was a smirk, and her good-humour could quickly convert itself into what it did a bad job concealing: the rage that consumed every fibre of her being. My short, delicate-looking father was the perfect foil to her, a full partner in the
folie à deux
that was their marriage. In a manner similar to Stan Laurel when he provoked his partner, my father was an expert in passive-aggressive behaviour: he would play dumb at the very moment he said or did something he knew would incite my mother's anger. This would cause her to strike him, making her the perpetrator of spousal abuse.

So imbued was my mother with the silver screen that she even once (my father had corrected her pronunciation of an obscure word) re-enacted the celebrated breakfast table sequence wherein James Cagney pressed a grapefruit into the face of his moll. In his turn, my father seemed to receive a strange pleasure from inciting my mother to violence. As if he were proving something about her to himself. His face would become suffused by a sickly sweet smirk. My mother suffered no fool gladly, and she was especially prone to being goaded by my father playing that role. In essence, that was their relationship: she was testy, and he took a malicious pleasure in making her more so.

My parents were extremely indirect with each other. Mother knew full well that my father's pay from the bus company was far more than it should have been—she both ordered and controlled the activity. He knew—in his capacity as janitor and security guard—
the combination to the safe, and would, from time to time, remove huge amounts of tickets, and then sell them on his own improvised black market. The proceeds from these sales would then be deposited—usually in small change—at his two banks—a branch of the Bank of Toronto, the other a branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce—which flanked the HSR offices at the corner of Wentworth and King Streets. Yet, this activity was merely hinted at in exchanges between my parents in front of me.

“Donald, we are very short this week.”

“Yes, my love. I shall work on it.”

“Don't work on it—do it!”

“Let me think about it.”

“I've told you a hundred times not to think. Just do what you are told.”

If my father kept quiet at this point, the matter would die a natural death. But sometimes he needled my mother.

“How do you propose I solve the problem, dearest? Our savings are very limited. I can only make so many withdrawals and our piggy bank will be empty.” This would be said in a loud swaggering voice, a glint of mischief entering his eye. He would wink at me, making me a co-conspirator.

More and more, my mother's anger was vented on my father. In the process, I became an uneasy bystander, a pawn in their bitter war. To be fair, Mother hardly had an easy time of it. Her domestic chores were vast and complicated. She hand-washed all the laundry before laboriously placing it on the clothesline to dry. She also maintained a vegetable garden, chicken coops and rabbit hutches in the back yard. When the laundry was thoroughly dry, she ironed it all—even the sheets.

Briefly, she took a job at the Membery Mattress Company but quit when her legs could no longer bear the constant pumping on the foot pedal that powered her sewing machine (electrical power would have made the expenses of the company too heavy and thus uncompetitive). Before that, the sweat that poured down her face made it impossible for her to see, so blinded was she by the salt water that invaded her eyes. So, she had a towel draped over her shoulder, which she made constant use of.

At the time she came across my father and myself
in flagrante,
Mother worked as a “tinflipper” at the Stelco steel works, one of the few well-paid jobs for females in the steel industry because women, unlike men, did not become bored inspecting both sides of a tin plate. The supposition of the captains of industry was that women, after centuries devoted to knitting and sewing, had quick eyes and patient hands. This stereotyping obviously did not lead to any other kind of preferment in the factory.

My father had refused to walk through what he called the “gates of hell” at Dofasco and Stelco, the two big steel works, each giant accounting for thousands of immigrant jobs. These places—in his words—were “bloody, dangerous infernos.” He was especially frightened by what he had heard of what could happen during a “bottom pour,” when overhead cranes delivered the enormous ladles of burning, bubbling steel from the furnaces to the men who waited to guide the pour into huge moulds. The twenty dollars a week the men were paid for such work hardly kept them and their families above the poverty line, but my father settled for the lowly job at the street railway company which supposedly gave him only seven dollars a week (the steel companies paid twenty-five cents an hour: ten dollars for a forty-hour week). Before that, father had worked for a month or so at the huge Tuckett Tobacco factory on Queen Street, but he quit when he could no longer remove the accumulation of the thick juice of the demon weed from his hands.

According to my mother, father was a coward, who refused to do a real man's work. He forced his wife to work in factories because he was not man enough to do so himself. What kind of a husband did this to his wife? She, therefore, felt completely justified in demanding he earn “extra wages” (another euphemism devised for my benefit) by volunteering for overtime. So, both the battleground and the battle lines were firmly established. The fighting was constant, my mother taking on the role of the aggressor. My father obviously felt his manhood had been ripped from him, and my mother was certain, as she told me, that she did not have a proper husband even though her spouse had an “instrument of unnatural size not intended for normal sexual activity.” She also reminded me frequently that I was not really a natural daughter. In more ways than one I was an orphan from an early age.

What was it like to live in that small house? The wallpaper had begun to disintegrate, falling in little strips to the floor; the glossy paint on the doors had chipped badly. I can still smell the cooking odours, the gas leaking from the oven. I do not remember much daylight ever penetrating those rooms. In my mind's eye, I am a large Alice—no magic potion at hand—trapped in a small, narrow room in which she cannot move.

My mother's domain was the bedroom; my father's, the makeshift space he cobbled together in the basement. Rightly suspicious of my father's easily assembled charm, I avoided him. I had only my sour mother for any kind of solace.

Roswitha (Rosie), the girl of my own age who lived across the street, escaped my mother's scorn because her parents were even more preoccupied with status than was she. Mr. and Mrs. Bauer were also fierce anti-Semites. So, Rosie's German ancestry was both tolerated and forgiven. Although she would not have wanted to admit it, my mother was entranced with the little bairn's snow-white hair and refined features. One day, in a moment of tenderness not usual to the way she normally conducted herself, my mother informed me that she liked seeing Rosie and myself playing together. “Like having two wee Scotch terriers, one white, one black.” Such were the compliments that came my way.

Since Rosie was the only one of my acquaintances who was welcome in our home, she, not surprisingly, became my best friend. We played with dolls, but we were encouraged by Rosie's father to devote ourselves to more academic pursuits, such as stamp collecting. At school, we were diligent, willing pupils, although neither of us did particularly well. Discouraged by his daughter's poor results, Mr. Bauer decided to enroll her at Loretto Academy. Upset at the prospect of losing Rosie, I confided in my mother my distress. To my great surprise, she told me she was perfectly well aware of this turn of events. The Bauer s had informed her of their decision.

“Evelyn, sit down, dear.” I was surprised by the gushy, confidential, almost affectionate tone in her voice. “I have given the matter some thought, and I have decided that you shall accompany Rosie to her new school.” I must have looked very startled because my mother stopped speaking and looked carefully into my face, as if trying to discover the full state of my feelings. “In fact, I visited two of the dear nuns at Loretto Academy yesterday afternoon. The Mother Superior and the principal. As you know, they do not like to take non-Catholics into their midst. The Bauer s were born Catholic, although they do not practice that creed, as they have become Lutherans. Any kind of Catholic is acceptable to the nuns. No self-respecting Scotswoman is a Catholic, and I could not pretend your father or I were born into that faith. No, I had to take quite a different approach. When I mentioned that your aunt, dear Lady MacLean, would, if they accepted you, be paying your fees, their interest quickened. Seldom do they have the opportunity to be associated with members of the English peerage. I'd notice in the paper how that posh finishing school—Strathallan—has Lady Bessborough as its Patron. I offered the nuns their own Lady! That did the trick. You have been given a place for this fall.”

I was vaguely aware that Loretto Academy was a society school. There were several other perfectly good private schools for girls in Hamilton. I also had some knowledge even at the age of 11 that the fees at my new school were outrageously high. I felt a bit guilty, as if I were putting my parents to an unnecessary expense. Not sure of what to say, I hesitated and then simply observed that Loretto was costly.

“Of course, it is my dear. Lady MacLean will help us out.” I was already perfectly aware that there was no such person. In fact, I knew it was a code word between my parents, referring to the money my father
routinely pilfered at my mother's instigation—from the Hamilton Street Railway Company. Any reference to financial assistance by dear, sweet Lady MacLean was a reference to the resulting cache of money hidden away in my mother's bedroom closet.

So, with the assistance of my Scots relative, about whom I was questioned incessantly by the nuns, I attended Loretto Academy, the educational benefits of which were in my mother's eyes secondary to the useful contacts I might make there. I would meet girls from the right families, one of whose sons might eventually make a suitable match for me. Despite my mother's hatred of Popish ways, she had an even greater contempt for the solid core of wealthy, stodgy Presbyterians—the Hendrys, the Faircloughs, the Buchanans, the Burkholders—who controlled Hamilton, then a city of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Catholics were very much a minority and, in such circumstances, she hoped, a certain fluidity in outlook might prevail. A penniless young Protestant girl with good connections back in the old country might stand a chance of marrying a good Catholic boy.