Remembering the Bones (10 page)

I
wouldn’t be lying here if I’d moved to Boca Raton. Ever since Harry died, Ally and Trick have been trying to persuade me to join them in Florida. But how can I leave Phil? She needs a daughter close by. Even one with broken bones.

If Harry were alive, he would reach out his hand and pull me up.

I could count on Harry. Who wouldn’t count on—indeed, who wouldn’t want to marry—a man who’d been carried around on an English pillow as a child? Our entire courtship was a celebration, and I could use a few celebrations to think about, right now.

I wore a pale blue suit at my wedding, with a matching porkpie hat made of felt. How could I have worn a hat shaped like a pork pie? I must have liked it at the time, although I questioned my taste when I saw the wedding photograph, later. I looked foolish; I couldn’t think what had come over me when I chose such a thing. Why didn’t Ally step in? Or Phil, or Grand Dan? Why didn’t Aunt Fred speak her mind?

I’d known Harry a few weeks when he jokingly mentioned the pillow, and my lips shaped the words
satin, tassels, prince.
My head whirled with images of pages in training, curly-haired youths dressed in cream-coloured livery and lined up for the privilege of transporting the young Harry. In my mind’s eye, I saw a cherubic boy wearing an oversize turban on his British baby head, a green jewel in the centre of his forehead. He could have walked out of a story in
The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book.

When Case was in grade one, she asked about our courtship.

“How did you and Daddy meet? How did you know you loved him? How could you tell?”

I wanted to say, “Because of his strength. It filled every room he entered.” I wanted to say, “Because of his voice. Such a voice, a voice without shouts. His gentleness. And his shoulder. If you could have seen his sloping, wounded shoulder when he came back from the war.” I wanted to say, “Because of the flame that jumped between us.”

Instead, I said, “I married him because of the pillow.”

“Tell me the pillow story,” she said.

Each time I told the story, the details were different. She didn’t seem to mind what was fact and what was not. The truth is, I made up almost everything because it was story itself that interested her until, finally, she’d heard every variation I was capable of inventing.

The real story is this. Harry said little about his history until just before we married. He was not a person who talked a great deal, and I believe he was terrified to unearth his own life. But once started, one memory yanked on another until his past spilled out like sheets tied together in an attic and tossed out a window for rescue.

Orphaned in England at the age of three, Harry spent his next four years in an institution on the outskirts of London. At first, his body was weak and undernourished, and he grew slowly. Because he was often sick, the thin, brittle bones in his legs refused to hold his weight—“They were like sticks,” he said—and the larger, stronger orphans had to tote him around on a lumpy pillow that had been recruited from a weatherbeaten chair in the garden. Harry was a diversion, and the others didn’t mind carrying him around.

He settled in as one of the Home Children and was soon able to walk by himself. Four years later, when he was seven, he was sent out to Canada by ship. This was the twenties, not so long after the end of the Great War. In cramped quarters he crossed the Atlantic, travelling with fifty-nine other boys and girls between the ages of three and fifteen. Five adults, their escorts—two women and three men—crossed with them. Each child was given a small trunk and a Bible. When the group disembarked, the children wore name-signs hung around their necks. Some of the children were so young they peed their pants when they were excited. A sailor on the ship showed Harry an open sore on his penis and said it was from “doing it.” Harry did not know what “doing it” meant.

The ship docked in Halifax, and from there the children travelled for days by train until they arrived in Toronto. They were met at the station by two women in long skirts, and were led to a house for temporary holding. There was a sign beside the door, but Harry could not read it.

“I never forgot the first meal I had in that house,” he told me. “Chicken and potatoes, carrots, thick slabs of bread with lots of butter—I was allowed two helpings—and for dessert, raisin pie.” He grinned as if this had been the one truly happy
memory of his childhood. He leaned back into the sofa and took a deep breath. “I was safe and my belly was full. But I left three days later and never returned. I wouldn’t have known how to find the house or what it was called, even if I had been able to make my way back to Toronto.”

Before sailing home to England, one of the men who had accompanied the children on the ship asked Harry if he remembered that he had an older brother and sister. Both children had crossed the ocean several years earlier, preceding Harry to Canada. They’d been sent to the west, and lived on separate farms. For Harry, the story was a fairy tale. He had not seen a brother and sister since he was three and did not believe in their existence.

A farmer had put in a request for a young boy, so Harry was sent on a second train, by himself, to a small station in rural Ontario. He did not know where he was going but when the train made one of its stops, the conductor indicated that he was to get off. Once again, Harry wore his name on a sign around his neck. No one was beside the tracks to greet him when he climbed down. He wanted to get back on the train, but it chugged off, leaving him behind. Eventually, the station master noticed him standing there and gave him a chair to sit on, outside.

“That’s when I understood how alone I was,” Harry said, his voice becoming softer. “That’s when I first thought of myself as an individual. I was seven years old.”

I held my body still while he talked, and tried to see the small boy who had never known a time when he had not been surrounded by lineups of other children. He had never been alone, and now he found himself sitting beside a set of iron tracks, with dense and frightening Canadian forest on either side.

“It was the first time I truly thought of myself as
I
,” he said. “I looked around and stared into the bush and, so help me, I could not understand why I had no mother. I sat on that chair and cried and cried. I thought my lungs would turn inside out.”

The rest was more difficult to hear, but Harry was determined to tell the whole story. Away from Home officials, he was not given a room in the farmhouse, but was made to sleep on a bed of hay in a loft inside a shed. In winter he suffered frostbite, and when he grew out of his shoes, he was not allowed to have another pair. He tied rags around his feet and was given old rubber boots several sizes too large, so that he could work in the barn. He received no pay. He was not permitted to eat at the family table, and was given leftovers after the host family had finished their meal. To make matters worse, the farmer and his wife had a son the same age, and this boy wore proper clothing and was permitted to go to school. Harry was not. He ran away when he was eleven, made his way to the nearest village and was sent back, only to be beaten. He ran away again at twelve and thirteen and fourteen. Finally, no one pursued him and he got away for good. The farmer had had his slave labour for seven years. Harry did not receive a penny for his work.

He followed the railway tracks and walked south for three days, resting and sleeping in fields and barns, drinking out of streams, arriving at a sizable town, which happened to be Wilna Creek, a town he’d never heard of during his seven years of isolation. It had a long main street, a train station and bus depot, a hospital and a number of small businesses. Outside the town were a quarry, several gravel pits and a canning factory. He inquired at the general store and was told that a local farmer named Dixon was looking for help. Harry walked another three miles, this time to the east, and when he turned up at the
Dixon farm he was hired on the spot. He was given room and board and two dollars a week. He was provided with his own room, up over the summer kitchen. He had never lived in such luxury. Not only that, but Mrs. Dixon was a former teacher and after a few weeks she began to teach Harry to read and write. He fell in love with this second foster family and stayed with them for several years, until Mr. Dixon could no longer afford to keep him. Those were Depression years, and there was barely enough to go around. Harry remained in touch with the family, but moved to a room in town and took odd jobs. By 1939, he had earned enough money to buy his first suit. It fitted his lean, muscular body and had a herringbone pattern and cost him twenty-two dollars. Two weeks after the purchase, he joined up. He left the suit with the Dixons when he went to say goodbye, and told them he’d be back. He asked them to look after the suit, because he planned to find a woman to marry when the war was over. That would be me. Neither of us knew the specifics of this; we had not yet met.

When I first laid eyes on Harry Witley, it was 1946. The war was over and he had recently returned from overseas. His ship had been torpedoed off the coast of England and had gone down. He was rescued from the water and picked up by another ship, and the second ship was torpedoed, too. Who, you’d wonder, could have that kind of bad luck? As if that were not enough, a piece of jagged metal had been blasted into his shoulder moments before he found himself in the Atlantic a second time, swallowing salt, shouting for rescue. As proof of the blast, he had an inward-twisting scar, larger than his fist.

He had been treated in hospital in southern England and had recovered enough to work. He answered an ad in the
Wilna Creek Times
for “Young man of character, no experience
needed,” and was given a job as an apprentice to a Dutch jeweller who had recently moved to Canada and set up shop on Main Street, three doors from the dry goods store my late father had owned. The Dutch jeweller’s name was Mr. Ring, which amused people of the town, considering his occupation. He called his shop the Double Ring, after himself and his wife. Mrs. Ring looked after the accounts in a black ledger. She was a plainly dressed woman, but wore earrings that dangled and shone in the light. It was said that all of her jewellery had been designed by her husband.

Mr. Ring’s first name was Cornelius. He was a stooped man in his sixties, and highly skilled. He had come to Wilna Creek because a cousin who’d lived in the town since the 1930s had sent a letter to Holland after the war, telling him that the town had a railway, that businesses were opening up, that the place was growing faster than spokes could turn in a wheel.

During the last two years of the war, Mr. Ring had experienced hardship in his country; Harry told me he rarely spoke about this. I found it difficult to imagine the two men, both given to silences, sitting in the shop and having occasional abrupt conversations about the buried past. Mr. Ring was pleased that Harry had been in Canadian uniform, and sometimes told him a little about the Dutch town he had lived in before it had been occupied. He had hidden away a number of diamonds during the war, and it was the sale of these that enabled him to start over. For him, Wilna Creek represented the new world. He and his wife were cautiously hopeful, despite having sorrow in their background. It was rumoured that they had lost someone during the
Hongerwinter
, or maybe to the Resistance. It might have been a daughter or a son; no one knew for sure.

Harry and I met soon after he began to ‘work for Mr. Ring, at a dance in the hall of the same Anglican church I had attended since I was six years old. He and a friend from his boarding house had heard about the Friday night dances and got a lift out from town. He stood before me and asked me to dance. He was slightly taller than I, had a sloping shoulder, and hands with slender fingers. He had a low, husky voice that carried a trace of old England. I took his arm and allowed him to lead me to the dance floor.

Eight days after the dance, on a Saturday evening, Harry walked the two miles from town, knocked on the door, spoke quietly to Grand Dan and Phil, and our courtship began. Months later, after he’d been coming to the house regularly, he showed his scar to Grand Dan and me in the kitchen when Grand Dan asked to see his wound. She was, no doubt, thinking of the blast that had killed her own husband thirty years earlier, and she told Harry about my grandfather’s last words and how she had received them. Harry opened his shirt and allowed her to inspect the scar. She looked it over from front and back, and nodded to let him know that he was to rebutton his shirt. She always had a fondness for Harry.

I
must not dwell on Harry’s orphan childhood. I felt badly enough when he told me his story, which I thought about for weeks. I mourned the small child who sat on the wooden chair beside the tracks, the abused boy who slept in a shed and suffered frostbite and was not permitted to go to school. I was outraged on his behalf, and despised the adults who had abused him. But those events had happened long before and I had not been a part of them.

Ally was twenty-one at the time of her wedding, and I was the same age when I married Harry. It was 1947, the year after I met him. Lilibet, too, was twenty-one—she and I were married the same year. My wedding was in August, hers in November. We were child brides, all of us. What did we know? What did Phil and Mr. Holmes ever tell Ally and me? What did the Queen Mum and the King impart? I know that on our side of the ocean, we felt a distinct lack of information in the air.

After I married, I thought about this one day when Phil told me a story about one of Grand Dan’s deliveries during her time
as a midwife. Called to a farmhouse because a baby was on its ‘way, she arrived to find the young woman in the last stage of labour, sitting on the edge of her bed. Convinced that the baby was about to come out of her mouth, she was holding an enamel dishpan under her chin.

Grand Dan removed the dishpan and told the girl to lie down. After the birth, when the cord was cut and the baby cleaned up and rubbed with oil, and after Grand Dan had given the mother a brand new cake of Baby’s Own soap, and after she’d burned strips of cloth on top of the wood stove to get rid of the birth odour, she sat on a chair beside the bed and told the young mother what she needed to know.

“She was no more than seventeen,” said Phil. “What worried Grand Dan was the girl’s confusion about how the baby had been put into her in the first place.”

That was the end of the conversation.

The story interested me for a different reason, especially as it had come from Phil. At no time in our lives had anyone thought of imparting what Ally and I needed to know. But there was no point in saying that, not after we were both married. In any case, hadn’t Grand Dan discussed with me, once, if vaguely, the matter of complementary parts when I was a child?

When I finished telling Case about Harry and the pillow and our courtship, she looked up and said, “Is that the end of the story, Momma?”

Well, no. I married Harry, after all. In my pale blue suit and my porkpie hat.

Our father was dead; Ally and Trick were married; I was still living at home with Grand Dan and Phil. A man named Ira had purchased the dry goods store shortly after Mr. Holmes’s funeral, and asked me to stay on to do the work Phil had once
done—serving customers, ordering fabrics and ribbons, buttons and needles and thread. Every morning, I walked as far as the mailbox, where Mott’s son, Junior, who worked at the hardware store, picked me up and drove me to town. I was glad to have a ride in cold weather, and I chipped in fifty cents a week to help with gas. Trick had taken over our father’s car, and he drove out to the country on weekends to take Grand Dan and Phil wherever they needed to go.

My employer, Ira, was tall and concave and had a receding mandible. When I first met him, I thought of
Gray’s
and Miss Grinfeld, simultaneously. He shaved, but his cheeks were shadowed with bristles. He made me think of consumption, excessive thinness, the crooked letter
C.
When he faced people, he approached and pulled away at the same time. He began his takeover of my father’s store by having a huge one-day sale of old stock, and I stood on the sidewalk with Ally and Grand Dan and Phil as we watched bolts of familiar plaids and wools and voile tucked under arms and carted out the door. The former enterprise of Mr. Holmes was, in a single day, transformed.

Before we married, Harry and I had saved enough money to begin paying rent on a small, three-bedroom bungalow in town. We planned to move in when we returned from our honeymoon, and hoped to stay there until we could buy our own house. As it turned out, affording own house took longer than expected; we didn’t move up the hill overlooking the ravine until Case had finished high school.

Our wedding took place August 2, 1947, a quiet celebration witnessed by nine people, including the Dixons, the family who’d been keepers of Harry’s suit while he’d been in the navy. Harry’s legs were wobbly and he complained of being hot in his suit, but we managed to get through the ceremony.
Among other gifts, Phil gave me an electric sewing machine. Ally painted a dazzling picture of the Danforth country house, white surrounded by light. Grand Dan gave us the glass-leafed tree, the “tree of life” that had belonged to my late grandfather. Harry and I had a modest plan to spend a three-day honeymoon in Syracuse, New York, a four-hour bus trip that included the border crossing. Neither of us had been to the United States. I had never stayed overnight in a hotel.

We had hoped to attend the annual New York State Fair, but it had been suspended after the attack on Pearl Harbor and hadn’t started up again after the end of the war. Our hotel was close to South Salina and Jefferson, in the theatre and shopping district. I wanted to go to Loew’s State Theater, having heard about its elegance, its grand staircase and Tiffany chandelier. We were headed for a big city—over two hundred thousand people—and our funds were limited, but we didn’t care if we did nothing more than stroll through Fayette Park and along the old filled-in Erie Canal. Harry’s employer, Mr. Ring, had been there with his cousin’s family, and he had described all the main sites to see.

It was necessary to take a bus from Wilna Creek, change to a Greyhound bus in Kingston, and cross the St. Lawrence over the recently built Thousand Islands Bridge, which we had only read about. The Dixons drove us to the bus terminal, and we were on our way. We held hands on the bus and by the time we crossed the long span of steel that joined the two countries, it was late afternoon. I stared down at shadows on the surface of the great river and silently repeated my new name,
Georgina Danforth Witley.
I saw not another person on that crowded bus, nor would I ever recall a face from that journey. I was suspended
over dark waters that flowed to the sea. I dared to think,
We love each other. We are safe from waves that will batter and strike, but will never break through.
I rested my head on Harry’s shoulder.
This is what Grand Dan felt for my grandfather; this is what Phil must have felt for Mr. Holmes—before he began to shout. This is what I see on Ally’s face when she exchanges a fast smile with Trick, or when a hand touches his arm as he passes.
I felt heat from Harry’s shoulder; I was aware of his thigh pressed against mine. And there was the matter of Grand Dan’s long-ago explanation of complementary body parts.

Harry slept the entire way. His hand was warm in mine and I did not try to wake him. I was sorry he’d missed the bridge, but I knew he would see it on the way home. We were wearing matching gold bands, which Harry had purchased by making deposits to Cornelius Ring for the better part of a year.

As the bus approached the terminal in Syracuse, I spotted our hotel from a side street before the driver pulled in to discharge the passengers. The hotel was a walk up the side street and then one long city block and part of another. I shook Harry and he woke, reluctantly. We got off, collected our suitcases and made our way to a busy, divided street with heavy traffic. I had never seen so many cars, and most of them were new. As soon as we checked in and took the elevator upstairs, Harry stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.

Was this supposed to happen? We were alone in a bedroom for the first time; we were married. I sat beside him on the edge of the bed while lights came on in the street below. I tried to wake him, but he shook me off. His voice was harsh. “Let me rest, Georgie,” he said. “Leave me alone. I’ll get up in a minute.”

But he did not.

Two hours later, I was hungry and angry. I had changed my clothes and brushed my hair and moved over to the armchair by the window. I looked out at the lights of the city and stared down at a group of black Americans who were walking by on the street below. I could hear them talking and laughing softly to one another. I woke Harry again and told him the hotel dining room would soon close and I had to eat. He was still wearing his herringbone suit, rumpled from being slept in, and he stared at me as if he couldn’t see my face. Was this the loving man I had chosen to marry? The man who had chosen me? He dragged himself up off the bed.

The waiter, a man in his fifties, wore a white shirt with a black vest and bow tie, no jacket. He was cleaning up for the night and was not happy about us coming late to the empty dining room. I must have looked anxious, because he suddenly capitulated and I could tell that he felt sorry for me. “All right,” he said. “You can order steak and potatoes. That’s about all the cook has left in the kitchen. There might be a few mushrooms, too.”

Grateful for any kindness, I promised that we wouldn’t linger over the meal. We had set aside enough money for dinners for three days and I was in charge of the funds, which were in a change purse inside my handbag. Breakfasts were included with the room charge, so I didn’t have to worry about those. For lunch, we planned to snack on fruit and sandwiches while we were out sightseeing.

Stained glass in the upper windows of the dining room gave a greenish glow to the room, and I suddenly had the feeling that we had swum to the table and were drifting underwater. The waiter’s nose looked as if it had taken a blow straight on and as I watched him I thought
septum, buckled septum.
He glanced over at us several times from the doorway to the kitchen, and
rubbed at his cheek. He must have wondered at our youth, our silence. We had not spoken a word to each other since we’d sat down. A low lamp hung over our table and, when the steaks were served, Harry raised his elbow as if to block the waiter’s approach. As he did, he struck the lamp, which swung crazily over our heads.

“Hey, take it easy,” the waiter shouted, and I saw his body tense for a fight.

I let out my breath and came up for air. “Are you sick, Harry? Is something wrong?”

He looked past me, ignored the waiter, stood up and said to neither of us, “I’m going upstairs to my room.” The lamp was still swinging. The voice I loved was gone. I cut a large chunk out of my steak and put it in my mouth and tried to chew quickly, but abandoned the rest of the food. I was afraid to ask if I could bring it with me; I did not want pity from the waiter. He picked up a plate in each hand and shrugged. “Have it your way,” he said. “But you could have saved the cook the trouble.” I paid for the food and, still chewing, followed Harry to the elevator. Upstairs, he collapsed on top of the bed, leaving no room for me. I slept in my clothes in the armchair, and cried half the night. Harry did not move.

In the morning, he was still sprawled on the bedspread, the front of his shirt blotched with perspiration. I wondered if he had become criminally insane. I tried to imagine what my family would say, what they would do in my place. I needed the women around me, Ally and Phil and Grand Dan and Aunt Fred, and I conjured their outrage on my behalf. Oh yes, this was love. This was what they knew. I went into the tiled bathroom and threw up. I had a shower, put on a fresh skirt and blouse and went down to the main floor for breakfast. I ate
alone and went back upstairs, fortified. Harry was still asleep. I stood by the bed and forced him to wake. He glared up at me and said, “Who are you?”

Nothing had prepared me for marriage.

I looked at him again and saw that I was staring into darkness. I was so frightened by this, I fought back rage and tears and told myself I’d been denying reality. My husband loved me. He must be sick, out of his mind. I touched his forehead and felt his burning skin.

My first thought was that he would die outside our own country. My second thought was that there was no money in my purse for doctors. Hadn’t we been warned that health care was expensive south of the border?

I had to get him home.

I was trembling, and thought my leg bones would not hold me up. I asked Harry if he wanted water, got him to take a few sips, and he lay back down. His eyes stared through me. I went downstairs, paid the bill and told the desk clerk we’d had a change of plans. My body was shaking so much, I had difficulty pressing the elevator buttons. I went back up and found Harry asleep again. I closed my suitcase and lifted his, still locked. I stood at the window, stared down at the median in the busy road below, and calculated the shortest way back to the bus terminal. If I could get Harry across the road directly in front of the hotel, the distance would be shorter than walking all the way to the traffic light and then across. After that, we would have to make our way down the side street.

I had no idea how often buses left for Kingston. I told myself,
You are a big girl, Georgie. You can do this by yourself. You have to get him home.
I threw the strap of my handbag over my shoulder,
hauled Harry up and off the bed and made him lean against me. He was still wearing his herringbone suit. I told him to move his feet, to shuffle, to keep himself upright. I picked up my suitcase ‘with my left hand, linked my right arm through his and supported his weight against my side. I took charge. My right hand carried his bumping suitcase between us.

When we reached the elevator, I straightened my spine and thought,
Vertebrae, vertebrae, hold me up.
I had a quick vision of Hubley the headless skeleton being dragged across the page. A man and woman in the elevator stared at us and looked down at the two suitcases. The man eyed Harry suspiciously and then looked away and turned to his wife. “You know that statue of Columbus in the circle?” he said. “They say Mussolini paid the shipping charges to get it here.” He shrugged. “That’s what I heard. I’m not saying it’s true.” At the mention of Mussolini, Harry lifted his head but didn’t try to speak. He slumped against me again.

In the lobby, I pushed and shoved him past reception, looked straight ahead and reached the outside door. A thin-faced woman followed us out to the sidewalk. It was obvious that she’d been talking to the desk clerk. “Mrs. Witley,” she said, “would you like a doctor to see your husband?”