Sisters in the Wilderness (46 page)

Robert Moodie was more sympathetic to his mother than his elder brothers and sisters. But he was struggling with health and financial problems of his own, which worried Susanna. “The dear kind fellow has a shocking cough,” Susanna wrote to Catharine, “and is very thin and delicate.” As though he did not have tribulations enough, an additional blow struck in 1871. His wife Nellie was overcome with what Susanna described as “
raving madness.
” Today, Nellie would be diagnosed as suffering from postnatal depression: she had just given birth to her fourth child, and was subject to alternating fits of weeping and rage. But there was no clear diagnosis one hundred years ago. Instead, she was committed to the grim wards of Toronto's Lunatic Asylum, whose “raving maniacs” (including the murderess Grace Marks) Susanna had visited twenty years earlier. Robert was left with four young children, an unpleasant mother-in-law and bills for both Nellie's treatment and his baby's wet-nurse.

Susanna was stuck. She didn't like her Belleville lodgings, but she could not return to Robert's cramped household. Sensing her sister's unhappiness, Catharine continued to press her to come and live in Lakefield. Susanna did not really want to be her sister's guest—she valued her independence, and she knew that Westove had become a refuge for lame ducks. Every fatherless child, ailing friend and grumpy adolescent within the extended Strickland network knew that Aunt Traill's door was always open to them. But there were few alternatives for Aunt Moodie. So in the spring of 1872, Susanna accepted her sister's invitation and boarded the train to Peterborough.

Catharine always loved family reunions. She and her daughter Kate put a stove, a carpet and a cherrywood dresser in the unused bedroom on the second floor for Susanna, and Catharine wrote in delight that “my dear sister Moodie” was going to be “an inmate with us.” At first, Susanna was profoundly relieved to have found such a pleasant home. “Nothing could exceed the kindness of my dear sister and her good daughter,” she told her daughter Katie Vickers. “We live twice as well as I did at Mrs. D.'s, without the miserable and begrudged scarcity and eternal liver and fish dinners. If I feel hungry I can get a bit of bread and butter without having to keep a store of food in private.” As summer approached, she sat in Catharine's garden, “in a dreamy sort of rapture communing with nature and my own soul,” smelling the lilac and honeysuckle that her sister had planted and watching “the bright winged birds and butterflies disport themselves.” Catharine's carefully nurtured collection bed of twenty-five different kinds of fern did not interest Susanna, but the summer riot of roses and delphiniums brought back pleasant memories of Suffolk. Often, she would take Catharine's four-year-old granddaughter Katie Traill down to the water's edge to watch the perch and sunfish darting through the shadows just below the surface.

The arrangement appeared to suit everybody. From England, Sarah Strickland Gwillym wrote to Susanna to express the satisfaction felt by all four English sisters, now well into their seventies and in varying degrees of health: “I cannot say how glad I am that you have arranged to live with dear Kate. I think it will be a mutual comfort to you both.” Agnes and Sarah probably hoped that if their Canadian sisters shared living expenses, they would need fewer handouts from home.

However, the English sisters might have guessed that Susanna and Catharine would not be happy under one roof for long. They themselves had refused to contemplate living with each other. To Agnes's chagrin, she had been unable to bully Sarah into allowing her to move into Sarah's comfortable home in the Lake District. Agnes, in turn, had refused to allow Jane to share her elegant Georgian house in Southwold, purchased after their mother's death and the sale of Reydon Hall. Jane
had had to content herself with buying a humble cottage next door to Agnes. Elizabeth wouldn't live with anybody: she preferred a reclusive life in her own house, Abbott's Lodge, in Tilford, Surrey. The only relative she visited was her brother Tom, now retired from the merchant navy. Given this pattern of scratchy relationships, it is no surprise to discover that harmony did not prevail for long at Westove, either.

Susanna and Catharine were too different, and by now too set in their ways, to live together. If anyone was sick, Catharine would start boiling roots and herbs, according to old Indian recipes. Some of her remedies sound terrifying: the limewater gargle that she recommended for a sore throat consisted of diluted quicklime. Susanna, on the other hand, would insist on producing Brown's Bronchial Troches or Ayre's Liver Pills—nostrums that were all the rage in the late nineteenth century but were rarely effective. When Catharine's daughter Annie Atwood arrived with an unruly swarm of children, Susanna would get snappy. (“You must just turn a deaf ear to criticisms on the little ones as though you heard it not,” Catharine told Annie. “It is just her way you know.”) Susanna objected to the number of people continually trooping through the house, and the consequent expense. (“Aunt has only a few dollars in the Bank,” she wrote to her daughter Katie Vickers. “But she will
entertain …
”) Sarah Gwillym, on the other side of the Atlantic, got the impression that the household was messy and disorganized. When an envelope arrived in England with unfinished scraps of two letters from Catharine, Sarah wrote back: “Tell her with my love that her last letters were rather disappointing….I suppose that as she seemed to have more than a houseful of people with her that she had more on her hands than she could well get through, poor dear, though I suppose that in Canada all visitors help till all the duties are done.”

Susanna spent more and more of her time in her bedroom, reading and going through old papers rather than joining the endless family gatherings in the drawing room downstairs. She refused to join Catharine for overnight visits to relatives' houses. She had been asked by a collector for a copy of her famous sister Agnes Strickland's autograph, and as she
searched through a pile of old letters, she was often moved to tears. “I had no idea that I had so many, and such long letters from Agnes, and until my unlucky book was published, so full of affection,” she told Katie Vickers, adding triumphantly, “Mrs. Traill seemed quite
astonished
that Agnes had written
such letters to me
!” As the months went by, Susanna's thoughts of Agnes became increasingly fond and she barely remembered how Agnes's reaction to
Roughing It in the Bush
had stung her.

In 1872, Susanna and Catharine were disturbed to hear that Agnes, now seventy-six, had suffered a serious fall on the stairs of a friend's house and broken her leg. Jane Strickland wrote from Southwold that the accident had been a prelude to serious bronchial problems for Agnes: “the attack was both paralytic and apoplectic, but you must not name it to her or let any of her relatives in Canada mention it as that would make her unhappy.” Agnes's health slowly collapsed, and she died in July 1874. A few weeks later, her brother Thomas Strickland passed away.

Susanna expressed quite as much grief as Catharine at Agnes's death. She was quick to correct various errors made in an obituary that appeared in the Toronto
Globe
, and to add a eulogy of her own: “An affectionate, loving daughter, a faithful sister and friend, kind and benevolent to the poor, and possessing warm sympathies for the sick and suffering; she never let the adulation of the world interfere with the blessed domestic charities.”

But indomitable Agnes had never forgiven her youngest sister for that “unlucky book.” At her death, she was not going to give Susanna the pleasure of believing that she could rival Catharine as the family favourite. Susanna must have been stunned when, a few weeks later, she heard the contents of Agnes's will. Agnes left the copyright to her
Lives of the Queens of England,
still a bestseller in Victorian England, jointly to Catharine Parr Traill and Percy Strickland. (Her sister Elizabeth was furious, since by rights half belonged to her; however, Elizabeth died the following year). There was no specific bequest for Susanna. Agnes did not leave her sister even a single keepsake from Reydon, “which was rather mean I must say,” Catharine acknowledged.

In the fall of 1874, a large box arrived in Lakefield from Sarah Gwillym. It contained a treasure-trove: the splendid wardrobe in which Agnes had made her entrances at various royal, noble and civic occasions. Catharine pulled out black silk and brocade gowns, jet and gold jewellery, pearl-encrusted collars and intricate lace flounces, whalebone corsets and horsehair petticoats, muslin underskirts and voluminous velvet cloaks, elaborately decorated bonnets, shawls and gloves. “It is so many years ago since I looked upon articles so rich and costly,” she marvelled. Most articles were distributed amongst various granddaughters and great-nieces. The only items Susanna received were a bracelet and a jasper brooch.

Soon after the parcel arrived, Susanna decided to leave Lakefield. Perhaps she had simply had enough of Westove's endless stream of relatives with their crying babies. It must have been hard for her to stomach the contrast between Catharine's children, who showered their mother with affection and worried about her health, and her own offspring, whose attention to her was fitful at best. Or maybe she left because Agnes's will, with its ostentatious concern for Catharine and disregard for Susanna, pushed her youngest sister's nose painfully out of joint. For whatever reason, Susanna packed her bags and took the train back to Toronto.

From now on, Susanna stayed only a few weeks at Lakefield each summer, and spent the rest of the time in Toronto, where Robert now lived, and where she could be close to her Moodie and Vickers grandchildren. There was a more varied stream of visitors in Toronto than in Lakefield to amuse Susanna with talk of exotic new fashions, such as spotted veils and women's rights. It was still not very comfortable living with Robert (he moved house seven times in less than three years), but Nellie Moodie had returned home after three years in the asylum and was willing to cherish her cantankerous mother-in-law.

Susanna was a petulant old woman, but she always kept her sense of humour. Her own children found her moods hard to bear, but her grandchildren appreciated her mischievous stories about their relatives. Who
wouldn't be amused by a grandmother who wrote funny verse, as Susanna did to fourteen-year-old William Vickers, the fourth of Katie Vickers's ten children? William, a student at Upper Canada College in Toronto, had lost the March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready another pair. Susanna replied:

You careless fellow!—What, lost your mitts?

Aren't you afraid I'll give you fits?

Punch your head, or slap your face,

Or send to a corner in dire disgrace?

Were I a lady young and fair,

You would certainly take the greatest care,

Of the smallest thing her love could proffer,

So what excuse my lad can you offer?

By 1876, Susanna's eyesight was no longer sharp enough to knit, but her wit was quite sharp enough for verse.

When I take up the pins in your behalf

I give you leave my boy to laugh—

At old Knitty Knotty, who loves you well,

And hopes to see you a learned swell.

When Catharine and Susanna were apart, they thought fondly of each other—even though they knew that, together, they got on each other's nerves. They exchanged frequent letters, never forgetting to mark each other's birthdays. Susanna wrote to “my beloved sister of old” whose face “seems looking at me through the dim mist of years in its youthful bloom.” She assured friends that “My dear sister Catharine is as amiable and loveable as ever….We still love with the old love through weal or woe.” The sisters were now in their seventies, and with each passing year, more ailments filled their letters. Catharine's lumbago made writing uncomfortable; Susanna had an “odious hernia” which prevented her
from walking very far. Both women complained of failing memories (although each could reel off the name of every single family member on each side of the Atlantic). More poignantly, Susanna began to suffer spells of dementia. “I had no idea,” she wrote sadly in 1882, “that age was such a ruthless destroyer of the senses and so perfectly obliterates the past, by mingling it up with the present.”

In 1883, Catharine received a summons from Robert Moodie: Susanna was sick. As Catharine boarded the 2:30 pm train to Toronto at Lakefield Station on a gloomy November afternoon, she wondered whether she would ever see any of her sisters again in this world. “There are only four of all the old Stricklands left,” Catharine had written sadly to Ellen Dunlop that morning. “Two in England—Mrs. Gwillym 85—Jane Margaret 83—myself 81—and dear Mrs. Moodie in her eightieth year—an aged sisterhood.” After a seven-hour journey, she stepped onto the platform at the yet-unfinished Union Station and was immediately bewildered by the throng of people, the whistles and clangs of huge locomotives, the white brightness of the huge station's new electric lights. But Robert Moodie, reliable as always, was there to greet her, carry her shabby cloth bag and find a cab to take them to his house on Wilton Crescent, between Jarvis and Sherbourne streets.

Catharine slowly clambered up the narrow staircase of the brick duplex to the bedroom overlooking the back garden, where Susanna had spent most of the previous two years. She was shocked when she saw Susanna: “She looked
aged
and feeble and I found the fine intellect much weakened … more than I could have supposed. Only at times she would brighten up, and seem more like her old self; but it was like flashes of light on dull cloudy days.” Catharine's ten-day visit proved a tonic for both these sturdy women. Susanna insisted on struggling down the narrow stairs to Robert's parlour, where her old piano now stood. Then Catharine would sit down and pick out the hymns they had learned in their Suffolk childhood. Susanna insisted that Charles Wesley was “the king of hymn writers,” and the sisters' quavery sopranos would join together in the words of “Jesu, lover of my soul” or “Forth in thy Name,
O Lord, I go.” Many of the poignant verses must have recalled for the sisters their hard times in the backwoods, when they and their young families had assembled on Sundays in Catharine's parlour to sing the same verses: