‘“Anyhow, I know a rather wealthy dentist. Dentists in general seem to be an unhappy lot. He is a club regular who is married to a society matron, but invariably has a girl of doubtful reputation on his arm and has often enough asked us to keep mum, which, of course, we do. But there is an unspoken rule in the nightclub business that one good turn deserves another. It’s particularly true of politics and the law, but in this instance it also applies to my friend the dentist.” Then she stopped and her voice changed. “What say we give that pretty face of yours a little help?”’
My mom looked at me. ‘Jack, it was a terrible moment and I think I must have gone purple. I didn’t know what to say to her except, “Oh!” But then she just carried on as if she was pointing out that the sky was blue. “You work for us in the club kitchen two mornings a week for a year and in return you get a set of teeth.” I didn’t even have time to answer before she said, “Now please, don’t be fussed, Gertrude. I have exactly the right files to consult and, best of all, no money has changed hands between us.”’
My mom laughed as she recalled the incident. ‘When I had regained my breath I said, “No, Miss Frostbite, the two mornings’ work in your kitchen are for Jack’s piano lessons. I will give you an extra two mornings’ work for this.”
‘“Gertrude, that simply won’t be necessary. As I mentioned, it isn’t going to cost me anything but a nice little chat next time my dentist friend comes into the club,” Miss Frostbite protested.
‘“Still, I couldn’t take it unless I did the two extra days,” I insisted.’ My mom looked at me. ‘Jack, poor doesn’t mean taking charity when you have two strong scrubbing arms and capable hands to clean with.’
‘So, what did she say?’ I asked.
‘She laughed and said, “Well, you must do as you wish, Gertrude. I think we are going to be good friends. Perhaps the two mornings can be spent cleaning my office and apartment.”’
Then Miss Bates remarked one day, not long after the concert, ‘Jack, I have wardrobes filled with evening dresses I wore on various concert tours. They’re just hanging there and I can’t possibly wear them all. If I’m not mistaken, your mother is the same size as me. I shall bring in four gowns and matching shoes, and you’re to ask her to try them on, and if they fit I’d be most obliged if she would do me a favour and take them off my hands.’
And so Mom started to attend performances with me again. I gotta tell you, she looked pretty as anything. After she got her new teeth and in one of Mona Bates’s gowns and swanky shoes, my mom never missed a concert or a performance, and people would often comment on her ready smile and quiet and charming ways.
But it didn’t stop my dad. Shortly after she got her teeth, we’d got home on a Saturday night from a concert that had gone on quite late and were having a cup of tea in the kitchen. ‘My feet are killing me!’ she’d exclaimed when we got home. She never said it, but I think Mona Bates’s shoes were a bit too small. Anyhow, she’d kicked them off when she sat down, but was still in her fancy concert dress when my dad arrived home.
He was silent, his watery blue eyes taking in everything. ‘Shit, what’s goin’ on here?’ he finally asked. ‘Where’d you get that dress?’ He pointed to the shoes. ‘You on the game or somethin’, hey woman? That how you payin’ for Jack’s pee-a-no lessons, is it?’ He turned to me. ‘Thought I didn’t know, eh? Who gave you the harmonica, eh? Me! That’s who! Now your mother is paying for yer lessons and her fancy whore-smilin’ teeth with her pussy!’
‘No, Dad, I can explain,’ I yelled, jumping in front of my mother.
‘Yeah, sure, you little bastard, think I’m stupid, do yah? The whole of Cabbagetown is talkin’ about the boy wonder. Wonder, my fuckin’ ass! It was me who give you the harmonica!’ he yelled again. Then he brushed me aside and let go with a vicious backhand, knocking my mom’s new teeth out of her mouth, and then he did something that had never happened before and let go with a second backhander, this time smashing into her nose so that she fell off the chair onto the floor. He stood over her. ‘Dirty fucking whore!’ he yelled. I ran at him and punched him as hard as I could in his fat belly. He grunted and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, sending me hurtling across the kitchen to slam face-first into the far wall. I didn’t know at the time that I’d broken my nose, but it bled a lot, and the next day my mom and I each had a pair of black eyes. By some miracle her false teeth didn’t break.
When Miss Frostbite saw me and my mom’s faces she was terribly angry. ‘Right, we’ll see about this!’ she vowed. Then, quite early on the following Saturday morning, there was a knock on the door and I answered it. It was Sergeant Crosby, the policeman who lived in Cabbagetown. ‘Mornin’, Jack. Your daddy in?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Sergeant, but I think he’s still in bed,’ I replied.
‘Better get him up, son,’ he ordered. ‘Your mother in?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘Good. I need to see them both.’
By this time my mom had joined us, drying her hands on her apron. ‘Oh, hello, Tony,’ she called.
‘Mornin’, Mrs Spayd.’
My mother had known Tony Crosby for years and years and, before she married, had gone out with him a few times. He was from Cabbagetown, man and boy. He’d been a semi-pro lacrosse player and a champion amateur heavyweight boxer, and was a bit of a legend around the place and owned his own house. He still looked pretty fit. His brother, Father Crosby, was the local Catholic priest, so, as my mom once told me, the two Crosby boys had done well for themselves, because they came from a dirt-poor Irish Catholic family. Also, it was fairly unusual for a Cabbagetown kid to end up with a career on the right side of the law. People sniffed at the so-called ‘careers’ of the four Crosby girls, who were supposed to be ‘dancers’ in Montreal.
While Sergeant Crosby was on first-name terms with everyone in the community, especially my mom, he’d chosen to refer to her as Mrs Spayd, so we knew it must be a pretty serious matter, him calling around on a Saturday morning and then addressing her in such a formal manner.
‘I need to talk to your husband and I’d be obliged if you’d sit in as well,’ he’d said.
‘Oh, what’s wrong, Sergeant?’ my mother asked, suddenly anxious.
‘Nothing you’ve done, Gertrude,’ he said, softening his demeanour now that he’d established the official rules. ‘But I require your presence.’
My mom repeated that my dad was still asleep and Sergeant Crosby again said to wake him.
My mom turned away to do as he’d asked and Sergeant Crosby said to me, ‘Better go outside and play for a bit, Jack.’
Later my mom told me what had happened. My dad came into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and smacking his lips, and went to the kitchen sink and shamed her by not bothering to get a glass, just cupping his hands and drinking straight from the faucet. Then he looked blearily at the police sergeant. ‘Ah, Tony,’ he said, ‘whatcha want?’
Sergeant Crosby pointed to the third chair, ‘Sit, Mr Spayd,’ he demanded.
‘Mr Spayd? What the heck’s that supposed t’ mean?’ That’s what my mom told me he said, but I knew she couldn’t say the ‘f’ word, and that he’d most likely said, ‘What the fuck’s that supposed t’ mean?’ Anyhow, he took a seat and rubbed his crotch. ‘What?’ he asked again.
Sergeant Crosby leaned forward, addressing my dad. ‘I could have done this the nice way and had a private chat with you, Mr Spayd.’
‘Well then, why didn’t’cha?’ my dad demanded, all surly and bad tempered.
‘I wanted Gertrude to be present at this interview, Mr Spayd. I emphasise, she didn’t call me and has no idea why I am here. I could have taken you to the station and taken down the conversation we are about to have as future evidence, but decided to give you the first and the last warning you’ll ever get from me on this matter.’
‘Hey, wait on! What’d I do? What’s the matter?’ my dad objected once again.
‘Nothing yet, Mr Spayd.’
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br /> My mom said he was leaning on the ‘Mr Spayd’ even though the two of them had known each other all their lives.
‘Well, get the fuck on with it then!’ my dad shouted. He must have had a very bad hangover to talk to a policeman like that.
‘Certainly, Mr Spayd. What I have come to say is that if you ever lay a hand on your wife again – and she won’t have to report it because it will be there for all to see – not only will I see to it that you lose your job at the council, but I’ll also throw you into a cell and charge you with assault and anything else I can think of that will get you a prison sentence. You’re a blowhard good-fer-nothing drunk! Everyone in Cabbagetown knows you drink your wages and not a cent gets home.’
‘That’s my business!’ my dad thundered. He looked over at my mom. ‘She been talking?’
‘No, not at all. Your pals at the tavern have big mouths and dry throats. Generosity, my friend, begins at home!’
My mom said Sergeant Crosby was getting very angry.
My dad rose from his chair and clenched his fists as he faced the policeman. ‘I won’t take that from nobody, ya hear?’ he spat.
Sergeant Crosby rose to face him. ‘Oh my, can’t tell ya how much I’ve looked forward to this moment, Harry Spayd. Just let me remove my jacket and cap so I’m not here officially. I’ve watched what you’ve done to Gertrude for years, so now just throw the first punch, will ya?’ Then Tony Crosby, never taking his eyes off my dad, removed his cap and jacket and dropped them on the floor. ‘Come on, hit me, you bastard!’
It seemed they stood toe-to-toe for nearly a minute, with my dad’s unshaven chin jutting out and his bottom teeth showing, and Tony Crosby looking into his eyes and waiting to block the first punch so he could beat the living crap out of him. But then my dad shook his head. ‘Just you wait. One dark night, you tyke bastard!’ he threatened. Then he pulled back, unknotting his fists.
‘I’ll be waiting, Harry. Make it soon, won’t you?’ Sergeant Crosby said, retrieving his coat and then his cap.
‘Get outa my house!’ my dad yelled.
Believe it or not, my dad never backhanded my mom again. But six months later he didn’t come home for a week, and my mom called on Sergeant Crosby to report him missing. Not that we wanted him back, but the lease was in his name. Tony Crosby called in the following night. ‘He’s taken up with a kitchen hand named Milly Townsend, at the tavern where he drinks. It seems it’s been on between the two of them for some time. She feeds him after the tavern closes at night.’
‘That accounts for him throwing his supper in the pail when he gets home,’ my mom replied. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
‘Don’t worry about the lease, Gertrude. Give me the name of your landlord and I’ll fix it up,’ Sergeant Crosby offered.
Miss Frostbite never admitted she’d informed the police, so I still wasn’t any the wiser until three years later, when I learned from Sergeant Crosby himself that it was Mac who had gone to see him. When I confronted him – Mac, that is – he blushed. ‘Jack, we don’t usually talk about things that happen in families, as you know. But your mom looked so pretty, I didn’t want that bastard to harm her again. When I told Tony Crosby he seemed very pleased and relieved. “Mac, I’m glad you came and told me. Now we can settle the matter in the Cabbagetown way. I’ve had a call from the police chief saying I’d better sort it out or he’ll be down on me like a ton of bricks. It seems someone very important called him. If you hadn’t come in as a local, I would have had to make a formal arrest, court and all the rest, including the slammer.”’
I have to backtrack a bit here to the year before I started piano lessons. The principal called me into his office one day and said, ‘Jack Spayd, what are we going to do with you? I have a report from your teacher, who says you are well above the standard of your class and should be in grade six, that you’re languishing, bored and disruptive and know all the answers so that she can’t keep up with you and at the same time be fair to the other children she’s attempting to teach.’
He was right, I’d long since given up caring about what the other guys thought. I couldn’t just sit in the class and play dumb. Now the principal looked at me over his big horn-rimmed spectacles, even bigger than Mrs Hodgson’s at the library, and said, ‘So I’m going to take the risk and elevate you to grade six, though you will be young when you enter high school, but I don’t suppose that will matter.’
I wrote to Miss Mony, who was now Mrs Pritchard, but would always be Miss Mony to me. She was going to have a baby. I wrote almost every week and saved the letters up until I could buy a stamp. I told her that at long last the principal had done what she’d asked.
She wrote back to say she was researching a bursary into one of Toronto’s good schools, and that she didn’t want me to languish in the local high school as it was filled with students who’d all leave at fourteen and didn’t want to be there in the first place. This was nearly true, but there were some kids who would go on to complete twelfth grade at the nearby high school – very few, I admit, but some. You couldn’t just write them all off like that, even though girls who were clever were never allowed to continue, partly because of the Depression and partly because of the notion, set in concrete in Cabbagetown, that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’, and that before she was married she was only fit for factory work or to be a domestic servant. Working-class girls were not permitted to have brains. Even I could see, plain as the nose on my face, that the cleverest kids in the class were usually girls.
I know I might be beginning to sound like a bit of a smart alec but I think it was mostly all the reading that I’d done that put me ahead, and Cabbagetown primary was hardly the benchmark for Canadian scholarly excellence. But, anyhow, I was lucky, thanks to Miss Mony and a letter from Miss Frostbite and Miss Bates, that I was asked in March of my final year in primary school to sit the first exam at UTS (that stands for University of Toronto Schools) in Bloor Street, only about two miles from home. I managed to pass in the top quarter, so they asked me to sit a second exam, based on writing an essay. I can tell you now I was grateful for all the years of reading and looking up stuff in the library dictionary and encyclopaedia, because I managed to pass this as well. So I got to the last part, which was an interview with two teachers and an old boy from the school who now taught at the university.
By this time I was doing fourth-grade piano and I think it was this that got me through, especially when I told them my teacher was Mona Bates. It seemed the music school at UTS was excellent. Then later, close to my eleventh birthday, we got a letter accepting me as a bursary student at UTS. We learned that over 600 kids had sat for the entrance exams and only seventy-five of us were accepted. They weren’t only bursary students. Most were clever guys who wanted to get one of the very limited UTS places. My mom cried and cried when she heard the news, then started to worry about paying for the school uniform. Fortunately, they had a free clothing pool where parents donated their kids’ outgrown uniforms, so I was okay for school clothes. When I told Mac, he clapped me on the back and said, ‘Best news ever, Jack. If I could afford fireworks, we’d let them off from every rooftop in Cabbagetown.’
Now here’s a lucky thing . . . sort of. The school had lots of extracurricular activities, where parents paid for their kids to go places and see special things, skiing and camp in the summer, excursions to the theatre or sailing on Lake Ontario, and then, when I got a bit older, there were parties with girls in private homes. But, of course, we didn’t have money for equipment or fares or anything else, and my clothes were too shabby for parties – I wore my school uniform for concerts. The reason I say I was sort of lucky was that I could easily have felt just like my mom after that first concert, but because the school accepted that I was a serious music student and had to practise for two hours a day and all through the summer vacation, I had the best excuse not to go on the various excursions, skiing trips, camps and so on, which saved me from being completely humiliated.
/> My mom proved she could be as stubborn as Miss Frostbite, and when she discovered that there was no union involvement at the Jazz Warehouse, she insisted on continuing to work an extra morning a week for Miss Frostbite after her teeth were fixed. Now she no longer worked in the kitchen doing the dirty work, but had become Miss Frostbite’s house cleaner four mornings a week. Like I said before, I know she felt proud that we weren’t taking Miss Frostbite’s charity without giving something back.
And so time passed and I grew into my teenage years, and the worst part was that I hardly ever had time to play the harmonica, except during the summer school vacation. I took to playing it on the streetcar going home from my piano lessons at night. The passengers became my very first jazz audience and seemed to love it, invariably clapping as I got off at my stop. More often than not the conductor wouldn’t accept my fare, so it was almost like being paid to play.
I was doing an awful lot of piano practice, but Mona Bates was a pretty formidable teacher in more ways than one. She demanded technical perfection as well as beautifully expressive playing. I worked my way through the grades and learned to play with absolute precision, as well as great feeling. ‘Emotion, Jack! It’s what makes the difference. It’s a great part of your musical signature,’ she would often say. Music is addictive and I loved the piano and all the classical music I learned, but I still hungered for jazz. I told myself all this technique I was learning would translate to jazz when I had more time. I learned theory, harmony and counterpoint and began to study Bach’s fugues, after a lot of work with Miss Bates ‘stupid boy-ing’ me and ‘wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong-ing’ me. I also worked at being able to modulate from any key intuitively, knowing it would be a great asset when I turned to serious jazz piano.
Of course, I said nothing to Mona Bates. I could see she had this big career in mind for me but it wasn’t where my heart was. By this time I knew a fair bit about the life of a concert pianist, and even if I made the big time, it wasn’t where I wanted to end up. If I’d told Miss Bates I had decided to turn to jazz when I left school she’d have had a major heart seizure. She was obsessed with my large hands and made me learn challenging pieces of music just to test me. When I succeeded, she was very pleased. ‘See, Jack, you can do it. It’s the hands, the Rachmaninoff hands!’
Jack of Diamonds Page 12
