That's My Baby

by Frances Itani

  HANORA had taken a cursory look at Mariah’s early diary before, but did not have a chance to read all the way through. Now she wants to organize the materials chronologically. As far as she can tell, this diary, dated 1900, contains the first of the artist’s writings. Eventually, every copybook, sketchpad, diary, writing tablet and loose page will be spread out over the living-room floor. For now, she wants to get through the reading and create a plan for the book. There will be surprises; there are surprises in every quest. The thought of the unknown makes her eager to immerse herself in work.

  Starting back at the beginning is a safe choice. In 1900, Mariah was fourteen years old. Handwriting indicates a mature fourteen. Her cursive style is careful. Neat, but not ornate. Slanted to the right. Sometimes in pen and ink; more often, especially later, in pencil. Sketches are scattered through the pages, each sketch a window into Mariah’s life.

  JUNE 28, 1900

  Thursday. My birthday. Father announced that I am fourteen years high and asked if I’d grown overnight. He had me laughing as I twirled for inspection.

  Here is my sketch of family around the table—from memory, as I’m this moment propped in bed. Mother made a three-layer cake. She had saved walnuts, as a surprise, for the icing. My older brothers and sisters—my eldest brother returned with his wife for the party—are leaning in while I blow out the candle. One thick candle is meant to represent all my years so far. The candle in my drawing is too thick, but I won’t erase. The likeness of family is to my satisfaction. Quick lines. That’s what I want to do. Quick lines that reveal something distinct about each of my brothers and sisters and my sister-in-law.

  Wild strawberries have been spotted here and there along the edges of the ditches and roads, and farmed berries will soon be ripe. I’ve been offered a job picking on the Freeman farm—one cent a quart. After the strawberries are done, the raspberries will ripen. I’ll be earning money for art supplies, and the extra cost to me will be an aching back and purple stains under my fingernails. Mrs. Banco, my teacher, says she will order items for me from Toronto. Half the money I earn will go to Mother, the other half to my work. Not that Mother takes my art seriously. As far as she’s concerned, picking berries and preserving them for winter are tasks more important than anything I might draw.

  Mrs. Banco told me to stay in touch over the summer months, now that school is out. She reminded me to ask Uncle Oryn to keep an eye out for second-hand art books while he’s travelling the countryside. Uncle Oryn is an auctioneer, and often stumbles across unusual items. He says that if the automobile ever comes to a town or city nearby, he’ll be the first to purchase. Mostly, he deals in property sales and the auctioning of farm equipment. Aunt Clarice travels with him occasionally, if he takes the democrat and she’s not busy on their farm. She likes to poke around the estates when house contents are sold along with outdoor equipment. Aunt Clarice gives me more encouragement than I deserve, and I love her for that. She and Mrs. Banco assure me that I can “do something” with my art. Beyond that, I don’t really know what “doing something” means. It is up to me and how steadfastly I persevere. Aunt Clarice suggested that I accompany her to one of the auctions on a summer day when I can be spared from home. “Bring your sketchpad,” she added. “You never know what you might see of interest along the way—or what you will witness at our destination. You’ll be wanting to draw other parts of the countryside.”

  Mother calls out from her room, asking me to shut off the lamp. She worries about fire in the bedrooms. Before I do, I’ll sketch this fluted dome, my favourite of all the lamps in the house. I wish for colour, but blacks and greys must do. After I pick berries, I will have a little money to buy colour, glory be.

  DIGGING UP OLD THINGS

  BILLIE TELEPHONES IN THE EARLY EVENING. Weeping. Almost wailing. “Please come, Hanora. I’m having so much trouble. I’m afraid. Please come and help me.” She will not or cannot say what the trouble is.

  Hanora dumps her just-made tea down the sink, throws on a jacket, races in the car to Respiro, parks, signs in. She proceeds down the hall at a half run, and when she walks through the door and into the suite, Billie looks over and says, “Hanora! I wasn’t expecting you. Are you out doing errands at this time of night? It’s almost dark.”

  “I came because you phoned. You asked me to come right away because you needed help.”

  “I certainly did not. I haven’t been near the phone all day.” Billie is truly indignant.

  She continues to deny, so there is nothing more to be said.

  Hanora decides to stay with her awhile. She makes tea and pours a cup for each of them, and sits across from her cousin. She pulls her notebook from her purse.

  “Let’s try to remember some things from the past, Billie. I want to write things down.”

  “Why do you want to dig up old things?” says Billie. “What’s the use of that?”

  “Because you’ll remember things I don’t. I can write down our memories. Why don’t you tell me about the Champlain? We could start there.”

  She looks around the room. Billie’s furniture has been moved in, and is exactly the way she wants it arranged. She appears to be comfortable with her belongings around her. The braided rug is on the floor in front of the chesterfield. The framed photo of Duke is on the far wall above a white end table. Whit’s paintings of Billie’s childhood home and their red-and-white house have been hung on a bedroom wall. As for Billie, there isn’t a trace of the fear and anxiety Hanora heard over the phone only minutes earlier.

  Hanora points to the photo. “We had a grand time on that ship. Before the war. It was the first trip overseas for both of us.”

  “I suppose we did. The man in the royal-blue socks. He was travelling alone. I slept with him in his cabin.”

  “I know you did. You made it perfectly clear that I wasn’t to go looking for you.”

  Billie laughs until she is out of breath. Hanora hasn’t seen her laugh like this for a long time. For a moment, she looks twenty years younger. Hanora can scarcely reconcile this Billie with the panicked Billie on the phone.

  “It wasn’t a big bed—quite narrow. But he knew what to do. You needn’t write that down.”

  “You went into considerable detail at the time, as I recall.” Hanora is thinking of Tobe during the war, how he’d appeared at her rooming house in London. How they went to a shop on the Queensway to buy tinned food, and later walked to a dimly lit underground dance hall she knew about, and danced and danced and then sat at an overcrowded table. How he reached for her chair and dragged it close to his own. She remembers the scraping of wood over floorboards, the intimacy, the privacy of the moment. How they walked along the edge of the park on Bayswater Road, and how she took him back to her rooming house and sneaked him up to her second-floor room, where she was not permitted to have overnight guests. Her landlady, a woman in her sixties who had tightly curled henna hair and was called the Fury by residents, owned a Pekingese that yipped loudly every time someone came to the front door. The landlady’s rooms were just to the right of the main entrance, at the bottom of the stairs. But the Fury’s dog knew Hanora well, and allowed Tobe to pass without setting off a shrill alarm.

  Tobe wrote from Canada in September of ’39 that he had joined the Hasty Ps and was training in Prince Edward County. No proper uniforms at first. Not for weeks and weeks. He and the boys were soon to receive the badge of the Regiment—a highlight, from what Hanora understood.

  There was a rush to join after war was declared. Not enough equipment yet, not even enough uniforms. That will all come, and we’ll soon be nine hundred strong. Boys have enlisted from every corner of Hastings and P E Counties. We’ve had to take over the canning factory in Picton for barracks. I don’t mind the drill, the discipline, the route marches. And we will be paid regularly. After the lean years everyone has been through, a regular salary is a wonder to most. Especially the boys from the farms. I was home to Deseronto recently—had all of a day and a half off
—and dropped in to see your folks. They worry about you being there, with war declared. I reassured them, told them to remember how sensible you are (?!) and said I’d visit you at first opportunity when I’m overseas.

  His ship had docked in Scotland on New Year’s Day 1940, but it wasn’t until the Hasty Ps moved south to Aldershot, and then later in the summer to Surrey, near Redhill and Reigate, that he was able to travel to London to find her. When he arrived, he had four days’ precious leave. She learned that he’d sailed from Halifax and arrived in convoy at Greenock, Scotland, on the Ormonde. Travel information was aggressively protected, restricted. She used her own channels, her contacts in London, to dig up information when she was interviewing and writing, but she could not compromise security. She would not have been published otherwise.

  She had been sending articles to Canada, but had found part-time work assisting a dietician with a staff of three to provide meals in a school canteen. Every recipe was calculated to feed one hundred children. She wasn’t used to cooking in such large quantities, and quickly learned how important it was to follow directions carefully. The salary she earned paid the rent. She wrote during her days off, and in the evenings, and at night when she couldn’t sleep. She wrote as often as she could. The Star bought two of her pieces, one of which was about the distribution of gas masks, or respirators. How civilians had to keep them with them at all times; how they practised using them during sudden mock attacks. She wrote about the wooden rattles used as alerts, and the drills that took place in factories and schools. What she found most poignant was the sight of small children involved in games and play while wearing masks and resembling tiny aliens with enormous window eyes and long rubber snouts.

  Tobe was able to visit again, and then again. The men in the Regiment moved about—training, exercising, learning to work together, learning to be soldiers—but Tobe was never far away. He told her about the bungled foray into France in June, with the Hasty Ps being withdrawn almost as soon as they’d “invaded”—this occurred at the same time the Germans were marching into Paris. After a quick recall to England, having been forced to abandon their new equipment in France, the Hasty Ps resumed their training, moving from one area of southern England to another.

  SHE thinks of Tobe’s visits to London, the narrow bed in her bedsit in Queensborough Terrace, how they could not stop laughing when they tried to stifle sound. She remembers the coin-slot gas heater, the thin walls, the cold. Often there was no gas, no water. God, how she froze when she lived in wartime England! Dampness in her room. Worse in the frigid bathroom on the landing below—a bathroom shared with three other roomers. Water was heated by a coke-fuelled boiler. If and when there was hot water, it was rationed. She shivered violently in front of the small sink and mirror, wondering if she would survive the removal of her clothes long enough to get clean. Wondering if she could manage two inches of warm water in the tub. Tobe bathed with her in that warmth. He washed her back, her shoulders, her face. “You still have a few freckles,” he said. They had added a kettle of boiling water to what was already in the tub, a sanguine attempt to make it warmer.

  She watched Tobe to see what had changed. Hair shorter, but the infantry hadn’t been able to thin out the thick mop on top. The kindness on his face: that had not been taken from him while he was being turned into a soldier. His shoulders were wider, more muscular after months of training and physical exercise. Hardening training. He was self-assured, more decisive than ever. She sensed his strength when she saw him, felt it when she was with him. She ran her hands down over his bare shoulders. The way he looked at her. She closes the memory.

  “THE Grand Salon,” says Billie suddenly. “The enormous painting of Champlain took up most of the end wall. I faced it often enough. Blue Socks wanted to sit at the same table every day. He ordered Champagne cocktails. Sometimes Chartreuse, because he liked the name. He was free with his money, so he must have had plenty. He sang country songs and I fell for his low, scratchy voice. Didn’t he play an instrument of some kind? He didn’t know a thing about jazz. He liked slow dances and country. But I liked the fast dances, and I liked him. I tried to show him the Lindy and he was game to try. What was his real name? I’ve forgotten. I was on the rebound, as the language goes. What was the other one’s name? The one from New York who dumped me?”

  “Hallman. He took you to jazz clubs, he took you dancing.”

  “His ears were too high,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone out with him. Never trust a man who has oddly placed ears.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of the ears.”

  “Well, it’s true. And what about Blue Socks? What was his name?” She is sparked by memories. Wants to follow them to their end.

  “His first name was Angus,” says Hanora. “His full name would have been on the Liste des Passagers. One of us might still have that Liste, stored somewhere. Tell me more about the Grand Salon.”

  Hanora, too, is trying to recall detail, though she didn’t spend much time in the Grand Salon. Angus and Billie played cards there during the daytime. Along with the musicians and Ivie, who had their cards out every day. There was a large smoking room, too, and card playing was continuous, night and day. The pillars in the room were decorated with impressive—almost life-size—carvings of kings, queens and knaves, along with the suits: spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs. Blue Socks kept a queen of spades in his pocket, for luck.

  In the evenings, Hanora danced, as everyone did. The music, the atmosphere, the dancing were charged, as if passengers believed this would be their final voyage. For many, it was their last peacetime voyage. But not for Duke and his orchestra. They toured with huge success in Paris, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark. In Sweden, they did a fifteen-city tour and were wonderfully received. But it was more and more apparent that war was closing in from all sides, and Duke had become uneasy. The news of his tour was widely reported when he and his musicians, travelling through a portion of Germany en route to Denmark, were forced by Nazi soldiers to leave the train. They were held up in Hamburg for hours before being permitted to move on.

  After playing in Copenhagen and then Sweden, the musicians sailed to England. Hanora learned later that they were not permitted to play there because of a union dispute. Duke and his entourage cut their tour short and returned to New York on the Île de France in May, several months before war was declared, and before U-boats regularly patrolled and threatened ships in the Atlantic. By then, Billie had finished sightseeing in London and was back at her office job in New York. Hanora, who’d travelled to London from the Continent by herself in late April, was disappointed that there would be no performances in England prior to Duke and his orchestra returning home.

  IN the middle of the week at sea, almost every passenger aboard—except the few who continued to suffer from mal de mer—turned out to attend the Bal Masqué. Billie dressed as a cigarette girl, with Blue Socks as her bodyguard. The two worked in the cabin all afternoon at their costumes, making the tray Billie wore from a strap around her neck. They filled it with empty or partially empty cigarette packages donated by other passengers. Billie wore Tangee rouge and two shades of lipstick, one overtop of the other.

  Frank and Frankie dressed as Adam and Eve, using cabbage leaves begged from the ship’s kitchen to cover their skimpy outfits. Frankie looked young—her own age—for the first time since boarding. Ruth dressed in black, as she did every day, but added a black mask and a wig of raven-black hair.

  Hanora dressed as George Sand, in men’s trousers, vest and tie, all borrowed from one of the many costume trunks kept by the ship for the Bal Masqué. She wore her hair long—elaborate flowers drooping from one side—and wished she had paid more attention when her mother used to put her hair in ringlets. She selected Le Dernier Amour by Sand from the ship’s library, and carried that with her. She borrowed a cigar from Foxy and tucked it into her vest pocket.

  Foxy, aware of his reputation as a ladies’ man, amused everyone by dressing as R
eynard the Fox. He wore a hat with pointed ears that jutted through slits, and a long, bushy tail that he, too, had borrowed from a costume trunk. He moved around from table to table, asking women to dance.

  The musicians danced, Ivie danced, most passengers turned out for the festivities. Hanora stood near the doorway looking on and wondering if she was really halfway across the Atlantic, while revellers paid no attention to the dark, to the endless ocean outside. The dance floor, the costumes, the partying could be anywhere. But she was aboard the SS Champlain, a place unlike any she had known before. A world of luxury and gaiety, her familiar world cast aside as if it did not exist. Time had come to a halt while she was at sea.

  Duke approached from the corridor, a sudden presence beside her. His deep, warm voice. He was wearing a plush wine-coloured bathrobe over an open-neck shirt and casual trousers. He looked entirely at ease. He had on old slippers, the backs worn down.

  He bowed, slightly. “Billie, isn’t it?” he said. “Serious young lady at this moment. In a seriously inventive costume.”