“I’m not sure.” I laughed. “Potato whiskey, most likely. She knows where to get it.”
“Good grief,” said Gwen.
She had never taken to Isabelle. She couldn’t get past her stained tobacco fingers. I liked her fingers and tried to get mine to look like that — like hers and Jackson’s — but I couldn’t manage it. Sometimes I wanted to be Isabelle, even for just one day.
Chapter 20
Several days after our swim I sat with Gwen on her back stoop helping her shell peas. Warren and Tippy were out in the field. We saw them walking slowly towards us, which seemed odd. They usually ran and leapt.
Warren looked scared when he entered the yard.
“What’s the matter, Squirt?” asked Gwen.
“I threw up,” said Warren, “and my head hurts.”
Gwen put him to bed with a bucket beside him on the floor in case he had to throw up again.
“Too much sun,” she said.
The next day Warren was fine.
Two days later his right leg ached but he mentioned it to no one at the time.
The day after that, Tippy barked. The quietest dog in the world barked for the first time any of us knew about. Gwen and I were sitting on her stoop talking about what a jackass Dirk was and it took both of us a moment to realize who was causing the ruckus from out in the field. It was Tippy, all right — barking and carrying on — running towards us where we sat and then back towards the middle of the field. Like Rin Tin Tin might have done.
Once we understood her, we ran to follow. We found Warren crawling slowly through the weeds. His eyes were unnaturally bright; he looked like he was watching a horror show at the Baddow Theatre, something way too scary for anyone his age to see, for anyone to see.
A few inches from his outstretched right hand was an old board with four gopher tails nailed neatly to it. Gwen and I carried him to the house and laid him on the chesterfield. I phoned Aunt Helen. Warren’s right leg was so weak he hadn’t been able to walk. He had crumpled to the ground on his way to the golf club where he was going to sell his tails to the greenskeeper.
He turned to me. “Violet, would you mind going back for my gopher tails? That was a good morning’s work.”
“For sure, Warren,” I said. I headed right out so he would have one less thing to worry about. I found them and put them under the stoop. I fought back my tears; he didn’t need to see those.
Aunt Helen was there when I got back.
I told him where I had put the tails.
“Thanks kindly, Violet,” Warren said.
“Warren, dear,” said Helen, “can you bend your head down to your knees?”
He bent down all right but he bent from the hips with his spine held straight and rigid.
“I feel quite stiff,” he said.
“Violet, phone your father and tell him to come over right now with the car. We’re going to take this young man to the hospital.”
Warren was put in isolation and given a serum that was thought to be effective if administered early on.
Gwen tortured herself. “Why didn’t I recognize the symptoms sooner?” she said.
“Why would you?” I said.
“We shouldn’t have gone swimming at Happyland,” she said.
“I don’t know,” said I. “Surely it takes longer than a few days to take hold.”
By the end of the week Warren couldn’t stand up without help. His right leg was almost useless and his left one was weak.
We were all put under quarantine: Gwen and her mum, me, Helen and Dad, all those who had been in contact with him that day. We couldn’t leave our houses for three weeks.
Most often polio was connected to swimming places, where other kids splashed and swallowed and spat and peed. But Gert Walker didn’t blame Happyland Pool or the Red River or any of the other places where Warren played. She believed that the disease came from the Negro named Tag. She made no secret of this and I prayed to any entity that might be listening that he was safely home on Brush Street in Detroit.
Chapter 21
One day ran into the next during our time in quarantine. It was an island of time, separate from the rest of our lives, before or after. A sign was posted on our front door explaining why everyone was to avoid us. I felt like a leper.
But the three of us were lepers together and it wasn’t unpleasant. No one could expect anything from us. And I didn’t have to worry about Helen and her Jackson-related activities.
I went through my old Hardy Boys books, getting them in some kind of order for Warren. I read Middlemarch; my dad read Ulysses (it irked him but he forced himself to finish it); Helen sewed. The Safeway delivered groceries and Wades delivered drugstore items. Mrs. Larkin and other neighbourhood women dropped off food and magazines and games and left them on our front steps.
Mr. Larkin brought library books and shouted encouragement to us through the closed front door. “Everything and everyone will be waiting for you when your time is up,” he yelled.
We played a new game called Monopoly for hours at a time and cribbage and Parcheesi and Snap. Snap scared my dad out of his wits.
“Please don’t shout so loudly,” he pleaded to Helen and me. “And I know it has to be sudden, but for heaven’s sake!”
He wouldn’t play Snap with us more than a few times because we couldn’t seem to tone it down.
I talked for long stretches on the phone to Gwen and to Fraser. That also made my dad nervous.
“What if someone is trying to get through to us?” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Someone.”
Helen wrote letters. She had a lot of people to write to. I wondered how badly she longed for another life — her own life. She could have it now I was grown. Did she not feel that she was wasting away with her brother’s family? I tried to talk about it with her but she wasn’t very forthcoming. For the first time in my life I saw the sadness in Helen and it was as big as Asia. I asked her about her soldier and all she would tell me was that his name was Joe and he came from Montreal.
That’s where my dad and Helen grew up, in a big house on Hutchison Street, close to Jeanne Mance Park. And that’s where the two of them went on living after the deaths of first their father and then their mother. Helen was almost through nursing school at the Royal Victoria Hospital at the time but Dad was just a boy of thirteen. The Palmers weren’t as well-to-do as my mother’s family but there was no shortage of money, so they were able to keep on in the house.
“Why weren’t you in the war, Dad?” I asked one evening toward the end of our confinement.
“I wasn’t old enough till the last year of the war. And by that time there were too many people interested in keeping me safe. With Major Helen Palmer at the helm.” He chuckled.
“You should be grateful you had so many people looking out for you,” Helen said, knitting needles clickity-clacking away.
“I was shipped off to Winnipeg when Helen went overseas in 1917. I stayed with your mother’s folks till she and I got married the next year. Actually, truth be told, we even stayed on with them for a good while after we were married. They were old friends of my parents, Anne’s folks. Your grandpas were at the University of Toronto together.”
“You got married when you were eighteen?” I asked. “That’s just one year older than I am now!”
“I was very mature for my age.” My dad laughed. “And being married was a good reason not to go to war. Everyone was very much for it. It was a darn good thing your mother and I happened to love each other. She was twenty — two years older than me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” said my dad. “I guess you never asked.” He set his book aside. “There was a lot of talk about conscription by 1917. So a marriage, a place at the university, excellent prospects for my future with a well-known Winnipeg law firm — all those things conspired to keep me safe and in this co
untry. I must say I was swept along.”
“Conscription is when they force you to go. Is that right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you ever wish you had gone?” I asked. “To war, I mean.”
“Hmm. Sometimes I feel as though I missed out on an experience, a huge one, but I can’t argue much with the opportunities I was given for a comfortable future. And I was so fortunate in marrying your mother, and having you.”
“And Sunny,” I said. “Don’t forget Sunny.”
“And Sunny.” He sighed.
We listened to Helen’s knitting needles for a few moments.
“As it turned out,” Dad went on, “conscription didn’t become law till January of 1918 but no one knew when the war was going to end, of course.”
“So you were just nineteen years old when you had me,” I said.
“Yup. And your mother was twenty-one. We were just a couple of kids, really, with a lot of help for a while from your mother’s family.”
On another night we talked about Warren and how bad it could get and what would become of him and how we could help if Gert would let us.
And the three of us imagined the things we would do when we were free.
I pictured adventures with Isabelle and kisses from Jackson and maybe Fraser and then later the same day I would see myself like Thomas Hardy’s Jude, when his studies consumed him, before it all fell to pieces. I would be out in time for the beginning of the university year. Maybe an academic life was what I was cut out for. But I had little doubt that at a word from Jackson I would still have run off to the sugar beet fields of Alberta.
My dad wanted to go fishing on the Lake of the Woods.
Helen talked about a trip to the Queen Charlottes but I think it was just for show; her heart wasn’t in it. She taught me some of her recipes and she cold waved my hair. One day as she curled a lock of my hair around her finger, I grabbed her hand and held it to my face.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Whatever for, dear?” said Helen.
I had no answer for her and we went back to the project of my hair. She was very gentle with me after that, more than ever before. But only for a little while. I worried sometimes that Helen would die before I was able to go on without her.
We all three got to the point where we were snapping at each other. And my dad and I slept more than usual. I dozed late into the mornings and he took afternoon naps, something he had never allowed himself before.
And then one day when I woke up, it was over. The quarantine notice was taken from the door and the three of us ventured out into the quiet late-summer world.
Chapter 22
The day our quarantine was lifted Gwen and I went to visit Warren. First, I ran his gopher tails over to the golf club so I’d have something good to tell him. He was no longer in isolation and had been moved to the King George Municipal Hospital in Riverview. The number of polio cases was turning into an epidemic. Warren had been one of the earliest victims. He was confined to his bed but his right leg wasn’t paralyzed. He could get better.
He was in a room with three other boys, two worse off, one not so bad. The one boy was sitting by Warren’s bed and the two of them were finishing up a game of Chinese checkers when we arrived. The boy stood quickly with the help of crutches, the kind that stopped at the elbow and had leather cuffs around the forearms. He offered to give up his chair.
“This is Robert,” said Warren. “Robert, this is my sister, Gwen, and Violet, my sister’s friend.”
“Hi, Robert,” I said. “You’re pretty good with those crutches.”
He was probably wearin’ on to twelve years old, as Warren might have put it.
“Yeah, they’re okay once you get used to them,” he said.
“I’ll probably be on crutches soon, myself,” said Warren. “And then a cane and then nothing. That’s the way it’s gonna go.”
Not even Robert could look at his bright young eyes. It was too dangerous to talk out loud like that about what was going to happen. What if the devil heard you and decided you needed to be knocked down even further?
“Things are pretty good now that I’m not in isolation anymore,” he said. “How’s Tippy?”
“She’s sad,” Gwen said. “She misses you.”
“Can you bring her to see me?” he asked.
“I’m pretty sure they don’t allow dogs in hospitals,” Gwen said.
“Tell her I’m comin’ home soon,” Warren said. “Don’t let her think I’m not comin’ home.”
“I’ll try, Squirt,” Gwen said.
When I gave him his eight cents from the gopher tails he told me to give it to his mum. I wouldn’t. I’d save it for him till he got out.
“Here’s a Hardy Boys book,” I said and set a copy of The Secret of the Old Mill on his bedside table.
He picked it up and it slipped out of his hand onto the floor.
“Oops,” he said. “My fingers are a little weak on the one hand.”
I hadn’t known that. I picked up the book and placed it next to him on the bed.
“Thanks kindly, Violet,” he said, “I really like the Hardy Boys.”
“So do I.” Robert smiled shyly.
“Warren can lend it to you when he’s done,” Gwen said.
“You can have it first if you like,” said Warren.
“No!” said Robert. “You read it and then I’ll read it and then we can talk about it.”
“Okay,” said Warren.
One of other two boys in the room was lying on his back staring at the ceiling. The other one was on a rocking contraption that moved back and forth; he stared straight ahead as he rocked.
“Where’s Mum?” Warren asked.
It was the question Gwen was dreading.
“She sends her love,” Gwen said. “She had to go to school today. Classes start on Tuesday.”
“So the school’s dirty already?” he asked.
“Probably not,” said Gwen. “But she was called in for some reason or another.”
“No first day of school for me this year,” said Warren.
“I guess not,” said Gwen. “That’s not so bad, is it, Squirt?” She pushed his hair back from his forehead. “Your hair could use a bit of a trim,” she said.
“No, that’s okay.”
Robert had moved away to look out the window.
“Gwen?” said Warren.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you could not call me Squirt anymore.”
“Sure, I think I could manage that. What would you like to be called instead?”
“Warren would be good.”
Gwen and I both laughed.
I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I smiled on like a fool and was dangerously close to tears.
“Ernie Pluotte and his mum came to see me this morning,” Warren said, “but Mum still hasn’t come by. It seems kind of weird to me.”
“We’ll tell her you’re anxious to see her,” I said and Gwen gave me a “shut up” look. I should have stayed quiet.
For a while longer we chatted about the things Warren was going to do when he got out. One of them was go to see the Winnipeg Football Club play at the Osborne Stadium.
“There’s been some talk about changing their name to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers,” I said.
“Really?” said Warren. “That’d be great; what a great name!”
“I think so, too,” I said.
“Fritzie Hanson’s my favourite player,” he said. “He almost single-handedly won the Grey Cup for them last year.”
“You’re my favourite,” I said and kissed Warren on the forehead. I think it surprised us all: me, Gwen, and Warren, anyway. But I couldn’t help myself; it just happened. I hoped no one minded too much.
We headed for the door.
“Be extra nice to Tippy,” he said.
From the hallway I heard Robert say, “You’re really good at talking to grown-ups.”
Warren
chuckled. “They’re not really grown-ups,” he said. “They were kids not that long ago, even though they’ve always been older than me.”
We walked to Osborne Street to catch a streetcar.
“So what’s with your mum?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want to come to the hospital.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s an evil witch dressed up like a regular person.”
I stared at Gwen.
“Let’s not talk about her,” she said. “I hate her.”
I put my arm through Gwen’s for the rest of the walk to the streetcar stop.
A warm shifting breeze worried the leaves on some trees and not on others, on one branch of a shrub and not on others. It stirred the hem of Gwen’s skirt and not mine.
“I hate wind,” said Gwen.
“Gosh,” I said. “I hate it too, but this doesn’t even qualify, Gwenny. This is barely a breeze.”
“I hate it,” she said.
On the way home on the streetcar I planned all the vile things I was going to say to Mrs. Walker next time I saw her, which I hoped was never.
“He’s just a little boy!” I blurted out.
Gwen concentrated on the passing scenery and I tried for a while to keep my thoughts to myself.
Where did Warren get his optimism, I wondered, with a mum like Gert to learn from? I wanted to bottle him and sell him to the world; no, I wanted to wrap him up safe and take him home and keep him for myself.
Gwen’s mum was still out when we got to their place. If only I could booby-trap her house in some way so that she would die. Perhaps an invisible wire at the top of the basement stairs would do it. She could tumble down and land upright on a broom. It could go in at the bottom of her and come out the top. A grisly, impossible death. But I’d have to make sure the trap didn’t backfire and kill Gwen.
I didn’t want to leave her yet so I offered to make some coffee. We sat with our cups at the kitchen table.
“She doesn’t want to go and see him,” said Gwen, “so she’s pretending she doesn’t have time.”
Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams Page 14
