The cathedral was (and remains) white stucco with one large green “onion” dome in the centre of the roof, and I found it less visually interesting than St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral on Avenue M between 21st and 22nd streets. That one has eight onion domes of different sizes and I remember many years later, when I taught at Princess Alex School, taking my grade eight art class to sketch the church. In fact, somewhere in the mountains of paper in my office there is a sketch book that includes my own unfinished attempt, from around 1970, to draw the cathedral.
The two Ukrainian cathedrals served two different religions, the Ukrainian Catholic and the Ukrainian Orthodox. If I had tried to draw both cathedrals, I would have noticed at once that the Ukrainian Catholic church has straightarmed crosses on its domes, while the crosses of the other, the Ukrainian Orthodox church at Avenue J, have one arm set at an angle. One day I would visit Alex’s grave, and there I would see the one slanted arm of the three on the cross that comprised her tombstone, proclaiming forever that here lay a Ukrainian Orthodox soul. (I’m told that the slanted arm is, among other things, a reference to St. Andrew, who was martyred on an X-shaped cross.) I knew when I saw that cross that I would have to make some, if only cursory, effort to understand her religion.
The truth is, I was always curious about Ukrainians and their religion and their customs. We all knew about Ukrainian Christmas—a lavish, twelve-course meatless meal beginning, famously, with cooked wheat soaked in honey, called kytia—and Ukrainian dancing was a marvel and delight, as were the colourful costumes, but I still felt there was some mystery about being Ukrainian, some magical depth to be plumbed. Now, I knew that to understand Alex I needed to know something about her culture. I was secretly glad to have an excuse to ask questions about the things I’d always wondered, but had never dared to ask.
Whenever I asked Ukrainian Orthodox church members about the two religions, they were adamant that they are different, that the Ukrainian Catholic is a branch of the Roman Catholic faith, and that the Orthodox religion is entirely separate from Catholicism, whether Ukrainian or Roman. The differences are large: Orthodox priests are free to marry; the Orthodox use the Julian calendar and celebrate Christmas and Easter later in the year than Catholics do; the Orthodox do not accept the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope as Catholics do; the two churches have two different hierarchies; and as well, they differ in traditional practices. (There are also more subtle theological differences, which I am too ill-equipped to go into.)
Of less significance to the Orthodox would be, for example, the dried palm branches, blessed by our priest, that my sisters and I would carry home from church on Palm Sunday, while Alex and her family would be carrying home pussy willows. The Orthodox faithful also hang icons in the home, often of the Virgin Mary, or of saints or other important scenes in the Orthodox story, and they keep a jar of holy water that has been blessed at the Feast of Jordan/Epiphany. We Roman Catholics had crosses on the wall, and maybe a religious picture or two, but icons would be as rare in our houses as they would be commonplace in Orthodox homes.
On April 30, 2004, a Saturday, I called to speak with Alex’s eldest sister, Marie, about some of the dates in the family history. I asked her if I had called at a good moment, and she explained that it was, in fact, on the Julian calendar, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday and that she was very busy kneading her Easter bread, but that her husband would take over the task while she talked to me. We spoke for twenty minutes or so, having met some months earlier when she had gone to the trouble of coming to one of my readings and searching me out to speak to me. I asked her about the Easter-basket custom. She told me that she and her husband would fill four Easter baskets, one for each of their children, all grown now and with their own families living not too far from where she and her husband had retired.
First, she explained, the basket is lined with an embroidered cloth, perhaps made of linen, and hand-embroidered in colourful traditional Ukrainian designs. Next, the basket is filled with items such as home-baked Easter bread, usually of two varieties, sweet and plain, ham or sausages along with horseradish to be eaten with the meat, home-grown green onions, cheese (traditionally home-made cottage cheese), butter, hard-boiled eggs, cake or cookies baked using the dairy products which are not eaten during Lent, as well as candles to light during the blessing. Then the basket is decorated with Easter eggs, or pysanka, a traditional craft requiring great delicacy and skill (and one of the things my Ukrainian school friends—the girls—might have been learning when they went off to Ukrainian classes on Saturday mornings. I didn’t know it until recently, but the designs are traditional too, and they each carry meaning). The finished baskets are then taken to church to be blessed as part of the Easter Sunday service.
It is at Easter also that when the carrier of the basket knocks on the door of a recipient and by way of greeting says to the occupant of the home, “Christ has risen,” the occupant solemnly replies, “Indeed, He has risen.” (In fact, this greeting is standard among the Orthodox during the Easter period. I first heard it from my husband’s Slovak father.) After church the basket is taken to a family gathering, where the contents are shared as part of the celebration of the most significant event of the church year—as it is in the Roman or Ukrainian Catholic church.
But Alex and I had in common something more important, in church terms, than either of us would have realized: that was the veneration of Mary. The year I began grade eight at St. Mary’s School on Avenue O, on Pleasant Hill, was a Marian Year. That is, a year singled out by the church fathers as one in which special reverence and honours were to be paid to Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary. (Its purpose was also to celebrate the centenary of the papal definition of the doctrine of the Assumption—that at her death, Mary ascended, body and soul, to heaven.) She was everywhere, it seems to me now, her hands clasped, her head tilted downwards, her expression sad and gentle, her robes a beautiful blue. She was slender, beautiful, and distant, and although she was a virgin—in fact, according to Augustine, “a virgin ever virgin”—and that was important, I did not know what a virgin was. Nor was I at all sure what the prostitutes I saw every day on my way to school down 20th Street actually did, besides getting drunk, fighting, and hanging around with men. I did know that to be a prostitute was something dreadfully wrong, and to be a virgin—whatever that was—was the best thing of all to be. I knew, of course, that both of these had to do with men, even if I did not know precisely what.
During that year, 1954, there was constant talk of the importance of Mary and the place she should occupy in our spiritual lives, but mostly about her inseparability from God because she was Jesus’ mother. We were not interested in the-ology, but the veneration of Mary was important to us, even if we did not fully understand the message. What it said was that women had value. Or, at least, sinless, pure women did.
If Mary was presented as a role model for us, I don’t think any of us saw a way in which we might be like her, other than if we had a vocation to be a nun. Most adolescent girls in the fifties from average Canadian homes did not know how babies were conceived, or anything about contraception, and we didn’t dare ask. And we were told that Mary did not suffer from original sin. This was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, an ancient belief but one not proclaimed officially until 1954, the year we began high school. As an adult, I took the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to mean that Jesus had been conceived without intercourse between Mary and Joseph. Of course, central to her role is the dogma that despite being a mother, she remained a virgin. No one ever explained that to us and I see now that that was because to explain it would involve explaining sex, something we shouldn’t know anything about until we got married.
Living on the west side as I did, and having to walk all the way down the avenues to O to go to school, we saw a lot of life that our parents—benighted, not understanding the city—knew nothing about. As little girls we were sometimes accosted by the drunks—alw
ays white men—hanging around in front of the four hotels with beer parlours, and their laughing attempts to touch us as, already wary, we dodged them, weren’t any different than the grabbing of the boys we knew at school. At least, I believe that was what I thought, for having no clear notion about sex, how could I know about rape? Or pedophilia? Or about any of the true evils that were going on around me all the time in the place where I lived, and of which I saw manifestations every day and which I understood only in some sub- or pre-conscious way?
And we saw prostitutes—always white women at that time—behaving in scary, inexplicable ways. Once, on a city bus in the evening, I was going to an event at St. Mary’s Church Hall, down 20th Street, when at the corner where one of the beer parlour—hotels sat, the few of us on the bus heard the raucous voices of women coming closer from down a side street, their shouts, and the clatter of their high heels on pavement. Then out of the darkness came a woman, running as fast as she could in her high heels and too-tight skirt, and chasing her, gaining on her, at least three other women, all dressed as she was and with shoulder-length dyed and curled hair and red, red lips and fiercely made-up eyes. As the first woman reached the lights of 20th Street, the bus driver, idling there at the bus stop, opened his doors and she leaped on board, muttered something to him, and, looking at none of us as we sat staring at her, plunked herself down on one of the seats near the driver, her back to us.While this was happening the other women reached the bus, but the driver, keeping the doors tightly shut, began to pull away from the curb. They pounded on the door and on its sides and then we were gone, out in traffic. It was over, and the woman sitting ahead of us began to subside physically, her shoulders lowered, her black, stiffly curled long hair began to gleam less ferociously, and as the blocks passed, she slowly became ordinary.
It was terrible and fascinating. If the very next morning I would go to church with my family and sit for an hour facing that statue of the Virgin Mary and hear again about her goodness, which was tied up in some baffling way with her virginity, and yet events like that of the previous night went on all the time, what on earth were the other girls and I supposed to think? The best way around this confusion was to pay no attention to what the Church said—except on Sundays, or when there was a priest, nun, or particularly pious relative around. So that is pretty much what we did.
Alex had better fortunes, having come to live in a better neighbourhood and with her older sister and husband who watched her closely. After she came to the city to live she probably saw only a tiny bit of what I saw. So it is fair to say that she was most likely more naive than I was, that she was better protected and felt in a general way safer in the world. She may also have been much more knowledgeable (although secretly, privately) about sex, because she had spent her whole life on a farm and all the farm kids knew things we city kids knew nothing about. Some farm parents would keep their daughters in the house when animals were mating, but that is not always predictable, and bulls, for instance, were always escaping their fields or corrals and mating with cows. But it is one thing to see animals mating and quite another to be seeing, and not understanding, prostitutes in their brutal, nighttime world.
I suppose the more practical difference between Alex and me when we were adolescent girls would be the wholeness of her family’s faith and their cultural rootedness. With my French father and my non-French mother, my father’s absolute Catholicism and my mother’s ambivalence toward it, which sometimes bordered on hate, I could boast no such completeness. If Alex found herself Other only when she was not with Ukrainians, if she was Other in terms of mainstream Canadian life by virtue of the power of British influence, I seemed to be Other most of the time: French when everybody else was English, English when everybody else was truly French. Where to turn for proof that one existed and was real? I would spend many years learning that I alone would have to, first, find and define my true self, and then use it for validation. But Alex would always know that the Ukrainian-Canadian world was wholly hers if she wanted it.
All of this would be background to the world in which Alex became a young woman, a rich, complicated, often tragic history beginning in Ukraine a thousand years earlier, baggage which young people want to shed but which, in later years—years Alex was not to have—they find the need to reclaim. Not just reclaim, but study, and try to make their own. One day, I would do this too, with my own history. But when I was young, I thought I could simply toss all that past aside and create myself as whoever I wanted to be. There is evidence Alex thought that too.
I was heading out to see the retired police officer who was “obsessed” with Alex’s unsolved murder. I was nervous, but my curiosity was greater than my nervousness. And I was not afraid, not then. Why should I be? I was hoping that during our interview I would begin to see what the story was, what the angle would be, so that I could start thinking about a book. It was that possibility that drove me, above all others.
He had brought his wife, and eventually a second retired officer joined us. We chatted informally; I summarized what I had found in the newspaper—this was to show them that I’d done my homework, that I wasn’t a sensation-seeking idiot—and we talked a bit about whether Alex had known her killer or not. The two former police officers seemed to lean toward thinking she had known him—or perhaps that there was more than one killer—and I said that I thought so too, although my comment was based on nothing but a sudden intuition. I didn’t even know then how much I didn’t know.
Never having had anything to do with police work beyond being an occasional reader of Agatha Christie and eventually P.D. James and John Grisham, I had no idea how convoluted a murder investigation could be, no real idea about things such as the corruption in police forces or in government—financial corruption, yes—other than what the popular media might have to tell us. I was just glad to meet these two men, anxious to talk to them, eager to listen to what they had to say about Alex’s murder. Which, in the end, was not much. But the effect on me was huge: the first man’s genuine pain, his anguish over his force’s failure to solve the case (at least, that was how I interpreted the undercurrent of emotion I felt coming from him) reminded me that police officers are, first of all, people, husbands and fathers and citizens; the second man’s not-verydeeply-buried anger, that I, just another bloody journalist, was going to start mixing in where I had no business to be.
I asked some questions based on rumours I was beginning to hear from the few people I’d contacted before our meeting, people who were high school friends and who had also known Alex. Did I know that she was pregnant? Or that she had been promiscuous? But when I quoted these to my new acquaintances, they said that none of them were true. At one point, one of the men, staring into the distance with a pained look on his face, said “If this were a TV show, it would turn out to be a cop who killed her.”
“Oh, no, a conspiracy of cops,” I said, laughing, and he laughed too. (Later, I would think that no television show about the investigation of a murder would be complete, either, without the second man’s hostility.) We talked a little more about who might have killed her, drank our coffee, promised to meet again, and I went away having made my decision to follow Alex’s footsteps on that fateful evening. I had no idea why. It just seemed like a good thing to do. Maybe I was trying to respond to this troubling sense I had of not knowing her, not having a grasp on anything about her or about her death. I wanted to walk my way into the past. I had a peculiar feeling that is hard to express: it was of something dawning in me, something bright and clear, something huge. Was it the opening of life for me, at last? Of real life? I think now that it was. But I did not know how hard that opening would eventually be.
And so I went to pay my first visit to Alex’s grave in Woodlawn Cemetery. The cemetery was close to where she had died, although that didn’t occur to me at the time. I stopped at the small office to ask for her location—such a huge cemetery, more than fifty-five thousand people buried in its ninety-four acres since its o
pening in 1906. I found her near the road, in an older part of the cemetery where the trees, elms mostly, are old and thick and tall, and cast a beautiful shade across the rows of stone markers, and the smooth, grass-covered graves. Her headstone, of thick white marble veined with grey, was in the form of a Ukrainian cross, with not one, but three horizontal bars, the lowest one angled. It was a small headstone, but a beautiful and feminine one, perfect for the girl I remembered her as being. And I thought with what love she must have been buried, to have had so perfect a stone chosen for her.
A small, oval-shaped glass embedded in it held a coloured portrait of her, the one taken when she graduated from nursing school, where she is smiling over her shoulder, her nurse’s cap with its single black band perched on the back of her head, and her nurse’s navy wool cape open and resting on her shoulders, and holding a bouquet of roses. In those days, all graduate nurses received that huge bouquet of deep red roses. I imagined their scent wafting upward as she held still for the photographer. I imagined her happiness. Below the picture, her name was chiselled in English: Alexandria Wiwcharuk, April 20, 1939, and below that, May 18, 1962. Farther down her name was carved again, this time in Ukrainian, with most of the letters still recognizable, but a few that had become hard to decipher.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 6
