by Kurt Palka
“A bit of a vain man,” she said, “who wanted to appear taller than he was. Size eight and a narrow foot. Less than medium-sized for a man. A fairly common shoe in any big city, I’d say. Perhaps on a Latin or Mediterranean foot. But not on a banker or an Anglo businessman. They like brogues with fancy toe caps.”
Now he was looking at her with interest. “Go on.”
“And there’s blood inside it. Under the insole where it’s coming off. See? And more brown all the way inside and under the instep. A shoe full of blood, I’d say.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“What did the children have on their feet? There were running-shoe prints on that dock.”
“Yes, running shoes. We’re going to find out whose blood all that is. The kids’, and from that shoe almost certainly someone else’s too.”
She put the shoe back in the bag and peeled off the gloves and set it all on the wheelhouse floor.
“Danny says they were shot.”
“Yes, they were. From up close, with a powerful handgun. The bullets had full metal jackets, so they didn’t deform much and punched right through him and into her. We think she was standing close behind him. Maybe he was trying to shield her with his body. We know they died from the same two bullets because the pathologist found one embedded near her spine, and he had a hunch and sent the bullet to the lab and in the grooves and cracks in the copper they found traces of the boy’s blood. I can tell you all that because it’s in the medical report and as his lawyer you could easily find it out yourself.”
Danny was not far away and she imagined he could hear all this. Later, when the inspector was sitting down, she joined Danny in the wheelhouse. He looked grim.
“Margaret, to tell you the truth—I know I said okay yesterday, but now you being here doesn’t feel right to me any more. I guess I don’t really want you gett’n involved, like asking him anything or talking on my behalf. I know you told him about moral support, but even that, I’ve decided I don’t want it. Don’t need it. I’ll tell Mom the same thing. She shouldn’t even have called you. I’d rather handle this on my own.”
“Really? Are you sure? I’m here now.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be, is what I’m saying. Yes, I am sure. I got nothing to hide, and I don’t want him to think that maybe I do. That guy doesn’t miss a thing. He’s like a bloody hawk.”
She hesitated. “You’re really sure, Danny?”
“I am.”
“All right. Let me know if you change your mind.”
She turned away from him and sat down and hugged her knees and looked out to sea. Water rushing past. She wiped mist from her face and rubbed her hands against her skirt under her slicker, pulled the cap down even further, and stared out to sea again. Worn threads hung from the peak of the cap, water beading on them.
She looked at her watch. Ten past four. She’d talk to Aileen, and then if she hurried she could probably still make the evening flight back to Toronto.
“Inspector.” She tugged at his slicker, and he turned around and rested one arm on the back of the seat.
“Have you found out who these children are?”
“No. And they’re not really children. Forensics thinks they’re about twenty years old. No, we don’t yet know who they are. Or where they’re from. We’re trying to find the parents.”
“The parents. Of course. And if you can’t find them?”
He shrugged.
When the boat was docked she asked him for his card. He reached under his slicker, took out a card and passed it to her.
“And you?” He held out his hand. “Your card?”
Thirteen
SHE WAS ON the seven o’clock flight. The dinner choices were chicken or beef. She had the chicken. The window shades were down and the cabin lights dimmed, a movie on the screen. The constant drone of the engines.
Aileen had driven with her to the airport and would take the Buick back to the house.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to come out,” she’d said in the car. “Put you to all this trouble. I should have waited. The boy just doesn’t want a lawyer getting involved. He thinks it makes too much of it all, and in truth I have mixed feelings about it too now. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be, Aileen. I understand and it’s all right. Danny seems to be in the clear, and I’m glad about it.”
It was foggy in places, as it often was on this coastal road, especially this time of year. Stands of evergreens with birches among them, shimmering pale among the darkness.
Trees. When she was little she’d had a book about trees that her father had loved as much as she had. The tamarack leaning kindly to the hemlock. The balsam fir joining in. All of them nodding their heads to the same breeze.
Where the fog was dense she turned on the low beams and the flashers, then a mile later the view was clear again. Aileen fiddled with the radio but the signals were poor. She switched it off.
At the airport they got out and embraced. She caught a glint in Aileen’s eye and reached out and gave her another hug.
* * *
—
Less than three hours later she was back in Toronto, in an airline limo already heading south on Avenue Road. Rain against the windows, water splashing up under the car. Night, and the familiar sights of her hometown. Wide intersections, traffic lights, low flat-roofed commercial buildings lining the street. Crossing Lawrence Avenue now, then Eglinton, heading east and south into the pocket of North Toronto where she grew up. Four-bedroom brick homes, mature maple trees lining streets.
Down Yonge Street now, across St. Clair. One of her better early jobs had been at a law office right here, working on immigration cases and white-collar crime.
Those had been struggling years, tough learning years, years that sharpened and hardened her. Andrew was in primary school then. At that place, her desk was one of two in the hallway near the washroom, and men still buttoning up as they walked past kept knocking papers off her desk and not even noticing.
One day a young woman came in the door and spoke to the receptionist, and the girl then turned and pointed out Margaret.
The woman came up and looked at her strangely. “Yes,” she said. “I remember you.”
“You do? From where?”
The woman leaned over the desk and with one of the pencils there wrote something on a piece of paper. She turned it around for Margaret to see.
LAKEWOOD, she’d written. She picked up an eraser and rubbed the word out again.
* * *
—
In the Murray’s at the corner, they sat in a booth by a window. The woman was slim, with red curly hair and freckles. In the window light her eyes were sky-blue. They were drinking coffee and eating toasted cheese sandwiches. It was mid-morning and the restaurant was nearly empty, but they spoke in murmurs anyway.
“You could tell me your first name at least.”
“You were already in your eighth month when I arrived, and you were gone long before me. I’m Florence.”
“Flo. Yes. I do remember you now. How did you find me?”
The woman shook her head. “Just through someone. They said you were doing human rights cases.”
“That’s a lofty term. I work fourteen hours a day doing prep work on immigration and white-collar crime files.” “Back then did you have a baby girl or a boy? What colour was its hair? And did it have all its fingers and toes?”
She stared at the woman.
“No idea, right? Because near the end there was the gauze mask and the spray of chloroform. And then it was all over and the baby was gone. Snatched away so fast. Straight to formula.”
Margaret wiped her fingers on the napkin and sat back. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t have a lot of money, but I want to hire you to negotiate with them and get the girls holding rights. Twenty-four-hour holding rights, so they can see their babies and hug them. Cry if they want to, but make peace with it. Say hello and goodbye. They can choose
not to, but they should have the option.”
“Holding rights.”
“I made up the word.”
“It’s not common practice. I imagine to avoid attachment and to make it easier.”
“Easier for whom? The clinic? Not for the mother or the baby. The baby knows nothing of anything for weeks, as long as it’s swaddled and fed. It’s busy learning to breathe, for heaven’s sake. No, this would be for the mother. It’s a chance I would have loved to have.”
Florence looked out the window for a moment, then back at Margaret.
“I can get you two Ph.D. psychologists who’ll testify that holding rights would be a good idea for the long-term emotional health of most mothers. To help them stop wondering for years and years what the baby looked like, and was it a boy or a girl and was it healthy. How would it have felt to hold that little bundle.”
“Maybe she doesn’t really wonder about any of that. Maybe she’s made her peace with it.”
Florence looked hard at her for a moment, then looked down at the table. She tapped a finger on it. Wiped away some crumbs and looked up.
“Are you married? Did you have other children?”
She nodded yes. “I have a little boy. He’s seven.”
Florence nodded. “Makes all the difference, later. Trust me, I know. And what I also know is that holding their babies, they would all weep. But a healthy weep, a good long cry of enormous release. You think about it. At least they should have the option. That’s all I’m asking.”
She reached into her purse and put a slip of paper with her name and number on the table.
“Call me and I’ll give you the names of the psychologists. And tell me what it’ll cost.”
* * *
—
By the time she was back at her desk she was already considering how to go about it.
The next day, searching for leverage, for something to trade with, she did some research into Muskoka zoning and property tax structures, and the following evening after hours she placed the first call to Lakewood. Someone she did not know answered, but when the matron came to the telephone it was clearly still the same woman. That same crisp voice.
“Holding rights. What on earth are you talking about? What was your name again?”
“Margaret Joubert. I was at Lakewood in the fall and winter of 1946 into ’47. I’m a lawyer now, and my married name is Margaret Bradley.”
She mentioned the name of the law firm. “I can come up on Saturday by car and tell you what I’m proposing.”
“I’m not interested in any proposal, and I’m never in on weekends.”
“Yes, I remember that. So make an exception. You’ll want to hear this. I know you will.”
It took five meetings, the first two on her own time, the others on the law firm’s time, but as a pro bono case. Her psychologists presented their findings without mentioning names from their own cases, findings that met great resistance because they clashed with Lakewood’s long-standing house rules.
In the end it was the forensic accountant who persuaded the matron. Margaret’s firm had used him before as an expert in white-collar crime. He never smiled, and somehow that made him all the more effective. He told the matron that he had looked into public records and learned that Lakewood was enjoying non-profit benefits, when a close audit and an evaluation of bookkeeping practices could probably find years in which the business had in fact made a profit.
The business, he repeated.
Because in that case, he said, Lakewood could be viewed as a profit centre that had lost money in some years, rather than a non-profit centre within a corresponding favourable tax bracket.
And so during the fifth meeting a clause was added to the intake form with Yes and No boxes that gave the girls the right to decide in their eighth and ninth months whether they wanted to make use of the new holding right.
She never charged Flo for her time, but she accepted her offer to pay for the experts. In a handwritten note some time later, Florence told her that on average fourteen out of twenty girls ticked the Yes box. The note was signed, Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sincerely yours, Florence.
* * *
—
She kept the note in her desk drawer for a week and then she photocopied it and described the situation and sent it to Thérèse in Paris.
She was not surprised when Thérèse wrote back that she could completely understand the girls who ticked the No box. That she’d thought there would be more who said no, with quick angry strokes, and that she could probably guess the stories of those who had.
“Almost certainly not a mere mistake with a fresh-faced summer boy, dear Margaret,” she wrote. “But probably a story more like mine.”
On one memorable occasion in her last year at the Sorbonne, she and Thérèse had talked about their stories, as they called them. Thereafter by tacit agreement nothing more was said, mostly because even though the outcomes were the same, their stories themselves were not. They were very different.
Margaret’s main memory of Thérèse’s story was of one horrific confrontation in her parents’ living room: her mother, her father, the father’s so-called friend at first in red-faced denial and then in shame, and Thérèse, at seventeen, having told her parents about her condition and how it had come about in half-hearted confusion but in truth against her will. There had been a bruise on her right upper arm that had turned deep purple and would not go away.
“You asked me what I think of those Yes or No boxes,” Thérèse wrote near the end of her reply, “and I think that perhaps the idea is wrong because it forces the girls to think about having to choose when the entire thing might be a nightmare for them already. Nature has no interest in our happiness, dear Margaret. So that is what I think. But it’s possible that I am still unable to see it clearly.”
Fourteen
THAT NIGHT BROUGHT the first of the fall storms to Sweetbarry. Aileen woke from the rapid drop in air pressure, and she got out of bed and stepped to the window to see if Danny’s truck was there. It was not. She went back to bed and lay waiting. When the storm made landfall it whistled in her leaking windows and howled in chimney stack and vent pipe. The house shook and creaked, and then the rain and sea spray thundered on the roof and quickly overflowed the eavestroughs.
By morning all was calm again, but a stunned and eerie feeling remained in the air, as of some catastrophe not yet over. From the parlour window she could see Franklin beachcombing in his dinghy, looking for useable stuff. Often after a storm he found all kinds of glass and cork floats and lobster traps that tourists from the cities paid good money for. A painted net float in half-decent condition was worth as much as ten dollars, more if it still had a number painted on it.
The bucket under the leak in her bathroom was half full, and she carried it downstairs and emptied it off her stoop. Then she spent some time picking up the broken shingles that the wind and rain had knocked off her roof.
She was checking if the house had shifted on the foundation blocks and was glad to see that it had not when Franklin came up the path. He was carrying a package.
“From the dealership,” he said. “Came this morning. So quick. Let’s put it in.”
“All right. But have a coffee first.”
He shrugged off his coat and kicked off his boots. They had one perked coffee and then another, and some blueberry muffins that she’d made the day before. At one time she handed him a napkin and pointed, and he wiped blueberries off his chin.
“From which patch?” he said.
“Up by the road. I saw the owl and she saw me too. Sat up there and didn’t stir a feather. Just looked down at me past her beak, you know how they do that.”
Franklin nodded and chewed and swallowed.
“We’ve got to do the fall wires,” she told him. “There’ll be more and more storms now and they’ll be getting stronger. Don’t wait so long again, like you did last year.”
“I won’t. But one of the turnbuckles h
as a crack in it. I need to get that welded first.”
“Well, you better do that then, Franklin. Before we all get blown off these rocks.”
They carried the tool box outside and cut the tape on the package and then laid the distributor cap and the wires and the new spark plugs out on the rock.
Franklin took out the old plugs and showed her the difference. “All shiny and new. They’ll last you another seventy thousand.”
She chuckled at that.
He cleaned the rotor contacts and clipped on the new cap and connected the wires and pushed the ends down onto the spark plugs.
“You didn’t say anything about new spark plugs too,” she said. “Or did you? I thought only the cap and the wires.”
“No, I think I did mention the spark plugs. And I wrote them down. You paid for them already. Crank her up and let’s have a listen.”
She swung open the door and slid halfway onto the seat with her right boot on the gas. She inserted the key and turned it.
“Nice,” said Franklin. “Listen how smooth. Like a new car, Aillie.”
He wiped the fender with his hand and lowered the hood and let it drop gently just the last inch.
“Did Margaret leave?”
“Yes, last night. I drove her to the airport. Feeling like a false friend, asking her to drop everything and come all this way only to have her find out we changed our mind and she’s not wanted. She’s never been not wanted here. Never.”
“It’s not like that and you know it. She knows it too. It’s much more complicated.”
“I suppose it is.”
* * *
—
From ten-thirty to two that day she did a pinch shift at the hospital, and when she was back home she took off the nurse’s uniform and put it on a hanger in the bedroom closet. It was a sky-blue dress with a white collar and cuffs, a white bib apron, and a white cap. Nursing, that good and noble profession. It had been her life, especially after Don had left, and it was still her life, even if it was only part-time now. It was how she thought of herself. A nurse. You are a nurse.
