Dedication
For Daniel Legault, my lightning bolt for
twenty-five years and counting
Contents
I THE MIRACLE
II ENTER MISS BENTWHISTLE
III HUNTERS AND HUNTED
IV THE HEARST PRESS
V MANUFACTURING DREAMS
VI LEAVE-TAKINGS
VII THE BARONESS AND THE SHOWGIRL
VIII THE RADIO CITY REVIVAL
IX HOLLYWOOD
X ARMAGEDDON
XI ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I
The MIRACLE
The Vision
Mary Mabel’s decision to kill herself wasn’t taken lightly. She’d considered it off and on ever since she was ten. That’s when she and her papa, Brewster McTavish, had arrived on the doorstep of the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, a Gothic flurry of turrets, parapets, corbelled chimneys, gargoyles, dormers and widow’s walks, more apt for the housing of bats than the delinquent daughters of the idle rich.
The Academy sat on a four-acre field in the west end of London, Ontario, a colonial outpost in the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the real London, London, Ontario, was a reconstituted barracks town of retired farmers, accountants, and insurance salesmen, who fancied the place a city. At eighty thousand souls, it was certainly large enough and moneyed enough, with its army of stone churches, steel bridges, and broad tree-lined streets of ample yards, each with a solid brick home sporting a Union Jack. It had its own fairgrounds, too, and a hockey rink, men’s club, and a train station — even its own east-end underbelly of unpaved, potholed roads and clapboard houses. What it lacked was imagination; Londoners were a practical, thrifty lot who said their prayers, and saw the Devil’s work in anything that threatened the predictable.
Construction of the Bentwhistle Academy had begun in 1910 under the supervision of the town’s greatest financier and leading citizen, Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V. Horatio had conceived the Academy not only as a monument to his family’s name, but as a hobby for his only child, Miss Horatia Alice, who’d become increasingly difficult since her return from school. Now, twenty-odd years later, Headmistress Miss Bentwhistle had halted improvements to the Academy in the wake of the Great Depression and her father’s untimely death. This had left the moat half-dug, its clay basin filled with leaves and stagnant runoff. School brochures conjured “a magical lagoon, ideal for the contemplation of Lord Tennyson, Longfellow, and Sir Walter Scott”; a breeding ground for mosquitoes was more like it.
Mary Mabel had had a bad feeling about the Academy from the moment she and her papa were shown their quarters, a basement dungeon below the Great Hall comprised of two windowless, low-ceilinged rooms with cement floors, an icebox, and a stove. Her papa had been hired to do odd jobs for room and board, as he’d done for the past five years in towns throughout Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. She was to work in the laundry and kitchen, in exchange for which she could attend classes with the young ladies.
Her schoolmates were a nightmare, especially Clara Brimley, ringleader of the ruling clique. They’d taunt her for being poor (“What’s your real name? Penny Less?”), for having lost her mama (“Where did you lose her? In a whorehouse?”), and, above all, for being plain (“Here comes Miss Potato Head”). At night, Mary Mabel would stare into the small mirror in her bathroom, praying for her mama to appear to tell her she wasn’t as ugly as all the girls said.
It’s true I have big eyes and a mop of curls, she thought, but my “auntie” in Indiana said my mole is a beauty mark, and my features are something I’ll grow into, whatever that means.
Mary Mabel refused to let anyone see she was unhappy. When the young ladies taunted her about her mama, her papa, or her looks, she didn’t cry like they wanted. Instead, she spat in their soup and blew her nose on the inside of their pillow cases.
“Devil child.” That’s what Miss Bentwhistle called her the time she pitched a ladle of vegetable slop at Clara. The headmistress was of the opinion that a week spent scrubbing the Academy’s toilets with an old hairbrush and lye powder would settle her down.
“Serves you right.” Clara smirked. “You’re a nobody’s brat. I trust you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Take care,” Mary Mabel replied, “or I’ll stuff your face in the toilet bowl where it belongs.”
Clara snitched. Mary Mabel got a second week, and her papa warned her that if she caused any more mischief, Miss Bentwhistle would send them packing. “Well,” Mary Mabel said, “if that’s a promise, I’d better get cracking.” He chased her down the hall and round the boiler, cursing her lip till an overhead pipe laid him out cold.
Mary Mabel would’ve gotten into greater trouble, if it hadn’t been for play-acting. She started with puppets. One night, she drew a face on a finger and stuck it through the toe of a dead sock. Production standards soon improved, thanks to decorated thimble-heads costumed with a wardrobe of worn hankies. Alone in her room, she’d entertain herself with epics, switching characters with the flick of a thumb. It reminded her of when she was eight, living with “Auntie” Irene, a mortician’s wife who directed theatricals for the Milwaukee Little Theater Guild.
At fourteen, fancying herself a grown-up, she set the puppets aside and acted the tales herself, performing the roles of Jo March, Little Nell, Dora, and, one memorable night, smothering herself on the sofa as Othello and Desdemona both. Inspiration came from her library. She collected it in the middle of the night. Families fleeing the bailiff would take off after dark with whatever would fit in a borrowed wagon; leftovers were strewn everywhere. Mary Mabel would sneak out to front lawns and pick books like fishermen pick worms, then stack them in her closet on jerry-built shelves of boards and cement blocks that wobbled up to the ceiling.
These books were her best friends, her only friends, if truth be known. To enter their worlds was to encounter possibilities wondrous and magical, certainly more so than any she could picture in the here and now. Her papa disapproved. “Get your head out of the clouds,” the beanpole lectured. “Life only gets worse. Accept your lot, or you’ll end your days weeping over your ironing board.”
His words went in one ear and out the other, though he was right about life getting worse. As she approached the age of seventeen, Mary Mabel thought about suicide daily. Not in the wild, hysterical way some of the girls did over boys or examinations, but with a calm, quiet resolve. She no longer wondered whether to do it, but rather when and how.
Rat poison was her first idea. It was easy to come by, as the Academy had a large supply to keep down fall infestations. Still, she shuddered at the fate of the mice and squirrels that died in the walls and smelled for weeks. Next, she thought of hanging herself from the clock tower, like a character out of Victor Hugo; but, however romantic, she hated the idea of letting the world look up her skirts. Leaping in front of a train like her heroine Anna Karenina, or shooting herself with a pistol like Hedda Gabler, were also out of the question; she was determined to die in one piece.
Mary Mabel weighed and discarded options until the week following her birthday. That night, out of the blue, she woke up to find her mama in glowing white robes, floating at the foot of the bed. She’d prayed for a visitation for as long as she could remember, but her mama had never come, and she’d almost given up hope. Her mama’s arrival now meant the visitation must be about something important: her entry into womanhood, perhaps?
“Meet me tomorrow at noon on Riverside Bridge,” her mama said, “and we’ll be together forever.”
Mary Mabel reached out to hold her, but the moment she did, her mama disappeared. What a peculiar dream, Mary Mabel thought. Yet the meani
ng was clear, and for the first time in ages she felt at peace. She knew when to die. And where. And how. The plan made such sense. Sunday was her one day of the week without chores; she wouldn’t be missed for hours. Riverside Bridge was perfect, too, out of the way, private and beautiful. And the height of it and the rocks beneath — it was a death that couldn’t be botched.
She got up. On the way to brush her teeth, she almost tripped over her papa, snoring on the floor of what passed for their living room, legs splayed out, back upright against the couch. Brewster tended to slide off when he passed out. As usual, his bottle was secure beside him, upright if empty. Mary Mabel stood for a moment and watched him twitch. He’d be upset when they gave him the news. Not because of her death, but because he feared scandal. She imagined his lament: “What will Miss Bentwhistle say?”
On that score, she knew he could rest easy. The headmistress was as skilled at deception as the Artful Dodger. She’d advertise the leap as a tragic accident. Privately, she might even rejoice, seeing as the funeral would provide her sympathy and attention. She’d see to it the service was a social event on the Middlesex County calendar, held at St. James with the Reverend Rector Brice Harvey Mandible presiding, and herself in charge of the eulogy, a moving oration correct in all particulars.
Mary Mabel pictured Miss B., a monument brave in grief, declaiming from the pulpit: “Our Miss McTavish was a motherless child whom we cherished as our own. Despite her circumstances, her hard work in the laundry and kitchen earned her a desk at the Academy alongside our young ladies. Here she flourished, winning academic honours in English Language and Literature as well as the Bentwhistle Prize for penmanship. A flower nipped in the bud, God has taken her to His bosom to blossom by His heart.” After the interment, Miss B. would arrange a memorial assembly in the Academy chapel at which her young ladies, decked out in black lace and crinolines, would be obliged to offer up prayers. Mary Mabel planned to give them all a good haunting.
Her reverie was interrupted by her papa, mumbling an order in his sleep. With me gone, he’ll be up to his ears in dirty underwear in no time, damning my memory for the bother, she thought, and surprised herself with a laugh.
There was still an hour to sunrise. Mary Mabel had half a mind to go to the bridge then and there, while her determination was awake and the world asleep, but she held back. The vision had been specific as to the time, and, as she knew from her books, “the constellations have purposes we mortals must attend.”
Besides, the truer reason, she hadn’t finished A Tale of Two Cities and was desperate to know how things turned out for Sidney Carton. He was a drunk, but a noble one. Mary Mabel couldn’t imagine her papa risking his neck for anyone. Would she love him any better if he got his head chopped off? What a pity she wouldn’t have the chance to find out.
She took her Dickens to the rocker, opened it to the page marked with the feather retrieved from one of Miss Bentwhistle’s Sunday hats, and began to read, eyes darting as fast as Madame Defarge’s knitting needles. She whittled down the pages till ten o’clock, when her papa woke himself with a loud fart, the explosion starting him bolt upright. “What time is it?” he blinked.
“Ten,” she said. “Would you care for some porridge and toast?”
Brewster grunted, padded unsteadily to the john, peed, and poured his weekly bath. Following the Sunday morning service at St. James, he had a standing engagement to clear Miss Bentwhistle’s drainpipes. She had, as she put it, “sensitive nasal capillaries, owing to good breeding and refined genes,” and he took care to keep her nose in joint.
By the time he was spruced up, Mary Mabel had his food on the table. Her papa at feed made eating an adventure in nausea. She shot him a look. Sidney Carton was about to die, and all he could do was belch. She consoled herself that this was the last time he’d disturb her reading.
Porridge guzzled, Brewster wiped his toast around the bowl, mashed it into a ball, popped it in his mouth, chewed twice, and gulped. Then he pushed back his chair and gave his tummy a pat. “What mischief will you be at while I’m out?” he asked, as he went for his toolbox and plunger.
“I’m going to jump off a bridge.”
“Mind you don’t make a mess.” Brewster snorted and lurched out the door.
The heroines in her books would have cried out, “Farewell, Papa, I love you.” Not Mary Mabel. She returned, dry-eyed, to Mr. Carton’s redemption. At last, the final page, the final paragraph, the final sentence, the final word. It was then that she cried, rocked for a bit, and thought that like brave Mr. Carton it was a far far better thing she was about to do than she had done, and a far far better rest to which she was about to go than she had known. A curious peace descended.
With great calm, she returned the book to its friends on the shelves, closed the closet door, and went to the teacup on the apple crate beside her bed. The cup wasn’t much to look at — late Victorian, green, with gold trim about the rim and handle — but it was the only thing of her mama’s she’d managed to grab the night she and her papa had fled Cedar Bend.
Mary Mabel held it tight, closed her eyes, and saw the large woman with big, warm breasts who sang to her and read her stories. She remembered how she cuddled next to her mama for afternoon naps. And about the three days that her mama lay very still at the end of the parlour, the house full of grownups, while she ran around getting lost in a sea of black skirts and saying to anyone who’d listen, “My mama’s in that box,” without quite knowing what that meant, except that when she said it, it made the grownups cry.
She remembered other visitors, too: her mama’s sewing circle that brought baskets of food; and the strange women who tucked her papa into bed when he was lonely.
One night, a man with big red ears barged in when her papa was out. He came from the lodge and smelled of raw meat. The man turned the place upside down yelling for someone called Marge to come out and face the music. When he realized the little girl was alone, he said, “When your pa gets back, tell him Slick Skinner dropped by, and he’ll be round again to gut him clean.”
Mary Mabel passed on the news. In a heartbeat, she and her papa were on the run with no more than they’d tossed in a pair of bags.
“Who’s Marge?” she asked.
“A mistake,” he wheezed, dripping sweat so bad the suitcase handles slipped his grip.
They hopped a freight at Peak’s Gully and hit the Sault border by dawn, fleeing into the States, west to Wisconsin. “Know why Skinner’s got elephant ears?” her papa asked. “He never forgets. As long as you live, you see them ears, you head for the hills.”
From that night on, the pair wandered as gypsies through a wilderness of small towns. Sometimes Brewster got odd jobs, and when he did, they’d stay, and when they’d stay, Mary Mabel would meet a new “aunt.” It seemed that aunts were like dandelions: a common nuisance found everywhere, and you couldn’t get rid of them.
They, however, could get rid of you. Inevitably, they’d complain of her papa’s late nights abroad, the upshot being that they’d be out on the street by daybreak. To hear him tell it, it was always her fault — she’d got on their nerves with her games of pretend — that’s what he’d grumble as they’d hitch a ride to the next town and the next aunt. It was like that from north Wisconsin around Lake Michigan, and back into Canada at Detroit — like that all the way to London, Ontario, where they happened upon the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, and its headmistress, the illustrious Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, B.A., a.k.a. her Auntie Horatia.
Mary Mabel checked the clock on the wall. It was time for her to put away the past and end the future. She gave her mama’s teacup a little rub and replaced it on the apple crate.
There were a few loose ends. She figured she owed her papa a clean start, so she did the dishes, wiped the ring from his tub, sewed the small tear on the underarm of his plaid shirt, and put a fresh bottle and a tumbler on the table. Finally, she took pen and paper and sat down to compose her note. She wished her last w
ords could be as beautiful as Mr. Carton’s, but he went to a Paris guillotine to save the husband of the woman he loved, so how could he not be eloquent?
She got to the point: “Dear Papa, Forgive me. Please don’t blame yourself or worry. I’ve gone to a better place. Your loving daughter, Mary Mabel. Postscript. For supper, you’ll find a plate of macaroni and cheese leftovers in the icebox.”
It was all done but the crying; that, she’d leave to others. She propped the note up against the bottle. Then, before procrastination could cool her heels, Mary Mabel took a deep breath, rose smartly, and set off to be with her mama.
The Wichita Kid
Three days before, Grace Rutherford had stood on her front verandah across town and peered down her long nose at the little rascal tethered to the railing. “Timothy Beeford,” she’d said, tapping the right toe of her black hobnailed boot, “do you honestly expect me to believe that after a morning’s church service and Sunday school at First Presbyterian, you’ll be of a mind to attend an evening gospel revival?”
“Yes, ma’am,” her nephew replied, with all the innocence his ten-year-old eyes could muster. “Billy and me, we’ll be with Billy’s mom and dad. I aim to get saved.”
Aunt Grace was having none of it. Since arriving on her doorstep, Timmy had been the very devil. Neighbours shook their heads and muttered, “There goes that Wichita kid.” Well at least they didn’t call him “that Rutherford kid.” She and her husband Albert had had the good sense to steer clear of children; they hadn’t wanted any, and the good Lord had answered their prayers. That is until they’d received that late-night telephone call from Kansas.
It was Albert’s sister Belle on the line — Belle, who’d been sent as a youth delegate to the International Assembly of Presbyterians in Wichita eleven years before, and made hay with the first farmer she set eyes on. Aunt Grace shuddered to think of the missionary funds squandered on her sister-in-law’s disgrace; it had been hard for the Rutherfords to live it down. Now here was Belle, calling from her neighbour’s farm at three in the morning, if you please, begging her and Albert to take in her mistake.
The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Page 1
