“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look so fine.”
“Thanks very much.” She pursed her lips.
“I don’t mean you don’t look good. You always look good.” He tugged his earlobe. “I just mean you look like you’re inside too much. Spend too much time indoors.”
“You think I’m too pale?”
“Not too pale. A little pale. We farmers, you know, we’ve got an obsession with fresh air.” He winked at her, at least she thought it was a wink. “So, how’s your mother doing?”
“Mum’s dandy,” she said. “Just dandy.”
“Then, the problem is clearly one of fresh air. You got skates?”
“Skates? Ice skates?”
“No, I’m thinking the weather is good for roller-skating, maybe. Yes, of course ice skates.”
“I think I had some when I was six, so even if I found them I doubt they’d fit. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter, we’ll rent some. I think it’s a good idea. You and me, we’re going to go skating tonight after work.”
“I don’t want to go skating.”
“You don’t want to?”
“No, David, I don’t want to go ice-skating.”
“So who asked you if you wanted to go?” He looked at her with such mock severity that she was forced to grin at him. “I think we’ll work it out this way: you get to be boss in the store, but me, I get to be boss of the skating rink.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yeah, I think maybe that’s a good plan. Now here’s what we’ll do.” He counted off the points on the tips of his big fingers. “You call your mother, tell her not to make supper for you. Since she is so dandy she won’t mind. We close up the store at the regular time. I feed you a big bowl of my chicken stew, famous in hobo jungles throughout the continent. We go to the Riverdale Park. We skate until you lose that prison pallor. At this time I buy you hot chocolate. I then see you home, a new and revived young woman.”
“I don’t know, David.”
“Irene, you gotta have a life.”
“I have a life.”
“Yeah. But I’m not so sure the life you have is your own.”
David laced the skates on her feet. He drew her up onto the ice, holding her hands. The night was cold. Irene wobbled and gripped David tighter.
“Relax,” he said. “Just relax.”
“You can really skate,” she said, seeing how easy he was on the slippery surface, which threatened to toss her off her feet at any second.
“Not much to do in Sonnenfeld in the winter. We were big hockey fans. We all thought we’d grow up to be King Clancy. Never mind he’s Irish. Never mind he’s as Catholic as the Pope’s pointed hat.”
“I guess there aren’t any Jews in the professional teams, are there?” she said, watching her feet carefully.
“Not yet. But you wait.”
Her foot shot out and he made a grab for her waist and arm, steadying her.
“And you call yourself a Canuck,” he teased. “Nobody’d believe it.”
They circled the rink once and then twice. She had her hand tucked up in his arm and she began to trust the feeling. Their breath formed small white clouds around their faces.
“I used to come skating with my mum and dad,” she said, “when I was really little.”
David took her hand and spun out in front so he was facing her. “Close your eyes,” he said.
“Why?”
“Go on. Close ‘em. Let me lead you. Trust me, I won’t let you fall.”
And so she did, and she held his hands and he skated backwards and drew her around the ice. She tipped her head back and let the cold wind hit her face and the darkness invade her body completely. She felt as if she were flying like a night bird over the clouds. She felt the subtle shift from foot to foot, the roll and dance of this movement, the sturdy heaviness of his hands beneath her weight. He pulled her in a circle, and the noise of the other skaters faded into the background. She kept her eyes closed and it felt as though what was inside was bigger than what was outside, like a crust of something thin and silvery, crisp with cold, covered a vast landscape of star-filled dark inside her. The only thing that connected her to the ground was the slim blade under her feet and the solid flesh at the point where she ended and David began.
David watched her face intently, felt her muscles relax under his touch. He let go of the breath he’d been holding when he saw the frown disappear from her forehead and the smile come to her lips. He smiled himself then, and knew that he had taught her the wonder of letting go. For just a moment he gave her the gift of unburdened lightness.
When Irene got home her nose and her fingers tingled with cold and her ears felt like frozen metal had been held against them. She stamped the snow off her feet and gently rubbed her ears to get the blood flowing. She had stayed out far longer than she’d planned.
Her mother stood at the top of the stairs with a bowl in her hands.
“I thought that would be you,” Margaret said. She had pincurls all over her head, the metal bobby pins sticking out this way and that.
“You’re up late.”
“You know I can’t sleep until I know you’re safely home. Anything can happen to a girl these days. The streets are full of criminals.”
“I wasn’t alone.”
“Two girls! That’s not safe. You shouldn’t go out at night anymore.”
“I was with David.” Irene felt bold and reckless after her wonderful evening.
“David! You said you were going out with Ebbie!”
“She couldn’t come.”
“So you went out with this David?” Hush! Hush! You knew it would happen. I can still control this. Weed out this thistle in our midst.
“Yes. What’s in the bowl?”
“Oatmeal. It’s good for the complexion.”
Irene could feel her mother’s eyes on her, so hungry, so reddened by craving, but for what? More of me, Irene thought. Margaret blocked her way up the stairs and into the dubious refuge of her room.
“I’m going to get a cup of warm milk. Do you want one?” she said, turning away.
The hackles rose on her back as she heard her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Here, Mum, I’ll take that. Did you want milk?” She reached out to take the green glass bowl. Her mother had a dollop of grey sticky oatmeal clinging to her jaw, another by her ear, as though she’d been eating from the bowl like a dog. Where were these thoughts coming from? This was her mother. Irene mustn’t think like that.
“It’s all right. I’ll come with you. Come on, let’s go,” she said, shooing at Irene. “So, did you have a good time?”
“Yes, actually, it was fun.”
“Just David and you,” Margaret said. She handed the milk to Irene, who poured some into a chipped white enamel pot and gave the rest back to her mother.
“Uh-huh.” Irene scattered a pinch of nutmeg in the milk.
“Irene, you can’t think that’s wise.”
“Here’s your milk, Mum. I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.” Irene kissed her mother on the cheek and felt a dab of oatmeal stick to her lip. She brushed it off with distaste.
“I’d just hate to see you get hurt, dear.” Margaret’s voice followed her down the hall. “I can’t imagine what any nice boy would think of you if he knew you were out gallivanting with a Jew.”
“Good night, Mum.”
“You never would listen to good advice. Don’t come crying to me later, then. You’ll see! You’ll see.” She stuck her knuckles in her mouth to stop the words.
“Good night, Mum.” As she closed the door to the bathroom she heard her mother slam a cupboard door.
Next to the sink an oatmeal-covered washcloth lay in a soggy heap. Irene rinsed it off and hung it over the towel rack to dry.
She looked at the large tub with the friendly lion’s feet and thought about running a bath. It would warm her up and give he
r a pool in which to wash away the confusion from her thoughts. Her life. Her mother’s life. Was David right? Did it have to be one or the other? But a bath would mean she wasn’t sleeping and her mother might well be waiting for her when she got out. She filled up the red rubber hot-water bottle with water so hot it scalded when it splashed on her fingers. She went into her bedroom and closed the door as quietly as possible behind her, leaning against it for a moment. She looked at the wooden chair across the room in front of her desk and considered putting it against the door. She gets to do it, so why can’t I?
Irene changed into her pyjamas and put thick socks on her iceblock feet. She slipped between the sheets and held the hot-water bottle to her stomach. Slowly the warmth spread throughout her body, sending goose bumps along her arms and legs.
She heard her mother clump up the stairs and settle into her own bed. Irene rolled onto her side. She folded the sheet over and smoothed the surface, then tucked the edge of the bedclothes up to her chin. This felt right. Some nights it felt right to have her ears under the covers. It was a question of sensing the energies of the night. As a tiny child she’d lain in bed and then decided covers up or covers down. The right choice made the difference as to whether her dreams would be good or bad. Superstitious, she knew, but wasn’t there more out in the world than she was able to make sense of? Look at tonight, for example.
Cold. Wind. Dark. Movement. David’s hands.
Irene found herself considering his hands. They were large hands, and work worn even though he was so young. They were not beautiful, tapered, well-tended hands such as Harry had. She had been surprised to find them so gentle, so deliberate in their actions, as though David knew the strength that lay behind them could crush or crack or mangle, and was careful.
28
July 1937
“They say this is the hottest summer in Canadian history,” said Margaret, reading the paper. She and Irene sat in the kitchen with both the back and front doors open, hoping to catch some sort of a breeze. “It’s 105.1 today.”
“Uh-huh,” said Irene. She fanned herself with a magazine.
“It says here thirty men were arrested for indecent exposure at the city beaches for wearing bathing suits that failed to cover their chests. Imagine that! And people are dying. The newspaper’s publishing lists, like the dead were war casualties.”
I know, I know. Do we have to keep talking about it? It was all anyone talked about all over the city and her customers spoke of nothing else. Even David, usually so energetic, was a melting mass of irritability and exhaustion. Every night he joined the thousands who left their sweat-box houses and apartments to sleep on the grass along the lakeshore at Sunnyside Beach or the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. You couldn’t buy a fan anywhere in the city. Dogs tied out in the yard during the day died from lack of water by the time their owners returned. Three children roasted alive after they had climbed, just for fun, into the family DeSoto and almost immediately fell into a heat-induced stupor.
The crime rate soared, not with crimes that took a lot of planning (for it was too hot to think) or much effort (too hot to scale a wall, or dig a tunnel underneath a bank, or even run from a robbery) but with crimes of dubious passion. The stabbing to the heart that might, in cooler, less nerve-grating weather, have been nothing more than a few broken plates. Neighbours fought over things that had been tolerated for decades. Women slapped their children for misdemeanours that a month before would have been overlooked with a loving eye. Men stood in the middle of the street and threw their hats to the ground and then their fists into the noses of other men, along with a torrent of curse words, and all for the sake of a bumped shoulder or a sideways glance.
Irene and Margaret were too exhausted by the weather to be anything more than irritable. They lay about in torpid heaps sipping cool water and lemon, fanning the fat sluggish flies away and mopping at their sweating necks and arms and chests.
Irene wished she could shut down the shop until it was all over. Shopkeepers stood in their doorways, hoping to catch a whiff of a breeze, and complained that sales were down. Some people fainted over factory belts and machinery, and accidents were plentiful. The hospitals were the busiest places in town, between the damage caused to limbs from these mishaps and cases of heat stroke and heart attack and dehydration. Irene decided the one blessing from the heat wave was an increased demand for ice cream.
For once, their house looked the same as every other house on the street, as people tried to keep the sun at bay by pulling every blind and curtain. Margaret huddled in the darkened recesses.
“You’re not listening,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Irene said. “It’s just been a long, hot day.”
“Well, it’s not a picnic being trapped in this oven alone all day either, I’ll tell you.”
“You don’t have to be trapped here, Mum.”
There was silence, and Irene knew she shouldn’t have said this. Then her mother said something, but so low Irene couldn’t hear it.
“Pardon?”
“I have tried, Irene.”
“I know, Mum.”
Margaret sat with her skirt hiked up, and folded a piece of newspaper into a fan. Irene took a sip of the sweating glass of lemonade in her hand.
“I would have liked a cottage,” said her mother. “A place to look out over the lake. My mother and father used to have a little place they rented every summer on Beaver Lake, did I ever tell you?” And of course she had, but Irene said nothing. “The kids were like little fishes, never out of the water. We picked blueberries and played badminton. Mum and Daddy played whist and cribbage in the evenings.”
“Must have been nice.”
“It was. Everyone was doing so well then. We thought it would go on forever. And then the war came and changed everything, everyone. Did you read the number of dead? As of this morning’s paper there were 458 dead in Ontario, 220 in Toronto alone. We could die in our beds, cooked. Roasted alive. Imagine what it must be like to live like some of the poor, in rooms with no windows, even. Poor little children. I heard a man on the radio today talking about children lying in wet mud under a porch to get cool, like little dogs.”
“We’ll never get any sleep in the house tonight,” Irene agreed, somewhat surprised by her mother’s empathy for children she didn’t know. “Lots of people are going down to the beach to sleep. Thousands, in fact. What do you say we join them? At least there might be a cool breeze down by the water.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Anything’s possible, Mum. You just have to believe it.” But not even Irene did.
“I couldn’t.”
“You could if you wanted to.”
“What do you know?”
“All right, Mum. Forget it.”
They sat in silence for some minutes, and Irene was halfway into a heat-induced doze when she heard her mother’s voice.
“I’m not sleeping with a bunch of strangers.”
“Nobody’s a stranger in this heat. It’s too hot for strangers.”
“It’s too far.”
“Well, what say we go down to the Gardens, then?” It was important to keep her voice calm. “I passed Mr. Steedman on the street yesterday and he said he takes his family down there to sleep now, like camping out. He said it’s fun.”
“Mr. Steedman does that?” Her mother held Mr. Steedman up as the pinnacle of propriety, had done ever since that night so long ago when he had brought her dad home in a state best not discussed.
“Yes. We’d see him there.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, please, Mum. Just for a half an hour, even, we’ll see how it goes. It’s only down the street and if it’s not proper, in any small way, even, we can come right back. I’ll bring down the mattress from the lawn chair for you. It’ll be better than sweltering to death here, you have to admit.”
“If we leave the house, robbers might come. This is the perfect time for them. They know
people aren’t at home.”
“What do we have? What would anyone want to steal?”
Margaret looked around the kitchen as though she hadn’t seen it in a long time. “We don’t have much, do we.”
“It would be all right, Mum. We could do this.”
Margaret put her fingers over her lips. “All right, then. I could try. Irene? Yes, I think I’ll try.”
It came as a shock to both of them.
For the first time in five years, Margaret MacNeil walked down the front porch of her house, along the path to the sidewalk and kept on going. And although she had a frown of concentration on her brow, there was a slight smile on her lips. Neither of them commented on the novelty. They walked quietly, Margaret carrying a pair of pillows and two light sheets, and Irene lugging a blanket for herself and the lawn-chair mattress for her mother.
They set their pallet on the grass a respectable distance from the other relief-seekers. They saw the Steedmans not far away, their two boys long-legged teenagers now. Irene waved and Mrs. Steedman waved back and put a hand on her husband’s arm, smiling. Mr. Steedman smiled as well and touched his forefinger to his temple in salute. Margaret nodded to them, shy. All around, people quietly settled in for the night, a lumpy carpet of bodies across the lawns. Babies cried and were hushed. Occasional laughter was heard, for it was almost festive here. Children, excited by the strange carnival atmosphere of sleeping under the stars with so many strangers, wanted to run and play, but were so exhausted by the effort of getting through the sizzling day that even they floated toward sleep without protest.
Irene lay on the sheet, with a portion folded over her legs for modesty’s sake. Her mother was silent, and Irene didn’t care why. It only mattered that her mother, with surprisingly little protest, had come out in the world. It was a miracle. Irene gazed up at the dome of stars and offered thanks to whomever might be listening. Margaret sat, stiffly leaning against a tree trunk, her hands clasped in her lap, her feet straight out in front of her. Her eyes roamed over the park, as though she were a sentinel on her watch. Irene reached over and gave her mother’s birdlike hand a reassuring squeeze. Her mother patted her hand and smiled at her.
The Stubborn Season Page 30
