Growing Up Ivy

by Peggy Dymond Leavey

  “Want to know the name of the story I’m working on this morning?” she asked.

  “All right,” came the indifferent reply.

  “It’s called ‘The Story of Ivy and Frances.’ I actually started it when I was at Gloria’s, but I forgot those pages back at her place.”

  It was impossible to gauge her father’s interest, because his expression didn’t change. He kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  “It’s about Momma and me and some of our adventures.”

  Still nothing from Alva.

  Ivy had come to believe that her father was just too polite to question her about the last twelve years of her life. It seemed only natural that he’d be curious.

  “Before Mrs. Bingley’s, Momma and I moved quite a bit,” Ivy continued. “One time, when the rent money was overdue, and the landlady was banging on the door of our room, the only way out was through the window. Would you like to hear what I wrote about that?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Ivy began reading:

  Someone was pounding on the door. Ivy and her mother, Frannie, knew it was Mrs. Potts. “Get your things together, Ivy,” Frannie whispered. Frannie’s real name was Frances.

  Frannie put everything into their suitcase and two of Mrs. Potts’s pillowcases.

  “I gave you fair warning, Mrs. Chalmers,” said Mrs. Potts, who was still on the other side of the door. “I can rent this room to someone who can pay me on time.”

  “Someone who likes rats and roaches,” said Frannie. She pushed the window up and set their things out onto the fire escape. “Come on, Ivy,” she said.

  Ivy watched her mother climb over the windowsill. Ivy was a little frightened because she was only six years old. But as long as Frannie was with her she knew everything would be all right. So Ivy climbed out the window too.

  In a minute her mother was standing down on the ground with the suitcase. Ivy climbed slowly down the iron stairs. But when she got to the last one she saw that there was only a rope between the end of the fire escape and the ground.

  “Toss me the bundles, Ivy,” Frannie said, and Ivy did. “Now jump.”

  “It’s too far,” cried Ivy. “I’m scared.”

  “There’s nothing to be scared of. I am right here to catch you.”

  Mrs. Potts had her head out the window upstairs and was shouting at them.

  “Jump, Ivy,” Frannie kept saying. “Close your eyes. Pretend that you are Tinker Bell and that you can fly. Come on now.”

  “I’m sending the bailiff after you!” Mrs. Potts yelled. “You can’t get away without paying!”

  Ivy closed her eyes and flew into her mother’s arms, knocking her down when she landed. They both rolled over and over on the ground. No one was hurt, and soon they were both laughing. They picked up their bundles and walked away to find a new place to live.

  Alva Chalmers was shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard, but he said not a word.

  “Well, do you think it’s a good story?”

  “Is it the truth, or a made-up story?”

  “Oh, no. It really happened. It’s pretty funny, don’t you think?”

  “Funny? You said you were scared.”

  “Only at first. When it was all over we laughed and laughed. Momma found us another room, and one day we went back over to Mrs. Potts’s with the money we owed her. And her two pillowcases.”

  Unexpectedly, Alva pulled back on the reins. “Whoa, Dora.” The horse drew the caravan to the side of the road.

  “We’ll stop here and fill up the water jugs,” Alva said. He climbed over the seat and into the caravan to collect the jugs.

  “Frannie never did have much common sense,” he said, before jumping to the ground.

  Ivy passed the empty jugs down to her father and sank onto the seat again, the disappointment she felt at his reaction to her story mingled with confusion over his last remark.

  It came as a cruel surprise to her that there were some stories she could not share with her father. The knowledge that she would have to be careful, to weigh what she told him, made her feel a little sad, as if she were cheating him out of part of her own story. Now she would tell him only what he wanted to hear.

  It was a several minutes before Ivy could bring herself to join her father at the spring. She helped him carry the water back.

  ***

  The July sun grew hotter and the roads more dusty. The ice in the caravan’s icebox disappeared in no time, and they left a steady trickle of water on the dry road behind them.

  Late each afternoon they would look for a place to stop for the night where they could take the washing-up bag and have a good soak in the cooling water of a lake or river.

  Alva had learned from the previous owner of the caravan the location of the best streams to fish for brook trout that hid in the shadows of overhanging trees. Often, Ivy woke to find him cooking a sizzling pan of fish for their breakfast.

  In the evening they stayed outside long after they had finished supper, letting the smoke from the fire keep the mosquitoes at bay. Only when the cool night air wrapped damp arms around their shoulders would they say goodnight to Dora, drop the bug netting over the doorway, and climb into their beds.

  Ivy kept her mind busy day and night, thinking of the best way to help her father learn to read.

  “You have to sound the word out, Papa,” she said. “I know it’s very confusing. The letter C has so many different sounds. In this word, cat, it has a hard sound, like K. Sometimes it depends what other letters are in the rest of the word. CH sounds different in chicken than it does in character. But don’t worry; those aren’t our words for today.”

  She worked at combining simple words into short sentences, and when her father had learned to recognize those words, they read the sentences together.

  One night, near the end of July, she fell asleep to the satisfying sound of her Papa slowly reading the sentences that she had strung together that day to make a little story.

  11

  Anticipation

  Ivy had been looking forward to the Travellers’ Fair ever since her father first spoke of it. It was to be the climax of their summer adventure.

  Every year, near the town of Birch Hills, on the first weekend in August, a large meeting of travelling salesmen would take place. From what Alva had been told, this gathering of peddlers, and however many family members they could muster, would camp together outside Birch Hills, setting out their wares so that everyone for miles around could come and search for a bargain.

  “They tell me everyone has a grand time,” Alva said. “The travellers sell to the public and trade amongst themselves, too. There’ll be a real big party on the last night, to celebrate all the sales they’ve made over the weekend. Some folks bring musical instruments along. So, there’ll be singing and dancing, too.”

  “A party, Papa? Does everyone get to go?”

  “The whole camp, they tell me.”

  Even though she knew that when the fair was over Alva planned to head home again, Ivy began counting off the days. After the meagre sales of the last little while she was sure the event would help to buck up her father’s flagging spirits. Sales on the road were not as good as Alva had expected.

  “Seems like folks just aren’t buying new shoes,” he said to Ivy one day. “Everyone’s just making do with what they have. Same as you and me, I guess.”

  “It’s summertime, Papa.” Ivy stretched her legs out and twiddled her bare toes. She hadn’t worn shoes in days. “Wait till people start talking about the fall, or kids get ready to go to school again. It’s sure to get better.”

  Sometimes Alva took pity on a family where one member really needed to have shoes to go looking for work, but had no money to pay for them. If their need was greater than his, he’d a
gree to barter, and he and Ivy would have fresh eggs for a while, or some crisp, red beets that tasted like the earth they came from.

  “But tomorrow, it has to be a cash sale,” Alva said one evening, as he peeled the skin off a boiled beet and plopped it onto Ivy’s plate. She had to spear the slippery globe with her fork to keep it from sliding off onto the ground.

  Brilliant red beets or a basket of warm biscuits, no matter how mouth-watering, would not make up for the pair of men’s oxfords Alva would later have to pay for himself.

  Each day now, as he walked back to the wagon after making a call, Alva’s pace grew slower and slower. He’d climb back up to the seat as if that climb was the hardest thing in the world to do.

  Ivy felt it was her job to administer cheering words. For weeks she tried to keep him optimistic that at the next farm, or on the next day, he would make a sale. “And just nine more days till the Travellers’ Fair, Papa.”

  Before he and Ivy could settle into their beds each night, Alva insisted upon rearranging the boxes of shoes in the caravan. But no matter how they stacked them, the boxes still lined both sides of the wagon, and they had hardly made a dent in the load that was in the cart behind.

  “It’s bound to be better when we get to the fair next week,” Ivy said. “I’m sure everyone will remember from other years that there will be a caravan filled with shoes for sale. Maybe they will even be waiting in line when we drive in.”

  They caught some little trout for supper one evening, at a stream that Alva had been on the lookout for. He cleaned the fish at the edge of the stream, burying the entrails before he and Ivy climbed back up to their campsite.

  Almost tenderly, Alva laid the fish in a pan of flour, turning them once to coat their speckled sides. Watching the care he took in preparing their meal, Ivy felt a sudden rush of affection for him.

  When Alva leaned over to set the fish in the frying pan that sputtered on the fire, Ivy put her head against his back.

  “I love you, Papa,” she murmured. She felt the muscles in his back tense.

  “I’m not very good at all those love words,” he said, and gave a small cough to cover his embarrassment.

  “That’s all right, Papa.” She went and sat across from him on the round stones that circled the fire pit. Both father and daughter became intent on watching their supper cook. After a minute or two, Ivy ventured, “You loved my mother once, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Least, I thought I did.”

  “Then why, Papa? Why did you go away?”

  “It wasn’t like that, Ivy.”

  “Can you tell me about it, Papa?”

  Alva flipped the fish in the pan, searing them on the other side. Ivy waited.

  “I lost my first wife,” he said slowly. “She came from a farm not too far from where I grew up.” He sat down again on the stone.

  “I never knew her then, though. Didn’t meet her till she came to Toronto one time to visit a friend. Soon after, we got married — then she got real sick and she died.”

  He looked up at Ivy. “That’s when I met your mother. She was so full of life, like a young kid. Frannie wanted to help me get over my grief. But after a while, I could see that I was just spoiling her happiness.”

  He took a deep breath. “It wasn’t all bad. There was lots of work in those days, near the end of the war. I wasn’t skilled at anything in particular, but I was never out of work, neither. Worked at a munitions factory for a while. Then we all heard talk that the best jobs to be had were in the mines up north. I had to go when I got the chance.

  “Your mother had been working for a lady, and she didn’t want to leave. Said a mining town was no place for a woman, and besides, she figured the nearest theatre would be hundreds of miles away. By then, Frannie was talking about being an actress. To tell the truth, Frannie and me had pretty much parted company by the time I left for the north. We had nothing in common anymore.”

  “Did you know about me, Papa?” Ivy hated to interrupt this unexpected flow of conversation, but had to know the answer all the same.

  Alva’s eyes were sad. “Believe me, child, I had no idea. Else I never would have gone.

  “I did come back a couple of times, but Frannie was always too busy to see me. When I came back to Toronto for good, I tried looking for her. But like you said, she moved a lot.

  “Then, purely by chance, about a year ago, I met her friend Gloria on a streetcar. She told me I had a half-grown daughter. I could hardly believe it.”

  “Did that make you happy?”

  “You bet it did! I begged Gloria to tell me where you and your mother were living, but she’d promised Frannie she wouldn’t. She did say that she would try to persuade Frannie to get in touch with me herself.”

  “And she never did?”

  Alva shook his head. “I guess your mother wanted to keep you all to herself. Maybe she was punishing me. Maybe I deserved it.”

  He lifted the pan from the fire, balancing it on a stone. “Well, you can just imagine how surprised I was to get to Mother’s last month and find you there.”

  “It was the best surprise ever,” Ivy said. “For both of us.”

  When the fish were ready, Ivy passed Alva the tin plates. “I really think, Papa, that in her heart, Momma wanted us to meet.”

  Alva slid one of the fish onto Ivy’s plate. “I don’t know, Ivy. You can think that if it makes you feel better. It was always hard for me to figure out what was going on in Frannie’s head. It was so full of dreams. I know that I disappointed her. She was hoping for Prince Charming, and what she got was me.”

  12

  Trouble

  Honk! Honk!

  The driver of a car that had been caught behind the caravan for miles was losing his patience. He’d sounded his horn several times to let them know his opinion of their slow pace. Unfortunately, the road was not much wider than a track and there was no room to pull over. Still, the driver tried numerous times to pass.

  “There’s a wide place up ahead, Papa, on the left,” Ivy said, pointing.

  Unwilling to wait a minute longer, the driver suddenly swerved out and around them, clipping the side of the two-wheeled cart. He sped away in an angry cloud of dust, without stopping to see what damage he might have inflicted.

  Almost immediately there was an ominous scraping sound, and Dora began to struggle with the load. “Whoa, girl!” Alva cried. He and Ivy jumped down from the wagon to investigate.

  To their horror, they discovered that the car with its impatient driver had broken the wheel on the left side of the cart. The cart had dropped onto its axle, causing it to dig deeply into the gravel and spill its contents onto the road. Loose shoes and broken packages lay in the dust.

  Without wasting any time, Alva unhooked the cart, and Ivy led Dora and the caravan safely off the road on the other side.

  His face ashen, Alva stood back and surveyed the damage. There was a spare wheel for the caravan, tied up underneath it, but there was nothing to replace the smaller wheel of the cart.

  Together they dragged the crippled vehicle into the long grass, and both worked feverishly to clear the road of shoes. Luckily, only one other car came along, and he gave them a wide berth.

  “Now what, Papa?” Ivy asked.

  Alva combed his fingers through his damp hair before picking his hat up from the road. “I think we’d best carry on to the next farm,” he said. “See if we can find someone there to help me fix the wheel.”

  Ivy offered to wait right there, guarding the loose contents of the cart, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. Before they could go for help, they had to load all the shoes and the pieces of the shattered wheel into the caravan.

  There were few houses on this road, and when at last they turned in at a farm gate, Ivy caught sight through the trees of a barn with a col
lapsed roof. “I don’t think anyone lives here anymore, Papa,” she said.

  The lane was so narrow that they were forced to keep going until they reached the end, branches scraping the sides of the caravan all the way along.

  Ivy’s heart sank even further when the house appeared, its front door hanging open above a crumbling stoop. Birds darted out through broken windows at their approach.

  She climbed down to look for a place wide enough for Alva to turn the wagon around. It took three tries before Dora and the caravan were facing back the way they’d come. Ivy tried not to think how late they were going to be for the fair.

  Looking back over her shoulder as they rolled away, she wondered what might have befallen the family that had abandoned the house. Were they victims of the hard times her grandmother spoke of so often?

  They were still several miles from the town of Birch Hills when they saw a farm wagon, drawn by a pair of chestnut horses, coming toward them, a man and woman sitting at the front. Drawing nearer, Ivy saw that the wagon carried crates and boxes that served as seats for several young children.

  “This is the way to the Travellers’ Fair, isn’t it?” Alva called out. The wagon came alongside, and the other driver halted his team.

  “We haven’t seen a sign for Birch Hills since we cut off onto this road yesterday,” Alva said. “We’re headed to the Travellers’ Fair. I know we’re late, but we ran into some trouble.”

  “Well, you missed it,” the other man declared.

  “It’s over?”

  “Not exactly.” All the occupants of the other wagon began to talk at once.

  “There is no fair.”

  “We all got turned away.”

  “They made us pack up and go.”

  “We were the last ones to leave,” the driver said, “’cos one of the youngsters was real sick.” His wife was holding on her lap a small child with flaming red cheeks. As if on cue, the child gave a harsh cough and buried its face against the woman’s breast.

  “What happened?” Alva asked.