Growing Up Ivy

by Peggy Dymond Leavey

  With the end of her travels with her father in sight, Ivy’s thoughts turned more and more to Frannie. Would she have come to Maud’s place while they were away?

  Part of her hoped that Frannie would already be waiting for her at Maud’s, proving to her grandmother that her mother had not deserted her.

  Ivy had dreamed one night that she was looking for her mother, searching the empty nighttime streets, the filthy alleys behind the tenements. The dream had seemed so real that Ivy thought, even on waking, that she’d heard her mother’s voice tell her not to try to find her. But it was only a dream, and Ivy knew that if Frannie had already come to Larkin, she would not go home without her. She would be waiting.

  If she hadn’t come yet, at the very least there would be lots of letters for Ivy at 54 Arthur Road, news of Frannie and when they could go home together.

  Where her father was concerned, Ivy was determined not to lose him again. “Let’s make a pact, Papa,” she said, hearing him come in to his bed at the back of the caravan that night. “Let’s agree to keep in touch always. After you drop me off and take the caravan back to the shoe factory, I know you’ll be looking for work. But promise me you and I will spend time together, once we’re all back in Toronto.”

  “Whenever we can,” Alva said. Ivy heard him groan as he settled his bones on the narrow bench. “That I can promise, child.”

  15

  The Journey Ends

  Two days out of Larkin it began to rain. Ivy and her father hadn’t seen much rain that summer, only showers that came and went within a few minutes, leaving rainbows in a sky so wide that, for the first time in her life, Ivy got to see both the beginning and the end.

  It seemed to her now as if all of nature was sighing with relief over the gift of rain — the trees grown heavy with summer, the parched fields, even the grey weeds that struggled for a place at the edge of the road.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Papa?” Ivy stood and held her face and arms up to the rain, and Alva, laughing out loud, tossed his dust-covered hat over his shoulder into the wagon.

  The rain continued without let-up for the rest of the journey. Water slid off Dora’s back in sheets and pounded on the roof of the caravan till Ivy couldn’t hear her own voice.

  Alva, who had to sit out on the seat in order to drive, was often soaked through, in spite of the rain cape Ivy hung over his shoulders. She felt guilty about staying warm and dry inside with her kitten and wished she could trade places with him.

  They had cleared the shoe boxes from around the little stove in the caravan when the rain began, and Alva had lit it for the first time that night, to cook their supper and to dry his clothing.

  ***

  It was still raining when they pulled up in front of the narrow grey house on Arthur Road. To Ivy, peering hopefully out over Alva’s shoulder, the place looked the same as it had when they’d left. There was nothing to indicate that her mother might be inside.

  “Come on then, Ivy.” Alva raised the cape over his head and drew her under its shelter.

  There was no sense waiting for the rain to let up. They made a run for the house, throwing open the gate, splashing through the puddles, and leaping onto the front porch.

  Maud appeared inside the screen door. “My good heavens!” she said. “Just look at the pair of you. A couple of drowned rats, if ever I saw one.”

  “Have you ever, Grandmother?” Ivy said, gasping. “Seen a drowned rat? I have and it’s horrible. It had fallen into the rain barrel, in the alley behind the diner. It was all swoll up and …”

  “I see the girl hasn’t managed to talk herself out yet,” Maud said, holding the door with one outstretched arm for the dripping pair to enter.

  “I guess Mama’s not here yet,” Ivy said when Maud insisted she go upstairs without another word and put on some dry clothing. “I’ll be back down to get my mail.”

  Hurrying downstairs again, Ivy found her father and grandmother in the kitchen. “How many letters did I get while I was away?” she asked eagerly.

  Maud was spreading Alva’s suit jacket on a rack behind the stove. “Not a single one, I’m afraid.”

  “Grandmother, please don’t tease me. I’ve read Momma’s first letter so many times that the folds wore through. There must be more.”

  “Guess your mother’s so busy in New York she doesn’t have time to write letters,” Alva said. “Could be she’s in lots and lots of those plays by now.”

  Ivy sank onto one of the chairs at the table. It couldn’t be true. “But that would mean she won’t be back for ages,” she said. “Why did she have to go so far away to become a star?”

  “We’ll worry about that later, Ivy,” Maud said. “For now, I’ve got a real nice pot of soup made here, and your father’s going to have a bite to eat.”

  She set a steaming bowl on the table in front of Ivy and handed her a spoon. “Eat,” she said. “If there’s a little left you can feed it to that cat of yours. Though no one ever thought to ask me if I wanted a cat in the house.”

  Ivy bent her face over the bowl, closing her eyes to keep in the tears, inhaling the fragrance of vegetables and broth.

  As soon as Alva had eaten, he set off down the street to see if one of the local merchants would take the shoes from his paid-up stock off his hands. He would be leaving in the morning.

  Ivy was drying the supper dishes when Maud unexpectedly turned from the sink and left the room. When she returned, she handed Ivy the envelope from Frannie’s one and only letter.

  Ivy frowned. “What’s this? You said there were no …”

  “It’s from the first letter. Something you need to see,” Maud said. “Did you have a good look at that postmark when you got it?”

  “I don’t remember.” Ivy set the tea towel aside.

  Now that was strange. Frannie’s envelope bore a Canadian stamp — a two-cent Canadian stamp. The name of the postal station where it had been mailed was smudged and almost illegible, but “Ontario, Canada,” was as plain as could be.

  “I don’t understand,” Ivy said.

  “Your mother’s letter didn’t come from New York at all, Ivy. It was mailed somewhere here in Ontario.”

  “It couldn’t have been. Why wouldn’t I have seen that before?”

  “Well, it was the letter you were most interested in,” Maud said. “You left the envelope here on the table, and I put it in with the scrap paper. When I was tidying things after you and Alva left, I found it again.”

  “I don’t understand how Momma’s letter could have come from Ontario. How could that be possible?”

  “I’ve had all summer to ask myself the same question,” Maud said. “Maybe Frannie never went to New York City in the first place.”

  “I don’t believe that! Of course she went. Someone else must have brought the letter back here to mail. That’s it! Maybe Gloria went to visit, and Momma gave her the letter to mail when she got home.”

  “That could have happened,” Maud said.

  “I’m sure that’s the way it was. It makes perfect sense to me.” And before her grandmother could suggest otherwise, Ivy hung up the towel and left the room. “I’m going out to say hello to my chickens.”

  “You can let them out into the yard,” Maud said, before the door closed between them, “now that it’s stopped raining.”

  Swinging open the wire gate on the chicken coop, Ivy greeted each of the ten hens by name, relieved that her grandmother had not murdered any of them while she’d been away.

  She stood back and watched the hens walk their peculiar walk — pecking and scratching, bobbing and nodding — down the rows of the now depleted garden.

  ***

  Ivy was up early the next morning, so that she could spend the last few minutes with her father. She sat memorizing the lines in his face while he ate his
breakfast.

  “Remember to keep practising your reading, Papa,” Ivy said. “You don’t need to wait till you’ve got a book to read. You have to read everything — road signs, notices, everything.” Lifting a familiar red package from beside the stove, she set it in front of him.

  “Red River Cereal,” Alva read. “Contains wheat, rye, and flax.”

  Out on the front porch, Ivy bade him a tearful farewell, wringing more promises from him that the minute he found a place to live, he’d let her know. And because Maud, too, was depending on him, Ivy trusted that he would keep in touch.

  “You are my one bright light, Ivy,” Alva said from the bottom step.

  “I made you happy, didn’t I, Papa?”

  “Indeed you did, child. Happier’n I’ve been in a long while.”

  ***

  With Alva gone, Ivy had to face the other possible explanation for the Ontario postmark on Frannie’s letter. Had her mother been playing her old game of “let’s pretend” when she wrote to say that she was enjoying life in New York City? Is that what Maud had also been thinking? That she’d been in Ontario all along?

  “You can live wherever you want to,” Frannie used to say. “You are the one who gets to decide.” Every time they’d moved from one miserable rooming house to the next, she’d ask, “Where will it be this time?” And the new place would become Shangri-La, or some other make-believe paradise for the two of them, where no hardships would ever be acknowledged.

  Frannie’s letter had talked about the sights of New York City, the tall buildings, the Statue of Liberty, the bustling city. But who hadn’t heard of those attractions? Was Frannie ever even there?

  So many questions. All she knew for sure was that her mother had gone somewhere … somewhere away from her only daughter. And it was up to Ivy to find her.

  If anyone had any news of Frannie it would be Gloria Klein. Gloria had never had a telephone, but neither had Maud. Ivy sat down at once and wrote a letter to her mother’s best friend. She didn’t know the number of Gloria’s building, but how many Gloria Kleins could there be on Coxwell Avenue in Toronto?

  The letter came back by return mail, stamped “Unknown.”

  “Of course, she’s not unknown!” Ivy was indignant. “Lots of people know Gloria. Why didn’t they just ask someone? All her customers at the diner adore her.

  “That’s it: The diner! Oh, what was it called? It was right there, on the corner.” She slapped her forehead, looking helplessly at her grandmother. “Was it Maxie’s? Or Manny’s?”

  “One time, years ago, I ate at a place in Toronto called McNeilly’s,” Maud said.

  “No, too many letters,” Ivy said, counting them on her fingers. “Half the lights on the sign were burnt out, and no one ever replaced them. I don’t think I ever knew for sure what the place was called. We just called it Gloria’s diner.”

  “It’ll come to you,” Maud said. “And you will kindly keep that cat of yours off the table.”

  Ivy tucked Merlin under her arm. “He’s just a kitten, Grandmother.” But if he was ever going to get along with her grandmother, Ivy was going to have to teach Merlin some manners.

  It was another name that popped into Ivy’s head in the middle of the night: Johnny Dracup. Dracup’s Bake Shop on Queen Street. She’d write to Johnny.

  Ivy was sure that the man would remember her mother. She had sometimes suspected that Johnny had been sweet on Frannie. There was a good chance that he had heard some news of her.

  “Dear Mr. Dracup,” the letter began. “My name is Ivy Chalmers …”

  PART TWO

  Charlie

  16

  Charlie’s Story

  The 1930s were no easier on the country’s farmers than on anyone else, but Rena Bayliss and her teenaged nephew, Charlie, residents of the third concession north of Larkin, were used to “making do.”

  Rena and her aging father, Garnet, had sold off most of the family farm back in 1928 when Charlie was twelve, keeping the larger of the two houses on the property and three acres of land. Besides raising chickens, Rena grew all her own vegetables, earned a meagre wage at the canning factory in season, and took in sewing.

  Charlie’s mother had died when he was still an infant, leaving him with no memory of her at all. The only thing the boy owned that had once belonged to his mother was a silver hand mirror.

  He had been just four when he discovered the mirror in one of the drawers in his aunt’s sewing machine.

  “What does it say on the back?” he had asked.

  Rena removed her feet from the treadle of the machine and read to him the words engraved in the tarnished silver. “It says, ‘To Dottie. Forever, Alva.’ You should have that mirror, Charlie,” she said solemnly. “It belonged to your mother.”

  It was much later when Charlie learned that, although his mother had been married to the man who’d given her the mirror, he was not Charlie’s father.

  Charlie never met his real father. He’d gone away to fight in the Great War and had died in a muddy field somewhere in France, outside a town whose name Charlie couldn’t even pronounce.

  Now past sixty, and her coronet of braids completely white, Rena Bayliss had never married, but had always considered Charlie her own.

  “You were our baby, born right here in this house,” she used to tell the little boy, who sat on the floor beside her, building tractors and wagons with bits of cardboard and empty spools of thread, while she did alterations for her customers.

  “Oh, your grandparents and I were heartbroken all right, when the two of you went off to live with Dottie’s new husband in the city. But Dottie was happy, and she’d married a kind man. Your poor mother, God rest her soul, got sick and died within the year. And so we got you back again.”

  Rena would squint at the cloth her fingers were guiding under the needle, her feet rocking the treadle while she spoke.

  “We lost track of the man after that, but I do remember his grief at losing Dottie. He knew you belonged with us, though, and he went back to Toronto alone. Climbed right back into the hearse that had brought you and your mother home.

  “We saw him just one more time after that. A friend had driven him and his new bride over to Larkin to meet his mother. While they were there, he came out to the farm, wanting to see you. He was real disappointed that you didn’t remember him.

  “He told us then that he had remarried. I didn’t get to meet the woman, though. She stayed outside in the car.”

  ***

  All day an easterly wind had whipped snow into drifts across the yard behind the Bayliss house. Now, at five o’clock, it was so cold out there that Charlie thought the bottom might fall out of the thermometer on the tin Shell sign nailed to the side of the barn. His feet felt like two blocks of ice, but still Charlie delayed entering the house. Twice Aunt Rena had come to the back door to call him in for supper.

  When he could stand the cold no longer, he knocked the snow off the metal shovel and set it inside the back kitchen. “All done, Aunt Rena,” he said, seeing her there. “I took those ashes out and cleared the path to the outhouse again. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “I don’t know what’s got into you, Charlie,” Rena said. “I never saw you work so hard at your chores as you have this winter.”

  The boy reached over his aunt’s head for the bottle of preserved plums she’d come for, and handed it down to her.

  Rena entered the warm kitchen ahead of him. “All that wood chopped and stacked,” she marvelled. “My land, it’s like someone lit a fire under you.”

  Miss Taylor, the schoolteacher who boarded with them, had already taken her seat at the supper table. “Charlie’s very helpful in the classroom, too,” she said, as if he wasn’t standing right behind her, washing up under the pump at the kitchen sink. “He’s the first one on his fee
t to put wood in the stove or to fill the gasoline lamps.”

  Charlie felt his face turn as red as his hair. The other boys in school teased him mercilessly about the pretty, young boarder, shouldering him off the road into the snowbanks on the way home, hooting with laughter.

  “Ah, you’re all just jealous,” Charlie would shout, scooping up handfuls of snow and pelting them with snowballs. They could poke fun at him all they liked. Charlie knew something they didn’t: Miss Taylor was engaged to be married. She’d be gone as soon as school was out for the summer.

  ***

  Charlie Bayliss’s favourite pastime on warm summer evenings was playing softball with the other boys from the area. Charlie could connect with the ball with such force that he’d hit it way out past left field, or take everyone by surprise with a mean line drive.

  “Tighten up, guys,” the other team would yell, whenever Charlie made a hit that got him on base. They were all familiar with the way Charlie would dance on and off the bases, teasing the pitcher into throwing the ball, so that Charlie could attempt one of his spectacular slides into home plate.

  The players had organized themselves into two teams, the “Farmers” and the “Townies.” Charlie was a Farmer, and his friend Delbert Coon, the fair-haired, raw-boned youth whose father owned a grocery store on the main street in Larkin, was a Townie.

  The boys could always count on someone bringing a softball to the game, and they’d share any gloves that could be found. But you couldn’t play serious baseball in bare feet, and Charlie had already worn out his only pair of shoes.

  Aunt Rena had found him an old pair of Grandpa’s boots to wear. The left one had a piece of corrugated cardboard tucked down inside to cover a hole in the sole.

  “They’ll have to do, Charlie,” Rena said, “till you can save up enough money to buy yourself a proper pair of running shoes.”

  Just in time, Edwin Fennell, the man who’d bought the Bayliss property, came around to Rena’s back door, asking to hire Charlie.