Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  Her handbag lay open on her lap as she sat on a bench, and inside it was the nest of blue silk. There was more than enough time for her to catch the trolley and ride as far as the park gates and return downtown. Enough time to ring the doorbell, to deliver the scarf and an explanation. Enough time for a cup of tea, in the unlikely event that Emily Ashburn requested that she stay for one. Time enough, but the determination to humiliate herself was beginning to wane.

  Across the street a Union Jack fluttered from a standard in front of the Winnipeg Auditorium, and Sara’s attention was drawn to it, and to a woman about to enter the building. As she reached for the door handle, sheets of paper came flying out from under her arm and went skittering end over end along the sidewalk. The woman dashed about collecting them and was soon joined by other people, the men among them stiff-legged and awkward as they ran in fits and starts. Their laughter at being caught like children at play rose above the sounds of vehicles passing in the street. Sara was left feeling hollow after her own laughter subsided, knowing that, given a similar circumstance, she would let the papers blow away rather than risk looking foolish.

  The trolley slowed to a stop in the street, but she resisted the impulse to gather up her shopping bags and push through to the front of the crowd. While the passengers began filing from the trolley she remained perched on the edge of the bench so that her feet would touch the ground. Her plastic overshoes were mud-splattered and so were her legs. I didn’t go because my stockings were dirty, she imagined explaining to Coral when she got back to the bus depot, and she cringed inwardly, anticipating Coral’s reply, Honey, that’s flimsy talk.

  Sara always dressed carefully for a shopping trip to Winnipeg, but this morning she’d been more particular than usual: a navy shantung suit, its jacket open at the neck to reveal the ruffled collar of her blouse. The short jacket and long narrow skirt made her look and feel taller. Thanks to the sewing talents of her younger sister, Annie, the suit was stylish and expensive-looking. She knew Emily Ashburn would appreciate her appearance, the wrist-length gloves, the pink scalloped-brimmed hat with its half-veil.

  However. While eating lunch at a coffee bar, she had managed to get a spot of mayonnaise on her skirt. That and the mud-speckled stockings made her less than what she had hoped to present to her former employer. She decided now that she would board the trolley car on the condition that she wasn’t required to stand. If all the seats were taken, she’d do the rest of her shopping and return to the bus depot early. She’d feed her curiosity on the sights there, the different types of people coming and going, the regulars, the low-downs shuffling in the front door and out the departure gates, returning again and again. Sometimes Sara recognized a woman from another town waiting for a bus, or from Union Plains, or one of the nuns who travelled frequently between Winnipeg and Ste. Agathe. She would ponder what they wore under their habits, whether or not they were having their period, if they were bald, and what they had to talk about so animatedly.

  The first shall be last, and the last first, Sara recalled a line of scripture as she waited for the people ahead of her to board the trolley. She wouldn’t fool herself into thinking that she wanted to board the trolley out of a desire to be last; rather she hoped that all the seats would be taken. This was not the case, she realized, as she stepped up into the coach and saw an empty seat beside a window. She sat down thinking that there couldn’t be a clearer sign; her fate was sealed.

  The trolley lurched and glided through stop after stop, until the buildings and pedestrians were fewer and far between. Moments later the trolley entered Crescent Road, an archway of greenery. The man beside her opened the window, and she recalled that the silk scarf felt like a moist breeze against her skin. I’ve been meaning to return it for ages. How it wound up among my things, I don’t know. A mistake. She would offer Emily Ashburn an explanation, not a confession. What sin had she committed in failing to return the scarf? Wanting what didn’t belong to her, coveting?

  But there had been more to it than that.

  Male voices drifted up the stairwell from the sunroom and Sara stood listening, her hands trembling. Beyond the dressing-room window she saw Emily Ashburn crossing the lawn, at her side the man who’d come to tend the garden. She turned to the dressing table, startled by the reflection; the seventeen-year-old round-faced girl looking back at her; the muslin band flattening her hair against her forehead, the band’s centre rising in a scalloped crown; the uniform, a crisp white apron over a black dress. Sara had cream-fed cheeks, Emily Ashburn teased, country girl cheeks, and a high complexion, unlike the pasty-faced city girls.

  Emily Ashburn’s crystal box wasn’t in its usual place in the top side drawer of the dressing table, but had been left out. The casual-looking clutter of pins and earrings, the absence of its lid, suggested a carelessness that invited Sara to pick through the jewellery. To choose a pretty pin and hold it against the bib of her apron for a moment, before putting it back. The whole dressing table was in disarray and had the look of impatience and hurry. Sara arranged an ivory vanity set in its usual order, and lined up the jars of creams and cosmetics, a decanter of toilet water, against the table’s mirror.

  A clock chimed from the room down the hall, the bedroom of the Ashburn’s’ only son, a young man who had failed to return from the war. Beside the mantel clock in that room was a photograph of him in uniform, and a brass vase of silk flowers. The mellifluous chiming of the clock never failed to catch her unawares, and left her chest aching for air. She deliberately avoided winding that clock, but apparently someone always noticed, Mrs. Ashburn, likely, although the woman never mentioned it. During the night Sara could hear the chimes from her room on the third floor. That far-off counting of the hour would awake her, pitch her down a well of despondency and leave her flailing to right herself by the morning.

  The clock and the dressing table in Emily Ashburn’s lilac-print room seemed familiar to her—perhaps her family had owned similar items in the old country. But when she’d told Katy she remembered sitting at such a table, remembered someone unravelling her braids and pulling a brush through her hair, her sister became terse with anger. They’d never owned anything like that. Sara shouldn’t confuse what she might have seen elsewhere with anything that had belonged to them. We were workers. Only workers. Our father didn’t even own land, she insisted, as though she were on stage and speaking to someone in the wings—a Soviet spy, perhaps, standing in the shadows, writing her name down in a book.

  There was something new lying on top of the jumble of jewellery in the crystal box, Sara noticed, a pair of pearl cluster earrings. She reached for them, her fingers suddenly chilled. Brazen, shameless, vain, shallow, the words leapt to mind. Women who resorted to using cosmetics and jewellery attracted the wrong kind of attention. A more fitting adornment for someone like her was beautiful hair, a clear complexion and a clean heart and mind.

  She held the forbidden jewellery to her ears, her heart racing, as the voices in the sunroom suddenly grew louder. Mr. Ashburn and a visiting nephew, she realized. She expected to see Katy in the mirror, arms crossed against her breasts. Ja, ja, so this is what you do when there’s no one watching. You forget that the Heavenly Father never sleeps. The sheen of pearls made Sara’s grey eyes appear larger, and her face brightened with a vivaciousness that the maid’s uniform thwarted. She set the earrings in her palm, enjoying their heaviness for a moment before putting them back into the box.

  She’d investigated the velvet-lined and lidded compartment where the whatnot box was kept, but had never gone beyond that drawer. Today she dared to pull open a second drawer, releasing a scent of citrus and cloves and revealing a wild toss of undergarments, among them a flag of blue.

  It was a scarf frayed at one corner, the colour blue of the Russian sky that had been in her eyes ever since she could remember. It felt like cool water in her fingers, but when she wound the silk about her neck, her skin instantly warmed. She crossed the room to the window in time to see E
mily Ashburn and the man who came to tend the flower gardens going round the corner of the house. A blond spaniel followed at their heels, its presence an abrasion. Sara had been taught that animals belonged outside, but Mrs. Ashburn wiped its paws and runny eyes on towels that were meant for kitchen use, and the dog left hair on the bedspread in the son’s room.

  Sara returned to the dressing table and picked up the earrings and, this time, managed to screw them into place. She savoured the bite of metal against her earlobes, the strangeness of the weight drawing them down. Impulsively, she unscrewed a lid from a pot of rouge and dipped her fingers into the russet powder and rubbed her cheeks. Her fine light brown hair, cut short since she had come to work in the city, had a natural curl, and she fluffed it. She stepped back from the mirror, heat rising in her neck. She saw that she was lovely.

  She went down the hall, the dog barking now as Mrs. Ashburn entered the foyer, the blue scarf a soft thickness in her uniform pocket. She hurried up to her room on the third floor and stuffed it into the toe of a shoe before returning to her chores.

  Throughout the day she was aware of her body, her buttocks shifting beneath the confining and heavy fabric of her uniform. She was certain she had grown up in a similar house. Somehow she’d become susceptible to beauty, had learned to appreciate the sensation of fine material against her skin. Surely she’d once been indulged, waited on by others. As she passed by doorways opening up to pastel-coloured rooms, light shone through the curtained windows. There was order and peace. She believed she was at home.

  Sara had come to work for the Ashburn’s in Winnipeg during the first month of the winter of 1928, a winter that proved to be severe. Near to Christmas there was a cold snap, but the roads stayed open and Sara was still able to travel to the farm on weekends. When the cold days broke in mid-January, the change in weather brought intense blizzards that left the city streets impassable for days.

  During one of those storms, the snow drifted halfway up the windows and doors of the Ashburn Edwardian house, imprisoning everyone until late afternoon, when at last they were freed by a party of young men going house to house, rescuing snowbound residents. The unpredictable weather prevented Kornelius from travelling to the city to fetch Sara, and for the first time in her memory she found herself passing time alone.

  She spent her off-hours in her third-floor room, the day broken by the meals she took in the kitchen. While Irene, the cook, went about her chores, she sat at a huge table eating without tasting the food while a radio played somewhere in the house. The male announcer’s voice seemed buffeted by high wind and waves, as though it were crossing an ocean. She thought that thespeech of the people around her sometimes sounded the same, a billow of distortion out of which a sentence would emerge, complete and clear in its meaning.

  During the time of the blizzards she was often joined at meals by Penny, the downstairs maid, and Irene, both of whom hadn’t been able to reach their homes in the north end of the city. Those meals were more leisurely, not the usual hurried gulping of food, Irene leaping up to tend something on the stove. The constant battering of the wind against the house, the hurl of snow against the windows, made Sara grateful for the warmth of the room and their company.

  Penny and Irene chatted about people they had known, events that had happened in the household before Sara’s time. When they included her, their talk became abrupt, simplified for her benefit. So then, what was life like in Russia? Irene asked one day, in a manner that suggested the question could no longer be avoided. The cook was large and florid, her eyes always reddened as though perpetually stung by onions.

  Most of the people in Sara’s world did not ask such questions. Occasionally they offered their own remembrances—only fond ones—of life in the old country. They repeated stories of the idiosyncratic antics of a person they had all known, without mentioning that the man had met a brutal end. They reminisced about a journey made to the Crimea; a grove of oak trees halfway up a hill above the town of Rosenthal where they had gone on May Day picnics.

  Ja! Ja! Hans and Frank, Sara’s grandmother once chimed in, interrupting a story to speak the names of young martyrs who had chosen to jump from a bridge into the Dnieper River rather than deny their faith. She was near to the end of her life then, her jaw swollen and bruised from a recent fall. Over three thousand of their people had lost their lives during the season of weeping, including seven that the grand-mother called her own. But it was the young men’s names she brought forward to the new country, wanting to say them before she could no longer speak. Her visitors grew silent, as they did whenever anyone ventured too close to the edge.

  You wouldn’t want to live there, Sara told the cook. Why not? Irene wanted to know. You just wouldn’t, Sara said, emphatically. A see-saw of ambivalence tied her tongue. The women’s averting of eyes told her that she’d sounded mysterious. Fine. It was better to sound enigmatic than risk sounding deficient.

  Had her father fought in the war? Penny finally asked, speaking loudly, of course, as though this were necessary to make herself understood. Immediately Sara thought of the photograph in the vacant upstairs room. Had the Ashburn’s’ son been in the same war as her father? Had men from Canada gone across the ocean to attend the same war? She recalled her father’s departure to Moscow for training as though it were yesterday.

  My father was in the war, but he didn’t fight, she told the women. We don’t believe in fighting. He was a nurse. She gathered from their raised eyebrows that either they didn’t approve of what she’d said or they questioned her truthfulness.

  We don’t believe in fighting, she’d said, and for an instant she’d felt taller, made of finer stuff than they were. Then she felt deflated—she couldn’t say if that was her own belief or not. She sat at the cook’s table, near the wood stove in the wide kitchen, its radiant heat pressing against one side of her body, leaving the other chilled. Outside, the snow slanted across all the windows, casting the pale white light of midwinter over the room.

  He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Sara had almost spoken the maxim she’d heard so often while living in Russia. Memory of the tragedies that made the creed of pacifism a topic for daily consideration back home had been buried beneath the Canadian soil. The line of scripture suggested judgment, punishment; she was silenced by the photograph of the Ashburn’s’ son in the upstairs bedroom as much as by the knowledge that many people who’d never lifted a sword had wound up dying by it.

  When the weather cleared, Sara sometimes caught sight of a skater gliding along a path of ice on the river. From her third-floor window she watched hikers thrashing through the drifts on snowshoes. In the early evening, the sound of sleigh bells drew her to the window. Lanterns illuminated a swirl of light snowfall as a team of horses drew a wagon of tallyho riders. The horses, the light moving through the darkness, made Sara’s throat constrict in a memory of home that was quickly receding into the twilight of a winter spent in a strange city. Distance transformed the skaters beyond the window into geese flying low across the ice, the hikers into black bears. The suggestion of a city was only that, a shapeless possibility, a smog of chimney smoke, an idea.

  During the ensuing months of a sudden wet and rushing spring, the river turned yellow and viscous with silt. It swelled and overflowed its banks, its current becoming a torrent that heaved sheets of ice into the underbrush, shearing off many small trees and carrying them away. Sara struggled to read the books she borrowed from a bookcase in a hall outside her room, books Mrs. Ashburn had placed there for that purpose. There were books her daughters had once read as children, and several that had been left behind by the maids who’d preceded Sara. Their presence was made known in the dog-eared pages of the books, in rust-coloured stains on the mattress and in the messages they’d left behind, which Sara came upon by chance when she retrieved a pencil that had fallen behind the bed and found several scraps of paper wedged between the baseboard and the wall.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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  In this room, Hannah Johnson spent an entire year, an entire lifetime.

  Ruth the good-hearted, soon to be departed.

  My heart belongs to Robert, the final message declared, in handwriting that was such a flourish of curlicues it was difficult to read.

  As the weather warmed, Mrs. Ashburn began sending Sara downtown on errands, writing precise instructions regarding what she should say to the trolley operator under every circumstance, and her address and telephone number should she become lost. She wrote down where Sara would find a card of shirt buttons and a packet of bias tape in the Hudson Bay store. When such missions proved successful she began to send Sara farther afield, to the Eaton’s store, whose goods were less costly than the Bay’s. The distance between the two stores was only several blocks, but seemed to be greater as, for the first time in her life, Sara walked among a throng of people on a busy street, her heart quickening with the sight and energy of the motor traffic. For whole moments she forgot who she was, and where she had come from.

  One day she returned, to the surprise of Mrs. Ashburn, with a poem she’d painstakingly copied from a café window near Eaton’s: I’d rather be the gayest mortal, that ever walked the street, if I could be the lucky dog that makes your pulses beat. Emily Ashburn read the poem aloud several times, as though she found it puzzling.

  Why does he want to be a lucky dog? Sara asked.

  He’s wanting to be her beau, I suppose, Emily Ashburn explained, a smile tugging at her rose-coloured mouth. Her thin russet hair was arranged in a swirl at the back of her head that reminded Sara of a bird’s nest.

  Her intended, her husband, Emily Ashburn explained further, when it was clear Sara didn’t understand.