by Mel Bradshaw
I moved in and grabbed Lloyd Hanson by the upper right arm just as he was heading out the door to the parking lot where his Ford touring car waited.
“I guess you must be on your way downtown to get a lawyer for Iva and arrange some bail. Mind if I hitch a ride?”
While I held Lloyd to his conjugal responsibilities, Ruth took a taxi back to the city to write her story. She promised to see me Saturday.
Ruth’s story — where was it? Next morning, Thursday, I went through the Daily Dispatch from end to end without finding a whisper of it. I turned the pages again, slowly. Among the editorials lurked a muddle-headed rant against the city’s Jewish community. Jews were condemned both for being acquisitive and for fomenting Bolshevism. They were damned both for crowding into slums and for infiltrating genteel neighbourhoods. I wished Ruth could have found a better newspaper to make her mark in, but I didn’t immediately connect the racism to Ruth’s absence. I phoned the newspaper offices to speak to her. I was told she no longer worked for the Daily Dispatch. No further information was offered. I couldn’t even find out whose idea the parting of the ways had been.
I tried to reach her at home. Before I paid a call on Jack Wellington, Ruth had told me she lived with her parents on Dunvegan Road. But Bell Telephone had no listing for Stone on that street, either within the Toronto city limits or further north where Dunvegan extended into the suburbs. I couldn’t find the name in the City Directory either. I’d have to wait to hear from her.
While I was waiting, other journalists phoned. Inspector Sanderson tired of rehashing the details of the case and passed the public relations job to me. I no longer had any reason to hold anything back. Eric Hutchinson phoned as well. The Christ Church rector wanted to remind me that, although he’d been wrong about possible murderers, he’d been the first to question the accident theory of Nora Britton’s death.
“I saw her on that scaffold,” he said. “She was sure-footed as a ballerina. And as lovely.”
I heard the wistful yearning in his voice. I could sympathize. He’d been lucky enough to know her, whereas I’d only been able to see Nora Britton through others’ eyes — her own and those of her circle. But perhaps I was the lucky one. My remove was already starting to help me over my infatuation with the dead woman. I’d done what I could for her. Now it was time to think of Ruth, and I found that not hard at all.
I’d have welcomed any excuse to stay late at City Hall in case she phoned. No excuse presenting itself, I left promptly at the end of my shift and went to see Harry. I found him at home, jiggling his daughter June on the knee of his good leg. I asked if she’d been born in June. No, he said, July — but that was no name for a girl.
Although June and her mother were unbeatable company, boredom was starting to gnaw away at Harry’s nerves. For his entertainment while housebound, a kindly neighbour had loaned him a radio. It was a revelation to Harry how many organ concerts were broadcast, and — in the absence of a church service or a movie to accompany it — how grindingly unrewarding organ music could be. He’d promised the family and Inspector Sanderson, an unexpected visitor the previous evening, to stick out the week at home. But come Monday he’d be back raising hell in the detective office. I was to consider myself warned.
“Well, Harry,” I said, “you got the day off you told me you wanted.”
“Yeah, in triplicate — more than enough.”
I asked him quietly if he wanted to talk about Oscar. He said no — not now, at least. He’d known when he joined the force that one day he might have to shoot to kill. And known that someone might shoot him. Today all he was thinking about was getting back in the saddle. When the hospital had got the bullet out of his leg, the head sawbones asked Harry if he wanted to keep it. No, Harry had said; he wouldn’t have room on his mantel with all the gold medals he planned to win at next year’s Olympic Games in Amsterdam.
Next morning, Friday, was Acting Detective Ned Cruickshank’s first back at his regular post in Station Number One. He phoned me early, asking what was going on in our office at City Hall. I wondered if you could be homesick for a place that wasn’t — but should have been — your home. I didn’t know how many of my older colleagues would have to die off before Ned could be promoted to the rank of detective sergeant. All I knew was that, in terms of diligence, he was already worth any three of the men over sixty.
Ned asked me if I’d like to come for supper tomorrow, Saturday. His mother was making the meatloaf I always had three helpings of. I asked Ned to convey my regrets. I was still hoping I had a date. Ned was discreet, but if he’d asked me who she was I’d have said the doll with the explosive red hair and the legs to make a Ziegfeld girl rethink her career.
She phoned a long hour later, her voice unusually tentative.
“Paul?”
“Hello, beautiful. How are tricks?” Those were my words, but I felt far from that bouncy.
“I thought you might be wondering about me.”
“And how! I couldn’t find your name in the phone book or the directory.”
“That’s because you were looking for Stone, not Steinberg.”
“Huh — oh. I didn’t know.” I didn’t know because she hadn’t told me. Should she have? Not unless she wanted me to look up her phone number — not unless it mattered. “Not that it matters,” I said.
“I wish that were true.”
“Did they fire you because they found out?”
“No, Paul. I quit because I saw that editorial before it was printed. You once suggested my career would benefit if I used a man’s name. In fact, I’d already changed my name once. That hurt my father, but he loves and forgave. I was willing to work under a regime of tacit bigotry. But for anti-Semites not even to be able to recognize the people they hate — to show me, whom they take for one of them, their libels — it’s just too stupid.”
“What’ll you do, Ruth? Do you think you might write for the Examiner? This morning they published a denunciation of the Dispatch editorial. They said such race hatred was grossly unfair, and what’s more unrepresentative of Toronto.”
“Maybe it is, maybe not. I’m trying to get my normally impulsive little noggin to do some mulling over before I jump into anything big.” Her tone brightened. “I’ve got an exhibition picked out for us tomorrow.”
Saturday it was lightly raining for the fourth day in a row. Normally that would have meant wet hair or a hat, but for the occasion I broke out my umbrella. Around one thirty I rode the Queen car downtown and walked north on Yonge. The exhibition — I forget whether it called itself “Portraits and Landscapes” or “Faces and Places” — was being held in the Arts and Letters Club on Elm Street. A three-storey building dating from late in the last century welcomed me in through an impressively arched centre entrance.
Ruth was waiting for me in the foyer and passing the time in conversation with an art critic from Saturday Night magazine. This gentleman, who sported a polka-dot bowtie and a white goatee, insisted on accompanying us around the show. On learning I was a detective, he waved a slender hand towards a painting of birch trees with blue water in the background, identified in the label as Canoe Lake.
“Perhaps Mr. Shenstone could solve the mystery of this artist’s death. Tom Thomson was an expert woodsman and guide, as at home on the water as on land, and yet he drowned on this lake ten years ago. Was he murdered? We still don’t know.”
“Paul did solve the mystery of Nora Britton’s death,” Ruth put in.
“Ah, yes,” said the critic, gesturing and leading the way. “Sunny Lake, just over here.”
It seemed Sir Joseph had found his opportunity to exhibit the full-length nude self-portrait. It looked very well among the unpopulated scenes of mountains and icebergs hanging on the same wall. We stood a long moment in front of the canvas.
“Strange,” said Ruth. “While I was writing about her I was thinking of her as a victim, but of course that’s not at all how she saw herself. Do you think it occurred to her, Paul
, that a man that changed women as often as he changed shirts would be jealous enough to kill her?”
“I don’t think it was jealousy so much as vanity.”
Hand on hip, Nora stared over our right shoulders at the next subject she planned to capture in paint. She appeared to have her mind on matters far above identifying who wished her ill — a subject of no more interest to our critic companion.
“Notice how there are no shadows in her art,” he said. “However brilliant the day, you can never tell where the sun is.”
“Any paintings in this exhibition by Oscar Craig?” I asked.
“Gracious no. He’s not quite in this league. Maybe in a few years he will be. Oh, I’m afraid I’m going to have to excuse myself: I’ve just noticed Mr. Lismer is here.”
Ruth and I exchanged a look.
“I don’t think Cyril’s quite caught up with the week’s events,” she said.
“Is it too soon for me to take you to tea?”
“Let’s stay a bit longer.”
We did, and I was glad of it. The last painting I found was a portrait of Sir Joseph Deane in his yellow cardigan, a roll of important-looking designs in his right hand, standing in front of the blank white wall of Christ Church Grange Park, the still empty and unscaffolded back wall of the chancel where the memorial mural was to be painted. Deane was not flattered by a low viewpoint, which would have made him seem taller than his five feet two or three inches. Rather he appeared dwarfed by the space to be decorated. And yet, without obsequiousness, the artist had made him look heroic. Was it the eyes? They seemed to burn with passion, ambition, love — in a way I’d seen when I’d met the man, but could never have put words to. And it was all done with thick brushstrokes, which lost their effect when viewed from up close. The canvas was unsigned. The artist identified on the accompanying label was Herman Koch. It was the perfect note to leave on.
To my surprise, Ruth had a car, a smart Chevy coupe.
My apartment was only a bed-sitter, but I’d recently acquired a bed that transformed into a sofa for polite entertaining. So I said she could drive me home and have tea at my place. She did. I was encouraged. She was back in short skirts, this skirt part of a very short blue dress with a dropped waist. That encouraged me more. After tea I gave her a kiss. Her slender arms went around my neck as she kissed me back. Then she took my face between her two hands while her amazing green eyes gave me a tender look.
“Paul,” she said, “I’m not going to be a tease, and I assure you I’m not a prude. But I want to say something before we go any further. I think you’re swell.”
“Likewise.”
“Were you going to want to see me again?”
“And again and again,” I said, my hand resting on her stockinged thigh.
“Because that’s not going to be possible.”
“What?”
“I’ve met someone.”
“Someone you love?”
“I want to see if I can.”
“Why not see if you can love me?”
She dropped her hands and shrugged.
To me the road ahead looked open. I was willing to give us a chance: why wasn’t she?
“I’m thirty-five,” I said. “Do you think that’s too old?”
“I’m just ten years younger. It’s not the difference in our ages.”
“Our religion?” I was incredulous.
“I’m not religious. Are you?”
“No.”
“We’re able to make up our own minds about religion, but not about race.”
“You’re not letting that poison in the Dispatch get to you, are you? That’s just garbage, Ruth.”
“It’s not only me I have to think about. My family worries. Their friends in the community worry.”
“Could I come home with you and speak to your parents?”
“It would only upset them and would change nothing.”
I knew she was tenacious. My only pretext for hope was that she didn’t love this other man yet.
“Who is it?”
“Will it help if I tell you?”
“Is he in love with you?”
“Starting to be, I think. It’s Michael Leavitt, son of the ice cream parlour man.”
“The medical student,” I said. “Seems like a nice kid.”
“He had to have higher marks to get admitted to the faculty of medicine than a Gentile would. Once he graduates, he won’t be able to find a hospital placement. Except perhaps at Mount Sinai, and there’s no surgery there yet.”
“Ruth, I had nothing to do with any of that.” Any more, I thought but didn’t say, than Herman Koch had had to do with killing our boys in Flanders. “Are you thinking I should have done more to prevent it?”
“God no!” She pushed her hair back from her face and put extra emphasis into each word, as if afraid of being misunderstood. “I’m not trying to punish you, Paul. The reverse. I wanted a juicy crime story; you gave me one. It wasn’t your fault I couldn’t use it. You deserve nothing but good from me.”
I wondered as I looked at her young face, so determinedly sweet, if this wasn’t worse than punishment. Ruth wasn’t going to date me ever again, but she was ready to reward my news tips with her trim little body.
I’d gone to bed with women when neither one of us intended we should stay together all our lives. But I’d never accepted sex as frank and futureless payment for a favour.
Ruth, impatient by nature, tired of waiting for me to say something. She dropped her voice, without the least trace of coquetry. “I’ll take my stockings off, shall I?”
“I guess I’m the prude, Ruth. But don’t worry. You did me a good turn by dragging me to that art exhibition. I’d say we’re quits.”
She took this well — better than perhaps I’d hoped. We talked about painting for a few more minutes, and I walked her to her car. We said goodbye forever with pecks on the cheek.
This is where the story ends, except perhaps for a mention of my visit on Sunday to Herman’s studio in the old Central Prison chapel. I found the artist in good health and working on an autumn landscape, his brown corduroy suit spattered with yellow and orange paint. I gave him back Nora Britton’s letter and the artistic supplies left on the scaffold when she had fallen; I told him I was sorry I’d persisted so long in suspecting him of her murder. He said not to mention it. He was grateful to the Toronto police for having put down that deranged poisoner. Then I confessed I had another reason for coming.
“Mr. Koch, I have a little money I set aside for entertaining girls. As there are none on my horizon just now, I was wondering if $150 would buy me one of your scenes of the Ontario north country.”
Author’s Note
Winner’s Loss is a novel set in 1927. The reader may be curious as to how much is history and how much fiction.
Some names of actual people are used, but all characters with speaking parts are imaginary, as are the houses and apartments they inhabit. Imagined also are Christ Church Grange Park and Pork Chops Lariviere’s gambling den My Blue Heaven (although in the 1920s similar clubs were located just outside Toronto to avoid the attention of the city police). Other locales — including the Coliseum, Central Technical School, and the Arts and Letters Club — are real. They existed at the time the novel is set and remain in place to this day. The historic Walker House Hotel, on the other hand, was demolished in 1976.
The newspapers Daily Dispatch and Toronto Examiner are fictitious. Nevertheless, the anti-Semitic editorial published in the former and the subsequent denunciation that appeared in the latter did have their historical parallels in the Toronto Evening Telegram (defunct) and the Toronto Daily Star (extant) respectively.
Another element of the made-up plot was inspired by historical events. The sculptor Emanuel Hahn was born in Germany in 1881, moved to Canada with his parents in 1888, and was naturalized in 1903. In 1925, he won a blindly-judged competition to design a war memorial for the city of Winnipeg. When his German birth was reveale
d, he was denied the contract and a second competition was organized, again with designs submitted anonymously. This time the winner was Hahn’s Canadian-born wife, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, an accomplished sculptor in her own right. Disclosure of Wood’s marriage to Hahn resulted in the rejection also of her winning design. Readers will recognize a rough parallel to the course of the mural competitions in the novel.
Finally, I have used two exact quotations from the Winnipeg controversy (as reported in the Manitoba Free Press of February 25, 1926). While by no means everyone shared his view, a representative of the city’s Board of Trade had this to say about new Canadians such as Emanuel Hahn: “Naturalization of an individual does not make him a Canadian in the true sense of the word. He may be naturalized, but he does not come in on an equal footing in any sense.” The same man went on to say that having Hahn build the monument would be “like asking the relatives of a murdered man to accept a memorial or tomb constructed by the cousin of the man who committed the murder.” In Winner’s Loss, the Christ Church rector attributes both these quotes to one of his parishioners.
Acknowledgements
The manuscript of Winner’s Loss benefited from reviews by Carol Jackson, Lesley Mann, and Nelson Patterson. In researching the art department of Central Technical School, I was fortunate to have the assistance of CTS alumni Fernanda Pisani and Lorne Strachan as well as of art teacher Dustin Garnet and former Vice-Principal Robert Longworth. Thank you all.
I am grateful also to the fine people at Iguana Books. Greg Ioannou, Mary Ann Blair, and Jen Albert have been a pleasure to work with.
The painting on the cover, “Gesture” and Elizabeth by Gordon Davies, is reproduced by permission of the National Gallery. The subject of this portrait is Canadian sculptor Elizabeth Wyn Wood.
