The view from the lane
& other stories
Deborah-Anne Tunney
Copyright © 2014 Deborah-Anne Tunney
Enfield & Wizenty
(an imprint of Great Plains Publications)
233 Garfield Street
Winnipeg, MB R3G 2M1
www.greatplains.mb.ca
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.
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E-Book conversion by Human Powered Design
Printed in Canada by Friesens
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tunney, Deborah-Anne, author
The view from the lane / Deborah-Anne Tunney.
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927855-02-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927855-03-4 (epub).--
ISBN 978-1-927855-04-1 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8639.U56V54 2014 C813’.6 C2014-903357-5
C2014-903358-3
For my mother
Ethel May Tunney
What are we but snow’s endless fall…
—Jiri Orten
“What Are We?”
If the door were open, I’d listen to creek water
And think I heard voices from long ago
distinct, and calling me home
The past becomes such a mirror –we’re in it, and then we’re not
—Charles Wright
“On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking about Tennessee”
Table of Contents
Overture
Nelson Street
Aura
Her Mother’s Daughter
First Snow
The Wedding
Studebaker
Us Dogs
My Brother’s Condition
The View from the Lane
Suicide Notes
The Murder on Prince Albert Street
On the Bus
Worst Snowstorm of the Year
A Nasty Bit of Business
Toadhead
Visitations
Evandie
Weekend
Overture
Look there, beneath us, snow falls on the street of red brick houses. We can see the peaks of their roofs and hear cars grumbling under the snow, their wipers creating intersecting arcs while the headlights cut cone-shaped light into the space before them. A young girl looks out the upstairs window of one of the duplexes. In the room where she stands, her mother sits in front of a mirror, fingering the pearls of her necklace, each pearl a memory. She hums a song from the early 1920s, from her own childhood, when she lived with her brothers and sisters in a large house in an old Ottawa neighbourhood, more than thirty-five years before. The girl’s father lies in the bed beside the vanity where the mother sits, adrift in his pained sleep.
Stray dogs roam the back alley; it is a neighbourhood for stray dogs. A man walks along the street, hands shoved in his pockets, head bent, slanted against the storm. The wind gusts and snow whitens the distance. The girl at the window follows his progress as he becomes a stroke of black against white. In the living room downstairs a sister and two brothers watch the grainy image on a black and white television; we see them illuminated by its flickering grey light. The girl at the upstairs window is four years old and it is 1956.
z
Amy stands by the window and looks at the snow falling on the parking lot of her mother’s nursing home; a white absence spreads across the field. Such scenes always evoke the storms from the winter of her father’s death. Throughout the years, as a teenager walking to school, as a young woman in her twenties watching from a bus on her way to work, or as a mother and wife living in a small town outside Ottawa, the soft fall of snow would always still her thoughts, bring her back to where she could see the streets of her childhood and sense in the scene an isolating quiet. Now fifty years later, it is snowing again. Amy watches it drift into silence when a sudden weariness overtakes her.
The surrounding fields brim with drifts of snow; at the line of houses beyond, smoke from the chimneys rises grey against a paler grey sky, as the sound of her mother’s laboured breathing fills the room. In the window’s reflection, she can see her sister standing by the bed. All the moments of their mother’s life gather here, the childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century, the years of her children, and the times she shared with people who are gone and those who will remain. The room is warm, crowded with memories and shadows. Amy places her hand on the window’s metal frame, is grateful for the cold under her palm and for the frost that crawls along the pane in a ghostly quartz pattern, mathematical and important in its miniature beauty.
Nelson Street
More than eighty years ago, the Howard family lived on Nelson Street in the center of Ottawa, close to the university, in an area known as Sandy Hill. There were ten children in the family, not an uncommonly large number for the time. The firstborn, a girl, died of scarlet fever when she was six years old, and her mother, although she seldom spoke of the death, never forgot the day her first child died. At times throughout the years as she raised her children, heard their rambunctious talk and arguments she’d see her young daughter, perpetually six, sitting on the front porch looking out to the road, or standing at the top of the staircase as she herself mounted the steps after another tiring day. It was no surprise, then, that near the end of her life, when she was in her early seventies, delusional and ill, she saw this child dressed in the blue-and-white sundress she had been buried in, watching her dying mother from the end of the bed.
The last year that all nine Howard children, five boys and four girls, aged four to twenty-two, had lived in the same house was 1920. The road in front of their house was made from hardened mud and gravel, and during the summer, when the tall windows were open, the sound of horses pulling carts and wagons could be heard through the high-ceilinged rooms. The pale light of early evening settled into these rooms and the upstairs hallways, stretching through the space in dusty bands. It was this large house with its many windows, either open to the air or closed and reflecting the light, that years later the children remembered best, after they’d moved away—those windows and the early-morning smell of the honeysuckle bushes that lined the side yard.
On the first floor was a kitchen, where the mother spent many hours making meals or sitting by the fireplace mending worn socks and threadbare pants. In the hottest weeks of July and August, the stove would be moved to the summer kitchen at the back of the house. The dining room table was big enough to seat twenty, which it often did on Sundays when the children brought friends home. Across the hall was the living room, where the father read his paper in the evenings, and a den where he would retire every working day after lunch for his noon nap. Because they were coaxed by thei
r mother to be quiet during these nap periods, the children, who had a desire to please their mother—a kind woman who made each child feel special—came to regard their father as a nuisance.
The last year the whole family lived together, the girls, aged six to fifteen, sitting side by side at the dinner table, were distinguished by their size and the colour of their hair, hair that had been combed smooth down their backs—Margaret’s dark auburn, Rita’s blonde, Dorothy’s red and June’s almost black, the same colour as her father’s.
Each of the children at one time or another heard the story of how their mother and father met. Usually their mother as she sat sewing or mending would recount the day of their meeting without looking up, as if it were a song or poem long remembered and greatly valued. The mother’s family had been wealthy and lived in Westmount, in Montreal. They owned a number of hotels in the city and the father had been appointed manager of one of them. At Christmas of the year the mother turned twenty, he was invited to a dinner party at the home of his employer. The father said he had only to see her once, to see her cross the room, the sway of her dress, the smile as she turned, extending her hand when they were introduced, for his life to be changed forever. At this point in the story, the mother would look up, perhaps thinking how much that moment was responsible for the scene before her, for the children in the room listening to her, for those children she could hear upstairs, and for her husband, who was most often beside her reading his newspaper.
Over the years the mother became stately, so that when people referred to her they called her handsome, or they would remark how, when she was young, she must have been a great beauty. In the evenings after the younger children had slipped off to bed she would join her husband by the fire in the living room, and for hours as the light dimmed no sound intruded, except the occasional rustle of newspaper, and the click of her knitting needles. Later in their lives, the children would remember their parents best like this, not speaking, yet connected, each pursuing a private interest.
In the years before June began school, a widow who lived on the same block made a point of greeting the father in the afternoons when he would walk by her on his way home from work. She had black hair and wore red lipstick. “Daniel,” she would say with a nod of her head and a smile. In the summer, if she were in the garden when he passed, as she often seemed to be, she would pick a rose and give it to him. Once, after accepting the flower and saying something about the beauty of roses and the beauty of women, he looked up and saw June, six at the time, face clouded with anger. When he asked what she had done that day, she refused to speak to him. June told her mother about this woman, how she waited in her front yard in order to speak with her father, and how she would smile with her “big fat lips.” But the mother only laughed and said, “Well, aren’t you the little spy?”
z
In order to find work during the Depression, the boys of the family, except for the youngest, moved to Detroit and never lived in Canada again. She seldom spoke of the loss, but at Christmas the mother would look around the table as fewer and fewer of her children congregated there, and she would seem depleted. Instead of having more of herself to give her daughters, she appeared to have less. In the years just after the departure of her oldest son, a man of exceptional good looks who would have a successful career as a litigator in Michigan, her health began to decline when she was diagnosed with heart disease. By the time she died, the four sisters’ memories were mostly of their mother sad and withdrawn; they all said, when remembering her, that life had taken its toll.
When the girls were in their teens they quit school one by one to work in the beauty salon at the Chateau Laurier, a large hotel beside the Parliament buildings, located off Confederation Square, or Confusion Square, as it was informally known. An imposing stone building with turrets and gothic spires, it had an impressive salon that took up most of the mezzanine level. They were pretty girls, clever with their hands, so they quickly graduated from being receptionists or mixing hair colour to doing facials and manicures. At the time, cutting hair was reserved for male hairdressers.
By the time she was in her early twenties, the eldest daughter, Margaret, was head manicurist and kept the agenda of the salon. A slim, intelligent woman with long graceful hands, quick to laugh, she had an easy way about her that made her one of the favourites of the clientele and the salon’s owner, who knew he had found a treasure. Near the end of a working day in May 1926, a man appeared before her at the receptionist’s desk, wanting a haircut, and she brought him to the back room to wash his hair, preparing him, as was her job, for one of the male hairdressers. She softly hummed “Heart of my Heart,” a song popular at the time. He was a wealthy New Yorker, the heir of a large business machine company, in Canada on a business trip. On this day, as he reclined in the salon chair, looking up at Margaret’s hands, at the sure, strong way they moved and feeling the warmth of the water and her fingertips on his scalp, he wanted to stop them, or so he told her later, to turn them over and kiss their soft inner palms, palms that smelled of lemons. When he asked her her name and she told him, he said his name was Bradley, and she nodded and quickly forgot.
The next morning when Margaret arrived at the front desk and sat checking the agenda and making notes for the hairdressers, he suddenly appeared before her. She told her sisters that when she looked up, there was something so endearing about him that although she had many boyfriends and was not initially attracted to him, in an instant she became aware of him in a new way, a way that made her look closely at his boyish smile and be charmed by his shy manner. Within three months they were married, and over the six years they lived together, before he died unexpectedly from a brain aneurism, she came to learn that despite his competence in most things he was incapable of standing up to his mother. And so with these battles left to Margaret, she fought with her mother-in-law over most major decisions in their domestic lives, the houses and furniture they would buy, where they would live and vacation. Weary from the conflict and from her husband’s increasing withdrawal, she grew to wonder if it was Bradley she loved or their life together and the privilege his money allowed them.
During their marriage they divided their time between the United States and Canada, where they bought a summer home across the river from Ottawa in Aylmer, so that Margaret’s family could visit on weekends. She wore tailored trousers and silk blouses bought from designers in New York City, smoked cigarettes through a long holder and decorated her homes with expensive furniture, sheers between stiff brocade drapes, floors covered with oriental carpets. In her apartment in New York City, a down-filled chesterfield covered in navy blue silk dominated the living room and eighteenth century paintings lined the satin covered walls. For the rest of her life, even when she was growing old and delusional, she could close her eyes and see this room and feel the pride she felt when she created it, even though living there meant she no longer participated in the only family life she’d ever known with her parents and siblings in that sprawling house on Nelson Street.
A year after her marriage, Margaret woke one morning in Ottawa with excruciating pain in her abdomen and was rushed to the hospital. After an operation for an ectopic pregnancy, she was told she would not be able to have children, and despite the sympathy from her sisters, sympathy which she listened to and accepted quietly, she was secretly glad to know her life would not be altered to accommodate a child. But without an heir to cement her claim to her husband’s name and fortune, after Bradley’s sudden death Margaret was given just a yearly annuity and the Aylmer home. She settled there and never again saw her New York apartment or her mother-in-law, who secretly believed that somehow Margaret had caused Bradley’s aneurism.
Two years later in the office of the lawyer who looked after her trust, Margaret met her second husband, a jovial, wealthy man named Philip. After their marriage they moved to Montreal where Philip’s family ran a steel manufacturing business. There Margaret developed the ha
bit of drinking every evening and spending her days recuperating from parties they’d thrown the night before. But this version of her life also ended when Philip died from pancreatic cancer, so that by the early 1960s, she had moved back to Ottawa to be close to her sisters. At first she lived in the house in Aylmer, which she had kept and visited over the years, but within a few months, because she found the house too large and remote, she moved to the city. By this point her mother was dead, her father lived in Florida with his second wife and the house on Nelson Street had long since been converted to a boarding house for students. When the Howard family had lived there, the rooms had been decorated in floral wallpaper with high crown and floor mouldings, those same walls that now were sullied to the colour of soiled linen and stripped of adornment except posters and bulletin boards. Over the years whenever the sisters drove by their old house, they found it difficult to see any vestige from their young lives in the collection of bicycles cluttering the side lane or the students they saw sitting on the veranda where they themselves had sat with their parents so many years before.
z
The year of Margaret’s first marriage, Dorothy, at eighteen, was working in the salon, where she was a manicurist and mixed the dyes used to colour hair. A careful woman, she became the dependable heart of the salon: the first person to arrive in the morning, turning on the lights and starting the coffee urn, and often the last person to leave in the evening. Engaged from the age of seventeen to a boy who lived on the same block, she was a silent help to her mother around the house, making sure her younger sisters and brothers were fed and bathed or ready for school. She longed for the routine of a domestic life with her own children and home, so when she was twenty-one and no closer to marriage, she asked her boyfriend one spring night if he still intended to marry her. She always wondered if she had not asked if he would have admitted he had fallen in love with her best friend, a petite blonde girl who was popular and always seemed to be laughing. They were on the veranda of her house on Nelson Street, and she said simply, “I see,” turning from him. To her back he said he would always have fond memories and think well of her and the years they had been together. After he left, as the night came down around her, Dorothy sat on the swing, alone in the dark, and hoped that if she did not move maybe the conversation would never have happened. If she could clear her mind of his words, then perhaps she could convince herself that they had never been spoken.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 1
