In the months to follow, she continued her schedule of waking at six a.m., looking after her youngest sister, walking to the hotel, speaking to her fellow workers and completing the tasks that she had learned and performed since she had started working there. No one could have guessed, watching her quiet competence, how she was reliving that night. She had not cried; she was too numb and unsure; even weeks later she found it difficult to believe that evening had happened. The sadness settled in her with such weight that she lost all expectation of ever being content again.
A year later another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, a boy she had always considered too young and awkward, called and asked her to the movies. They went to a theatre on Rideau Street, not far from her home, and whenever she recalled the evening to one of her sisters or later, to her daughter, she always mentioned the yellow sundress she wore that her mother had made, how it showed off her arms and neck, two of her best features. By autumn Dorothy and Joseph, this new suitor, were engaged and by the winter of 1932, married. As was common for married women at the time, and much to the disappointment of everyone at the salon, she quit her job. She and her husband moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment, close to her parents’ house and began a routine that included Monday cleaning, Tuesday shopping and Sunday dinner at Nelson Street. During the summer months, Sundays were spent at her sister’s house in Aylmer, sitting out on the lawn looking across the river as the soft glow of city lights and the stars grew distinct against a darkening sky.
It took Dorothy many long and anxious years to become pregnant with her only child, a daughter, whom she named Sophia after her maternal grandmother. Dorothy often took Sophia in the stroller to visit her own mother during the afternoons and was sometimes still there when June returned from work. Always interested in the news from the salon, Dorothy would ask her sister what had happened that day, shaking her head or laughing at what June told her and when walking home she would think how she missed the place, the sense of competence and relevance she received from working there. Because Joseph’s job, as the manager of an oil distribution office, demanded that they move, Dorothy and her husband eventually left Ottawa, and even though each move brought with it larger, more expensive houses, she always remembered those early years of her marriage as the happiest of her life.
Much later, when she was in the hospital near the end of her life, it was not the salon of the Chateau Laurier that came back to her but the bright-windowed rooms of the house on Nelson Street, the Sunday evenings when the family used to gather around the table for dinner, the rush in the morning as each of her brothers and sisters got ready for the day, or the quiet way her mother and father sat in the evening listening to the radio in the living room. These moments repeated in her mind with a potent familiarity, like a song, impossible to forget.
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When Dorothy married Joseph and quit the salon, she left her two younger sisters, Rita and June, working there. June was only fifteen, but in those days it was not uncommon to start working that young. Rita was the receptionist, who looked after the ordering of supplies for the hairdressers, which meant that she knew all the salesmen who came to the salon selling beauty products. Edgar, one of these salesmen, caught her interest; he was nervous in a way that made him appear ambitious and serious, and he never made overtures to Rita, something that annoyed but at the same time attracted her. She was blonde and voluptuous, and as she worked she gave off an air of boundless energy and enthusiasm so that you could often hear her laughter and chatter from the other rooms of the salon. Rita knew her sisters had husbands with futures, and it seemed to her that this man, attractive though he was, lacked refinement; she could not imagine him sitting at the family dining room table as the boyfriends or husbands of her sisters did, contributing to the conversation and impressing her father. It took almost a year until she brought him home, but by that time she was in love and did not care what her father or sisters might think. She need not have worried because he not only impressed her father but also went on to impress the owner of the company where he worked, becoming top salesman and eventually vice president.
By the time their first child was born, they were living off Island Park Drive in the west end of Ottawa, where she had two more children and where they lived for twenty more years until Edgar admitted one night in late 1958 that he was in love with his secretary and was leaving. After a few months during which time she continued to withdraw from her family, she was placed in a private psychiatric hospital in the Laurentians, where she followed a schedule of meals, appointments with her doctor and solitary walks along trails that meandered through the countryside. When her sisters would visit, they brought her to the sunroom, talked about their children or brothers, how they had decorated their living rooms or how winter was coming early that year. Rita looked past them to the window, but they would continue, convinced that what she really needed was to care about these things again. After nine months, when she came back to Ottawa, she did not return to the house she had shared with her husband but moved instead into one of the first high-rise apartment buildings of the city, on Riverside Drive.
When she first moved to the apartment it was with her youngest son, a senior in high school. Her two other children had married and left home and the new quietness at the core of her life left her with time to reflect on how it was she ended up there, unmarried, living a life where she found her greatest comfort from women—her sisters whom she called often and friends she met who were divorced or widowed. Within a few years, her daughter Claire had a baby and Rita often spent her afternoons with them while Claire’s husband was at work. But as soon as he returned home, Rita would leave, saying when he coaxed her to stay, “No, no, you young ones need your time alone.” It came to feel to Rita as if her life was half-lived, full of talk and television and the sense, if she was being honest, of emptiness. If she had tried to explain her life since Nelson Street she would have said the plans she had made, the happiness she had coveted, those goals were unrealistic and ultimately unattainable. Over the years when she would sit on the balcony watching the stream of cars and river below, she’d think how her life had changed, its patterns and routines unrecognizable to her younger self, the girl who had been part of that large family in that large house on Nelson Street, a few miles from where she now sat.
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June met her first husband, William, at school when she was fourteen and he was sixteen, a few months before she began working in the salon. Shy, she spent her breaks and lunch hour with her sister Dorothy, who taught her the routine of the salon, how to mix dyes, greet clients and take appointments. June married William in her early twenties and shortly after moved to Montreal, where his skills as a carpenter were used in the war effort. When they first lived there, they were happy, but as the years went by and June had her second child, William began to stay out later and later with his coworkers, and June began to feel more and more alone and isolated. William became ill with tuberculosis, which made it necessary for the family to move back to Ottawa and stay with his parents, the only relatives who had the room to take them in. He died of consumption before the war ended, and June, who had also been infected, was forced to stay in a sanatorium for more than a year. Her children, aged four and six, went to live with different relatives—Natalie with Dorothy and her son Lawrence with her brother, Norman, and his wife. June could only see her children on Sundays and only through the glass panes dividing the visiting room, looking very much, she thought, like a prisoner’s visiting room, with chairs and phones on either side of the windows. The children were always dressed in their best clothes, Natalie’s blonde hair in ringlets, Lawrence wearing a bowtie; they would sit before the window, taking turns speaking to their mother over the phone. When June later recalled her illness, she always said the hardest part was not being able to touch her children.
At the end of her ward was a sunroom with worn sofas, bookcases stacked with newspapers, used books and, in the
corner, under the window, an old piano. One day when she went there to read she found a young man playing the song “Sentimental Journey,” and the melody stayed with her long after he had stopped playing and left the room. The next day when he was there again, she asked him to play the song. He looked up and said, “You have remarkable eyes.” She used to say if they had not met in a sanatorium where such things as age and past histories were not important, she would never have noticed him and probably would never have spoken to him, but instead June and Robert, the piano player, who was fifteen years her junior, became inseparable.
When she was stronger and able to leave the hospital, she moved in with Dorothy, where her daughter and now son had been staying. She had rejected Robert’s proposal, and upon his release from the hospital, he left Ottawa for Winnipeg. But he returned six months later, asked her again, and she realized then how much she had missed him. At the time June thought the hostility of his family toward her because of their difference in age would be the challenge of their marriage. She never guessed this concern would soon be eclipsed by his next illness and then death. They had two children before he fell ill with liver cancer, and when she was widowed again at forty-four and was left with four children, she found herself poor, truly poor, for the first time in her life.
Before her second husband’s death the family had moved into a public housing development on the outskirts of Ottawa and she took a job working in a department store uptown. The streets of the neighbourhood were lined with red brick duplexes and townhouses, divided by laneways where old cars and yard equipment were stashed. She asked that her children be with her for Sunday dinner, and they often, as she and her brothers and sisters had done years before, invited friends to share dinner with them. The table set with china inherited from her mother and silverware from a favourite aunt, she would reminisce during the meal about the dinners on Nelson Street, the way things were when she was a child. As she spoke she remembered autumn evenings when the dining room was lit by candles and the night came in, wrapping their big old house in darkness.
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Over the years, June and her sisters stayed in each other’s lives, calling weekly when they didn’t live in the same city, more frequently when they did. Dorothy, Joseph and their daughter Sophia moved to a small town along the St. Lawrence River and lived in a brick bungalow on a street of similar bungalows, close to a park and water tower. It was a comfortable existence, one that ensured Sophia could attend university and that their routine of shopping and cleaning, meals and watching television, continued with minimum intrusion from the world around them.
In August 1959 Rita left the hospital in the Laurentians, June’s second husband had been dead two years and Margaret moved from her house in Aylmer to the outskirts of Rockcliffe Park, where her world was to close in and become the size and shape of her apartment.
One evening in the spring of 1968 when Margaret was sixty-three, she called June and said that someone was outside the building installing wires in her bedroom window for surveillance. “Don’t be absurd,” June said. “You live on the tenth floor.” But Margaret said she could see the men and wires clearly, and if June didn’t come over, she was going to call the police. This delusion was the first sign for June that Margaret was ill.
After June calmed Margaret she sat across from the bed watching the restless sleep of her oldest sister. An hour later when June went to the living room to leave, she stood and looked at her sister’s apartment, at the expensive furniture, porcelain figurines and crystal in the buffet, items that heightened June’s sadness. Her own home stood in stark contrast to the order and quiet of these rooms. She would never have been able to hear the even tick of the clock over the sounds of her house, the radio, telephone conversations and television or the interruptions from her children. In the stillness of her sister’s living room she felt that she had rediscovered something precious, long lost, something that had been in the house where she grew up, a slowness akin to the order and custom of her life when she lived with her parents.
The next morning Margaret woke in her bedroom where the sun stretched across the ceiling, bringing with it the full light of a spring day. She had been dreaming about her husbands, alternately waltzing with the two of them in a large ballroom, and as she danced, her memory of the previous night swung back at her. She remembered being terrified by men standing outside her window, by the cavernous hollows of their eyes as they smiled in at her.
In the last year people from her past, people now dead, had begun to visit. First it was only their voices she would hear in other rooms, but gradually she would look up from watching the television and see them in the room across from her, sometimes humming, sometimes watching her and sometimes rambling on about past grievances.
“Philip cheated on you, you know, every chance he got. You couldn’t have been that stupid as to not guess.” Margaret tried to ignore the voice of a woman who had been a customer in the salon years before, but she continued, accusing Philip of sleeping with neighbours, making passes at June’s eldest daughter and stealing money from Margaret. When Margaret accused her visitors of being figments of her imagination, they would sulk back into their chairs until later in the evening, when they would start again. “Look at you,” they would say, “the pretty one, the one who got the millionaire; look at you now.” How I wish they’d all shut up, she would think and turn her thoughts back to the rooms of their house on Nelson Street.
The last day of her life, Margaret woke at eleven in the morning. Her throat felt sore, her tongue coated. She went into the bathroom to wash, stopped and looked at her eyes, which had in the past been bright but now appeared filmed and dull. She brushed her teeth and then went into the kitchen to make coffee. She could see her living room and balcony beyond; she could see rain falling, and the grey light that settled on the room, like dust. She turned on the television and sat with her coffee. “So, Meg, what do you think this all means?” Philip asked her. She glanced from the television and saw him sitting in the chair at the other side of the room; he was dressed in a suit with wide lapels, a hat that shadowed his face and shoes made from alligator leather. He looked uncomfortable and out of place.
“You’re a damn fool, Philip,” she said, turning back to the television. “You know nothing about life now.”
“Then I must know less,” Bradley said from the dining room. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you didn’t love me? Why did you let me think all those years that there was something wrong with me?”
He seemed slighter than she remembered and wore pajamas, slippers and a satin dressing gown with his initials embroidered on the pocket. “Why are you two ganging up on me?” she asked before she got up and left the living room. In the bedroom her mother sat in the corner in a chair upholstered in the same floral fabric as her curtains and bedspread. “You were always the clever one, Margaret, the one who was going to go somewhere.”
“Ghosts,” Margaret muttered. “My life is jammed with ghosts.” She got back into bed and fell asleep to the sounds of her husbands in the living room. At three in the afternoon, with the curtains closed against the dull day, the ringing phone woke her from a dream where she was back home, lost in an upstairs room. It was Rita speaking about what she was going to make for dinner, about the neighbour she had met in the hallway, her daughter’s trip to Florida. Margaret sat up in the bed and took a cigarette from the package on the night table, lighting it. She could still see her mother sitting in the same chair across from her, her face obscured by the room’s darkness but her hand on the arm of the chair clearly visible in the light from the window. “That’s a good idea, Rita,” Margaret said in answer to one of her sister’s comments. “How about if I give you a call back when I’m up and more awake.” She put the receiver down, continued smoking and looked at her mother. “So, Mother, what’s going to happen now?” she said and struggled to lift herself up to get her robe and slippers.
When M
argaret did not call back, Rita called her son, who lived close to Margaret and who found her lying on the carpet in her bedroom, face down, her leg turned in at an awkward angle. He called an ambulance, then his mother, who in turn called her sisters. Margaret had hit her head on the dresser, it was confirmed, and had never regained consciousness, but June always thought the reason for the accident was Margaret’s growing confusion, the onset of dementia, the ailment that had also struck their mother.
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When Rita called Dorothy it was six o’clock, the evening news had just started, and Dorothy was watching it in the living room with Joseph. She loved the room, decorated with burgundy velvet chairs and floral love seats. She loved that she had chosen the furniture, had spent weeks searching for the material to match the chairs and curtains. She loved the scent of new fabric, which was still discernible and the stiffness of the upholstery when she sat on it. “Now who could that be?” she said. In the last few years her hair had turned white, and it puffed about her head in thick tufts. Her eyes were still pale blue, but rimmed with red, so that she always looked on the verge of crying. “Oh no,” she said and sat down slowly into the chair by the telephone, “Who found her?” She spoke in such a hushed voice that Joseph turned and saw her blank stare, the pinch above her eyes that told him something was wrong.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 2
