June was the youngest amongst the sisters Dorothy, Rita and Margaret. She was widowed twice, the first time when the father of Natalie and Lawrence died, and then again when the father of Amy and Amy’s brother Stevie died. A small woman with dark hair styled in a pageboy, she usually wore heels and dressed most often in black and white, although on the day of the wedding she wore a dark blue suit with a pencil skirt and a tight fitting pill box hat.
Before her second husband died the family moved to a duplex, part of a housing development in a new subdivision in the east end of the city, and after his death she’d began work as the hostess at a dinner club. When she proved herself, she was put in charge of the club’s finances and helped with booking the orchestras and singing acts. She became a favourite of the owner, a wizened man with a past that included numerous indiscretions, and, as a thank you, he’d offered the downstairs convention room for Natalie’s wedding reception.
“We need to leave shortly,” June said through the door. Natalie looked at herself in the mirror, and instantly felt the division between who she was, what she felt, and the image in front of her. In the dream she’d had only a few hours earlier she was also looking at herself in a mirror when she saw a white pimple on her forehead. Oh no, she thought, not today. And she pinched it but it kept issuing a white paste-like substance in a cord, like a tiny toothpaste coil, while she, now frantic, thought, this can’t be happening. In the future when she’d see her wedding photographs, despite the smiles, the manicured appearance and the posed attractiveness of the wedding group, what she remembered was that white coil that would not stop oozing. Decades later when she told Amy, she laughed and said it was like all the horribleness imaginable had found a portal into the world.
Natalie’s memory of that October wedding day in 1959 was a mixture of intense awareness and yet, inexplicably, forgetfulness, as if the event had been so vivid that her over-saturated mind could not grasp it in any normal way. She could only liken it to a moment of cohesion so profound it seemed that who she’d been in childhood, who she was and who she would become, coalesced. “When I think back all I remember clearly is seeing those people,” she said to Amy. “All the important people in my life, gathered together for the day.”
“Natalie,” her mother said, “Your uncle Joe will be back any minute to pick us up.” And Natalie put away the thoughts of the dream as definitively as she put away her lipstick and mascara. She slipped the dress on, opened the door so her mother could help her with the zipper, combed her bangs once more, and was downstairs waiting for her uncle when he returned.
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Amy went back to standing beside her oldest brother Lawrence on the steps, but she kept her head down, reeling at the unfairness of it all. Now what will I do for fun, she wondered. Just this stupid wedding and then we can’t even go home after. When she looked up she saw the crowd gathering in groups on the lawn and pathways leading from the street and parking lot. She lifted her head and glared at her three aunts who were standing close to each other: her aunt Rita, a blonde, petite woman, animated with talk, her aunt Margaret, the oldest, most flamboyant, and Amy thought, most untrustworthy, in a mink-trimmed suit and a close, veiled hat. Dorothy, the tallest, most maternal, the most serious, turned from her sisters, holding her hat, when the wind rushed at them. Beside Amy, Lawrence, at sixteen, bounced slightly from foot to foot with nervous energy. Her other brother Stephen, who was eight, ran between the grass and steps until Dorothy grabbed him and told him he’d have to calm down.
Amy saw her cousins scattered throughout the crowd. Claire stood with the bridesmaids, smoking, her exhaled smoke aimed high over their heads. Close by, Dorothy’s daughter Sophia was in the group with Amy’s cousins, Jim and Glen, standing by their sports car. The car was bought by Jim and Glen’s father shortly before he left their mother, Rita, to move in with a woman who worked with him. A loud bark of laughter came from the group of ushers standing with the groom, their dark suits and jittery manner giving them the appearance of a gathering of crows.
z
Before the church a line of oak and maple trees lined the curb, in turn yellow, orange, and red: a bracelet of autumn colour. When the wind blew, in near unison the women put their hands to their heads to hold their hats as the leaves loosened, some falling to the street, on the lawn, and in the ditch along the road. After just such a rush of wind Amy saw her grandmother, her father’s mother, arrive in a black Dodge driven by her grandfather, a short man with cropped grey hair, steel-rimmed glasses and yet despite the severity of his appearance his eyes often squinted with amusement. They moved slowly from the car, stopping by the edge of the lawn and stood together.
“Beautiful bright day,” Amy’s grandfather said but her grandmother hated when such bland statements were used as a way to ward off awkwardness or boredom, and so did not respond. Instead she looked around and realized she did not know most of the people who stood by the sidewalk or in the parking lot. But she did recognize two women, sisters of her daughter-in-law, and when one of them saw her and waved, she smiled weakly and raised her hand.
“Why are the doors not open?” she said, flicking a piece of lint from her skirt. “They ask us to be here by a certain time and then the doors are closed.”
“When we first arrived, I saw someone go in,” the grandfather said. “It’s just everyone seems to be enjoying the day out here.”
Amy saw her grandmother speaking to her grandfather and recognized the look of annoyance on her face. The look frightened her and made her momentarily forget her Aunt Margaret’s betrayal. Her grandmother often wore this expression when she’d bend to look at Amy, holding the child’s elbows tightly, bending down toward her face while Amy noticed the fine circuits of lines around her eyes and lips.
It would take a long time for her view of her grandmother to soften, for Amy to realize her grandmother must have always carried the tragedy of her son’s death, almost two years earlier and perhaps it was the search for something of him that made her appraisal of Amy so intense. But on the day of the wedding, standing with her husband, suffering the dull beginning of a headache, Amy’s grandmother turned and saw her granddaughter by the front steps and as she did the sun broke out from behind a cloud. The air became clearer and sharper with the autumn colour of the street, the trees, the people and cars now illuminated, and in that instant, without warning, as the sharp light fell from a high distance, she felt again the spear from the loss of her son.
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As the wealthiest of the sisters, Margaret always wore the most stylish and expensive clothes; she was childless by choice, unlike her sister Dorothy and even though she was fond of Natalie, she was not interested in being part of the chaos of the bridal party. She viewed the fuss over gowns, shoes and makeup as mere commotion. She did admire, though, the end result, the beauty of the bride; it was a currency she appreciated; that and the appearance of the guests, all gussied up, as she called it, were things she found worthy of notice.
When Margaret saw June’s mother-in-law and waved a greeting, to which she received the slightest of acknowledgements, she said, “I’ll be glad to see that bar at the reception,” to her husband Phil, himself an avid drinker. The night before, lying quietly beside him, she’d woken to his heavy breathing that escalated to snores and wondered how she’d ended up there, with a man who annoyed as often as amused her.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean I’m feeling whiskey will be in order very soon.” She turned then and saw Amy who was looking down from the steps and listening, “You didn’t hear that, kid,” she said.
Amy usually liked the way her aunt spoke to her, liked that the register of her voice was the same as when she was speaking to any adult, and that she never apologized for swearing, but on this day she was still harboring her grudge. So when her aunt Dorothy walked toward them and said, “Didn’t hear what?” Amy answered, “Auntie Margaret wants to se
e that bar at the reception.”
“What did I just tell you?” Margaret said to Amy but she was smiling.
“I think you can wait for a drink Maggie,” Dorothy said, her voice rising.
“Of course I can,” Margaret said. “I just would rather not.” She was amused by her sister, by the way Dorothy straightened and refused to look at her, mounting her high horse, as Margaret referred to it.
“Oh for God’s sake, Margaret,” Dorothy said. Often the sisters’ conversations with each other ended with this type of dismissive comment; it was a mark of the honesty, affection and the deep-rooted exasperation of their interactions. Dorothy turned toward the bridesmaids who had gathered at the end of the path, talking and laughing with the ushers.
Oh no, there they go, Rita thought when she heard the tone of Dorothy’s voice and turned to see her sisters standing on the lower steps. Closer to the road, the photographer was taking photos of the bridesmaids, asking them to walk along the path, holding their bouquets. He was dressed in a worn suit, shiny at the knees and elbows, frayed at the cuffs; a suit that looked like a costume used many times when he was called upon to play the role of photographer. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips, long fingers of ash falling as he worked. Rita watched and said aloud, “He’s going to drop ash on Claire’s gown.”
Claire looked toward her mother and gave a small wave before the photographer instructed her to look serious. “But be happy too,” his cigarette bouncing with each word. This was the first family gathering Rita had attended without her husband and standing there watching her daughter who looked serene and lovely, she felt constricted by her dress and began to feel hot, even though it was not a hot day. The sky was mottled with clouds and the light kept fluctuating from brilliant to subdued as the sun was obscured and then revealed. Rita’s thoughts were cut short by the sharp laughter of the ushers who were standing together, the groom off to the side speaking to his sister, and Rita wondered if the cake, her contribution to the wedding, had been delivered to the reception hall.
z
Johnny stood with his friends and groomsmen Brad and Gus—boys, now men, he’d known since childhood. He was so thin as to be angular, his hair shiny black in a heavy bump above his face, a duck cut in the back, and his features were narrow and likeable. He and his friends had gone out the night before to a bar in the neighbourhood where they’d grown up, and both Brad and Gus became drunk, but Johnny drank only a beer; he’d never been able to drink when he was excited or nervous.
Like Natalie, he lived with his widowed mother, but she was a different sort of mother than June. She wore loose kimonos made of cotton, with a sweater and a pair of Johnny’s socks in the winter. Her hair was wild around her head, like grey cotton candy, and she was older, more acerbic, harbouring—it seemed to Natalie—a whole household of regrets and angers. Her comments on most everything, from what appeared on the television (a device that was on from the moment she woke to the moment she went to bed), her neighbours, and any news she heard were invective, sour, and often deeply humorous. Not liking Johnny’s friend Gus, she nicknamed him Pus, and Sue, the woman her brother had married and whom she despised, became Sewer.
When she’d be lounging on the chesterfield and Johnny was sitting beside her, she’d poke him with her big toe if she wanted something. “Go get that bag of potato chips in the kitchen,” she’d say jabbing him with her pointed foot.
“Christ, Mom, can you keep that hoof away from me.”
“This is the thanks I get,” and then she’d list everything she’d done for him, starting with giving birth. And yet he knew now that this was not true. She had not given birth to him. He was the result of a relationship between a travelling musician and the girl Johnny had always believed to be his oldest sister. He discovered this not by unearthing some secret correspondence or overhearing talk he was not meant to hear, but he discovered this fact because his sister wanted to be at the head table with the groom and bride.
A few days before the wedding, Natalie went with Johnny to explain to his mother what would happen on the day of their marriage. His sister Sandy arrived in the apartment shortly after them, and Johnny could tell she’d been drinking and that the evening would most probably end with his mother and sister arguing. As he spoke to his mother
she grunted and tried to look beyond him and Natalie to the television until he turned the set off. “Come on, Mom. We want you to be part of this.”
“Yeah, well,” his mother said and before she could say more Sandy, who’d been standing in the doorway, a beer bottle in her hand, said, “It really should be me up there.”
“Where?” Johnny said. “You don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“Oh yes, I do, and you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Natalie was used to Sandy’s talk and to family gatherings disintegrating into emotionally spiked conversations, vibrating with long held resentments, but there was something still and almost teasing in Sandy’s voice that made Natalie stop and look closely at her.
Sandy came into the room, placed the bottle on the coffee table, put her hands on her hips and leaned in close to her mother who was lying on the couch. “Don’t you think it’s time he knew?” Straightening, “I mean he is getting married.” And so this is how Johnny found out he was the illegitimate son of the woman he thought was his sister. In the car later when he drove her home, Natalie said, “But really, what does it change?” And in his mind he thought everything, but did not answer. After he’d dropped her off, alone in the car driving home, he watched the roads change from major thoroughfares, narrowing into the streets of the neighbourhood where he’d grown up, where his friends lived, where everything that he could remember happened. It felt to him as if a mystery was churning high above him, a revelation that would descend and all the elements of his life would fix into their place. Something on the rim of his mind, his ability to know, teetered there and when he parked and walked past the familiar streets and scenery to his apartment building, he felt radiating out from him not regret, but a loss that he attributed to the imminent loss of this neighbourhood, with its childhood memories, and the quieting sense that this was how it was meant to be.
On his wedding day, the thoughts of his mother and grandmother were put aside and it seemed his happiness could seal off all ambiguities and recriminations, if only temporarily. With a rare effusiveness he joked with his friends, watched the wedding crowd grow on the walkways and steps and called out to people he recognized. That is until he saw his mother, his true mother as he thought of his grandmother, and sister arrive. When his sister saw him she gingerly stepped over the grass in her high heels and when she reached him he left his group and said, “Don’t make me tell you again, Mom will be at the front table. She raised me. Remember?” He turned back to his friends and Gus noticing her for the first time said, “Hey Sandy, save me a dance, eh?” But she ignored him.
“What’s her problem?”
“She’s her problem,” Johnny said, jostling Gus, and snorting a laugh when Brad said, “yeah, she’s female, isn’t she?”
z
Beside Amy, and like her, Lawrence looked down at the people who milled about in front of him. On the other side of Amy his aunt Dorothy and cousin Claire were fussing over Claire’s hat. Lawrence folded his arms, he wore black-framed glasses and an expression that looked more like a sneer than a smile, but was in fact an indication of shyness more than malfeasance. So thin, he looked lost in the loose suit his mother had borrowed from her brother.
“Big day,” his uncle Joe said after he moved from the path to stand beside Lawrence, turning to view the crowd. He was a rotund man with a face that turned scarlet at the slightest exertion or risk of embarrassment. Lawrence had lived with him and his aunt Dorothy when he was six years old, after losing his father to tuberculosis, and his mother to a sanitarium for the same illness.
He ha
d originally gone to live with his uncle Norman, who was in his mid-fifties at the time and, with his wife Nora, ill equipped to care for the taciturn boy who rolled his mashed potatoes in bread and hid them under the counter rather than say he could not eat anything more. After this was discovered and weeks went by when Lawrence’s shy nature meant he did not speak more than a few words at a time, Norman and Nora became flustered and overwhelmed. When their attitude toward the boy hardened they called Dorothy and said they just couldn’t look after him. Dorothy was already caring for Natalie. “Well, what’s one more?” she said to her husband in a resolute way, but resolution was not an easy stance for Dorothy and so regret or something closer to anger at her fate took root and she became silent and stern.
Norman and Nora were on the lawn of the church, smiling simply at the line of bridesmaids and the groom with his ushers who were standing in a circle smoking and brushing off the parking lot dust from their clothes. Now in their mid-sixties, the couple wore clothes of a muted colour—on this day, a bulky rose-coloured coat with a lambskin collar for Nora and a grey duffle coat for Norman, heavy winter clothes.
Lawrence remembered how, when he was five, he’d wake in the spare room of their house where he slept those months after his mother was hospitalized: the year 1947, the light through the window falling on an assortment of clothes, furniture, a crucifix over the bed, the sound of traffic from Laurier Avenue, the slow, dreaded walk to the kitchen where food always awaited him. It was then that he learnt the body continues its routine, even if the mind and the confused core of a person becomes static inside. What had they thought at the time? That he could be the son they never had? These people who lived alone, obsessed with their infirmities, Norman’s diabetes, Nora’s stomach ailments, who had a strict schedule of activities—shopping on Monday night, on Tuesdays listening to the radio while Nora knitted, visits to family members on the weekend. This child, quiet as he was, was such a disruption that they were thrown off balance and their inability to extend themselves to include the boy revealed the narrowness of their lives. And the simple truth, that they were deficient in a certain basic kindness became unavoidable, so that they perceived at the core of their life together an emptiness, the thing that also ironically linked them.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 5
