Читать книгу Significant Things - Helen McLean - Страница 8

Edward’s fantasy of perfect love had evolved over the years from formless memories of a sublime happiness that still floated, will-o’-the-wisp-like behind his eyes, whenever he allowed himself a moment of quiet meditation. He had been his mother’s utterly beloved only child. What had been exceptional in the relationship between Edward and Dolly Cooper was the exclusivity of the attachment. Until he was past his sixth birthday, there had been no other person of any importance whatever in the lives of either one of them.

From the day he was born Edward and his mother had never been separated from one another for so much as an hour. Woman and child existed in a continuum so seamless that neither could have easily distinguished the place where one left off and the other began. Before he could even understand the words, Dolly had begun telling Edward that except for him she was alone, that there was not one other person in the whole world she loved, nor anyone but him to love her back. From a very young age he understood, too, that his mother was frail, a little helpless, that he would have to grow up as quickly as he could because she needed someone to look after her, and that person would be himself. He was like the little boy in the nursery rhyme, Weatherby G. Dupree, who took great care of his mother although he was only three.

By the time he was five Dolly was treating her son as though he were in every way an equal, a partner, sometimes even as though he might be the wiser of the two. She never insisted that she knew better than he, or that she was the one in charge, she made no rules as parents usually do — in fact she began looking to him for advice when he was little more than a toddler. In later years, looking back, he saw that she had always been a woman of very feeble inner resources, and he never thought of blaming her for the way things turned out. She had found it so difficult to stand alone that she looked for support anywhere she could find it. Even when he was a small child she asked his opinion and advice about practically everything.

“Do you like this dress, Edward?”

“It’s beautiful, Mummie.”

“Are you sure? Is it a bit too long?”

“I like it that way.”

“Well, I won’t change it then. What should we have for lunch, darling? Do you think if we invited Mrs. Macklehenny up for a cup of tea this afternoon she’d want to come?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t like tea.”

“I guess we won’t, we don’t want to hear her make excuses, do we?”

Edward was happy to play the part of the little man, proud of his mother’s beautiful golden looks and gentle manners. He liked it when men got up and gave her their seats on the streetcar and smiled at the two of them. He would have done anything in the world to please her, and if she seemed to be in low spirits or unhappy, which she often was — in tears over her lack of money and her loneliness, and at having to live in that mean apartment on that miserable street in a city she hated — he took it upon himself to cheer her up. By the time he was six he and his mother were drinking tea and eating toast and marmalade in the mornings like an old married couple, glancing through the day-old newspaper the landlady left for them in the hall downstairs after she’d finished with it. As far as Edward was concerned there was nothing in the world he wanted that he didn’t already have. He never had a reason to cry unless he’d fallen and hurt himself, and except for his mother’s occasional fits of tears, his existence was cloudless, an idyll.

The two of them woke up together, spent the day in each other’s company, and at bedtime — which was at whatever hour they both decided they were tired — he went to sleep curled in the crook of her warm arm, with his fair head snuggled into her shoulder, often with one small hand resting on the soft mound of her breast. If he happened to wake up during the night to find they’d rolled apart, he had only to look across and see her head on the other pillow to be reassured. No one ever intruded into their quiet domesticity; he had his mother entirely to himself, and she was devoted to him. What child could find such an arrangement anything but perfect?

In the mornings, when the sun came needling in through cracks and pinholes in the brittle dark green window blinds, Dolly would reach over and draw her son into her arms, stroke his head and hug him, and tell him how much she loved him. He hugged her back. “I love you too, Mummie,” he would say. They gave each other this reassurance half a dozen times every day. After the ritual of morning greeting they talked about where they’d gone and the things they’d seen the day before, how they might spend today, maybe even give a thought to what they’d do tomorrow if the weather stayed nice. Edward was a sunny, good-natured child with a natural poise and charm about him and an air of being wise beyond his years that sometimes made strangers in the street pause and pat his little fair head before they walked on. He was not unaware of his appealing looks, and he enjoyed his ability to draw approving nods and smiles from strangers. He was mentally precocious, too. Dolly had begun teaching him to read when he was barely three, and by the time he was five he could read just about anything, and print and write very nicely too. He’d been drawing since he was able to hold a pencil.

Home for Dolly and Edward was part of the second floor of a house on Brunswick Avenue, which they called their apartment but was really just one room with a kitchen alcove at one side and a tiny bathroom in a kind of ell at the back. They ate their meals facing each other across an oilcloth-covered table in front of the window, and they slept on what Dolly called a “studio couch,” a bed that folded in on itself and turned into a sofa by day. After she closed up the studio couch in the mornings she threw her brilliantly embroidered long-fringed Spanish shawl over the back of it to make the room look a little more cheerful. There was a worn blue Axminster carpet on the floor with the canvas backing showing through in patches, an easy chair covered in a faded pattern of red peonies and white lilies, a brass floor lamp with a mustard yellow shade, and a small bookcase. A green-painted dresser and a rickety wardrobe of yellowish wood with sagging doors held all their clothes. The room overlooked the street with two windows in a little bay, facing east.

Dolly received a cheque from England every month, with which by dint of careful management she paid for their rent and groceries and other necessities. They were poor — but then so was almost everyone in that old neighbourhood. By the time Edward was three the world had been plunged into the worst economic depression in history. Brunswick Avenue was on the way down, and most of the big one-family brick houses on that old midtown street were being cut up into apartments like the one Dolly and Edward lived in. The boy was unaware of their financial straits. They had everything they wanted as far as he could see, but their mean pinchpenny existence made Dolly so unhappy she thought she might go completely crazy if she had to go on living in that ugly room much longer, watching every single nickel so carefully. In winter the landlady didn’t stoke up the furnace until midmorning, and the apartment was so cold at night that she and Edward had to wear sweaters and stockings to bed. She couldn’t afford to buy nice clothes for them, and her good shoes had long since worn out and the cheap ones she was forced to wear didn’t fit and looked horrible. Concerts and even movies were beyond her means; they could never have a proper meal in a restaurant; they had to buy little odds and ends they needed — a saucepan, or a toy for Edward — at second-hand shops and rummage sales. When she was out walking men often glanced at her with interest, but as she went everywhere with her child they naturally assumed she was a married woman — and indeed she wore a cheap wedding ring she’d bought at Kresge’s, in case anyone should notice — so there was no possibility of her having a beau or finding a husband, of finding anyone at all who might rescue her from her miserable circumstances.

Dolly was a naturally gregarious person but she had no friends of her own age — no friends of any age, apart from her son, and in her present circumstances she didn’t know how to acquire any. The women in the neighbourhood, mostly Catholics of Irish descent with large broods of children, eyed her with suspicion. She had begun calling herself Mrs. Cooper when she moved onto Brunswick Avenue, but there was never any husband to be seen, and the landlady, who lived downstairs and sorted the mail for the house, couldn’t help noticing that Dolly’s monthly envelope from England was addressed not to Mrs. Cooper, but to Miss. It didn’t matter to her one way or the other as long as Dolly paid the rent, but it did to other women on the street when word leaked out. Edward seemed like a nice little tyke and it wasn’t his fault if his mother was a slut, but they didn’t fancy being friends with her or having their own children play with Edward. The likely truth, which they didn’t put into words, was that they didn’t want a loose-living woman as pretty as Dolly Cooper getting anywhere near their husbands. In any case Dolly was raised to view Catholics with suspicion and was even slightly fearful of them, what with their confessions and incense and the pope telling them what to do. There was a convent school almost directly across the way from their apartment, and the glimpses she got of those black-clad nuns made her shudder. What a way for a woman to spend her life. She hadn’t attended church since she’d left home to study music in London at the age of seventeen, and even if there had been an Anglican church close to where she and Edward lived she would have had no interest in attending it. The neighbourhood took note of the fact that Dolly was never seen heading out on Sunday mornings wearing a hat, and that was another mark against her.

Edward was less than three weeks old when the two of them moved into that apartment on Brunswick Avenue. The landlady, Mrs. Macklehenny, met them at the front door when they arrived in the early afternoon of a dull wet day. Dolly handed the woman an envelope containing a month’s rent and received in return the key to the front door and another to the apartment — second floor, the woman said, pointing up the stairs, first door on the left. With the keys in her hand and her tiny baby in her arms, Dolly climbed the stairs, followed by the taxi driver who came bumping up behind her with her small trunk, returned to his car for the two bags of groceries they’d stopped to buy on the way and the suitcase Dolly had borrowed from her Aunty Kay for Edward’s things. After she’d paid off the driver and closed the door behind him, she laid her infant carefully in the centre of the sofa, shifted the cushions on either side of him to make sure he didn’t roll off, and began to unpack the trunk and suitcase. She put her underwear and blouses and the baby’s things into the one dresser the room contained, hung her beautiful evening gowns and her everyday dresses and skirts in the creaky old wardrobe, and lined up her shoes below. She stored the milk and eggs and butter she’d bought in the brown varnished wooden icebox where the landlady had already installed a block of ice, put the loaf of bread in the battered metal breadbox, and set the cans of soup and the packet of tea and a jar of marmalade on a shelf beside the stove.

She was just about to make herself a cup of tea when suddenly such a feeling of weakness came over her that she had to sit down. She didn’t have the strength to do another single thing. Her baby was still sleeping soundly. She leaned back in the chair and looked around, taking in the stained oatmeal wallpaper, the fly-specked windows with the cracked green blinds and greyish net curtains, the sagging shelf of mismatched plates and cheap glass tumblers over the sink, the battered aluminum teakettle and old iron frying pan on the tiny gas stove, the radiator with blisters of brown paint flaking off its sides, the gritty-looking carpet. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the most terrible feeling of despair. She was so tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. Everything that had happened, from the time the baby started to arrive back on board the ship until this very minute, had drained her of every ounce of energy and strength she possessed, leaving her so worn out and hopeless she didn’t know how she was going to be able to go on. Twenty-six years old, and her life was over. She leaned her blond head against the back of the chair and let the tears pour unchecked. While the baby slept on, she wailed and sobbed as though she might never stop. How could those few most wonderful days of her life have brought her to this? How was she ever going to escape from this huge unfriendly country, this cold horrible city, this hideous flat? How would she ever get back where she belonged? What was going to become of her and her poor little innocent son?

As she lay in bed nursing her baby early the next morning, Dolly decided that if she were going to survive she must get out of that apartment as much as possible because if she sat around in it day after day she would certainly lose her mind. She wrapped Edward in his woollen shawls and carried him along Bloor Street until she came upon a second-hand store that had an old wickerwork pram for sale. The proprietor of the shop gave it a wiping out with a duster and Dolly put Edward into it right on the spot. After that she spent every morning out walking, came home at noon to feed and change her baby and make herself a little lunch, and then set out again for most of the afternoon, arriving home at dusk with just enough energy left to put together a meal for herself, unfold the studio couch, tuck Edward in beside her on the side next to the wall, and drop exhausted into a dreamless stupor. When the weather was fine she often didn’t even come home at noon. When the baby was hungry or needed changing she would go into the women’s lavatory of a public library, the museum, or a department store, even a cafe or luncheonette, to nurse him and change his nappie and eat the sandwich she’d brought with her for her own lunch. Nobody challenged her about using these washrooms. She looked so tired and sad, as if she had enough trouble as it was, poor pretty little thing.

When Edward was nearly two she exchanged the pram for a collapsible go-cart and pushed him around in that, even lifting it (invariably with the help of some gallant male passenger or the motorman himself) right onto the streetcar, and that broadened the scope of her travels. By the time Edward was three and could walk at a decent pace they began to go even further afield, riding streetcars all over the city. In the summer they went down to the waterfront, or to High Park, or over to the Toronto Islands for the day, carrying their lunch in a paper bag.

About once a month they would board the Bloor streetcar and travel to the west end of the city to pay a visit to Dolly’s Aunty Kay, who had taken her in when she’d first arrived with her newborn infant in Toronto, her one relative on that side of the Atlantic. It had been Aunty Kay who had read the newspaper ads and found the Brunswick Avenue flat and arranged for Dolly to rent it. Kay had three boys of her own and a house and a husband to look after, so there was no question of Dolly and Edward moving into that little two-bedroom house on Garden Avenue. Over the following years when Dolly came to visit, Aunty Kay often seemed rather stern with her flibbertigibbet niece, ready with questions to fire at her the minute she walked in the door. Was she making sure Edward kept regular bedtime hours? Did his bowels move every day? Maybe he should be having a dose of milk of magnesia once a week. Was Dolly cooking him enough fresh vegetables? Since Dolly had no knowledge whatever of how to feed a young child she simply bought the things she liked herself and fed him those. Sometimes they both had cornflakes for supper or ate a lunch consisting entirely of some overripe bananas she’d got cheaply. Once when she had an absolute craving for chocolate cake she bought a whole one and they ate practically nothing else all day. Edward ate everything she offered him and seemed to thrive.

For Dolly the great attraction at Aunty Kay’s house was the old brown upright piano with yellowed keys that occupied the main wall in the parlour. Uncle Alf was the musical one in that family, but he couldn’t play anywhere near as well as Dolly. He never let one of her visits go by without persuading her to give them a concert, and after she’d played a few pieces from her repertoire he’d get out the sheet music for a little singsong. Alf had quite a nice light tenor voice, surprising for so large a man, but Aunty Kay could hardly carry a tune, so she didn’t join in the music-making. The three boys were as unmusical as their mother and escaped out of the house as soon as Dolly sat down on the piano bench.

Plain stout Aunty Kay would sit on the sofa with Edward on her lap while Dolly played, Alf standing at one side turning the pages of the sheet music, his head bent down close to Dolly’s so he could read the words. Kay’s feelings about that scene were mixed, and they were mixed too about the child she held on her knees. He was so beautiful and sweet you couldn’t help but love him, but the contrast between him and her own three clumsy roughneck sons disturbed her. Boys ought to be a bit knobbly and awkward, for how else would you know they were real boys? Dolly was probably turning Edward into a bit of a sissy. Just the same, Edward aroused tender feelings in Kay that she couldn’t remember feeling for any of her own three — huge, bald, red-faced babies they’d all been, hard to carry and hard to give birth to with their big square heads. Her boys seemed to have been born shouting and bawling and banging their toys on the furniture and on each other, exhausting her with their wrestling and yelling and squabbling. She cared for her niece and sympathized with her plight, but her ambiguous feelings about her, and about her child, made Kay uneasy; she was just as glad that Dolly only visited every few weeks so she wouldn’t have to think about it too much. Dolly sensed her aunt’s reserve and prickliness, so she didn’t come to the house on Garden Avenue too often, didn’t overstay her welcome when she did.

Dolly became quite clever at finding ways to keep herself and Edward amused, places they could go that cost little or no money and filled the empty hours of their aimless existence. In really bad weather she and Edward might spend an entire day in one of the big department stores and as a special treat have a lunch of chopped egg sandwiches in the basement cafeteria. They drifted around from floor to floor, riding the elevators and escalators, looking at toys and children’s clothes, furniture, ladies’ dresses, washing machines, chinaware and linens, carpets, curtains, dry goods. And, of course, pianos. One day, when Edward was five, they were in the piano department of Eaton’s uptown store on College Street. Dolly looked around, saw that there wasn’t a salesman or customer close by, and with a boldness unusual for her she slid onto a piano bench and played the opening bars of her favourite Chopin étude. Suddenly someone spoke, right beside her.

“May I help you, madam?”

Dolly leaped from the bench so quickly she almost knocked Edward over. “Oh, no, I’m not buying a piano. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t resist ...”

A middle-aged man dressed in a floor manager’s black jacket and pinstriped trousers was standing behind the bench she’d just vacated. “Please go on,” he said, smiling. “You play very well. I’d like to hear the rest of the piece.”

“Oh dear, I don’t get the chance to practise very often, I’m afraid my fingers are stiff ...” Dolly sat down again anyway and found her place in the étude.

“There,” she said when she was finished, “you see — I really am rusty ...”

“You’re a professional pianist, then?”

“Oh, I did play professionally when I was — before my son ...”

“I see. Where was that?”

“Well, actually, on the high seas,” she said with a little laugh, “entertaining the passengers in the salon of the Queen Mary.”

The man looked amused. He put his fist to his mouth and coughed into it. It was clear even to Edward that he didn’t believe her. “Well, this is a far cry from what you’re accustomed to, then,” he said. “Do you know more pieces off by heart? Do you sight-read? Play by ear? Popular music, show tunes?”

“Oh yes, certainly, all of those, but why — ?”

“I’ve been thinking of hiring someone to play for a couple of hours in the afternoons, to give people an idea how the different pianos sound if they’re thinking of buying. Then of course the music attracts customers to the department if they happen to be on the floor. Would you be interested in doing that?”

“Oh, I would, I’d be very interested — as long as I could bring my little boy along.”

“I see. Well, I don’t suppose that would be a problem, as long as he’s well-behaved. Think you could behave while your mother plays, sonny?”

“Yes, sir. I like listening to her play.”

“I can’t pay you what you’ll have been getting on the — what was it — the Queen Mary? How about twenty-five cents an hour?”

Dolly accepted. An extra fifty cents a day would be a big help.