Читать книгу Memories of the Beach - Lorraine O'Donnell Williams - Страница 9

Chapter 1

Floating

“Till then, feed on innocent bubble air, enjoy your little life, and make your mother happy.”

— Sophocles, Ajax

I’m a water baby, floating lazily with my back to the pebbly lake bottom, full of wonder at the bubbles rising and the flashes of coloured light that break around me. The water is warm, soothing, wrapping me like a cradle as I rock back and forth with the rhythm of the waves. Time is measured by streams of bubbles languidly moving toward a sun that is almost too brilliant for my eyes to bear. I feel a sense of perfect peace. I am drowning …

If you’re born a son of the Beach (as we later daringly labelled ourselves), you know Lake Ontario intimately. When I was two years old, I almost came to know it too intimately when it tried to claim me. My mother was sitting on the sand with her friend Ev and Joyce, Ev’s daughter. Whatever it was they were talking about distracted my mother, because when she looked out she couldn’t see me. In panic, she raced across the broad stretch of sand to the shore. She spotted me, and my bubble-air reverie was violently interrupted, as she snatched me by my flimsy sunsuit and clasped me to her breast.

My mother, who always had a sense of style, prided herself on getting the best tan on the beach.

The miracle was that her panic didn’t stay with me. Forever, water will be only a source of solace and serenity to me. If my life should end by drowning, I will embrace my executioner as an old friend, reclaiming me to peace.

I grew up in a time when everyone knew how things should happen, even though sometimes things didn’t turn out that way. It was a time when couples got married for life, had their children after that, and lived lives of laughter, high spirits — and spirit — and made sacrifices for their family or their country because their parents has taught them that was what we were here for.

Where did my life begin? In my mother Velma’s womb, the fruit of her passionate love for Neil, the bright, fun-loving, youngest-of-eight-boys who was the love of her life. I’d beg her to tell me that story of their first meeting over and over again: “I was at Balmy Beach Canoe Club standing with my girlfriend Phyllis on one side of the hall. It was a dance. Your father was across the room with some other fellows. I watched him for a long time, then I turned to Phyll and said ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry.’”

The club had been a focus for Beach activity since 1903, and became so popular that its small boathouse had to be replaced by a larger clubhouse in 1905. Balmy athletes were well known. As early as 1924 they had won gold and four bronze medals for sprint canoe in the Paris Olympic Games. They continued to garner awards, including several at the national level. Balmy’s football team won Canada’s Grey Cup in 1927 and 1930. Fire destroyed the clubhouse in 1936 and again in 1963. The present clubhouse was reopened in 1965. But, for my parents and their friends, it was a social centre, an inexpensive place to have fun in dark economic times when, according to my mother’s girlfriend Phyllis, “we ate a lot of sausages, carrots, and tapioca pudding because they were the cheapest.”

In the full fury of the Great Depression, 1931 was a daring time to marry. Most businesses demanded that if a woman married, she had to forfeit her job. Dad was following in the footsteps of his older brothers — all of them salesman who surely in some prior life had kissed the Blarney Stone. Selling was in his blood as deeply as his Irish love of rum. When he announced his engagement, his older brother and mentor Arnold was not impressed. “You don’t have any money to get married on.” Undeterred, these true devotees of the flapper generation were wed by Father McGrath in a simple ceremony in Corpus Christi Church at Lockwood and Queen East. In 1931, the church, now designated as a heritage property and containing a little-publicized treasure — namely a three-themed mural by famed Canadian-Ukranian artist William Kurelek — was in its second incarnation, having been expanded in 1927 to accommodate the growing Catholic population of the Beach. Velma and Neil then went on a quickie weekend honeymoon to Buffalo, financed by Arnold’s generous gift of fifty dollars. This was the same uncle who confessed to me when I was a married woman, “You know, when Neilly brought your mom to my house to meet me, I thought she was a funny-looking little thing.” His expression obviously equated “funny” with “homely.” I wondered if he’d noticed the marks on my mother’s cheeks, spaced like seed pits of a strawberry, but devoid of colour. The ones I used to dare to trace with my fingers and count, enjoying the sensation of being that close to her. “I caught scarlet fever when I was young. I almost died from it. That’s how I got all these marks on my skin,” she’d explain.

Uncle Arnold would reminisce some more. “I tried to talk your dad out of marriage, but he said he figured two could live cheaper than one. I never knew how he did arrive at that one (chuckle, chuckle). But you know, it did turn out okay after all.”

I arrived a year and a day after their marriage, the same year that the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. My parents brought me from St. Mike’s Hospital to their one-bedroom basement apartment in Howell Manor, at the southwest corner of Queen and Beech. From the building’s front door, you could look south several hundred yards and see the lake. That beautiful backdrop of water was to act as my lifelong touchstone.

One of my first memories was a ceremony of approval. I’d just turned three. My father had given my mother a Silex coffeepot for Christmas, the kind with a glass rod joining the upper and lower sections. In the excitement, the rod got lost somewhere among the crumpled wrapping paper. The search was on! Persistently scrunching up every scrap of tissue, I finally found it and proudly held it out to my father. Taking it from me, he announced in a proud tone, “Now, isn’t she smart, Velma?” I was labelled for life.

My mother didn’t have much first-hand experience with mothering. From the time she started school until she finally quit at the age of fourteen — a disobedient mischievous troublemaker whom her teachers, in spite of themselves, felt compelled to love — she had been sent away to mostly French-speaking convent boarding schools, as had her older brother and sister. None were in the same school. Her French Canadian mother was Agnes Larivière La Branche. At the time she was pregnant with my mother, Agnes already had two children — Flo and Adolphus. I was told my maternal grandfather had died while my mother was still in Agnes’s womb. Or was my grandmother really widowed? This was a family secret I grew up with. No one admitted to any recollection of my maternal grandfather — how he looked or what he was like. The only information I could elicit after great coaxing was “he worked on the railway and was killed in a train accident.” Until this day, I wonder — did he run away and abandon all of them, did he have some Native blood in him, was my mother fathered by the same man as her older siblings? When my Aunt Flo was in her eighties I’d ask her about their father.

“What do you want to know about that old stuff for, anyway? I can’t remember any of that. It was too long ago.”

When I became a mother myself, my curiosity impelled me to go to Massey and look up my grandparents’ wedding certificate. There were their names — Baptiste La Branche, farm-labourer from Bear Brook, Ontario, and signed with an X. Underneath his name were the letters A-n-g, which were then scratched out and written beside them, A-g-n-e-s Lariviere, spinster. This nervous script was followed by two witnesses who also signed with Xs. Agnes was the only literate one. Is that why she and her children were so reluctant to talk about Baptiste? How did she afford to educate her three fatherless children in convent boarding schools? How did she make sufficient income giving sewing lessons and fashioning exquisite creations as a milliner, in one small northern Ontario hamlet after another?

When I reflect from this distance, I think my mother wanted me so that she’d have someone to love the way she’d always wanted to be loved. But it was difficult because of the fragmented mothering she’d experienced. What she brought to me, her first-born, were authentic intentions, a commitment to carry out her role, and a need of her own so great that at times it threatened to create a vast desert of loneliness for me.

If any awareness of that loneliness did arise in my child-mind, I never let it linger. It was too overpowering for a small child to be able to do anything about. There are no memories of those infant hours of frustration, anger, and despair waiting for a mother to nurse me at her breast. But later, when I had children, she’d tell me, “My, it’s so different from when you were a baby. They told us only to feed you every four hours or you’d get spoiled. We had to get you on a routine, we were told. I’d listen to you cry, and I’d be longing to go to you, and there’s be tears coming down my cheeks too. But I wasn’t allowed to feed you again until the four hours were up.” Oh, yes, the convent years had done their job. Velma may have been a holy terror there, but when it came to being a mother she was going to obey the 1930s rules of child rearing and be the best mother she knew how.

One of the few memories she’d share was about the year she spent on a farm when she had scarlet fever. “Someone gave me a baby lamb as a pet,” she’d tell me as I pestered her for stories of her childhood. “I tied a ribbon around its neck and fed it with a little bottle filled with milk.”

Mother and I spent a lot of hours together from Monday till Friday in our small apartment. We’d visit my aunt and uncle in their apartment on the next street over, Balsam Avenue. My Aunt Flo, ten years my mother’s senior, had taken my mother in when she defiantly left the Grey Nuns Convent in Ottawa when only fourteen. My mother must have presented quite a challenge — a wilful, spirited, French-speaking adolescent — to Flo who, settling close to Toronto’s east end, was determined to leave everything French and Catholic behind her.

Flo’s husband Frank Byrnes was from Lunenburg, son of a sea captain. He’d served in the First World War in the 154th Canadian Expeditionary Force with the Construction Corps Signallers in France. A unit photograph hung in their hallway. My aunt claimed I eventually rubbed out some of Uncle Frank’s face with my finger, repeatedly picking him out — correctly. I never knew if it was accident or design that Auntie Flo and Uncle Frank had no children. They never dared give my mother any parenting advice. I’m not sure she’d have taken it, anyway. To her, Auntie Flo had done something shameful. She’d married “outside of the church.” My pious mother was never to be comfortable around a couple declared by the Catholic Church to be “living in sin.”

I had no notion of this dilemma. I was more engrossed with staring at Uncle Frank’s picture. One day I abandoned Uncle Frank’s dim face for another picture on their wall — a man and woman, standing in a field, heads bent in prayerful and saddened attitude. It was a print of “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet and probably the only object my aunt had that connected with her former faith. (Years later I learned that Salvador Dali had an intuition that this painting had a deeper meaning. When subjected to X-rays it was discovered that Millet’s original theme had been two peasants praying over the grave of their young child. He changed the painting on the advice of art dealers who said the subject was too morbid to sell.) Even at that young age, the picture connected not with my religious sensibilities, but with a deep sense of loss.

My little life was full of summers with pail and shovel, sand sifters and sand moulds, playing on the shores of Lake Ontario while mother and her friends unwrapped picnic lunches on the plaid car rug Dad left behind. The water was never very warm, but I didn’t go too far as a toddler. I loved the feel of the rounded pebbles under my feet as I ran up and down the shoreline, teasing the incoming waves. If I found a piece of glass known to us as “coloured stones,” clouded and worn smooth by the water’s motion, I’d run and show it to Mother. She’d obligingly acknowledge it while comparing tans with her friends. Those were lazy days — no husband from Monday to Friday for her to hurry home to prepare meals for, and no housework to speak of in the frugally furnished apartment.

Sometimes, Mother would give me forty-five cents to buy a quart of milk at the corner store. Hershy Taylor, a little boy who lived in our building, would often accompany me. At that time, Toronto’s Jewish population was only 45,200. One of the oldest synagogues in Toronto was only about ten blocks from our apartment building. But it wasn’t called a synagogue then. It was named the Orthodox Beach Hebrew Institute — a more neutral label chosen to deflect the attention of the Canadian German Party who were putting up swastikas everywhere in the area. Things were tough for Jews in Toronto then. In 1933 the Swastika party put up signs near the Balmy Beach clubhouse with the words, “Heil Hitler.” These same party organizers lobbied to literally keep Jews off the beach. Fortunately, their efforts failed, but Hershy’s parents must have felt the hatred. They persevered in this hostile environment, eventually expanding their small dry-cleaning business on the southwest corner of Wineva and Queen into the largest one in the Beach.

Mother was kindly disposed to Jews. Before marriage she’d been a coat and dress model for a Spadina manufacturer. “There’s nobody better to work for than Jewish people,” she’d say. Then after a dramatic pause, she’d underline “If they like you.” She claimed, “My boss and his wife treated me just like a daughter when I modelled coats for them.” I could picture her in the Spadina showroom, her marred complexion compensated for by beautiful dark brown eyes, lovely body, and gorgeous legs. That, combined with her cocky defiant air, gave her verve. Anything she wore looked good.

One morning my mother sent me to buy milk. Hershy and Jackie Keenan, another neighbour, trudged along with me. What was in my mother’s mind sending a four-year-old to buy milk in a glass bottle? One of the boys who insisted on carrying it dropped it just as we got to our front door. Milk and glass splattered over the walkway. When I rushed in to tell my mother, the two boys denied they had anything to do with it. I was shocked my two friends would lie. My parents had told me lying was a sin. It was even more shocking that anyone would do so when it cast someone else in a guilty light.

The perfidy of friends didn’t end there. A few days later, one of the boys and I were coming through the back alley after buying some candy. The boy stopped, pulled down his pants, squatted, and did a huge bowel movement on the pavement. I was fascinated, because the only ones I’d ever seen till now were always floating in toilet water. When we got home, I rushed in to tell my mother about the remarkable pavement presence of “Number Two.” She in turn told the boy’s mother. All four of us hurried back to the scene of the crime. The evidence was still there, in its pristine, sculpted state. The culprit started to cry and denied it was his. Worse still, he said it was mine!

“No, it’s not, it’s not.” I cried to my mother, as once again I was betrayed by a friend’s lies.

Mother was very quiet the rest of the day. When I went to bed that night, I realized she wasn’t sure whether to believe me. I felt utterly powerless because there was no way to prove to her that I was telling the truth.