His children all loved him and we knew he loved us. But we all had difficult moments with him when communication became confounded on both sides. He could be upset by one of us, often out of the blue. It must have been that we triggered something in him that none of us, I’m sure including him, understood. His disapproval of one of us, conveyed only by the look, hung in the air for a while like a strangely stiff grey fog.
Once he came to my boarding school to take me to a film. I was fourteen and for once had felt compelled to put on some lipstick in the face of my roommates’ astonishment as I headed out without it. In the darkness of the theatre I was suddenly aware of my father looking sideways at me. Shock and distaste transfixed his face as he hissed, “Are you wearing lipstick?” Unaccountably he somehow hadn’t noticed it on our way to the theatre; maybe the light from the screen for a moment made my lips shine. I felt searing shame. But why was it so dreadful? I didn’t know. But it was. And I hadn’t even wanted to wear it.
Two key women in his early life enacted opposing but equally destructive stereotypes. This was never put into words. That would have been impossible. Underground, fear moved about in our father and inevitably infected us, his daughters. Might one of us go in the direction of the wild promiscuity and general fecklessness of his sister Ruth? Or might someone have inherited the hopeless passivity of his mother? Would that be the better alternative? What sense does a daughter make of such intense paternal emotions when they are expressed only in alarmed eyes, heavy silences, an abrupt leaving of a room? The unspoken messages didn’t stop coming even when we became adults.
~
Our Aunt Ruth was two years younger than our father. I’m sure he loved her when they were children, indeed probably always. When they were young he was her protector from the constantly shifting ground of their family, particularly the raging and erratic temper of their father. Apparently she was a creative, dramatic, volatile girl; in the rare photos I’ve seen of her she has a quantity of dark curly hair and dark eyes. She was exotic looking, unlike my fair, blue-eyed father, and she played on that. All her life any story she told was a wild exaggeration or a lie. This could be funny and exciting, but also alarming.
For my whole early childhood I knew her only through snippets of stories, vivid as snapshots, the surrounding circumstances never elaborated on enough to figure out rhyme or reason. One image is of my young mother, an Anglican canon’s virtuous daughter, being forced by her sister-in-law Ruth to hide behind a pillar in the Biltmore Hotel in New York to spy on Ruth’s first adulterous husband. Another scene also comes from the protracted collapse of that first marriage, of Aunt Ruth’s widowed, poverty-stricken mother selling her own rings to scramble the money together to pay for the divorce. The legal stipulation was that there be no marital relations between the first court action and the decree nisi. Nevertheless Aunt Ruth went down to the station to see him off to somewhere. These stories are never complete. Was this also in New York? Where was he off to? Of course she simply couldn’t resist leaping on the train with him and sharing his berth. It was much too dramatic a situation not to play out. Back to square one with the divorce, her mother’s rings sacrificed in vain.
How she then supported herself and her one child, Douglas, is another shadowy area. The details were clearly too unsavoury for us to hear much about them. She worked as some sort of actress, sang and danced in some kind of Montreal clubs; there were many men.
Who saw to the tiny boy, Douglas? It’s likely he was left alone much of the time. My very maternal mother, who was our source of any glimpses we got, was appalled at the neglect of Douglas, distressed by the worn and dirty state of his clothes on the rare occasion she saw him. His father was long lost to view when suddenly the little boy had to have an appendix operation. This was Montreal in the mid-1930s and the church, and the Napoleonic Code, ruled the law, as indeed it did for several more decades. A child or a woman could not have an operation in Quebec without a father’s (or, for a married woman, a husband’s) permission. The nuns at Hôtel Dieu de Montréal knelt in prayer around Douglas’s bed — as a child I found nuns sinister figures and I pictured their enveloping black habits, their bald heads under wimples, their severe white faces, their closed eyes — until his appendix burst and he died.
The child must have suffered agony before death took him. He was eight years old, our cousin we never met. Our mother was sure she would have snatched up any child of hers in such a mortal plight and made a dash for Ontario where saner laws prevailed.
There were also tales of how Aunt Ruth would borrow money from her brothers for some scheme of hers — money of course never paid back. One apparently typical time was when she managed to weasel her younger brother’s savings out of him, by pleading and tears. That was my Uncle Bunny, who was then working hard to save enough to start university. The savings she nipped off with he never saw again. Another case of back to square one, that time for poor Uncle Bun.
At some point she essentially disappeared. Until I was ten or eleven, to me she was simply a distressing rumour. Mention of her brought a certain look of distaste to our mother’s usually kind face, and if we were lucky, and our father not present, she might reveal a few of the details I’ve just described, maybe adding another one.
~
And then I have a brief but clear memory of our stopping, on the way back to Toronto from North Hatley, at a rural farmhouse where the aunt-of-dark-mystery was staying.
Our mother and we children remain in the car, but I can see our father standing some distance away under a yellowing willow tree and talking to a woman. She is standing among fallen yellow leaves and talking agitatedly, her hands gesturing, then clasped. Her look is an imploring one. Is she actually crying? I am too far away to see if there are tears. I have a feeling that she is faking: her movements and expression are too dramatic to be real.
Our father is standing back from her a little. He looks uncomfortable. I know he doesn’t like someone to be crying because he’s soft-hearted but even more doesn’t like a person to exaggerate feelings or even worse, pretend them entirely. We are all consumed with curiosity but our father is silent when he gets back into the car.
~
We later gleaned — it can only have been from our mother — that our aunt was begging him for the money she needed to board at that farmhouse for a while and write a book. I suspect he gave her the funds, sent them later, that is. I’m pretty sure no money changed hands on the spot.
No book ever appeared.
Another time a couple of years on she came for a brief visit to North Hatley. I remember she started to come for a walk up the hill with us but stopped only a little way up into the pasture to sit in the grass and dream and “commune with nature.” I watched her settle herself and was sure she was simply lazy rather than having some sort of poetic moment. My sister Ruth told me afterwards that Aunt Ruth thought both she and Carol had artistic temperaments and talents but that I was a hopeless tomboy with no sort of interesting future.
Probably most family trees have a feckless Aunt Ruth figure lurking in the branches but for our father I am sure she was forever a strong and threatening example of how a girl could turn out. He had loved and protected her when they were children — and look what she had become! Feckless Aunt Ruth had three feckless husbands and, from our remote vantage point, lived a disastrous and irresponsible life. What her life was really like from her point of view is something