The hopelessly inadequate husband and father, my grandfather Thomas Coleman, is a man of almost total mystery to my generation. His own original family were people of consequence for several generations in Canada, going back to the Thomas Coleman who arrived in the New World from England in the late eighteenth century. He was a United Empire Loyalist who became a Captain and raised a regiment in the District of Montreal, the Canadian Light Dragoons, to fight in the War of 1812. For his services he was given over 800 acres in what became Belleville, Ontario, and built the enormous, very ugly, Italianate Coleman’s Castle there (now a funeral home; I’ve seen it). He was followed by illustrious descendants, the men all doctors, lawyers or other worthies. In my grandfather’s generation, one brother, Alfred, became a medical doctor and Thomas a dentist.
My grandmother was eighteen when she met Dr. Thomas Coleman and to that point she must have been a very clever and ambitious girl. He was her professor. He was exactly double her age.
One of seven children she graduated from Montreal High School in 1898 with the top marks in her year. That meant she earned the title “Dux.” She was the only family member to go on to university and she chose medical school.
I imagine her as a lovely looking tall girl with curly light brown hair worn drawn back in a bun, the style of the time, and large blue eyes. I have to use my imagination to create the girl Ruth as I’ve seen only two photos of her and in them she no longer looks young. In one she looks far older than she must actually have been, given that my father as a toddler is also in the picture. She can only have been twenty-one or twenty-two. She is crouching down beside him, not smiling, and is looking up at the camera. Her eyes are serious, perhaps sad. The child is solemn also. The two seem to be in a sort of tenement yard, outdoors but with walls on the three sides one can see and presumably one also behind the photographer. It looks a rather wretched place, outdoors but no blade of grass or shrub in sight. If they are in Montreal, it’s not a part of the city I know.
In the other photo she is much older and is sitting on a bench outdoors with my mother, and I think this must be in New York, just before my mother sailed for Africa to join my father. You can see that my grandmother has been a good-looking woman, indeed still is, in a rather haggard way — the large eyes, the high cheekbones — but both women have unsmiling faces. I have no idea what my mother really thought of her mother-in-law. Her loyalty to our father held her tongue, most of the time.
But how did things ever get going between Ruth and her professor? It is a puzzle. She must have worked so hard to get where she was. If she were the one who made the first move, why would she risk everything she had remarkably achieved for this man, so much older than she? It seems more likely to me that he forced himself upon her. But what sort of man does that make him and why was he unmarried at thirty-six anyway? Unanswerable questions. What we do know is that they ran away together a couple of months after she entered his class, in November of her first and only university year.
How I long to know what in the world really happened to the brave and very smart young woman who did something so unusual as get herself into medical school in 1898. Something happened to her. Thomas Coleman happened to her. And the strong, clever, capable and ambitious girl she had been up to then disappeared without a trace for the rest of her life.
We, my siblings and I, always assumed they married immediately, but a distant family connection did some research just this year and found the record of their marriage. It was a surprise. They were not wed until two years after the runaway and after the death of their first child, a son, another Thomas. His death is recorded in the family Bible, without mention of his parents being unmarried at the time. But why the delay in marrying? Did he try to get out of it? Did she? But she would have been so vulnerable, and pregnant; she would have needed marriage. Otherwise, who would have taken her in? Did my father know the truth of any of this and never reveal? I thought that over for a moment and then realized: if he’d known he would not have told us.
What possessed this man to act in a way that meant the end of his professorial position, and then to live a strange, wandering life?
All we know is that he set up dental practices in one town after another, constantly moving his family, as it grew, from one small town to another around Quebec and Ontario. This was surely unwise in a profession that usually requires building confidence in the community.
He was a sadistic man and brutal to my father: one time, at least, he administered a vicious beating with a belt soaked overnight in brine so the wounds would really smart: it was a plotted and elaborated punishment.
It was our mother who told us of that beating, and also that it was actually his sister who had committed whatever the naughtiness had been. Our father protected her and took the blame. And as with Aunt Ruth’s neglect of Douglas, here too our mother condemned. She could never forgive our grandmother for not managing to stop it. But our mother had no experience of living with an abusive husband. Fear can be paralyzing. It can leach away power.
My sisters and I have wondered if our grandfather was an alcoholic, or was addicted to drugs, which, for a dentist, we assumed, would have been easy to obtain. Addiction could explain his moving the family so often, unwise for a professional man but necessary for — what? We don’t know what drug, available then, would have caused his rages, not to speak of his strange absences for stretches of time. Our fantasist Aunt Ruth, who came to North Hatley again for a visit in her old age, told my sister Ruth and me on a long evening walk that he had been a bigamist and had another family in a nearby town. That was her explanation for his absences, based on scenes “observed” or “overheard” by her as a small child. She was only nine when he died so her spying seems improbable.
She told us another story on that walk. It turned on one of our grandmother’s brothers. Remember she was one of seven children, and we know almost nothing about them, bar one brother whom we met once, and Aunt Emmy, also seen only the once. The dramatic tale she unfolded was something we’d never heard a whisper of but she had several details: one dark night our great-uncle rushed into a millenary establishment — a code term for a brothel, she explained — and there he shot and killed his faithless mistress. She lay in a great pool of blood and he fled the scene, racing to hide in the family home on Beaver Hall Hill. Aunt Ruth claimed to have watched from the window there as the police came and dragged her struggling uncle away.
As soon as we got home from this rather electrifying walk Ruth and I could not resist hastening to our father for confirmation, or much more likely, denial, of all this. His face went very pink and his bright blue eyes bulged a little as they did when he was overcome with emotion. He was extremely upset. Aunt Ruth had details wrong; she had been much too small at the time — a toddler — and would not have been staying in that house, and so could not have observed his arrest. But the murder was not a lie, nor was the brothel detail. Our father was upset simply out of shame. He had hoped we would never know of such a deeply unpleasant blot on his maternal side.
As for the bigamy story there is no evidence to support that notion. Certainly no other family came forward after his death. And as for drugs, when he died the family was left destitute. Would a man’s financial resources be drained back then by drug addiction as they could be now? In that era, the years leading up to World War One (he died in 1913), laudanum, for example, was readily available and I believe not particularly costly. As well, opium derivatives are calming not enraging.
In the family Bible, in an erased and rewritten entry, his cause of death is recorded as meningitis. However my sister Ruth before she died did research that resulted in a different finding: he died in a mental hospital in Whitby, Ontario, of what was described as “acute mania,” whatever that might have meant in 1913. My brother recalls a further detail Ruth turned up: our grandfather died over a five-day period. I don’t remember this as part of our sister’s findings, and my brother had his