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