3
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