Edward was less than three weeks old when the two of them moved into that apartment on Brunswick Avenue. The landlady, Mrs. Macklehenny, met them at the front door when they arrived in the early afternoon of a dull wet day. Dolly handed the woman an envelope containing a month’s rent and received in return the key to the front door and another to the apartment — second floor, the woman said, pointing up the stairs, first door on the left. With the keys in her hand and her tiny baby in her arms, Dolly climbed the stairs, followed by the taxi driver who came bumping up behind her with her small trunk, returned to his car for the two bags of groceries they’d stopped to buy on the way and the suitcase Dolly had borrowed from her Aunty Kay for Edward’s things. After she’d paid off the driver and closed the door behind him, she laid her infant carefully in the centre of the sofa, shifted the cushions on either side of him to make sure he didn’t roll off, and began to unpack the trunk and suitcase. She put her underwear and blouses and the baby’s things into the one dresser the room contained, hung her beautiful evening gowns and her everyday dresses and skirts in the creaky old wardrobe, and lined up her shoes below. She stored the milk and eggs and butter she’d bought in the brown varnished wooden icebox where the landlady had already installed a block of ice, put the loaf of bread in the battered metal breadbox, and set the cans of soup and the packet of tea and a jar of marmalade on a shelf beside the stove.
She was just about to make herself a cup of tea when suddenly such a feeling of weakness came over her that she had to sit down. She didn’t have the strength to do another single thing. Her baby was still sleeping soundly. She leaned back in the chair and looked around, taking in the stained oatmeal wallpaper, the fly-specked windows with the cracked green blinds and greyish net curtains, the sagging shelf of mismatched plates and cheap glass tumblers over the sink, the battered aluminum teakettle and old iron frying pan on the tiny gas stove, the radiator with blisters of brown paint flaking off its sides, the gritty-looking carpet. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the most terrible feeling of despair. She was so tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. Everything that had happened, from the time the baby started to arrive back on board the ship until this very minute, had drained her of every ounce of energy and strength she possessed, leaving her so worn out and hopeless she didn’t know how she was going to be able to go on. Twenty-six years old, and her life was over. She leaned her blond head against the back of the chair and let the tears pour unchecked. While the baby slept on, she wailed and sobbed as though she might never stop. How could those few most wonderful days of her life have brought her to this? How was she ever going to escape from this huge unfriendly country, this cold horrible city, this hideous flat? How would she ever get back where she belonged? What was going to become of her and her poor little innocent son?
As she lay in bed nursing her baby early the next morning, Dolly decided that if she were going to survive she must get out of that apartment as much as possible because if she sat around in it day after day she would certainly lose her mind. She wrapped Edward in his woollen shawls and carried him along Bloor Street until she came upon a second-hand store that had an old wickerwork pram for sale. The proprietor of the shop gave it a wiping out with a duster and Dolly put Edward into it right on the spot. After that she spent every morning out walking, came home at noon to feed and change her baby and make herself a little lunch, and then set out again for most of the afternoon, arriving home at dusk with just enough energy left to put together a meal for herself, unfold the studio couch, tuck Edward in beside her on the side next to the wall, and drop exhausted into a dreamless stupor. When the weather was fine she often didn’t even come home at noon. When the baby was hungry or needed changing she would go into the women’s lavatory of a public library, the museum, or a department store, even a cafe or luncheonette, to nurse him and change his nappie and eat the sandwich she’d brought with her for her own lunch. Nobody challenged her about using these washrooms. She looked so tired and sad, as if she had enough trouble as it was, poor pretty little thing.
When Edward was nearly two she exchanged the pram for a collapsible go-cart and pushed him around in that, even lifting it (invariably with the help of some gallant male passenger or the motorman himself) right onto the streetcar, and that broadened the scope of her travels. By the time Edward was three and could walk at a decent pace they began to go even further afield, riding streetcars all over the city. In the summer they went down to the waterfront, or to High Park, or over to the Toronto Islands for the day, carrying their lunch in a paper bag.
About once a month they would board the Bloor streetcar and travel to the west end of the city to pay a visit to Dolly’s Aunty Kay, who had taken her in when she’d first arrived with her newborn infant in Toronto, her one relative on that side of the Atlantic. It had been Aunty Kay who had read the newspaper ads and found the Brunswick Avenue flat and arranged for Dolly to rent it. Kay had three boys of her own and a house and a husband to look after, so there was no question of Dolly and Edward moving into that little two-bedroom house on Garden Avenue. Over the following years when Dolly came to visit, Aunty Kay often seemed rather stern with her flibbertigibbet niece, ready with questions to fire at her the minute she walked in the door. Was she making sure Edward kept regular bedtime hours? Did his bowels move every day? Maybe he should be having a dose of milk of magnesia once a week. Was Dolly cooking him enough fresh vegetables? Since Dolly had no knowledge whatever of how to feed a young child she simply bought the things she liked herself and fed him those. Sometimes they both had cornflakes for supper or ate a lunch consisting entirely of some overripe bananas she’d got cheaply. Once when she had an absolute craving for chocolate cake she bought a whole one and they ate practically nothing else all day. Edward ate everything she offered him and seemed to thrive.
For Dolly the great attraction at Aunty Kay’s house was the old brown upright piano with yellowed keys that occupied the main wall in the parlour. Uncle Alf was the musical one in that family, but he couldn’t play anywhere near as well as Dolly. He never let one of her visits go by without persuading her to give them a concert, and after she’d played a few pieces from her repertoire he’d get out the sheet music for a little singsong. Alf had quite a nice light tenor voice, surprising for so large a man, but Aunty Kay could hardly carry a tune, so she didn’t join in the music-making. The three boys were as unmusical as their mother and escaped out of the house as soon as Dolly sat down on the piano bench.
Plain stout Aunty Kay would sit on the sofa with Edward on her lap while Dolly played, Alf standing at one side turning the pages of the sheet music, his head bent down close to Dolly’s so he could read the words. Kay’s feelings about that scene were mixed, and they were mixed too about the child she held on her knees. He was so beautiful and sweet you couldn’t help but love him, but the contrast between him and her own three clumsy roughneck sons disturbed her. Boys ought to be a bit knobbly and awkward, for how else would you know they were real boys? Dolly was probably turning Edward into a bit of a sissy. Just the same, Edward aroused tender feelings in Kay that she couldn’t remember feeling for any of her own three — huge, bald, red-faced babies they’d all been, hard to carry and hard to give birth to with their big square heads. Her boys seemed to have been born shouting and bawling and banging their toys on the furniture and on each other, exhausting her with their wrestling and yelling and squabbling. She cared for her niece and sympathized with her plight, but her ambiguous feelings about her, and