Dolly became quite clever at finding ways to keep herself and Edward amused, places they could go that cost little or no money and filled the empty hours of their aimless existence. In really bad weather she and Edward might spend an entire day in one of the big department stores and as a special treat have a lunch of chopped egg sandwiches in the basement cafeteria. They drifted around from floor to floor, riding the elevators and escalators, looking at toys and children’s clothes, furniture, ladies’ dresses, washing machines, chinaware and linens, carpets, curtains, dry goods. And, of course, pianos. One day, when Edward was five, they were in the piano department of Eaton’s uptown store on College Street. Dolly looked around, saw that there wasn’t a salesman or customer close by, and with a boldness unusual for her she slid onto a piano bench and played the opening bars of her favourite Chopin étude. Suddenly someone spoke, right beside her.
“May I help you, madam?”
Dolly leaped from the bench so quickly she almost knocked Edward over. “Oh, no, I’m not buying a piano. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t resist ...”
A middle-aged man dressed in a floor manager’s black jacket and pinstriped trousers was standing behind the bench she’d just vacated. “Please go on,” he said, smiling. “You play very well. I’d like to hear the rest of the piece.”
“Oh dear, I don’t get the chance to practise very often, I’m afraid my fingers are stiff ...” Dolly sat down again anyway and found her place in the étude.
“There,” she said when she was finished, “you see — I really am rusty ...”
“You’re a professional pianist, then?”
“Oh, I did play professionally when I was — before my son ...”
“I see. Where was that?”
“Well, actually, on the high seas,” she said with a little laugh, “entertaining the passengers in the salon of the Queen Mary.”
The man looked amused. He put his fist to his mouth and coughed into it. It was clear even to Edward that he didn’t believe her. “Well, this is a far cry from what you’re accustomed to, then,” he said. “Do you know more pieces off by heart? Do you sight-read? Play by ear? Popular music, show tunes?”
“Oh yes, certainly, all of those, but why — ?”
“I’ve been thinking of hiring someone to play for a couple of hours in the afternoons, to give people an idea how the different pianos sound if they’re thinking of buying. Then of course the music attracts customers to the department if they happen to be on the floor. Would you be interested in doing that?”
“Oh, I would, I’d be very interested — as long as I could bring my little boy along.”
“I see. Well, I don’t suppose that would be a problem, as long as he’s well-behaved. Think you could behave while your mother plays, sonny?”
“Yes, sir. I like listening to her play.”
“I can’t pay you what you’ll have been getting on the — what was it — the Queen Mary? How about twenty-five cents an hour?”
Dolly accepted. An extra fifty cents a day would be a big help.
4
A year later Edward and his mother were sitting down to his favourite midday dinner — a tin of pink salmon creamed with condensed milk (the recipe was right on the tin, even he knew how to make it) and canned peas — before they went off to her job at Eaton’s College Street store. It was late October, cool, not cold enough for winter leggings, but when they headed out after lunch he was wearing his brown wool coat and thick knee socks and a pair of dark brown shoes the landlady had given him a few days earlier. The shoes were too big but the thick socks helped.
You’ll have to let me pay you for them, Mrs. Macklehenny.
Well, if you insist, Mrs. Cooper. You can give me fifty cents if you like. There’s still a lot of good in them. My Jimmy’s feet are growing twice as fast as he is.
After lunch the two of them walked down to Bloor Street, crossed the road and turned west so they could pass the chemist’s shop where there was a row of large bottles in the window, each containing a dead baby, starting with a little thing no bigger than a mouse and going right up to one as big as a doll, to show what they looked like before they were born. Dolly found that display a bit disgusting, but Edward never tired of looking at it. The two of them then proceeded to Bathurst Street where they boarded a streetcar. Edward put his own red ticket in the box and took his transfer from the motorman. He was an old hand at streetcars by then; he could have travelled around the city pretty well by himself if he’d had to. They changed to the southbound car at Yonge, got off at College, and went into the store.
Dolly had been playing the piano at Eaton’s two hours every afternoon for more than a year now. She was playing when Harvey Rak stepped out of the elevator that day, congratulating himself, so he told them later, on having renewed a business contract in the executive offices upstairs. When he appeared in the piano showroom Dolly was seated, by coincidence, at a Rak upright, and Edward was perched on the end of the bench, hunched over, feet dangling, quietly drawing pictures of squirrels and birds in the Big 5 scribbler he had open on his knees. His mother’s right arm moved in and out of his peripheral vision as she reached for the high notes on the keyboard.
Harvey Rak stopped in his tracks, his pendulous ears perking up when he heard the succession of effortless runs of a Fauré barcarole. When his eyes lit on the pretty blond pianist, their upper lids ascended into the tufts of eyebrow set like commas in his narrow squared-off forehead. He stood watching and listening, and when the lovely pianist had finished the selection, he made his sidling knob-kneed way across the floor, tacking this way and that between the pianos, and proceeded to compliment her on her musical ability, all the while eyeing the small waist and high bosom under the bodice of her dress of patterned artificial silk, noticing the way its skirt moved across her knees and slithered down between them when she moved her feet on the pedals, outlining her slim thighs.
“Very nice indeed,” he said. “Fauré, I think? Do you play any of the English composers?”
She looked up and gave the man an arch little smile. “Oh, certainly!” She turned back to the keyboard, raised both hands, and plunged into a spirited rendering of “Land of Hope and Glory.”When she’d brought the piece to its resounding conclusion Harvey Rak set down his attaché case and applauded.
“Beautiful, my dear, beautiful,” he said, slapping his long bony hands against one another. “You may be interested to know that my own company is the manufacturer of the very piano you’re playing.”
“Really? Well that is a coincid —”
“And I must say I’ve never heard one of my instruments produce a lovelier sound.”
Dolly put the tips of her fingers to her cheek.
“Oh, I’m no concert pianist, I’m afraid,” she said, laughing modestly. “I’m sure a better musician than I could do your piano more justice.”
Things went on in this vein for a few more minutes, and then this person straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat. He wondered, with a ducking of the head and lowering of the eyes meant to express diffidence, whether the lady — and the little fellow, of course — would care to join him upstairs for a cup of tea in the Round Room when she had finished her stint at the piano. He hoped she wouldn’t think him forward, but what a coincidence it was, after all, that at the very moment he arrived she had been persuading one of his own pianos to bring forth such beautiful sound. He had just been on his way up to the Round Room himself and would be delighted if she would consent to join him. A little refreshment wouldn’t be amiss, eh?
Dolly thought for a minute, and then she told the man she’d be through for the day in ten minutes and she would be happy to join him then.