“Looks like you got an admirer, Chief.”
“She’s too rich for your blood.”
“Watch out for her old man. He’ll set the constable on you.”
“You lucky bastard. What have you got that I haven’t?”
By the summer of the fifth year, Claire had lost her baby fat and was a tall, well-proportioned young woman with dreamy eyes and straight white teeth. She now insisted on doing the shopping by herself, and when she saw Oscar at the store at the beginning of July, she didn’t ask him to carry her groceries to the motorboat, although he did so just the same. One day after work, she was waiting for him outside the store and walked with him back to the manse, where they sat on bamboo chairs inside the screened porch until Mrs. Huxley asked Claire to stay for dinner. Afterward, she and Oscar went back outside and sat on the porch swing listening to Chopin piano music on a windup gramophone and talking for hours about things that were important to them.
Oscar told Claire his favourite piece of writing was The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It was the story of someone who wakes up one morning to find he has been turned into a giant beetle, and even though he tries hard, he can’t get out of bed to go to work. In the end, the hero accepts his new condition but has trouble communicating with his family and stops talking to them altogether. Sometimes, Oscar said, he felt like that bug.
Claire told him she was reading everything she could put her hands on by John Steinbeck and listening to the songs of Woody Guthrie to get a better feel for what the people of the Dust Bowl were going through. She hadn’t yet decided exactly how she would do it, but someday, somehow, she would help them and people like them around the world.
Oscar told her he had promised Reverend Huxley and James McCrum to study to become a missionary to the Indians in northern Ontario, even if he wasn’t sure he had a calling. But if that didn’t work out, he would find some other way to repay them and the other people of Port Carling for the help they had given him after the Great Fire of 1930.
In the weeks that followed, Claire often came home with Oscar after work and stayed for dinner. In their discussions outside later on, she told him her parents only seemed to like going to dinners and cocktail parties with their friends in Toronto and spending time with the same people on Millionaires’ Row and at the Muskoka Yacht Club. They wasted their time talking about their holidays in Europe and horse racing in Canada and the United States when people were out of work and going hungry. They wanted her to study art appreciation and home economics at university and then quickly find someone to marry from among their set, but she wanted more out of life.
At first the Huxleys were flattered that the daughter of someone from such a prominent family would spend so much time at their home with Oscar. But Reverend Huxley began to worry.
“Do Claire’s parents know she’s seeing you?” he asked. “Claire comes from a different world.”
Oscar said he didn’t know, but that it didn’t matter. “Claire doesn’t care about things like race and social position.”
“I just don’t want you to be hurt,” Reverend Huxley said.
By the latter part of August, the two friends had become so close that Claire invited Oscar home to meet her parents, Dwight and Hilda.
“Sundays are when we hold open house,” she told him. “Everybody knows they can just drop in; no formal invitation is needed. We eat, joke around, and have a good time. Some of my friends from school come right after their morning tennis games. Daddy and Mommy’s friends are always there. I’d like them all to meet you.”
Oscar was surprised and gratified. His efforts to fit in were being rewarded by an invitation to mix with the cream of Canadian and American society. Assuming Claire had told her parents he was an Indian and that her family and friends had nothing against Indians, he immediately accepted.
On Sunday morning, a member of the household staff held Claire’s motorboat steady as she and Oscar stepped onto the dock.
“I think I’ve been here before,” said Oscar, “but I don’t remember when.”
“I know,” said Claire. “I was going into grade nine and you were working on the Amick when I first saw you.”
They then walked side by side up a recently raked, stone-lined gravel pathway past beautifully tended gardens of delphiniums, daisies, daylilies, and hydrangeas to the twelve-foot-wide flagstone front steps that led to an immense wraparound veranda.
“I’d like you to meet Oscar Wolf,” she said to her parents, who were sitting on white cane furniture sipping gin and tonics and chatting with friends from nearby summer homes. “He’s a good friend of mine and I invited him to join us for brunch.”
“Why, it’s that young Indian from the grocery store. Claire is always surprising us,” her mother said, gazing unsmilingly at a place just above Oscar’s eyes and ignoring his outstretched hand.
“How’s business at the store? How’s old McCrum making out?” one of the guests blurted out. But Oscar, taken aback by the frostiness of Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s greeting, ignored the question and the conversation ended.
“Time to eat,” Claire said after an embarrassing pause, and she led Oscar to the living room where brunch was already being served. A massive granite fireplace dominated the room. The floors were polished maple. Hand-painted light fixtures hung down from fourteen-foot ceilings and a wide circular staircase with a landing and built-in window seat led up to the second floor. Prominently displayed on a panelled yellow birch wall was a large black-and-white photograph of Claire’s parents with President Wilson of the United States taken when the American leader spent his holidays at a nearby summer home before the Great War. On another wall hung a photograph of equal size of Claire’s father dressed in the uniform of Commodore of the Muskoka Yacht Club. Silver cups, awarded to Claire and her brother for winning canoe races at the club’s annual regattas, stood in a line on the mantel.
A maid handed Oscar a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a large folded starched linen napkin. Oscar tried to open the napkin with one hand after balancing the glass of orange juice on top of his plate with the other. However, his hands trembled and he spilled some juice on the floor. The older guests exchanged small smiles and chuckles among themselves when they thought Oscar was not looking. Claire’s friends, who had come to the brunch from the Muskoka Yacht Club elegantly dressed in their crisp tennis whites and cotton V-neck sweaters with navy blue trim, stared with barely concealed disdain at Oscar’s clean work pants and plaid shirt and avoided speaking to him. Later that afternoon, when Claire took Oscar back to Port Carling in her motorboat, she seemed upset, but didn’t say why. But the next day, when she went shopping for groceries at the general store, her mother accompanied her, and when Oscar said hello, mother and daughter pretended they didn’t know him.
That evening, Claire telephoned Oscar to say how bad she felt not having answered his greetings at the store. She had no choice, she said, because her family had threatened to disown her if she saw him again. But that didn’t mean they still couldn’t see each other when university started in the fall. Toronto was a big city and they could find out-of-the-way places to meet and no one would ever need to know.
Oscar let Claire speak until she finished and then hung up without replying.
No one from the village, Oscar thought, despite their ingrained suspicion of Indians and occasional racist remarks, would have treated him in such a shabby way. But to be invited and then rejected out of hand by presumably well-educated people, not because of some personal failing but because of his race, upset him. The personal snub from Claire hurt even more because she had been the first friend his own age that he had ever had. She was someone who had shared his love of poetry, novels, and ideas, and someone he had permitted to penetrate the