by Kate Kelly
“And don’t have them until you’re good and ready. Don’t even have them at all if you don’t want them, Lisa. That’s my advice to you, honey.”
Although she doesn’t add that she speaks from experience, the implication is there. Age has given her a freedom, an ability to stand in the harsh light of truth and not turn from it. Her dark secrets, kept hidden in the corners of her subconscious, have begun to float to the surface of her mind like driftwood, tempered by the years and becoming buoyant over time. They seem separate from her, drifting of their own accord through the passage of memory. They are no longer the heavy weights that held her down; they are simply part of her reality, a reality that moves and shifts so quickly that it is best just to embrace it all. She should never have had children. They were simply a by-product of sex, she thinks, a harsh and private thought. But if she hadn’t had children, she would not now be in the company of this lovely young woman, her companion, her grandchild, herself.
The irony of life, Ruby thinks, is coming to realize the truth too late. But there can be no regrets, life is what it is. “Maybe I was given children at the wrong time in life,” Ruby continues, unaware that she is speaking out loud, the thoughts tumbling out with a life of their own. “I loved my children, but I could not help feeling that they were a hindrance. Francis and Phoebe, and then Gary, all before I knew that there could be a choice not to have children. In my time, women got married, and married women had children.”
“Nan?” Lisa looks at Ruby and touches her hand, bringing her back to the present. “I didn’t know you never wanted to have children.”
Ruby turns, confusion edging her voice and lending a hollow sound to her words. “My children?”
“Yes, Nan. You were just talking about your kids. You said that you felt they were a hindrance, and that you never knew you had a choice not to have them.”
“Yes. That’s right! I did say that,” Ruby replies after a moment. “Don’t look so shocked, Lisa.”
“I’m not shocked. Well, maybe a little surprised. I guess I never really considered…” Lisa trails off, her look of surprise replaced with one of confusion.
Ruby, taking up Lisa’s hand, looks at her and smiles. “I know most women want children. Biologically and socially, we as women are programmed that way. There is no getting away from that. But in the moments that I can stare truth in the face and not look away, I can see that I never wanted children. It made me different.” Ruby nods to herself, Lisa momentarily forgotten. “I felt the difference in me, and it seemed to alienate me from other women. I simply did not and could not share their passion about children.”
Lisa nods with this new understanding, her own thoughts racing with bewilderment. Minutes pass as she struggles to find the words to reply, and the silence somehow seems to amplify Ruby’s confession. When Ruby continues, it is as if Lisa were not present, and she is thankful for the anonymity. “I wasn’t running headlong into marriage in order to have children. For a middle-class Christian woman in the forties, marriage was the only way to experience sex. When I met John Grace, I was twenty-three and more than a little anxious for the experience. I don’t know how other women felt. Mine was a time before the sexual revolution, before Oprah and self-help books began to examine the female psyche and sexual propensities. Ha! I simply knew that I was interested in knowing about sex. I wanted to know what it would feel like to be overpowered by a man, to have him, his physical presence above me, to be with him to the exclusion of everything else….” Ruby falls silent as she drifts off, becoming lost in thought.
She had felt the need, the curiosity, in the childish daydreams of her youth and later in the more informed desires of her late teens and early twenties. But to marry simply to experience that area of adulthood—barred as it was to single women—brought with it feelings of guilt and indecision. She couldn’t explain this to her mother, who married at eighteen, never knowing the frustration of spinsterhood, of forced virginity. Marriage could end that.
She remembered the old house alive with light and activity the night before the wedding, full of excited voices punctuated with laughter. Her father was in his study, leaving the living room—or parlour, as mother had called it—free for the women to finish her dress. Aunt Lucy was there, Mrs. Worthing, the seamstress, Catherine Lowery, her maid of honour, and her mother. They were flushed, energized by the preparations. She was standing on the old burgundy ottoman while Mrs. Worthing hemmed her wedding dress, and she had felt like an observer, an interloper, so separated from the excitement she could feel all around her.
“What is it, darling? You look so worried.” Her mother’s voice jarred her from her thoughts. How could she have explained what she was feeling? That she was stealing the life of a man by this marriage in order to satisfy her own curiosity, and her own cravings. She was being dishonest. She felt sure that she should have other reasons for marrying John Grace. But perhaps, she told herself, there were no other feelings; maybe there was only the feeling that she wanted to know more, to take the next step in adulthood, to marry and to have children.
LISA’S HAND IS ON RUBY’S ARM as she watches her grandmother’s fragile eyelids flickering with the movement of her dreams, so present and so removed. “Nan, wake up. We’re pulling into the station.”
Startled, Ruby looks around, her dreams receding slowly, disorientation in their wake.
“Are you okay?” Concern pulls at the corner of her voice.
“Lisa.” It’s almost a question.
“Yes, Nan. It’s me, Lisa.” She takes her grandmother’s hand.
“My God, I was dreaming it was the night before my wedding. I was in my mother’s parlour. I could even smell the room, wood polish and cold ash, and my mother, so young and alive.”
“Are you okay, Nan?”
“Yes. Yes, I am, honey. It was beautiful, really, being there again in the house I was raised in. Seeing my mother and Catherine Lowery—I haven’t thought of her in years. We were best friends until John and I moved to Toronto, and then slowly we lost touch.” Ruby stops, her mind still in the past, reluctant to let go.
“Well, Nan, we’re pulling into Union Station. We’ll get off the bus now and onto the train, but first let’s find a nice place and have a cup of tea, okay?”
Ruby shakes off the past and focuses on the present. “Never mind the tea, honey, I think I need a good stiff drink.”
Lisa laughs, always amazed by this woman. “All right, a drink it is. A toast to old friends.”
“Yes. A toast to old friends.”
It feels good to disembark. Ruby is stiff and slow geting off the bus and following the crowd along the walkway and into the station. The energy and the grandeur of Toronto’s Union Station and its Great Hall reinvigorating them.
Within minutes, they find a small crowded bar with tables and chairs spilling out onto a gated patio. The Great Hall is spacious, with four-storey-high vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tiles, the walls faced with Zumbro stone from Missouri, the floors made from Tennessee marble, the light natural and diffused from over-storey windows. The furniture is wrought iron and the patio is polished flag stone. Large double doors open onto the patio, exposing the darker recesses of the inside of the bar.
“You know, I sang in places that looked very much like this,” Ruby comments as she sits, nodding toward the bar.
“You have had an extraordinary life, Nan. Was it as exciting as it seems?”
“It certainly was. It had its bumps, but I was blessed right from the beginning. My parents, your great-grandparents, were very well off and they doted on me. I was well educated for a woman of my day, you know. My father insisted on that. I was in training for years with LeLiberté.”
“LeLiberté? Yes, Dad has mentioned him. He was quite famous in his day, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. I was being classically trained in voice. He was the renowned master of the time.
Originally from Europe, he had a wide influence, you know.”
“But I thought you sang blues and jazz?”
Ruby laughs. “Yes, I did that, too.”
“Can I take your order, ladies?” A busy young waitress sidles up to the table, empty glasses on her tray, a practised look of boredom on her face.
“Yes, I’d like a vodka gimlet,” Ruby says, happy with her choice.
“I don’t think we have those, Ma’am.” The waitress replies, shifting her tray in impatience.
“Do you want something with vodka, Nan?” Lisa asks, leaning over to her grandmother.
“Yes, I do. That’s why I ordered the vodka gimlet.” Turning to the waitress, she continues, “You do have a full bar here don’t you, dear?”
“We do, but I’ve never heard of the drink you asked for.”
“Well, perhaps your bartender has. Take my granddaughter’s order and mine, and if the bartender doesn’t know how to make a vodka gimlet, I can give him the ingredients. Would that be too much to ask for an old lady?”
The waitress turns to Lisa, unsure whether or not she has been somehow reprimanded, and Lisa smiles with a look of commiseration. “I’ll have a white zinfandel, thank you.”
“Well, I hope they can make my drink. I’m feeling quite nostalgic. Now if only they were playing some Billie Holiday or Nina Simone.”
“You know, I’ve started to really listen to jazz. Dad has always loved it, and so I know about Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.”
“Yes, two of my all-time favourites, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I was even told once that I sounded very much like Sarah, and, truth be told, I used to try and imitate her style.” Ruby, nodding with pleasure, continues, “She was a contralto or mezzo soprano, and her songs were easy for me to sing. That music, it’s the beginning of everything when everything was beginning. I still hear it in some of the new singers today.”
“Yes, you’re right about that. Like Norah Jones and Diana Krall. Have you heard Duffy? I have one of her CDs. ‘Mercy’ is one of my favourite songs, but now I’m listening more and more to the older stuff, like Etta James and Lena Horne. I guess I have you and Dad to thank for my taste in music.”
“And I have my father to thank for my love of the same music.” Ruby smiles. “He got to hear many of the original players. Our home was full of the music he loved, and I think it just seeped into my bones. All my memories play out around that sound.”
“The soundtrack of your life. It’s a great one to have, Nan.” Leaning back from the table, Lisa makes room for the waitress.
“Your drinks, ladies.” The waitress, almost smiling, places their drinks on small square napkins .
“Thank you, dear. And is this a vodka gimlet?” Ruby asks, leaning over and peering into her drink.
“Yes. I don’t know what’s in it—the bartender had to look it up in the book behind the bar. Enjoy.”
Not waiting for the waitress to leave, Ruby barks, “Thank God for the book behind the bar. Ha!” She sips tentatively at the drink. “Not bad,” she pronounces. “You know, I’ve always liked being in a night club, or bar, as you young ones call them nowadays. I think it’s in my blood. My father and mother enjoyed it too. Well, perhaps my father more than my mother. I think she just went along with him, but my father loved it. Did you know he took me to my first night club in Montreal?” Her question is rhetorical.
After a sip from the cool, wet glass, Ruby continues with her story. “I was eighteen, and in Montreal jazz was big”—she learns forward to emphasize her point—“and bad! Well, most of my friends’ parents frowned on it, believing it to be an inferior type of music. They believed it ‘put the sin in syncopation,’ as they say, with its evil influence. Ha!” Ruby laughs, her wide grin dimpling her face.
“That’s the same thing they said about rock ’n’ roll when it first came out.” Lisa nods, enjoying the thread of this conversation.
“Yes, exactly! But my father was different. He loved the wildness, the improvisation of the music, the fact that it was made up as it went along.” Ruby smiles, remembering her father’s words. “He always said that there were two kinds of jazz back then, the white jazz and the real jazz.”
“Real jazz?”
“Yes, the hard-driving, high-energy music with ragged rhythms and complex melodies. This was the jazz my father craved, and he knew all the best places to find it, although they weren’t always run by the best people.”
Lisa looks quizzically over her glass at Ruby.
“Well, Montreal was ripe with organized crime, and a few of the ‘families’ ran some of the best clubs.” Ruby takes a long satisfying drink before continuing. “It was just the times. My father knew some of the men, I think. Well, I got that impression anyway. He could always get us in anywhere, anytime. But the place he liked the best was the corner.” Ruby’s voice drops as she thinks of Daniel Kenny, her father, and the mystery he remains to this day.
“The corner?” Lisa gently prods after a moment. “Was that a night club?”
“What’s that, lovey?” Ruby asks, roused from her thoughts.
“You said your dad took you to the corner. Was that a night club?”
“No, no.” Ruby laughs. “The corner was where St. Antoine meets Mountain street in Montreal and there are, or were, two clubs there: Rockhead’s Paradise and Café St. Michel. The Rockhead was a three-floor show bar where the best of the best played. The owner was a good-looking man, a black East Indian named Rufus Rockhead. He’d stand by the door of the club, dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, allowing only the people he knew and the best musicians to get in. He knew my father all right! Ha!” Shaking her head in wonder, Ruby sighs, her mind alive with the hustle and excitement of those evenings. She savours the feel of her memories—smooth beads begging to be handled—before returning to the present and continuing her story. “The Café was where Louis Metcalfe, the famous American trumpeter had his band. He played there for years. Both clubs would swing, let me tell you, with the best jazz, the best musicians. But it was a time when things were still segregated, and often we were the only white people there.”
“Weren’t there any clubs for white people?”
“Oh yes, uptown had some great clubs too, but my father preferred the sounds on the corner. He said they were authentic. He liked the free-spirited, rebellious rhythms and melodies, and they attracted all the greatest players. He was right of course. I first saw Oscar Peterson there. He was a few years my junior, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, and playing boogie woogie like a man twice his age! Everyone in the place danced to his music. I wasn’t formally introduced to him until years later when I was working at the radio station in Toronto. But even as a kid, he was something!” Ruby says, slapping the table top for emphasis.
“Montreal must have been something during those years, Nan. What an exciting city to live in.”
“Yes, it really was. It was an exciting time that passed too quickly.” Ruby nods, her voice dropping with a note of nostalgia. “But Montreal changed. By the sixties, there weren’t any more after-hours clubs. Rock ’n’ roll took over. I suppose they were trying to clean up the city and its reputation, but I think they just plain lost something. My father never did like Jean Drapeau as mayor. His campaign to clean up the city’s reputation ended up ruining its extraordinary night life. Clubs shut down, and places like the corner just faded away. Eventually the area was pulled down to make room for an expressway and blocks of social housing. It’s a sad statement about progress, let me tell you. But that’s the way life goes. I guess we never know what it is we have at the time we are in it, at the time we are living it. Everything is always clearer in retrospect. It’s the same with our own personal history as it is with a city’s or a country’s history. There is no plan, no road map; there is just doing what you think is best and then trying to make the choices acceptable in
the retelling.” Ruby sighs, staring down at the table. She studies her hand around the glass; it’s a hand she can hardly recognize, dark with liver spots and thick with veins.
“Would you ladies like another drink?” the same young waitress asks, her eyes on the table and Ruby’s empty glass.
“Yes, I believe that would be in order. Wouldn’t you say, Lisa?” Ruby asks, looking from the waitress to Lisa.
“No, thank you. I’m still working on mine, but you go ahead and have another one. We’re on holiday.”
“Well yes, dear, I think I will!” Ruby says. “I’ll have another vodka gimlet. Thank you.” Watching the waitress retreat, Ruby continues, “I think in light of the story, a few drinks are called for. Prohibition is over, you know. Ha!”
“So, how did you go from singing in the night clubs to community theatre and then to the movies?” Lisa asks, enjoying the conversation and hoping to coax her grandmother into revealing more about her long and interesting life.
“Well, I left Toronto. It was expensive, and at the time I was supporting the kids on my own. The work I had with the singing wasn’t what you would call reliable and I needed something I could count on. I can’t remember how I decided on Peterborough, but I did and it worked out well. I found a steady job and a great place to live. But provincial Ontario can be pretty insipid after the excitement and flavour of a big city, as you can imagine.” Ruby looks directly into Lisa’s eyes, her seriousness bringing a smile to her granddaughter’s face. “Thankfully, I met Robert Davies. He was the editor of the Peterborough Examiner and a drama enthusiast, not to mention a writer—one of Canada’s greatest! He and his wife, Patricia, befriended me, and it just grew from there. Oh, we spent so many evenings together, reading over a play Robert was working on. He’d say, ‘Ruby, you were born for the stage,’ in that deep, resonant voice of his, and I believed him.
“That was a wonderful time, and Robert and Patricial became our best friends. The stories I could tell about those years!”