“Mrs. Diamond, welcome,” the woman said, once Beatrice had been helped out of the car by Oliver.
“Yes,” she said. “That is I. Thank you.”
She didn’t wait for Oliver’s arm, and she walked up the boards to greet the landlady.
IN THE DAYS after their arrival, Oliver went to the plant with Nathaniel while Beatrice unpacked her bags and tried to get used to the idea that this was now her home. She placed a few of their wedding gifts about to see if that would help: a lace tablecloth, a crystal cream-and-sugar set, a pink china flower vase. The rooms had come furnished, and Beatrice did not think much of her landlady’s taste in decorating. The painting above the chesterfield was dark and brooding—a deer running for its life from the hounds—and she especially did not like the stoneware teapot on the sideboard. She tried to remove the lid but it was solidly stuck in place, and when she picked it up, she found herself weighing it in her hands as she might a bag of potatoes in the shop. It was impossibly heavy, and unattractive, with no redeeming value that she could see. She was considering hiding it in the sideboard and replacing it with a colourful china peacock she had unpacked when she heard someone at the door. She turned around and saw that it was Oliver. As he came in, he was saying something about finding her walking shoes, but when he saw that she was holding the teapot, he stopped mid-sentence, and in that moment Beatrice remembered that Salina had been in the Byrne Corners pottery club, and she understood that the teapot was hers.
“This is lovely,” she said, not sure how else to describe it politely.
“It’s not the best example of a handcrafted vessel, is it,” Oliver said, and then he added, “Salina made it. I leave it to you—if you would rather I throw it out, I will do so.”
Beatrice set the teapot back down on the sideboard, trying to avoid the inevitable clunk. It had been only a year since Salina’s death, she thought, and it behoved her to respect her memory. “Of course we will not throw it out,” she said. “Although there’s no need to make the tea in it, is there. We have other teapots. I believe we received three as wedding gifts. We’ll treat it as a museum piece.”
Then she looked around for a place to put the china peacock and decided on the kitchen windowsill.
“Now then,” she said, turning to Oliver, “what were you saying about walking shoes?”
He said that he wanted to take her out to see the plant.
They travelled from the city along a well-used country trail that took them to Oliver’s property. The factory yard resembled a huge excavation site cut into the surrounding hills, and as they drove toward the new buildings, Beatrice saw the brick kilns Oliver had told her about. She counted six of them. She could see why they were called beehives: the shape, but also the number of men working around them. In fact, when they got out of the car and walked closer, she saw men everywhere, even on the roof of a long wooden building, where they were hammering shingles into place.
Oliver explained that this building was the heart of the operation, from one end, where trolley cars brought clay from the pits, through to the other, where the raw bricks were stacked and taken to the kilns. He took her inside and up a narrow staircase leading to his office so she could have a look at the works from overhead. The office had windows on all sides, and a catwalk was suspended under the rafters so that every aspect of production was visible. As Oliver led her along the catwalk, he explained what she was seeing below them: a giant pug mill, which looked to Beatrice like something you might see in a bread-making plant; the mould shop; the drying tunnels; the network of conveyor belts and trolley tracks that connected the shops and work stations. It was sometimes hard to hear with all the hammering on the roof, but Oliver leaned close so she caught most of what he was saying, and she was amazed that he—or any man, for that matter—could bring such a complicated production into being.
When they’d finished their tour of the building, they descended the stairs and stepped once again into the factory yard. Oliver took her next to see the kilns, and they were able to walk inside one so Beatrice could see the overhead construction that created downdrafts of heat during the firings. Then he showed her the warehouse, where the finished bricks would be sorted and loaded onto skids for transport. Horses had been purchased, he said, and would soon arrive from Ontario by train to pull the trolley cars and transport the finished bricks by wagon to another warehouse in the city, near the railway tracks. He pointed out the new barn that awaited the animals.
“I know nothing of horses,” he said, “but Nathaniel has hired a man to care for them and train them to the harness.”
Later, they walked out into the quarry hills, and Beatrice wondered how she might describe adequately in a letter home the strangeness of the clay deposits, which did not look at all as she’d thought they would. She’d expected a rust colour, like the bricks in Byrne Corners, but instead, variegated seams of pink and blue-grey ran through the cut banks. She felt as though she had gone back in time, and she half expected a giant reptile to step in front of her with its teeth bared. There was something disturbingly prehistoric about these hills, she thought. She asked Oliver what happened when it rained and he told her the clay sluiced like thick cream. After a windstorm, he said, you might find arrowheads exposed in the surrounding fields. He had found many. She was quiet as they walked then, no longer thinking about dinosaurs, but of a time much more recent. Although it hardly made sense, she felt as though they were trespassing.
As they looped around and the buildings came back into view, Oliver said, “The West is a new land now, Beatrice, and you can’t argue with progress, can you.”
She didn’t know whether you could or not, that was Oliver’s business, but on the way home in the car, she was overtaken by a wave of homesickness. She was unsettled by this wilderness, and she felt a longing for quiet, conventional Byrne Corners, Ontario, and the house she had grown up in. Although she admired Oliver’s determination, she wondered if perhaps she should not have replied to his first letter, and this thought, too, unsettled her because she did not want to be unhappy and believed discontent was something you brought on yourself. She had once been to a lecture with her parents where a fiery speaker from Chicago said that God wanted His flock to be prosperous, and anyone who wasn’t had only his own insufficient faith to blame. He had lost her by appearing to blame poverty on the poor—what had happened to charity?—but she did agree that happiness was of your own making, barring dire circumstances.
When they got back to their boarding house she said she thought she had best lie down, she was feeling a bit poorly. She drank the cup of tea Oliver made for her and assured him that she would be herself again the next day, which she was. She vowed never again to let nerves and homesickness get the better of her, because she was a fortunate woman to have been there to pick up the pieces when Salina died and Oliver Diamond’s life fell apart.
She was much better prepared the next time she accompanied Oliver to the plant, a month later when the first bricks came out of one of the beehives. They stood at the open door to the kiln, Nathaniel Thick beside them in his suit and cowboy hat. She was not wearing walking shoes that day; she had dressed up for the occasion. One of the oven men wheeled a trolley from inside the kiln, and Oliver donned insulated gloves and removed a still-warm brick from a stack and declared it the ceremonial first brick. There were at least a hundred workers and their families there, and Beatrice was introduced many times as Mrs. Diamond, the owner’s wife.
When the paper came out the following day, she sent a clipping home to her parents, along with a letter.
Dear Mother and Father,
As you can see, Oliver is on the front page of the newspaper! The plant is up and running, and we removed the first brick from one of the kilns with all of the workers there to celebrate with us. Oliver is very proud of that first brick after years of planning and hard work. He and his partner, Nathaniel Thick, hosted a wonderful picnic afterwards for the workers and their families. It was quite the th
ing to see . . . Oliver serving corn and potato salad at a cookout.
The bricks from Oliver’s plant are different from those you are used to. They are a warm yellow colour, and not the red brick you see in Byrne Corners, but striking all the same. This is due to the iron content, I am told, and residue from the coal furnaces. You will see when you come to visit.
Oliver has shown me the plans for our new home—to be built with Diamond bricks, of course—and it looks very much like a house you might see on High Street in Byrne Corners, with a front porch just right for a swing. A swing is one of the first pieces of furniture I intend to purchase. You can look forward to taking your tea in the fresh air when you come to visit, although it will have to be in the summer or you will not survive.
I have other joyous news as well. Oliver and I are happy to announce that we are expecting a child in the spring. I am feeling well, just a bit of the morning sickness, but Oliver is very attentive. I hope the house will be ready by the time the baby arrives and that you will make plans to visit and meet your first grandchild. The train is a very fine way to travel.
Speaking of travel, the Daisy china has not been unpacked since its journey west. However, I aim to put it to good use when the Oliver Diamonds are settled in their new home. I remember you saying, Mother, that proper china separates the wheat from the chaff, and I dare say that will be especially true here in the frontier.
I hope you are both well.
Your daughter,
Beatrice
P.S. I do miss home, but as Oliver says whenever I am a bit blue, the future is here in the West. I’m sure that he is right. He is very clever about these things.
2
The Oliver Diamonds
Oliver Diamond was known to be a family man. Although he was an esteemed member of what was referred to as the city’s business community, he had no interest in private clubs or golf courses or the men’s spa at the YMCA. He was in his office high above the brick works at six every morning, and every evening at six on the dot he sat down to the supper Beatrice had prepared, expecting his children to do the same until they got married and moved into their own homes. Sometimes he would return to the plant for a few hours in the evening, but unless there was an emergency he was always home again in time to have a cup of tea with Beatrice before she went to bed. If the youngest children were already asleep, he looked in on them. If Estella was still awake (and she often was) he sat on her bed and talked to her for a few minutes, about the book she was reading or what she had done that day. Sometimes he asked her what plans she had for her life when she grew up. In answer to that question, she always said, “Run the factory,” and Oliver would say, “Very good, then,” before he went downstairs to join Beatrice in the parlour.
Oliver’s unquestionable devotion to his family allowed Beatrice to overlook his ambivalence in the matter of the Sunday service. Most husbands in his position sat in the pew with their wives every week, but Oliver went to church with Beatrice only sporadically: on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, perhaps to the Thanksgiving service. At his insistence, the children were given a choice about whether to accompany their mother each week, and one by one they all chose not to after being bored silly enough times, but they did not argue on the occasions of Oliver’s attendance, when they were told to put on their best clothes. They knew that if their father was going to church, they were too. The United Church minister always welcomed them boisterously and said something predictable like, “Look what the wind blew in, the entire suit of Diamonds,” and the other congregants gathered and told Beatrice what a good-looking family she had. She was so pleased by the fuss that no child, not even a teenager, begrudged the inconvenience of having a perfectly good Sunday hijacked, and Oliver’s status as upstanding was affirmed in spite of his hazy beliefs. After church on these occasions, the family would arrive home to the aroma of a perfectly timed pork roast, and they would have dinner together at noon rather than six. In the first years, Beatrice used her good daisy china for these special Sunday meals, but as the family grew in number she became worried one of the children would break a plate or a bowl, and so she arranged the dishes and the matching tea set attractively behind the glass doors of her china cabinet and there they stayed. Her parents would be disappointed, she thought, if they knew that neither she nor Oliver felt compelled to host the elegant dinner parties they had imagined when they’d purchased the china.
Oliver’s life—through the first decades of the business and the arrival of the children, through two world wars and the difficult years of the Great Depression—comprised two things, the brick plant and his family, which is why Beatrice could not have been more dismayed when he announced, at seventy-four years of age, that he was going on a fishing trip with a group of businessmen he knew. The Diamonds—which by then included the boys’ wives and a dozen grandchildren—were all at the house for Sunday dinner, the regular six o’clock kind. There was no question of using the daisy china now, there were far too many people. The only one missing on this day was Jack’s wife, Phyllis, who had moved home with her parents. Temporarily, according to Jack, but Beatrice suspected the first divorce in the Diamond family was pending.
“A fishing trip?” Beatrice said. “Have you lost your mind, Oliver?”
He ignored the question and said, “Jack here wants to come along.”
No one was going to ask Jack if he had lost his mind. They were all too worried it might be true. He’d spent months in an overseas hospital after the invasion of Normandy in 1944, followed by a full year of recovery at home once he was shipped back to Canada. Now, more than five years later, he was still plagued by headaches and what looked like a complete lack of ambition.
“I believe it might be good for both of us,” Oliver said. “Theo, I have every confidence you can run the plant for a week. Time you tried it on.”
Theo and his wife Gladys exchanged a look that said they had spoken about his position at the factory, but if they thought it was time he was given more responsibility, they didn’t say so.
The fishing party drove north on their way to a remote lodge, but they’d been delayed leaving the city and darkness fell when they were still several hours short of their destination. They decided to stop for the night at the village of Lake Claire, which was not much more than a few small businesses stretched along the shore of an immense body of water. They booked rooms at an old hotel—The Travellers—that had been there as long as the village, and in the dining room they struck up a conversation with a local fishing guide and entrepreneur named Allen Foster. Foster told them he was planning to build twenty rental cabins along the lakefront, the first real commercial development at Lake Claire other than the hotel.
“Twenty eventually, that is,” he said. “Ten is probably all I can manage for now. The bank’s been a bit difficult. They’re not sure people will travel this far.”
Oliver laughed and said he knew a thing or two about banks. There was something about entrepreneurship they didn’t understand, that gambling was a necessary part of winning.
“Tell that to my credit union,” Foster said. “And maybe my wife, although she at least sees the potential. Lenora. She’s a friendly sort, an asset. She’ll do well with the tourists.”
As Foster talked on about his plan, and his other assets besides Lenora, Oliver’s companions lost interest and drifted upstairs to their rooms. Only Oliver stayed at the table with Foster.
As he listened, he thought about Nathaniel Thick, a man of means who had taken him seriously when the brick plant was just an idea, one that far exceeded his own available funds. He felt affection, nostalgia even, for the early days of the factory and for his old friend, and he almost expected Nathaniel to walk through the door and join them at the table with a ledger and a roll of blueprints. It had ended badly with Nathaniel because Oliver had been so intent on claiming the business in its entirety for his sons. His decision to force his partner out the way he had was one of the few in his life that he regretted. He
wondered now if there was something he might do help Allen Foster, with himself in the role of Nathaniel Thick. He and Foster talked into the evening, until the woman who ran the dining room began to turn off the lights and they realized she was waiting for them to leave.
The next morning the fishing party, including Jack, continued farther north, but Oliver stayed on at The Travellers. Every day he went out on the lake with Allen Foster in his fishing boat. Foster sat in the stern with his hand on the tiller and steered them across the open water, and when he slowed to cruise along the shoreline of a bay so clear you could see the fish on the lake bottom, he talked to Oliver about his plans for the rental cabins. Oliver had grown up in a place where hunting and fishing were common—the Ottawa Valley—but he associated fishing rods with subsistence and men who smoked their catch or stored it in ice houses for the winter. Foster had a different clientele in mind, family men with wives and children. The war was over, he said, and young men were settling down, finding jobs, buying houses. No one, young or old, wanted to relive what the country had been through in the last twenty years. There was a market for happiness, and he believed that if he could build affordable family holiday cabins, Lake Claire would provide the rest. Oliver listened carefully, and he became convinced that Foster was on to something.
When they were having supper at the hotel one night as the week drew to a close, Oliver decided it was his turn to talk, and he asked Foster if he would consider brick for his cabin construction. He was thinking about the yellow face bricks that had been stockpiled in his storage sheds since the war, when Diamond and Sons had been declared a war service industry and had switched its operations solely to the production of firebrick for the boilers of ships. After the war, Oliver had discovered there was a lucrative industrial market for firebrick and he had continued with its production. The construction bricks produced before the war were still sitting unused.
The Diamond House Page 9