Yes, a house. It was situated just a block from the Elbow River, he told them, and conveniently close to a new school where their future children might go (Opal blushed). The house was a brown bungalow with white trim and a green shingled roof. Here—he would show them a photograph. As they could see, if they gathered round, a large veranda ran across the front, and half of it was glassed in for protection from the weather. The style of the house was unfamiliar to both Opal and her parents. The style, said Mac, reflected the characters of its original owners, an Englishman and his French wife. In the picture, Mac was standing on the front steps, wearing a suit and a boater, arms akimbo, proud.
June 15, 1915
Mrs. James Macaulay, née Opal King, of Winnipeg, greeted a large number of guests at the tea house yesterday, on the occasion of her first reception since her marriage. She wore her wedding gown of duchesse satin, with court train and trimmings of shadow lace. Receiving with her was Mrs. J. Deslisle May, who was wearing her wedding gown of ivory charmeuse, trimmed with duchess lace, and Mrs. Johnson, of Winnipeg, who was wearing her wedding gown of pink and white voile with shadow lace.
The tea room appointments were carried out in yellow and green, the table centred with a basket of yellow mums, swathed in yellow tulle. Mrs. George May and Mrs. D.T. Townsend shared the honours the first hour, and were later relieved by Mrs. Kiteley and Mrs. George M. Thompson. Miss Helen and Miss Genevieve Thompson waited on the door.
Opal found the clackety-clack of the train as it headed west unnerving, though it didn’t seem to bother Mac, head buried deep in his thick books. She did needlework to pass the time, but she had done so much of it in the last two years that it brought her very little pleasure or sense of purpose anymore. She had finished reading her books, Aunt Jane’s Nieces Out West and O Pioneers!, both travelling gifts from her sisters, as well as The Return of Tarzan, courtesy of Farley. (It’s a loaner not a keeper, he said.) Her hands sat uselessly in her lap. She wanted to wring them. What else was there to make? Mac’s suitcase was half filled with handkerchiefs, and it was early to start on baby things, not to mention bad luck.
Eventually she started feeling a little pouty. Neglected. This was, after all, their honeymoon, wasn’t it? She shifted slightly. She was sore down there, but not unpleasantly. She changed her train of thought. She tried to yet again entertain herself by thinking about their house, and how she would decorate it, but this daydream went only so far when all she had seen was a photograph of the outside. Having never been to Calgary, she found it impossible to imagine the location. This morning at breakfast she had tried teasing Mac into giving her more particulars, but he wouldn’t tell her a thing. “It’s a surprise,” he said. “You’ll see it soon enough.” Still she pestered, until he burst out unkindly, “You’ll see it when you see it. Shut your trap, would you?” Heads turned in the dining car and she was ashamed.
So she held the photograph and pictured the inside of the house herself. She pictured the front door opening, and Mac carrying her, his beloved bride, over the threshold. She saw the house as completely empty but for the trunks and crates that had arrived in their absence and were stacked in the foyer and living room waiting for her. The house echoed slightly with their footsteps. Light streamed through the windows. In the foyer Opal saw herself turning her head towards the living room, where she saw for the first time the grand piano Mac had bought as his wedding present to her. In her mind the piano was standing alone in its grandeur, gleaming in afternoon light. Dear Mac. How had he known buying the piano would make her so happy? And how had he, not a particularly musical person, chosen it?
Still he read. She sighed heavily. She might as well be by herself for all the attention he paid her, the old bookworm. He didn’t notice, or pretended he didn’t notice, her small ploys for attention. Difficulty getting a hat box down. Difficulty opening the compartment door. She could be murdered and thrown off the train by robbers and he wouldn’t notice until dinnertime. Opal picked one of Mac’s books from the pile—pages like tissue paper, and written in Greek. Another in Latin. Politics. History. Biography. Nothing, he looked up to say, suitable for a woman to read. Well, what did he think she was to do while he did all that reading? she wondered to herself. Stare out the window forever? She did have a brain she would like the opportunity to use, if only in conversation. Was that so much to ask?
Opal did smile as Mac carried her over the threshold of her new Calgary home. But as soon as he set her down in the foyer, she looked around completely baffled. Whose was all this furniture? Puzzled, she looked at Mac, who was uncharacteristically grinning from ear to ear. Pictures and curtains, furniture, lamps, carpets and doilies—whose house was this? Without moving, she looked around her.
“Mac? Whose house is this?”
“Well, it’s yours, of course.”
And then he told her the rest of the story. An Englishman and his bride, a Frenchwoman, had, as he had told her in Winnipeg, built this house five years before. The Frenchwoman had had no particular love for Canada, but since she was so terribly in love with her debonair husband, she had agreed to settle in “the colonies.” But then, without warning, the Englishman died, and the Frenchwoman wanted to flee this très mauvais country as fast as she could and return to France. So Mac had seized the opportunity—carpe diem!—and bought this house completely furnished, right down to the tea towels in the kitchen and right up to the grand piano in the living room. Opal wouldn’t have to do a thing except unpack her clothes, he crowed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked him, her throat so constricted she could barely speak.
“It wouldn’t have been much of a surprise if I had told you, would it?” Things were not unfolding as he had imagined they would. And whose fault was that? He strode over to the sideboard to pour himself a Scotch. He got out a glass. The decanter.
“Mac! What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m taking a drink.”
“Mac! You promised me. You promised me not to drink in our home! We haven’t been here an hour!”
Mac took up the decanter and held it tight against his chest like a child with a doll. “Go to hell,” he said, glaring at her. Then he took up the glass and went out to the garage.
Opal sobbed as she walked from room to room looking at the elegant furniture—the intricately carved living room pieces upholstered in rose-coloured jacquard; the china cabinet and long sideboard; the large circular dining table with carved claw legs and the eight matching chairs upholstered in dark blue velvet. Upstairs, the Italian walnut bedroom suite, the pale green and yellow satin duvets on the beds, the thick white towels in the bathroom. Every drawer and cupboard she opened was filled. In spite of its obvious quality, there was nothing—nothing—she would have chosen herself. She sat down on the landing and cried.
She could have packed away the woman’s towels, and sheets, and linens, but she didn’t, and for years she would feel she was snooping through another woman’s house. She left her own things packed in their crates and boxes, and had the maid, once she’d hired one through the YWCA employment services, help her move them down the narrow wooden stairs into the basement.
And so she tried to acclimatize, and succeeded somewhat. Once she knew her house better she relaxed a bit, and while Mac was at work she set herself to learning to play the music for the song version of “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” for him. To show him she had forgiven him for not telling her about the house; to try to get them on an even keel.
“Sit down,” she told him a few weeks later with a smile when he came home. “I have a surprise for you.”
But it wasn’t a good day for romance: Mac’s work that day had been difficult. He had been wrangling with plans for the railway, and what he had hoped would take an hour or two had taken the whole day. After stopping in the garage for a drink, what he craved now more than anything was some supper and some time to himself, not some female malarkey. But to please her he sat down and appeared to listen. He stoo
d up the moment she finished and said, “Very nice. Thank you.” And as he left the room, he turned to say, “I bought you the piano for your own pleasure, not mine. I’ll thank you not to play while I’m here.”
And that was the kind of daily exchange that occurred in the life they settled into. Every day Mac went out into the world and then came back to the house again at night via the garage. Opal adapted as best she could to her husband’s wants, but she never felt secure. His lack of physical and verbal affection made her suspect early on that he simply didn’t like her; it seemed to her as though he had expected to be disappointed by her, but she didn’t know why. She had always considered herself, and thought others considered her, a good person. She had never questioned herself. But now she began to ask herself what was wrong with her. And why had he married her if he didn’t like her? It made no sense. Nor did the times he behaved as though it were she who didn’t like him. The unfairness with which she felt he treated her made her chronically worried, and stubbornly certain he was wrong in his opinion of her, while she also began fearing that he was right. Eventually she became a little snappy herself. And then more. She gradually changed until she didn’t always recognize herself; she started to doubt things that she had never spent a breath on before. Perhaps, it occurred to her one day, she had deformities of person or personality that only she could not see, and that her own family had loved her too much ever to point out. It was such a gradual and subtle erosion of her confidence that she barely noticed it; it was as though her self-esteem were a bar of rosewater soap run under warm water for hours on end.
Little Pearl’s hair was straight and black and her dark brown eyes were like Opal’s brother Farley’s and her sister Pearly K’s, while baby May had her mother’s larger bones and plump softness. May’s wavy hair was light brown, and she would have fair and freckled Scottish skin and blue eyes, and though her smile would become self-conscious, it was both warm and tolerant, even when her big sister, whom she adored, treated her unkindly.
Both daughters were born at home, Pearl in 1917, May in 1921. The first time Pearl saw May, Pearl had shyly, even softly, approached the bassinet where her new baby sister lay. Pearl peeked in and took one look at May, and a wail rose from inside her and grew in volume as she stamped out of the room, up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door. Not only did her new sister have the only blue eyes in the family, she sobbed to Opal when she coaxed and coaxed her to divulge what was wrong, but now Pearl would have to share. Everything. Everything that mattered, everything that had been all hers until this interloper had arrived. When a smile played on Opal’s lips, little Pearl had looked at her with adult fury and ordered her mother out of her room. Opal had gone.
Pearl was a strange child, and Opal was intimidated by her. When Opal knelt and embraced her, Pearl stood stiff as a stick, offering little or nothing in return. Pearl’s rare smiles always seemed forced, and laced with unhappiness. What appeared to Opal to be an inherent sadness that she had seen early on in her little girl’s face had almost broken her heart. But as Pearl grew older, the sadness gradually became a fixed expression that more closely resembled displeasure as Pearl became, apparently, chronically dissatisfied and cranky. Nothing and no one could please her, and that’s how she stayed. In some ways, Pearl was a lot, Opal thought, like Mac. Like him, her gaze was shrewd and somewhat unnerving; even when she was very young she had looked suspicious, as if someone somewhere was getting something that she was not, or that something was going on that she ought to be privy to and wasn’t. Something wasn’t fair. How to convince her beloved daughter that the world had other things on its mind than thwarting her every desire? If Pearl liked them better, people would like her better, she told her. People were offended when other people did not trust them. But Pearl did not care. She could stay mad for days, refusing to speak or even acknowledge anyone’s existence. Yet Opal had heard desperate sobs emanating from Pearl’s room, had heard her daughter’s weeping and wailing that no one loved her, so she knew Pearl was not without feelings. But she would not open her door to her mother, and to her father only when he angrily demanded that she do so or he’d thrash her.
Pearl could stay mad at her sister for days, refusing to speak to her or even acknowledge her existence. If little May looked sad or hurt, Pearl ignored her. She treated her sister like a curse that had been sent to interfere with the way the world should run—which was, of course, around Pearl. Little May would traipse after her looking so unhappy it would melt anyone’s heart but Pearl’s. Pearl slammed the door in her face. “That girl had better learn that’s not the way things work!” said Mac, as he locked Pearl in her room for insolence. “She may speak to you rudely, but I won’t put up with it. Let her stew. She’ll sort herself out soon enough.”
Mac had strict rules about many things, and required Opal to enforce them when he was not present. Discipline was a mother’s job, he said, implying when they misbehaved that Opal wasn’t fulfilling her responsibilities. Mac might administer verbal chastising, but he would not administer corporal punishment, though he considered it necessary. Let them hate their mother, not him, thought Opal. The children were not allowed in the parlour unless they wanted to practise on the piano or there was company. They were to keep their hands off the furniture because Mac didn’t like fingerprints on everything and the maid had better things to do than to run around cleaning up after them. They were to keep their feet off the clawed feet of the dining room table because it scuffed the wood and made an annoying sound. They were, as was the accepted wisdom, to be seen and not heard. Period.
Opal didn’t like to hit her daughters. Her own parents had never hit their children, had admonished them with quiet, stern words when it was necessary, which hadn’t been often. Her father had only once raised his hand to the boys, and the occasion was so unusual that Melville had been just as surprised as their father. But Opal did what Mac told her to do with Pearl, hitting her either with her hands or with a stick Mac acquired and gave her expressly for the purpose, and then Opal cried for hours afterwards, torn by the pull between being an obedient wife and a loving mother. Without her husband’s permission, she lightened the touch with May.
Summer holidays usually involved a week or two in a cabin in Banff, and two weeks for the girls riding horses at the King Ranch in Millarville. But in the summer of 1926, the Macaulays took a sea voyage to Britain. It was the first time Mac had been back home, which he regretted deeply, as his father had died in January without ever seeing his grandchildren. Pearl was nine, May five when they embarked. The twenties were turning out to be the best decade of their lives together. Mac had prospered, and he didn’t mind showing his mother that was the case, with the clothes he dressed his family in, and the manner in which they travelled and lodged. First they went to London, where they visited the Tower and Buckingham Palace, and then they hired a car and driver and went north to Scotland. The week they spent there with his mother was tense and unpleasant, and the absence of his father and the presence of his mother created a turmoil in Mac that resulted, Opal could see, in his hardening himself like shellac. Which made it difficult for everyone, his mother included. He could barely speak a civil word.
As they travelled south into England again, Mac decided that he wanted to have his sister Joan meet his children and his wife. How many years had it been? Almost twenty, surely. His sister had married badly, he reminded Opal, and this time he gave her the details. She had married an Indian doctor named Walla who was from Bombay, of all places, in spite of her family’s forbidding it. Now, he said, he had changed his mind about it all. Surely there were worse things than marrying a coloured man, and if they visited during the daytime he would not have to set eyes on him. He wanted his sister to see that he was doing well; he wanted her to be pleased for him the way she had tried on occasion to be when he was a child, removing him sometimes from their mother’s path, from her grasp. So when they arrived back in London, he took Opal, Pearl and May to his sister’s door, and brus
quely knocked with short, hard raps. Joan opened the door. When she saw who it was, an indescribable look swept across her face. Then she closed the door in her brother’s face. Not only that, but she had caught her skirt in the door, and had to open and shut it again.
Mac looked dumbstruck, crushed, and then his face went hard. As hard and as black, Opal thought, as that day he came out of Mr. Tupper’s office. He ordered his family away, and walked apart from them back to the hotel. He remained ill-tempered even when they had crossed the Channel to France, and in Paris, where Opal bought her mother and each of her sisters a dress, Mac, still smarting from his sister’s rebuff, was vocal in his disapproval of the expenditure, and there in their hotel room they fought.
“You make too much of that family of yours,” he said.
“I do not,” she said.
“You are completely foolish when it comes to them. You’d think you hadn’t a brain in your head.”
“Fiddle-dee-dee. I am not. And I do so.” Then she recklessly added, “Well, at least I talk to my family.”
She and Mac didn’t speak to each other for days after that, and they said to their two daughters, Tell your mother this. Tell your father that, though May was the only one to co-operate. Pearl sat staring at the wall or the floor, sullen and silent, ignoring them all. “I refuse to partake in such idiocy,” she said finally, in a very grown-up voice.
On the day the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the Alberta Five, saying that women were not persons, Opal had gritted her teeth and barely held her tongue while Mac, jubilant, crowed at the dinner table as he sat with his wife and daughters and the maid waited on the table. He said to them that anyone with a brain knew already that women should not serve in the Senate. He said these females had wasted the court’s time, anyone could see that. This was the culmination of many months of one-sided “discussions” on the topic: Mac had spoken often and long about it. Women were too stupid to see that they were out of their league wanting such rights. He needed to look no further than his own wife with her willy-nilly spending habits if he wanted to see a woman in action. There were female pursuits and male pursuits. Women excelled at their chosen activities, and men at theirs. What was so hard to understand about that? Opal sat across from her husband and watched her daughters absorb his words.
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