But still I say to her, It’s the running that counts.
We are coming out around the barn, the field opens before us, and I begin to run the old familiar path. No one sees me running. But I do, each step unfolding in my mind, shaking my body, jarring and rattling it, and carrying me along. This is what it feels like: a catalogue of dull pain from ankle to shin to knee to hip to shoulder. The breath comes hard at first, rough, but will smooth into a rhythm. And when I’ve been running for a while, only then, the thoughts settle into sense.
I am remembering the races, stealthily entered in my middle years, when I ran with a hood shadowing my face, my hair cropped wiry and short, so that I could pass as a man competing at a distance from which women were barred. Look up my times. In my fifties and sixties, as A. F. Smart, I ran Boston, Chicago, New York, Hamilton. Why did I do it? Why race, when I could run from here to the lake and back in a single day, and often did, leaving Cora at home to mutter and fret? I would carry along boiled eggs, walnuts, and homemade sweetened ginger water.
Somehow it never went out of me—the desire to compete, to line up against others, win or lose, part of a rhythm larger than myself. One turning wheel in a crowd of effort.
If the girl is mine, as she claims, she’ll get to Rotterdam, if she wants to. But it won’t be money that buys her the race she intends to run.
WHEN GEORGE DIES, I do not hear of it immediately. In dying, George leaves behind Tattie, the mother of his four children, my nephew and nieces. Tattie, short for Tatiana. I believe her to be younger, even, than I am. She sends the eldest to tell me about my brother’s passing, but I am not at home. I am at the Toronto Daily Star, working the job found for me by Miss Gibb’s favour. My brother has died and I do not know because I am in a windowless office downtown transcribing copy for a reporter who has been on the scene of a factory fire—suspected arson—and the landlady tells me nothing.
The following day, the boy comes again, this time to ask for money for the burial, and the day after that to say a man has been by their house with a letter that Tattie cannot read, and still the landlady does not say a word of it. Placidly, she serves up her fatty cuts of meat and soft mealy potatoes, inquiring whether I’d like seconds, without a hint that anything might be amiss. I plan to visit George on Sunday, when I’m free, if I can stomach it, and as I’m not sure that I can, it does not occur to me to visit any sooner.
The boy comes a fourth time. On this occasion, he is sent by his mother to tell me that someone in a dark suit is going to take him and his sisters away.
I hear nothing of any of this.
Perhaps the boy does not know he may leave a message with the landlady, and asks for me only to flee when told I’m not in. Perhaps the landlady thinks the child is a stray. Perhaps—and I consider this the most likely possibility—she believes that the ragged child is beneath me, beneath my interest. She has ideas about glamour and style, and she seems perpetually to imagine me a fine young lady in a fur coat, no matter the evidence to the contrary.
I almost cannot bear to think of Tattie waiting, waiting, each time, for the boy to return home. I can’t bear to think of the silence ascribed to me. The help denied.
On the Sunday, at last, the boy finds me home. This time he is carrying his baby sister in his arms. I hear his story, all in a rush, a cascading urgency of need. There isn’t time to question the landlady; I’ll state my case against her silently, by leaving before month’s end without notice, even if it means abandoning the hard, velvet-covered chairs. What does anything matter? All in a rush, I learn of my brother’s death and pauper’s burial, and of the letter that Tattie cannot read, and the man in the dark suit who has clearly terrified the boy with his threats. All of this tumbles out of the child in one long exhalation.
We hurry along the dirty streets. The first leaves of the season are falling from the trees, brown and ugly, swirling around our feet as we run, the child just ahead of me. Burdened by the infant, he refuses my help, and keeps a stoical businesslike pace that I admire.
We enter through the garden gate, the late-summer fruit hanging heavy and overripe and bug-bored on the weary tomato plants. A patch of lettuce has gone to seed.
The boy climbs the back steps almost wearily, like an old man, and hesitates, after all that rush, at the door. I look at him and try the handle. It isn’t locked. Inside, we hear a strange cry, thin as gruel, persistent as life itself. I take heart. I open the door. The strange cry is silenced.
“Tattie, I’m here! I’ve come! It’s Aggie, your sister,” I call as we stand on the threshold, our eyes adjusting to the dark room. I want her to know that I think of her as a sister. I want her to feel centred inside the embrace of family, even a family like ours, that with its instinct for secrecy does not know she exists.
There is no answer and the strange cry is silenced.
It is only one room, as I’ve said already. The room is dark. Along the wall nearest us is a small kitchen area, a few cupboards, a low shelf for preparing food, a greasy cook stove that warms the space in winter. The infant in the boy’s arms has begun to whimper.
I see the children first. They could be asleep, flat on their backs, lying on the wide board floor with a pillow beside them. But they are not asleep. And that is when I see Tattie kneeling in the corner, head bent as if in prayer.
A calm enters my body with the efficiency and speed of an injected drug. I push the boy behind me, toward the open door, I say, “Run!”
I move as if I know exactly what to do. I approach Tattie.
“Give me that,” I command, and take from her willing hand the heavy knife with which she’s been nicking her wrist, unable to make the first cut.
“I can’t live,” she tells me in an urgent, private whisper, but I won’t hear it. The calm floods out of me as I turn my back on her. That is when I see the boy. He hasn’t gone. He stands in the doorway, a shadow against the light of day.
The boy, he can’t be more than seven. The summer I first arrived in Toronto, he was an infant.
I remember meeting him, when George decides I am ready for it. I remember meeting them, I should say: the babe in arms, and the girl in whose arms the babe lay.
“I got something to show you, Aggie. It’s a secret. You won’t tell?”
I understand secrets. Our house is the location of many kept, and never told.
I agree.
George and I are walking in the street, as there are no sidewalks here. The houses are crammed together—shacks, I think. I push the thought down.
“You won’t tell Olive. Promise.” Olive will have nothing to do with George, in any case. She does not like him.
“I won’t tell Olive. What is it George?”
He grins suddenly, ear to ear. “You’ll see.” Whatever his secret, it makes him happy.
We enter without knocking at a house split into two sections, no porch, no steps, a rough door scraping across the dirt, one window, broken and covered with a nailed board. I hear the baby’s cry as my eyes adjust to the dim interior. A chilly room, a bed on the floor. This is where they are. The girl rises quickly, straightens her skirt, sweeps her fingers through her hair.
“This here’s Aggie, my little sister,” George says. It surprises me to hear his voice busting with pride. “Aggie, this is Tattie. Tattie, show Aggie my son, Rob, we call him.”
Tattie cradles the baby expertly, lifting and displaying him against her chest. He is big enough to hold up his head, and he is surprisingly chubby, filled out like a properly fed baby should be, toothless and chortling. Instinctively, I reach for him, and he jumps as if he wants to meet me too.
I hold him squashed against me, under my chin. I breathe in his musty spoiled-milk warmth, his graceless rubbery limbs flailing, his tiny fingers and toes clutching for my hair, my dress. I suppose I get a bit lost in him. Maybe it is kinship—love. My brother’s son.
“You’re married! Why ever didn’t you tell us?” I say at last, looking up to see the two of them
watching me, leaning against each other. She has her arms wrapped around his chest in a posture of intimacy to which I have never been witness, certainly not between my mother and father, not even when Fannie walked into the corn with our brother-in-law. I feel my face go hot. I have misunderstood. I have blundered.
It should have been obvious: George is not married to this girl. This girl, the mother of his child, is not his wife.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“Who needs it?” says George. He kisses Tattie, or she reaches up to kiss him, full on the mouth. I feel like I am glimpsing through a window a scene I am not meant to be witness to—compelling, illicit. I stare down at the lovely lightly curling black hairs on the baby’s head. He is beginning to fuss, for which I am thankful. I hop him up and down in my arms and walk the room, away from them, humming his name into his hair.
“She looks broody,” says Tattie.
“Maybe she’ll take him home,” says George. “It’ll be just the two of us again.”
“Oh, Georgie.”
I assume they are joking, but I disapprove nevertheless. I bring the baby over to them, and pass him, wriggling, into Tattie’s arms. “He’s perfect,” I say.
“Isn’t he?”
Isn’t he? He remains perfect in my eyes as he stands on the threshold of that other room, seven years on. He is a small child, stunted by diet, rickety, all jutting wrists and ankles. He holds his baby sister like a package he can be trusted never to drop, no matter what comes.
I don’t want him to fear the knife I’m holding, but what am I to do? He’s waiting for me. I cross the small room in three leaping strides and push the boy in front of me, out into the back garden. Rows of houses crowd around, intrusive, indifferent.
We are quite stunned, I think. The baby arches her back and howls. I toss the knife—an ordinary kitchen tool with a blunt blade—in among the fruiting plants overgrown with weeds.
“Police! Murder! Help!”
The boy, he hears the word police—or is it murder? I should not have used that word, nor this tone, entirely hysterical—and he takes off running. Good, I think, forgetting, briefly, that he is only a child and in my charge. “Police! Police!” There flies the boy, the baby in his arms, disappearing down the alleyway. After a moment’s confusion, I tear after him. He knows all of the neighbourhood’s hiding places; but he can’t outrun me. I follow at a small distance, keeping him within sight.
I want to let him go, to let him lose me. I can feel what he is feeling—or so I imagine. I can feel the world collapsing around us. I can feel the weight of the baby, like an anchor, like an extra heart. I can feel the need to run, to keep just ahead of everything that is falling like an avalanche behind our passage—if only he can keep ahead of it, he can outwit destruction. He can hide out. He can keep what little is his.
But I know it will never do to let the child go, not like this. I track him until finally he is too weary to continue. I catch them in my arms. I hold on for as long as I can, and then I can’t anymore. It is my duty to let go.
Isn’t it?
It is only later that I wonder why it didn’t occur to me to go along with him, to sweep them up in my care and escape, the three of us. Surely I could have outrun any threat. We could have made our own fugitive family, somewhere else.
Instead the baby, and the boy, both are taken from me. Their only legal relation is their mother, now a murderess. I am prevented from making a claim, as the children are not considered my legal relations. The state will see to it that the children receive care. All I can do is hope the boy forgets everything that came before. I hope he begins life anew, as the infant surely can. To comfort myself, I imagine them adopted into families of wealth and prosperity, I give them tennis lessons, and pressed white shirts, and the smell of roast chicken with rosemary wafting from a clean kitchen streaming with light.
Every day during the trial, which is less than a week in length, I attend in the courtroom. In the evenings, I work the graveyard shift at the newspaper, writing headlines and photo captions for the morning edition. I sleep little but take care each morning to arrive in the courtroom neatly attired with my hair pinned into a bun. When it is my turn to be called as a witness, I reply in plain statements of fact. I identify myself as a friend. Do I believe my friend to have been mad? Surely it was a mad act, I say, with no rational explanation.
I try to catch Tattie’s eye, to tell her through mine—but what? What would I tell her, if I could?
I stay. I take notes throughout the week. I write my notes into a story. The story of the trial.
“You are not a crime reporter, that is clear,” says Miss Gibb. She urges me not to show my story to the local editor at the newspaper where she’s gotten me work, but in this instance, only, I refuse her advice.
“Mr. Stephens, have you got a moment? I . . . I’ve been sitting in on the case of the mother who smothered her children . . . I’ve been working on a story. Would you be willing to take a look?”
“Interested in crime, are you?”
I give away nothing. I watch his eyes scan my carefully typed-out page of text. He shows no emotion as he returns the piece of paper to me.
“Strong. Colourful. But this isn’t balanced reporting. That’s what I’d be looking for. Balance.”
“Oh.”
“You make it sound like you knew the woman or something. You can’t go around expressing your sympathies so obviously. That’s not your job, as a reporter.”
Fact: being a reporter is not my job. Yet.
Fact: it will be by the time this conversation is over.
“Aren’t you the girl who won the race? The one Miss Gibb brought in?”
“Yes. I am she.”
“You’ve got good grammar, nothing to sneeze at. And you’re not afraid of a gruesome story—I like that. That’s not something that can be said about most women. We’re always looking for fresh blood, a new angle. There’s a murder case coming up, man bludgeoned his wife to death in front of the kids.” He watches for a reaction. “It’s yours if you want it.”
“Thank you.” My tone is calm, my expression clear. I do not find his test difficult.
“I don’t mind a bit of the sentimental if you feel a need to add a feminine touch, but don’t pick sides. Maybe the wife was a shrew, or worse, what do we know? Keep it clean. But remember—a touch of shock keeps ’em reading, see what I mean? And readers are what we want. Eyeballs on our paper. It’s a bloodbath out there.”
I nod, as if I understand completely. Bloodbath. Readers. Eyeballs. Shock. I have to resist the urge to yank out my notebook and take notes.
“Thank you, Mr. Stephens.”
“Call me Rudy.”
“I prefer Mr. Stephens, if you don’t object.”
“Whatever tickles your fancy, miss, tickles mine.”
“I did know her,” I say after a moment of pause. He is shuffling papers on top of his desk and his head snaps up. “That woman in my story. She was someone that I knew.”
“Bit of advice—don’t go around telling people things like that. You should know better. Don’t make me regret giving you this murder case.”
“No, sir.”
“Call me Rudy.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stephens.”
“Don’t foul this up, Miss . . .”
“Miss Smart.”
“And may I call you Miss Smart?”
I open my mouth, close it. Ah, he’s joking. He grins.
Fact: it will be another three years before Mr. Stephens can talk me into a drink after work. Whiskey and soda for him. Fruit juice for me. Once an athlete, always an athlete.
Fact: he is married.
Fact: we’re never more than friends, whatever anyone else may think. We get along. We enjoy a meal together now and again. If he hopes for more, he hopes in vain, and—mostly—politely.
I am a woman unattached, a single woman of a certain age. I’m spared some complications. No one to nurse
in his declining years, for example. Also, no one to check my little eccentricities, developed over years of solitary habit. It may surprise you what a person would forgo in order to keep her small comforts, her calculated balance of order and disorder.
One thing does not change, no matter how much practice I get. I do not know how to say good-bye. I never learned that trick.
TATIANA LUKIVNY SITS beside her lawyer and weeps. Her face does not alter in its expression, and yet the tears flow steadily down her cheeks.
She is asked to stand, to accept judgement, and she obeys. She is asked to confess that she, an unmarried mother of four, took the lives of two of her own children. The children, Margaret, aged four, and Cecily, aged three, are named, and Miss Lukivny groans in apparent agreement: these are the children she smothered to death.
“Did you love them?” the judge asks.
The accused stares unseeingly and does not respond.
“Did you love them perhaps less than the other children, the two you did not kill?”
The accused cannot reply. Her throat is stopped with tears.
“Why did you do this, miss? Why?”
The accused has become a statue. She utters nothing in her own defence.
“TATTIE, IT’S ME, your sister, Aggie.”
“Come in.” She is sitting in a straight-backed hard wooden chair set before a window in a room that is whitewashed and very small. She is fortunate to have her own room, she has told me. I agree. I sit on her bed.
“And how are you?” I ask, as I always do.
“Just fine,” she replies.
I wonder why she doesn’t face the window. She is always facing the door, instead, when I knock and enter, sitting in the chair, her back to the glass. Does she not wish to see the sky, the grass, the trees? Does she fear being overcome with an irresistible urge to throw herself out? But the window is locked, as she must know. Or have I got it wrong, and it is not that she is facing away from the window, but toward the door, waiting for someone to come in?
I don’t ask.
“I’m glad you’re well,” I say. I have brought her a book, a slight novel of melodrama and romance such as she prefers. They have taught her to read, in here.
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