A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2)

by Terence M. Green

  Flowers. Dreams.

  Flames in the city. Flames on a birthday cake. Blue water. A blue candle, burning slowly.

  "Listen to this," Maggie says. She folds over the copy of The Toronto Star newspaper as she reads. "The life expectancy for a woman is fifty-three years. For a man, fifty-two."

  I have heard numbers like these before, but have forgotten them.

  "It used to be fifty-one for a woman, forty-eight for a man," she says.

  "We're gaining."

  "We're not." The newspaper is folded again. "And it says here that the number of children that a healthy woman living in wedlock should have is ten."

  "Who says?"

  "The Vice Commission of Chicago."

  "What is that?"

  "I don't know. Some fool commission of men who have no idea what it is to be a woman." She looks at me. "Don't you think two children is enough?"

  I think of my father, of thirteen children. "I don't know," I say.

  I see her face, the new lines.

  She folds the paper, says nothing, breathes rhythmically.

  2

  The topic changes at work. Just before midnight on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the world's largest floating vessel, the White Star liner R.M.S. Titanic, strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic and sinks within three hours. Of her 2,206 passengers, 1,503 drown. The list of names of those dead does not sound like anyone I know: a colonel, a novelist, an artist, an editor, a millionaire book collector.

  In the days that follow, we discover that of the 703 who are picked up by the Carpathia, several are from Toronto. A fellow named Arthur Peuchon from the Island's Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the RCYC, is soundly criticized by the local press upon his arrival home for not adhering to the time-honored code of women and children first. We talk of little else for weeks.

  I think of Maggie, of Margaret, of Jack. I think of drowning so that they may live, of the honorable thing to do.

  On a Saturday morning in July, Maggie and I are standing in the summer sun outside the new Woolworth's store at the northwest comer of Queen and Yonge, Jack in her arms, Margaret clinging to my hand, as the city's only motorized fire truck howls by us, bells clanging. Jack's attention is complete, Margaret is enraptured.

  I pick small, dark-haired Margaret up in my arms so that she can see better, watch her face as her neck cranes, as the truck disappears, her eyes beautiful, big. Jack is so excited small bubbles sprout on his lips as he tries to sputter his enthusiasm.

  I smile, holding her, watching him, seeing Maggie wipe his mouth, his chin. Seeing my family.

  August swelters. In our new three-room flat on Lansdowne Avenue we lie awake nights, bathed in sweat, the air still.

  Jack cries. Margaret crawls in with us. We wait for morning.

  The Toronto Star responds to the summer's heat and humidity by announcing a "swat the fly" contest, with cash prizes for the most dead flies produced. On August 19, two days before Margaret's third birthday, more than three million flies are turned in to the newspaper. A neighbor, Beatrice White, wins fifty dollars for producing 543,360 flies, weighing more than two hundred pounds.

  On Saturday evening, the street throws a party for Beatrice, who shows everyone the dozen wire-mesh traps in her yard that she used to catch the flies. Molasses, she explains. That's the key. Beatrice is a celebrity. We delight in having her among us, previously unaware of her ingenuity. Maggie and I drink beer, wander from porch to porch, exchanging pleasantries, complaining about the heat wave, Margaret and Jack in tow. When they finally fall asleep on Mrs. White's unpainted wicker verandah chairs, we carry them home, put them to bed. They lie there, beads of perspiration on their upper lips, their brows, skin perfect, ours.

  Perhaps it is the heat, the beer. I touch Maggie the way we used to touch each other, and she softens, is there for me. Finally. It's all right, she says. It's a good time of the month, my cramps are just starting. It's safe.

  I hear her as if from a distance, wish she would stop worrying, planning. I kiss her mouth, her neck, tremble. It's been so long. So long. I touch the small of her back where I have pulled her blouse loose. Her hands cup my face. She breathes into my mouth.

  It is October, the heat long gone, the trees yellow, red, when Maggie, folding the newspaper in her lap, says, "Norway has given women the right to vote."

  I look up from my own piece of newsprint, say nothing. I barely know where Norway is. I picture Norwegian women, tall, blond, emancipated, casting ballots, discussing politics.

  I think of the children. I try to understand. I try.

  In November, Maggie reads to me from McCall’s magazine. The Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Life, Collier's. Maggie reads everything she can get her hands on. "There is an Italian educator named Maria Montessori who has a fascinating article in here about educating children."

  "Margaret is only three," I say.

  "That's not too early, according to her. Even Jack."

  It is evening. The children are asleep. I take a cigar from my vest pocket, roll it between my fingers.

  "She speaks of educational toys. Says children can learn from toys, from color, from proportion."

  I think about this. "What kind of toys?"

  "Numbers, letters, pasted on cards—alternate rough and smooth paper—so that the child learns to distinguish between the smooth and rough texture, without realizing that the letters and numbers are also being learned."

  I strike a match, puff the cigar to life. I think back to Elora, to St. Mary's School, remember no toys. All that comes to mind is Dewey, my rag doll, clutched while I slept.

  "They become familiar with forms long before they know any purpose for them. She calls it sense training."

  I listen, fascinated, think about Margaret and Jack, and through the blue smoke see the dream called the future, see them in wonderful brick houses with fine clothes and shoes, their families about them, healthy, educated, all reading books.

  On Friday, December 20, instead of going directly home with the small brown envelope the size of a playing card that holds my weekly pay, I trudge back and forth in the snow between Simpson's and Eaton's, riding the escalators to the toy departments. I buy a circular alphabet board made of metal and fiber, twelve inches in diameter. It has eighty letters and characters and a drawing slate in the middle and costs me $1.39.1 buy wooden alphabet blocks, a set of jacks, an Erector set. A toy milk wagon, twelve-by-four inches, with red-spoked wheels, twisted wire loop handles, rubber tires, and metal wheels, costs me fifty-nine cents. The front wheels turn. And then, picturing Margaret with it in her hands, I buy a toy piano, eleven-by-sixteen inches, with fifteen keys and a lithographed front consisting of birds in a tree and the word "Symphony." The $2.98 price is more than a day's pay, and dizzy with the excitement, I have to stop the wild spending.

  But before I leave, on the main floor of Eaton's, thinking of Maggie, I buy a perfume atomizer for thirty-seven cents and a manicure and toilet set for $1.69.

  Nine dollars, I think. I have spent more than nine dollars. It is Christmas, I tell myself. Jack and Margaret will be excited. And swaggering through the snow to the streetcar, picturing their reactions, their faces, I am euphoric.

  "We don't have nine dollars to spare," Maggie says.

  "It's Christmas."

  "What will we do for the groceries, for the rent?"

  "I'll borrow some."

  "From who?"

  I do not know. "From mother. From Mike."

  She shakes her head, touches her brow.

  "I have money," says Margaret, who has been listening. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a nickel. "Uncle Mike gave it to me." Her English is perfect, her eyes dark and round.

  I think of the atomizer, its rubber squeeze ball, its scrolled surface, of the manicure and toilet set, combs, mirror, brushes, scissors. Jack is clinging to my leg. I reach down, pick him up. He plays with my tie, my collar, my ear. Margaret holds out the nickel.

  * * *

  FROM:
JOCK ROSS

  190 MICHIGAN AVE

  DETROIT MICH

  23 DECEMBER 1912

  TO: MARTIN RADEY

  DON VALLEY PRESSED BRICKS AND TERRA COTTA

  60 ADELAIDE STREET EAST TORONTO ONT

  $10 ENCLOSED STOP PAY ME BACK 5 AND SAY MERRY XMAS TO THE KIDS AND BUY A TREE AND SOMETHING FROM US STOP GETTING MARRIED IN THE SPRING WILL WRITE WITH DETAILS STOP GET READY TO COME TO DETROIT STOP

  SANTA

  3

  I pour tea from the silver thermos into my cup and sip it slowly. "Margaret is the only one that I make happy," I say. When the words are out, they astonish me because I realize that they are true, yet I have never thought them before.

  Propped up against her pillow, Gramma listens, stares.

  A long pause: the trickle effect of what I have uttered runs through my veins, opens doors. "I disappoint everybody else."

  Gramma opens her mouth. I lean forward with her tea, help her drink.

  "Even though he's still a baby, Jack has no interest in me."

  Gramma looks at me.

  "Maybe when he gets older."

  We sit quietly for a while.

  "I think Maggie expected more."

  The cup warms my hands.

  "I don't know what they want."

  Her mouth makes the o, her eyes soften, and I think, maybe, she understands.

  I dream that Jack and I are on a wooden dock by a lake when Jack slips into the water and beneath the surface. I dive into the water, hold my breath, search, but cannot find him. I dive again and again, deeper, lungs bursting, but he has sunk out of sight. I know that he cannot last much longer without air. I am frantic. The water is black. He is gone.

  A moan breaks from my chest. I wake up sweating, heart pounding, Maggie holding me by a shoulder.

  "You were dreaming," she says. "A bad dream."

  "I lost Jack." I am panting. "I couldn't find him. I couldn't save him."

  In the darkness, she strokes my head, my brow. "You're all wet," she says.

  I am cold. Jack, I think.

  Jack.

  TEN

  We must always walk in darkness. We must travel in silence. We must fly by night.

  —Thomas Merton

  The Ascent to Truth

  The hawk took another.

  A burst of feathers, soundless. We erupted from the field, an explosion of black dots, knowing that death was among us, our movements random, swaying, spurred by the primal flight from extinction.

  To the south, then east, headlong, for hours.

  Into another node, another loop. Fog.

  Suddenly, below us, the St. Lawrence. May 29, 1914, and the Empress of Ireland, rammed by the Norwegian collier Storstad, sank out of sight completely in fourteen short minutes. We settled into trees near the shore, listened, watched. One thousand fourteen people silenced. The hush, the mist, shrouded us. As before, we had fled the hawk only to encounter the cleansing of fire, the finality of water, always.

  The Titanic, women and children first. Jack, in a dream, disappearing beneath dark waters, my lungs squeezing, dying.

  Through the fog and the curved horizon that was the future, I now could make out the blurred shape of troops that would sail to England down this same river, across the Atlantic, and knew that if I soared high enough I would almost be able to glimpse them plunging down muddy embankments at Ypres, the yellow gas falling, heavy as it tumbled into the trenches, into their lungs, into their hearts and the hearts of their families forever, replacing the fog.

  The hawk we have fled was clean, simple, pure. It was right.

  The world, both large and small, was in madness.

  We lifted off, moving, again.

  ELEVEN

  1916

  1917

  1

  It is 8 p.m., January 18, 1916. Maggie is telling me about Manitoba's Nellie McClung, who has succeeded in attaining the right to vote and hold office in her province. It is seven months since the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat and the drowning of 1,198 people, whose grave, strangely, is Cork Harbour, the port from which mother and father sailed in 1846. Farther north, in Dublin, in three months the Easter Rising will occur, taking with it thousands more lives, ending in the court martial and execution of fifteen men, leaving more than one hundred thousand in the city on public relief. In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger is being arrested and jailed for opening a birth control clinic and dispensing information. The Parliament buildings in Ottawa will be destroyed by fire within a month. In two months, the legal drinking of alcoholic beverages will cease for eighteen years in Ontario, and stores will sell off their stock before the deadline. D & W Special Whiskey will go for seventy-five cents a quart. A walk down Dufferin in the evening and a glance along Liberty Street reveals shell casings like giant empty gray pods lining both sides of the street as far as one can see, higher than a man's head, overflowing from the munitions factory that is staffed mostly by women. Six months from now 624,000 Allied troops will perish during the offensive at the Somme, and fourteen months later, American president Woodrow Wilson will take the United States into the war in Europe, the war in which everyone has a friend a brother a cousin an uncle.

  There is a knock at the front door and we hear Verna from downstairs talking with someone. Then there are footsteps on the stairs and Maggie and I turn expectantly at the sound. Margaret, six and a half, and Jack, not yet five, both wrapped in a blanket, close to the stove, stop talking. The circus characters carefully arrayed on the sofa beside them, figures of wood, enameled in colors now faded and chipped, are ignored. I lay my cigar in an ashtray, the blue smoke slow to rise in the cold winter air of the room, fold my newspaper. It is wartime. We have no telephone. A knock on the door in the evening is seldom a good thing.

  When I open the door, it is Mike, my brother. He has been to our flat only twice before. Our lives, like so many others, have separated, somehow, inevitably, without our being aware of it.

  His face is ashen, sunken, his eyes blank.

  Dear God, I think. Oh, God.

  Both Bill and John, his two oldest, are overseas, Irish sons fighting England's war.

  But then he speaks, standing there in the doorway, says: "It's Kervin, Martin. He's dead."

  I don't know what I'm hearing. Kervin. He is not at war. He is here, at home. He is just a boy. Mike's youngest.

  Mike comes forward, puts his arms around me, puts his face on my shoulder, holds me tightly. I feel the coarseness of his hair against my cheek, feel him trembling, am filled with his pain. My brother. He cries, and I hold him, pull him closer, afraid to let him go.

  Jack and Margaret are silent, still.

  Mike is seated, a cup of hot tea in his hands.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  He shakes his head, shrugs. Mike is fifty, his hair thinning, his face gray. "It was his heart, they say. He wasn't strong enough." He looks at me. "Heart failure. He was only fifteen."

  I remember Kervin, coughing, sick. "Have you told Ma?"

  He shakes his head. "No," he says. His head continues to shake. Then, again, "No."

  Maggie and I glance at each other, then at Jack and Margaret, and cannot speak. Without words, we have said it: we cannot imagine this. It is impossible to imagine.

  At 5 p.m., Friday, March 17, 1916, Peter Sterling, the owner and president of Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta, calls me into his office to tell me face-to-face what he has been telling others all day. He is seated behind his desk. "Sit down, Martin."

  I sit.

  "You know what I'm going to say."

  "Yes."

  We are quiet for a moment. He is writing on a piece of paper. Peter Sterling, an Orangeman, a Lancashire man, took a chance on me, hired me when no one would hire an Irishman, even one born in Canada. I have always thought of him as a model of decency, of fairness, of Presbyterian sobriety. He wears a blue suit, a red tie, his hair white, his glasses thick. I have never seen his wife, his family,
although they say he has two grown sons who work in Chicago. I do not know him well at all. We live in different worlds.

  "It's true. I've sold the company and will be retiring. The company will cease to exist as of the end of the month. The new owners will bring in their own people. I'm not a young man anymore." He pauses. "How old are you, Martin?"

  "Thirty-five. I'll be thirty-six in June."

  "And you've worked here a long time."

  "Almost eighteen years." Half my life, I think.

  He writes something on the piece of paper. "And you have a wife and two children."

  "Yes."

  He nods. "What will you do?"

  I look into a corner of the room, away from his face, puzzled. "I don't know," I say. I am one of twenty-four employees. I do not know what any one of us will do.

  He folds the paper on which he has been writing and slides it into an envelope. It lies on the desk between us.

  I look back at his face, realize he is not really seeing me, that he is somewhere else, distracted. He is thinking of his life, not mine.

  He picks up the envelope, hands it to me.

  I take it, rise, shake his hand, leave.

  Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta

  60 Adelaide Street East

  Toronto

  March 17, 1916

  To Whom It May Concern:

  The bearer of this letter, Martin Radey, has been in my employ for the past eighteen years. During this period I have always found him to be honest, and reliable, and I have no hesitation in recommending him.

  Sincerely yours,

  Peter Sterling (President)

  In the envelope, with the letter, are five ten-dollar bills.

  I walk north to Gerrard, then east. It is a long walk, but I know exactly where I am going. When I reach the southwest corner of River Street, I enter the Shamrock Hotel, seat myself in a comer, order a pint of Guinness and a Blue Union Label cigar, and slump into the shadows. It is, after all, St. Patrick's Day, and there are only five more days until the temperance forces will close down the Shamrock, the Winchester, the Nipissing, the Rupert, the Dominion House, the Avion, and all the other workingman's pubs. The King Edward, the Queen's, and their ilk will survive, somehow. But not the Shamrock, I am certain. Not the Nipissing.