Winston believed his mother took no small pleasure from their smugness and discomfort, though she never said a word about it. While pretty French manor scenes stitched by other ladies seemed to be sitting on every chesterfield in town—the single setting of bewigged but chaste youthful romance on a swing had become the inexplicable staple of the River Bend City ladies’ repertoire—Winston had never spotted one of Alberta’s pillow covers in the house of any colleague or acquaintance. Their absolute invisibility led him to conclude that the women threw them out before they could scare the public during the Auxiliary’s Christmas and Citizen’s Day sales. We have a reputation for discerning taste to uphold, he supposed they might proclaim.
As she worked on a new extravaganza in buttercup yellow (maybe “Laura Secord on the Plains of Abraham”? She always chose a historical tableau), Winston could read. There was now scarcely enough time to finish the chapter. Winston was curious to know how the author was going to manage with the Minotaur legend. Already, as they had been speaking signs of human habitation had supplanted alder and salmonberry; boats and barges gave testimony about the economic value of a streaming body of water. Invective could replace Alberta’s romance of brontosaurus paradise with lightning speed: majesty was covered with blight…. Winston knew what to expect.
Outside the station, they stood for the moment next to one of the fluted columns—tall and solid as a Douglas fir—and took in the hectic scene.
Alberta secured her hat and straightened her gloves. She looked at the sunny cut-glass chrysanthemum she’d pinned to her coat. “Is it a bit much?” she asked.
“No, Mother, it’s perfect for the day.”
“Should we walk there? It can’t be far.” Being outside her familiar routine had turned Alberta unusually ruffled, Winston noticed.
“Yes it can. Let’s splurge, Mother. We’ll catch a cab. You can close your eyes and reunite with your brontosaurus pals. We ought to wait over there, though.” He walked toward a stand of taxicabs.
Following closely behind, she said, “Smart alec. Rouse me when we’ve arrived at our palace.”
Winston had arranged the earliest possible appointment and fully expected to be out of the podiatrist’s office in a matter of ten minutes. Greeting him with an automatic “Hello, Mr. Wilson. Lovely weather, isn’t it?” the receptionist led the way to the same cramped examination room and reminded him to remove his shoes and stockings. Winston noticed the walls had been painted, lemon yellow over Kelly green, one coat only and not quite thick enough.
When the doctor arrived with his notebook in hand, he immediately bent on one knee and lifted Winston’s foot. “Huh. I’ll be darned,” he exclaimed. He handled Winston’s ankle and calf, pressing here and there to measure the swelling. Grinning now: “Huh. And that’s my professional opinion, Mr. Wilson. My diagnoses have been about as helpful as your mother’s mustard poultice. All I can say is that it’s a mystery, but at least it’s a harmless one. And as long as you’re not too uncomfortable, you’re going to have to get used to having a spongy foot and a tight shoe. I could lance it, I suppose,” he muttered as he wrote in his notebook. He drew strong lines through metaplasia.
“Another six weeks, doctor?”
“No, I don’t think so. If the swelling increases, book an appointment. Otherwise … well, welcome to the future.” He snapped the book shut and glanced at his wristwatch.
“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Wilson.” Grinning again, the doctor thrust out a fraternal hand. Winston wondered if he ought to smile with the same frequency; outwardly, the doctor’s life-long success seemed assured.
Winston left feeling flustered, finding in his behaviour the very picture of the hypochondriac who believes that a tiny welt left by an insect was the seed for a blistering fever and terminal case of malaria. He’d always detested boys who cried wolf.
Winston bade the elderly elevator operator adieu with a tip of his hat and strode to the creamy-tiled Hudson’s Bay outpost in under ten minutes. Seated in the vestibule of the south entrance as they’d arranged, Alberta gave him a discreet and queenly wave as she noticed him emerging from the chrome doors. “You’re right on time, that was a fine guess,” she said.
“You’ve found nothing to purchase, Mother?” She’d rested her boxy oxblood purse on her lap, but carried no shopping bags. Winston was struck by how contented she appeared.
“There’s hardly been a minute to spend a cent. The perfume counter alone kept me busy, thank you very much, for half an hour. Those broads are cutthroat: ‘No woman is complete without her secret weapon.’ Were you aware of that? So I was informed. It reminded me of the poster that loomed over the post office for years: ‘Tell Nobody—Not Even Her. Careless Talk Costs Lives.’ Or some such tripe. You’d think we started wars, every one of us a plotting Mata Hari in the making. Huh! Still, I was nearly suckered into buying a small bottle.”
Winston had taken a seat as his mother was relating her adventure. He said, “You ought to indulge yourself once in a while,” and got up quickly to hold the door for a smartly dressed young woman overburdened with packages. “Maybe not all at once, though: a blind man might mistake you for a bouquet of carnations right now.”
“Oh my. My sense of smell gave up the ghost five minutes after I arrived at the counter.” She lifted her wrist to her nose. “It’ll fade soon enough. Let’s hope.”
Now standing beside his mother’s chair, Winston added: “You know, I think Mr. Carlyle actually kept that poster up for years after V-Day because Doris left him. He’s such a bitter fellow. He’d refer to ‘an ill wind’ with a wink after a friendly lady left his wicket.”
“Maybe he should have learned to drink a little less and keep his hands to himself, silly man. Everybody concerned would be happier.” She had not nurtured many friendships, but Alberta managed to be up to date with grapevine dispatches. Returning home with staff room gossip, Winston was usually confounded that she’d heard details that hadn’t passed his way.
Alberta told him that she was giddy as a bride, and had spent the hour wandering through several floors crawling with merchandise. The bins, shelves, and stacked towers of tinned goods in the Food Department made the Bend shops look like chicken scratch, as if they were still living in the Depression, she exclaimed. And the prices weren’t bad, either.
“There’s enough to clothe an army. We can wander through it all later,” Alberta added. “You must be hungry, though. Any good news from the specialist?”
She was up and moving before he answered. Wandering along the aisle, she explained that she’d made a reservation for luncheon at the Marine Room, a fancy restaurant she had happened across on the top floor. “It’s a lovely room. I requested that our table overlook the water. The hostess said she thought there would be something available. We’d best not be late.”
Winston was hungry and, now, curious. He asked, “You’re sure? We’re not far from rail tracks here, Mother, we could head that way for a thriftier meal. We could split a can of pork and beans with some tramps down that way. Shoot some dice for dessert. I’d guarantee the view would be great there, too.”
“Yes, I suppose we could. But….” She slowed for a moment to caress a diaphanous sun-coloured scarf worn by a blank-eyed plaster head. “You have plenty of money squirreled away, and you’re buying. All the ladies will be impressed: A Good Son Taking His Delicate Mother Out For Luncheon.” Her left hand semaphored the words in capital letters. “They’ll all have the same thought, I can promise you that.”
Alberta led him to a marble-clad wall punctuated with three bronze elevators. Riding the middle car, they remained silent till arriving at the sixth floor. Together or alone, they felt uncomfortable holding conversations at spots where they were sure of being overheard; in bank and post office lineups or the grocery store check-out, their concern was with getting through before being trapped by a chatty Mrs. Bell or Mr. Jenkins into shooting the breeze about the weather, the price of stamps or the latest se
tback on the new bridge. That compulsion of men to speak—to say just anything at all to halt the birth of silence—was one they did not share.
The elevator panel’s square button lit 6 and a bell dinged their arrival. Stepping quickly out of the car Alberta said, “This way, sir,” with mock-solemnity and mimicked the white-gloved military hand directions of a policeman at a busy intersection. Winston followed her signs.
En route to the Marine Room, they passed under a long and narrow showcase corridor. Winston studied its vaulted stained glass ceiling. The patriotic scenes of British Columbian industriousness had been captured with chunky leaded rectangles and translucent glass, a year of cutting and soldering at least, he guessed. Such an undertaking! An undulating indigo banner proclaiming A Century of Progress in bright yellow ran through the centre, and on either side were illustrated the provincial hallmarks as deigned by some centennial committee—Energy and Power, Recreation, Fisheries, Forestry and Logging, Mining, Agriculture, Education, Commerce. Winston noted that Education was represented by a milky one-room schoolhouse that looked forlorn and minute on what must be a wheat field surrounded by intimidating panes of deep green Emily Carr forest. Not quite the picture of today, he thought, but accurate enough. Then as now, Agriculture and Forestry and Logging were the careers of choice for many of the future breadwinners attending River Bend High. He noticed that there was no panel dedicated to Arts and Culture. A Century of Progress indeed.
Winston was impressed, even if he would have changed two or three of the highlighted provincial hallmarks. The Bend’s puny Centennial stab was another story altogether. Beside throwing in some half-baked special events for the 1958 Citizen’s Day parade—the mayor and his deputy dressed as the town’s two founding missionaries and a dozen frisky aldermen dressed as Indian chiefs, railway men, coolies, and lady entertainers; and the high school’s entire marching band decked out as Atomic Age strawberries following two straw-hatted farmers holding a Land of the Big Red Strawberry banner—the town’s biggest effort had been renaming the new concrete bridge in honour of the province’s Century of Progress. Centennial Bridge: what lyricism. Compared to this graceful lighted canopy, that centennial enterprise was an embarrassing cache of fool’s gold.
Alberta had already seen this outpouring of provincial pride, or was not interested. Abandoning her traffic cop routine as they passed through, she was thinking aloud, casting herself as a career girl in a fantasy of city dwelling. “I wonder if I could get a job here, become an elevator lady. You think they’d hire me, or am I already too much of a relic?” she asked.
Winston surged with affection and took his mother by the arm. “Too old? You? I’m sure they’d take you on. You’re a natural. You could offer perfume samples too. Tell the women they are incomplete unless they purchase the secret weapon now in your possession and available to them for mere pennies. You’d be a manager in no time.” His tone was jocular even though he was sincere.
“You think? It’d be an adventure, at least a part-time one.” She was swinging her purse as they came to the end of the corridor.
“Here we are,” Alberta said at the heavy cedar doors, carved, Winston saw, with scenes borrowed from the glass ceiling. He thought to ask whether the department store had entered and won a competition during centennial. Alberta strode toward the hostess, a pale unsmiling matron with tight swirls of black braided hair. The woman turned to indicate a table by the window that was being set for them by a pair of girls wearing lacy white aprons over top stiff aqua pinafores.
“Stern Mrs. Danvers over there says we’ll have our panoramic view in two minutes,” she reported with an elated grin.
She took a few steps past the hostess’s post, absorbed by the watery expanse just beyond the window. Winston studied the room, his attention first drawn to the lit tapers in trident candelabras sitting at opposite ends of the skirted banquet table. Barely visible, their light served no purpose in such a bright room except decoration, he decided. Between them lay the platters of elaborate food—rolled, wrapped, knotted, stuffed, or else spiked with toothpicks—that formed the room’s centrepiece. Outside that inner circle sat jellied salads, coleslaw, smoked salmon, devilled eggs, celery stalks, rolls and biscuits, olives, pickles, condiments. At the far end: a deep metal tray heated with a kerosene flame that he guessed held scalloped potatoes and a layered chicken casserole. A smaller circular table promised them puddings, pies, and cakes garlanded with pastel icing.
Except for the chef carving bite-sized slivers of ham, turkey, and roast beef, Winston was the only man present. He saw that all the women had dressed up, some not removing their gloves until their orders had been taken. The bare arms and exposed backs, though, was a Marine Room fashion he could predict would not be catching on in the Bend. Farmers and loggers might admire that sort of thing in burlesque dancers they’d sneak out to gawk at across the river in Clear Brook, but never on their wives—who were expected to churn out the children while remaining as prim as nuns.
The hostess walked to the table and placed menus at each of their settings. There would be a waitress to serve them presently, she explained.
“She’s seen this all hundreds of times before,” Alberta said once the woman had returned to her station.
Winston smiled, sure that if the window could open, his mother’s head would be stuck out of it, catching the rush of sea air.
“It’s strange to think one could get tired of something so spectacular.”
“Well, Mother, even you change teas from season to season.” Winston was staring outside, focused on nothing in particular, wondering if sailors ever suffered from a marine sort of snow blindness.
“That’s different,” she replied.
They pored over the menu for a moment before deciding on the buffet.
In the spirit of fun, Alberta ordered a Jolly Fishwife. Winston read that it contained rum, grenadine, and pineapple juice, but imagined that an actual fishwife—an improbable mythical creature like a farmer’s daughter, he thought, the butt of jokes men tell in beer parlours after they’ve had a few—was likely to drink straight from the bottle. Who could blame her? He told the waitress—younger and fairer than the hostess yet no less frosty—that he would be satisfied with water alone. She pointed to the plates available next to the chef.
“Heavenly days,” Alberta exclaimed at the banquet table. “What a selection.” She chose samples of everything, and even questioned the chef about turkey stuffing that was nowhere to be seen. She spoke her mind: “You can’t have one without the other. I’d like a smidgen if you can dig some up.” Winston’s choices were fastidious: no olives, nothing with mayonnaise in it, no salmon.
Throughout the meal, their conversation was the usual merging of flows and eddies. They imagined the view as it was now and as it might have been in Alberta’s Age of the Dinosaurs. With a smirk, Alberta added “doctor” to her list of career possibilities after Winston told her about the specialist’s timid brand of diagnosis. Winston presented his mother with a short list of possible activities for the remainder of the day, but she waved aside the list and said she would like to walk through a park planted head to toe with flowers. The so-called park in the Bend was a memorial for the Great War circled by overgrown and unkempt greenery.
Over the years, Alberta had sent numerous letters to the city council about it—polite ones filled with practical and thrifty suggestions at first, then a wheedling pair, and finally a terse note whose lines veered toward vitriol. Aged and infirm veterans sat there gathering wool and speaking of fighting the good fight amongst themselves and to passersby, while younger layabouts and their rough-mannered girls smoked cigarettes and treated them with a palpable contempt tempered with false civility. A patch of dusty, butt-strewn petunias looking parched and dissipated in summer was as florid as it ever got.
They decided on a huge blossomy rectangle of a park in the city’s southern reaches, agreeing it would likely be nearly overrun with flowering Dutch bulbs. Winston guess
ed that its splendor might reawaken his mother’s reformist spirit and produce a fresh batch of splenetic letters.
Winston looked at his mother and felt happy that she was taking such pleasure with the day. Alberta’s routine was so entwined with his and she’d been Mother for so long that he overlooked that she might have ambitions other than household cleanliness, gardening, and making them meals three times a day. A career, unlikely as that was, could be one of them. Why not move to the city and become an elevator woman at the Hudson’s Bay Company? She might even marry. Who could say? His inviting her along had turned out to be a benefit for them both.
They finished with coffee—served in bone china, no less—and samplings from the dessert table. Winston told his mother that the Marine Room custard was nowhere close to hers. Looking forward to taking him through the highlights of the department store and getting across the city to view flowering trees and beds of blossoms, Alberta recommended they pick up the pace. Winston waved to their waitress.
As they stood and readied themselves for the afternoon, Alberta said, “Alright then, sir, let me show you around.” She resumed her policing act, white gloves beckoning him now toward the elevator. He smiled, thinking how infectious her enthusiasm had become.
On the main floor at long last, Alberta and Winston planned their route to Queen Elizabeth Park from downtown. Winston agreed to their taking a bus, and refrained from suggesting an easy and quick taxicab.
The Age of Cities Page 7