Audrey hung up the phone after taking the call. She and Ellen were having their tea late; a few neighbours had come back to the house for a cup of tea and a slice of cake. It was only when they had gone that she could brew the second cup, the one they could really enjoy with their feet up, if anything was enjoyable in this day.
“He sounded like he’d been drinking,” Audrey said with a sigh.
“That’s a shame. But it’s what you might expect—I mean, if he’s in the habit of it anyway, after such a shock.”
“He’s too young to be in that habit. He only just turned eighteen.”
“He’s not really eighteen anymore either, though, is he?” Ellen blew on her tea to cool it. “Is there either bit of that cherry cake left? I never had any when they were here, seems like I can’t eat these days with anyone watching me. I feels like I might choke.”
Audrey got the cake and cut her a slice. “I suppose in a way he’s older than eighteen, with all he’s been through. Married, a father, and widowed.”
“Most men haven’t been through that by the time they’re fifty.”
“Well, I hope it makes him grow up,” Audrey said, settling back to her own cup.
“I’m sure it will. It’s a hard way to grow up, but it’ll make a man of him.” Privately Ellen was not at all sure of this, but she had to put the best face on it for Audrey. Henry had already given his mother enough worry to last a lifetime.
“Will it, though? Going through hardship don’t always make a person better. Sure look at Nathan Taylor—his missus and two little ones both died in that fire, and what happened to Nate? Went right off his head and he never had good sense again after. Can’t hold a job, can’t even carry on a sensible conversation. If Nellie and Bern hadn’t taken him in he’d be living on the street.”
“Poor Nate. Well, it’s true, not everyone takes hardship the same way, and all the Taylors got that melancholy streak. The same sun that hardens the clay melts the butter, like they say.”
“So what’s Henry—clay or butter?”
“Only time will tell, I ’low,” said Ellen. “But our crowd, we’ve mostly always been clay. You’ll see.”
AUDREY
The baby was awake at five. Ellen got up with her if she cried in the night so Audrey could get a full night’s sleep, and then it was Audrey’s turn to see to her in the morning. Audrey got up, changed and fed Rachel, then made breakfast. After breakfast, Ellen went down to open up the shop. These morning hours while Ellen worked, which once used to be Audrey’s free time to do her own messages or do a bit of housework, were now consumed with watching Rachel. It took her back to when Henry was this age, not a time Audrey had fond memories of. She wasn’t like some women, Treese or Doris, who went on about how they couldn’t wait for the grandchildren to come.
“See how much you likes it when you got your grandchild all the time,” Audrey muttered. She was washing out a pail of diapers, a task she’d have been happy never to have to do again in her life, while Rachel was in the playpen. Any normal child would be amusing herself with her rattle and bear—the youngster was over a year old now, big enough to play and keep herself occupied. Big enough to train out of those diapers soon, too, Audrey hoped. Rachel loved to throw the rattle out of the playpen. Ellen or Wes would always pick it up and give it back to her; Audrey thought that would only teach Rachel she could rule the roost. She was better off to learn that if you threw something away it was gone and no amount of crying would bring it back.
Audrey finished with the diapers, put a load of wash through the wringer of the machine, and carted Rachel downstairs with her to hang it all out on the line. She wasn’t sorry when dinner time came and she heated up and served what was left of the pot of pea soup Ellen had made the evening before. Wes came home for his dinner and Ellen came upstairs to eat hers while Audrey went down to take over the shop. Even with people coming in and out, the shop was more peaceful than being stuck up in that apartment with the baby.
She tried to air her complaints to Doris, although she knew that would be useless. Doris couldn’t wait till one of her girls had a baby and she could look after it.
“Looking after it is one thing, I mean the scattered evening, nobody minds that,” Audrey said, lighting up a smoke. “But I’ve had care of that child twenty-four hours a day since the poor youngster was six months old. Yes, Mom’s been a grand help, but she’s not as spry as she used to be.”
“And Henry? Does he take any interest in her at all?”
“He comes by and looks at her. Sometimes he picks her up. But what can you expect from a young fellow like that? I don’t recall seeing Dad take much interest in any of the youngsters till they were old enough to walk and talk, and Alf seemed to be the same with his crowd. Just because her poor mother is gone, I don’t s’pose it means he’s suddenly all interested in the baby.”
“What about Stella’s family?”
“Not a peep out of any of them for weeks after the funeral, and then out of the blue Mary-Louise waltzes in here last week, large as life.” Mary-Louise lived clear over on Campbell Avenue so there was no chance she had just happened into Holloway’s store. All the time she was picking up her groceries and talking to Audrey about poor Stella, what a sin, she was peeking around like she expected to see the crib in back behind the counter. Finally she came out and asked how the baby was doing and if she could see her.
“And what did you tell her?”
“I told her the truth. I said, you crowd treated that poor child like a common whore and turned her out of house and home just because she married my son. If you’d offered some help to her and the baby, she might not be where she is today. The time for you Nolans to take an interest in that youngster was long ago, I told her. She’s my son’s daughter, my granddaughter, and I’ll decide who sees her and who don’t.”
“How did she take that?”
“She looked like I was after slapping her, and she said, Well, you got some nerve, missus, and then she turned and walked out the door, and I haven’t heard another word from her or any of the Nolans before or since.”
“If you ask me, she’s the one has got the nerve. Any of them, really, after how they treated her. I had a cousin, poor girl, whose family was like that when she got in trouble, but her mother had enough backbone to defy the father and keep in touch with her—otherwise I often think poor Morag might have ended up like poor Stella. And Morag wasn’t married, either, poor girl—in her case, the man already had a wife and children, so of course the shame was even greater.”
Audrey sometimes thought she could listen to Doris’s voice all day. That Scottish accent, still clipped and precise after twenty years in St. John’s, was her favourite thing about her friend. Not that she didn’t like the things Doris actually said, it was just that the accent made everything sound better. Audrey got bored with almost everyone else, but never with Doris.
“Oh, I think Bridget sent Mary-Louise here to test out the waters, you might say,” Audrey replied. “To see what kind of a reception she’d get. Bridget don’t dare show her own face around here; I gave her a piece of my mind after the funeral.”
“It’s a crying shame, that’s what it is,” said Doris, picking up her bags. “Well, I must toddle off, Les will be wanting his tea.”
Henry came in about an hour later. It had been a good three days since Audrey had seen him—he had gone back to living with his buddies, and he had been working again the last few weeks. There was plenty of construction work on the go with the new apartment buildings being built down on Graves Street and Anderson Avenue, and Wes, Alf, and his crew, including Henry and both of Alf’s sons, were all working there. It was good for Henry to have work, she thought, something to take his mind off it all. As if his mind would ever be off Stella.
“Do you want to go up and see Rachel?” Audrey glanced at her watch. “Mom will be just finished giving her a bath
now, she’s always in a good mood after her bath.” That was a bit of a stretch, in Audrey’s personal opinion: the baby was more likely to be in a good mood after her bath, but that wasn’t saying much.
Henry shook his head. “Nah, not right now. I came over to talk to you. I’ve…I made up my mind about something.”
“About what?” Was he going to take Rachel back with him, or hand her off to the Nolans after all?
“I’m going away for a while. Nick and Chris have been real decent to me—they’ve been letting me stay there without paying the rent and they gave me back the damage deposit I paid them back when St— when we moved in there. And I got paid today, so I got a bit of money. I’m gonna buy a plane ticket and go on down to see Dad and Carol.”
The possibility that Henry might go away had not been far from Audrey’s mind. They had all kinds of family up in Ontario now, Marilyn and June in Toronto, Frank in Whitby. Alf’s oldest, Randy, was talking about going up there; his uncle Frank had assured him he’d find a job in no time. Audrey had heard Henry talking over the plan with Randy and she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d announced they were both moving upalong. It might be the best thing for Henry to be away.
Still and all, Louisiana had never crossed her mind as a possibility. “There’s lots of places you could go, lots of family you could stay with up in Toronto or Whitby. Sure we even got people in New York if you wants to go to the States.”
“Yeah, I want to go back to Dad’s place for a while. I’ve been talking to him on the phone and he told me I could come anytime. I like it down there, there’s a lot of good music and I think I could learn something. And probably Dad could help me find a job or something. I’m not going to stay down there forever or anything, I just thought…well. I just want to go there.”
It’s as far away as you can get, Audrey thought. It made sense if you looked at it that way. As far removed from the memories of Stella and the daily reminder of baby Rachel as possible. It wasn’t like Henry could book a ticket to Timbuktu and have someone waiting at the other end who’d put a roof over his head.
“What about the baby?”
“Will you go on looking after her, Mom? You and Nan and Pop? You’re way better at it than I would be. I don’t know what to be doing with her.”
“I don’t either, half the time. I’m not good with youngsters, never was.”
Henry shrugged, and gave half a smile, which was half more than she had seen on him in a long time. “I don’t know, you did all right with me. Look how great I turned out.” There was a thing he did, a way he shrugged and ducked his head, that broke a mother’s heart but probably looked adorable to young girls. That look would get him in trouble, but then Henry had already gotten in the worst kind of trouble a boy could get into, and had it end about as badly as it possibly could. Everything on the other side of that was just survival.
“Well, you got your mind made up, and you’re eighteen years old, so I can’t stop you.” All she could give him was her blessing, and that was the closest she could come to putting it into words.
musical interlude
RAE HOLLOWAY
I wish I was a Lord Mayor, Marquis or an Earl
Then blow me if I wouldn’t marry Old Brown’s girl.
I hate talking in between songs. Like it’s the worst thing about a gig. I’d like to be this mysterious singer who just gets up to the mic, sings a song, and disappears into the music. But people like it when you talk. They want to have a story to go with a song—if you wrote it yourself, why you wrote it, what it’s about. Like a song is about anything. If it’s a cover they want to know why you picked that one, what it means to you or whatever.
I’m doing a mix tonight, some originals and some folk songs. Got away with not talking between the first two but as I finish up the last chorus of “Old Brown’s Daughter” they look like they expect me to say something.
—So, um, that song always reminds me a bit of home, because I grew up over a store. Only it wasn’t my father, it was my grandmother and great-grandmother who ran it. Holloway’s on Rankin Street, it’s, um, it’s still there. We lived upstairs over the shop….
See, this is what I hate about talking, I don’t know where this is going. I have to figure out some kind of segue from Old Brown and his shop and his daughter to the next song in the set which is one I wrote, all about love and betrayal. It’d be good if I had some cute story about growing up in the shop to tell, but all that sticks in my mind is being eight or nine years old and Nanny Audrey telling me to get out, stop hanging around the shop, go outside and play. Then coming back in hours later, cold and numb-fingered. I wandered around the neighbourhood looking for adventure or kindred spirits and never found either.
That’s when she’d hand down the sentence: You go upstairs now and have your bath before supper. Damn, I could write a song about that bathtub. It was huge, with steep, gleaming porcelain sides that rose up like glaciers from the narrow bottom. This long finger of rust stain spreading out from the drain hole. It filled really slowly and I never knew how long it would take to get it full enough to be comfortable, because the hot water gave out long before then.
Looking around at this crowd here tonight I bet half them are the types that buy up old downtown houses cheap and renovate them. You meet people like that everywhere these days, and boy do they love to take you on tours of their houses. And they’re beautiful, no doubt about it, these old places down on Gower Street and wherever, with the high ceilings, the original tile work around the fireplace, the refinished hardwood floors. Then you get to the bathroom and there’s this old claw-foot bathtub and they have to tell you the story about how they found it, how they got it all rigged up with a shower and a curtain around it. Such a find, such a steal, you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes they even tear out perfectly good built-in tubs and showers to replace them with the old fashioned tubs, and all I can think is I bet not one of you people grew up having to take a bath in a claw-foot bathtub.
I’d sit there in three or four inches of water, half froze, and then when I’d shivered enough I’d get out and dry off and Nanny Audrey, if she was upstairs from the shop then, would nod at me like I’d ticked an item off a list. Nanny Ellen would say, Did you dry off good my love? You don’t want to catch your death of cold, these chilly nights.
I used to imagine if I had a mother, she’d be someone who would fill up the bath—a proper tub, like Vicky’s family had—and make it warm and bubbly, with bubble bath or something, and dry me off with a big towel afterwards. Wrap my hair up in a towel like a turban, like I saw Vicky’s mother do with her hair when I slept over.
All this, about the bathtub and towels and all that, is flashing through my head like a silent movie, when what’s actually coming out of my mouth is some foolishness about corner stores and how they were the heart of the neighbourhood and blah-di-blah-di-blah. It’s not like I’m going to tell them about getting a bath when I was nine, am I? Time to wrap this up.
—So, um, yeah, I didn’t love everything about growing up over the store, but it’s certainly not something you ever forget. And, um, as far as I know there was never anyone hanging around the store asking for my hand in marriage. But if there was, it probably would have ended something like this…
D minor chord, and I’m past the talking part now. On to the singing. The easy part.
five
FORGET ME NOT
1971
AUDREY
In the dim light Audrey could barely see her watch. She squinted to make out that it was 9:45. She had told her mother she’d be back by nine for sure. Ellen was wonderful with Rachel, but not always good at getting her to go to bed on time. You couldn’t expect a great-grandmother to be strict with a five year old.
Beside Audrey, Nelson Spracklin snored gently. He always booked a room for the whole night, even though Audrey couldn’t spare more than an hour or two. She pull
ed on her slacks and blouse, slipped her feet into shoes, picked up her jacket from the chair by the door. It wasn’t like some scene in a movie where he tore off her clothes as soon as they got through the door of the hotel room and she was left to pick up a sock here, a brassiere there. Nelson, she thought, would like to believe they were living out that kind of movie scene—that this was some grand passion, that he was cheating on his wife because he couldn’t keep his hands off Audrey Holloway. But it wasn’t that at all. He was a lonely man who didn’t sleep with his wife much anymore, and Audrey was an acquaintance who was willing to go to bed with him in a room in the Kenmount Motel.
He was a nice-looking man. She wouldn’t have taken the risk if he wasn’t. For her it was mostly the flattery, the thought that someone would want her. It had been a long time— eighteen years since she left Harry Pickens. Over the years, she had been out on a few dates with fellows, but nothing ever turned serious. Most men weren’t keen on a divorced woman, much less a single mother.
She thought about waking Nelson to say good-bye, but he was sleeping soundly. They fell into this almost by accident, one night when Valerie Gillard, who had split up with Bryce, convinced Audrey to come downtown for a girls’ night. Audrey had been glad to go: it was a better night out than Bingo with Treese and her sisters. Val was mad, when the evening was over, that it was Audrey who’d managed to snag a fellow’s attention. She went off and left Audrey sitting at the bar with Nelson. Thank goodness Valerie didn’t know who Nelson was, didn’t know he was married. The next time Audrey talked to Val she told her that there was nothing to it, the fellow from the bar wasn’t her type.
The crisp evening air hit Audrey like a slap in the face after the too-warm motel room. She went to her car, wondering if anyone would recognize it, would think anything if they saw her parked here. They’d probably think she was inside having a drink at the bar. Nobody—not even Lorraine Penney or Selena Ivany, the worst gossips Audrey knew—would think she was in a motel room having relations with a married man.
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