Open House

by Jane Christmas

  An occasional visitor to our home was Robert Homme, who wrote and starred in the popular children’s TV program The Friendly Giant. My brother and I were explicitly instructed by our parents to address him as “Mr. Homme” and not by his TV name of “Friendly.” Mr. Homme happened to drop by one evening—obviously not wearing his alter ego’s Robin Hood–type tunic and tights—to speak with my father. My brother and I were getting ready for bed, and Mr. Homme asked my parents for the honour of reading us a bedtime story. That is how he phrased it: “the honour.” His humility touched me; if anything, it was an honour for us to be read to by the Friendly Giant. I have never forgotten his courteousness and gentleness, or his comforting, sonorous voice. Nor have I forgotten my awe: “Wow, Friendly is reading us a bedtime story!”

  Larkfield Drive was as singsong sunny and carefree as its name implies. The sky was preternaturally cerulean; the air as clear and clean as a new pane of glass; the grass and shrubs in our large backyard as glossy as polished tsavorite. When my mind’s eye roams the streetscape in front of our house, however, the grass is always, curiously, parched; as gold as a wheat field. I have wondered about this many times: why the backyards of my imagination are green and lush, while the front yards are dry and pale. Perhaps from the vantage point of a youngster the terrain beyond our property was a metaphorical wasteland: that life beyond our home had yet to bloom and colour for me, while the backyard where I played was as green as I was.

  I barely remember the winters; what is fixed in my mind are the summers—long, hot, humid summers of perpetual sunshine alternating against a soundtrack of lawn mowers and the high-pitched drone of the cicadas.

  Mr. Tamaki, our gardener, kept the property trimmed and our trees, shrubs, and flowers blooming in orderly profusion. My parents also employed a cleaning lady. Mrs. Kaiser was young, beautiful, and blond, and she went through our home cheerfully dusting, vacuuming, and washing. At the end of the day, she would slip into the bathroom to change her clothes, and emerge minutes later in a plain but figure-enhancing shift, makeup applied and hair done up in a slight beehive. She would wait patiently by the front door for the arrival of Mr. Kaiser, young, blond, and handsome at the wheel of a gleaming red convertible. Mrs. Kaiser would lift a patterned scarf over her neat coiffure and tie it under her pretty chin, don a pair of white-framed sunglasses, and when smiling Mr. Kaiser arrived, she would elegantly slide into the white-leather passenger seat and with a gloved hand would wave us goodbye. As we waved back, I often wondered why the cleaning lady was more glamorous and happier than the people for whom she worked. A few years later, after our black Monarch finally and blessedly bit the dust, my father bought an ice-blue Ford Galaxy 500 convertible. We could at least pretend to be the Kaisers, pretend that we were cool and carefree when we went out for long drives—at least until my mother insisted that we stop at every antique shop along the way.

  I was permitted to have friends over to play, but not when Mrs. Kaiser was there, or when my mother had a telephone interview to conduct (she was a columnist for the local paper), or when my father was at home. We could play on the front or back lawn, but only if Mr. Tamaki was not there working and only if we were quiet. My father had a low tolerance of children; my mother subscribed to the Doris Lessing school of parenting: “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” To my parents, play was a waste of time and children were a boisterous interruption to their quiet, smarter pursuits. Their eyeballs rolled whenever my brother and I pleaded with them to play in the sandbox with us, and if they relented, it came across as a huge sacrifice and never lasted more than three minutes. They did not want to play with us or converse with us; they conveyed to us that they had better things to do.

  Eventually, my brother and I stopped asking. After all, we had an entire neighbourhood of playmates. Every home had at least one child. A notable exception was our next-door neighbours, a generous and childless couple, the MacDonnells, who kept a large freezer in their carport stocked with Popsicles and freezies, and who invited us kids to help ourselves. It was a child’s paradise: all you had to do was walk out the front door and there would be a kid or three waiting to throw a ball or go for a bike ride or ask you to play house.

  My parents’ social circle was equally abundant. On the weekends, they had lively dinner parties, to which my brother and I were explicitly not invited. Bathed, readied for bed in our crisp pyjamas, we were allowed to greet the guests and to take their coats to my parents’ bedroom, but once all the guests had arrived, we were shooed off to our rooms and ordered not to come out. I always disobeyed. I would sit on a step hidden from view of the main floor, and listen to adult gossip and laughter, stealing a peek at the women in their shimmering pearls, the flared skirts of their satiny dresses rhythmically swinging and swishing to the music on the hi-fi. I enjoyed the house when it was filled with adults, and I loved seeing my parents in high spirits, laughing with their friends. But when the guests had left and the evidence of the party was cleaned up, they retreated into their silent lives—my mother to her writing, my father behind a newspaper or book. Occasionally, my mother would break the silence and monotony by mentioning that she had seen a new house—it was always coded as “having possibilities.” Something seemed to catch her fancy every week. Dad would lower his newspaper and listen to her avidly. He never discouraged her, nor did he ever encourage her, but he nonetheless would agree to go along “just to take a look” at her new discovery.

  Move? Why was that necessary? And why was I not being consulted?

  Being young sucked. I bristled against the powerlessness of childhood, and against not being allowed to express my emotions and feelings. Oh, the insignificance of being so young, and of having to weather the miserly affections of adults. I craved my parents’ attention and love, but it was as if they were withholding it until my brother and I grew up and became interesting. Furthermore, I sensed that if I did not share their interests, there would be no hope of me having any kind of a relationship with them.

  If my parents could not wait for my brother and I to grow out of childhood, I could not wait to be an adult and have my own home.

  WE ALL SCRUTINIZE OUR CHILDHOOD and ruminate about those metamorphic, sometimes seismic moments like archeologists excavating some unexpected disruption in the advancement of humanity. No such rumination is ever undertaken without laying the blame at the feet of those who raised us, taught us, employed us, befriended us, dumped us, hurt us, or upheld us. They all contribute to the strata of our existence, making it as defined and impermeable as an exposed face of raw rock. We are set in the stone of our own making and histories.

  In the years since the deaths of my parents (my father in 1999, my mother in 2013) I have come to understand that the madness concerning their serial house moves was not of a capricious variety but rather the kind driven by circumstances that must have affected them deeply. Both their upbringings were shaped by instability: my father’s by grinding poverty and parental irresponsibility, my mother’s by political tyranny and necessary immigration.

  To my father first. He was the eldest of four children born to Lancashire mill workers who immigrated to Toronto in the early 1900s. They raised their family in a slum approached down a grimy lane in the city’s Yorkville district. (My father lived to see his old soot-covered neighbourhood turned into Toronto’s most expensive and desirable address.) At the age of five, my father was sent out to work to help support the family. He hawked newspapers every day at the busy corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. On the Sabbath, he lit fires for Jewish families in his neighbourhood. It makes me extremely uncomfortable to think of sending a child of that age out to work, especially alone. Who knows what near misses of danger my father evaded, for he was a sweet-looking boy, blond of hair, blue of eye, and gentle of nature. The experience had a profound impact on him because it became his private crusade to escape the wretchedness of tenement life and to raise himself from penur
y.

  The model that spurred this crusade was his father. Stanley was a dreamer, an unreliable provider, and a liar. His boast—and lie—that he once played for Bolton Wanderers football club was intended to mark him as being too special to toil in the workaday world of his new adopted homeland. Whatever money he made, he took to the pub, while his family shivered and went hungry at home.

  My father had no intention of being the loafing, larking fool that was his father. He applied himself to his studies, and his diligence earned praise and prizes at school. Like many of his generation, he enlisted in the Second World War, and once it was over, he parked the trauma of that horrific tour of duty and took advantage of a government-sponsored university scholarship.

  Stanley, meanwhile, shuffled reluctantly into steady work as a bus driver for the Toronto Transit Commission, with overtime to boot—or so he told my grandmother. He said he had been conscripted by the TTC to train new bus drivers in the growing city of London, about two hundred miles southwest of Toronto. Each Friday he would leave his family for London then return on Monday to Toronto in time for supper. It took Hurricane Hazel to end his deceit: He died in the midst of the raging storm in October 1954, of a heart attack. At his funeral, a TTC supervisor who approached my grief-stricken grandmother to pay his respects was surprised by her rebuke:

  “Your company led my husband to an early grave, making him work seven days a week,” she cried.

  The TTC supervisor gently corrected her: “Stanley never accepted our offer of overtime. He said he needed to spend time with his family. In London.”

  “Nonsense,” said my grandmother. “Our home is in Toronto, not London.”

  As fragments of lies were pieced together, the picture revealed a scandal: Stanley had been keeping a second family in another city.

  The shock was devastating, not just for my grandmother but for my father and his siblings. My father, by then firmly employed in the nascent field of public relations, and with a family of his own, felt deep shame, and did all he could to distance himself from his father’s fraud.

  My mother’s life could not have been more different. She was born in Hungary into a hard-working, upper middle-class family. Her father, the village miller as well as its mayor, was an industrious man, clever with his hands and with his mind and well liked by his community. He was the model of decency, an upstanding citizen at a time when Hungary was in shambles. At the end of the First World War, when Hungary traded its monarchy for a parliamentary system, a band of counter-revolutionaries going by the name of Lenin’s Brothers began terrorizing an exhausted citizenry. They nationalized industries, businesses, transport, banking, and landholdings. They expropriated grain from farmers and executed those who resisted. This reign of terror lasted barely a year, but the damage cut as deep as the blade of anarchy can go. My mother witnessed overnight the confiscation of everything that her parents and their parents before them owned: land, farm machinery, tools, furniture, jewellery, heirlooms. Gone.

  Many Hungarians fled their country, my grandfather among them. He boarded a ship to Canada, where he was dispatched to the gilded wheat fields of Saskatchewan. The farming family that took him in were blessedly kind to him. They taught him English, recognized his aptitude for engineering, and helped pay his way toward a formal certificate. After five years, he earned naturalization, and he brought over his young family. They settled in the manufacturing town of Oshawa, Ontario, where my grandfather secured a job at General Motors as a stationary engineer. In time, they bought a house, a bungalow, on King Street East. Its large backyard had an abundance of fruit trees, whose fruits my grandmother harvested and made into jams for the local Catholic Women’s League. As their savings grew, my grandfather invested in his community. He bought rooming houses.

  My mother, the middle child and only daughter, accompanied her father on his rounds to collect rent and undertake repairs. She saw how the acquisition of property reaped affluence and paved the way toward upward mobility. In her late teens, against her parents’ protests, she moved to Toronto. She wanted nothing to do with Hungarian culture or with the marriage proposals from the sons of her parents’ Hungarian friends. She got a job as a copy editor at The Canadian Press, which is where she met my father, who was a reporter at the time.

  Theirs was an unorthodox marriage, one that was frowned upon by both their families: his English Anglican background paired with her Hungarian Roman Catholic one. Even in appearance they were starkly different: she with thick raven hair and dark chocolate eyes; he with blond wavy hair and eyes the colour of Lake Ontario. Despite their differences, they had a unified purpose: my father to rise above his poverty; my mother to rise above her ethnicity.

  They were a sensible couple, though not always prudent: They once attended an auction with the intent of buying a bed and ended up falling in love with a painting. The painting depicts the dark interior of a simple Dutch or Flemish home. The canvas is illuminated by a pale band of sun splaying through a side window and landing on a mother cradling an infant as she delivers something into its mouth by a slim, long-handled spoon. A young girl, possibly the daughter, looks on in obedient silence. To one side of the scene dark flames flicker in the grate, almost like an afterthought. It is not an expert painting; body proportions are off, and the artist’s hand was not skilled enough to render depth, giving the scene a somewhat flat, naive appearance, but its sentiment of hearth and home from a bygone era obviously resonated with my parents.

  When I ponder my parents’ backgrounds nowadays, I see that one of the compelling reasons any of us move is the hope that planting ourselves in a new place will magically replace something lost or absented in childhood. On the surface, in my parents’ case, the reason for their moves is obvious—the escape from poverty and ethnicity—but was there also something subcutaneous? Some psychological compensation? Was my mother trying to restore for her parents what they lost in the Hungarian upheaval, to somehow atone for them being wrenched from their homeland and forced to immigrate? Was my father trying to prove through a rise up the social ladder that he was better than his duplicitous father? Did he feel he had to compensate for his father’s failings with his own moral, upstanding image in order to curry acceptance?

  In a symbolic way, Don Mills gave them that break, that fresh start. There had been two previous homes, both short-term ones, but Larkfield Drive marked a milestone in my parents’ new life. A new house, in which you are its first owners, conveys special proprietorship: There are no past owners; there is no past history. You are solely responsible for the formation of its soul and personality. Though young and inexperienced, my parents had an intuitive understanding of that concept. They knew that a new home settling into its place in the earth requires vigilance to ensure that its many parts and facets function properly and safely, that its stability in both fabric and foundation depends on alert nurturing. They found this easy to apply to a house; not so much when it came to raising children.

  My parents lived on Larkfield Drive for about seven years. Their next home was to define their lives, and to imprint and influence mine.

  3

  The Cornerstones

  The memory of my last day in Don Mills is so vivid it might have happened last month rather than more than half a century ago.

  There was my young self on the final day of school, a sweltering late-June day, the air fragrant and clean, but so heavy with heat that it sent the apple blossoms in their drowsy demise fluttering like confetti to the ground. In my arms I clutched artwork of coloured construction paper, of drawings showing my first experience with Conté sticks, and paintings studiously rendered with fine brushes and watery paints that had been mixed with grown-up panache (or so I imagined) on a wooden palette hooked through my thumb. There were essays, too, and poems; and most important, my report card, which showed decent grades and the vital words “Jane has passed grade three and can proceed to grade four.”

  I was waiting outside Rippleton Road Public School for a neigh
bour to pick me up because that day our family was moving from Larkfield Drive to a house unknown to me. My parents had not felt it necessary to burden me with the details of or the reasons for the move, not even the location of our new home. I do not remember inquiring about where we were going to live. My parents looked after my needs and I trusted their direction. So much so that I only learned days earlier that we were moving.

  A humid gust blew up, raining down another basketful of apple blossoms and at the same time threatening the papers in my arms to flee my already tight embrace. I hugged them closer to my body. Around me swirled a celebratory atmosphere as children sprung from the restraints of school greeted parents and relatives with happy squeals and were hustled into idling cars to be whisked off to their summer holidays.

  I remained dutifully at the appointed spot, my mother’s explicit instructions on Repeat in my head: “Mrs. Austin will pick up you and your brother in front of the school. Do not walk home.” But from where I stood, I could not see my brother. A year younger than me, he had a mind of his own, so God only knows where he was.

  In a flash the children, their parents, the cars, the celebratory hoopla, disappeared, plunging Rippleton Road into preternatural silence. Even the birds seemed to have flown off. It was just me and the cicadas. No Mrs. Austin. Something was wrong, some miscommunication, and I knew with the surety of those young years that it would be my fault. I twisted my white-leather perforated sandals from side to side on the sidewalk, making patterns in the film of dirt that had blown up from the playground. I waited. I let the breeze tease the skirt of my flowered dress, watching it swell like an umbrella being opened and then gently collapsed.

  Still waiting. The drone of the cicadas grew louder.

  Eventually, I turned away from the street and peered past the school to the vast, deserted grounds behind Rippleton Road Public School. Time to be decisive. An asphalt area sloped down to an expanse of sun-dried grass and a few young trees, and to the baseball diamond where we spent our recesses panning for fool’s gold and which now stood like an oasis amid the veldt-like emptiness. At the far end of the schoolyard was a major road—Leslie Street. I had never had need or cause to walk to Leslie Street—to a nine-year-old it looked far enough away to be in another country—but having given up on Mrs. Austin, it seemed a logical destination, and I began to walk toward it.