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 corner, 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.
The Guinness, dark and smooth, disappears, and I order another. With a second Union Label, I sit back, drink, smoke, stare through the blue air, letting the odors penetrate, cling to me, avoiding going home.
I have no plan.
The place fills up, the noise grows, and I sink gratefully into the haze, let the hours slip by.
At eight o’clock I give the waiter a ten-dollar bill, accept a five back, wave off the change, and find myself standing on the street outside, collar turned up against the cold. I walk south on River to Queen, then west through Irish Cabbagetown.
Sumach Street, then Sackville.
At Sackville, I pause. This is where my sister Bridget and her husband Charles and their four children live. Bridget, I think. Only four years older than me, whom I seldom see anymore. Like Rose, only two years my senior, now with Neil and their three on Sherbourne Street, which I will pass in a half-dozen blocks or so. Rose: the Nipissing comes back to me, odors, textures, as does a sudden flash of even earlier images: Kate, Teresa, Bridget, Rose, and I crossing the Grand River on our way to St. Mary’s School. Miss Lecour. Bridget, Rose, and I, huddled beneath heavy blankets in the same room: the sound of their breathing, of Rose coughing.
Maybe it is the Guinness, the blarney about St. Patrick that floated through the pub, but I begin to think, as I note the faces on the street about me, that perhaps I belong here. I think of Peter Sterling, an Englishman, who employed me, paid me for eighteen years, yet never knew me, never wanted to know me. Who let me go. Who let us all go.
I walk on.
At Power Street, I stop: another memory.
Lillian. Eighteen years ago. The hayloft at Boyd’s farm, the woods beside the Don River.
I turn down the street, stop outside Osgoode Dairy, number 82, wonder about Lillian, her mother, her three brothers, if they are still there, atop it. Then I see different people moving about through the windows, in the gaslight, and I know that they are not, that they are gone, like so much else. Eighteen years ago.
At my back is St, Paul’s Roman Catholic Church. I cross over, push through the creaking wooden doors, slide into a richly lacquered pew near the back. It is warmer inside, and there is the church smell, the incense. At the front, over the altar, is a painting of the Last Supper; above that, in the domed recess, is a large mural of a man dying, whom I take to be St. Paul, amid warriors, angels, and rays that part the clouds. Between the two paintings I read the Latin inscription Sauk Saule Quid Me Persequeris? which I do not understand. I count nine more paintings, from front to back, adorning the ceiling, high overhead. I glance about at the three-dimensional carvings that are the stations of the cross, at the cloth-draped confessionals—remember kneeling in ones just like them as a boy.
I do not know how I came here. I do not attend church. Margaret was baptized in St. Cecilia’s, Jack in St. Helen’s. Soon there will be Margaret’s first communion. Places for rituals only, I think, where we are assigned roles. Nothing more.
Yet sitting here, in shadow, I am drawn to the flickering tiers of votive candles behind colored glass, red, green, the possibility of contact, of help. I rise, walk to the side altar, light a candle, drop a nickel into the brass box, watch the wax begin to flow, to settle. I think of Kervin, Mike, Ma, of John and Bill, boys, covered in mud, clutching rifles somewhere in Europe, of Gramma in a blue nightgown, propped against a white pillow. I think of my father, a blacksmith, leaving Elora, leaving his trade, living and dying in a city he did not know, that did not know him, thousands of miles from his birthplace, and folding my hands I stand there and say what I hope is a prayer.
I am on the sidewalk outside Don Valley Pressed Bricks, staring at the stone facade of the building. I think, again, about eighteen years. Then I walk to Berna Motors and Taxicabs at Victoria and Adelaide, flop into the backseat of a cab, light another cigar, and tell the driver to take me home, take me to Lansdowne Avenue, to Maggie, Margaret, Jack. When we arrive, I pay the driver two dollars, tell him to keep the change, stumble inside, up the stairs.
The door opens easily. Maggie is waiting for me, fear in her eyes. I go to her, hold her hands, drop my head, shamed. The children are quiet, watching, listening.
She looks at me.
I shrug my shoulders. I know I smell badly, of beer, cigars. Then I realize: I am doing it again. This, I think, is how I first came to her, those many years ago, in Simpson’s, my hat lying on the counter between us.
I am tired, cold. I am about to disappoint people again. But before I do, before their faces turn from me, I take the envelope out of my pocket, with my letter, with forty-three dollars left, and hand it to Maggie, my offering, all that I have.
2
151 McDougall Ave.
Detroit, Mich.
May 7, 1916
410 Lansdowne Ave.
Toronto, Ont.
Dear Martin,
Got your letter last week with the news of Kervin’s death and your being let go at work. Things do
n’t sound too good but don’t despair as things always pick up. Please give Cora and my sympathy to everyone. Cora is worried about her own brother (Morris) because he has enlisted in the army and it just seems like a matter of time before the Yanks too will be going abroad for this bloody war so these things visit us alt.
I have some news of my own. Cora is now pregnant and we are expecting the baby in November. But here’s the other news, by November we’ll be back in Toronto as Ford is opening a plant there at the corner of Dupont and Christie and I applied for a promotion there and got it! I start in September. It didn’t hurt any that I was born and raised in the city and knew important people like you! I’ll sure miss some of the folks at the plant, like Walter as we go back a long way, and Cora and his wife Mary Alice have become quite good friends. There’s something about going home though that I find irresistible and Cora remembers her trip to your wedding so fondly that she didn’t take much convincing. The only one she is close to in her family is her brother Morris and I already told you about him.
Say, are you interested in seeing if you can get on at the plant toot J can look into it if you’d like, just let me know.
Tootin my horn,
Jock
* * *
410 Lansdowne Ave.
Toronto, Ont.
June 11, 1916
151 McDougall Ave.
Detroit, Mich.
Dear Jock,
Great news on both counts—that you will be a daddy and that you and Cora will be coming to Toronto. Congratulations twice! (And a promotion, what a big shot.) I look forward to getting together again often.
My news is that I’ve got a new job. I’m working in the Receiving Department on the 7th floor of Simpson’s. Yes Simpson’s. Maggie worked at Simpson’s, as you know, and Mike has always worked for them, so they found out about the opening and put in the word for me. If they hadn’t done so, I trust that I might be working for you underneath a flivver at Dupont and Christie pretty soon. By the way—they are selling Model Ts here for $360 now. Can you believe it? But my chances of ever getting one are still slim and none. Oh well.
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 21