Time happened to the world below, froze there, forever, everything, and memory was needed to make time happen to my mind. And in my mind I heard women’s voices, so many women, muffling the sharp silence of men who could not speak, who felt but could not share, could not touch. Alone.
My own family, small, lost in the numbers, in the crush of time, insignificant. Except to me. Except to me.
High, in the wind. Mother, Father. Talk to me. Oh, Maggie.
FIFTEEN
January-May 1926
1
It is 8:30 p.m., Wednesday, January 6,1926. We are in the kitchen at 10 Constance Street in the west end, near Bloor and Roncesvalles, our new flat of only two weeks.
Our first day here was the day before Christmas and Margaret and Jack got to celebrate by waking up to parcels under the tree. Mike, my brother, a widower with half his family grown and gone, now lives in a small place out on Queen East—on Lockwood Road—with his son Carmen, eighteen, and his two grown daughters, Ann and Kathleen. Mike has left Simpson’s. For the past two years he has worked for the gas company, and has managed to get Carmen hired on with him. Still enamored of his wagon though, ever reliable, it was he who helped us drag our worldly possessions across the city.
Now that I am making twenty-four dollars a week, we are moving up in the world. The new flat costs thirty dollars a month. It has four bright rooms, a bath, water heating and oak floors, a telephone. There are rosebushes that will bloom in the spring and summer, a verandah. Maggie likes it because she feels that she is closer to her roots and to the Junction. Margaret, attending St. Joseph’s Convent School, and Jack at De La Salle, both find it more convenient too.
At one end of the kitchen table Margaret finishes listing out her Latin verbs, conjugating each into its four parts. Jack is reading the comics from The Toronto Star: Bringing Up Father, Gasoline Alley, Tillie the Toiler, Polly and Her Pals, Toots and Casper, Winnie Winkle—The Breadwinner.
Margaret takes a card out of her notebook as she closes it, handing it to me. “I got this Monday from Sister Josephine,” she says. It is a picture of the sacred heart of Jesus. On the back is the inscription To Margaret Radey, January 4, 192.6, for fifth place on the honor roll.
I look at her. She is a marvel. Yet her innocence unsettles me. She seems so easily pleased, so naturally happy.
Margaret, her mind elsewhere, changes the topic. “Did the new radios arrive at Simpson’s?”
Even Jack looks up now, interested.
It was Monday at dinner, I recall, that I mentioned the shipment that we were expecting. “We got fifty of them. They came in today.”
“When can we get one?” Jack asks.
I frown through my eyeglasses and cigar smoke. It would be nice, I think. Kate and Jim have a radio. Mike and Liz talked about getting one even back at the end of the war. But, I think, they waited too long.
It could be playing right now. We could all be listening to it. “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” “When You’re Smiling.”
“What kind are they?” Jack persists.
“Atwater-Kent,” I say.
Jack listens intently. I notice Margaret and Maggie paying attention too. “Five-tube sets. One seventy-nine fifty. That’s a lot of money,” I add.
Their eyes waver. They know the phrase. That’s a lot of money.
But we gave ourselves a washing machine as a Christmas present, and it cost $120. Few have $120; but most, including us, can find fifteen dollars down and five dollars a month. The fact that the machine cannot equal the dirt-removing ability of the washboard and scrub brush and old-fashioned elbow grease, or that Maggie often calls on me to disentangle clothes from the sprockets, has not lessened our fascination with it. It is a marvel, and affordable. Payments are the key. Jock has bought a General Electric refrigerator on payments. Everything is available on payments.
The children wait. Even Maggie is smiling, knowing.
I have always wanted to give them everything, without having anything. I smile. Nothing is new. I am forty-five years old, living in rented rooms. I still have nothing, but I can afford the payment. Everybody makes payments nowadays. A radio, I think. Why not. I know the terms. Twenty dollars down, fifteen dollars a month. After all, I am making twenty-eight dollars a week. These are prosperous times. And there is the employee discount.
I think again of Mike, who waited too long. I think of all the things we have done without. I look at the three of them. Jack, especially, waits. This would be something for all of us. I say it aloud. “Why not?”
“Oh, Martin,” says Maggie.
“Like the washing machine,” I say.
Jack stands up, excited. Margaret smiles the smile that melts me.
Suddenly I am feeling magnanimous. Things are changing for the better. I can feel it. “This Saturday,” I say. “We can all go together to get one, make a day of it.” The idea grows, takes on its own life. I see a picture of us in my head as a family, doing something together. “We’ll go in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch at the Palm Room on the sixth floor. The chicken dinner is on special this week for a dollar.” I have seen the signs in the cafeteria downstairs. “There’s an orchestra.”
Margaret gets up, surprises me by hugging me. Even Jack, his expression always wry, is nodding rare approval.
I look to Maggie, who even though pale, never fully well, is smiling. “There’ll be giblet gravy, rhubarb pie,” I say, waiting for her approval.
“Oh, Martin,” she says, giving it, smiling. Knowing me.
2
It is a dream, a bad dream, beyond imagining.
I am out of body as I crouch down beside her where she has slumped on the bathroom floor. I must be somewhere else, I think, as I hear myself shouting her name.
Margaret is beside me, her hands covering her mouth, her eyes wide. Jack is standing in the doorway, face frozen in shock. The tap is still running.
Even squeezing her, holding her, I cannot make her talk to me. Maggie! I shout. What happened? What happened? Her skin beneath my fingers is white, like chalk.
She just fell, says Margaret. Call your father, she said. And she fell. She was washing my face.
Jack! I shout. Go downstairs. Tell Mrs. Birnbaum I need help. Tell her quick. Hurry!
I loosen her collar, shout her name again, again, try breathing into her mouth, shout her name again. Come back I think. Not now, not now or ever, oh, God, no, please, no.
My mouth is on hers, her lips cold. No, I think. No.
My eyes blur with water, I cannot see. I cannot think.
Margaret is crying. I am crying. I am holding her now, squeezing her, desperate. Maggie, oh Maggie.
And in my head I hear her say it as I clutch her, although her lips, that curl downward at the corners, even now, especially now, do not move, will never move again. Oh, Martin.
I’d say it was myocardial failure, a Dr. Harcourt tells me, using words I have never heard before. How old was she? he asks.
Forty-seven, I hear myself say. She would have been forty-eight in three weeks. On January 29.
It just happens, he says. Nothing could be done.
I look around me, at the faces of Margaret, Jack, Mrs. Bimbaum.
I don’t know what he means, nothing could be done. I don’t know what he means.
What should I do? I ask.
You’ll need to call a funeral home, he says.
Margaret and Jack are both crying.
I don’t know a funeral home, I say, scarcely believing that I am saying it.
He nods, takes a pen and piece of paper from his bag, writes on it. Here, he says. Lynett’s, on Dundas. They’ll take care of everything.
I look at him, at the piece of paper, make no move to take it. I cannot talk. He realizes this, folds it, puts it in his pocket. I’ll call them he says. Do you have a phone?
Mrs. Birnbaum is crying too now.
Yes, I say. Yes. We have a phone.
I cannot
just let them take her. It isn’t right. I go with them without knowing why, since there is nothing that I can do. We sit in a room on opposite sides of a large desk and I am asked questions while forms are completed and I sign them. They are good enough to bring me home, and after I come home, in the middle of the night, my hands shaking, dizzy, I sit on the bed between Margaret and Jack, my arms around them, and we cry, all of us, finally, for as long as it takes.
* * *
RADEY—Suddenly on January 6, at her late residence, 10 Constance Street, Margaret
(Maggie) Curtis, dearly beloved wife of Martin J. Radey.
Funeral from above address Saturday 9th at 8:45 a.m. to St. Vincent de Paul
Church. Interment in Peacemount Cemetery, Dixie, Ont.
The Toronto Daily Star
Thursday, January 7, 1926
MR. MARTIN RADEY and FAMILY
acknowledge with grateful appreciation
your kind expression of sympathy
in their bereavement
10 Constance Street
Toronto
* * *
On March 1, we leave 10 Constance Street. We cannot stay here. It will never be the same. Jack, Margaret, and I, with Mike’s help, move to a flat on Margueretta Street. It is not as nice or as big, but it does not matter.
My brother and I have always been close, but now the bond runs deeper. First his wife, Liz, then Maggie. Even so, something is bothering him. He is not himself. He tells me that his mouth is sore, that he thinks there might be something wrong with his teeth. He worries about gum disease, which Da always talked about, but neither of us know exactly what it is, so we drop the subject. He says that if Liz were here, she would know what the problem was, know the right medicine.
I go to work daily. Margaret and Jack go to school. On the sixteenth of the month, I pay the woman at the accounts wicket in Simpson’s five dollars for the washing machine. Nobody mentions the radio again.
On Tuesday, April 6, before I can even get my coat off, Jack comes to me when I come in the door after work. “Father?”
I take off my hat, place it on the table. “What is it?”
“My arm hurts.”
“Where?” I ask, trying not to seem annoyed. I am tired.
Patience, I think. Patience.
He touches his right forearm with his left hand. “Here,” he says. “It hurts here.”
“What did you do to it?”
“I fell.”
“Where?” I ask. “When? How?” Jack tells me nothing voluntarily. I must ask for everything.
“On the way to school. I was leaping from a fence, grabbing onto a tree branch, swinging. I fell. I landed on the sidewalk. It’s been hurting ever since.”
“That sounds like a stupid thing to do.”
He says nothing.
“You went to school though?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t be too bad then.”
He drops his eyes.
I watch his face. He is in a pain of some kind. “Let me see it,” I say.
Gently, he lifts it, holds it out. I take it carefully, unbutton the cuff, roll up the sleeve. There is some swelling. I touch it.
Jack winces, tries not to pull away.
I do not know what to do. Maggie would have cradled it, kissed it, held him, stroked his hair, soothed his woe. I know this. I have seen her do it.
But I cannot do it. I have never done it.
“Can you move your fingers?”
He wiggles them.
“There. It can’t be too bad then, can it?”
I look closely at his face. It is streaked with dirt. It is possible that he has been crying. He looks up at me.
Margaret comes into the room, stands, watches.
I meet her eyes. She smiles.
“Jack hurt his arm,” she says.
“Yes. He told me.” I let his arm drop, put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be all right. It’s just a bruise. Go and wash up. Your face and hands.” I glance at Margaret. “How’s dinner coming?”
“Baked potatoes and sausages. It’s almost ready.”
“Good.” I take off my jacket, hang it on the wall hook, unfold the newspaper I have been carrying, eye my reading chair.
Jack is still looking at me.
“Jack.”
“Yes sir.” He turns and leaves, heading for the bathroom.
Margaret goes back into the kitchen.
I stand alone, watching them disappear.
The next evening for dinner Margaret cooks bacon and boiled potatoes. I watch Jack favoring his right arm as he eats. We have plums for dessert.
“How’s your arm?”
“Sore.” He does not meet my eyes.
I am quiet, thinking, wondering what to do. Wondering what Maggie would do.
Jack is eating his plums with his left hand.
“Maybe we should soak it in warm water after dinner. What do you think?”
He looks up.
“We could do it in the sink,” says Margaret. “I’ll help.”
I am grateful for her offer.
“Would you like that, Jack?”
He shrugs. “Yes,” he says.
After dinner, I fill the sink with warm water, but I step aside and let Margaret handle the bathing. Her touch is soft, gentle, feminine. Exactly what Jack needs, I think. Exactly what I need.
On Thursday I smell the bacon and fried potatoes Margaret is cooking for dinner when I come in the door.
“Where’s Jack?” I ask as I head for my reading chair.
“In his room.”
Before I can ask how he is, Margaret approaches me.
“He’s in his room. He’s been crying.”
I look up at her from my chair, surprised.
“He came home from school early.”
After a day at work, I have to orient myself to their world, try to remember what has been happening in his life that may have caused this, but can come up with nothing.
“I think there’s something badly wrong with his arm, Father. He was sent home because he couldn’t write with it today. He hasn’t been writing anything at all for three days. He’s been pretending in classes, but his English teacher finally discovered what he’d been up to when he asked him to write on the board and he couldn’t.”
I get up from my chair, go to Jack’s room, open the door. He is lying on his back on the bed with his eyes closed, His right arm is across his chest. There is a sheen of sweat on his brow. His mouth is open.
At St. Michael’s Hospital, they place the arm in a cast. Broken, they tell me. The forearm. We had to break it again to set it. Should have had him in here right away, they tell me. Three days? Why so long?
He didn’t tell me, I say.
They look at me quietly.
Did he tell his mothers?
She’s dead, I tell them.
They are quiet.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand.
More silence.
I didn’t know what to do.
They say no more.
At dinner on Monday, Jack shows Margaret the signatures of his classmates that adorn his cast. She signs it and he smiles. Then they laugh.
I do not know if I am supposed to sign it or not, but neither of them ask me, so I content myself with smiling. But I know they would have asked Maggie. They would have. And she would have laughed and written something witty. I know it.
My brother, Mike, at age sixty, is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. He spends two days in St. Michael’s Hospital while they do tests, see how bad it is, whether it can be cut out.
When I go to see him, he is scared, but does not cry, although you can see that he is holding back, that it is what he will probably do as soon as I leave. Carcinoma, he tells me. Carcinoma, they call it.
A month goes by. The carcinoma gets worse, spreads slowly, a laborer toiling for daily wages.
SIXTEEN
June–August 1926
1
<
br /> I cannot believe what is happening to Mike. I have never seen anything like this. It is eating away his jaw, his mouth, his face, and he just sits there and looks at me when I visit—can barely talk. He could not afford to stay in the hospital and since there was little they could do for him there at any rate, he has returned home where all he does is lie in his bed. The doctors fear the worst: that secondary cancers will occur in the neck glands.
When they can afford it, his children, Kathleen, Ann, and Carmen, buy a supply of steaks, and Mike keeps them on his face so that the cancer will eat them instead of him.
Lockwood Avenue is at the other end of the city. I have to take the streetcar out to the east end, then back across the city to where we live in the west end, a distance of about ten miles. Simpson’s is midway between the two, so a trip after work becomes more like fifteen miles, and I cannot get home until nine or ten o’clock at night.
Margaret is a gem. She says that she understands, and I think that she does. She has assumed the role of housekeeper and family cook. I would be lost without her. Jack resents my absence. I can see it in his eyes. He misses his mother in a way that makes me feel responsible, and he seldom talks to me.
“I don’t feel well, Father.” Jack lies in bed instead of rising for school. It is almost June. The cast is off his arm. I am on the verge of ignoring his complaint as a childish attempt to stay home from school, but I remember dismissing his sore arm and am careful.
“What’s the matter?”
“I feel sick to my stomach.”
I feel his brow, which seems warm. Perhaps he has a fever. I am not sure. I do not even know if we have a thermometer.
“Might be the flu.” The flu is nothing to toy with. It killed millions at the end of the war. Everybody knows this.
“Stay in bed,” I say suddenly. “Maybe Margaret can stay home with you.”
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 23