by Brian Moore
‘God’s own country, kids,’ Harry bawls. ‘God’s own bloody country.’ We giggle. ‘Git up them stairs,’ Harry orders, smacking his wife’s bottom. She turns to us, woebegone. ‘He always wants that,’ she says. Again, we giggle. Harry gives us one of his large ‘double-intender’ winks, then lumbers upstairs after her, old and heavy in his darned brown cardigan and floppy mud-coloured slacks. Later, under the covers in our back bed-sitting room, Jimmy and I clutch each other, repeating these catch phrases, re-triggering our giggles. Our minds are full of Blodgett lore: we can close our eyes and see Harry in his favourite nook, scrunched down in his old cretonne-covered armchair, the chair planted foursquare in the bay window of his front parlour, his back to Gerrard Street, a case of Labatt’s India Pale Ale on the floor, within reach of his right hand, the wreckage of the Toronto Star and the Toronto Telegram strewn about his slippered feet. He has not moved out all weekend. Across the room, the television flitters fitfully. Mother rises to adjust the rabbit ears. Harry talks. He talks. From time to time, like a blind man, he gropes for and finds a new quart bottle of ale, reaches it up to the wall bottle opener without taking his eyes off the TV set, strikes the cap off, brings the foaming bottle top neatly to his lips. No drop is spilled.
‘Trouble with you kids, trouble with you, you’re like bloody belted earls, you are, born with a silver frigging spoon in your mouths because you was born here. Yes, here. In Canada. This bloody country, I tell you, this is democracy, God’s own bloody country, I say, and don’t tell me the States, don’t tell me the frigging Yanks are as good as we are, the frigging Yanks, I tell you I’ve been in Buffalo, I like people better, ha, ha, get it? That’s one of my double-intenders. I been in Buffalo, now Mother don’t give me them nasty looks, it’s just my way and a bit of fun never killed nobody.
‘Mary-Jimmy, did I ever tell you kids how I come here? I come to Canada with a football team. No, straight up. We was rank bloody amateurs too, but good enough to play the best they had over here which was not bloody much. Factory teams, mostly. Let’s see that’s – what is it, Mother? – must be thirty, no, that’s right, thirty-two years ago. Never mind, we got off the boat in Halifax, played there, then come on to Montreal, played a couple of matches there, then come on here. Toronto the Good. Second match we had here was with the Soap-O factory team and yours very truly kicked the only two goals and afterwards Mr Henry, he was general manager of Soap-O, a nice guy, he came up and offered me a job – just wanted me on his team, he said. So, our team – Sunderland Wanderers, we was – frigs off back to Blighty, God help them, poor sods – while I started at Soap-O sweeping floors – and I can hear you say, not much of a job, that, but, kids, I’ve not had one day’s regret. Right, Mother?’
‘Not one day’s regret,’ Mother says.
‘Seven months later, I sent for Mother, yes, her sitting over there, my bloody fiancey, and I sent full fare too, oh, yes and we was married right here, Bloor Street baptist, eh Mother? – and let me tell you, not one day’s regret about that neither. The Old Country, you hear some of these Old Country types here in Toronto going on about sodding England, don’t make me wet my drawers, I’m as English as any man and so is Mother and let me tell you kids the sun can bloody set on the whole sodding country, I said set, from Land’s End to John O’Groats and sink into the bloody Emerald sea – how’s that, what’s it, a jewel set in a something sea. Yes, and what’s the Old Country ever done for me, I ask you and I’ll give you my answer straight up – fuck all – sorry, Mary, sorry, Mother, but Canada, that’s another story, that’s my country now, I’d bloody die for old Canada, I would. It’s God’s bloody country, yes, God’s bloody country and don’t none of us forget it.’
Christmas was over. At Christmas time Jimmy and I deceived our respective families by announcing our ‘engagement’ then, courting the family seals of approval, went through a second marriage ceremony, this time in a Toronto Catholic church. My mother had to send written permission to the parish priest, which she did, but only after she’d written a letter warning me that in marrying the likes of Jimmy Phelan I was throwing my life away. Jimmy’s mother felt much the same way: her letter to Jimmy pointed out that he could now see where uncontrolled ‘passions’ led people: to a job packing shoppers’ bags in a supermarket. Jimmy still had his Loblaws’ job but I had been fired by the T. Eaton company right after the Christmas rush. Now, I had a job compiling a list of Toronto dentists for a firm which specialized in making up directories.
Yes, Christmas was over in God’s own country. Jimmy’s mother said I had ruined his life and my mother said he had ruined mine and we lay in bed giggling as we re-read the letters, camping up these doomsayings, but in the dark, afterwards, I would sometimes wonder how true these predictions were. We were married now, officially, by the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, living in Toronto in God’s own country and the best we could do was make a combined salary of eighty-nine dollars a week and live on Gerrard Street with Harry and Mother Blodgett. Harry who believed the millennium was here because he was now supervisor of the night cleaning staff at Soap-O’s Etiobicoke factory, and Mother who gave thanks to her Redeemer for His eternal goodness in making her a chicken plucker at Kemelman’s Poultry in the St Lawrence Market. Yes, it was God’s own country for the Blodgetts with three square meals a day and lots of lovely beer and the mortgage half paid on their lovely home and we giggled as we heard all this and remembered it in bed, clinging to each other, trying to make believe that we were in love, a part of us sensing the rim of hysteria around the edge of our giggles, for Harry and Mother were not just comedy relief. There was another side to them, a side we saw sometimes on Sunday mornings, Harry, stupefied with beer, asleep in his armchair, snoring in concert with Mother, who lay dead drunk at his feet, her mouth open, her teeth slipping, great dead pigs, the pair of them in the cold winter sunlight of a Toronto Sunday morning, surrounded by empty beer bottles, the air rancid with stale cigarette smoke, while, facing them, across the room, the television test pattern, blue and constant, hummed ignored. And even Harry’s shout of ‘Git up them stairs’ had a sinister ring to me sometimes, as I sat in my cubby-hole office, compiling lists of registered dental surgeons, and imagined Harry rearing up like some old hippo over Mother and, Sweet Jesus our Saviour, if huge Harry and mountainous Mother could make it in bed, then what was wrong with Jimmy and me? Either Jimmy came before he was inside me or just after, and often I would feel so frantic I’d have to go into the bathroom later when he fell asleep, sit on the throne and finish it off. Afterwards, sometimes, I would cry. Was it me or was it him? He was so proud of the size of his penis, it had to be my fault, but what good was the size of his prick to me when I never got time to come? Was I frigid, was that it? He implied I was colder than he was and once suggested that perhaps our difficulty was that while he found me beautiful and couldn’t control himself with me, I didn’t find him attractive and so remained cold with him. But I knew that wasn’t true, his looks had nothing to do with it, I was cold to him all right, but cold because in some secret part of me I knew it had been a mistake to marry him. I had done a selfish rotten thing just because I wanted to get away to Toronto. But I was not prepared to pay the price for that mistake. I was not prepared to serve out a life sentence as Mrs James Phelan. The truth was, I was twenty, I didn’t want to live with anyone for a while, I wanted to be alone in my own room, to cook only when and if I felt like it, not to have to wash dishes or men’s socks, and the thought of having Jimmy’s baby, that was what brought on the real panic of those days. I saw myself becoming one of those drear, wan women who wander the supermarkets, aimlessly pushing wire shopping carts up and down the aisles of merchandise at three in the afternoon, their minds muzzy with Muzak while, up front on the shopping cart, some infant slobbered and peed in its snow suit and, farther up the aisle, its boily brother, aged three, noisily upset a soapflakes display. O diaphragm between me and all harm, I didn’t have you in those days. We knew I should go to a doctor but
I was shy about it and so Jimmy went on using the french letters which were part of our trouble for he hated them and my worry was that he’d forgotten to put it on and so, in the dark, when he would start to take my pyjamas off, I’d interrupt him to ask, ‘Did you?’ which made him cross and spoiled things.
But I feared his sperm. A mistake would send me on that long supermarket wander while the Muzak played ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and so there were no enchanted evenings or afternoons between Jimmy and me, no, not ever. And I dreamed of abortions. I didn’t believe I’d be able to go through with one. I suppose the last vestige of being a Catholic was the little part of me which saw it as murder and when I was not dreaming about abortions, sometimes I sat in gloom, thinking of what would happen if I did have a baby. I was sure it would mean post-natal depression. I had read an article about post-natal depression in Canada’s Own Magazine and I couldn’t get that article out of my mind. I read how some women get in such a state that they have to be locked up. In the article, a Canadian psychiatrist was quoted as saying it happened to women who secretly didn’t want babies, which was my case exactly. My abortion dreams changed to nightmares in which I killed the baby and flushed it down the toilet, nightmares so frightening and in which I did such horrible things that I’ve blanked them out for ever.
Anyway, all of this made me more afraid than ever of a mistake with Jimmy and so I was always making excuses, saying I was sleepy or sick or telling lies about my period, which made him think I was frigid and that, of course, made him resentful and it became more difficult for us to spend evenings together without passing snappish remarks and so, I suppose to avoid talking, we began spending a lot of evenings at the movies.
Strange that I decided, a while back, that we went to the movies because Jimmy was a mad movie fan. When now, examining that life of ours, wasn’t it I who drove us out all those nights?
And post-natal depression. Funny how long it is since I’ve thought of that. Or of Mackie.
Mackie, Mackie McIver. I can see her face more clearly than my mother’s. Her hair is reddish, her skin freckled: there is just a hint of red rims around the lids of her light-blue eyes. I wonder does she still wear those shirtwaist dresses, dresses with pleats which always made me think of the tennis dresses our mothers wore in the ’thirties? There she sits in her well of loneliness in the library at Canada’s Own Magazine, at her jumbled but ordered desk, the phone cradled against her shoulder as, in that light, clear, girlish voice, she tells some reader the size and population of Patagonia. Patient, tenacious, going back again and again to the files to hunt up some point. She did not give up. If ever she needs an epitaph, that sentence should be chiselled on the stone over her grave. She did not give up. Oh God, she did not give up.
Tall, I remember her as very tall. I wonder has any woman, will any woman remain as vividly in the retina of my memory? And yet, the first time I saw her I did not notice her at all until she made her amazing offer. I had been having the nightmares about flushing babies down toilets and was trying to think of a way to exorcize them, or at least exorcize that article on post-natal depression. But I didn’t have a copy of it any more and I decided to re-read it in hopes it hadn’t been as gloomy as I thought. So I phoned Canada’s Own Magazine and asked for a copy but they said it was too far back, impossible to let me have that issue, but if I came into their library I could copy it out.
Next day I went up to Canada’s Own in my lunch hour. I was directed to the library on the editorial floor where I asked for the article. The librarian was a woman and she sat me down at a desk with a nice reading light and it was very warm and quiet in there. When she brought the article, I felt foolish, as though I were there under false pretences, for I’d said something vague about wanting it for ‘research’. So I took out a piece of paper and made a couple of squiggly notes as I re-read the piece. A voice said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I looked up and it was the librarian. ‘I was just wondering, are you researching this piece for someone, or is it just a personal interest?’
Which made me blush, I remember, and also made me furious at her, but I saw that she was blushing too, then she said she didn’t mean to be nosey, it was just that she was short-staffed and was looking for a girl to help her in here. ‘And,’ she said, ‘you look like a researcher, you see.’
‘Well,’ I told her, ‘I am in a way. I work for a company which compiles directories and things. But I was just interested in this article for a friend of mine.’
‘Directories,’ she said. ‘Do you work for Lowry’s?’
I said I did. She smiled, triumphant. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘They don’t pay at all well, do they?’
And then, sensing the murder rising in me, she added, very quickly, ‘I mean I used to work there myself once. I mean, I only said that because if you were at all interested in coming to work here, I’m sure we could pay more than they do. And you’d have more freedom. We’d pay – oh, let’s see, say sixty-five dollars a week. Would you be at all interested?’
Well, of course I was interested: it meant a twenty-dollar raise and besides it seemed more prestigious to work for a magazine. So I said, ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Oh great.’ (One of the things I remember best about her after all these years is the funny high whinny she gave when something really pleased her.) She gave it now and said, ‘Of course I’ll have to speak to the editor. I’m not sure if he’s back from lunch.’
I said, ‘But there’s no hurry. I could come in tomorrow, or any day that suits you.’
‘No, no,’ she said. She smiled. ‘You might change your mind. Now, you just wait here, will you, please?’
She ran to her desk, grabbed up some sort of accounts book, and ran out. While I sat there at the reading desk, bemused, not really believing this was happening to me. Until, after what seemed an awfully long time, back she came, very jumpy, very eager. She asked me to come with her.
And so I walked into my first meeting with the Warm Brown Turd, R. J. McKinnon who now, improbably, has been chosen to write the foreword to Hat’s one and only book. I remember I felt dazed, as a prisoner might when led into the glare and confusion of a courtroom, for there were very bright overhead lights in McKinnon’s office and, off by one wall, two teletype machines mysteriously typing out stuff on their own, which was something I had never seen before and found distracting. There were two phones on his desk and he kept being interrupted by one or the other of them ringing, and the librarian lady (I mean Mackie, which was the name I gave her, perhaps to pay her back for the name she insisted on giving me), anyway, Mackie, Miss Ruth McIver, the librarian lady as I said, kept talking at McKinnon, talking very fast in her high schoolgirlish voice while he half listened and looked at my legs, and then, after a perfunctory question about my schooling, he quickly ascertained that I was married, that I had no library training and had been only a few weeks in my current job and just as I was deciding that I had failed his examination and that, as soon as he finished a conversation on the phone which had interrupted him, he would tell me he didn’t think I was quite what they had in mind, he said to the person on the phone, ‘Okay. Go to hell,’ slammed the phone down, stared up at me, and sighed in an ‘I-give-up’ manner. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ruth, here, seems to think she can use you. I suppose it’s up to her. I can give you fifty dollars a week, okay?’
‘Sixty-five,’ she said sharply. McKinnon looked at her and there was, I remember, a warlike sort of pause. ‘Sixty,’ he said. ‘Take it or leave it.’ He looked at her, not at me. ‘She has no experience,’ he said.
Mackie (Miss McIver, the librarian lady) looked at me, alarmed. I said, thank you, sixty would be all right. Then I said I supposed I’d have to give a week’s notice in my other job and I remember McKinnon nodded and suddenly came up to me and shook my hand, saying, ‘Well you’d better arrange the starting date with Ruth here. Good luck.’ And that she thanked him, very gushily, then took my arm and walked me down a long corridor of editorial offices, going
back to the library, and squeezed my arm and said, ‘Oh, boy. Wasn’t that something? I mean, really something. I’m delighted, delighted. Aren’t you?’
I must have looked confused for she at once put on her stricken face again and said, ‘Look, is it the five dollars, for if it is, remember, I promised it to you and you’re entitled to it and I’ll give it to you myself, all right? It’s worth it to me to have you, honestly, it is.’
‘But that’s not necessary,’ I told her. ‘Sixty is fine, it’s more than I’m getting now.’
She stared at me there in the corridor, her eyes widening, then mysteriously filling with tears. She bent forward and her lips touched my cheek. ‘You are a dear,’ she said, blushing, blushing. ‘Can I ask you a very big favour?’
I said, ‘Yes, what?’ and then she said, ‘I’d like to call you Maria. Is that all right?’
I said, ‘Yes, it’s all right. But why?’
‘Because you are a Maria and not a Mary. I hope you won’t be offended but Mary is stodgy and you’re not stodgy, you’re . . . well, you’re just Maria, that’s all. Do you mind?’
I thought at the time it was sweet of her. I thought her an extraordinary woman, hiring me on the spur of the moment, and if she wanted to call me Maria, why not? But now, thinking back to that time, I realize no man ever tried to change me as much as Mackie did, no man tried so ruthlessly to suppress the Mary Dunne I was in order to transform me into a creature of his imaginings. It took a woman to do that, it took Ruth McIver whom I called Mackie and who was Miss Mouse to most of the people on the editorial floor, Miss Mouse, perennial spinster, the sort of woman who wasn’t kissed even at the annual office party. But behind the façade of Miss Mouse was a Caesar of determination. Once she had decided I was Maria, she never called me anything else.
So I became Maria, Miss McIver’s assistant in the library at Canada’s Own Magazine. It was as though she had decided to destroy my old identity by inventing a new one for me. Oh, I know. That sounds Machiavellian, when the truth is my relationship with Mackie was probably a simple little Mammon fable, a story of my greed. Certainly, it was the one time in my life when I was corrupted by someone’s money. Poor Mackie, I’m being hard on her, she meant well. Yet when I think back to those times, to Jimmy and Mackie and me sitting down to dinner in her big house on Prince Arthur, I feel no auld lang syne.