“Rupert! That vulgar little man and those hideous beasts! Darling, it was a sign of my deep and adoring affection for you that I even accompanied you to that…that pit!”
“Oh dear, and here I thought you might have wanted to take one home.”
“Please!” She shuddered. “Actually the only thing I wished to take home from Palm Beach was the recipe for that incredible dessert that Chef La Chance made.”
“The Crepes Suzette?”
“I’ve never had anything quite so delicate. The amazing aromas of the Grand Marnier igniting the sweet orange juice. It makes me swoon to think about it. How impressed our friends would be if we could have something like that served in our home! The food at Whitehall was absolutely extraordinary in every way, and I’m so sorry that we couldn’t persuade Chef La Chance to say hello to us in person. Rather rude, don’t you think?”
“Well, Mrs. Flagler did explain that he was an artiste, and a bit temperamental. The French can be like that, you know. Perhaps remaining unseen was deliberate to add to his aura.”
“Oh, I do hope we’ll return to Palm Beach before long. Could we get a home there one day, Rupert? I would adore being there every year.” Beth batted her eyes at her husband.
Maisie appeared, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and a plate of cucumber sandwiches.
“Excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Willows, the dining car is reporting a delay, and I thought you might care for a bit of refreshment in the meantime.”
“How thoughtful, Maisie. Thank you,” answered Beth.
“I also have a telegram that was delivered to your attention, Mr. Willows, during the station stop in Toronto.”
“A telegram, from whom?” asked Beth.
“It’s from Alfred,” said Rupert, with concern on his face. He tore it open, scanned it quickly and broke into a wide smile.
“It’s wonderful news, Beth. There is to be a wedding at Ravenscraig!”
Maisie felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. A wedding?
“Alfred is to be married to Lily Quartermain,” Rupert announced. “Isn’t that marvelous news?”
Beth clapped her hands with joy. “How wonderful! Such excitement after our holiday, Rupert. Lily is a fine young woman. Well educated and cultured. Her parents belong to all of the right clubs. Just the kind of wife Alfred needs.”
“Yes, quite,” responded Rupert. “A tad dull, perhaps, and a little timid, but I agree, he’s made a good choice. Too bad James is so slow off the mark in getting involved in a social life. On the rare occasion he does go out, he picks the dreariest girls in the city to share his company. He seems much more interested in his medical studies than he does in romance. It’s time he paid more attention to his future, don’t you agree?”
“Now, Rupert, don’t be marrying off all of my children in such a big hurry. James will be graduating this year, and he will find his happiness. You will see.”
Much relieved that it was Alfred and not James announcing the upcoming nuptials, Maisie retreated to her place in the tiny kitchen of the Pullman car. She smiled to herself as the train clattered down the track, and she tidied up the workstation. Of course, it would be impossible to think of a life with James, but dreaming about it could do no harm.
In the parlor, Rupert had tired of discussing plans for the wedding and pulled out his reading glasses.
“I’m sure that you and Mrs. Butterfield will be quite capable of looking after all of these little details, and I will thank you to keep me out of the planning. Now if you would excuse me, my love, I’d like to catch up on the news.”
“Did you find something worthwhile at the newsstand?”
“Plenty, including a society magazine you may like.” He settled into his comfortable seat and opened The Dominion, Coast to Coast.
Maisie dozed as the train rocked along the tracks, happily thinking about telling her family all about her Florida adventures, and returning to her studies with James. It was the shouting that woke her up. Mr. Willows was in quite a state. She cracked the kitchen door open to better hear his ranting.
“How dare they print this rubbish? And here I thought Coast to Coast was a serious magazine, not a scandal sheet!” Rupert was on his feet, pacing.
“Rupert, dear!” Beth tried to calm him. “You frightened me out of my skin. What on earth are you reading?”
“Here, look at this. It’s a dreadful expose on the foreign quarter of Winnipeg that has been written for the sole purpose of damning the actions of city council. It’s written by a man named Isaac Zigman, a Hebrew, no doubt, who is out to destroy our image by unfairly painting a terrible picture of our fair city!”
The hair stood up on Maisie’s neck. Isaac Zigman!
The Shameful Secret in the Gateway City
By Isaac Zigman
Winnipeg is hiding a dark secret from the world. While it clamors to be recognized as the fastest growing city in the Dominion, Winnipeg has turned its back on its most defenseless citizens—the impoverished slum dwellers, a great many of them children, in the foreign quarter, now known simply as the city’s North End.
Sitting at the gateway to the North-West, isolated by geography a full five hundred miles from its closest large neighbor, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Winnipeg is home to theaters, opera, restaurants and hundreds, even thousands of citizens with the means to frequent these elegant establishments. The Manitoba capital boasts musical societies, art galleries, and piano stores, aplenty. There are rows of banks and real estate offices, as well as warehouses, fine department stores, and sewing factories. There are grain merchants, furriers, cloak makers, book publishers, bicycle shops, and motorcar sales offices. Doctors and dentists by the dozen are housed in fine tall buildings reaching six stories and more to the sky.
Winnipeg is also home to fine institutions of higher learning, filled with ambitious young men, and an increasing number of bright young women, all looking to the future. Even young girls, if they are from families of appropriate circumstances, may attend one of the finest girls’ schools in the country, Winnipeg’s Havergal College.
In short, it is a city with everything, except compassion for the under classes, whose daily suffering is equal to that in the world’s worst slums. Vastly overcrowded, with the poorest shelter imaginable, the North End is tucked away out of sight and out of mind, lest the sensibilities of the upper classes be offended. Indeed, it would no doubt be a shock to many inhabitants of the Manitoba capital to know that such poverty exists in their midst.
Among those who live out of sight and out of mind, is Victor Gurevetsky, a child of the slums. This is his story.
Two hours before sunrise on a bitterly cold February morning, Victor takes his place in a line at the employment office on Winnipeg’s Main Street. There are perhaps seventy men in front of him, and more quickly gather behind. They huddle together in the freezing weather, slapping their arms through patched coats to stay warm. In a variety of languages, they share stories about which company is hiring and how much is being paid. Is there a boxcar to unload? Wood to cut? Snow to be shoveled? Does anyone have need for a good blacksmith’s helper?
Men skilled as tailors and machine workers fare better than the new immigrants who don’t speak English, for they have little to offer beyond their strength and reliability.
After several hours, dejected and worried, Victor leaves the employment office without any work.
Victor is twelve years old, but since his father’s recent death from consumption, he is burdened with the responsibility as sole provider for his family. Now, it is all up to Victor to feed and shelter his mother, his sisters, ages six and five, and his infant brother, who was born two months after his father was gathered by the grim reaper.
Consenting to allow this reporter to accompany him, Victor heads to the river to gather driftwood. Perhaps he could sell a few sticks and make a penny or two, he explains.
When her husband died, Mrs. Gurevetsky had no choice but to move her children to the poorest secti
on of the ghetto. It was all they could afford. It was here that Victor’s baby brother, Sol, was born, with the help of a neighbor. He said it was so cold that his mother’s hair froze to the wall in the shack during the birthing.
The slums of Winnipeg, generally known as the North End, are separated from downtown and the better neighborhoods by the train tracks and the sprawling railway yards. As Victor tells his story, we make our way from the river, back to Main Street, and head north across the tracks. Here we find a string of small shops frequented by the people of the foreign quarter.
There are fruit merchants and dry goods stores. Others are selling meat and sausages, with chickens hanging in windows and barrels of herring, sauerkraut and apples near the doorways. Shoppers haggle for bargains in the used clothing shops. Victor remarks that his sisters have a single coat to share. It is the same one they use as a blanket. He is trying to save money to buy a used coat for himself, but finds it hard to save. The money goes for food before clothing, he says.
The afternoon light is fading as we round the corner from Main Street and moved toward a clutter of wooden shacks on Dufferin.
The dismal shelters offer little comfort against the forty-below zero temperatures in this hard land. Tempers fray under the weight of hunger and poverty. Fingers, numb with cold, reach for shared scraps in a pot, while mothers watch to see that all of the children get a share of whatever there might be to eat.
Dirt is caked in lines along Victor’s exposed wrists; his hands are reddened by the cold. With dark hollows under eyes too old for a boy so young, Victor explains that the hunger never goes away.
“Poverty in the old country and poverty in Winnipeg look and smell the same,” he says. “You don’t forget.”
Acre after acre, the sights and smells of destitution have taken root here, strangling the ambitions of many of society’s weaker members, citizens who have no one to fend for them.
The newspapers refer to the area as the foreign quarter, but “Mitzrayim”, is what the Jewish residents call it. Strictly speaking, this is the Hebrew term for Egypt, but to those who call this area Mitzrayim, it describes the suffering of Jews still fighting to be free.
Here the shacks appear glued together for warmth against the bitter cold. Smoke wafts from a chimney here and there, and the dark, dirty sheds fade into shades of grey and black against the starkly beautiful blue of the fading prairie day. The neighborhood more closely resembles a heap of smoldering rubbish than a place for people to live.
The ugliness spreads well beyond this dreary corner, for thousands of families, transplanted from Eastern Europe are flooding into the North End. Those most fortunate occupy the more expensive tenements, hastily and poorly built by speculators. These property owners were quick to see that the steady stream of immigrants from Russia, Romania, Galicia, Bukovina, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and other countries would provide a rich return for landlords.
This prairie version of slum housing is a long, drab wooden structure, divided into narrow homes, each with its own door fronting onto a common porch. Often two, or even three, families will share the expenses of a two-room tenement. Some of the more imaginative landlords stack a second storey onto the first to get the most from their investment. Fire is a daily fear. Bedbugs are a year-round problem. Maggots, mosquitoes and flies are thankfully restricted to the summer months.
Cleanliness is a wish that goes unfulfilled in the struggle to survive. At best, a battered washbasin is filled with water that has to be carried in pails from a community pump two blocks away. Regular bathing is only for the rich.
The harshness of winter provides a bitter solace. It offers protection against the many diseases that flourish here in summer when flies and mosquitoes carry illness from one home to another. In summer, the small patches of yard, when they exist, are often not safe places for children to play, but rather breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid, diphtheria tuberculosis, smallpox, and scarlet fever. Human waste spills from the outhouses that stand too close to the back of the homes.
Inhabitants live in fear of the appearance of horse-drawn wagons that come to collect the dying folk, stricken with smallpox and other contagious, incurable diseases. For these hapless souls, the wagon means a one-way trip to a facility west of town on the edge of the prairie adjacent to Brookside Cemetery. It is the Pestilence House. From there, it is a conveniently shorter trip to the final resting place in a pauper’s grave at Brookside.
Driven by the crowding, foul odors and constant arrival of new tenants, each year new shacks spring up next to the tenements as renters turn into squatters in homes they build themselves out of whatever they can find or steal. These shelters are hovels, some less than hovels. Most are barely more than lean-tos made of used crates and scrap yard cast offs, strung together by frozen clotheslines.
Desperation is always close at hand, ready at an instant to explode into violence. The wind moans through the rubble, occasionally punctuated by the solid smack of a fist landing on its mark. Wailing, crying. Death comes at night. Babies, too, come in the darkness, into a world steeped in the stench of wet woolen boot liners, dirty blankets and unwashed workers.
But, like a dying ember in the stove, so burns the promise of tomorrow in the ghetto; the defiant hope that spring will come. There are also signs of success as businesses take root, schools are built and children are educated. There is a pride and determination among the dwellers of the North End of Winnipeg as they are building the foundation for future generations, who will grow and prosper in the new country.
Victor says, “In Canada, the streets aren’t paved with gold as they dreamed they were in the Old Country, but neither are they drenched in blood from the violent life they left behind.”
Victor will go to the Main Street employment office again in the morning. He is there every morning. Every day he dreams of a future when he will own a business to support his family. A bakery, he says. A bakery on Dufferin Avenue, so that they will never again be hungry for bread.
Rupert continued to stew over the magazine article while Beth read the story. When she started to weep he couldn’t stop himself from rolling his eyes and turned away.
“Oh, why can’t you do anything about this, Rupert?” she whined.
He paused for a moment as inspiration charged through him. She was right. A brilliant opportunity was at hand.
He would wire Alfred to find this guttersnipe and hire him as an errand boy. Rupert paced as he calculated how much press he would generate from this act of generosity and grudgingly decided he would also have to throw in free rental accommodation for the wretched family to gain the attention of the Manitoba Free Press. It would be worth it. He’d have a good shot at making the front page.
Chapter Forty-Four
Matters of the Heart
March 26, 1905
A joyous chorus of honking birds lifted Maisie’s wilted spirits. The giant Canada Geese were filling the pre-dawn sky by the thousands, heralding the start of another spring. Thus awakened from her fitful, troubled sleep, Maisie threw open her attic window and stuck her head into the rush of freezing air. She took comfort in the sound of the geese as she sought to ease her painful matters of the heart. Perhaps the geese would help her answer James’ question. She knew what she had to say. She just needed to find the words to face it. She blinked hard against the fresh tears.
She was barely able to make out the long strings of birds, stretching out in perfect “v” formations against the dark sky. The call of the geese was a sound like no other. To her, it was the sound of victory. Another migration behind them. Mating for life and driven only by instinct, these sturdy birds knew no barriers. They didn’t question. They had no choices to make. They did what nature dictated, even nesting in ice and snow, if need be, to hatch their young.
Maisie closed her eyes and felt the chill of the air on her cheeks, the wind in her hair. She was soothed by her communion with nature. Her own family came to mind. How determined they had always bee
n, together in strength and purpose. Had she gone astray? Had she forgotten how to be one with her own kind?
Within a few weeks there would be endless gaggles of bright yellow goslings to watch along the riverbanks, each little beating heart driven to fulfill its destiny.
Maisie pondered, for a time, the notion that each new bird arrives in the world knowing precisely what purpose it shall serve. To live an eternally uncomplicated life, uncluttered by the necessity to make decisions, put the geese in an enviable position, she mused. Oh, the benefits of being born with a plan firmly planted in your brain that would take all need for consideration out of your hands, out of your control. She sighed at the thought of the letter under her pillow. She took it out and smoothed it in the dark, caressing the pages until the early morning light became strong enough for her to see the words.
March 25, 1905
Dearest Maisie,
It has been so difficult for me to work with you since your return from Florida. I have come to a decision, and I hope you don’t think me cowardly or unkind for putting my words on paper rather than taking the chance to speak to you in person. Forgive me if this seems a wholly inappropriate way to take what I desperately hope will be a new path for us.
As awkward as it is, given your position, and mine, I must confess my deep and abiding affection for you. I missed your company terribly when you traveled with my parents. Since your return, there are moments when I look at you and see that it may be true, and not just hopeful thinking on my part that you may care for me as I do for you.
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