The Stubborn Season

by Lauren B. Davis

  Eventually Margaret stopped screaming. She slammed her fist into her mouth again and again until she tasted the iron saltiness of blood. Then she was quiet. How long or how loud she’d been screaming she didn’t know. Margaret stood in the dining room. She took her hand out of her mouth and ran it along the top of the table. It was as smooth and cool and reflective as a deep pool of water. Margaret had polished it herself. She bent down and lay her face against the surface, trying to flow into the dark cool world inside the wood. Then she rose again, because there was nothing else to do but rise. She sat in the chair in the corner. Her chair.

  Irene would come back because she was a good girl. She would come back, and Margaret would wait right here. If she stayed here and did not move from this chair, then Irene would come back. Margaret gripped the seat with both hands.

  She’s gone. She won’t be back.

  Shut up. She will be back.

  Gone, gone, gone, free as a bird, flown the coop, fly away, fly away, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children have gone.

  “Shut up!” Margaret yelled. “Shutupshutupshutup!”

  Fine. I can wait.

  Margaret sat for a long time. She sat until it was clear Irene would not be back that night. She sat as darkness fell all around the house and did not get up to turn a light on, for if she moved … Her teeth began to chatter and her legs cramped and all around her she knew something watched and waited. And still she did not move. She gritted her teeth so hard that pains shot up into her temples. Her back ached and burned with holding still, but still she did not move. She concentrated on the ticking of the clock on the desk in the living room, although she could not see it. She was frightened in the dark. The dark that would not budge. She began to cry.

  Ready yet?

  Shut up!

  Go upstairs and get your medicine.

  No. Shut up.

  Stupid bitch.

  She cried harder and gazed into shadows inside shadows.

  It’s just a shadow, just a shadow, she thought and she knew that was true. Just shadows on her mind. But there, curled into the darkness of the shadow-land, was another place, full of wild exultation. Well, what do we have here? Windswept and barren. A place of savage abandon. Land of the Crows. Margaret tried not to know that place; tried not to turn toward it. Her face contorted. Come on, don’t dawdle. She felt herself sliding closer to the place-within-the-place. Margaret stood on the lip of the chasm and knew it did not matter if she flung herself into the breach. Nothing mattered. She could see that now, quite clearly. So simple. Up you go. And then she knew she was falling. A long and lazy turn upon turn, swoop and dive … Oopsy-daisy. The Other Margaret stood erect and laughed peals of laughter that were not good to hear. Margaret’s flesh goose-pimpled to hear it, so wild and terrible was it.

  “Oh my God,” said Margaret, and she fell from the chair.

  When she woke it was daylight and she knew that Irene would not be back. She had fallen from her chair, failed to keep up her end of the bargain and had lost.

  It’s not so bad.

  No.

  Haw! Yes it is, yes it is, fooled you tricked you fooled you tricked you.

  Margaret ran up to her room and slammed the door. Put the chair under the handle. Took it away again. She opened the door, spat on the threshold and laughed. She was Other now, abandoned in the windswept place. She could hear the wind under the floorboards. Let it come. Margaret let despair shake her, a rat in a bloodhound’s jaw, and she fell upon the bed, her bones rattled with the force of her sobs. The worst has happened now, nothing to worry about now. She took her bottle of friendly pink sleep and put it to her lips. I am so tired. Margaret went to sleep. And woke. And drank. And slept some more.

  She tried to open her eyes, crusted over with sleep, the eyelashes sticking together. When she pulled them apart, several eyelashes clung on her fingertips. She blew them away and looked at the room. Small room. Her room. Dark and close and comforting. It was like her own skin, enveloping and hiding her. Her house. It was hers.

  Won’t be ours for long. Money’s all flitted away with the girl. They’ll come and turn us out sooner or later.

  The idea rolled over in her mind.

  That makes it very simple, then, doesn’t it?

  How so?

  We will stay alive as long as long as the house is ours.

  Then we’ll go?

  Yes, then we’ll go.

  This seemed a sensible idea. All her worries would be over then, and an end would come. A friendly end. But until then. Until then the only thing she had to do was breathe in and out and in again.

  Glittering things in corners can sneak up on you at any time. See? Do you see now?

  Margaret saw.

  What shall we do until the day our house is not our house?

  Good question.

  I think we’ll sleep for now. And Margaret turned her head on the pillow, not bothering to take her medicine, for she was tired all by herself.

  She came to slowly, in her bed, fully dressed, and for a moment could not think where she was and did not remember getting there.

  Remember? We are alone now.

  Ah. Yes.

  Margaret stood then and felt her muscles protest. She did not know how long she had been … what had she been?

  We made decisions.

  Decisions?

  Yes, we will die when we lose the house. Friendly sleep.

  Ah. Yes.

  It came to her then that all the things she had ever craved, during a whole lifetime of fierce wanting, had fallen away. There was nothing left to want, since there was nothing left. And in the absence of wanting, she did not now know what disappointment felt like, although she tried to summon it. Or unrest. Or fear. She put her hands along her face to see if it was still her face at all.

  Familiar bones held beneath her searching fingers.

  I am so thirsty.

  Drink something, then.

  It was a place to start, while living until it was time to live no longer. Margaret would drink something. She was as weak as a baby sparrow and moved slowly. Then she passed Irene’s door.

  No.

  Margaret would not, for just this moment, think of Irene.

  She made her way to the kitchen and she poured herself a glass of water. She drank it and poured herself another and then one more.

  She was hungry now, but something else more than that. She went to the front door and opened it. Newspapers were piled there. For how long? She picked them up, one at a time, for they seemed very heavy.

  Two days.

  No, three.

  Risen from the dead, then?

  Only temporarily.

  Margaret took the papers into the kitchen and sat at the table.

  She would not think of abandonment, of betrayal. She would not think of having to go out into the world and do things she did not want to do. See people. Go into a store. Margaret shut her eyes tight. She would not think of all the hopeless days before her. She would agree to not think of it for this particular minute.

  Can we do that?

  Yes. I think that might be possible.

  If I think about it I’ll slit my wrists now.

  Don’t think about it, then. Time for that later. Think about a drink of water.

  And then what?

  Think about eating an egg.

  33

  October 1937

  David and Ebbie helped Irene move the last few things into her new room on Carlton. The proximity to her mother left David looking dubious, but Irene had insisted. David had offered to move out of the room above the store, but Irene had adamantly refused. He was a better deterrent to break-ins than she was, she said, and besides, she wanted a place that was her very own and was new, a fresh start.

  Well, new was a relative term, she thought. The only reason she could afford it was because it was a run-down little place. But it had potential. They helped her paint the walls white. They hung pretty blue curtains, t
he same shade of blue as in the Greek restaurant. There would be nothing red, nothing black in this room. All must be clear and bright and airy. The three of them sat in the tidy kitchen alcove, pleased with the results of their labour. Irene’s skin shone as though washed with light reflected from the Aegean Sea. When Mike joined them they all went to Syros, the restaurant named after George Elytis’s island home.

  David and Irene tried to convince Ebbie that squid was edible, and there was much laughter at the table, helped along by the bottle of retsina that George provided for the occasion, although Irene stuck to cola. The big Greek had proclaimed it a celebration and threatened to break plates.

  Three men at the table next to them, in somewhat soiled working-men’s clothes and surrounded by the remnants of their meal, drank beer and were locked in a discussion of European politics and the smell of war on the west-bound wind. George shushed them and chided them for ruining the atmosphere. Their voices dropped but the conversation continued.

  Mike said, “Do you agree now that we’ll end up at war?”

  “I have no doubt of it,” said Ebbie.

  “Everything ends in war, it seems,” said Irene.

  “Uh-oh. Very gloomy,” said David. “We all know how contagious that can be. All right, already, enough of this. Some battles have been won, eh? So, here’s to Irene’s new home!”

  They raised their glasses and drank to her very good health.

  “I do wish you’d taken a place a bit farther from the old girl, though,” said Ebbie. “Given yourself a bit more breathing room.”

  “It doesn’t really matter much at the moment, does it, since she’s not actually speaking to me?”

  Irene had called four times, and every time her mother had hung up the phone, which Ebbie said was a good sign.

  “Well, she hasn’t hanged herself, as threatened, at least you know that.”

  Irene would not talk about how frightened she had been those first few days on her own. She had stayed with the Watkinses, and Ebbie and David had persuaded her to remain away from the house for a while. David checked on her mother every day, and he assured Irene she was all right. He did not, of course, tell her he had been pretty scared himself when there was no sign of life for the first couple of days, not even the papers picked up from the front porch. And then, on the third day, they were gone, and he could see Margaret moving about inside. If he hadn’t seen that, he told himself, he would have broken in the door.

  Irene looked at her friends and knew they had her best interests at heart, that she could relax and be herself around them. Still. How could she tell them what it was like, how hard it still sometimes was to not go back? She had spoken to the lawyer who had handled her father’s will and arranged for an annual allowance for her mother, but it hadn’t quieted the worry, or the guilt. She arranged for groceries to be delivered weekly. She had done everything she felt she could do, and yet … It was impossible to explain to herself—how could she explain it to her friends? She hadn’t told them how afraid she’d been that her mother might do her harm, and she never would.

  “My mother is not to be despised, you know. If anything, she’s to be pitied. The only thing worse than being around my mother is being my mother.”

  Mike and Ebbie laughed, but David did not.

  “No, really, can you imagine how lonely it must be?” Irene shivered.

  “You spend too much time worrying about what’s going on in her head,” said David.

  “You might be right.”

  “Then, believe it. And live life. L’Chaim!”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Irene.

  The evening is winding down now, as all evenings eventually do. Ebbie and Mike have gone off together, and David and Irene walk along Yonge Street. She has her arm through his. He has told her he’d like to go home soon, maybe early in the new year, to see his family, and this has frightened her. She has admitted to him that she does not want him to go and it has shaken her to admit her reasons for this are more personal than professional. He has said he will return, and Irene has chosen to believe him. She has said something that has made them both laugh.

  She tucks her arm through his again and pulls herself close to the warmth and strength of him. She can smell the leather and soap scent of him—such good smells. She breathes deeply and closes her eyes. She lets herself float along beside him as she did that night last winter on the ice. She opens her eyes and smiles.

  At her door he kisses her, a little awkwardly, which neither of them mind.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, feeling shy and a little foolish.

  When he has gone and Irene has closed the door behind him, listened to his footsteps down the stairs, she begins to smile but the smile dies quickly as a surge of loneliness passes through her. She can sense her mother there, not far away, and imagines her feeling abandoned, despairing. Trying to put the image out of her mind, she begins to turn down the bed, but the image will not leave her and she knows she is in for another sleepless night.

  She shrugs back into her coat and slips out of the apartment, along Carlton and up the street on which she was raised. She creeps along the long-forgotten flower bed and peers in the window. She expects the worst, but there Margaret sits, wearing her red dress with the white collar, her feet in slippers and a sweater around her shoulders. Through the window Irene can hear The Maxwell House Coffee Hour with George Burns and Gracie Allen playing on the radio.

  Her mother sits with a cup of something at her elbow and a newspaper across her lap. She is doing the crossword puzzle, she reaches up with the eraser end of her pencil to push her reading glasses up her nose. On the radio the happy postman arrives at the door and her mother puts her pencil down to listen. She leans over and adjusts the tuning. She laughs at something as the postman sings in a fractured voice. Then the innocent chirp of Gracie Allen’s voice and she laughs again. Slaps the paper with her hand and wipes her eyes.

  Irene can’t remember ever seeing her mother alone like this, when she thinks no one is looking at her. It is reassuring, yet unsettling at the same time. Her mother seems perfectly fine without her. Irene’s heart tugs irrationally, to know she is neither as needed or possibly as cherished as she’d thought. She had expected to find her mother distraught, sitting in the dark, or upstairs in bed, or in her housecoat with tears in her eyes, and yet here she is, laughing at Burns and Allen. Her hair is combed and clean. After all the worry and the fear, what does it mean? She watches her mother take a sip of her drink, wrinkle her nose and add two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Irene does not recognize the cup, a white one with a blue flower on it and a matching saucer. Margaret sips again, then picks up several small black medallions from a cut-glass bowl. The bitter licorice she is partial to. She puts a couple in her mouth and chews. Then she laughs again and wipes her lips on the back of her hand. She settles her hands in her lap and lets them sit there quietly. She does not scratch them. She gazes up at the ceiling as she listens to the radio, and Margaret looks satisfied, yes, that’s the word for it, satisfied.

  It’s puzzling. Irene turns and walks away, shaking her head, baffled, relieved, and yet, something else. Made to believe her mother could not live without her, she now feels manipulated and betrayed. Margaret’s world does not, apparently, revolve on the axis of her daughter’s devotion. Irene feels unexpectedly hurt. It’s too much to take in, too much to sort out. Perhaps this love is simply a stone she’ll never be able to shake out of her shoe.

  As she walks down the street toward her new home she is careful of where she puts her feet. She adjusts her step to the rhythm of the sidewalk.

  Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

  Step on a line, break your mother’s spine.

  Acknowledgements

  Among the many people who helped me with the research for the book I would like to thank the staffs of the Metropolitan Toronto Research Library, the Albert J. Latner Jewish Public Library of Toronto and the City of Toronto Archives, par
ticularly Karen Teeple; and Mike Brassard for early digging in the dusty stacks.

  I am grateful to my agents Suzanne Brandreth and Dean Cooke for their belief in this book and their guidance as I learned to play with the big kids.

  I also wish to offer my sincere appreciation to everyone at HarperCollins Canada: Iris Tupholme, Siobhan Blessing and the rest of the gang. You pushed me to a better book and taught me many things, including confidence in my abilities. Thank you.

  The characters in this book are purely fictional. Some of the minor historical details have been altered in order to facilitate the narrative.

  For those so inclined, here is a list of some of the books I found invaluable in my research:

  Abella, Irving. A Coat of Many Colours. Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited. 1990.

  Berchem, F.R. Opportunity Road. Toronto: Natural Heritage/Natural History Inc. 1996.

  Berton, Pierre. The Great Depression. Toronto: Penguin Books. 1990.

  Betcherman, Lita-Rose. The Little Band. Ottawa: Deneau Publishers. 1983.

  Betcherman, Lita-Rose. The Swastika and the Maple Leaf. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. 1975.

  Biderman, Morris. A Life on the Jewish Left. Toronto: Onward Publishing. 2000.

  Broadfoot, Barry. Ten Lost Years. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1997.

  Davis, Minerva. The Wretched of the Earth and Me. Toronto: Lugus Press. 1992.

  Hunter, Peter. Which Side Are You On Boys … Toronto: Lugus Press. 1988.

  Levitt, Cyril H. and Shaffir, William. The Riot at Christie Pits. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys. 1987.

  Luftspring, Sammy. Call Me Sammy. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd. 1975.

  Meltzer, Milton. Buddy Can You Spare a Dime? New York: Facts on File, Inc. 1991.

  Secunda, Victoria. When Madness Comes Home. New York: Hyperion. 1997.

  Sharp, Rosalie, Abella, Irving and Goodman, Edwin. Growing Up Jewish. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1997.

  West, Bruce. Toronto. Toronto: Doubleday. 1979.

  About the Author