Serafim and Claire

by Mark Lavorato

  She thought one of these opportunities might have arisen when a smartly suited gentleman came into the cabaret late one Thursday night, wanting to chat with some of the performers at his table after the show. He was unmistakably married, rich, prominent, but what wasn’t quite clear, and something Claire only learned from one of the musicians in the band, was that he happened to be one of the five city councillors out of Westmount, the affluent and English-speaking powerhouse at the epicentre of the city. He’d only been voted in a year and a half earlier, in the 1927 election, in which the campaigning had been famously full of pomp and pageantry. Now he was there in front of them, and plainly looking for an anonymous and uncomplicated tryst. Female entertainers gaggled in around him, laughed at everything he said, and jockeyed for a position at his side.

  Claire, however, wasn’t quite feeling the part. Even if she had set out to seduce him, she doubted she would’ve been able to go through with it. She’d become acutely self-conscious about her serrated scar, that unsightly lightning bolt of pink that cascaded from her navel and pointed into her hairline. She imagined the disgusted sip of air that men would take in when first catching sight of it, their pause, and how naturally the questions would flow from there. This insecurity had her missing the one chance she would ever have of winning the favour of this gentleman, who would be the only city councillor ever to frequent the Kit-Kat. Instead, he made the obvious choice. Hours later, Claire saw him in one of the backrooms, naked and thrusting on top of the youngest dancer in the establishment, the two of them having pulled a three-piece oriental screen in front of a doorless frame, the lights on, radio playing, impish laughter. Claire scurried past their groans and sighs and took a tram home, completely unaware of how important the situation she had just seen would one day become.

  Arriving back home, Claire found she couldn’t sleep, lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling, the city noises colouring the darkness: tram bells dragging sparks over wires, hooves trotting past, the putter of automobiles shifting gears. Beneath the sheets, Claire ran her fingers along the scar of her abdomen, thinking again about her sister’s insinuation that she had become entirely self-absorbed, that she’d been clinging so tightly to her own affairs for so long that she’d somehow lost the facility to grasp anyone else’s. It was a possibility that conjured an unsettling memory for Claire. Knowing she wouldn’t find sleep for hours to come, she got out of bed, turned on the lights, and rummaged through a drawer, looking for a scrapbook she kept that tracked her career. In it, unglued and sliding out from the pages, she found the photograph she’d been thinking about. She carefully brought it over to her only chair, sat back, crossed her legs, and inspected it.

  It had been taken when she was nineteen and still working the vaudeville circuit, mostly at the Blue Sky (where the image had been captured). She remembered the portly photographer, how he’d stood below the dancers, right in front of the stage, his camera flush with the wood, encouraging Claire and the other dancers to pinch the fabric of their dresses just a little higher — yes, perfect, now, only a slight bit more, yes, yes, excellent, now, I wonder, if, yes, just a trifle higher — squinting through his viewfinder, sweaty brow sheening. What she remembered most about that day, however, was what happened when he left.

  One of the dancers at the Blue Sky, Corrine, had been “unwell” for quite some time, having missed her shifts for more than two months, a kind of unofficial sick leave. Since she had both the face and the body that were likely to stir the most interest out of all the dancers, Corrine was ordered to show up for the promotional photo shoot. When she refused, she was threatened, then finally coaxed to come out with money. When she arrived, the reason for her previous absence became clear: she was pregnant, and was now showing. To solve this problem, all the dancers were instructed to wear the loosest costume they had, and told to lean slightly forward for the photo, arms in front of their stomachs to pull the hems of their dresses higher. After the photos were taken, Corrine was promptly fired, and told never to return.

  Only it wasn’t the last anyone saw of Corrine. Sniffling and hanging around just outside the club on St. Catherine Street, she met each of the other dancers as they left the cabaret either to head home or to go out on the town. She begged them to listen to her, to help her, insisting that things had dramatically changed for her, and that she suddenly found herself with nowhere to go and not a friend in the world. Claire was one of the last to wander out that evening, and was met with Corrine’s intense and frantic pleas, asking for, at the very least, a place to stay for the night. Please, please — a prayer to the god of tightly pressed palms — please. Claire was actually on her way to meet her most recent (and soon to pass) fling, but thinking of Cécile and what she would do in the same circumstances, she decided to invite Corrine home. She had to admit that, in the tram at least, she felt rather virtuous. That was soon to fade.

  They arrived at Claire’s apartment, which at the time she was sharing with three other dancers, and the two young women settled in the cramped space of Claire’s room, sitting on either end of her narrow bed, arms around their knees. Corrine told Claire her story, how she’d been dating a wealthy older man whose hair was streaked with grey. He worked in the Montreal Curb Market, bragged about having liquidated his house and other properties to place his every asset into the runaway stock exchange that he himself was helping to snowball, and boasted about tripling then quadrupling his net worth. He bought her pretty gifts. She suspected, however, that he bought his wife and children prettier ones.

  Corrine swore she wasn’t so naive as to think he’d actually leave his family and start another one with her, but she did allow herself to believe that they might come to some kind of agreement, that it might be possible, with the proceeds of all his investments, to live out a comfortable though secret existence, be given a modest apartment and humble grocery allowance for her and her future child, maybe even see her prosperous lover on the weekends, take brief holidays together in anonymous towns through New York State.

  But the moment he found out what was growing in her belly, he threw her out of their hotel room and made it clear that if she ever so much as whispered a word about him to anyone, she and her bastard child would be made to quickly (and painfully) disappear, their faces suddenly shuffled into the neglected pages of the province’s missing persons’ list. After the confrontation she stayed home, weeping for her lot. She pawned his gifts until they ran out, then sold what she could of her own things, and only managed to be lured from her apartment by the cash carrot of posing in a promotional photograph for the Blue Sky — money which, once they saw her condition, and after the photos were shot, they refused to fork over anyway. Now she had nothing, had been kicked out of her flat for not paying the rent, and had no way of making cash so that she could disappear, in that age-old and proven way, long enough to have the child, give it up for adoption, and return looking much as she had before, ready to continue her life as if nothing had happened.

  Claire listened and grew restless. There was obviously no solution here, because it was far too late to consider terminating the pregnancy. Claire wasn’t about to offer her tiny room and income as a safe and secure haven for the next six months, either. Claire was yet to gain first-hand knowledge of how prone kind-hearted Catholic families were to disowning their wayward daughters, but she assumed that appealing to Corrine’s parents was quite out of the question or she would have done so long ago. There was, of course, the highly selective assistance of the Church that might be sought, though every woman had heard rumours about the humiliation that option involved. No wonder Corrine found herself friendless, thought Claire. Her very existence imposed itself on everyone around her, required them either to take action to help her or to abandon her, which, whatever way you looked at it, was a bit much to ask a person on a light and breezy Saturday night. To Claire’s shame, she began to feel a niggling regret at having invited Corrine into her apartment. How was she ever going to
get her out again?

  So Claire pressed her to think harder, to consider even the most distant of relatives who might be trusted to keep her secret, and could feed and house her for the few months necessary. Reluctantly, Corrine mentioned an aunt who lived in Three Rivers, who, while not exactly the sweetest or most tolerant individual, was a widow, lived alone, and presumably had the means. No sooner had she mentioned this than Claire grabbed her arm and whisked her to the telephone in the adjoining apartment, urging Corrine to make the call. After a great deal of persuasion and encouragement, she picked up the receiver, bared all, and tearily arranged to meet her aunt at Windsor Station the following afternoon. Claire spent the rest of that evening reassuring her that she’d made the right choice, and even carted Corrine off to the station the next day, pleased and satisfied to have been of service. She mentioned the deed in a letter to her sister a few weeks later, a righteous exploit, her very first stroke for the female cause. Predictably, Cécile lauded her efforts.

  The event flitted from Claire’s mind, and she had almost forgotten about it when, a little under a year later, there came a knock at the door. It was a shivery autumn day, raining and windy, so Claire only cracked the door open a bit to keep the warm air of the apartment from draining into the outdoors. It took her a long moment to recognize the tattered woman on the other side as Corrine.

  “Hi,” she said, stealing a look back over her shoulder, watching the bread man as he made his way down the street. She shuddered as the man slammed the wooden door of his carriage and, with a wicker basket heaped with loaves, trotted towards the next apartment on his route. “Hi,” she repeated. “I didn’t . . . This is the only . . . place I could think to come.” Her words, Claire noted, were vaguely slurred, sluggish. She was filthy, blotches of oily stains on her dress and coat, and she smelled of body odour.

  “Corrine? Are you all right?”

  “Can . . . .” She looked at her hands, the tips of her fingers frenetically rubbing against each other. “Can I come in?”

  Claire hesitated, tactless. “Well . . . yes, yes, of course, come in.” She opened the door and, as Corrine passed, covered her nose.

  “I . . . Thank you.”

  Claire closed the door behind her. “So, the first thing we should do is run you a bath and get you some fresh clothes. Then we’ll catch up. Okay?”

  Corrine thought about this for a dull moment, then agreed with a drunken nod and anaesthetized grin.

  Out of the bath and into an old but clean dress of Claire’s, and with a warm cup of coffee in her hand, Corrine filled Claire in on what had happened since she’d left that same apartment eleven months earlier.

  The aunt who had met her at the train station had apparently never once entertained the idea of taking Corrine back with her to Trois-Rivières, but ushered her instead into a taxi and headed straight for the Miséricorde, where her parents were waiting to register her stay. The Miséricorde was a Catholic institution in the middle of the city whose sole aim was to bring unwanted and illegitimate children into the world and give them up for adoption; where soon-to-be mothers could be placed in the concealed and competent care of nuns throughout their pregnancy, childbirth, and postnatal recuperation. Corrine’s parents had quickly signed the papers, letting her know how disappointed they were in her. She was then deposited on the other side of a locked gate.

  Generally speaking, the girls there were from the countryside and had been working as servants or jeunes filles in private homes, with English or Jewish families. Few of them were originally from Montreal, and none were anglophones, who (the Irish aside) would have the means to send their daughters off to private doctors and discreet residences in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Washington. The nuns were severe and unsympathetic. When a girl gave birth, she was kept from knowing the sex of her child, hence preventing her from forming an unnecessary attachment (or guessing which baby was actually hers). After they’d delivered, the women were charged with breastfeeding the infants in the institution, a chart being used to systematically swap babies and the breast that a woman was using for each feeding. The only way the women knew that a child had been given away was when the woman who had been breastfeeding the longest was suddenly released, and so conveyor-belted through the roster and back out onto the street.

  Corrine returned to her parents’ home to be placed under the severest of control. Forced piety and religious duty had her realizing she was being prepped for spinsterhood, the only path to redemption following such a disgraceful plunge. So she ran away, tried to get work as a dancer again, but her figure had taken a turn for the worse, and the only place she could find work — after several weeks of spending her nights in the abodes of the shiftiest, seediest men — was a venue where going on “private dates” with some of the higher-paying clientele was part of the unwritten contract. That was something her father, who was searching for her, soon caught wind of, and he asked a policeman (while licking a few dollars free from his billfold) to pick Corrine up at her place of work and drop her off at the reformatory.

  The officer signed her in, and duly passed on the fact that she had a history of running away. Luckily, they knew just how to deal with such individuals. Corrine was processed —stripped, scrubbed down, her personal items confiscated — and was then given clothes that would be entirely unsuitable to escape in, should that bright idea even enter her mind. She was forced to don slippers and transparent gowns, her bare breasts and underclothes so visible that even the women in the reformatory couldn’t help but stare. She was at first isolated from the others, made to clean long and dark hallways on her own, and every interaction she had with the staff was designed to illustrate and reinforce the fact that she was entirely powerless and vulnerable. It was explained to her once, by one of the women in charge, who was consoling Corrine through the grated window of her cell, that it honestly wasn’t her fault; that somewhere along the way she, Corrine, had somehow adopted a disobedient nature, and that nature now had to be broken in order to make room for a more compliant and respectable one to replace it, which would then grow and flourish. Surely that much was understandable, was it not? Months passed before she was able to speak to anyone else, and when she was finally given the chance, she felt the last of her hope ebb away. Because the only thing anyone in the girls’ reformatory could talk about was the burgeoning influence of the Montreal Local Council of Women.

  The MLCW was a coalition of several women’s groups in the area, primarily headed by Protestant anglophone wives, which, at the time, was bent on weeding out the sordid vice of prostitution from the city’s streets. Together with local priests and other men of virtue — who were given the dastardly task of going undercover and staging stakeouts at dance halls, pool halls, and “disorderly houses,” in order, of course, to analyze the goings-on there by way of the most rigorous scientific scrutiny — they reported their findings to allies who worked at upstanding newspapers and journals in the city, published brochures of their own, and disclosed their findings to strategic men of the cloth to get their message blaring out from the pulpit as well. The aim was to appeal to the upstanding populace, to incite their moral outrage, provoke the radical change that was needed to clean up the misguided modern culture. Such efforts, it was often pointed out, had already successfully lobbied for prohibition in the United States and parts of Canada, bringing about marked and positive changes in society. However, what had really caught the attention of the women in the reformatories was that the MLCW had recently renewed its attempts to convince the provincial minister of justice of the need for reformatories to offer “indeterminate sentences for prostitutes.” They felt that if a prostitute could not be reformed, if she was likely to re-engage in an amoral lifestyle once released, then society should be able to postpone her reintegration in perpetuity. Surely that much was understandable. Was it not?

  Having heard this, Corrine’s behaviour approached angelic. She was eventually released an
d returned to her family, where she lasted all of a month before choosing (over drowning herself) to run away again. She fled, was elbowed in the same direction of the seedy men she’d stayed with previously, and was soon given shelter by a “procurer,” then some clothes, unwavering protection, even a bit of money. She tried to step out of the underworld several times, but with each job she found, from waiting tables to clerical work to labouring in the manufacturing sector, once her past as an occasional prostitute was discovered — and without fail it was — she was let go and told never to return.

  The reason she’d come to Claire’s apartment was that she just happened to be in the neighbourhood and she feared she was going to be beaten. She had blown off her old procurer for the slightly better offer of another one, and someone, she said, was going to be punished, very badly, and it wasn’t yet clear if the fists would fall on her or one of the men — it was often hard to tell. She only needed to stay for the night, she promised. By morning, she would be gone.

  Claire, however, watching Corrine scratch at the pinpricks in the crooks of both elbows, suspected there was more to the story than she was telling. Claire asked if she could help in any other way, besides a place to stay for the night.

  Corrine eased onto her side of the bed, coiling into a ball on Claire’s mattress, and folded the top cover back on itself to tug it over her shoulders. “No,” she mumbled. “No, I’ve had your help before.” Then she closed her eyes, her lids trembling tight, and pressed herself into a fidgety sleep.