by Alex Caine
For the first six years of my life, however, this was largely invisible to me. We lived in a little house in a part of town called Wrightville but which the locals knew as Ragville because of the rag recycling factory that employed many local women. In socio-economic terms, it was the wrong side of the tracks, definitely, but in terms of community it was a perfectly fine place for my parents to set about having five kids of their own. I was the third, born on a December evening in 1948 after a snowstorm had buried Hull under a foot of snow.
By necessity, we spent much of our childhoods outside—the walls of the tiny house were too close together to contain us all except when we were sleeping. There, among other kids, our being half English wasn’t an issue because we spoke French as well as any of them and because there were enough of us and we were tough enough. But since at home we all spoke English with my mother, my dad included, she never learned much French. Not speaking French (and being Irish and Indian) meant she didn’t make any friends. And even if my aunt Cécile spoke good enough English to be employed across the river as a civilian employee of the Royal Canadian Navy, she made no effort to include my mother in the wider family life.
Cécile lived in the house in which my father had grown up, along with her sisters Irène and Laurette, my father’s youngest brother Laurent and my grandmother. The house was in downtown Hull, and remained the family gathering place. Every Sunday, after Mass and a quick stop at home to change out of our church clothes, we’d head over to the house for a late lunch and a long afternoon of playing. For the first few years of my life my mother dutifully came along, but the tradition must have been not just excruciatingly boring for her but all the more isolating. By the time I was five, she stopped accompanying us on the Sunday outings.
Not long after, she disappeared for a spell, and then another. In the summer of 1955, when I was six and a half, my mother split for good. We were left entirely in the dark about why she had gone, where, or whether she would ever be coming back. It sounds like a bad cliché, but she went to the movies and never came home—or at least that’s what the adults told us.
Right from the start we sensed that this time her disappearance might be final. Our aunts started coming over, managing the household and telling us and anyone else who cared to listen “bon débarras”—“good riddance to bad rubbish.” There was no blame placed on my father, even if at the very least he had been blind to my mother’s unhappiness and deaf to her desires to move back east. Instead, my aunts just made it clear to everyone that they were now going to clear up his mess.
Within a week, all the arrangements had been made. Our house would be sold. My two brothers, Jim and Pete, then aged eleven and nine, would move with my dad into the family home. My two younger sisters, Norma and Pauline, four and three respectively, would go live with a family my dad knew in a small town a few miles away. The middle kids, my sister Louise and I (aged six and seven), would be sent to St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Ottawa.
I wasn’t told of the arrangements until the morning of the day we were to be shipped off, so I had no time to plan an escape. After my dad took me into the kitchen to tell me what was happening, I just bolted. I headed to a secret hiding place my brother and I had in some nearby woods. I figured I’d wait awhile then sneak back into the house and live there by myself till my mom came to get me. But soon enough my two brothers came and dragged me back home. The orphanage had sent a car to pick up Louise and me. Just before we were driven off, my oldest brother, Jim, gave me his golf ball. I kept it for years.
Louise and I were just being warehoused at the orphanage; my dad had told the nuns he fully expected to be in a position to take us back in a matter of months. He’d bring us toys on occasion, but most importantly he brought us hope that we’d soon be getting out. In mid-September of our second year, after a week or so of school, my father came and retrieved us—but not to take me home. There still wasn’t room.
Instead I was sent to live with a colleague of my father’s, Doyle Parent, his wife and their countless kids. Their house had no room for another child—all the boys slept in one room, all the girls in another—but Doyle and his wife were big-hearted and generous. Life there was a chaotic but pleasant adventure after the orphanage.
The proximity to the rest of my family was also a big relief. I was just a couple of street corners away from the family home. Still, I wasn’t a regular visitor for reasons that would be considered bizarre today: my family’s house was actually in St. Bernadette parish while the Parents’ house was in St. Rédempteur parish. In those years, the parish where you lived dictated more than just what church you went to. For the women, it determined which grocery store they shopped at. For the men, it made the difference between taverns. And for kids, it determined who your friends were, what pool hall you frequented, what girls you could pursue, even what streets you could walk without fear of being harassed and chased back to safe territory.
So, even if we all went to the same school, as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day we kept within our little tribe.
Still, if necessary, you could change parishes without much hassle. And the younger you were, the easier it was. So after about a year at the Parents’ I gave up membership in St. Rédempteur parish and joined St. Bernadette.
Space opened up for me at the Charbonneaus’. They were good friends of the family. They also had a mess of children, but they were older by then and beginning to move out. Which meant that I could move in, as I did in the late summer of 1957, just before I was to enter grade three.
Once at the Charbonneaus’ I might just as well have been back in the family home, I was there so often. And indeed I did move back in permanently the next summer when my uncle Laurent died.
I didn’t have any illusions that everything would be splendid once I moved back to the family home. I knew my aunts well enough for that. There were upsides, especially living under the same roof as my brothers and having their friendship and support on the street. But tensions between me and my aunts didn’t take long to grow more pronounced.
They constantly put down my mother. Any time we did something they didn’t approve of, they would say in a disgusted voice, “Mary tout chié”—meaning more or less “You’re shit just like your mother.”
It was during one tirade that I learned belatedly that my mother was half Irish and half Native. The news had a different effect on me than my aunt intended. All of a sudden I felt special, not English or French but something different.
We’d got our first television when we were living on Rouville Street. Back then channels used to broadcast an Indian-head test pattern when they had nothing else to air. I was intrigued. I started imitating the stoic look of the TV Indian and would practice my version of it on the grown-ups. Whenever they would come down on me for whatever reason, I would glare at them. “R’garde-moi pas avec tes yeux tueurs!” my aunt would yell. “Don’t look at me with those killer eyes!” And then my dad would order me: “Pis change ta face!”
My imitation of the Indian head—and the impact it seemed to have on people—got me interested in facial expressions and body language and what effective and subtle ways they were to communicate. This likely had a lot to do with the fact that I had always been short and slight and knew that, if I was going to be noticed, let alone impress people, I would have to do it in a way that didn’t involve puffing out my chest and standing tall. So I began to work on developing my own non-verbal ways of sending a precise message, whether through an almost imperceptible tilt of the head or a small hand gesture. I also started to study everyone I met to read what they were saying through their movements. I wasn’t necessarily seeing things that other people didn’t see, or even picking up non-verbal messages that they were missing, but I was indexing these sorts of subtle cues. Facial expressions and the like became, in that sense, a third language for me, one that everyone spoke but didn’t necessarily understand, one in which very few people could tell a lie, but I certainly could.
It didn’t, however, help relations with my aunts. I wasn’t any more rebellious or up-to-no-good than Jimmy or Pete, but I was more defiant. Jimmy, when confronted with a misdeed, would fold and apologize profusely; Pete would deny everything. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t speak and just took my licks. After one Friday night blowout Aunt Cécile declared that on the following Monday she would report me to the local priest. Given the weight that the Church swung in Quebec until the late 1960s, the priest was more than just a confessor and sermonizer; he was also an adjudicator and dispenser of community justice. As such, he was only called upon in very serious circumstances. So I knew what Cécile’s threat meant—and it scared me half to death. As an “incorrigible” I would likely be sent to a reform school such as the notorious Mont St-Antoine in Montreal. The Mont was run by “the brothers” and the physical and sexual abuse going on there was legendary, even back then. A friend had spent six months there. When he came back, he showed us the scars on his back from being whipped by a motorized contraption the brothers had rigged up to carry out their punishments for them.
So, the next morning, Saturday, I got up early, went into Cécile’s purse, took forty dollars and left. A friend put me up in his house that night and the next, but on Monday morning his mom forced me to leave. I didn’t have my books and wasn’t in the frame of mind to attend school anyway. So I faked my father’s signature on a note claiming I was sick, met up with Pete on the way to class and had him deliver it. If I hadn’t done that, the truancy cops would have been looking for me and that would have meant the Mont for sure.
It was February and very cold. My dad had an old car in the backyard that he cannibalized for parts, and after a day of lying low I spent most of the night in there. My father and aunts had to know I was in the car—it was just outside the kitchen window and the kitchen was the busiest room of the house. But they let me sleep there anyway, thinking, I suppose, that it would teach me a lesson. I never forgave them for that.
The second night, I found two blankets on the back seat. Pete had left them there. The next day we met up and he told me of a rooming house across from the local arena that would rent to anyone. The rooms were furnished and cost ten dollars a week. With some of the money from Cécile’s purse I paid for two weeks and settled in.
The other tenants were hookers, a couple of old winos and maybe a crook or two. I was the only child. For my first few days there I continued lying low and keeping to myself, venturing out occasionally but spending most of the time in my little room alone. Pete brought me my books and some more clothes, so I was able to get back to school. And after a week or so a friend brought me a bike. He said he’d found it but didn’t really expect me to believe him. Wherever the bike came from, riding it around was better than walking, even in the snow.
By that time I had got to know many of my neighbors in the boarding house, especially the working girls. They’d leave their doors ajar and go from room to room to socialize. It was a couple of days before I talked to any of them. Then an older woman with puffy, bleached blond hair and far too much makeup knocked on my door. She was tall and very solid—not fat, just solid—and, standing there at the door wearing a floor-length pink bathrobe, she struck me as something between forbidding and outright scary. She held a plate of food in one hand.
“Have you eaten?” she asked. I said no and she handed me the plate. “My name is Lorraine. I’m in room seven,” she said, and left.
I cleaned the plate and returned it to Lorraine. On her turf she took the opportunity to ask me some questions and I spilled the beans. It felt good to open up to someone, and we talked for what seemed like hours. Beneath her tough, all-business exterior, Lorraine was still tough and no-nonsense. It was clear she’d had a hard life full of betrayal, disappointment and probably violence. But she took me under her wing without expecting a thing in return, and looked out for me as well as any of my various mother figures had up to that point.
After that first meal she always made sure I was getting enough to eat. Most of the girls, coming home after a long night working, would bring home food. On Lorraine’s instruction—she definitely called the shots, to the extent that in retrospect I think she was more of a madam than a hooker herself—they always brought extra for me. Breakfast was often roast chicken and french fries instead of cereal and toast, but that was fine by me.
Lorraine also had the girls check in with me before doing laundry, to see if I had any that needed washing. There were jobs that she didn’t delegate, though, in particular ensuring I was up in time for school and had my homework done. She also made sure that none of the other girls—who were all younger and more vivacious and sillier—got too friendly with me. I was, after all, still only eleven or twelve.
When my two weeks were almost up, I began to get anxious about where my rent would come from. I was enjoying life and the last thing I was going to do was head back home. My father and aunts knew where I was—I was seeing Pete every day—but seemed content to have me out of their hair. I was too proud and defiant to go back to them. I talked the situation over with a friend and he told me how I could steal fifty dollars easily. He worked after school and on weekends as a grease monkey at a garage, and he knew that at the end of each day the boss hid the next day’s float in an empty oil filter box on a shelf behind the cash. I could just smash a window with a rock and help myself. I was prepared to do it, but only as a last resort: it would almost certainly cost my friend his job.
I told Lorraine of my predicament. She told me not to do the garage job. “Something will turn up. Don’t worry.”
Within a day or so, the girls were giving me odd jobs. The first was as a timekeeper. Some of the girls would bring their more regular tricks to their room. I would note when they arrived and after forty-five minutes I would go rap on the door and say “Time’s up.” Each time I did that was worth a dollar or so. I also would make runs to the store for them to buy cigarettes and the like. One girl bought her tobacco by the tin and liked her cigarettes hand-rolled; rolling them for her became another source of spare change.
Sometimes my errand running took me farther afield. If condoms weren’t exactly illegal in Quebec in 1960, they might as well have been. Certainly the girls weren’t able to get their hands on them easily. So instead, they would have me bike across the bridge, through downtown Ottawa and to the red-brick house of a greasy old man who ran a surreptitious porn, sex toy and condom business out of his home. I would knock on the side door and the old man would open it a crack. I would tell him which girl had sent me and he would hand me a box. Then I would get on my bike and head back to Hull. No money changed hands; the girls got him his cash—or whatever else they may have paid him in—some other way. A run like that earned me anywhere from two to five dollars, depending on the girl and how rich she was feeling.
One way or another, these odd jobs made paying my $10-per-week rent very doable, and I was perfectly happy living there. Pete was a regular visitor, as were most of the rest of our little gang. Even if their parents wouldn’t have been caught dead in that part of town—and would have been appalled to know their children were spending time there—my friends would run the risk of serious punishment for the thrill of seeing the girls and the fun of hanging around chatting with them.
After about four months came the end-of-year school assembly and kids’ show. Parents were invited, but I certainly hadn’t told any of my relatives about it; I hadn’t even seen my father or aunts since I’d run away that Saturday morning in February. I had, however, told Lorraine and some of the girls. My class didn’t put on an ambitious act: we just sang two or three songs. Still, when our turn was up, the applause was loud and boisterous—most of it emanating from the second row, where Lorraine sat along with three of the other girls. They hooted and clapped and whistled, and I, oblivious to the dirty looks and scandalized gasps, waved at them.
In those days, hookers really looked like hookers—big hair, bright red lipstick, thick makeup, long eyelashes, b
right, tight and gaudy clothes, the whole bit. And even if Lorraine and the girls knew they were going to a respectable community event, attended by the priest, principal and teachers as well as the parents of all the other kids, they had made no effort to dress down. On the contrary.
A day or two later, Pete came over to tell me that my father and Aunt Cécile wanted to talk to me. I went home and they came straight to the point: if I promised to behave, I could return to live at the house; if not, they would send me to reform school and have Lorraine and the others charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
So back home I went. Or rather, back home I stayed: part of the deal was that I never went back to the rooming house, not even to get my things. Instead, my dad went and retrieved them.
I’d been dragooned back into the family home after getting a taste of freedom, so it was, I suppose, inevitable that things were rocky between me and my aunts from the moment I returned. But soon enough an uneasy peace was hammered out, a modus vivendi that kept conflict to a minimum.
Within the house my aunts had absolute authority; their word was the law. But their jurisdiction extended no farther than the front door—as long, that is, as my brothers or I didn’t do anything that embarrassed my aunts in front of their neighbors and peers. Our marks at school weren’t important so long as we passed; after all, failing a grade would amount to a public shaming. So our routine became simple: after school we’d rush home, do our homework, have supper and go out until bedtime—out of sight and out of mind.
Sunday lunch with the whole family, however, was an obligation and the place where an important Québécois ritual occurred: the induction into manhood of twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys. Pete had gone through it while I was out of the house and I had the pleasure several months after my return.