Astray: Stories

by Emma Donoghue

  Unless.

  It couldn’t be.

  Daddy?

  I turn the picture up, and all of a sudden it changes; I see past the ringlets, into the face. It looks like Daddy dressed up as a girl, for a game. Eyebrows drawn together; a faint smile.

  I have got his nose.

  Well, he looked better in trousers. But I will tuck the picture into my pocket. I did not know before today that you can hate and despise a person and still love him on the other side of all that.

  He is still my daddy. Even if he is dead. And a woman.

  Doctor Gallagher says “she,” now, when he remembers, and so do the reporters. But I won’t, not ever. Daddy wouldn’t like it.

  Daddy’s Girl

  According to the death certificate, Murray Hall died on January 16, 1901, and was born around 1831—so lived to be nearly seventy. But nothing about Hall is certain. Born perhaps Mary Anderson, or Mary or Elizabeth Hall, Murray Hall was said to have come from Ireland, Scotland, or New York’s Lower West Side. Hall’s first wife died, or disappeared; the second marriage ended in estrangement after about seven, or perhaps twenty, years. This jumble of facts and speculations comes from the New York Times (January 18 and 19 and March 20, 1901), the New York Tribune (January 18, 20, and 29 and March 20, 1901), Munzey’s Magazine (1901, including pictures), and The Weekly Scotsman (February 9, 1901).

  Minnie (Imelda) Hall was only twenty-two when her famous father was posthumously exposed as female. One of the few things we know about Minnie is that she refused to talk to reporters. At the inquest she was prompted to refer to her father as “she,” but retorted, “I will never say she.”

  NEW MARKET, ONTARIO

  1967

  WHAT REMAINS

  She hasn’t asked for me in two months. I check with her nurses, though it’s a little humiliating. “Has Miss Loring by any chance asked for me?” I say. Lightly, as if it doesn’t matter either way.

  That’s what they call her: Miss Loring, or sometimes Frances. She’s not Queenie to anyone but me.

  I wheeled myself into her room today. She was lying there like a beached whale ready for the ax. “Queenie,” I said, “it’s me. It’s Florence.” Which sounded absurd, as I’ve never had to tell her who I am before, she always knew. What a pass we’ve come to, if I need to introduce myself! Like that line in the Bible: The people who walk in darkness. Brains rot like fruit in the end. I don’t pity her for going senile. It’s worse being a witness.

  I try to keep a grip on the numbers, myself. The nurses start to worry if you get the numbers wrong. It’s 1967 and I’m eighty-five years old. I should by rights be dead. Queenie’s not even eighty. I ought to have gone first. It shouldn’t be like this.

  I always thought it would be all right so long as we ended up in the same place. She collapsed just before our final exhibition, and I fell sick a week later, and when we were both moved to this Home just north of Toronto, I thought, Well, at least we’ll be together. No need to fuss with cooking or shovel our own snow anymore; we’ll get to talk all day if we want.

  But there’s more than one kind of distance that can come between people. This is our third year here. Her door says Miss F. Loring, mine says Miss F. Wyle, and they might as well be a thousand miles apart, instead of a fifty-foot corridor. Since Queenie’s last attack, her eyes barely move when I wheel into her room, and she doesn’t seem to recognize my name.

  What’s important, I suppose, is for me to keep remembering. What matters is to hold on to what’s left.

  Each one must go alone down the dark valley.

  I wrote that poem a long time ago, before I knew what I was talking about.

  My father used to say man was the only creature capable of sleeping on his back, so that was how we should sleep. To mark the difference, you see; to show that we were a Higher Form. I did try; I started every night flat on my back, but it hurt my bones and I couldn’t breathe. My father would come to wake me in the morning and find me curled up on my side and shake me awake. “Florence,” he’d roar, “you look like an animal!”

  When I was six I found a rooster with a broken leg. I fixed him just fine, mostly because my father said I’d never manage it. It was animals that turned me toward art. I saw a bird, and then a picture of a bird, and it all came together. If I couldn’t be a bird, then at least I could make one. Once a cat of ours died, and I asked if God had taken her to heaven, and my father said there was no room for animals in heaven. That’s the day I stopped believing in God. Rosa Bonheur, the French sculptor, believed in metempsychosis, which means that human souls migrate into either human or animal forms. She lived with her friend and a whole ark of animals and painted them. I suppose it seemed to her that we’re all just creatures in the end.

  Mind you, I’d shoot a dog if it got as crazy as Queenie.

  Sixty years this month since we met in that Clay Modeling class in Chicago. She was big and I was small. She was beautiful and I was not. Her family adored her and mine didn’t care for me. She grew up in Geneva, Switzerland; I came from Waverly, Illinois. She thought she liked men and I thought I hated them. She had faith in politics and I wrote poems about trees. She worked in spurts; I did a little every day. All we had in common was a taste for clay.

  Today her hands lie on the sheet like withered bananas. I remember a time when they were swift and sure and tireless. Like the Skeena River in full flood, that time I went to the Indian village to model the old totem poles. When was that? Back in the twenties sometime? Damn it. Gone.

  That’s us these days, a couple of old totem poles. Tilting at mad angles, silvery as ash, fading into the forest.

  At the Art Institute in Chicago, the master used to pinch all us girls on the bottom. He called it the droit de maître. Queenie didn’t much mind. I slapped his hand away and called him a damn fool. Later he spread a rumor we were a couple of Sapphists.

  There was another thing Queenie used to say: You can’t go through life worrying about what people think of you.

  Some days she’s got more of a grip than others. She still doesn’t ask for me, but when I go into her room she sometimes seems to know who I am.

  I tell her uplifting stories. “Remember Adelaide Johnson, Queenie?”

  A flicker of the eyes.

  “She was barely twenty when she fell down that elevator shaft in the Chicago Music Hall. Did it stop her?”

  “Hell, no,” says Queenie feebly.

  I laugh out loud. “That’s right. She won fifteen thousand dollars in damages and went off to study her art in Europe!”

  But Queenie’s face is blank, like a block of marble that’s never been touched by the chisel.

  I will not feed my soul with sorrow, that was her favorite line in all my poems.

  Some dates are so clear in my head it’s as if they’re chiseled there. We came to Toronto in 1913. Canada was a young country; there seemed infinite room. But we only really got established after the Great War. The towns needed so many memorials, they had to stoop to hiring women! Queenie used to say that her career was built on dead boys.

  Sculptors, we called ourselves from the start. The word “sculptress” sets my teeth on edge. Work like ours called for sensible clothes. We took to trousers, as early as the twenties, plus men’s shoes and baggy jackets.

  I’m not allowed to wear my old gray flannels here. I suspect they’ve been thrown in the trash. Well, they were a little decrepit, I admit. Instead, the nurses give me housecoats to put on, pink or orange: hideous. “Blue was my color, Queenie, do you remember?” I usually wore a touch of pale blue.

  Queenie was always the more bohemian dresser. At our studio parties she’d appear in purple velvet with a gold fringe, or a green satin cape. I told her once she looked like something out of the comic strips—the Caped Crusader, or the Emerald Evil—and she wasn’t too pleased. There was always a trail of ash across her front because she was too busy talking to remember the ashtray. They keep her clean and tidy here; that’s another reason
she doesn’t look like herself. And you can’t get hold of a cigarette for love nor money.

  I am lost in this forest of days. I can’t remember when I wrote that. I go through a sort of checklist of names in my head, in case I’m forgetting anything. Our dogs were Samson and Delilah. (Delilah tore our neighbor’s fur coat, but it served her right for wearing such a thing.) We had two motor cars, first Susie, then Osgoode. (Queenie always drove, and never got any better at it; I read the maps.) Some of our sculptures were—are, I mean—Dream Within a Dream, Women War Workers, Torso, Girl with Fish, The Goal Keeper, Negro Woman, The Rites of Spring, Derelicts, Eskimo Mother and Child, The Miner, Sea and Shore, The Key. There were others, I know there were others, but I can’t recall their names just now. Some are sold, some are scattered, the rest are under dust sheets in our cold locked-up studio in Toronto that was a derelict church until we moved in. I don’t have any of them here, but I can see them more clearly than my own mother’s face.

  The thing about sculpture is, it’s always a risk. It costs money to model it, cast it, carve it, even transport it. Clay’s bad enough; bronze is terrible; marble’s ruinous.

  All this week Queenie’s been yapping away in her head to old friends, dead or alive or who knows. Sometimes if I listen closely I can pick up hints of who it is. Yesterday I could tell it was A. Y. Jackson, because she was thanking him for taking us out to dinner the day he sold his first picture. He and she seemed to be having a grand old time.

  She always did like parties better than I. We had forty-eight artists for Christmas one year, as well as three beggars from the neighborhood. Six turkeys got eaten down to the bone. In the evening there was chamber music, and I drank too much wine and was persuaded to show them all how to do an Illinois hog call.

  “Remember Liz Prophet, Queenie?”

  “Mm,” she says, ambiguously.

  “That awful gallery in Rhode Island, they said they had nothing against showing a black girl’s sculptures so long as she promised not to come to the opening. Barbarians! Do you remember what she did, Queenie?”

  Silence.

  I fill in with barely a pause. “Ran away to gay Paree.”

  “That’s right,” whispers Queenie.

  “That’s right,” I repeat. “Lived on tea and marmalade.”

  “Stole food from dogs.”

  This detail cheers me immensely. Her memory’s still in there, like the shape locked inside the marble. “That’s right, my dear, Liz Prophet had to steal food from Parisian dogs. What was it you used to say to me in our bad winters? No one’s got a right to call herself an artist until she’s starved a little!”

  Her eyes have gone unfocused, milky blue.

  She still keeps that photograph on her bedside table, the one of Charlie Mulligan, who taught her marble cutting back in the 1900s. “Isn’t he a fine fellow?” she’s taken to asking the nurses, sometimes four times a day. I bet she doesn’t remember his name either.

  “Was he your young man, Miss Loring?” one of them said this morning, to humor her.

  “That’s right.”

  “Was he the love of your life?”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Queenie repeats in a whisper, like a child. “The love of my life.”

  She doesn’t mean Charlie Mulligan, by the way. That wild German she nearly married back in 1914, he’s the one she used to call the love of her life. Not that I know what that means. Which life is she talking about when she says stupid things like that? As far as I know, the life she had was the one she spent with me.

  I will not feed my soul with sorrow,

  Not while dark trees march in naked majesty.

  When I wrote that, ten years ago, we still had the farm: a hundred and fifty acres of wild quince and poison ivy by the Rouge River. These days I have a room with a small window facing onto the parking lot. I haven’t seen a tree in a while.

  Queenie doesn’t know anyone today. She’s got butter on her double chin.

  A journalist once asked her, “Miss Loring, do you specialize in memorial sculpture because of a special sympathy for the dear departed?”

  I had to cut in; I couldn’t resist. “No,” I said, “it’s because she likes climbing ladders.”

  It was true. She’s always liked to work on a grand scale. She’s built on a grand scale too.

  The local children used to call us the Clay Ladies. That was because we showed them how to make things out of clay, of course, but the phrase fitted us too, more and more as the decades went by. These days we look like works in progress, there’s no point pretending otherwise. Queenie’s a vast model for a monument—all two hundred pounds of her clay slapped onto a gigantic wire armature—and as for me, I’m some skinny leftover. Maybe I’m a Giacometti and she’s a Henry Moore! Not that I’m a fan of the so-called moderns; most of them couldn’t draw a human body if they tried, and as for beauty, I doubt they could even spell it. Boring holes in things!—that’s not sculpture, that’s vandalism.

  To think she and I used to be something. A unit; a name. The Loring-Wyles.

  I’m not saying it was all fun and games. We had a couple of bad years. We sometimes considered suicide, only half joking. But we didn’t think we should depart alone; we wanted to take at least a dozen enemies with us. On dark February evenings in the studio we amused ourselves by drawing up a list.

  But if there’s no heaven, what remains?

  All this week Queenie’s been having delusions. She sits up in bed, the sheets draped around her like snow on the Niagara Escarpment. She shakes her fists over her head and pants with effort. The nurses say if she doesn’t calm down she’s going to bring on another attack.

  Finally today I figured out what she’s doing. She thinks she’s carving her lion, all over again.

  “Why a lion?” I asked her, nearly thirty years ago.

  She laughed. “Isn’t it obvious, Florence? A snarling, defiant lion; rising from a crouch, ready for a fight.”

  Well, this was 1940.

  It was to be a huge, stylized sort of lion, guarding the entrance to the new Queen Elizabeth Way near Toronto, to commemorate the visit of the king and queen. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to do anything new with a lion, but Queenie’s design was a wonder: the beast’s face and ruff and whole muscled body were made up of great smooth arcs of stone.

  It was just about the most grueling project Queenie ever dragged us into, and that’s saying something. I say “we,” but I was only doing a bas-relief of Their Majesties on the back of the column. Queenie’s lion had to be carved on site, emerging from the column, as it were. She planned to use Indiana limestone—lovely, flawless stuff—but no, word came down that for patriotic reasons it had to be Queenston limestone, which was twice as hard and pocked with holes. That was bad enough, but hiring a stonecutter was the worst. The top three men on our list were struck off by government order as “enemy aliens,” even though the German had been reared in Canada and the Italians were the best in the trade. Instead, Queenie had to put up with a true-blue Englishman whose work she’d never trusted.

  He couldn’t take orders from a woman, that was his problem, and he wasn’t the only one, let me tell you. We had to scour the country to find a cutting machine for the fellow, and he still didn’t get started till August of that year. When we drove down in November to check his progress, the rough outlines of the lion had only half-emerged from the column. “The fellow hasn’t even started on the hind quarters,” muttered Queenie.

  I thought the neck looked a little odd. Queenie asked him about it. “Oh, yes, actually, Miss Loring,” said the fellow, avoiding her eyes, “I changed the line a little, to make it lie better.”

  The cheek of the man! I didn’t blame her for firing him on the spot, even with all the horrors that followed.

  Queenie couldn’t find another qualified cutter in Canada. She consulted the union, who told her that only their members were permitted to cut stone for sculpture. She told the union to go to hell, she
’d finish it herself.

  Neither of us had ever used a cutting machine. The December winds howled in off the lake. I remember craning up at Queenie on the scaffold, which we’d swathed in tarpaulins as a feeble shelter. She was fifty-two that year, and already a huge woman. Her hands were swollen with arthritis.

  “Queenie!”

  “Don’t you fret, Florence,” she shouted down.

  “It’s not worth it,” I bawled. “Give it up!”

  She pretended not to hear. I could tell, from the way she handled the machine, that she was in pain. The planks of the scaffold buckled under her weight. Specks of snow fell on her head.

  I cursed her, but the wind ate up my words. “What if you fall?” I screeched.

  She peered over the tarpaulin, her face drawn but hilarious. “I’ll probably bounce!”

  She didn’t fall. Next day she abandoned the machine and picked up her biggest chisel and hammer. If I’d been a praying sort of woman, I’d have prayed then. As it was, I stood and shivered and watched, week after week. I remember wondering what would happen to us all if Hitler won the war.

  The snow held off just long enough. The lion crawled from his block, metamorphosing like something out of Ovid. By the time Queenie dropped her tools, her hands were like claws but the lion was magnificent.

  On his pedestal, in deep-cut letters, it said something about “the Empire’s darkest hour” and this work having been done “in full confidence of victory and a lasting peace.” I remember it because it was on the day of the highway’s official opening, as we stood below the lion with the lake wind lashing our scarves against our numb faces, that it occurred to me that I was a Canadian. Not that in thirty years I’d ever got around to filling in the forms; on paper I was—as I am still—a U.S. citizen. But sometimes things about you change without you noticing.