The Stubborn Season Read online

  “Don’t mess with his feelings,” Rory had said. “He’s a nice guy.”

  “Of course he’s nice. How can you think such a thing of me?” she’d protested. But in truth, she thought she’d stay with Douglas just until John returned. She planned to make John suffer a little, as he’d made her suffer. Then she would forgive him, and with deep regret, but with good reason (for hadn’t John pledged his undying love for her first?), she would end her engagement to Douglas and things would go back to their proper place. But John Carlisle never did return.

  Back in the spring of 1918, with the war raging in Europe, the world had seemed to offer so little promise or hope. So she walked down the aisle, wearing her cream silk gown, and beamed at Douglas. The war would end one day. They’d have a good life. He was kind and tall, with all that wavy brown hair and a soft moustache. She couldn’t wait to see what he’d do once the relatives were gone and the lights were low and there was no longer any reason for him to be so careful of her. She thought he would shrug off the polite displays of gentlemanly behaviour and press her body to his the way that John had done, with a demanding knee between her thighs and his hand on her throat.

  After the blur of the reception they arrived at the Queen Anne Hotel and went immediately to their room. The walls were pale blue and the carpet was ivory. Small cunning bunches of violets were woven through the bed’s white canopy, and a gilt mirror hung from one wall. Margaret thought it the most elegant room she’d ever seen. Douglas uncorked a bottle of sparkling wine.

  “Perhaps you’d like to get ready for bed now,” he said at last, and his eyes were very bright. Margaret blushed, as was expected, and excused herself. In the bathroom she filled the tub and added fragrant oil. She lowered herself into the water, thinking of his hands on her hips. When she was done she smoothed scented cream into her skin and dabbed perfume behind her ears and between her breasts. She brushed her hair and slipped on the thin-strapped rose-coloured gown she had bought especially for tonight. Her breathing was shallow and her mouth was dry, but it was an exciting sort of fear.

  She opened the door and stepped into the brightly lit room. She paused a moment so he could see her. How disappointed she had been to find him lying there, in his blue-striped pyjamas, with the covers pulled up to his chest. He had been reading a book.

  “You look beautiful,” he said. “Come here.” He patted the side of the bed. She walked, feeling awkward. Douglas put out the light. She slipped beneath the cool, pressed sheets. He moved on top of her and pulled up her gown.

  Afterwards, he’d asked, “Are you all right?” and patted her hair.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “I hope it didn’t shock you. Did your mother talk to you?”

  “I wasn’t shocked, Douglas.”

  “Well, that’s all right, then,” he said. “I love you, Margaret.” He put his arm around her and pulled her to his chest. She lay there, trying not to cry, while he fell into a loud and leaden sleep. When her arm became numb beneath her, she got up, went into the bathroom and washed her ruined nightgown in cold water, rinsing away the blood.

  She spent the night in the armchair by the window, looking at the face of the man to whom she’d given her body and her future. In the morning she developed a headache and couldn’t eat breakfast, preferring to lie quietly in the dark room while Douglas went down to the coffee shop alone. Over the eleven years of their marriage she’d come to rely upon the refuge of a silent, still room the way others relied on whisky, perhaps, or opium.

  And so Margaret lay beneath her comforter now, a rattling bundle of irritable loneliness. The words from the newspaper accounts kept going through her head. The market was completely demoralized … Stocks were sacrificed ruthlessly … Extreme declines … Clients carrying cheques and cash in their hands to stave off ruin. It shouldn’t really matter to her—after all, they had no stocks, no bonds, no investments whatsoever. Douglas had been prudent. He was a deeply prudent man. But there was still a sense of ruin. She clenched her hands until the red moons of her fingernails left crescents on her palms.

  The problem was that big things were happening in the world, and she was not a part of them. She felt that some great chance had been missed, for fortune or for failure, it hardly mattered. She’d felt it for weeks now, this itch of discontent. A shiver of something angry twitched at her body from her toes to her teeth.

  3

  April 1930

  Homewood was a quiet, well-tended street. Although it was mostly a street of modest homes, boasting gardens of zinnias and marigolds and climbing-rose vines, there were several modern apartment buildings. Margaret did not approve of the apartments, nor their residents, single men and women, newlyweds, the elderly, and families too poor to afford a house.

  Children played double dutch and telephone, using two tin cans and a length of string, while their mothers chatted with the fruit man who came by twice a week with his horse and cart, or the knife sharpener with his grinding wheel that sent out sparks. The women swapped recipes for angel food cake and jellied salads the way the children swapped the miniature playing cards that came in Turret cigarette boxes.

  The residents bragged that Dr. Banting, the discoverer of insulin, had lived on the street as a boy. Dr. Banting, of course, had moved to a more fashionable district long ago, but still, they prided themselves on this badge of gentility, particularly now, when hope of moving off to Forest Hill or Rosedale seemed very slim indeed. Some of the families, such as the Gardners at number 19, the Lambies at number 25 and the Cantwells at number 36, had taken in boarders. The family who used to live in number 9 had moved out and the house was now carved up into four apartments, two of which were occupied by single men.

  Still, the MacNeils’ old neighbours were largely unchanged, although they were all feeling the pinch. The Steedmans, with two small boys; Mrs. Annie Dixon, a retired schoolteacher who’d lived on the street alone as long as anyone could remember. There were the Whartons, who had immigrated from England, the MacKays, the Boyers and the MacIntyres. All good Anglo-Saxon stock, most with a trace of Scottish in their backgrounds, a love of the King and a good cup of tea with toast. And there was Mr. Rhodes, who owned the butcher’s across from Douglas’s pharmacy, his overblown wife who had a hunger for gossip, and four noisy teenagers, three girls and a boy.

  Inside the MacNeil house, at number 51, Margaret pored over news stories of unemployment and unrest from both near and far. In India, the nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi opened a civil disobedience campaign by leading the Salt March, to protest the levying of a salt tax on poor people. In Columbus, Ohio, a fire killed 318 inmates at the state penitentiary, which was nearly two hundred percent over capacity. Margaret sat with her ear next to the radio as the voices spoke about the prairies drying up and blowing away and industry shutting the factory doors, leaving thousands to get by as best they could, living off their savings or their relatives if they were lucky, on the street if they weren’t.

  She sometimes sat for hours, her dust cloth in hand, rereading the paper. All across Canada manufacturing plants closed and men wandered the streets in rising numbers. Construction, in the middle of a boom just a year before, came to a complete halt. As the country grew more despairing and more desperate, Margaret kept pace. Like the winds on the drought-ridden prairie, Margaret’s depression was invisible, guileful and exhausting. She began to scratch the back of her hands until they were red, and when Douglas told her to stop it, for it annoyed him, she looked at him blankly, and then at the back of her wounded hands, as though she had no idea where the marks might have come from. Her speech became peppered with negatives. Douglas teased her, called her Cassandra, prophetess of gloom, but no one laughed.

  With every plant closing, with every layoff, she hoarded more food. When the massive layoffs came to the mechanics in Windsor, she put up cans of everything from tomatoes to plums. She was convinced that soon they would starve. She went to sleep grinding her teeth and woke up wringing her hand
s.

  Irene came home for lunch one day and couldn’t open the door. Puzzled, she rang the bell.

  “You locked the door,” she said to her mother when she opened it.

  “And it’ll stay locked from now on,” said Margaret.

  “Why? We don’t lock our doors.”

  “There was a tramp at the door last week, and this morning I found another hanging around the back. It’s not safe anymore.”

  “I’ll have my own key, then?” asked Irene.

  “No need for you to have a key. I’m always here, aren’t I?”

  Several weeks later Margaret drew all the downstairs curtains, saying she didn’t want the men who came looking for handouts peeping in and spying on her. A few days after, the upstairs curtains were closed as well. Irene was confused at these precautions because none of her friends’ houses were locked up this way, but when she asked her father about it, he simply said, “I’m sure your mother has good reason.”

  Irene was frightened by the strange woman who had come to take her mother’s place, who looked like her mother but behaved so oddly. She hoped her father was right. She pictured her mother’s depression like a shadowy fog that slipped around doorways and through plaster cracks and along the pipes. She couldn’t escape it, and it made everything too close, too blurry. Where did one person end and the other begin?

  “The neighbourhood’s going downhill,” Margaret said to Irene one Sunday in April. “I worry about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “What do you mean?” Irene said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand,” said Margaret. “You will stay home, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  When Irene looked pleadingly at her father, he only buried his head in the Globe and said nothing.

  “Daddy …” Irene stage-whispered. “Pleeease …”

  “Didn’t Grandma send you a new Girl’s Own Annual?” Douglas’s parents had taken it into their heads last year to return to Scotland, and had sent Irene the book for her birthday.

  “But, Daddy.” Irene came to the side of his chair and clasped her hands under her chin. “It’s so nice out. You always say I should be out in the sunshine, don’t you?”

  “Douglas!” Margaret hissed through gritted teeth. “Don’t you dare undermine my authority. She’s only playing us one off against the other.”

  “Now, Irene, you can’t have looked all through your annual.”

  “I’ve read it all.” She pouted, and then her face lit up again. “Checkers! Play checkers with me, Daddy.”

  “Maybe later, Pet.”

  Irene moaned and shuffled away to her room, dragging her feet in an exaggerated way. Douglas had begun to loathe Sundays, when he was stuck in the house. You could do nothing on Sundays in Toronto. Couldn’t even buy a box of chocolates, let alone a bottle of beer.

  He went out to the shed, where he kept a dusty bottle of whisky hidden behind the clay pots and rat poison. He took a good long swig. The whisky loosened the knot in his stomach. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the doorjamb. Was it any wonder he’d begun to stay away from the house, preferring at the end of the business day to visit the Rupert Hotel at Queen and Parliament? There in a quiet booth a man could drink a beer and read his paper, or talk to his friends in peace. No women were allowed in the Rupert Hotel bar.

  He was thinking how good a beer would taste just now and wondering if he could risk slipping out for an hour or two, when he noticed Irene looking out from her bedroom window; she looked as mournful as any kid ever had, cooped up on a fine day like this. Poor little mouse, he thought. But he didn’t think it would hurt her to stay home and keep her mother company.

  As he was looking up at the window, Margaret came out the back door.

  “Douglas. Douglas.” Her voice was small again. “I’m so sorry.”

  She came down the steps and across the garden to him. Her arms were held out and her head was tucked up to one side. Her face was tear-streaked. She put her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.

  “I don’t know why I get so scared.”

  “I don’t know why you do either.”

  “You’ll take care of us, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I know you will. We’re going to be all right.”

  “We’re going to be fine, my dear.”

  “Do you love me?” Her lips pressed against his neck and he could feel the heat coming off her.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Douglas, I do. You know I do.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Her display of affection and need, so raw, and out here where the neighbours could see them, made him uncomfortable. But he also felt himself harden inside his trousers. He drew her hands away from his neck and held them down at his side.

  “Will you come inside?” said Margaret. “I’ll make tea. Scones. With currants, just as you like.”

  “I was thinking I’d go for a walk.”

  Margaret felt the tears coming again. She did not want him to go for a walk. She wanted him to stay and have tea and they would be a family and she would be a gracious wife and he would see that and not disapprove of her. But there was no way to insist without being exactly what she did not want to be. The sour taste of resentment made its way up into her mouth.

  “I could come with you,” she said and was a little surprised to hear herself.

  “Come with me?” Douglas said as though it was an odd idea. “Do you want to?”

  “Yes,” she said, and stood up straight. She would go for a walk, like any other woman, with her arm linked through her husband’s, and they would talk of pleasant things and he would tip his hat at the neighbours. But her hair was a mess, and the neighbours would gawk and ask where she’d been and why didn’t they see her these days, and she would have nothing to say. And there was the canning. It was so important to have enough food. She was tired then, thinking of all the things she had to do, and the idea of walking out on the busy streets made her heart beat a little too quickly.

  “No,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “I don’t suppose I should go. But don’t be long, will you? I’ll be making supper soon.”

  “I won’t be long,” Douglas said, and tried not to sound relieved. He looked up again and saw Irene watching them. “Why not have tea with Irene?”

  “We’ll wait for you,” Margaret said.

  “As you like, my dear.” He kissed her cheek. She smiled up at him, just as she should. He waved at Irene and told himself it would be just a short, quick walk, and his two girls would be fine together.

  He lifted the latch on the back gate, stepped out into the alley and started toward Carlton Street. The Rupert was not open for business on a Sunday, but there was always a place or two in Cabbagetown where if a man knew the right people he could get something with which to wet his whistle.

  A week later Irene had a nightmare. She was in the yard of a house where she shouldn’t be, although she’d lived there once. It was an empty white house, filled with the kind of silence that made you think someone waited behind the door to jump out at you. She had to get out before anybody caught her, and she started to run up a great snow hill. She hadn’t taken more than five or six steps when the crust broke and she plunged into a hole. She stopped, but could feel nothing below her but soft snow that could give at any moment. Her hands were trapped at her sides, and the daylight, the lip of the hole, was such a long way above her head. Someone was out there and she called softly, afraid if she filled her lungs to scream that she would push the snow aside and tumble down into the middle of the earth, or else the snow would fall in and she would suffocate. She whispered a thin “Help me!” A face appeared at the top of the hole, silhouetted against the unforgiving blue sky. It was her father’s face, yet she was not reassured, for she couldn’t tell from the look on his face if he had any interest in rescuing her.

  She woke up crying, but she did
not cry out. It was the first time she had not called for her parents after a nightmare. Soon she fell asleep again, and when she woke to the morning sound of sparrows in the hedge, she had no recollection of the dream.

  1930

  Just outside of Estevan, David runs alongside the moving train. His feet slip and twist on the gravel. He hears a voice hollering and looks up. A face, and hands reach out for him, and with a final burst of speed, muscles nearly snapping, he grabs for them and jumps. For a moment he dangles, legs dangerously near the churning wheels, and then, with a rasp of wood along stomach, he is in the car.

  “Come on, young fella, you’re all right now.” The man is maybe thirty, maybe fifty, his face stamped with sleeplessness and hunger. He wears a cap low over his eyes and a lumber jacket that smells of wood smoke and long wear.

  The boxcar is clotted with shadows, and his eyes will not adjust. He feels blind and a little dizzy. He lies gasping on the wooden boards, hugging his pack, too winded to say thank you.

  “First time?” says the man after a few minutes.

  He nods, swallowing hard. The man’s voice is low and sounds kind.

  “You gotta grab the ladder, boy, don’t try and jump in an open door. You’ll slip that way, lose a leg if you’re not careful. What’s your name?”

  He tells the man and as he does his voice cracks.

  Laughter comes from a pitch-dark space in the corner. He turns toward it, but can make out only a blacker shadow within the first one.

  “Christ, how old are you?” This voice does not sound as kind.

  “Old enough to take care of myself.”

  “Sure you are, son,” says the man who’d hauled him through the door. He holds out his hand. “My name’s Jim. That’s Fred in the back there. We travel together. You just leave home?”