A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) (8 page)

* * *

190 Michigan Ave.

Detroit, Mich.

July 25, 1909

166 Crawford St.

Toronto, Ont.

Dear Martin,

Thought of you yesterday (today is Sunday) when we were down at Detroit Beach on Lake Erie and we saw all the families with kids playing there. Let me know the minute the baby arrives, Cora and I wilt pop a champagne cork that you might hear all the way from Detroit! My friend Walter Norton has managed to buy a Tin Lizzie and he and his girl Mary Alice and Cora and I drove down to spend the day at the beach. Walter let me drive for a bit, we didn't get stuck even once. What a ball!

I was offered a transfer to Ford's Walkerville plant across the border near Windsor but turned it down. They've been turning out Model C, K, N, R, & S since '04 there but now that they're gearing up to turn out Model Ts they need more men. Want me to give them your name? Interested? A family man like you could use the money.

Like the song says, Toot Your Horn, Kid, You're In A Fog.

Jock

* * *

FROM: MARTIN RADEY

166 CRAWFORD STREET

TORONTO ONT

22 AUGUST 1909

TO: JOCK ROSS

190 MICHIGAN AVE

DETROIT MICH

MARGARET MARY RADEY BORN AUG 21 AT 6 LB 6 OZ STOP MOTHER AND DAUGHTER DOING FINE STOP FATHER SMOKING A BIG CIGAR AND TOOTING HORN IN A FOG STOP POP THAT CHAMPAGNE STOP

DADDY MARTIN

EIGHT

It is strange awakening to find the sky inside you and beneath you and above you and all around you so that your spirit is one with the sky, and all is positive night.

—Thomas Merton

The Sign of Jonas

Now, in 1984, Margaret lies before me in the hospital bed, dying, and I know, without knowing why, that the death within death that I have witnessed in the treetops, in the sky, will come to me shortly, a hawk falling from the clouds, and that all this will end. That is why I am here, a final stop on my ethereal trip, loosed from the flock of lost souls with which I travel. And looking at Jack, my son, I now know that he too is dead, that Margaret is seeing us exactly as she last remembered seeing us, and I am filled with a longing and a sadness and a joy beyond understanding. That is why I am here in my seventy-year-old body and why Jack is smiling, in his prime, handsome in his early twenties.

Words are not needed. We all understand. It is what happens. It is how we close the door.

Then Jack does a remarkable thing. He hands me a small stone, smiles. I am breathless. I close my hand over it. Oh Margaret. Oh Jack. I look at them both, see babies, then children, see everything good that I managed to spoil, and silently ask for their forgiveness.

NINE

1911

1912

1

On April 30, 1911, Jack is born. John Francis Radey. My son.

When Margaret was born, my heart melted. With Jack in my arms, my chest swells with a pride I never knew. Babies, both, but so different. Margaret, so easy to please, so eager to please in return, Jack pulling away, creating his own space. I sense this immediately, instinctively. A son and a daughter. I am the luckiest man alive. Yes.

We are in a new flat on Lansdowne Avenue—the second floor of the middle house in a row of three. All is wonderful, yet all is chaos. Margaret always slept at reasonable times, is perpetually good-natured. Jack is the opposite. He cries at night for hours, leaving us exhausted for days, weeks at a stretch—exhaustion such as we have never known. Margaret did not prepare us for this. Is it the difference between boys and girls? We do not know.

Maggie's eyes are red with the burden. I live in a strange isolation from her as she withdraws into herself, not needing me, needing only sleep.

She sleeps with the children.

I think of my father, how I suddenly understood him once I had been with a woman, with long-forgotten Lillian. Now I understand him again, more fully. I understand his life, what he gave. I close my eyes and see him eating quietly at the end of the table.

Typhoid fever is what people are talking about in the city. The downtown area reports hundreds of cases, and we are glad we live near the west end. Yet I travel every day into the city center and listen to the talk, hear the reports. The city adds chlorine to the drinking water, explaining that this chemical will kill the disease, that the germs are in the water.

I drink it, taste the difference, fill empty milk bottles, seal them carefully by wedging cloth in the necks, take them home to Maggie and the kids in a shopping bag. When I cross Yonge Street the two miles from Front to just north of College are aglow with six thousand new streetlamps, like a fairy tale, pumped to us from the giant generating plant at Niagara Falls.

The city ablaze with electric light, bottled water that will spare us. Miracles abound. Things are not so bad.

On Saturday I treat myself to the Harrison Baths at McCaul and Stephanie Street. It is heaven. A thirty-minute bath, complete with showers and a towel: ten cents. Refreshed, I stroll toward Yonge Street, cross to the south side, and enter 57 Queen West, R. A. Caldwell Hair Dressing & Shaving Parlor ("Razors Honed"). After the twenty-cent haircut, the chair folds back and I lie there, eyes closed, amid perfumed and leather scents, as my face is lathered and scraped. When I am asked if I would like my neck shaved as well, I say yes, why not, I would, aware that it will add another five cents to the ten-cent shave, but I do not care. I close my eyes again, wish Jock were here, wish we could go for a glass of ale afterward.

I stand at the Yonge Street wharf and watch as the new
Trillium
sails toward the Island. The ferries, I realize for the first time, are flowers.
Primrose, Mayflower, Blue Bell,
and now
Trillium,
the largest. Flowers on the water. Dreams.

Fire has consumed the past. I sift through the ashes, quiet, try to envision the new order. I can see the rebuilt Hanlan's Point amusement park, see the strings of colored lights even in the daytime, even from this distance. But it is not the same. In '04, the city, in '10, the Island. The Figure-8, the Scenic Railway, the old Mill, enveloped in flame. The House of Fun, the Penny Arcade, all there when Maggie and I watched diving horses, all gone, replaced by something new, something I can only see while standing here at a distance, something I do not know.

The
Trillium,
white, cuts the blue water.

Flowers. Dreams.

Flames in the city. Flames on a birthday cake. Blue water. A blue candle, burning slowly.

"Listen to this," Maggie says. She folds over the copy of
The Toronto Star
newspaper as she reads. "The life expectancy for a woman is fifty-three years. For a man, fifty-two."

I have heard numbers like these before, but have forgotten them.

"It used to be fifty-one for a woman, forty-eight for a man," she says.

"We're gaining."

"We're not." The newspaper is folded again. "And it says here that the number of children that a healthy woman living in wedlock should have is ten."

"Who says?"

"The Vice Commission of Chicago."

"What is that?"

"I don't know. Some fool commission of men who have no idea what it is to be a woman." She looks at me. "Don't you think two children is enough?"

I think of my father, of thirteen children. "I don't know," I say.

I see her face, the new lines.

She folds the paper, says nothing, breathes rhythmically.

2

The topic changes at work. Just before midnight on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the world's largest floating vessel, the White Star liner
R.M.S. Titanic
, strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic and sinks within three hours. Of her 2,206 passengers, 1,503 drown. The list of names of those dead does not sound like anyone I know: a colonel, a novelist, an artist, an editor, a millionaire book collector.

In the days that follow, we discover that of the 703 who are picked up by the
Carpathia,
several are from Toronto. A fellow named Arthur Peuchon from the Island's Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the RCYC, is soundly criticized by the local press upon his arrival home for not adhering to the time-honored code of women and children first. We talk of little else for weeks.

I think of Maggie, of Margaret, of Jack. I think of drowning so that they may live, of the honorable thing to do.

On a Saturday morning in July, Maggie and I are standing in the summer sun outside the new Woolworth's store at the northwest comer of Queen and Yonge, Jack in her arms, Margaret clinging to my hand, as the city's only motorized fire truck howls by us, bells clanging. Jack's attention is complete, Margaret is enraptured.

I pick small, dark-haired Margaret up in my arms so that she can see better, watch her face as her neck cranes, as the truck disappears, her eyes beautiful, big. Jack is so excited small bubbles sprout on his lips as he tries to sputter his enthusiasm.

I smile, holding her, watching him, seeing Maggie wipe his mouth, his chin. Seeing my family.

August swelters. In our new three-room flat on Lansdowne Avenue we lie awake nights, bathed in sweat, the air still.

Jack cries. Margaret crawls in with us. We wait for morning.

The Toronto Star
responds to the summer's heat and humidity by announcing a "swat the fly" contest, with cash prizes for the most dead flies produced. On August 19, two days before Margaret's third birthday, more than three million flies are turned in to the newspaper. A neighbor, Beatrice White, wins fifty dollars for producing 543,360 flies, weighing more than two hundred pounds.

On Saturday evening, the street throws a party for Beatrice, who shows everyone the dozen wire-mesh traps in her yard that she used to catch the flies. Molasses, she explains. That's the key. Beatrice is a celebrity. We delight in having her among us, previously unaware of her ingenuity. Maggie and I drink beer, wander from porch to porch, exchanging pleasantries, complaining about the heat wave, Margaret and Jack in tow. When they finally fall asleep on Mrs. White's unpainted wicker verandah chairs, we carry them home, put them to bed. They lie there, beads of perspiration on their upper lips, their brows, skin perfect, ours.

Perhaps it is the heat, the beer. I touch Maggie the way we used to touch each other, and she softens, is there for me. Finally. It's all right, she says. It's a good time of the month, my cramps are just starting. It's safe.

I hear her as if from a distance, wish she would stop worrying, planning. I kiss her mouth, her neck, tremble. It's been so long. So long. I touch the small of her back where I have pulled her blouse loose. Her hands cup my face. She breathes into my mouth.

It is October, the heat long gone, the trees yellow, red, when Maggie, folding the newspaper in her lap, says, "Norway has given women the right to vote."

I look up from my own piece of newsprint, say nothing. I barely know where Norway is. I picture Norwegian women, tall, blond, emancipated, casting ballots, discussing politics.

I think of the children. I try to understand. I try.

In November, Maggie reads to me from
McCall’s
magazine.
The Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Life, Collier's.
Maggie reads everything she can get her hands on. "There is an Italian educator named Maria Montessori who has a fascinating article in here about educating children."

"Margaret is only three," I say.

"That's not too early, according to her. Even Jack."

It is evening. The children are asleep. I take a cigar from my vest pocket, roll it between my fingers.

"She speaks of educational toys. Says children can learn from toys, from color, from proportion."

I think about this. "What kind of toys?"

"Numbers, letters, pasted on cards—alternate rough and smooth paper—so that the child learns to distinguish between the smooth and rough texture, without realizing that the letters and numbers are also being learned."

I strike a match, puff the cigar to life. I think back to Elora, to St. Mary's School, remember no toys. All that comes to mind is Dewey, my rag doll, clutched while I slept.