Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (2 page)

"Who?" The thin white eyebrows wrinkled.

"Jack."

He had caught the thread again. "He left in nineteen thirty- two, I think. We never saw him again."

"Where did he go? Why did he leaved"

"He left because there was nothing here for him. He was a young man, about twenty-one. He had no use for the old man; he could see through him. When Margaret married me he was alone. I think he felt she had abandoned him. It wasn't fair." He shrugged. "But then, nothing is fair." The cigarette was placed between the thin dry lips once more. "Your mother felt bad. Felt guilty, I think." He looked at me. "Try to see it from Jack's point of view. His mother dies; his father's run off and married this young thing; his big sister marries the guy down the street. It's the Dirty Thirties. Nothing for him here."

I shifted in my chair, crossed my legs.

"He left the country. Left Canada. Went down into the States. Last we heard of him he was in Detroit."

"Why Detroit?"

"Detroit was turning out cars. There were jobs."

"Did he writer

"Once, that I remember."

"Did anyone try to find him?"

"The Mounties tried to find him."

I raised my eyebrows.

"RCMP came to the door here in nineteen thirty-nine looking for him. Wanted to know where Jack Radey was. He hadn't answered his draft notice."

I waited.

"They never found him either." He drew deeply on the cigarette. "You sure you don't want a coffee?"

I got up and put on the kettle.

"Good. I've changed my mind, too. The hell with my heart."

I stood, looking out the window at the parking lot. The sky was gray and the snow was still falling. A creek, I thought. Under there. And soon, a police station. Layer upon layer. Impossible to find it.

"When the old man died, they found some correspondence between him and a private investigator he'd hired to find Jack. It was one of the few bright spots your mother could find at the time. The fact that the old man had made some kind of effort to find his own son—that it might have even bothered him—was something he never let any of us know."
 

"What did it say?"

"The trail had run dry. That's what it said. He was gone."
 

The kettle began to whistle softly.

3

When the phone rang that evening, it was my father. "I found something you might be interested in."
 

"What is it?"

"The letter from Jack that I remembered. And a card from your mother to him that was returned unclaimed."
 

"How old are they?"

"Just a minute." There was a pause. I could picture him pushing his glasses up onto his forehead and squinting at the paper in his hand. "Nineteen thirty-four," he said. "You want 'em?"

The excitement I felt was all out of proportion to the news. There was no reason for it. "Yes," I whispered.
 

"I'll keep 'em for you."
 

"I'll be right over." I couldn't wait.

The envelopes were yellowed. The one from Jack was postmarked Feb. 22, 1934, Detroit, Michigan. In the upper right- hand corner, it sported a purple three-cent Washington stamp, and the ironic cancellation imprint: "Notify Your Correspondents of Change of Address." It was hotel stationery. The upper left read: "Return in Five Days to Vermont hotel, 138 W. Columbia, Detroit, Michigan." It had been torn open at the end. It was addressed to my mother, here, at the only address she had ever known after she had married my father.

The other envelope was postmarked Toronto, Ontario, 8:30 p.m., April 29,1934. It was addressed to Mr. Jack F. Radey, c/o Vermont Hotel, etc., and across the bottom there was a Detroit postmark dated May 3, and a stamped imprint that read: "Return to Writer UNCLAIMED." Somebody else had scrawled in pen: "Try Washington Hotel."

"What's the F. stand for?"

"Francis. Your brother Ron had the same middle name. Your mother's choice."

I pulled the letter from Jack to my mother from the torn end of the envelope. It consisted of four faded sheets of Vermont Hotel stationery, complete with stylized letterhead. In the upper left corner it read: "Phone Cherry 4421"; the upper right bore the announcement: "Rates $1.00 and up." The handwriting was quite legible, and in pencil. It was dated February 22/34.

Dear Margaret:

Received your letter okay, and sure was tickled pink to hear from you. I'm sorry to hear Ronnie has been sick and I hope he is real well and yelling his head off when you receive this.

I must be going "Goof " or something. I was starting to think you had deserted me, and here I had sent you the wrong address. It's funny we didn't get your other letters or the Valentines. They must have been lost in the mail.

Gee—Margaret, I like it real well here. If anything ever happened now that I had to go back I think it would break my heart—no foolin'. I am working in the picture business for the largest and best-paying outfit in town, and I like it.

Do you know that coming here has given me an entirely new slant on life? I seem more anxious to be somebody than I ever have in my whole existence. Things seem to be pretty fair here, and you can live cheaper, and make more money than you can in Toronto.

I received a letter from a friend in Toronto today. The one that phoned you. She said you wished I hadn't come over here with Carmen as he may prove a bit of a bad influence. Well, forget it—he won't; and besides I've met, and mingled with so many fellows who are that way that one more couldn't make any difference. So stop worrying about me being led astray. So far as drinking is concerned, I haven't been doing any. I am too busy making money, and trying to get somewhere. The only thing I'm sore about is that I didn't come here about four years ago. I'd have had a lot more now to be thankful for.

I bought myself a nice new pair of shoes last Saturday and a couple of shirts, etc., and I hope to have a new suit in a week or so. I need one badly.

You know, Marg the secret of the whole thing is I came over here on my uppers. By the time I had paid Mrs. MacDonald in Toronto, and a few other little items, I was broke. I was determined to come over here, though. The boys I worked with there gave me a rotten deal, and that's no fairy tale. I borrowed a little money from Carmen (that's where he got the idea to come along) and I've paid him back every bit of that right now. That isn't all either—cause I really am going to make something out of myself. I mean it, Marg.

This all may seem strange to you
—me
talking this way, but I have to tell someone how I feel and you are the only person I feel I can tell without being laughed at for dreaming. This is all just between you and me, Marg. I wouldn't want anyone else to know how I was fixed or what a tough time I had for the first week in Detroit. Everything is going to be okay now, though, and pretty soon I will be able to send you and the children and Tommy something from the U.S.A.

I've been working around Royal Oak—gee, the "Shrine" is beautiful, Marg. I also make it a point to get to Mass on Sunday. Write me real soon.

Lots of Love,
 

Jack

I put the letter down and looked across at my father, who had been quietly watching me. "Have you read this?"

"Yes."

"Where did you find them?"

"In the trunk, at the foot of the bed. At the bottom."

"What did you make of it?"

He shrugged. "Not much."

"He said he worked in the picture business. What did he mean?"

"Margaret told me that he was working as a sidewalk photographer down there. She'd heard this from a friend of his here."

"Sidewalk photographer?" I blinked.

"You know—one of them guys who used to snap your picture, then come up to you and offer to sell you prints when they were developed."

I continued to look uninformed.

"No," he sighed. "I guess you don't know. Polaroids, Instamatics, video replays ... Of course you don't know."

"I think I've seen them in the movies. Old movies." I smiled.

He smiled back. "Yeah. Old ones."

"Doesn't sound like much of a job."

"It wasn't."

"I thought he went to Detroit to work in the car industry."

He shrugged. "I don't know what happened. Sometimes," he said, "things don't happen the way you plan."

I opened the envelope that had been returned unclaimed. Because I had never seen birthday cards from the 1930s, what I found intrigued me. The stationery and greeting card industries, I reflected, had shifted gears significantly over the past fifty years. There were two birthday cards inside—not birthday cards as we know them—but birthday cards of the era: two flat, unfolded cards about ten centimeters square, with elaborate, embossed colored drawings of a bird in a garden and a galleon on the high seas respectively. The former read: "Birthday Greetings Dearest Brother," the other, "To the Nicest Uncle on His Birthday." Each sported a genial epigraph and was signed by my mother, for herself and for the children. On the back of hers was a P
S.—Why Don't You Write?

Accidentally, I tore the envelope putting them back. It tore easily.

"And this was it?" I asked.

My father nodded.

"You never heard from him again?"

He shook his head.

"She's going to die, you know."

The eyes behind the thick lenses weakened. "I know."

"She wants to see him."

He shrugged, looked away. "He's gone. He never came back." Then he looked at me. "What can we do?"

I stood up, walked to the kitchen window, stared out at the snow-covered parking lot. Beyond it, the traffic inched along Eglinton Avenue.

TWO

… our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone ...

—Joseph Conrad

Youth

1

I spent every evening for the next few weeks in two places. First, I would visit my mother; then I would drive to the main branch of the Toronto Public Library at Bloor and Yonge. There I would pore over an atlas, copying down names of cities, towns, communities in and around the Detroit area, and as far south as Toledo. The litany had become familiar: Windsor, Pontiac, Wyandotte, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Flint, Lansing, Grand Rapids—even Saginaw and Bay City—plus numerous others. Having made my daily list, I would then ask the librarian for the white pages of the communities' phone books, which were all filed on microfiche, and seat myself in front of one of the viewers, scanning them for any mention of the surname Radey. It was likely, I realized, that he was dead. But it didn't seem too unlikely that he may have married, may even have had children. The name—"Radey"—proved remarkably uncommon, which was to my advantage.

My list of names and addresses grew, slowly but steadily.

Eventually, I progressed from the Detroit area to major cities in general, including New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Houston, New Orleans, San Francisco, L.A., San Diego ... I had also begun to realize the impossibility of my self-appointed task. How, I wondered, could I hope to succeed where the RCMP and private investigators had failed? The answer, I knew, was that I probably would not. What I would need was a lightning bolt of luck, pure and simple. There were too many places I could never cover, too many years that had passed.

Yet, I persisted. I wanted to give this to my mother. It was what she wanted. The attempt needed to be made.

My final list consisted of some fifty or so names. A couple were even J. Radeys. One in Kansas City was a John F. Radey.

I wrote my letter.

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am trying to trace a relative—for strictly family reasons—with the surname Radey. I am trying to find Jack (John Francis) Radey, born in Toronto in 1911- His father was Martin Radey (deceased), born 1882 circa Toronto, and his mother was Margaret Anne Curtis (deceased), born Toronto, 1878. He had one sibling—a sister, Margaret, born Toronto, 1909-

Margaret, Jack's sister (now Mrs. Thomas Nolan), is my mother.

If Jack is still alive, perhaps this letter can reach him. Perhaps he married and had children, some of whom might read this. Xeroxing and networking of this letter is encouraged. If this letter should reach anyone with helpful information, please feel free to call me collect, as soon as possible. Any information would be appreciated.