The alarm of this woke me, or so I believed. I dreamt that Richard was back. I could hear him breathing in the bed beside me. Yet there was nobody there.
I woke up then in reality. My legs were asleep: I’d been lying twisted. I fumbled for the bedside lamp, decoded my watch: it was two in the morning. My heart was hammering painfully, as if I’d been running. It’s true, what they used to say, I thought. A nightmare can kill you.
I hasten on, making my way crabwise across the paper. It’s a slow race now, between me and my heart, but I intend to get there first. Where is there? The end, or The End. One or the other. Both are destinations, of a sort.
The January and February of 1935. High winter. Snow fell, breath hardened; furnaces burned, smoke arose, radiators clanked. Cars ran off roads into ditches; their drivers, despairing of help, kept their engines running and were asphyxiated. Dead tramps were found on park benches and in abandoned warehouses, rigid as mannequins, as if posing for a store-window advertisement of poverty. Corpses that could not be buried because their graves could not be dug in the steel-hard ground waited their turn in the outbuildings of nervous undertakers. Rats did well. Mothers with children, unable to find work or pay their rent, were bundled out into the snow, bag and baggage. Children skated on the frozen millpond of the Louveteau River, and two went through the ice, and one drowned. Pipes froze and burst.
Laura and I were less and less together. Indeed she was scarcely to be seen: she was helping with the United Church relief drive, or so she said. Reenie said that come next month she’d only be working for us three days a week; she said her feet were bothering her, which was her way of covering up the fact that we could no longer afford her full-time. I knew it anyway, it was plain as the nose on your face. As the nose on Father’s face, which looked like the morning after a train wreck. He’d been spending a lot of time up in his turret lately.
The button factory was empty, its interior charred and shattered. There was not the money to repair it: the insurance company was balking, citing the mysterious circumstances surrounding the arson. It was whispered about that all was not as it appeared: some even hinted that Father had set the fire himself, a slanderous allegation. The two other factories were still closed; Father was racking his brains for some way to reopen them. He was going to Toronto more and more often, on business. Sometimes he’d take me with him, and we would stay at the Royal York Hotel, considered to be the top hotel then. It was where all the company presidents and doctors and lawyers who were so inclined kept their mistresses and conducted their week-long binges, but I didn’t know that at the time.
Who paid for these jaunts of ours? I have a suspicion it was Richard, who was present on these occasions. He was the one Father was doing the business with: the last one left, of a narrowed field. The business concerned the sale of the factories, and was complicated. Father had tried to sell before, but in these times nobody was buying, not with the conditions he set. He wanted to sell only a minority interest. He wanted to keep control. He wanted a capital injection. He wanted the factories opened again, so that his men would have jobs. He called them “his men,” as if they were still in the army and he was still their captain. He did not want to cut his losses and desert them, for as everyone knows, or once knew, a captain should go down with the ship. They wouldn’t bother, now. Now they’d cash in and bail out, and move to Florida.
Father said he needed me along “to take notes,” but I never took any. I believed I was there just so he could have someone with him—for moral support. He certainly needed it. He was thin as a stick, and his hands shook constantly. It cost him an effort to write his own name.
Laura did not come on these excursions. Her presence was not required. She stayed behind, doling out the three-day-old bread, the watery soup. She’d taken to skimping on meals herself, as if she didn’t feel entitled to eat.
“Jesus ate,” said Reenie. “He ate all kinds of things. He didn’t stint.”
“Yes,” said Laura, “but I’m not Jesus.”
“Well, thank the Lord she’s got the sense to know that much at least,” Reenie grumbled to me. She scraped the remaining two-thirds of Laura’s dinner into the stock pot, because it would be a sin and a shame to have it go to waste. It was a point of pride with Reenie during those years that she never threw anything out.
Father no longer kept a chauffeur, and no longer trusted himself to drive. He and I would go in to Toronto by train, arriving at Union Station, crossing the street to the hotel. I was supposed to amuse myself somehow in the afternoons, while the business was being done. Mostly however I sat in my room, because I was afraid of the city and ashamed of my dowdy clothes, which make me look years younger than I was. I would read magazines: Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, Mayfair. Mostly I read the short stories, which had to do with romance. I had no interest in casseroles or crochet patterns, although the beauty tips held my attention. Also I read the advertisements. A Latex foundation garment with two-way stretch would help me play better bridge. Although I might smoke like a chimney, who cared, because my mouth would taste clean as a whistle if I stuck to Spuds. Something called Larvex would end my moth worries. At the Bigwin Inn, on the beautiful Lake of Bays where every moment was exhilarating, I could do musical slenderizing exercises on the beach.
After the day’s business was done, all three of us—Father, Richard, and myself—would have dinner at a restaurant. On these occasions I would say nothing, because what was there for me to say? The subjects were economics and politics, the Depression, the situation in Europe, the worrisome advances being made by World Communism. Richard was of the opinion that Hitler had certainly pulled Germany together from a financial point of view. He was less approving of Mussolini, who was a dabbler and a dilettante. Richard had been approached to make an investment in a new fabric the Italians were developing—very hush-hush—made out of heated milk protein. But if this stuff got wet, said Richard, it smelled horribly of cheese, and the ladies in North America would therefore never accept it. He’d stick with rayon, though it wrinkled when damp, and he’d keep his ear to the tracks and pick up anything promising. There was bound to be something coming along, some artificial fabric that would put silk right out of business, and cotton to a large extent as well. What the ladies wanted was a product that wouldn’t need to be ironed—that could be hung on the line, that would dry wrinkle-free. They also wanted stockings that were durable as well as sheer, so they could show off their legs. Wasn’t that right? he asked me, with a smile. He had a habit of appealing to me on matters concerning the ladies.
I nodded. I always nodded. I never listened very closely, not only because these conversations bored me but also because they pained me. It hurt me to see my father agreeing with sentiments I felt he didn’t share.
Richard said he would have had us to dinner at his own home, but since he was a bachelor it would have been a slapdash affair. He lived in a cheerless flat, he said; he said he was practically a monk. “What is life without a wife?” he said, smiling. It sounded like a quotation. I think it was one.
Richard proposed to me in the Imperial Room of the Royal York Hotel. He’d invited me to lunch, along with Father; but then at the last minute, as we were walking through the hotel corridors on our way to the lift, Father said he couldn’t attend. I’d have to go by myself, he said.