If anyone is searching for me now, I’m the mystery. Phil might be seated on her walker wondering why she hasn’t heard a word since my arrival in London. I said I wouldn’t call until I was back, but she might expect a call anyway.
She’ll be waiting for her pigskin gloves.
It has become clear to me that Phil takes her long life for granted, that she plans to outlive everyone, including me. She has already outlived her husband, her sister, her brother-in-law, my husband and her friends. She plans to outlive the other residents at the Haven, whom she collectively calls “the inmates.” She has also begun to steal, which, when I was first told, I found hard to believe.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized she’d been moving in that direction for some time. Before she decided to become an inmate herself, she was obsessed with watching crime shows on TV. She kept notes, referred to as “suspicion reports.” When she looked out the windows of our old home and saw herself surrounded by newly constructed rowhouses, she began to record any behaviour she deemed suspect. Her reasoning was that she would be a reliable informant if ever called upon to be an expert witness. Because she wrote on yellow sticky notes, these were not lasting testaments. They curled up and were thrown into a kitchen drawer. I leafed through some of them before I advertised and sold the house.
—Tall young man, black hair, entered corner house. Carried white cloth in two hands.
—Woman, royal blue coat (doesn’t suit her) canvassed at door. Fraud? Gave no $.
—Man in plaid jacket walked centre of road, stopped by stone wall, marched four paces on spot. Lunatic.
Those are a few I remember.
She steals only on Mondays, sheet-changing day. Six months after she moved in, I was invited by the nurses to attend a staff meeting about her kleptomania. Phil was not present.
“I don’t hurt a soul,” she said, later—and I suddenly felt weary. I looked at the face of feigned innocence before me and wondered if we’d switched roles and I had become the mother.
“I take things when I’m on my rounds,” she went on. “I nip into suites when no one is looking. Sooner or later the nurses find out where I’ve hidden my cache and it’s returned to the owners. No harm done.”
“What do you steal?”
“Belts, buttons, combs, a hand mirror—the old-fashioned kind with a bone handle. I stole that from Maudie Hanslow—remember her? She’s about ten years younger than I am. She used to come to the store. She tried to tell me I shortchanged her one day, after she bought a tag-end of felt. Well she’s an inmate now, and I stole her mirror. Serves her right.
“I also steal chocolate bars—I don’t eat them; I just take them. I grab up things that are small enough to stash under my clothes.”
She watched my face as she spoke. “It takes energy to steal, you know.” She looked at the floor and slumped and then raised her head and added slyly, “You wouldn’t believe how boring it gets.”
The staff members were not amused. It was reported that Phil had stolen a tin piggy bank from the bazaar table at the front entrance. “The bank,” said the charge nurse, “was found on a windowsill in your mother’s room. Behind the curtain.”
“Why would you steal a piggy bank?” I asked, later. “You have money. Why didn’t you just pay for the bank?”
“I did,” said Phil. “I dropped a quarter inside and then I stole it.”
She was energized by theft.
Oh, Lilibet, did you have responsibilities like these before the Queen Mum died? Were you held accountable? I know you addressed her as Mummy, because I heard you on TV, calling out during a horse race. Did she order you around? At least you were not her chauffeur. There were staff members, weren’t there? Stalwart, reliable people to take hold and keep Mummy occupied and well.
I think Phil’s friend, Tall Ronnie, aids and abets, Lilibet. I believe he checks to see if the coast is clear. They are a Mutt-and-Jeff pair but I’m glad they found each other. He’s almost six feet tall, hunched, while Phil has shrunk to five-two bent over her walker. But she can still move quickly. And there’s one other thing. Tall Ronnie can’t stay in one spot while he’s talking. He ends up a foot away from the point at which conversation begins. I have to tell my body to root to the floor when I’m facing him; otherwise, my feet will follow. His head shifts from side to side; he shuffles; he cannot remain still. I finally get relief when he sits, because then his body behaves like that of a normal person.
When Phil first told me about him, she slipped in the information one night just before we hung up the phone. I admit to being surprised, especially as she had never shown an interest in finding another partner.
“Oh, and I have a new gentleman friend,” she said. “He’s ninety-two and lives across the hall. The only thing I don’t like about him is that he cracks his knuckles. This will interest you—I can hear his fingerbones all the way from my room, even when I put a pillow over my head.”
She paused as if unsure whether to say more, and then she added, “His name is Tall Ronnie. He offers his arm in the old way. When I go into his room, we shut the door. This drives the other inmates crazy. Maudie Hanslow said, at breakfast, ‘I thought we were all past that sort of thing. It’s unseemly.’”
I didn’t ask.
“Also,” said Phil, “Tall Ronnie knows how to make me laugh.”
He is as unlike Mr. Holmes as any man can be.
TWO SEPTUM
TWENTY-TWO
I wouldn’t be lying here if I’d moved to Boca Raton. Ever since Harry died, Ally and Trick have been trying to persuade me to join them in Florida. But how can I leave Phil? She needs a daughter close by. Even one with broken bones.
If Harry were alive, he would reach out his hand and pull me up.
I could count on Harry. Who wouldn’t count on—indeed, who wouldn’t want to marry—a man who’d been carried around on an English pillow as a child? Our entire courtship was a celebration, and I could use a few celebrations to think about, right now.
I wore a pale blue suit at my wedding, with a matching porkpie hat made of felt. How could I have worn a hat shaped like a pork pie? I must have liked it at the time, although I questioned my taste when I saw the wedding photograph, later. I looked foolish; I couldn’t think what had come over me when I chose such a thing. Why didn’t Ally step in? Or Phil, or Grand Dan? Why didn’t Aunt Fred speak her mind?
I’d known Harry a few weeks when he jokingly mentioned the pillow, and my lips shaped the words satin, tassels, prince. My head whirled with images of pages in training, curly-haired youths dressed in cream-coloured livery and lined up for the privilege of transporting the young Harry. In my mind’s eye, I saw a cherubic boy wearing an oversize turban on his British baby head, a green jewel in the centre of his forehead. He could have walked out of a story in The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book.
When Case was in grade one, she asked about our courtship.
“How did you and Daddy meet? How did you know you loved him? How could you tell?”
I wanted to say, “Because of his strength. It filled every room he entered.” I wanted to say, “Because of his voice. Such a voice, a voice without shouts. His gentleness. And his shoulder. If you could have seen his sloping, wounded shoulder when he came back from the war.” I wanted to say, “Because of the flame that jumped between us.”
Instead, I said, “I married him because of the pillow.”
“Tell me the pillow story,” she said.
Each time I told the story, the details were different. She didn’t seem to mind what was fact and what was not. The truth is, I made up almost everything because it was story itself that interested her until, finally, she’d heard every variation I was capable of inventing.
The real story is this. Harry said little about his history until just before we married. He was not a person who talked a great deal, and I believe he was terrified to unearth his own life. But once started, one memory yanked on another until his past spilled out like sheets
tied together in an attic and tossed out a window for rescue.
Orphaned in England at the age of three, Harry spent his next four years in an institution on the outskirts of London. At first, his body was weak and undernourished, and he grew slowly. Because he was often sick, the thin, brittle bones in his legs refused to hold his weight—“They were like sticks,” he said—and the larger, stronger orphans had to tote him around on a lumpy pillow that had been recruited from a weatherbeaten chair in the garden. Harry was a diversion, and the others didn’t mind carrying him around.
He settled in as one of the Home Children and was soon able to walk by himself. Four years later, when he was seven, he was sent out to Canada by ship. This was the twenties, not so long after the end of the Great War. In cramped quarters he crossed the Atlantic, travelling with fifty-nine other boys and girls between the ages of three and fifteen. Five adults, their escorts—two women and three men—crossed with them. Each child was given a small trunk and a Bible. When the group disembarked, the children wore name-signs hung around their necks. Some of the children were so young they peed their pants when they were excited. A sailor on the ship showed Harry an open sore on his penis and said it was from “doing it.” Harry did not know what “doing it” meant.
The ship docked in Halifax, and from there the children travelled for days by train until they arrived in Toronto. They were met at the station by two women in long skirts, and were led to a house for temporary holding. There was a sign beside the door, but Harry could not read it.
“I never forgot the first meal I had in that house,” he told me. “Chicken and potatoes, carrots, thick slabs of bread with lots of butter—I was allowed two helpings—and for dessert, raisin pie.” He grinned as if this had been the one truly happy memory of his childhood. He leaned back into the sofa and took a deep breath. “I was safe and my belly was full. But I left three days later and never returned. I wouldn’t have known how to find the house or what it was called, even if I had been able to make my way back to Toronto.”
Before sailing home to England, one of the men who had accompanied the children on the ship asked Harry if he remembered that he had an older brother and sister. Both children had crossed the ocean several years earlier, preceding Harry to Canada. They’d been sent to the west, and lived on separate farms. For Harry, the story was a fairy tale. He had not seen a brother and sister since he was three and did not believe in their existence.
A farmer had put in a request for a young boy, so Harry was sent on a second train, by himself, to a small station in rural Ontario. He did not know where he was going but when the train made one of its stops, the conductor indicated that he was to get off. Once again, Harry wore his name on a sign around his neck. No one was beside the tracks to greet him when he climbed down. He wanted to get back on the train, but it chugged off, leaving him behind. Eventually, the station master noticed him standing there and gave him a chair to sit on, outside.
“That’s when I understood how alone I was,” Harry said, his voice becoming softer. “That’s when I first thought of myself as an individual. I was seven years old.”
I held my body still while he talked, and tried to see the small boy who had never known a time when he had not been surrounded by lineups of other children. He had never been alone, and now he found himself sitting beside a set of iron tracks, with dense and frightening Canadian forest on either side.
“It was the first time I truly thought of myself as I,” he said. “I looked around and stared into the bush and, so help me, I could not understand why I had no mother. I sat on that chair and cried and cried. I thought my lungs would turn inside out.”
The rest was more difficult to hear, but Harry was determined to tell the whole story. Away from Home officials, he was not given a room in the farmhouse, but was made to sleep on a bed of hay in a loft inside a shed. In winter he suffered frostbite, and when he grew out of his shoes, he was not allowed to have another pair. He tied rags around his feet and was given old rubber boots several sizes too large, so that he could work in the barn. He received no pay. He was not permitted to eat at the family table, and was given leftovers after the host family had finished their meal. To make matters worse, the farmer and his wife had a son the same age, and this boy wore proper clothing and was permitted to go to school. Harry was not. He ran away when he was eleven, made his way to the nearest village and was sent back, only to be beaten. He ran away again at twelve and thirteen and fourteen. Finally, no one pursued him and he got away for good. The farmer had had his slave labour for seven years. Harry did not receive a penny for his work.
He followed the railway tracks and walked south for three days, resting and sleeping in fields and barns, drinking out of streams, arriving at a sizable town, which happened to be Wilna Creek, a town he’d never heard of during his seven years of isolation. It had a long main street, a train station and bus depot, a hospital and a number of small businesses. Outside the town were a quarry, several gravel pits and a canning factory. He inquired at the general store and was told that a local farmer named Dixon was looking for help. Harry walked another three miles, this time to the east, and when he turned up at the Dixon farm he was hired on the spot. He was given room and board and two dollars a week. He was provided with his own room, up over the summer kitchen. He had never lived in such luxury. Not only that, but Mrs. Dixon was a former teacher and after a few weeks she began to teach Harry to read and write. He fell in love with this second foster family and stayed with them for several years, until Mr. Dixon could no longer afford to keep him. Those were Depression years, and there was barely enough to go around. Harry remained in touch with the family, but moved to a room in town and took odd jobs. By 1939, he had earned enough money to buy his first suit. It fitted his lean, muscular body and had a herringbone pattern and cost him twenty-two dollars. Two weeks after the purchase, he joined up. He left the suit with the Dixons when he went to say goodbye, and told them he’d be back. He asked them to look after the suit, because he planned to find a woman to marry when the war was over. That would be me. Neither of us knew the specifics of this; we had not yet met.
When I first laid eyes on Harry Witley, it was 1946. The war was over and he had recently returned from overseas. His ship had been torpedoed off the coast of England and had gone down. He was rescued from the water and picked up by another ship, and the second ship was torpedoed, too. Who, you’d wonder, could have that kind of bad luck? As if that were not enough, a piece of jagged metal had been blasted into his shoulder moments before he found himself in the Atlantic a second time, swallowing salt, shouting for rescue. As proof of the blast, he had an inward-twisting scar, larger than his fist.
He had been treated in hospital in southern England and had recovered enough to work. He answered an ad in the Wilna Creek Times for “Young man of character, no experience needed,” and was given a job as an apprentice to a Dutch jeweller who had recently moved to Canada and set up shop on Main Street, three doors from the dry goods store my late father had owned. The Dutch jeweller’s name was Mr. Ring, which amused people of the town, considering his occupation. He called his shop the Double Ring, after himself and his wife. Mrs. Ring looked after the accounts in a black ledger. She was a plainly dressed woman, but wore earrings that dangled and shone in the light. It was said that all of her jewellery had been designed by her husband.
Mr. Ring’s first name was Cornelius. He was a stooped man in his sixties, and highly skilled. He had come to Wilna Creek because a cousin who’d lived in the town since the 1930s had sent a letter to Holland after the war, telling him that the town had a railway, that businesses were opening up, that the place was growing faster than spokes could turn in a wheel.
During the last two years of the war, Mr. Ring had experienced hardship in his country; Harry told me he rarely spoke about this. I found it difficult to imagine the two men, both given to silences, sitting in the shop and having occasional abrupt conversations about the buried past. M
r. Ring was pleased that Harry had been in Canadian uniform, and sometimes told him a little about the Dutch town he had lived in before it had been occupied. He had hidden away a number of diamonds during the war, and it was the sale of these that enabled him to start over. For him, Wilna Creek represented the new world. He and his wife were cautiously hopeful, despite having sorrow in their background. It was rumoured that they had lost someone during the Hongerwinter, or maybe to the Resistance. It might have been a daughter or a son; no one knew for sure.
Harry and I met soon after he began to ‘work for Mr. Ring, at a dance in the hall of the same Anglican church I had attended since I was six years old. He and a friend from his boarding house had heard about the Friday night dances and got a lift out from town. He stood before me and asked me to dance. He was slightly taller than I, had a sloping shoulder, and hands with slender fingers. He had a low, husky voice that carried a trace of old England. I took his arm and allowed him to lead me to the dance floor.
Eight days after the dance, on a Saturday evening, Harry walked the two miles from town, knocked on the door, spoke quietly to Grand Dan and Phil, and our courtship began. Months later, after he’d been coming to the house regularly, he showed his scar to Grand Dan and me in the kitchen when Grand Dan asked to see his wound. She was, no doubt, thinking of the blast that had killed her own husband thirty years earlier, and she told Harry about my grandfather’s last words and how she had received them. Harry opened his shirt and allowed her to inspect the scar. She looked it over from front and back, and nodded to let him know that he was to rebutton his shirt. She always had a fondness for Harry.