Marian and the Major: Engel's "Elizabeth and the Golden City" 9780773576513

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: Marian and the Major or The Major and Marian?
Introduction
PART I: THE MAJOR AND MARIAN
Major William Kingdom Rains
Lake Simcoe, Upper Canada
St Joseph Island
Sister Stories
Illustrations
PART II: MARIAN ENGEL, Elizabeth and the Golden City
Introduction
MONTREAL
Elizabeth and the Golden City
The Major and His Diary, I
The Major at McGill
The Major and His Diary, II
Middle-age Memories of Montreal
Elizabeth on Her Education
Leaving Montreal
TORONTO
Toronto
Elizabeth in Her 30s
Elizabeth at 50, Remembering Her 40s
Elizabeth, Publisher and Writer
The Major’s Funeral
Elizabeth Finds Her Father
Elizabeth in the Hospital
PART III: TROMPE L’OEIL
Agassiz and Bryant Visit the Major
Elizabeth and the Golden City: A Lexicon
Archival Locations of Engel Material
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Marian and the Major

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Marian and the

Major Marian Engel’s Elizabeth and the Golden City

EDITED BY CHRISTL VERDUYN

McG I LL -Q U E E N’S U N I VE R S ITY PR E S S

Montreal & Kingston

•

London

•

Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010 Text by Marian Engel © Charlotte Engel and William Engel 2010. isbn 978-0-7735-3634-0 Legal deposit first quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Engel, Marian, 1933–1985 Marian and the Major : Marian Engel's Elizabeth and the golden city / edited by Christl Verduyn. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3634-0 1. Rains, William Kingdom, 1789–1874. 2. Rains, William Kingdom, 1789–1874–Fiction. I. Verduyn, Christl, 1953– II. Title. ps8559.n5e45 2010

c813'.54

c2009-904292-4

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Sabon 10/13.5

Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Preface: Marian and the Major or The Major and Marian? / xi Introduction / 3 pa rt i : t h e m ajo r a n d m a r i a n Major William Kingdom Rains / 11 Lake Simcoe, Upper Canada / 21 St Joseph Island / 26 Sister Stories / 38 Illustrations / 45–54 p a r t i i : m a r i a n e n g e l , Elizabeth and the Golden City Introduction / 57 montreal Elizabeth and the Golden City / 69 The Major and His Diary, I / 125 The Major at McGill / 133 The Major and His Diary, II / 141 Middle-age Memories of Montreal / 147 Elizabeth on Her Education / 158 Leaving Montreal / 161

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toronto Toronto / 165 Elizabeth in Her 30s / 183 Elizabeth at 50, Remembering Her 40s / 212 Elizabeth, Publisher and Writer / 221 The Major’s Funeral / 227 Elizabeth Finds Her Father / 237 Elizabeth in the Hospital / 242 p a r t i i i : t r o m p e l’ œ i l Agassiz and Bryant Visit the Major / 253 Elizabeth and the Golden City: A Lexicon / 262 Archival Locations of Engel Material / 283 Notes / 285 Bibliography / 301 Index / 305

Acknowledgments

Completing a book can sometimes seem like a long and lonely project. This book, however, was energized and informed by a number of individuals and institutions. They shared, supported, and confirmed my curiosity and helped me to sustain the research and the completion of the work. It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to acknowledge, to credit, and to thank them. This project was based to a tremendous extent on accessing archival material, papers, and information – and various individuals were critical in this regard. Kathleen Garay is an archivist at McMaster University, where the Marian Engel Archive is housed. Her expertise and support in helping me to access this archive were equaled by her shared enthusiasm for the treasures of the collection. My research on Rains’s roots in Wales took me to the Pembrokeshire County Records Office in the spring of 2006, and my good friend Conny Steenman-Marcusse provided energetic company, encouragement, and assistance in hunting down material. My research on Rains’s experiences in Canada included trips to St Joseph Island in the summers of 2003 and 2005, and the use of materials in St Joseph Township Public Library and St Joseph Island Museum, for which I had the kind assistance of Sharon Thomas and Pat Fleming. The production of a manuscript and its transformation into a book is also a collective effort, requiring the assistance, expertise, and good nature of many people. Sally Heath provided much appreciated help with transcribing hand-scrawled archival material into accessible and readable digital form. Silas Granjo also contributed generous transcription help. Sandra Barry read and corrected an early draft of this book. Laura Dillman and

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Sheila Blagrave at Mount Allison University and Kerry Cannon at Trent University provided practical assistance with photographs, while Jackileen Rains and Peter Sibbald Brown generously gave permission for the inclusion of their photographs in this volume. Some of the material in this book was given a test run, and received valuable feedback, when I communicated excerpts to various audiences. In March 2001, at a very early stage of the project, I presented some research at the Peterborough Public Library. This opportunity was kindly provided by the Trent University Department of English Rooke Lecture Series. I was able to present my work in French at the international conference “Archives et manuscrits d’écrivains: Politiques et usages du patrimoine littéraire,” at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in September 2006. This was made possible by the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises (crilcq) and the Initiative interuniversitaire de recherche sur les manuscrits et l’archive littéraire (irma). I also presented the Major to the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (acql) at the annual Congress for the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia in June 2008. I would like to offer particular appreciation to the editors and staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press, with whom I have developed a wonderful professional and personal relationship in the course of this and other projects. I appreciate enormously their faith in, and their commitment to, my work and to this project. To Philip Cercone, John Zucchi, Joanne Pisano, Joan McGilvray, and Susan Glickman: many, many thanks. Two vital public agencies provide invaluable support to research and scholarly enterprise in Canada – both to individual scholars and to university presses. They deserve greater government support than they presently receive, if Canadian scholarship and culture are to survive and flourish. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which has supported my work consistently since the mid-1980s. And I would also like to express my appreciation to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences; their Aid to Scholarly Publications Program has helped support the publication of this book and others that I have produced. Three families provided substantial support and encouragement through the extended process of taking an idea and transforming it into a book. First, I was very fortunate to meet and discuss Major Rains’s story with his

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Canadian descendants. Jackileen Rains is a St Joseph Island historian, and her work proved to be invaluable to me, as was her generosity in supplying photographic material for this book. She was also a warm hostess when my husband and I went to St Joseph Island for the Rains family reunion in the summer of 2005. Thanks to Jen McColl, who drew my attention to this remarkable family reunion. Second, Marian Engel’s work and life have been a substantial part of my professional work and life for a number of years. Throughout this period, I have received tremendous support from her family. I would like to offer sincere thanks to the Engel children – Charlotte and William – for their cooperation and generous permission to publish the excerpts from “Elizabeth and the Golden City.” Finally, my greatest appreciation and thanks to my own family – Robert Campbell and our four children, Malcolm, Lachlan, Colin, and Frances – for their good-humored and loving support over the years of this and other projects.

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Preface Marian and the Major or The Major and Marian?

I faced a bedevilling tactical decision in producing a book that comprises two distinct but inter-related parts: (1) an unpublished (and unfinished) novel and (2) the background to, and origins of, this novel. In what order should I present the two parts: background/history first and results/output second? Or, results/output first and background/history second? What should come first: the chicken or the egg?! It struck me that the story behind the (unfinished) story enjoyed equal status and importance with the unpublished (unfinished) story. Indeed, a primary objective of this project was to demonstrate how the former informed and shaped the latter, in a complex and intriguing process. So, I determined that the “egg” indeed should precede the “chicken,” and the order of the book sees the origins and background as Part I and the unfinished manuscript as Part II. I would like to assure readers, though, that this book can be read in either order, depending on their individual preference. Some may wish to know first about the origins of “Elizabeth and the Golden City” in the story of Major William Kingdom Rains, so they can see how Engel’s fascination with the Major led her to develop the characters of Frances and her sister Elizabeth. If so, they can proceed in “normal” fashion, and begin with Part I,

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“The Major and Marian.” The title of Part I emphasizes its focus on the figure that initially inspired Engel’s last work. As “Elizabeth and the Golden City” developed, however, the Major was eclipsed by Engel’s interest in and identification with the “Elizabeth” of the title, as the second part of this volume acknowledges. Other readers may therefore prefer to delve directly into Engel’s “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” without first being told how the novel developed. If so, it is entirely possible and equally practical to start with Part II and to read the novel first, before returning to Part I to be introduced to its origins. “The Major” or “Elizabeth” – the chicken or the egg? Either way, I believe that readers will find life and literature uniquely linked in Marian and the Major.

Marian and the Major

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Introduction

Who was Major William Kingdom Rains and what was his relationship to the Canadian novelist Marian Engel? Who were Elizabeth and Frances Doubleday? How did these four individuals, born nearly a century-and-a-half apart, cross paths in the world of fiction? In what ways do life and literature illuminate one another? What was Marian Engel’s last novel like? Marian and the Major attempts to answer questions such as these. Part biography and part fiction, the pages that follow present the captivating real-life story of William Kingdom Rains and the Doubleday sisters, as well as the compelling fictionalized version that was Marian Engel’s final workin-progress. Neither story is complete, for many details of William Kingdom Rains’s life have been lost and Marian Engel died before finishing the novel to which she gave the working title “Elizabeth and the Golden City.” Nonetheless, the stories complement one another in fascinating ways, and one of the purposes of this book is to preserve and present that complementarity through publication for the sheer reading pleasure it produces. For Engel’s late-life prose is crafted and clever and Rains’s life story is a lively tale. Born in Wales on the eve of the French Revolution, William Kingdom Rains (1789–1874) distinguished himself early as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, where he fought under the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshall Sir John Nugent. Nugent’s commendation earned the young Welshman the Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold from the Emperor Francis I of Austria. During military postings in Malta, Rains met the poet Byron, whose work he would take with him to the backwoods of Canada.

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Following his military career, in which he reached the rank of Major, Rains had the opportunity to work with the great Victorian engineer Marc Isambard Brunel, a relation through his mother’s side of the family. Instead, he joined the nineteenth-century wave of emigration from Europe to North America. In 1830, he set out for Upper Canada accompanied not by his wife Ann Williams (1790–1883), with whom he had six children and from whom he had separated, but by two young women placed in his care after their father’s death – the Doubleday sisters, Frances (1811–1891) and Elizabeth (1813–1899). Together, they embarked on an unusual, though by all accounts harmonious, domestic arrangement whereby both sisters had children with Rains: nineteen in all. From the first Rains-Doubleday home on Lake Simcoe – now the museum in Sibbald Point Provincial Park just outside of Sutton, Ontario – Rains moved his families to St Joseph Island, near present-day Sault Ste Marie. Here he raised his children while pursuing various schemes for the settlement of the island. Over the years, the Rains-Doubleday households attracted the attention and imagination of various visitors to the island, including the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson (1794–1860), the Swiss-American naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), the American poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel (1933–1985) when she and her family camped in the area in 1969. Author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, a non-fiction work about islands, children’s books, essays, and newspaper columns, Marian Engel was a key figure on the Canadian writing scene during the formative 1960s and 1970s. She served as the first chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, which was conceived in the early 1970s in her living room on Brunswick Avenue in Toronto, and she played a crucial role in the creation of Public Lending Rights. She enjoyed friendships with many of Canada’s prominent writers, including Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Timothy Findley. Engel drew on Rains’s story in a number of writing projects. The Major inspired a radio play that Engel worked on during the 1970s called “At Home, St Joseph’s Island, June 25, 1848.”1 He provided a model for Colonel Cary in her Governor General’s award winning novel, Bear (1976). And he appears, along with Frances and Elizabeth, in Engel’s last novel-in-progress, “Elizabeth and the Golden City.” As Major Arthur Silliker, he plays a leading role in the lives of Elizabeth and Frances Lennox, sisters who, like their Doubleday namesakes, are the mothers of his chil-

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dren. Major Rains and the Doubleday sisters were clearly a source of literary inspiration for Engel. Beyond the insights of biography, Marian and the Major explores the fascinating relationship between history and literature in a Canadian context. It contributes richly to the tradition of pioneer and immigrant stories in Canada, of which Susanna Moodie’s and Catharine Parr Traill’s are perhaps the best known examples.2 Like the Moodies and Traills, Rains and the Doubleday sisters faced the challenge of carving new lives in strange and often unforgiving circumstances. As Charlotte Gray has observed of Moodie’s and Traill’s arrivals in the New World, two years after Rains and the Doubledays landed in 1830, they encountered raw Upper Canada, not pastoral England. “Hideous roads, swarms of black-flies, swamp fever, thieving land agents and a disgusting diet of potatoes and pork fat,” one disillusioned and defeated Englishman reported to Susanna Moodie as he headed back to the home country.3 For nineteenth-century immigrants from Europe, life “in the backwoods” of Upper Canada meant “roughing it in the bush,” in the memorable words ascribed to Catharine Parr Traill’s and Susanna Moodie’s experiences. Like Moodie and Traill and the Doubledays, Engel’s fictional Elizabeth and Frances are sisters – a relationship the author was clearly interested in exploring in greater depth. If the inspiration for “Elizabeth and the Golden City” began with the Major, it extended to the Doubledays and to relationships between sisters in general, including Engel’s. The intricacies and complexities of sisterly relationships brought depth and dimension to “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” and form another focus in this volume. In that quintessential Canadian way whereby the land itself becomes a character in a story, this book is also about St Joseph Island, still home to many Rains descendants. Situated just east of the northern Ontario city of Sault Ste Marie, at the junction of the Great Lakes Huron and Superior, St Joseph Island long enjoyed a strategic location on one the narrowest points of the Great Lakes shipping system. Twenty miles by eleven-and-a-half miles at its greatest length and breadth, it is the second largest fresh water island in the world. The most northerly point of the Niagara Escarpment, it shares the limestone formation of the Niagara and Manitoulin districts and boasts the largest maple syrup production in Ontario, as well as “St Joe sweet corn,” and the famous “puddingstone,” a stone unique to the Algoma area whose formations reminded early settlers of fruit puddings.4 A picturesque

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island, it offers holiday charm in summer and winter alike, and is affectionately referred to as “The Garden of Algoma.” Today it remains associated with the Major; Rainses from near and far gather for reunions on St Joseph Island, most recently in July 2005, and remember the Major in anecdotes passed down through the generations. It is easy enough to understand why Rains’s descendants would be fascinated by this figure, but what accounted for Marian Engel’s interest in the Major? Rains’s story gave Engel the opportunity to act on her attraction to family and social history and to realize an ambition originating as far back as her early unpublished novel “Lost Heir and Happy Families.” In the 1960s, when her career was just gaining momentum, Engel was already exploring the creative potential offered by family history. Although her birth family history was obscure, she delved with delight into that of her adoptive family, the Passmores, and that of her husband, Howard Engel. She was equally alive to the literary possibilities of Ontario social history – in her view a veritable gold mine just waiting to be tapped. “I am aware as I think most of us are,” Engel commented to Mrs Victoria Rains Agnew in a letter dated 31 March 1974, “that much Canadian historical writing is dull because it does not contain enough personal detail. If you would fill me in on family stories, I would be delighted.”5 Her curiosity was not idle, Engel assured Mrs Rains Agnew: “I would like to do justice to Major Rains … I have written my play already, but intend to revise it, and I hope that eventually the material will make a book.”6 Marian and the Major endeavours to fulfil that hope by making Engel’s “Elizabeth and the Golden City” available in published form. The first part of this book offers a brief portrait of Major William Kingdom Rains as a frame and context for the presentation, in the second part of the book, of core excerpts from “Elizabeth and the Golden City.” Part II is divided into two sections, Montreal and Toronto, the main geographical settings Engel chose for her story. A short third part offers additional pieces from the novel. While their inclusion in its final version cannot be confirmed, they are in quality and appeal too good to leave aside. Drawing the parts together is a weave of scholarly background notes, illustrating the complex links between life and literature, between published and archival material, and between the Rains-Doubleday story and its literary rendition by Marian Engel.

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Marian and the Major is, finally, a book about literary genesis and production. It is an illustration of how real-life times, events, places, and people can be transformed into fiction. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter some of the striking figures from Rains’s world of Napoleonic Europe and nineteenth-century migration to North America, such as Wellington, Byron, Brunel, Agassiz, and Bryant, as well as some of the memorable individuals from Engel’s world of 1960s Canadian and Québécois cultural development and nationalism, including Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Alice Munro, Graeme Gibson, Matt Cohen, Farley Mowat, and Michael Ondaatje, as the worlds of Major William Kingdom Rains and Marian Engel, born over a century apart, come together in Marian and the Major.

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PA R T I

The Major and Marian

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CHAPTER ONE

Major William Kingdom Rains

Information about William Kingdom Rains is scattered in a handful of sources, including regional history books, museum and library archives, parish records, family memoirs, oral history, and finally, notes taken by Marian Engel in her cahiers.1 Facts are few and far between. A key source is Historic St. Joseph Island (1938),2 researched and written by Rains’s granddaughter, Estelle Bayliss, and her husband, Joseph. The Baylisses conducted extensive research into Rains’s life, turning to government archives and parish offices in England, Wales, and Canada for any details they could secure. Their account draws on oral history as well. Estelle recalled “many a delightful hour … spent, seated by her grandmother, Frances Doubleday, as she recounted, in her own inimitable way, incidents of history, fragments of her own life.”3 Another important source of information about Rains is St. Joseph Island: A Tour and Historical Guide (1988) by Jackileen R. Rains and Elsie Hadden Mole. Like Estelle Bayliss, Jackileen Rains has a historian’s interest in St Joseph Island and its people, and has compiled a staggering 218page Rains genealogy, “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains.”4 In the pleasant St Joseph Township Public Library, it is possible to peruse a number of thick files related to William Kingdom Rains. They contain newspaper clippings and copies of personal memoirs and letters that various Rains family members collected over the years. The St Joseph Island Museum offers further documentation and materials, including some that belonged to the Major himself. Rains’s “Field Book,” transcribed and photocopied, is a particular treasure for the details it provides about his military postings and assignments, for entries recording the births of his children,

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and for other fascinating if fleeting glimpses into his life. The museum has copies of a few letters written by Rains as well as “Major William Kingdom Rains Recipes” – again transcribed and photocopied – with recipes not only for food, but also for building materials and other practical goods. Rains’s instructions for making “Cement for Grafting” and “Ventilating Waterproof Cloth,” for example, sit alongside recipes for “Boston Ginger Bread” and “Apple Jelly,” “Rice Flour Blanc Mange” and “Boiled Suet Pudding.” The Major is mentioned in a number of regional histories, including Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals, Compared with Those of Other and Similar Regions. With a Narrative of the Tour by J. Elliot (1850) by Louis Agassiz; Letters of a Traveller, or, Notes of Things in Europe and America (1850) by William Cullen Bryant; Georgina: A Type Study of Early Settlement and Church Building in Upper Canada (1939) by Francis Paget Hett; Lake Huron (1944) by Fred Landon; The Desbarats Country (1950) by Hermon Dunlap Smith; and River of Destiny: The Saint Mary’s (1955) by Joseph and Estelle Bayliss. Rains also makes an appearance in Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) and in Katherine Hale’s Historic Houses of Canada (1952). Over the years, Rains descendants have passed along stories about the Major from one generation to the next. I had the opportunity to hear some of these stories at the Rains Reunion 1–4 July 2005, where I was welcomed by Jackileen Rains and her husband, on whose farm the reunion took place.5 Even so, details about William Kingdom Rains are scantier and more contradictory than one would wish. For example, his date of birth appears as both 1 June 1789 and 2 June 1789.6 Likewise, the date of his marriage to Ann Eve Williams is recorded as both 11 July 1811 and 15 August 1811.7 Recurrent use by generations of Rainses of the same names that Frances and Elizabeth first chose for their children8 can lead to confusion, especially when corresponding dates are missing. In short, there is cause for caution in piecing together Rains’s story from the available documents. Happily, however, many facts can be established.

welsh childhood William Kingdom Rains was born in 1789 at the naval base of Milford Haven in Pembroke County, Wales, to Stephen Rains (1745–1824) of Royal Tunbridge Wells and Ann Kingdom of Plymouth.9 Like his father before

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him, Stephen Rains was a captain in the British Navy. His wife Ann Kingdom belonged to the large family – Bayliss reports sixteen children – of William Kingdom and Joan Spry. Among her siblings, Ann’s sister Sophia married Sir Marc Isambard Brunel,10 the great Victorian engineer with whom Rains would study engineering, an experience that stood him in good stead in later years on St Joseph Island. Stephen Rains and Ann Kingdom had several children – one source names nine11: John Soady, William Kingdom, Ann, Henry, Sophia, Sarah, George Brown, Frances Mary, and Ruport.12 Perhaps because of the large number of children, young William Kingdom was placed with a family named Morgan, in Haverfordwest, Wales. Where the Rains family was large, the Morgans appear to have had no children of their own, and William Kingdom is thought to have inherited their estate, Sutton Lodge, a notion about which my research raises some doubt.13 In October 1803, fourteen-year-old William entered the Royal Military College at Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire. In April of the following year, he proceeded to the Royal Military Woolwich and on 14 June 1805, he graduated and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Artillery.14 Just sixteen years old, he embarked on a twelve-year tour of military service (1805–17). Half of this time (1807–13) was spent fighting in the Peninsular War under Sir Arthur Wellesley, later known as the Duke of Wellington. Rains’s progress through the military ranks and his wide-ranging travels during these years are recorded in his Field Book. Transcribed by Robert J. Andrews in January 1976, the entries provide an idea of the young Rains’s life and experiences: Went to Worley in Essex on the 28th of May 1806 Promoted to 1st Lieut 1st June 1806 Marched to Tilbury Fort 24 July 1806 Embarked 28th July 1806 Disembarked at Plymouth 1st Septr 1806 Embarked 12 Septr 1806 Arrived at Tetouan 1st Novr 1806

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Sailed 8th Novr 1806 Arrived at Messina 3rd Decr 1806 Sailed 8th Decr 1806 Arrived at Augusta 11 Decr 1806 Arrived at Syracuse 13 Decr 1806 Sailed 15 December 1806 Arrived at Malta 16 Decr 1806 Disembarked 19 Decr 1806 Went on detachment to St Angelo 25 Octr 1807 Went back to quarters in Valetta 25 April 1808 Went on Detachment to St Angelo 25th Octr 1808 Went to Valetta 1st April 180915 Rains’s Field Book entries trace his travels throughout Italy and along the Mediterranean coast. On 9 November 1809, he watched the sun rise from the summit of Mount Etna. From the Curcuracci heights on 7 October 1811, he saw Mount Etna erupt. His adventures were punctuated by regular returns to Lissa, Messina, and Malta for periods of rest. On one of these occasions in the summer of 1809, he is thought to have met the poet Lord Byron,16 “for whom he always professed warm sympathy, and whose poetry he could repeat at length,” his granddaughter Estelle recalled.17 Between 1813 and 1815, Rains fought in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, on loan to the Austrian army under Field Marshall Sir John Nugent. Surviving documents from this period record Nugent’s highly favourable evaluation of Rains’s service. On 10 May 1814 Nugent wrote from Alexandria: A True Copy Lt. Rains of the Royal Artillery served under my command during the last two campaigns with the greatest distinction as my reports of the principal actions prove his services were particularly useful at the siege of the castel of Triste, the defense of Ferrana, and the attack of Fiorinquola. He engaged with success a French force three times superior to our Artillery. During the whole campaign Lt. Rains commanded a

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proportion of ordinance much larger than is usual for an officer of his rank. His conduct and bravery deserve the highest recommendation and he has obtained not only my full approbation but likewise the respect and confidence of the whole of the troops under my command. Signed Nugent18 Elsewhere, Nugent praised Rains for his intelligence and effectiveness in directing the Royal Artillery’s mortar fire.19 In a dispatch from Uianna Beauaechter on 5 May 1814,20 Nugent declared that “the guns under the command of Lt. Rains … did great execution. This meritorious officer deserves a medal of approbation from his majesty the Emperor. He at one time manned a gun himself, the cannoneer being killed.”21 Rains indeed received the Emperor’s recognition. Appointed Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold by Emperor Francis I of Austria, he was selected as one of the officers of the allied armies to escort Pope Pius VII, exiled under Napolean, back to the Vatican.22 His Royal Majesty the Prince regent hath been pleased, in the name and behalf of his Majesty, to grant unto William Kingdom Rains, of the Royal Artillery, His Majesty’s Royal license and peroration that he may accept and wear the insignia of the Imperial Austrian Order of Leopold with which the Emperor of Austria has been pleased to honour him, in testimony of the high sense which his Imperial Majesty entertains of the distinguished conduct and service of that officer in the Field during the recent operations in Italy provided never the less that his Majesty’s said license and permission doth not authorize and shall not be debarred or construed to authorize the assumption of any … appellation Rank Providence or privilege portaining [sic] to a knight bachelon [sic] of the realms. And his Royal Highness hath been more than pleased to command that the said Royal Conception and declaration be registered in his Majesty’s college of Arms.23 With British military activity temporarily at rest, Rains retired from the army on half pay. The civilian life to which he returned for seven years, from 1817 to 1824, was characterized by three broad areas of activity: family life; the study of engineering; and service to the Queen.

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c i v i l i a n fa m i ly l i f e William Kingdom Rains had married Ann Eve Williams (1790–1883), daughter of John Williams and Katherine Archer, at Messina, Italy, on 15 August 1811. Ann was one of at least five children. Her sister Katherine married John Fletcher and emigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto; the couple had no children.24 Another sister, Fanny, married Peter Zorab and had six children. There were also two brothers. William Kingdom Rains and Ann Eve Williams had six children. Four were born in Malta and were named after places to which Rains travelled on military duty.25 Lissa Martha was the couple’s first-born on 15 June 1812. A grief-stricken entry in Rains’s Field Book on 30 April 1827 records Lissa’s death on 21 March 1827. A second daughter, Nura Dorothea, was born 1 May 1814, and followed by a son, Archer Morgan, on 7 January 1815. Archer would later accompany his father to Canada where, like his sister Lissa, he too died young. Melita Katherine Fletcher, born 7 July 1817, was named after Ann’s childless sister Katherine.26 Two last children were born after the Rainses left Malta. The family arrived in London 30 October 1817 and on 1 November 1817 Rains applied for and received his discharge at half-pay. In early December 1817, the Rains family relocated to Haverfordwest, Wales, and on 23 November 1818, they took up residence at Rains’s childhood home, Sutton Lodge. Here Eva Sophia was born on Easter Monday, 11 April 1819. All five Rains children were baptised at Lambston Parish Church on 27 July 1819,27 and two years later, on 6 March 1821, Ann and William’s last child together, Conrad, was born. During this period, Rains was introduced to the study of engineering through his aunt Sophia’s husband, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769– 1849). Father of the equally renowned engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859),28 Brunel invented a tunnelling shield that made it possible to construct tunnels under rivers, the first being built under the River Thames. Further accomplishments included the Palace Theatre, New York.29 Brunel had come to England from his native France via America, where he lived from 1793–99. He came to marry an English girl with whom he had fallen in love years earlier, Sophia Kingdom, Rains’s aunt. Through his mother’s family, then, Rains came into contact with Brunel, and Rains’s association with Brunel may account for his numerous trips to London, some 250 miles east of Sutton, during the early 1820s, as noted in his Field Book.

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Walked to London 37 miles 8th Nov r [1822] Walked to Wells 12 Nov r Walked to London 16th Jan ry 1823 Walked to Tunbridge Wells 31st Jan ry [1823] Walked to Ramsgate through Maidstone & Canterbury 4th March Went to London 6th April Went to Tunbridge Wells 12th April Went to London 31st July To Carmarthen 14th Aug t To Sutton Lodge 15th Aug t Arrived in London 29th Jan ry 1824 We sustained the irreparable loss of our dear Father 1st of Feb ry 5 o’clock am [1824] His association with Brunel may also have been a factor in Rains’s decision to emigrate to Upper Canada. Brunel, after all, had travelled to America. He had surveyed the area around Lake Ontario and would have had tales to tell as well as engineering know-how to share with his young relative. The England to which Rains returned between 1817–24 was caught up in the public drama of the newly ascended King George IV’s attempt to annul his marriage. His wife Caroline was the daughter of Karl William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, and Princess Augusta of the United Kingdom, George the III’s eldest sister. Heavy debts had led George, then Prince of Wales, to wed his first cousin in April 1795. A marriage of monetary convenience, it was a failure from the beginning, and the couple lived apart. Upon George’s accession to the throne of England in 1821, however, Caroline claimed her position by his side as Queen. George IV applied to Parliament for a divorce and the Pains and Penalties Bill (1820) was introduced as a means to dissolve the marriage. In turn, Caroline appointed a brilliant young lawyer from Edinburgh, Henry Brougham, as her attorney-general, and he engaged various individuals in the task of constructing a defence of his queen. One of them was Major Rains, according to Bayliss’s research. Rains’s role was to investigate the characters of witnesses testifying against Caroline. He found many of them to be unreliable, Bayliss reports.30 Despite charges of infidelity and unconventional behaviour, Caroline enjoyed widespread popular support, whereas George IV had only the narrower

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support of the upper classes. In the end, thanks in large part to Brougham’s persuasive powers of speech, the Pains and Penalties Bill was defeated in Parliament. Nevertheless, Caroline was barred from George’s coronation, during which she fell violently ill and died. The cause of her death was never determined. As if mirroring the royal marital difficulties, the Rains marriage also began to unravel during this period. Was this the inevitable end of a union that Rains had recorded in his Field Book with the exclamatory “Married and be d—d [damned?] to it 15 August 1811”? Later entries in Rains’s Field Book suggest that he and Ann Eve Williams had started to drift apart shortly after the birth of their last child, Conrad, in the spring of 1821. On 23 May 1821, Ann left Sutton Lodge for nearby Swansea, Wales. The following year, on 29 September 1822, she took the children away to Malta, while Rains stayed on in England. Perhaps it was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Frances and Elizabeth, when their father, Francis Jack Doubleday, placed them under his guardianship. Francis “Mad Jack”31 Doubleday of Carmarthenshire was by Rains family accounts a Milford Haven attorney who had fallen on hard times. He had four daughters and two sons. One son, Frank, died in a hunting accident that the other son, John, may have caused.32 In some accounts, John is reported to have disappeared to Australia or New Zealand, while in others he is said to have gone to America. The latter report may be a confusion with John Rains, William’s older brother, who is known to have emigrated to the United States. Of the four daughters, Ann married and had children. Another daughter, Emma, died young, as did Doubleday’s own wife. Frances and Elizabeth were raised by their father, who sent them to an elite private school so that they were well educated, refined young women by the time they came into the care of William Kingdom Rains. In 1824, Rains requested and was granted reappointment to his former army status. Perhaps he had become bored with the more sedentary style of civilian life. Maybe Sutton Lodge felt empty without the children, who were now in Malta with their mother. Or perhaps he needed the extra income. Whatever his motivation, on 15 November 1824, Rains was placed on full pay again. He remained in service until 1828, with promotion to first Brevet Major on 17 November 1825 and to Major in June 1826. Rains’s Field Book for the period 1824–28 indicates considerable travel through the south of England.33 By the end of his four-year return to military service, Rains

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had formulated two goals. One was to emigrate to Upper Canada. The other was to obtain legal separation from his wife. As the king’s own experiences had shown, divorce at the time required no less than an act of parliament. Legal separation, however, was possible as well as recognized by society. Legally separated, and also legally in charge of the two Doubleday sisters, Rains formed a new relationship with Frances, and on 29 May 1829, their son Tudor Madoc was born, the first of several children to follow. Rains’s plans for Canada continued apace with new complications. In addition to his infant son with Frances, there were his children by Ann Eve Williams to think of, as well as his guardianship of Frances’s sister Elizabeth, age seventeen. His son Archer from his marriage to Ann was living with Rains and Frances, and one chronicler34 maintains that another son from that marriage, Conrad, also remained with his father, while three surviving daughters, Nura Dorothea, Melita Fletcher, and Eva Sophia,35 lived with their mother Ann.36 It is not clear what became of Conrad but Archer died in Canada, as did Ann and her daughters. Possibly they came over at the time of Archer’s death.37 The women settled in Toronto where the Rains-Williams daughters married and had children. Nura Dorothea and Robert J. Turner had three sons,38 while Melita (Katherine Fletcher Rains) and Kenneth Sutherland had six children,39 and Eva Sophia and James B. Sutherland had one child.40 Despite their geographical proximity, however, there is no documentary evidence to suggest that there was any contact between the RainsWilliams and the Rains-Doubleday branches of the family. Rains and his entourage left Sutton Lodge, Wales, on 6 May 1830. Rains’s Field Book records that the group put into Cork on 8 May 1830, set sail again 10 May 1830, and arrived at Quebec on 18 June 1830. From there, they proceeded to Montreal, arriving with summer solstice on 21 June 1830. The next leg of the journey took them to Prescott (23 June 1830) and on to York – present day Toronto – which they reached on 26 June 1830. They then made their way to Newmarket (5 July 1830). The journey continued from there until 14 July 1830 when they arrived at their new home, a beautiful point of land on the southern tip of Lake Simcoe that is today a provincial park outside the town of Sutton, Ontario. Why did Rains emigrate? He had a comfortable home in Wales. He was legally separated from his wife. He could surely have found work through his family connections to Brunel. Why did he abandon all this for the New World?

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Between 1815 and 1845, hundreds of thousands of people left the United Kingdom and Europe for new lives in North America. Their reasons were multiple and complex. Agricultural revolution, industrialization, and urbanization had radically altered their lives. Changing modes of production, dramatic increase in population, and decreasing opportunities for livelihood meant unemployment, housing shortages, and widespread economic uncertainty across Europe and the United Kingdom, though the severity of these conditions varied by region and timing. The economic and social aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and Britain has been the subject of numerous excellent studies that emphasize a confluence of factors, ranging from the impact of war to commercial crises that affected different localities and social classes in different ways and to different degrees.41 For a majority of British emigrants during the first half of the nineteenth century, spreading poverty was a primary impetus for departure. “In every corner of Britain signs of desperation were evident,” Hoffman and Taylor state: For the ordinary people, this was a time of great discontent. It was also a time of shifting demographics and of extraordinary population growth. In a fifty-one year period, between 1780 and 1831, the population had risen from around thirteen million to over twenty-four million. In every corner of Britain, signs of desperation were evident. A significant proportion of the nation’s reserve had been channelled into sustaining the Napoleonic wars. When hostilities ceased, returning soldiers were frequently met with cold comfort in their search for work. It was a cruel twist of fate that, after serving their country through such terrible conflicts, there was no role for them except to swell the ranks of the poor.42 William Kingdom Rains was one of these returning soldiers. He faced the same concerns about the times as the many men and women of Britain who left for Upper Canada during this period. Emigrants came from all walks of life and all types of background. “It made little difference whether one arrived as a pauper or with pockets bulging,” Frances Hoffman and Ryan Taylor observe in Across the Waters: Ontario Immigrants’ Experiences 1820–1950.43 Thus the Rainses joined the Moodies, Traills, Sibbalds, and countless other British families whose lives continued in Canada.

CHAPTER TWO

Lake Simcoe, Upper Canada

No detailed record remains of the Rainses’ journey from Wales to Simcoe, neither in the Major’s Field Book, nor in any letters that the Doubleday sisters might have sent home. In this silence Frances and Elizabeth differed from another pair of sisters, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, who made a similar journey a few years later.1 The Lake Simcoe area where Frances and Elizabeth arrived with Rains and the children in the summer of 1830 was considerably less developed than other parts of the colony, including the Peterborough region where Moodie and Traill settled.2 Land grants were not issued until 1819 and by 1835, there were still fewer than two hundred people living in the area. Public transportation by stagecoach was not available until 1825 and the first steamboat did not appear until 1832. Newcomers and travellers – the Rainses among them – typically made the long journey from Toronto along rough corduroy roads. The worst of the blackfly season would have been over by the end of June as Rains, Frances, Elizabeth, and the children headed north from Toronto, itself a muddy miniature of the metropolis it would later become. Mosquitoes would have been plentiful, however, and the weather already warm if not hot. It is not difficult to imagine the group’s relief upon arriving at Lake Simcoe, where fresh breezes from the lake would have helped keep the bugs at bay and the sandy beach along the shore would have been a blessing after the bumpy roads. The land on Lot 10, Concession 8 promised good crops that would spread out around the two-story house that Rains would build and name Penrains.

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Houses are an important part of the Rains-Doubleday story,3 both in their actual lives and in the fictionalized version Engel later wrote. Penrains – as it was spelled in Rains’s Field Book on 4 October 1830, or Penn Range as it appears in other accounts – was the first Rains home in Canada. The house still stands today, converted into a museum at the heart of Sibbald Point Provincial Park. But Rains’s presence on the site has been eclipsed by that of its subsequent owner, Susan Mein Sibbald.4 Rains sold Penrains to Sibbald in 1835 and the furniture, family portraits, and dishware on display in the museum today belonged to the Sibbalds, not to the Rains-Doubledays.5 The house was also renamed Eildon Hall, after Sibbald’s childhood home in Scotland, and the land that Rains farmed is known today as Sibbald Point. Rains’s name merits a mention in the museum’s pamphlet and on a plaque that stands outside the building. And visitors to the Eildon Hall Museum can still stand in the centre of the building that Rains constructed and imagine Frances and Elizabeth and the children charging up and down the stairs that lead to two small bedrooms on the second floor. The sisters must have shared these bedrooms with the children, and with Rains. A two-storey house was a respectable affair in 1830s Canada. Katherine Hale describes Penrains/Eildon Hall as “a venerable mansion on the southern shores of Lake Simcoe, near Sutton West in Ontario.”6 The location is spectacular, with the lake stretching out on both sides of the point. On summer days, happy sounds of children playing on the sandy beach fill the air. It is hardly surprising that the house and its setting caught Susan Mein Sibbald’s eye as she sailed by on Lake Simcoe’s first steamship, the Sir John Colborne, in the summer of 1835. Mrs Sibbald was on a mission: she was searching for suitable land for her sons to farm. The Sibbalds had nine sons in all.7 Two of them, William and Charles, had come to Upper Canada because prospects in Britain were poor, especially for young men, and they hoped to improve their fortunes in the New World. William and Charles Sibbald landed near Orillia, just to the east of Rains’s Simcoe location. Hearing that her sons were living above a tavern, Mrs Sibbald set out to rectify the situation. Colonel William Sibbald was ill and unable to travel, so his wife sailed in the company of another of their sons, Archibald. The pair found William and Charles dutifully doing as they were supposed to – “developing respectable careers in agriculture, as had been planned.”8 They needed land of their own, however, and their mother determined to find them some. This was what Mrs Sibbald was doing aboard the Sir John Col-

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borne when she spotted “an old colonial house, white-walled, greenshuttered and surrounded by a verandah” – Penrains.9 Timing was on her side. Rains was ready to sell. Susan Mien Sibbald turned Rains’s comfortable colonial house into a Regency country estate. She had the second floor extended to create six more bedrooms and she oversaw the addition of a carriage house, a dairy, a parlour, a large kitchen and kitchen garden, a gallery, an office, a heated greenhouse, a smoke-house to cure fish and hams, and a peacock house. Her family had the financial means for such expansion. Born in Cornwall in 1783, the fifth daughter10 of Dr Thomas Mein of the Royal Navy and Margaret Ellis, Susan was educated at the elite Belvedere House in Bath. Accomplished in music, art, and literature, she made her debut at seventeen and for the next few years divided her time between London, Edinburgh, and the family estate. The Mein estate neighboured on those of the novelist Sir Walter Scott and the wealthy Sibbald family, into which Susan married at age twenty-four. In Canada, the Sibbalds focussed on improving and maintaining soil quality through annual crop rotation and diversification, extensive manuring and triple ploughing, and superior livestock and poultry breeds.11 The family expanded its farming practice to include maple syrup and apple orchards, and they landscaped the farm in British style. A European weeping ash, brought in a flowerpot from Italy by Susan’s son Thomas, and a stately American elm, both planted nearly 150 years ago, still stand today. A white cedar hedge protected Eildon Hall from winds off the lake in winter; the road leading from Eildon Hall to St George’s Church was lined by cedars and a stacked stone wall, and sugar maples alternated with pine and spruce trees in the adjoining fields. Susan Sibbald lent her support to the construction of a community school, church, and cemetery. She collaborated with Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe’s daughter, Charlotte,12 to raise funds from overseas for these purposes. The schoolhouse was completed in 1837 and construction of the church began in 1838. A modest wooden structure located at the entrance of Eildon Hall estate, it was replaced in 1877 by St George’s Church, a solid stone building established in Sibbald’s memory by her sons Thomas, Hugh, and Frank. She is buried by the church alongside a number of notable figures of Canadian literature, including the writers Mazo de la Roche (1879–1961), author of the enormously successful Jalna novels, and Stephen

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Leacock (1869–1944), whose autobiography, The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946), captures life at Eildon Hall at the turn of the century. Leacock spent the summers between 1880–1908 in the Sibbalds’ guest house, “The Grange,” the setting of his “Buggam Grange: A Good Old Ghost Story.” Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) also depicts aspects of Eildon Hall and St George’s Church. Leacock was one of many distinguished guests whom Susan persuaded to board the steamship or brave the corduroy road leading to her home. She in turn made trips to Toronto to visit with her friends, who included Governor-General Sir Charles Metcalf, Admiral Robert Baldwin, Bishop John Strachan, and Chief Justice Sir John Beverley Robinson. Susan Mein Sibbald clearly cultivated to its fullest the potential that William Kingdom Rains had seen in Penrains. By 1835, however, as the Sir John Colborne steamed by with Sibbald on board, Rains had new plans and was ready to move on. He had been preparing this departure for some time. On 27 March 1833, Rains was appointed Justice of the Peace for the Home District, comprised of Northumberland, York, Durham, and Simcoe counties.13 In 1834, he petitioned Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne to colonize St Joseph Island. He had respectable partners – his neighbour Archibald Hamilton Scott, a former British Naval Officer, and Charles Thompson, a promoter from Toronto14 – and together they planned to establish a sawmill and a store on St Joseph. The island was strategically located at the junction of the Great Lakes in St Mary’s River, for many years the major route to the West. Not far away, copper had been discovered at the Bruce Mines. The island itself was fertile and suitable for farming; the partners assumed that a sawmill to provide building materials would surely attract settlers. Indeed, the scheme seemed solid and on 20 December 1834, Rains was granted the concession to colonize St Joseph Island: “Major Rains and the Capitalists [Archibald Hamilton Scott and Charles Thompson] who intend to unite with him, might, I think be allowed with advantage to the Province to purchase five thousand aces each at a shilling per acre, and to dispose of lots of two hundred acres each at the same rate to actual settlers; provided he transmits Returns to the Commissioners of Crown Lands of the Lots sold by him, and report regularly the number under cultivation.”15 Rains, Scott, and Thompson loaded a steamboat16 with sawmill machinery and merchandise for the store and at the beginning of June 1835 they sailed to St Joseph. Their first impression of the island they had come to

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colonize was reported in the Toronto Recorder on 7 June 1835: “The Steamboat Penetanguishene returned this day from her first trip to Sault Ste Marie, Michilimackinac, and St. Joseph, on which island they left the first settlers. The whole party speaks in raptures of the beauty of the scenery among the islands … which cannot be surpassed.”17 The beauty of the island and the prospect of success in business, however, may not have been the only reasons for Rains’s departure from the shores of Lake Simcoe and the comfort of Penrains. Four of Rains’s children had been born at Penrains and one had been buried there. Rains’s Field Book records the birth but not the death of Archer, his son by Ann Eve Williams. Born in 1815, Archer would have been between fifteen and twenty when he died – still a young man.18 Rains had been grief-stricken by the death of his first-born child, Lissa, at fifteen; no doubt he felt the same grief upon Archer’s death. Perhaps Penrains became too great a reminder of the sad loss. Or perhaps his growing family had simply outgrown the space: four children were safely delivered at Penrains – Owen Ronald, 25 March 1831; Agnes, 25 May 1832; Walter William, 31 July 1832, and Edith, 3 August 1835. The birth dates of Agnes and Walter, three months apart, indicate that the unusual household for which Rains became known had already come into effect. Agnes’s mother was Elizabeth, while Walter’s was Frances. This development may have been at least part of the impetus behind the household’s move. On 26 August 1835, Rains packed up the sisters and their children and left Penrains to its new owner. On 5 September 1835, the Rainses landed on St Joseph Island.

CHAPTER THREE

St Joseph Island

To the Chippewa who were there long before European explorers, traders, and settlers arrived, St Joseph Island was known as Payentanassin. The name Anipich1 also appears on a map dating from 1670.2 Local historian Jackileen Rains notes that in 1725 the island was called St Jean, while in 1744 both the names Caribou and St Joseph were current.3 There are various accounts for the name St Joseph. One relates that since the river was called St Mary’s, the island was appropriately called St Joseph.4 Another claims that a Jesuit missionary who nearly drowned near the island named it St Joseph in honour of the saint whom he credited for his survival.5 The first European known to have come to the island was Etienne Brulé. A member of Samuel de Champlain’s crew, Brulé was sent inland in the early 1620s to explore travel routes. Jean Nicolet was sent with similar instructions in the 1630s and the fur traders and Jesuits followed. Records from the period identify the names Jogues, Raymbault, Menard, Allouez, Nicolas, and Marquette among the arrivals.6 In 1649, Matthew Creswell and twenty European men, with the help of a large group of aboriginal men (Jackileen Rains suggests as many as one thousand), constructed a stone building on the southern tip of the island. Creswell’s community seems to have been wiped out by smallpox in 1658. The American explorer and ethnologist Henry R. Schoolcraft (1793–1864) recorded a canoe battle between the Iroquois and the Huron off the tip of the island in the 1650s.7 Tribal relations were a matter of concern for the newcomers, especially as tribes began to side with or against the British and the French. In 1671, New France’s administrator, Jean Talon, decided that it was important for France

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to declare formal possession of the country and sent a young French nobleman named François Daumont, Sieur de St Lusson, to the task. On 14 June 1671, Daumont claimed all the lands draining into the Great Lakes for the King of France, thus marking the official start of French influence on St Joseph Island. It would last until the historic battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, when Montcalm’s defeat by the British General Wolfe ended French rule and Canada was decreed British. In 1783 St Joseph Island offered a nearby alternative to the highly strategic post at Michilimackinac, which the British lost to the United States under the Treaty of Paris. The British needed a site from which to protect the fur trade from the Americans. They entered negotiations with the Chippewa for the purchase of St Joseph. The Chippewa sold the island to the British government on 30 June 1798, in a transaction that was recorded 20 July 1798 and that detailed a list of goods and items included as the purchase price. The British built Fort St Joseph on the southern point of the island where it played a role in the War of 1812. The Congress of the United States declared war on Great Britain on 18 June 1812. Tension between the Americans and British had been mounting as a result of their respective foreign and trade policies, as well as regional issues, in particular control over the fur trade routes and the Great Lakes. In Upper Canada, General Brock reacted quickly to the declaration of war. He sent word to Captain Roberts at Fort St Joseph to prepare for immediate attack on Fort Michilimackinac, where Lieutenant Porter Hanks had not yet heard the news. Unprepared, Hanks and the Americans surrendered and no blood was shed. The British remained posted at Michilimackinac, leaving Fort St Joseph unprotected. Two years later, in 1814, the Americans burned down Fort St Joseph and the nearby North West Company storehouses. American plans to recapture Fort Michilimackinac were foiled, however, and it remained in British possession until the end of the War of 1812. Under the terms of the peace agreement, Michilimackinac was restored to the Americans. Rather than return to St Joseph, however, the British relocated to Drummond Island. As Jackileen Rains notes, with the decline of the fur trade, a British garrison was no longer required in the area and St Joseph became virtually deserted.8

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m i l f o r d h av e n , s t j o s e p h i s l a n d 1 8 3 5 – 3 7 St Joseph Island had a long, vigorous history by the time William Kingdom Rains arrived with his family on 5 September 1835. The Major named the broad inlet to the east of the peninsula9 where he landed Tenby Bay, and the narrow inlet to the west of the peninsula Milford Haven, both names recalling life back in Wales. He and his partners located the sawmill and store at Milford Haven. Archibald Scott was in charge of the mill and Rains operated the store. The enterprise that seemed so sound in the planning soon began to falter. Neither the local French nor the native residents, nor the handful of settlers who came to the island, had the means to purchase lumber from the mill or merchandise from the store. Nor had the partners banked on the competition from the Hudson’s Bay Company at Sault Ste Marie, where fish and fur could still be traded for goods. A fatal blow to the fledgling enterprise came with the news that all Rains’s funds had been lost. According to Rains family history, Rains had netted some 30,000 British pounds from the combined sale of his army commission and Sutton Lodge in Wales. He entrusted the funds to an agent, who appears to have been either his sister-in-law Ann’s son, John Walcott, or his sister Ann’s son, John Clark.10 In any event, someone speculated unwisely and lost or otherwise squandered Rains’s money. Lacking this financial backing, the St Joseph Island business plan faltered and ultimately failed. “By July, 1839,” Bayliss records, “or three years after the partners came to the island, two of them, namely Rains and Scott, had withdrawn from the enterprise, while the remaining partner, Charles Thompson, had evidently turned his attention to commercial pursuits, having found the original idea of colonizing the island impracticable.”11 A report by Samuel P. Jarvis, Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs, delegated to assess the progress of colonization on St Joseph Island in July 1839, notes: Major Rains is still considered as one of the original proprietors who bargained with the Govt. Mr. Scott sold his share reserving only the farm of 100 acres on which he resides. A younger brother has since purchased the interest which the elder brother disposed of from the Company. Major Rain [sic] occasionally visits the Settlement at Milford Haven, but seldom interferes with the arrangements of the Company.

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Mr. Charles Thompson is considered the active partner, and has been the largest contributor of money. Mr. Peck is the Acting Agent under Mr. Thompson, and carries on a very extensive and lucrative trade in fish and sugar and fur …12 The number of houses belonging to persons, who may be considered Settlers is twelve. Mr. Scott’s and Mr. Peck’s are the largest and best built. The others are very inferior log houses.13 By the time of Jarvis’s report, Rains had moved households. Without funds to invest in the company, he had withdrawn from commercial affairs. While he had been appointed Magistrate for the District of Algoma (13 July 1836),14 it was not enough to keep him in Milford Haven. One can only imagine the mental fortitude that would have been required to carry on after such a catastrophic outcome. Nevertheless, Rains persevered. And he and the sisters were not destitute, as Frances and Elizabeth each received a modest monthly income that kept the families afloat.15 Their next house was Hentlan on Rains Point.

hentlan house, rains point 1837–49 Rains Point is situated just east of where Fort St Joseph once stood on the former site of a North West Company trading post established in 1792. Both the fort and the post storehouses had been burned down by the Americans in 1814. This is where Rains moved next, naming his new home “Hentlan.” There are two explanations for this choice. Jackileen Rains writes that Hentlan means “Old Place” and was chosen by Rains in honour of the former North West trading post that had occupied the site. Bayliss, however, states that Rains chose Hentlan “after an intimate friend, Lewis of Hentlan, who was a Church of England minister in the old country.”16 The publication date of Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) suggests that it was the Rains household at Hentlan that she glimpsed on her travels in Upper Canada: “We proceeded, coasting along the north shore of St Joseph’s Island,” she wrote. 17 “There is, in the interior, an English settlement, and a village of Indians. The principal proprietor, Major R-, who is a magistrate and justice of the peace, has two Indian women living with him – two sisters, and a family by each! – such are the

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examples sometimes set to the Indians on our frontiers.” Jameson’s comment reflects the misinformation that circulated about Rains and the Doubleday sisters, as well as her views of their household arrangement. Several children were born at Hentlan.18 Elizabeth had a son, Evan Ernest, born 10 June 1838; both sisters had daughters in 1839 (Alice and Blanche respectively) and sons in 1841 (Allen Wilfred, born 16 February to Elizabeth, and Arthur Morgan, born 18 March to Frances). The next three babies were Frances’s: Hoel Dahl, 6 May 1844; Constance, 15 May 1846, and Rupert Raymond, 12 September 1847. Elizabeth had another daughter, Rose, in 1848,19 and a son, Norman William, born 8 November 1849. During this period, the scientist Louis Agassiz, and his assistant J. Elliot Cabot visited the Rains homestead. Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807– 1873) was a Swiss-born physician and naturalist whose work on fish fossils, Poissons fossiles, established his reputation in the scientific community. He became known as the “Father of Glaciology” for his study of glaciers and his theory that the earth had experienced a great Ice Age. In 1846, Agassiz immigrated to the United States where in 1848 he accepted a professorship at Harvard University. Between 30 June and 15 August 1848, Agassiz explored Lake Superior, an expedition that resulted in the publication of Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation and Animals, Compared with those of Other and Similar Regions (1850). It was during these travels that he and his assistant met Rains.20 Cabot recorded: As we landed, a rather rough-looking, unshaven personage in shirtsleeves walked up and invited us to his house, which was close at hand. We found his walls lined with books; Shakespeare, Scott, Hemans, etc caught my eye as I passed the shelves, forming a puzzling contrast with the rude appearance of the dwelling. A very few moments sufficed to show a similar contrast in our host himself. He knew Professor Agassiz by reputation, had read reports of his lectures in the newspapers, and evinced a warm interest in the objects of our excursion. When he found out who the Professor was, he produced a specimen in spirits of the rare gar-pike of Lake Huron and insisted upon his accepting it, and afterwards sent him various valuable specimens. His conversation, eager and discursive, running over Politics, Science and Literature, was that of an intelligent and well-read man, who kept up, by books and newspapers, an acquaintance with the leading topics of the day, but seldom had an

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opportunity of discussing them with persons similarly interested. He turned out to be an ex-Major in the British Army, and he showed us a portrait of himself in full regimentals, remarking with a smile that he had once been noted as the best-dressed man in his regiment.21 Marian Engel fictionalized Agassiz’s visit to the Major’s house on St Joseph Island in an early draft of her unfinished novel, included in the third part of this volume, “Trompe l’Oeil.” In 1849, the year after this encounter, Walter, who had been born to Frances at Penrains in 1832, drowned at Hentlan.22 And just as he had moved his family from Penrains after Archer’s death, Rains relocated his household following Walter’s death.

loch (lough) rains house, sterling ( s t i r l i n g ) b a y 1 8 4 9 – 5 4 23 The Major, Frances, Elizabeth, and their children moved to Stirling Bay, into a home they called Loch (Lough) Rains, which looked out over Tenby Bay towards Milford Haven. The house, described by Estelle Bayliss in 1938 when it was still standing, “was built of cedar logs, fastened together with wooden pins. The roof was of split cedar, covered with cedar bark. The fence, whose cedar pickets were hand made by Major Rains’s son Owen, still stands erect, while lilac bushes, hop vines, and mountain ash trees planted by the Major, continue to flourish.”24 From its description, Loch Rains was a pleasant place to call home. Frances’s daughter Linda was born at Loch Rains on 1 October 1850,25 while Elizabeth had a boy, Xavier, on 8 January 1851. Xavier was Elizabeth’s last child. Frances went on to have two more children, of which the second to last, William Wilfred, was born at Loch Rains on 12 October 1852. Another traveller through the Great Lakes region at this time recorded his impressions of Rains. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was an American poet, lawyer, and newspaper editor known for his anti-slavery advocacy, his legal expertise, and the simple but powerful style of his poetry. Bryant observed: We passed Drummonds Island and then coasted to St. Joseph’s [sic] Island, on the woody shore of which I was shown a solitary house.

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There I was told lives a long-nosed Englishman, a half-pay officer with two wives, sisters, each the mother of numerous offspring. The English polygamist has been more successful in seeking solitude than in avoiding notoriety. The very loneliness of his habitation causes it to be remarked, and there is not a passenger who makes the voyage to the Sault, to whom his house is not pointed out, and his story related. It was hinted to me that he had a third wife in Toronto, but I have my private doubts of this part of the story, and suspect that it was thrown in to increase my wonder.26 Rains’s family life on Stirling Bay may have seemed lonely to the more urban Bryant, but it was rich and rewarding in its way, with books and schooling part of daily activities. However, Rains would move his growing family away from Loch Rains. In 1853, the household was relocated yet again, this time to the other side of the St Mary’s River, on Rains (Neebish) Island.

bas swo o d l o d g e , r a i n s i s l a n d 1 8 5 4 – 6 0 The Rains’s fourth house, Basswood Lodge, on the island known today as Little Neebish, had been built by previous owners. “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003” claims that it belonged to a man named Cadotte, who had built it and then moved to Penetanguishene. Bruce Martin relates a more dramatic story: Major William Kingdom Rains moved from Lock [sic] Rains to the vacant house at The Upper Encampment which had formerly been occupied by two trappers, known as Black Anthony and Le Sens. These trappers had trapped north of Lake Superior. About 1850 Black Anthony returned to the Trading Post in Sault Ste. Marie without his partner Le Sens. The authorities suspected something was amiss, went up to the camp in which the two trappers had made their headquarters. Poking through a heap of ashes outside, they discovered human bones. Black Anthony was charged with the murder of Le Sens and sentenced to be hung, thus his house became vacant. The major, after moving into the empty house soon enlarged it, to make it more comfortable for his large family.27

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Whether or not the story of Black Anthony and his partner Le Sens is accurate, Rains did indeed expand the dwelling on Rains Island (Little Neebish Island) to accommodate his growing family. Frances’s last child, Alma Marie, was born at Basswood on 4 March 1855. Across the river on St Joseph Island, Rains’s sons Arthur, Hoel, Rupert, and William were clearing land at Sailors Encampment where Tudor Rains was operating a successful wooddock and a small store. The Major frequently made the short trip across the water for business and family reasons. He joined Tudor in the sale of wood, taking over a business that had been started in 1851 by John Spaulding and his partner James Ransselaer.28 “He had a sailboat built for him which could carry twenty cords of wood,” Bayliss records. “Some of the wood was cut near the foot of St. Joseph, and ferried across the river to be sold to passing boats for fuel.”29 Rains became acquainted with the officers, and on occasion they would have their boat orchestras strike up “God Save the Queen” as they passed, to the great delight of the Rains children.30 There were now Rains households on both sides of the river, as Rains letters from the period indicate. P.W. Murray, who transcribed some of these letters, included notes about Rains’s arrangements for the sale, rental, and purchase of properties at Loch Rains (Rains Point), Basswood Lodge (Rains/ Neebish Island), and Sailors Encampment respectively.31 As Bruce Martin noted, “Major Rains and his sons were really kept busy from the time of their arrival at Encampment Island in 1854 until 1860 … Between their other work, they were clearing land to farm on St. Joseph Island, and building two log homes for the Major’s two families.”32 When an 1860 survey declared that Rains Island was in fact part of the United States, Rains left that side of the river and settled into his final home, Westfield, at Sailors Encampment,33 St Joseph Island.

w e s t f i e l d , sa i l o rs e n c a m p m e n t, s t j o s e p h i s l a n d 1 8 6 0 –7 4 Sailors Encampment acquired its name from French navigators who were obliged to spend a winter on St Joseph Island when the water routes froze.34 In the handful of surviving letters from this period, Rains refers to the Encampment by its French name “Campement Matelot” – typically spelled “Campment Matelot.” Sailors Encampment was a lively centre. In the

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1830s and 1840s schooners stopped regularly, followed by paddle-wheel steamers in need of wood for their furnaces. The wood-dock business flourished for many years, and the Riverside Hotel, built in 1872, became a popular watering-hole for the men of the area. “Many were the tall stories told by the patrons,” Martin writes, “as the locals tried, and often succeeded in outdoing the sailors or other visitors in the humour and outlandish fabrications they recounted.”35 When coal replaced wood as fuel for steamers at the turn of the century, Sailors Encampment’s lively times ended, unfortunately for the Rainsmere Hotel, a project that Walter and Clara Rains undertook in 1896 and that endured more hard times than good times until the stately building was demolished in 1989.36 Westfield was one of two homes Rains built at Sailors Encampment with the help of his growing sons. It was the house he shared with Frances. A second house for Elizabeth and her children was built a mile to the north of Westfield on what is today the Coulter farm.37 By the time the Rainses settled into life at the Encampment, the Major was in his seventies, and Frances and Elizabeth in their fifties. They were now grandparents. As P.W. Murray notes on his transcription of a letter Rains sent from the Encampment on 5 August 1855, the candy that the Major was ordering along with other items “was obviously for his grandchildren.” The letter also reveals that Rains was aware of events in the world at large. The former soldier expressed his view on the Crimean War: Campment Matelot 5 Aug. 1855 Please to give Mr. Archibald Stirling 1 barrel of pork, 1 barrel of flour for us. Also some trifling articles – very sorry you stop[ped] here without our having a chat. Don’t you fancy because the French and English blundered and had a slight check, that they are not going to take Sebastopol – I fear nothing but sickness that will fall ten times heavier on the Russians, certain however one Frenchman or Englishman is of ten times more Stirling value than a Russian. Regards to Mrs & Miss Barbeau. Truly yours, W.K. Rains 1 salad dish 1 quire of paper candy, or any children’s condiments if cheaper

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Archibald Stirling was Rains’s son-in-law, husband of Frances’s daughter Alice, St Joseph’s first schoolteacher. The Barbeaus lived in Sault Ste Marie and were among Rains’s friends. A descendant, Mrs E.S.B. Sutton,38 recalled in later years that Rains was a frequent and welcome guest at the Barbeaus, as well as with the officers of Fort Brady. William Kingdom Rains was a well-liked man. As a young officer, he had earned the esteem and confidence of the men who served with him. “It gives me great pleasure,” Marshall Nugent had written of Rains on 20 July 1814, “to perceive upon every occasion the high opinion that is entertained of you.” “Amiable” and “jovial” were how Katherine Hale and F. Paget Hett chose to describe Rains at the time of the sale of Penrains to Susan Mein Sibbald.39 Those who met or knew Rains on St Joseph Island retained memories of “a man of education and broad culture, well read not only in the literature of his own tongue but of others as well, fond of music and of beauty in nature.”40 Indeed, Rains’s library included works by Shakespeare, Byron, Hemans, Lytton, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, Moore, Gray, and Shelley, as well as technical works on birds, fish, and flowers, a few books in French, and some in Italian. He could read, write, and converse in French, Italian, and Greek, and had a speaking knowledge of several other languages. He could recite Byron’s poetry at length and he copied down many poems by Byron and other literary friends.41 Rains’s books were passed down to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Winnie Brayley described her great-grandfather’s volumes: “Musty, crisp and yellowed by age, written in old English script, many with the “S” letter written as “F” [they included] books of learning to tutor his and other children, church and religious manuals, in Latin and English, law books to administer justice in the name of the British government.”42 Among the volumes were Goold Brown’s Institutes of English Grammar (New York: Samuel S. and William Wood; Brayley cites an 1859 edition); William Phillips’s Elementary Introduction to the Knowledge of Mineralogy (London: W. Phillips, 1816); two volumes of William Enfield’s work on Natural Philosophy (London: J. Johnson, 1753); a Latin reader; The World’s Ready Reckoner and Rapid Calculator (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1890)43; Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son (London: J. Dodsley, 1774); history books by Alfred Noyes, books of sermons by Hugh Blair, and Samuel Seyer’s Principles of Christianity (Bristol: J. Rudhall, 1746). Brayley described “well marked volumes of poems,” including Sir Richard Blackmore’s Creation: A Philosophical Poem (London, 1712), Samuel Rogers’s Pleasures

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of Memory (London: J. Davis, 1792), Thomas Curnick’s Vortigern and Rowena: A Poem (Bristol: Philip Rose, 1814), and William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (London: John Sharpe, 1819). Rains’s love for adventure was reflected in such works as Della’s (pseudonym) The Rambles and Surprising Adventures of Captain Bolio (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), three volumes of Alain-René Le Sage’s Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (London: W. Strahan et al., 1782), and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (London: Longman, 1801).44 In addition to books there were many newspapers and magazines. “The mails were irregular and infrequent,” Bayliss wrote, “but when they arrived, the Major read aloud in the evening from the London Times, the Illustrated London News, and other publications;” in addition, “Good music entranced him. For the same reason, he was an enthusiastic gardener. He did not swear or smoke, but drank freely at times. He keenly enjoyed conversing with the learned Jesuit Fathers, upon their visits to St. Joseph, although he remained a member of the Church of England all his life.”45 “All of this and much more as well might long since have been forgotten were it not for a more romantic aspect of Major Rains’s life,” Fred Landon remarked in 1944, referring to Rains’s families by Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday. “What might have happened in an old and ordered society such as that of England one cannot tell,” but in 1850 Upper Canada, “utmost harmony seems to have existed,” though “a domestic situation such as this was bound to create a measure of notoriety and arouse criticism, some of it not in accordance with the facts.”46 Clearly a well-liked man to his final days, William Kingdom Rains died at the age of eighty-five at Westfield, St Joseph Island, on 19 October 1874. Frances died at Westfield on 24 November 1891. She was eighty years old. Elizabeth, who survived her sister by eight years, left St Joseph to live with her son Xavier, lighthouse keeper at 40 Mile Point Lighthouse, Michigan,47 where she died at eighty-six on 27 February 1899.48 Only Frances is buried on St Joseph, in the little cemetery of St Mary’s Church, looking out over Sailors Encampment. Elizabeth is buried in Rogers City Cemetery, Michigan.49 The Major, who received a military funeral in Sault Ste Marie, is interred in the city’s Greenwood Cemetery. Rains died on the eve of the influx of settlers to St Joseph that he had envisioned a half-century earlier. The Major had been ahead of his time. Between 1874 and 1882, the long-awaited settlers arrived in solid numbers. The 1868 Homestead Act offered free land to those who by the end of five

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years had cleared at least fifteen acres, built a sizeable house, and were debt free.50 By 1878, when the annual number of settlers to St Joseph peaked at over 150, virtually every property on the Island was taken, as St Joseph historian Jackileen Rains points out. But, she continues, the offer of free land on St Joseph did not mean freedom from hardship: No matter what were the advantages of educational and cultural background, once on the homestead a pioneer was faced with the elementary basics of survival – food and shelter. Especially to be pitied were those who arrived in autumn when adequate shelter could not be quickly erected and often there was not food to buy if one should have the money to do so. Regularly the only cow was butchered negating the hope of a calf or two and the start of a herd in the spring. Fish, berries and other wild foods were gathered compulsively. Some families, in desperation for a meal, dug up seed potatoes that had been planted only a week or two before.51 Such stories only serve to underscore Rains’s earlier accomplishment in raising his large family in difficult and demanding circumstances. In this he was amply aided by Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday. Their stories, though less well known, are no less compelling.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sister Stories

Major William Kingdom Rains attracted attention and admiration throughout his life and indeed long after. It would be wonderful to have more information about him and his adventures, although the handful of accounts and documents that do exist provides a vivid portrait of the man. Of Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday much less is known. Scarcely any written documents are available. Letters, diaries, and other forms of writing by pioneer women in Canada, such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing in the Bush (1854), Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), and accounts by Elizabeth Simcoe, Susan Mein Sibbald, Frances Stewart, and Anne Langton, offer valuable records of life in nineteenth-century Canada.1 Unlike these women, however, Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday did not leave writings about their lives and experiences. They were both educated women who could read and write, who appreciated literature and the arts, and who shared their enjoyment of them with their children. Estelle Bayliss recalled that her grandmother Frances would recite, “with sparkling eyes, choice bits of poetry or prose,” and that she and Elizabeth “were keen, clever, and witty women, and endowed with more than ordinary beauty.”2 But the sisters appear not to have possessed the “intellectual need” that Charlotte Gray identified in Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill “to capture their experiences in the written word.”3 Both Doubledays seem to have had a tremendous capacity to be content with their circumstances. Neither sister manifested a pressing need for travel and society; “while on rare occasions they visited

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at both Saults, combining business with pleasure,” Bayliss notes, “they never went elsewhere, even to Bruce Mines or Manitoulin Island.”4 On the other hand, Bayliss added, “no one ever entered …[their] homes without according the inmates thereof the utmost deference.”5 Perhaps this was because “in addition to rearing large families in the wilderness, with all its accompanying hardships and privations, they still found time to tutor their children in reading, writing, history, and arithmetic.”6 However unconventional the sisters’ living arrangements, or however scandalous in the eyes of some observers, Frances and Elizabeth commanded respect. They were extraordinary in all of the ways of other Canadian pioneer women such as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, whose experiences theirs paralleled. These women had to face childbirth alone in the woods, contend with cold winters, and help their families through food shortages, illnesses, and accidents of all sorts. They had to do their own cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, and mending. A letter written by Major Rains on 16 November 1854 provides a fleeting glimpse of Frances hard at such tasks. “Please ask Mrs Barbeau,” he wrote, “if she has any suckers (offsets) of roses she can spare me. Mrs Rains wishes a piece of strong cotton print to make comforters (thick quilts) and twelve rolls of batting for the same.”7 There were as well all the farm tasks to do when men were away or unable to carry them out. Another challenge is suggested by a rare reference to Frances’s experiences by Estelle Bayliss. Like Susanna Moodie, Frances had to learn the customs and culture of her aboriginal neighbours. At their first New Year’s on St Joseph, 1836, the Rainses were advised to be ready to receive their native neighbours, who had adopted the old French custom of making New Year’s house calls. Frances prepared a large supply of cookies to pass around to visitors, but the batch was bundled up by the first-comers and taken away to be shared elsewhere. It was not the Chippewa custom, Bayliss explains, to eat in the settlers’ homes, one of doubtless many lessons in cultural difference that Frances and her sister learned during their years on the island.8 In the absence of first-hand accounts, the Doubledays’ pioneer lives in Upper Canada must be deduced from those of other women who kept records of their backwoods experiences. Alternatively, they can be imagined. Certainly, Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday captured Marian Engel’s imagination when the author first encountered their story while camping on St Joseph Island in 1969. Initially, it was the Major who took literary form for

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Engel, in a radio play9 and in her novel Bear, where he served as a model for Colonel Cary. With time, however, the sisters moved to the forefront of Engel’s thoughts and literary endeavours. In “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” they became the primary characters. While Engel’s death prevented completion of “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” it holds a significant place in Canadian writing about sisters. Canadian literature and literary criticism harbour a wealth of “sister stories.” The most familiar pair is Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Much has been written about their lives, including Charlotte Gray’s awardwinning “double biography” Sisters in the Wilderness. Moodie and Traill have made numerous appearances in Canadian fiction as well.10 Atwood’s 1970 The Journals of Susanna Moodie was instrumental in reigniting interest in their story. In her collection of poems, Atwood re-imagines Moodie’s transition from a life of comfort in England to the hardships of backwoods life in 1830s Upper Canada.11 Carol Shields’s M.A. thesis, Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision, was published in 1976, the same year as her first novel, Small Ceremonies, in which the protagonist, Judith Gill, is working on a biography of Susanna Moodie. Catharine Parr Traill, too, has garnered attention from contemporary writers, most famously in Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners (1974), where Morag Gunn, struggling with worries about her daughter and her writing, compares both her problems and her productivity to those of “Saint Catharine,” measuring what she regards as her meagre achievements against Traill’s prodigious accomplishments: Scene at the Traill Homestead, circa 1840 C.P.T. [Catharine Parr Traill] out of bed, fully awake, bare feet on the sliver-hazardous floorboards – no, take that one again. Feet on the homemade hooked rug. Breakfast cooked for the multitude. Out to feed the chickens, stopping briefly on the way back to pull fourteen armloads of weeds out of the vegetable garden and perhaps prune the odd apple tree in passing. The children’s education hour, the umpteen little mites lisping enthusiastically over this enlightenment. Cleaning the house, making two hundred loaves of delicious bread, preserving half a ton of plums, pears, cherries, etcetera. All before lunch. (…) Catharine Parr Traill: … Your situation, if I may say so, can scarcely be termed comparable.

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Morag: Well uh no, I guess not. Hold on, though. You try having your only child disappear you know where, Mrs. Traill. Also, with no strong or even feeble shoulder upon which to lean, on occasion. Okay, don’t say it, lady. You’d go out and plant turnips, so at least you wouldn’t starve during the winter. You’d pick blueberries or something. Start a jam factory. Make pemmican out of the swayback which dropped dead of exhaustion on the Back Forty. Don’t tell me. I know.12 Laurence contributed other sister stories to Canadian literature as well. Her “Manawaka cycle” revolves around the Cameron sisters, Rachel (A Jest of God) and Stacey (The Fire-Dwellers). Rachel is the sister who stays at home to look after the girls’ aging mother. A teacher at the local school, she is unmarried and generally thought to be headed toward spinsterhood, a fate her sister Stacey has escaped by marrying and moving to Vancouver. Stacey’s move has not meant greater happiness, however, as she struggles to raise four children and to remain interested in her marriage. In addition to its relationship to such tales by other Canadian writers, “Elizabeth and the Golden City” was not Engel’s only sister story. Her first published novel, Sarah Bastard’s Notebook (1968), introduced the Porlock sisters, Sarah, Rosemary, Peg, and Leah, Sarah’s “almost twin”: “People might have taken us for twins, we were that close in age; they at least forced the dialectic on us: beauty/truth, light/dark, introvert/extrovert,” Sarah observes of Leah; “If Snow White was feckless and lovely, Rose Red must be earnest and fat.”13 Dualist thinking such as this is generally resisted by Engel’s female characters, however; they are more attuned to life’s complexities and complications, as Engel’s novels and short stories show.14 In Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings, I identified a “both/and” vision that informs Engel’s work and its strategic blending of the ordinary and extraordinary, the everyday and the exceptional, the “real” and the imagined, as a means to fuller understanding, appreciation, and expression of life: Her writing records the enormous attraction of a life of intellectual pursuit and imagination while demonstrating the pull and interest of everyday reality as a woman. Her characters are constantly drawn in both directions at once as they seek to express their personal understanding and vision of the world (…) the world of dreams and ideas, philosophical reflection and intellectual pursuit, is exceedingly attractive to Engel’s protagonists. In it they find an outlet for their instincts, emotions, and

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unconventionality. At the same time, there is the pull of logic, reason, order, propriety, gentility, and middle-classness. Even as Engel’s protagonists lean toward the world of art, dream, and the nontraditional, they are drawn towards a conventional reality, logic, and order. This push and pull creates a tension that is characteristic of many lives, if not all human existence.15 Like the Porlock sisters, Sarah and Leah, of Engel’s first novel, Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday of her final novel, serve to explore the complex forces of life. As I have suggested in my previous study of Engel’s fiction (Lifelines, 1995) and of her notebooks (Marian Engel’s Notebooks, 1999), personal history may have deepened Engel’s interest in sisters. Engel was one of twin girls born in Toronto on 24 May 1933. Their mother, eighteen and unmarried, had little choice about raising her daughters, and the sisters, named Eleanor and Ruth (Freer16) spent the first years of their lives in foster care. Eleanor, the first born and slightly larger baby, weighing in at four pounds, fourteen ounces, was admitted to the Infants’ Boarding Home on 14 June 1933.17 Ruth, somewhat smaller at three pounds, thirteen ounces, followed a few weeks later on 12 July 1933. Both girls became Permanent Wards on 19 December 1934 and remained in the same foster home together until the summer of 1935 when Eleanor became part of the Ryan family of Carleton Place, Ontario.18 Ruth was subsequently adopted by the Passmore family and renamed Marian. Frederick Searle Passmore and his wife Mary Elizabeth had another daughter, Helen, who became Marian’s new sister. The twins’ paths separated.19 A twin motif would surface in Engel’s novels and short stories, however, and in her notebooks, particularly those dating from the period when she was working on “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” and her thoughts turned to her lost sister and their mother. On 9 July 1984, Engel included the following poignant “autobiographical note” in her notebook: I tell at parties how I am an adopted person with a lost twin & this is true. But let’s get the 2 families straight. 1. I was born May 24, 1933, in Toronto, a second twin. My name was Ruth. Eleanor came first.

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2. Our mother was 18, just out of Central Commerce. Her mother, a widow, was a cost acct for Eaton’s. Times were bad. They lived on Walmer Rd. 3. They gave us to the Children’s Aid. 4. I was sickly, E. aggressive. After several changes of home & hospitalizations I was adopted by Fred & Mary Passmore in P[ort] Arthur in 1935-7? (At about 3) – then it got made legal. They had already a daughter Helen (b. 1927). They changed my name to Marian. I do not remember Eleanor but still suffer from a burning rivalry with her. Helen & I have had these years to work it out – love, hate, competition – everything – but she is not the sister spectre in my work, the twin, the “other.” I was nearly 50 years old before I realized that this was a dreadful story – neither of us with anything but the other – the dark rivalry instead of love – the emptiness & loneliness & hate & I’ll get you & I got adopted first, you hurt me I’ll hurt you – I’ve never looked her up. (…) Who is my sister now. Bright Hel[en], Dark Eleanor? We are all grey –20 More spectre or shadow than a figure in the foreground of Engel’s work, the twin or sister self inscribes the notion of the double and the “other” woman in the author’s novels and short stories.21 The double may be the self divided, a woman struggling with conflicting roles as a daughter or mother and as an artist or someone freer from societal expectations of duty. Much of Engel’s work explores the tension in women’s lives between the social stereotypes of feminine behaviour and the grittier realities of their experiences. The latter are a fundamental feature of her writing. Engel boldly included aspects of women’s day-to-day existence long considered

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unacceptable or indecent in the literary domain. “Half a century ago,” she observed, “women had to disguise everything about their heroines. Nobody menstruated, no one came closer than embrace or disgrace, childbirth was veiled. Women’s lives were half blocked off.”22 Engel’s novels and short stories offer a keen critique of social conventions, as well as philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytic traditions that can divide women within and between themselves. Her characters struggle with dichotomies that categorize women as mothers or mistresses, saints or sinners, Marys or Marthas, Snow Whites or Rose Reds. Like the Snow White–Red Rose duo in Engel’s Sarah Bastard’s Notebook, the Mary-Martha pairing is explored in depth in her 1978 novel The Glassy Sea when the protagonist Rita (Marguerite) Heber, who has grown up in a good, plain, hard-working rural Ontario family, decides to join the order of the Eglantine Sisters of the Church of England and in so doing, frees herself from traditional expectations and societal roles for women. These roles are plainly visible in “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” where Frances and Elizabeth incorporate but also contradict their requirements. Bookish Elizabeth is the Doubledays’ down-to-earth main income earner, as well as a mother and a mistress. Frances may be an earth-mother, but she too circulates in the work force. More than any of Engel’s other protagonists, these two – involved with the same man – make clear the “dark rivalry” so prominent between sisters in the author’s work. Like all of Engel’s protagonists, Elizabeth and Frances Doubleday complicate convention and do so in such impressive prose by their author that their story begs to appear in print. That is the purpose of the second part of this volume.

Major William Kingdom Rains (1789–1874) St Joseph Township Library papers. Courtesy Jackileen Rains

Rains family crest. This rubbing and various research notes about the Major appear throughout Engel’s writing notebooks during the 1970s. Marian Engel Archive (Box 34, File 4) McMaster University Library Archives

Lambston Parish Church (Saint Ismael’s), Haverfordwest, Wales Five of Rains’s children with Ann Eve Williams were baptized here, 27 July 1819 Photo by Christl Verduyn

Laneway into Sutton Lodge, Haverfordwest, Wales Photo by Christl Verduyn

Outbuildings at Sutton Lodge, Haverfordwest, Wales Photo by Christl Verduyn

Eildon Hall 1870. Formerly known as Penrains, it was Rains’s first homestead in Canada. He sold it in 1835 to Susan Mein Sibbald, who renamed and developed it. Today it is a museum in Sibbald Point Provinical Park. Photo by Peter Sibbald Brown

Aerial view of Eildon Hall Museum, Sibbald Point Provincial Park, Lake Simcoe, Ontario. Site of Rains’s first homestead in Canada. Photo by Peter Sibbald Brown

Susan Mein Sibbald (on right) 1802. This portrait, by the Royal Academy artist William Owen, is in the Eildon Hall Museum. Photo by Peter Sibbald Brown

Westfield, Rains homestead, Sailors Encampment, St Joseph Island, where the Major was living when he died on 19 October 1874. Photo by Jackileen Rains

St Mary’s Church, Sailors Encampment, St Joseph Island. Frances is buried here. Photo by Jackileen Rains

Frances Doubleday Rains (1811–1891) Photo circa 1890. St Joseph Township Library papers. Courtesy Jackileen Rains

Elizabeth Doubleday Rains (1813–1899) Photo circa 1890. St Joseph Township Library papers. Courtesy Jackileen Rains

Marian Engel, 1981 Photo courtesy Charlotte Engel, William Engel

PA R T I I

Marian Engel Elizabeth and the Golden City Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty yeares, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count it not an Inne, but a Hospitall, and a place, not to live but to die in. The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my conditions, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestriall part within us: that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1652)

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CHAPTER FIVE

Introduction

“Elizabeth and the Golden City” was a “simple enough” story, Marian Engel told her agent Virginia “Ginger” Barber in a letter on 7 January [1985].1 “Rose Red and Rose White with only one bear between them,” she summed up her new project, with a note of humour and the caveat that “the ramifications are many and worth working on.” In correspondence and in drafts of the new novel, Engel included a valuable overview of the work she had in mind. It was based, she stated, “on the history of Elizabeth and Frances, daughters of Mad Jack Doubleday of Milford Haven, who left England in the 1820s with their guardian, Major William Kingdom Rains, cousin of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and came to Canada with him, where they attained a scandalous reputation and produced 19 children to colonize St. Joseph’s Island.” Readers will recognize the blend of fact and fiction, the occasional error (Rains emigrated in 1830 rather than the 1820s), and the note of exaggeration or artistic licence in Engel’s summary, which otherwise provides a useful guide to the excerpts that follow and is worth reproducing in full here: Elizabeth and Frances Laird, daughters of Frank Laird are appalled when their mother dies when they are 15 and 16. Elizabeth plans however to continue her studies while Frances is occupied by her boyfriend, Killer Flynn, and the duties of managing her father’s house. Laird, however, having misappropriated trust funds, has to get out of town; he gets his old friend Major Arthur Silliker, formerly an officer of the Welsh Guards, to come and look after them and turns their equity in their mother’s estate over to him.

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The Major quickly overthrows Killer Flynn in Frances’s estimation, and when Elizabeth has finished her university entrance exams, takes both the girls – he says he has married Frances but Elizabeth doesn’t believe him – to Montreal where they all live on the family trust fund while Elizabeth attends McGill. Elizabeth and Frances are close in age, and not always the best of friends. When she is particularly unhappy with Frances, Elizabeth moves into an imaginary edifice called The Golden City, which is entered from the Vanishing Lakes. Elizabeth is intelligent, Frances in love with domesticity and possessed of an intelligence Elizabeth cannot understand. Competing with her sister, unable to connect with young men in the outside world because of the irregularity of her situation (Is she living at home? Is she independent? Never quite.) Elizabeth accepts the Major as her lover. She has three children, widely spaced, which Frances looks after, along with her own half dozen. When Elizabeth has finished school, they move to Toronto where Elizabeth becomes an assistant in a publishing house, translating various French manuals and handbooks regarding herbal medicine. The tensions in their lives vary and Elizabeth finds that the Major makes love to her when she is discontented with her role as Chief Wage-Earner. The Major attempts various jobs, potters around as a JP [Justice of the Peace], takes courses, and becomes host to the parties Roe, Allen, Levy [publishers] begin to give for their authors. He and Frances are socially and domestically superb, but expensive. Elizabeth attempts to leave them, but is frustrated because an accident to her daughter Constance requires her to spend a great deal of time with the child at hospitals as well as with her therapist. She becomes fully conscious that most of her life has sped by and the Major’s promise that the house will be sold and its price divided to allow her to buy her own has not been kept. At the same time, Amelia Roe is no closer to giving her a share in the publishing house, although in compensation she has spent time in Paris. She feels like a fool, and is given a good deal to think about. Whose work is work? Am I really the ugly sister? What is a life in books really about – escape or real value? How can I resign my children to their illegitimacy? Is the Major a good parent or a bad one? Where is

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my father, and what value has he for me? What is family history about? Have I been right or wrong to work for them? What am I left with? These are the questions Elizabeth chews her way through as she darts in and out of her sister’s life, and these are the ones she must resolve when the Major dies and the possibility of separation from Frances occurs. At the same time, Roe dies, and Elizabeth’s daughter runs off with Levy in Paris: Elizabeth has to leave her Golden City and rescue, as a middle-aged woman, what she can from her life. The text is interspersed with songs and episodes from the folkways and history of the Golden City.2 Engel entitled her overview “Elizabeth and the Golden City or The Vanishing Lakes.” The author envisioned the work as a “three strander” about sisters – “two parallel stories … one set in competition, another harmonious.”3 The “Vanishing Lakes” strand came from another work-inprogress4 about a journey in search of a lost mother named Iris. Iris, Engel explained to Barber, “lived at the end of a long valley called The Vanishing Lakes, a long chain of rosy sunlit lakes which do seem to advance ‘forever and forever as I move’ as in the Tennyson poem.” But The Vanishing Lakes strand called for a science-fiction style that did not suit Engel at the time. “Somehow I can’t stay in unreality for ever,” she mused to Barber; “reality is too interesting.” Still, the author felt that her Vanishing Lakes material was strong and she hoped to find a way to work it in to her new novel. Similarly, she hoped to integrate a second strand about The Golden City. She was “not quite settled in [her] mind about ‘the Golden City’ streak,” Engel told Barber, explaining that the Golden City was Elizabeth’s “childish system of compensation,” but that as the character grew older, the Golden City turned into “a genuine aesthetic pleasure, like gardening or playing the piano” (7 January [1985]). She thought it important material but just how it fit in the book was not yet clear to her. One possibility was for the Golden City sections to “rise to a kind of crescendo 2/3 of the way through the book, and then diminish” in Elizabeth’s life. The third strand – the most developed and successful strand – concerned characters clearly based on Elizabeth and Frances Doubleday, and Major Rains. This is not to say that “Elizabeth and the Golden City” is a fictionalized biography of the trio, even if it was inspired by their story – “a marvellous story” indeed, Engel remarked, “and a

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historical one (Henry Schoolcraft and Louis Agassiz both ran into Major Rains, Fan and Eliza in their travels)” (7 January [1985]). Engel had used the story before as the basis for a play, but had found that “if you focus on the major, who was obviously a charming bastard, you get a work full of wind and rhetoric” (7 January [1985]). Focussing on the sisters in a historical novel, however, resulted in “weariness, washing, childbed and teaching the Indians to knit.”5 Engel’s conclusion was that the novel had to be modern, and so “Elizabeth and the Golden City” brackets World War II, overlaps with the post-war period of Engel’s university years, and continues into the 1960s and 1970s when she was writing her first novels. Moreover, its settings correspond to places Engel lived, from small-town Ontario when the story begins, to Montreal, where Engel attended McGill, to Toronto, where she raised her family and published her novels. In short, Engel changed the story in ways that allowed her to draw on her own life experiences and knowledge. This is most obvious in her portrayal of the Canadian literary scene. Situating Elizabeth’s studies at McGill University provided an opportunity for Engel to revisit 1950s Montreal, when she was a student at McGill and the likes of Hugh MacLennan could be seen striding across campus. MacLennan makes his appearance in “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” along with other writers whose names are synonymous with the Montreal writing scene in the 1950s, such as Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, and Louis Dudek. Moving the Major’s household to Toronto and Elizabeth’s job in a small Toronto publishing company (Roe, Allen, Levy) allowed Engel to showcase her first-hand knowledge of the publishing and literary worlds. “By making her a peculiar publisher (the firm does botanical manuals, translations of French herbals, the romances of Amelia Allen, whatever else it can pick up cheap),” Engel explained to Barber, “I can run Elizabeth through a lot of stuff I’ve learned on committees, introduce her to a fair range of people, and bring in a partnership crisis. And let’s remember that Clarke Irwin up the road from me does inhabit the old Elizabeth Arden building: it’s not far from there to Amelia Allen Healthy Cosmetics, and typing the labels for them when you’ve finished the last of Levy’s herbals. This way Elizabeth can have the high and low of it” (7 January [1985]). If the “low” of Elizabeth’s job is the nitty-gritty but decidedly profitable business of health and diet books, the “high” is the burgeoning Canadian literature scene that forms the backdrop of the book. Margaret Laurence, Margaret

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Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Alice Munro, Graeme Gibson, Matt Cohen, Farley Mowat, Rudy Wiebe, and Michael Ondaatje join the Montreal writers Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, and Louis Dudek in a panorama of cultural Canada that Engel knew first-hand. As Engel’s protagonist Elizabeth puts it: “The country was in a maelstrom of cultural rebounding excitement … There was McLuhan, there was Betty Friedan; writers were emerging in Canada, publishers were creating and recreating themselves. There was a Royal Commission to watch and speak to, there was a Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a prime minister shaking a big stick … Nationalism, bilingualism, biculturalism, separatism, the Vietnam protest; the draft dodgers, hippies, yippees, marijuana; the Royal Commission, publishers’ grants … The Trudeau phenomenon, French-love, French-hate, back-to-the-land.”6 All of this made for a rich and entertaining prose narrative, with autobiographical threads from Engel’s, Rains’s, and the Doubledays’ lives braided into a contemporary fiction. Beyond its temporal and spatial alignments with Engel’s life, “Elizabeth and the Golden City” presents a series of further personal resemblances. For example, as a teenager, Elizabeth has a job at a summer camp and teaches swimming, just as Engel did. Elizabeth’s appalled reaction to negative comments about Jews mirrors Engel’s response to similar attitudes that she encountered during her lifetime.7 Engel drew on her own experience and knowledge of raising children to depict Frances and Elizabeth in their roles as mothers. Finally, passages about Elizabeth’s struggle with cancer reflect, sadly enough, Engel’s battle with the disease. Similarities between Elizabeth’s and Engel’s lives are illuminated by the author’s striking choice of epigraph for “Elizabeth and the Golden City” from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1652), printed at the beginning of her text (p. 55). Sir Thomas Browne was one of several authors whose writing Engel read while working on “Elizabeth and the Golden City.”8 In her 7 January [1985] letter to Barber, as well as in a letter to Alice Munro,9 Engel referred to Browne’s work, in particular his reflection on “all Africa in us.” Elizabeth “passes through her longing for the Great World, and, when her children are grown, finds the ‘all Africa in us’ once she resolves her quarrel with Frances,” Engel explained to Barber. To Munro, Engel wrote: “I’ve finally … grown into Sir Thomas Browne: we all have Africa within us. I love that. And each of us has a different Africa.”10 Virginia Woolf maintained that Sir Thomas Browne was “the first of the autobiographers.”11 Browne “paved

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the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within. ‘The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on.’” Woolf also praised Browne’s tremendous regard for the imagination and its powers, quoting the same passage as Engel: “We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”12 What makes readers seek out Sir Thomas Browne, according to Woolf, is “the desire to be steeped in imagination.”13 “There is, too,” she added, “his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together.” In weaving together the nineteenth century of William Kingdom Rains and Engel’s twentieth century, “Elizabeth and the Golden City” brings together the remote and the incongruous. Engel’s portrait of Major Silliker draws heavily upon the facts of William Kingdom Rains’s real life. Like Rains, Major Silliker is raised by a family friend, Linton, a minister with no children of his own. Silliker also shares Rains’s physical appearance and military background, as well as his love of music, art, and maps. Both men are well-travelled and worldly, yet both suffer the loss of their family estates. Silliker leaves his in the hands of his brother who claims to know “an honest estate agent” and when the agent turns out to be less than honest and Silliker loses his fortune, he has to rely on the income of the women in his life, just as Rains did when his fortunes failed. Silliker and Rains both become Justices of the Peace. Both meet the scientist Agassiz. And both, of course, have intimate relations with two sisters resulting in the births of several children. At the same time, numerous small divergences anchor the work in fiction. Major Arthur Silliker is born in Plymouth, Devonshire, rather than in Milford Haven, Wales, like Rains. Silliker has only one brother, Rupert, and one sister, Edith (whereas Rains had several siblings), and only one son, “Silly Sidney,” with his English wife (whereas Rain had several). Like Rains, Silliker abandons that wife when he comes to Canada (his “one error,” he declares, “my ridiculous marriage at the age of 19 to the first Mrs. S”), but the reasons for his immigration are entirely made up: he comes thanks to Kenneth Duffy, a man with whom he worked as part of a war-time espionage team that included Frank Lennox/Laird – Frances’s and Elizabeth’s father. This background is lightly sketched in, as is the history of the girls’

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own family, including class tensions over the fact that their father Frank was a lawyer while his wife, Belle (Isabel), came from a family of farmers. There is much comedy at the expense of Belle’s farmer brother Eugene and his grasping wife, Myrtle, and a great deal of satire at the expense of smalltown Ontario, which Engel excelled at portraying. Family finances become tight when Isabel falls ill and requires costly medication. Isabel dies, Frank loses his legal practice over misuse of trust funds and disappears, leaving his daughters in Silliker’s charge. Engel felt that “Elizabeth and the Golden City” was a “good book” (7 January [1985]) and that parts of it were publishable already, “so McStews won’t lose their money,” she quipped. But she knew she had to find a way “to stylise and harmonise” her narrative, otherwise it would be “a 4,000 pages mess.”14 She looked forward to working on “Elizabeth and the Golden City” for a “long time.” There were serious questions to be pondered, as she had outlined in the book’s overview. “Elizabeth and the Golden City” goes a great distance toward that goal but sadly, Engel did not have time to answer all her questions. Cancer claimed Engel’s life on 16 February 1985. There is no attempt in the current undertaking to finish Engel’s workin-progress for her. As Engel asserted, however, “parts are publishable already.”15 From my very first encounter with the manuscript in the archives, I have felt that these parts could – indeed should – be published. What follows is not a novel in the traditional sense, nor is the scholarship concerned with detailing its many different versions. By this I mean that it is not the purpose of this book to present a detailed comparison of the various drafts, noting each change in wording or style. Rather, guided by the initial ordering of the papers by archivist Kathleen Garay, and by my earlier studies of Engel’s fiction and writing (Verduyn 1995, 1999, and 2004), I have retained what appear to have been the closest-to-complete of the novel’s chapters-to-be. This means that earlier versions of the chapters preserved in the archives have not been included here, accounting for the numerical difference between the “4000 pages mess” that Engel joked about in her letter to Barber and the 250 pages of “Elizabeth and the Golden City” presented in this volume. I have focussed on the chapters or parts of the novel that are nearest to the structure Engel sketched for the work and that read today as the most complete, which is not the same as “completed.” As Engel’s quip about “4,000 pages [of] mess” suggests, and as the multiple drafts in

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the archives clearly demonstrate, the process of finishing a novel is far from neat and tidy. Engel had a number of working structures for the book, of which the following was one: the shape of this book 1. The Golden City 2. The Deaths in her Life 3. How She Became an Orphan 4. How she acquired an education 5. How she paid for it 6. How she survived a year in Toronto 7. The Murder of Maugher 8. Cherrystone House 9. The Years Parade 10. The Glitter of the Garden 11. How does it all end?16 The writing did not necessarily abide by the structures Engel envisioned for it, however, and as her notebooks clearly reveal, she continued to struggle with the form of the novel until the end. For example, on 30 August 1984, less than six months before she died, Engel was “thinking about [the] novel again. Form is bad,” she declared. “Immense detail wrong … Discontinuity is best for me with this kind of material. So I may break through. Different form could get rid of set-piece ‘characters’ like Lalice17 – a joy to invent [but] Trollope did them better. Perhaps he has finally shown me the limits of realism.”18 Many writers, Engel among them, report that they do not know in advance how a work-in-progress will end. In her letter to Barber Engel wrote that she did not yet know how Elizabeth “ends up – out of coldcream publishing eventually, I think, and in her own house” (7 January [1985]). In drafts of the proposed conclusion Elizabeth dies; but this part of the book was less developed than earlier sections. The excerpts included in Part II are the most developed sections of the novel. Readers may observe some overlap in the parts, the necessary result of the whole not having been sewn up. I have marked occasional excisions intended to minimize the repetition. Part III offers two too-good-tooverlook pieces, which might never have found their way into the final publication, but which are relevant to the Rains connection that this volume

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explores. One is the section in which Engel fictionalized the real-life visit that the nineteenth-century scientist Louis Agassiz made to St Joseph Island where he met the Major (and, in Engel’s version of the visit, Elizabeth and Frances as well). Another suggests that at one point, the novel was going to begin with the story of how Frank and Isabel Lennox/Laird met, married, and had two daughters named Frances and Elizabeth. Engel tested two versions of this material, the first set in the 1850s (Rains’s time), the second set in the post-World War II period (1950s), the era she eventually chose for the version of the novel that appears in this volume. Beyond selecting closest-to-final versions of the various sections of the novel-to-be, my editorial interventions have been intentionally minimal. On the one hand, many excerpts were remarkably clean – indeed, pretty much publishable as they were, just as Engel claimed. On the other hand, I did not want to weigh down Engel’s spirited prose with too much academic freight. Obvious typographic errors have been silently corrected, but I have left intact various clever and amusing plays on spelling or expressions that, based on my knowledge of Engel’s writing, I believe she intended. The occasional missing word has been added in [square brackets] and punctuation has been tidied up but not perfected. Readers can anticipate a number of long, syntax-bending sentences, the result of Engel’s stylistic adventures with the comma and the colon as well as her failing health as death approached. In the last analysis, “Elizabeth and the Golden City” was an unfinished, not polished manuscript, and an editorial judgment was made to correct punctuation where it deemed helpful to readers’ understanding and enjoyment of the text. Editorial notes at the beginning of each section provide further context for this and other aspects of “Elizabeth and the Golden City” as well as linkages between its various parts. The primary aim of Parts II and III, however, is to provide reading pleasure – the pleasure of reading Marian Engel.

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Elizabeth and the Golden City

At over seventy-five pages of double-spaced typescript, the novella-length beginning of the manuscript is polished and practically self-contained. Readers will note that in contrast to the later sections, Elizabeth’s and Frances’s family name appears as Laird and not Lennox; the character deLesseps’s first name is Andrew and not Jo; and Elizabeth has three children (Constance, Alan and Agnes), not two, all of them the product of relations with the Major. We also learn how Elizabeth invented the Golden City as a little girl, and that she continued to retreat to it in her imagination whenever the real world became unbearable.

When my mother died, I was reading Jane Eyre. That would be a good line for the beginning of a novel. It’s not only a good line, it’s a great one, as flexible and funny as, “‘Hell,’ said the Duchess as she slid down the banister,” as potentially pathetic as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” It could begin a romantic novel, a serious literary novel, a Gothic detective novel, or indeed a parody. Any of the genres would adopt it with reverence, for it is the opening line of a darned good read. I’d love it if it came over my transom; I haven’t seen anything with a beginning that strong in all my years at Roe, Allen, Levy. Unfortunately, it is not fiction: it is the first line of my adult life, the end, as they say, of the beginning, and the beginning of the end; at once a commencement and an obstacle, a rock I cannot climb, a stream too wide for me to ford. I ought, at my age, to be able to crease my life and fold it away neatly, preparing to be a kind old woman. Instead, I shall hack away at the

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shape of the paragraphs that follow that sentence once more, try again to construe it, in order to free myself from its constriction: make my life into something satisfactory before I leave it. Constance is in bed reading Wuthering Heights. We tried hard to save our elm tree, but lost it in the end. Since then, however, I’ve been able to see the sunset from my bedroom window. As I sit at my desk, the sky begins to streak itself with magenta and red, as if the tops of the trees were equipped with coloured-ink bags. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” my father used to say. Or was it the Major? When I can see the sky I wish we lived in the country, or somewhere like the prairie where we’re not closed in. We talk a lot about moving, but we don’t go. I think we’re probably right to stay: people seem to drink themselves to death in bucolic and beautiful landscapes; rush out and consume volumes of alcohol, then dash their cars against the edges of whatever obstacles they can find. Beauty is either too much or too little for us. We can’t stand it without some kind of discipline. I was talking to Constance’s doctor today and he said I ought to tell her more about her background. I wasn’t in very good condition; I was late and wet and flustered, a little drunk, even. I had taken Andrew deLesseps to lunch, he had talked about himself and his divorce from 12.30 ’til 4; and when we emerged from the restaurant the skies had opened up, and deLesseps being deLesseps had snaffled the only taxi, saying he couldn’t possibly drop me off at the hospital, he had to pick his boy up at school. So I ran through the rain and arrived crushed and smelly and late. No Constance. I thought, this is it, I’ve finally failed; they’ll throw me out of Motherhood. Then a nurse told me Dr Wiley wanted to see me. And there he was, looking at his watch. I like him because he’s been good to Constance, but he makes me nervous. I don’t like the way he puts our lives out on the table and slices pieces off to put under his microscope. I’m not usually hostile, but this afternoon I was bothered and upset. Mothers who turn up dishevelled and half-drunk! I was keeping an eye on the bill because, although I like Andrew deLesseps and God knows we are liable to lunch him because we are indebted to him, his books sell, I resent the way he reads correspondence and budgets upside down on my desk so that what he orders comes always within a hair’s breadth of what I planned no matter how long it takes to consume it. Next time, I swear, I’ll hold him

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back and then give him the surplus out of petty cash for a bottle of brandy, though it might be bad for him to drink it alone. So I explained to Dr Wiley that it was my turn to take one of our authors for his half-yearly binge, that it was therefore no time to think, and I said, “How’s Constance?” “She’s well,” he said in his measured way, “but she’s very confused about her background.” “They all are,” I said. Then I said too that I didn’t think it bore worrying about because somehow news of the situation trickled down from the older ones to the younger ones, like news of sex or menstruation, and we had done our best to correct the versions, and I had told Constance every blessed thing. “I don’t think she’s understood.” “I don’t either,” I said. I sat and looked at my wet wool gloves that smelled of some Taiwan sheepfold and thought, if she can, I can, and I can’t, and the guilt that I am so good at, the self-indulgent wail of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, which is easier than doing anything about the sin, welled up inside me again, an easy cry that is half romance. Then the feeling came, too, that it was time to fly away to the Golden City: no more could be borne here. Off, off, and away, I know a place where you can go. I sat, however, like a stone in front of my daughter’s psychiatrist, feeling that he could read the text inside my head, played with my fingers and said, “I don’t know what you want.” “Just be frank with her. It’s important to her.” “I am frank. She knows who she is.” “She knows that Alexander Maugher, merchant seaman, does not exist.” “Merchant of semen?” “I am Constance’s doctor, Mrs Maugher, not yours.” I wish you were mine, I thought, I wish someone was mine. The accident was no one’s fault. Frances ran upstairs to get a diaper for Agnes. The big girls were making French fries in the kitchen, the little boys were playing tag around them. Edith was on the left of the stove, Constance on the right. The fat flared to the right. In the long process of healing Constance and restoring her appearance, Dr Wiley was called in to help. He says Constance doesn’t understand who she is. I don’t either. I don’t understand anything I’ve said or done for the past twenty years, since that moment when I was reading Jane Eyre and my

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mother died. If there are lies and evasions, old suppurating neglected truths, they belong to that moment, and to the moment later when I saw my father coming up the stairs and thought, he’s mine now. Which he was not, and did not become. I don’t see how we can understand anything, I don’t understand what understand means, I did things and said things against my conscious will, from motives so deep they might have been hidden from God himself (if I believe in him, which I only do enough for a capital letter, touching wood). I had Constance and Alan and Agnes, I have this job, I do translations and budgets and throw novels back over transoms, I take poets drunk on my budget and their own egos out to lunch, and I go home to the back half of Frances’s house when I’ve picked Constance up from the hospital. What is there to understand? I’ve often felt we ought to get our own house, but in our living situation that would involve separating Siamese twins; putting a partition order on the whole building would deprive Frances of her own house. And I would hate to leave my broad western evening view; and my morning secret watch over the Major and his constitutional in the garden. The books are out of order. I should pay one of the kids to put them right again. I can’t find my old Penguin Voss; I want to read it again to see if the present Patrick White was already there in embryo. I remember it as dry and thorny, but that might have been because of the cover drawing. Or was that the drawing on Tree of Life? Constance is beginning to read the Brontë sisters, but she is lukewarm to them. Jane Eyre was all right, she said, just all right, and she finds Wuthering Heights boring. I sopped them all up with a straw and loved them, except for Jane Eyre, which I read guiltily in Classic Comics, which is why I didn’t get around to the full text until I was fifteen. I read the “Angrian Chronicles,” too. There was a section on the Brontës in the funny round-domed public library at home, and the adventures of Anne, Emily and Charlotte seemed a thing of wonder to me: the girls huddled on the blasted heath against a hard father, a mean aunt, a drunken brother; Mother dead, and older sisters too. They kept trying to go away, but it never quite worked; perhaps they lacked confidence, growing up isolated as they had, with only each other for company. They kept on returning to huddle against their personal storm. That didn’t work either, and, eventually, they died. I knew the why of Heathcliff, Mr Rochester: imaginary lives, imaginary lovers. They were the forerunners of generations of lonely women who say, “Perhaps I should write a novel …”

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I don’t suppose they masturbated. They were Victorians and they would have died much sooner, of the guilt; they wouldn’t have had the Tampax folder to teach them not to. Was Eyre the explorer alive then? Could he have been one of their heroes? Is that why I thought of Voss? I am nothing if not bookish. What is it that Constance doesn’t understand? How can she transmogrify the brute fact of her parents’ lives sufficiently to understand them without having lived longer than she has now? That’s what I told Dr Wiley. I don’t know what he thought. I was too tired to interpret his blank look. I came out of that rather unsatisfactory interview with Dr Wiley, whom I ordinarily like and respect, upset and distracted, frowning: and there was Constance in the waiting room talking to a nurse. Her eyes were great black-teared wells, and she looked up at me as if she wanted to tell me something. It took me a moment to realise what the end of this series of operations had meant: she can smile! It’s a wide-cornered, painful, uncertain smile. I grabbed her and held her to my damp black bosom and we both began to cry. We found a taxi and took it home. I made her poached eggs on toast and gave them to her in bed because I know how much she hurt (and is still hurting, as I am hurting, as if pain heals; it goes on and on until it becomes almost a given, oh, certainly a given: almost a virtue). We went through the old ritual of splitting the fine white skin on them so that the yoke oozed through yellow and scattered itself, and, as we cut more deeply, bled all over the toast. (“Off with his head,” Mother had taught Frances and me to cry from our high chairs; “Daddy, come and watch us murder our eggs!”) Constance took her painkillers with her milk. “I’m glad I can smile now,” she said. “But do you mind if I don’t?” Her smile is as wide as the mask of comedy’s. She is reading herself to sleep. Perhaps she will dream she is romping on the moors with Heathcliff and Cathy. Funny, she’s the same age I was when things started to happen, when Mother died. Maybe that’s what Dr Wiley meant. I wish I hadn’t taken deLesseps out today, I could have made it another day, I wouldn’t have missed the point of what Dr Wiley was saying, if there was a point to what he was saying. Still, I like deLesseps when he’s not in his greedy phase, and it’s good to sit for a while with a handsome man even if he isn’t available. He’s never made a play for me, I suppose because he sees me as a mother-confessor and

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far too plain, and that’s as well, because I would hardly dare to sneak someone like him into the house at night; nor would I like to become involved with someone whose passionate life turns to print at every point (Can’t you see the lyric? “The night I screwed my / publisher rain fell / the skies opened to mourn/ that impersonal relationships should become so / fitfully implausible.”) – and so on, rationalisations being what they are. Although I am approaching the age when women become invisible, and I am, indeed, to deLesseps, invisible, I’m a walking ear, I still enjoy having some sort of contact with the males of the species, and deLesseps suffers from maleness as a stalking lioness suffers from felinity. So nothing, I suppose, was lost except my self-composure, my desire to appear correct and impervious before my daughter’s first friend. I wonder about my mother, sometimes. I wonder if she had love affairs before she married my father. Did she make a fool of herself over some country boy before she left for the city? What we know of our parents is the faces they present to us. Our adult efforts to decipher their lives require the skills of a detective. There was some woman my mother used to know, a cousin possibly, who came to us after the war was just over and sat in the big chair in the living room and rocked until she became the armchair, and the armchair became a rocking-chair. She sat and rocked and sobbed. She said that her husband had not been killed at Singapore, the authorities were lying to her; he was on a secret mission, he had been captured, he had escaped, he had been tortured, his journey was being made longer and more difficult by hostile tribes and wild terrain, but he would return to her; he wasn’t dead. She had visited every last shred of the family, every third cousin twice removed in order to find someone who would tell her that what the War Department had told her wasn’t true. She went from relative to relative, from priest to minister to clairvoyant trying to receive confirmation of her view. My mother kept repeating, “Irene, Irene, you know that’s not true. Take hold of yourself. You must go home and bring your children up.” And then, softly, “And if Bruce does come back, what will he think of you for leaving them with Auntie Maisie at her age?” I understand her now: a sad, sweet woman with big eyes boiled in tears. Truth is important. We had it in Sunday school that the truth shall make you free. I’ve had argument after argument with Frannie and the Major about that. He’s a great man for face-savers, but I always say, tell them the

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truth, they’ll find out anyway and resent the lie. Still, when I look at the girl who is the age I was when the story of my adult life began, this girl out of whose unface my own eyes stare, wincing, I think also, better she should spend another year lying on the heather, weeping for an imaginary lover. She’s coming along fast, now; the plastic surgery has been beyond my dreams. There’s a surface of sorts and with every operation more of the facial muscles move. Oh, my darling, I cry, you will one day be able to go into a world where no one knows you have been hurt. First there was the business of pulling her through, then there was the healing that had to go on; then, when they asked for photographs with which to reconstruct her face, I found that she had scissored herself out of every family picture: how Dr Wiley got involved. She will have to make a new beginning, and not here, for when she first returned to school the other children rejected her, with taunts, neglect, curiosity; even the other children in her family rejected her, especially little Agnes, especially guilty Edith, who was not responsible at all. She will have to go away to school, I think, in a place where they do not know her, because although I have no experience of her massive wound, I know that it is good, it is healing, to shake the dust of the past from your shoes, and move on, make another life. She has a tutor and attends school at the hospital when she is there. Like me at the same age, she takes refuge in the library, but her interests are not academic: she is hiding behind the books. She had no one for company, no Martin Mackay to roll down the hill with, two pebbles aiming at the same brook. She is almost as domestic as Frances, and shares, to my horror, the ambition to make a perfect lemon pie. She will have to find something to do. In the Golden City, of course, she would find plenty to do: there is something for everyone of every circumstance. She might turn out to be one of the women who are happy plucking flowers and tending trees, who knows? There are few opportunities along those lines here and now. No, I think she has more ambition than that, and her ambition will have been strengthened by her ordeal at the hospital, where they speak of her as a person of strong character; not everyone who has been defaced has so much good endurance. It is the wreck of her personal relations at home, the way she has been forced back on me as her only ally, that has hurt her, and that will in the end create the need for a separation; we must think up a good one, something that will provide her with career and happiness.

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Dr Wiley, whom I like because I find no malice in him, though God knows what he is like in his own bathroom mirror if he has one, suggested that there were many things I hadn’t seen, aspects of my situation that were transparent because I was in it and not above it. Should I then take a lofty eagle’s stance to view my world? Should I liberate myself from the Golden City in order to brood over the real one? Should I separate, finally, from Frances in order to separate from Constance? How do you see your own life steadily and whole in order to convey its truth to your children? And isn’t it too late for them to understand it? Surely time and generation separate people from each other because angles of vision differ until a sense of history springs up – and then it is too late: the older ones have gone. Still, there is something Constance must know before she can grow up into a feeling that she is a person of value, and that is surely that in spite of her odd beginnings and the family’s meandering against the tide of convention, there is value here, value enough to give her pride. But how can I give her pride, who has been reading the final pages of Jane Eyre for my whole life? Perhaps it is time to close the book. Years ago I decided that if there was one book in the Golden City, it was The Wide Sargasso Sea. A chronicle of exile, derangement, and thwarted love entirely out of keeping with that magical place. It must have meant a great deal to me. I am a person who, under a pretence of pellucid honesty, tells lies. Sometimes I hook my lies to other peoples’ lies, the romances of the sisters Brontë: but my lies are mine, as theirs are theirs. Still, truth is important to me. They held me down in the dust to deny it; and the lie they made me request did not even rhyme; it had to be pretty, or I would not accept it and thrive. A lie can be a bullet-proof vest, but only if it is the right lie. Which is why I have to get it sorted out, get it outright, out right, straight. Else I am the crook of lies. But I fuss around in the process, staring at a forgotten sunset, which has in its turn forgotten to pursue its existence and turned into night; scratching my head; listening to Constance’s sheets slide on her knees as she shifts and turns and reads; listening to the little ones through the wall beginning their cry, “One more story.” I have another daughter, but I did not go there to see her tonight.

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Night has come and it makes me feel secure. My blackness in its blackness: no one can know me, a woman who has promoted truth and lived on lies, and if I were of another turn of mind I would be out there slipping like a dark cat through the night. major silliker’s song Roast beef and Yorkshire buttered, frilly sprouts A salad for your stomach’s sake Strawberries and cream. Their flannel nightgowns The ducal strawberries My coronet I was reading Jane Eyre when my mother died. I was sitting in my housecoat in the kitchen, glued to the tension between Jane and the attractive and sinister and authoritarian and perhaps destructive Mr Rochester. Frances made up the tray. She put the little Madeira cloth, freshly laundered, on it; the blue and white teapot that Mother had been given on her honeymoon cruise with Father; a boiled egg in a white cup covered with a cosy I made at summer camp, a plate of toast cut in fingers, a slice of lemon, and a lump of sugar. There was also a rosebud in a slender glass vase, for the pink rambler on the front porch was coming into bloom. It was Saturday morning and hot. The cicadas were singing. Father had already gone out and the kitchen smelled of his coffee. Frances wanted me to take the tray up immediately. I wanted to finish the chapter. “How can you do that, Lizzie?” she asked. “She’s sick, maybe she’s even dying, and you want to finish some terrible old book.” “It’s great literature.” “Mother’s tray is ready; take it up.” I might have said, “You take it up,” but this was not our routine. Frannie made the tray up, I carried it to Mother, and Mother told me we were both angels. Frannie went up to get the tray after she was finished, and tidied the bedroom around her. I was bored by the whole business: this illusion, this dying. Sick of the

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doctor with his long, noble face padding up and down the stairs as if he was in his stocking feet; sick of the way Father turned his face sadly away from us when we talked to him, like a man with a visible deformity. Sick of Mother’s being inert, thin-skinned, blue as evaporating skim milk. We had to whisper. I wanted to bounce. I was fifteen going on sixteen. It was all right to read about death but I didn’t like listening to it. It made the air gritty. In my world, which was properly ordered, things wouldn’t be this way. For two years, they’d been taking her to the hospital and bringing her home again; she should have been getting better, but the only change was that her bed jacket was yellowing from too many washings. Finally, I snapped the whole book shut, jerked the tray off the table, and marched upstairs. The only way to get my world was to get on with things, get up those stairs, on with life. Whatever that was. I felt like swinging and clattering that tray, but I carried it carefully and respectfully, because I was impatient with Mother, but I loved her, too. Her room, which Father had shared until she became so ill that he moved to his study next door, was at the head of the stairs. The light came through the maples at this time of year and swam around the pale green satin curtains. I felt when I walked in that I was dipping and swimming below the surface of the water. Frances had already been in to tidy Mother up, help her to the bathroom, and adjust the blinds. The doctor would come at ten, after the tray was cleared away. By that time, I’d be at the Y, giving swimming lessons. Mother lay against her pillows, her hair wound around her head in a neat, thin, black braid. She was dozing. She didn’t look right. I put the tray away on the table beside her bed and leaned over to wake her. Her colour was wrong, or perhaps only absent, though the greenish light might be playing tricks. Her mouth was gracelessly halfway open. I could see her long back teeth, brown where the gums were receding. Her head had fallen a little to the right. There was a hair in the mole on her cheek. Her hands, which were blotched with liver marks, were bent outwards, as if she had tried to raise herself. She was forty-one. I leaned towards her, recoiled and withdrew. There was not, and has never been, a nurse inside me. She didn’t look right. I screamed inside myself, looked hopelessly outside in the green depths of the trees for help: anyone, anything. Father, the doctor, Santa Claus, the

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Mistletoe God, Francis the Talking Mule, Mr Rochester. There was no one there. I felt my own blood rinsing and flushing from heart and lungs and liver, crashing through elbows and knees to toes and fingers, returning. I was the only live creature in the world. I hated it. I went to the head of the stairs and said coldly and clearly, “Frances, there’s something wrong.” She put something heavy down on the counter in the scullery (we were always going to have a Hollywood kitchen installed) and came running up the stairs two at a time. We stood in the doorway staring. I thought, “I should have come sooner, the egg will be cold.” She said, “Call Dr Duff,” and began to whimper. His number was 324-J. I was sick of the death in this house, the drag of footsteps, the solemnity, the seeping sadness. I could not burst into tears; something else burst in me and said, “It’s over: now something can happen.” Dr Duff’s nurse said he would be over right away. There was no answer at Father’s office so I left a message at the Golf Club where all lawyers went on Saturday morning. I thought of throwing Jane Eyre out the window. Instead, I went up to my room and put on my good plain blue dress. Frances was lying on the foot of the bed crying, “Mamamamama;” I wished I could do that. I began to rub her back, as Mother did when she was having one of her fits. What I was thinking was, “This is an adventure. Now we are Orphans.” But there was a dragging inside me; I didn’t know how to give birth to it. I thought also, “This is going to be bad for Frances. Frances was so attached to her.” I started to float free, as if my body was being carried down a river. I was Ophelia. I was the Lady of Shallot. I was free to go to the Golden City. Or was it Mother floating down the river on a ghostly bier? Decked out in mourning flowers, lilies and asphodel woven in her long dark hair. Things shattered; I couldn’t put the pieces together. I didn’t know who I was, except that I wasn’t Frances, and it wasn’t an adventure anymore, the river was flowing too fast, pulling the raft out to sea, the body was slipping, the stately high rhetoric of death was disturbed by the river’s whirling current, twigs and flotsam eddied around us. This was no longer a stately occasion

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filled with the music of mourning. Voices were shrieking in the air. By the time Dr Duff, with his curious straight-boned humourless face, had come up the stairs, I was crying louder than Frances, and for myself. I was a year younger than Frances, the little one. Now I was taller than she was. I had blonde frizzy hair and big bones. I looked like my father, they said: but he had a moustache. Frances was a beauty. The doctor was leaning over Mother. Frances was leaning against the doorframe, crying. I heard a familiar step on the stairs. Father came up. Even in his golf clothes he was beautiful, like a movie star. Light came through the little oriel [sic] window and made his hair glow gold. I thought, he’s mine, now. “Go to your rooms, girls,” Father said. “Dr Duff and I have to talk.” That’s how things were between parents and children, then. I don’t know what Frances did. I lay on my back and turned myself into a stone. I wanted to make myself hard enough not to feel or think or hear or see any more. Though I heard Dr Duff and Father talking in low voices, and I heard Dr Duff go down the stairs. I thought I heard him snap his bag shut, but perhaps that was only because I had heard him snap his bag shut a hundred times this awful year when Mother was dying but we weren’t really sure, and there was hope that if we were good enough, kind enough, and didn’t quarrel, she would live. I heard Father go into Frances’s room. “I didn’t kill her,” I said to the pillow. “It wasn’t my fault.” If I’d brought the breakfast tray up earlier I might have seen her die, and who wants to see anyone die? She died because she was going to die, because she was born with a bad heart and this far was as far as she could go. He won’t come to me, I thought. I’m only the little one, though I’m the big one now, three inches taller than Frances and broad in the beam. He did come, however, and stand in the doorway. I sat half up and looked at him, to see if his face had changed. He looked quite normal. He had his lawyerface on. “I’d advise you to go out before Mackenzie’s men come,” he said. “Frances is going to Betty-Jean for a while. I’ll be in my study if you want me.” Then he came and kissed me. “I’m sorry, pet,” he said. “She couldn’t have gone on any longer. The old ticker wouldn’t do it.” Heart surgery hadn’t been invented then.

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I didn’t have a Betty-Jean to go to, and I couldn’t talk to Marty so I picked up my book and went downstairs. I paused when I was going through the kitchen to wash the breakfast things and tidy up: probably the first time I had done anything domestic without being told to. Then I went outside and set up a wooden deck chair under the apple tree. I sat and started at Jane Eyre. I couldn’t read it, and I never have again. The rhubarb was shooting up, and I looked at it longingly, remembering being little and making little private houses under big rhubarb leaves wherever we lived, hidey-holes for myself where Frances wasn’t going to come because she was afraid of bugs and getting dirty and making Mother mad. I had loved my mother with a hopeless soaring love, but it didn’t stop me doing what I knew I had to do, which was make hidey-holes under rhubarb leaves, crawl under verandas and through hedges, lead a subterranean life that belonged only to me. Frances was a good girl, a little Mother. She sat patiently and had her hair curled. I was someone else. I heard a car pull up. I wanted to run and see if it was Mackenzie’s men to take Mother away and if they drove a car or a station wagon or a hearse. Perhaps it was the minister and I didn’t want to see him. A month ago he had had us all on our knees around Mother’s bed and all I could feel was collective embarrassment. Then I wondered if Father had pulled the sheet up over Mother’s face and if he’d said goodbye, and I wondered if I ought to have said goodbye, and I started to cry again. Then I stopped because I remembered a book where the girl had gone to tell all the bees that someone had died. I couldn’t remember the name of the book, but it was by Mary Webb. I couldn’t remember who had any bees around here, but I thought one of the old men on the street up the hill above us did, but I thought this was another country, and because his bees didn’t know me, they wouldn’t care. I thought about Dan Mackenzie. It embarrassed me that his father would see my mother dead. Surely he wouldn’t take all her clothes off. A dead person is just a body. The soul is released and flies off free. I stared into the sun, but I couldn’t see Mother. She told me a story once about an old man who lived in a tumbledown farm across the line from them when she was little. He got sick and they sent for his sister from Philadelphia to come and nurse him. She was a city

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woman and afraid of the banshees in the woods up there, and a general nuisance: over the road six times a day and sometimes the worse for the wear, almost as bad as her brother. Then one day she came tearing over and said old Mickey had died, and Mother’s mother had had enough, she didn’t want to go over there, it was a dirty place and she’d done enough. Mother’s brother Eugene piped up, “I’ll do it; come on, Izzie,” and they went across the road to the shack with the woman from Philadelphia. While the woman drank tea and maybe something else in the kitchen, and Isabel crouched in a corner, Eugene stripped Mickey Crowder down to his elderly underwear, bathed him and combed his dirty old hair with his dirty old comb, even combed his moustache and whiskers. Then he dressed him in his best shirt that had studs and a dickey, and put on his suit coat and tie, and called Isabel to help put on his trousers and the woman from Philadelphia to bring pennies for his eyes and clean socks without a hole. And Eugene slicked his hair again and stood back with Isabel to survey his work, full of pride. And the old man’s foot twitched in the last throes of rigor mortis, and Eugene and Isabel jumped out of their skins and tried to run out at the same time, which accounted for the little scar she had under her right eyebrow, where their heads hit. When we were little we went back to that farm sometimes and stood respectfully back from the ruin of Mickey Crowder’s cabin, which was then fallen logs and wild roses and lilac bushes, and shuddered as we gazed at it. I turned the deck chair round and stared at the delphiniums and the roses, which were in their glory. It was a pity Mother hadn’t seen them, though we’d brought a few into her room. They were her colours, bright true blues, salmon pinks and dusty greens. She had loved the house and the garden. “Frank,” she had said, “how lucky we are,” when Grandma Laird died and left us this house. I liked the other one better, the one down the hill nearer the river, because it was little and white. Grandma Laird hadn’t liked Mother, didn’t think a farm girl, even one with a Secretarial Science degree, was good enough for Father, though she was a farm girl herself once. She hadn’t liked us, I was sure, and I knew from things I had overheard that Father had fallen out with his parents years ago. Something about a bad cheque when he was a student. Of his father I heard him say, “The old gaffer wouldn’t take me in as a partner until he ran out of students.” He was a hard, old man married to a hard, old woman. It was something of a surprise that they left us the house – Frances

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and me – and a trust fund for our education. We’d expected them to leave everything to the Presbyterian Church. We went to see them three or four times a year when we were little, our shoes greased or whitened, our dresses starched or steamed, our hair curled or straightened, our bodies stiff in the old Dodge as Father chauffeured us up the hill. Grandma would tell us what a pity it was that Father hadn’t married one of the Hall girls, and Mother would pretend to be mortified. At the very last moment Grandpa would come in and kiss us with the scratchiest moustache in the world, and give us a peppermint and a nickel. Some of the time when we were small, we lived in Windsor. My father was overseas at the war, and we lived with mother’s friend Milly who was a milliner. “The Hat Box” was the name of her store and it was right in her living room. We played in fur and feathers, scraps of ribbon and lace, tied veils over our faces, and, as we got older, decorated our own hat forms extravagantly for Christmas and New Year’s and Easter and Valentine’s Day. We started school there, and almost immediately I got ahead of Frances, because I could grasp reading and she couldn’t. She got her own back because she had a friend called Divina, who was very big and black and strong, the daughter of the woman who came to help Mother and Milly in the house. Divina and Frances held me down until I shouted after them, “White is black,” “red is green,” and “two and two make five!” After that I invented the Golden City so I could play there by myself. We grew up in an atmosphere that generated the traditional idea of farmers being poor and low. Mother’s relatives did not substantiate this claim: she and all her cousins were sent to business college or university routinely, even during the Depression when crops were bad and prices low. Her brother Eugene might have had an education if he’d wanted one but he was, as she always said, “a card”: happy-go-lucky and none too bright. She was the clever one and she was at business school in London when she met Father, who was at law school and unhappy with it. It was she who persuaded him to finish, although after he finished articling with his father he was not unhappy to go off to war. That’s what I know about them. Milly was a high school friend from Mount Forest. Most of the cousins headed west. They took with them Mother’s surviving aunts, Lois and Viva, who lived to be ninety-nine and a hundred in Victoria. Mother’s parents died shortly after we were born, leaving the farm to the feckless Eugene.

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When Father came home after the war we moved to the town we grew up in, which was smaller than Windsor and more interesting, because I could go to the library by myself, and there was a river, which one could fall into or not fall into at will: it gave me a sense of choice. The white house on the riverbank had a high fence at the back, but if you lay still under the rhubarb you could hear the water rushing by. There was a pantry off the kitchen with a stone sink in it. Divina’s mother was brown, but it wasn’t polite to mention this. Divina was a purply-bronze colour. She had white far-apart teeth and a strong character. She and Frances had to punish me because I was a year younger and in the same class as they were and pushing ahead. “That uppity child” they would cry when our mothers and Milly were out of sight doing housework together in flowered dresses. Then they would grab me and hold me down in the dirt until I cried, “White is black!” “Two and two make five!” “Red is green!” Mother was small and neat and dark, like a thrush with bright eyes. Father was tall and big-boned and fair. He had crinkly hair and a moustache that scratched. Frances had dark red hair, as she still has, and was small like Mother. Her eyes are brown with a yellowish gleam so that sometimes they look golden. I have hazel eyes. Ours was a generation of daughters, half of them called Elizabeth and Margaret. In imitation of the royal pair, we were dressed in little tweed coats, good oxfords, smocked dresses and hats turned back at the brim. We had our pictures taken together, with our hair curled like theirs, and parted at the side. The little house was the one I liked: it was small and snug and full of hidey-holes. It fit around us like a shell and we were blissfully happy there, even without Milly’s fur and feathers. Frances was very good at handwriting, but otherwise fell behind me in school. I was quick and careless and got prizes for essays and drawing, taught swimming at the Y, worked at the local camp and on the school magazine. She had friends, however, and moved in a cloud of girls as thick as mosquitoes in their bell-shaped summer dresses. By the time she was twelve there were boys around her too. It was obvious even to me that as soon as she acquired a waist-line, she also acquired an effulgent eroticism; her small high round breasts, pink skin and pink-tinged auburn hair, her doll’s rosebud mouth, small perfect

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nose and small-boned frame were somehow heartbreaking. Her beauty was something to admire as well as resent. It was like having a Renoir in the family. From the time she was very small, she had liked to work with Mother, shelling peas, polishing furniture, running the dust mop around the margins of the rugs. I would sit in the window reading while they worked and prattled. I thought they were crazy. There were all those books in the library to read. When Mother’s health declined, Father arranged to have Frances released from school. It was obvious that her talents lay elsewhere and he was afraid that she would take the domestic girl’s way out of the back row of the grade eight and get pregnant. He set her free to do what she wanted to. I had scorn for her once, though I don’t any more. She has always kept a good house, and as for her academic failures, it is now clear that she was dyslectic. Early on that day that Mother died, I looked out my window to see dewcoated spider webs strung like nets between blades of grass on the side lawn. “The fairies have their washing out, the day will be fine,” I thought. Mother had taught me that. The webs were gone by the time she died, or at least invisible, but the flowers were iridescent in the sun. I sat among them, protected by a wall of roses and peonies and budding delphiniums, by the hum of bees, from the sound of the undertaker’s men bearing their leaden burden, the minister’s neat, light step, the solemn closing and opening of doors, the telephone’s shrill. When Frances called me in to help make supper, I went at once. Supper was glum. I had not mashed the potatoes well enough. Father pushed his plate to the side and said, “You will have to change Mother’s bed. Eugene and Myrtle are coming.” Frances gave a cry. “No nonsense, Frances. They have to sleep somewhere. The funeral is the day after to-morrow.” “I have an exam,” I protested. “I will phone the school and that will be looked after.” He ate his pie and went to his study. His shoulders sloped like a coat hanger. We did the dishes in silence. She washed, I dried. Leaving the potato pot

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to soak, we went upstairs to Mother’s bedroom. The covers were rolled back and sideways; there was an empty triangle of white sheet where this morning she had lain. Automatically we took our bed-making places, Frances to the left, I to the right. We stood on either side of the bed. We could not touch the sheets. We stood and stared at the emptiness, the crevasse that was a break in our lifeline, a white, vacant canyon of loss. I began to shake. I thought, this is the only important thing that is ever going to happen to me. I looked up at Frances. She was shaking, too. We moved around to the end of the serpentine bedstead and put our arms around each other and held on hard. Then we broke away and began to strip the bed. Frances got the clean linen from the closet, while I put the old down the chute. Zip, flip, we put the bottom sheet on, added the top, did the hospital corners, added the blankets, pillows; turned down the top, tucked in the sides, smoothed the surface, plumped and straightened the pillows. Then Frances and I folded Mother’s beautiful green satin bedspread, put it in the closet, and smoothed the mauve one over the made bed. Myrtle and Eugene couldn’t have everything. Then we went to the dressing table and cautiously opened the drawers. We didn’t want Myrtle going through Mother’s things. I put the cosmetics in a shoe box. Frances packed her initialled ivory hairbrushes and nail buffers, shoe horn and mirror in one of the big Simpson’s boxes we always saved after Christmas. We looked at each other, nodded, and left behind two lace handkerchiefs and a Lypsil. Frances took the tweezers and gave me the nail scissors. We left behind a box of black hairpins. We put her jewel box outside Father’s door. We threw out her mended stockings and parcelled up the miscellanea: two wartime ration books (sugar, butter), a drawing Frances had done at six, a worn-out cosmetic bag I gave her when I was eight, a box of costume jewellery. We dusted and straightened the pictures: Father at University, Mother and staggering infant Frances in a garden, the four of us together, Mother and Eugene as solemn children. We shook the lace dresser-scarf out the window, and ritually applied the last of the perfume from the green and mauve glass bottle behind our ears. It was old and stank of alcohol. Frances took the Pond’s cold cream and I the Noxzema. We ranged the Dorothy Gray pots and vials in order. Frances preferred Helena Rubenstein and I didn’t use anything. We threw out the intimate Arrid and a mucky little quarter-sized disk

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of rouge. Ditto two dirty velvet powder puffs. We adjusted the skirt of the ballet-dancer lamp. We took Mother’s suitcase from the cupboard and tackled the chiffoniere. All her pretty underclothes, all her well-loved cardigans, all her scarves and leather and woollen gloves and especially the pink silk rose she sometimes wore at the neck of her black dinner dress we hid away. It was correct to empty drawers for the use of a guest. We left behind the hatboxes and suits and day and house and dinner dresses in the closet, the rows of shoes with Cuban and court and illusion and spike heels, the thin metal shoe-trees we had played war with when we were little. We threw out a collection of corn plasters. I thought of the times I had sneaked in and pawed through her blameless possessions looking for adult magic and secrets and how I had longed to have the run of these drawers and how I hated it now. It wasn’t death I wanted permission from. Frances went across the room and straightened the books on either side of the fireplace. They were mostly Book-of-the-Month Club. Where else would you get books in a town like ours? We’d ferreted in them for the secrets of love and found the source of the Nile, the Spanish Civil War, conversations with Bach and Rembrandt as well as steamy love affairs in the South. All this time we had worked as if we were two pairs of hands attached to one body. I looked at the Swiss clock on the mantle. It had taken us less than twenty-five minutes. “There’ll be people coming,” Frances said, picking up Mother’s suitcase. “I’m going to change.” As she spoke, a black Pontiac drove up and a lawyer got out. A blue car parked behind him. Killer Flynn’s yellow jalopy was third in line. I heard Frannie fly down the stairs as he emerged, pulled up his pants, and adjusted his parts inside them like Gary Cooper. I left the room slowly. If Martin Mackay, who was supposed to be my boyfriend, came to see me, there’d be no need to run interference with Father. It was more likely, however, that his mother would come. Killer Flynn’s real name was Kyle, an odd one considering that we lived in a generation of Rons and Bobs and Dicks and Bills and Georges. Father didn’t like him. He was a farm boy, but as Mother said, his parents were all right. He had, like Frances, left school early. He had a job in the stockroom of the People’s Store at the moment.

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I went to my room, combed my hair, and prepared to go graciously downstairs, to play the Countess and receive guests. I was not a long time away from the desert of the empty bed, but I knew one must rise to occasions and anyways, Frances would be preoccupied with Killer so I could be Junior Chief Mourner. Frances was standing in the double doorway between the living room and the dining room with Kyle Flynn who, now that his pants were adjusted and his greasy pompom was slicked to the side, looked perfectly acceptable. Father looked every inch beautiful and bereaved. His social manner had given way to his court manner and he had a sprig of white lilac in his buttonhole, like the flower he wore for his dead mum on Mother’s Day. He was saying to Judge Bampton, “Yes, it was a long time.” The Minister was waiting to talk to him and so was the secretary of the Golf Club. When I saw Mrs Mackay steaming up the walk, I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, full. frannie’s song I can make a cherry pie, Killy Boy, Killy Boy I can make a lemon pie, raise me lover, I can make an apple pie, quick’s the Grits git in your eye I’m a young thing and would not leave my Mother in the kitchen, Mother in the spring, Mother in the orchard, who knows what time will bring? Mother in the pantry, Mother in the yard, Mother in the bedroom, Father’s coming Hard by the brook a lemon leans Telling of her lover Who’s blue of eye and breek’d and lean And will I have an Orchard of my own one day, Baby for to dandle? Not if Martin’s Eye’s too keen who doesn’t have a Handle us gently, time; one day We’ll have a sweeter song to sing. She’ll have books and I’ll have treen And fairy babies in between

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And love and lonesome, dark and screen: O lilt me love, I’m lost, I lean. I peeped out into the living room to see if Martin was there. Perhaps he had been hidden from view behind her as they came up the walk. That happened sometimes. But no, he wasn’t there. He was probably at home studying French. She was talking to Killer and Frances. I suddenly knew how much I wished Martin was like Killer, and how glad she was he wasn’t. I thought of the time Martin told me he saw Frances changing her clothes behind the People’s Store, in the parking lot, in Killer’s car. He had marvelled at her transformation. “She has two complete sets,” he said, “one for home, one for going out with Killer. She’s like an actress. She’s marvellous.” I stood and watched Mrs Mackay, half hoping, half fearing she would turn and see me. I liked her a lot, particularly when she was teaching me and Martin Shakespearean Madrigals, or recalling her days as a student in the twenties at the University of Toronto, but I also felt guilty for liking her because my father didn’t. He was some complicated relation of hers – a cousin once-removed. Both Jean Mackay and my grandmother Laird were descendants of Ellen Jane McClure who came out to the township from Ulster in 1825 and raised twelve children by herself after her husband was killed felling a tree. And of course my father was a descendant too, but he and my mother were not in the same tradition, they did not concentrate on looking as if they were capable of raising twelve children alone, and “dear life and grim death” was not their favourite expression. They were sports, frivolous members of grim and earnest families, dedicated to looking well, earning a living seemingly without effort, and enjoying themselves. And look what happened. Jean was so typical a product of her society that I could describe her varicosities, her corsets, and her shoes the first time I looked at her. Like my grandmother, she appeared not to believe that the human body was capable of holding itself up (hadn’t Ellen Jane McClure’s?), and she wore corsets, thick support stockings, and arch supports in her heavy Cuban-heeled shoes. Martin described these to me with a malicious sort of wonder. She was kind, intelligent, and hairy. I spent more time with her than I spent with my mother the last year of Mother’s life, and I was guilty for it. I stood watching her. She was wearing a mustard-coloured chiffon dress. Her corset-laces stood out in knots underneath it, although I knew she had

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the regulation number of under layers on too. I could suddenly hear Mother say, “oh, if only Jean would take some of it off! She doesn’t have to be a widow forever.” And I stared at her and thought, she’s unfortunate (black straight hair visible even through thick stockings, black straight hair hanging down from the curls on the nape of her neck) but she’s somehow right. She had Martin to bring her up because her husband hadn’t come back from the war. I thought she was sensible, hard-working, and right. Finally, she saw me and rushed to me and held me to a bosom that smelled of stale Muguet de Bois and said that Martin was working on his French but he’d come over tomorrow and certainly to the funeral if he was through his exam in time and she was so, so sorry, but it was a mercy in another way too, and I’d know that in time. She was worn out, poor Belle. Over her shoulder I saw my father standing watching me. He had a glass in his hand, and in his dark suit, with his fair hair combed back and his moustache trimmed, he looked like a man in a liquor ad. He has his nerve, I thought, in front of the Minister. Who was pretending not to notice, and who soon took his leave. There were a lot of people in the house now, more than I had seen since my grandparents’ diamond wedding anniversary when I was eight. Somehow the members of the Women’s Association of the church had got in and taken over the kitchen, removing my one pathetic kettle to a back burner and heating up coffee on the stove, laying out plates of fancy sandwiches and little cakes. They kept whizzing past me in the doorway, laying fingers on my shoulder and saying, “There, there dear.” “You and Martin can work on your songs,” Jean was saying. Because Martin and I were writing a musical for summer camp. We had started it in mid-winter at the Hi-Y club and it would be ready for production, we hoped, in August. We didn’t waste our time necking, Martin and I, we did things. Sat all night over the rhyming dictionary and the piano sometimes, trying to better “Paint Your Wagon” and “Brigadoon.” I wasn’t much good, but I could copy music fast, and Martin liked the company, he said. Jean was good at harmony, and she knew something I couldn’t ever fathom: how to break up conventional prosody so that it would fit in with a tune. Our Sunday School teacher, Miss Fensom; the superintendent, Otis Reid; Richard Faichnie from the Register Office; my grandfather’s law clerk, old Beattie Troon; my home-room teacher, Mr Glynn, who looked five feet tall beside Father; Frances’s favourite teacher, Miss Kitching, who was better

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looking than I thought, and of course did Domestic Science; the church ladies, who were parents of my friends; and Connie Dinsdale who used to be our “country girl” before she got married: all these people were in our house and it wasn’t even the funeral yet. I ate a lot of brownies as the plates of cakes whizzed by me, and listened to Jeannie’s soft meaningless mutter as I inched towards Frannie and Killer. He smelled funny; under the Vitalis there was a strong, acrid male smell. It wasn’t BO, it was boy. Martin smelled of Lifebuoy soap. I couldn’t stand that about him, and I ought to tell him. Then someone opened the door again and Myrtle, my aunt, Uncle Eugene’s wife, rushed in, crying, “Frank! Frannie! Poor little Lizzie!” I looked in desperation for the bloodless minister, perhaps he could keep her in line, but he was gone. “Well, Myrtle,” said Father. Myrtle handed him a brittle piece of fur from around her neck, and stepped into the room. She smelled of chaff and chop, which would have been all right, except that she was Myrtle. Father handed me the fur and I put it on the hall table, where it looked like the carcass it was, but whose it did not reveal. Myrtle put an ankle into the living room. “The silver candlesticks are gone,” she said. “They’re being resilvered,” Father said. “Can I bring you a cup of tea?” Myrtle settled in a chair, playing Chief Mourner. “Oh, Frank,” she said. Eugene came over and kissed me, and then leaned on me, as if for support. “She didn’t suffer, Lizzie?” “She died in her sleep,” I lied. “What will I do without old Bella, Lizzie?” “I don’t know, Eugene.” I tried to cheer him up, and said, “You’ve got the turkeys.” “Turkeys!” he said, and glowered at Myrtle. He had gone from Gallant Lad to village cardsharp, unhappy under the thumb of his father. By the time his father died, he’d lost half the value of the farm. He had no practical sense and no gift for husbandry. Myrtle kept him going: he needed her the way floppy collars need pins, and it was her idea that fifty acres would do for turkeys. He hated turkeys. He was never disloyal to Myrtle and Mother had told us not to be either, because however awful she was, she kept Gene going. It was hard. She had a goitre she refused to have removed or cured because goitre ran in her family, and she stole.

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I suppose she was jealous of Mother, who had left village life behind her and married above Myrtle’s expectations. I don’t think she stole from other people, but when we were small and spent voluptuously featherbedded vacations on Eugene’s farm, a ring of mother’s disappeared; when they came to us, her pearl earrings disappeared. After that, we didn’t visit back and forth anymore. Eugene came alone when Mother wrote that she thought she was dying. There was something in me that stood back and watched, and that night it knew how everyone was feeling. Eugene and Father and Frannie and I were grieving. Mrs Mackay was trying to see how she would help. Killer was aching for Frances. Myrtle was wondering what else was gone and I wasn’t surprised when she said she had a headache and went upstairs. (Belle’s room, my father said, without moving an eyebrow). I felt I ought to go up with her and left Killer asking Gene about the turkey business. I showed her to her room. “You’ve taken off the good spread,” she said. I didn’t answer. Then she nodded to the bed. “She died there.” “You can have my bed, if you like, but it’s only a three-quarter.” It was an ivory tin bed with a basket of roses stencilled at its head and I loved to put my cheek against the cold metal when I had a fever. “You’ll need your own bed tonight.” I went downstairs and sent Eugene up with their baggage. The Women’s Association were washing the dishes. I watched them but I was really upstairs watching Myrtle going through Mother’s clothes: the black chiffon with the painted roses, the pink silk stencilled in grey hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades; the gold and black evening dress, the blue velvet cloak. When I came down in the morning, Frances was making a second lot of eggs for Myrtle, because the yolk of one of hers had broken. Eugene winked at me and said, “Bed bugs didn’t bite, eh?” Myrtle said, “Frank, there’s time to sew black ribbons on the girls’ dresses.” Father said, “They’re fine as they are, Myrtle.” I said I didn’t want any eggs and nobody tried to talk me into any. Myrtle tried to get my toast, but I made her wait her turn for her second portion. I stared at Uncle Eugene and wondered where the bright gaffer of Mother’s stories was in this bald old simpleton, and whether I would die to my true self also in growing up; perhaps the complexities of turning child into adult were so numerous that it was impossible to achieve consistency in anyone. The thought made me feel cold. Father, however, had the steady gaze of his baby pictures, wise eyes that

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said, you may think it’s that way; it may be different; wait. This was the day before Mother’s funeral, and he was almost dapper, almost indifferent, although he seemed to shuffle a little when he got up to go upstairs after breakfast. The florists kept ringing the bell with big baskets of flowers. It was not like receiving corsages for a dance. Myrtle wanted to help us with the dishes. We declined. She hung around anyway saying we were burying Mother in haste, everybody but Jews waited until a body was decently cold before they buried it. I said I was sure Father had made the right decision. She said, you pore gels, no one but me and Eugene to turn to, or were the old girls coming from out west. I said the old girls couldn’t come, Victoria was too far away. She said it was a weak-hearted family that died out that way. And then, “It’s a pity poor Isabel never had a son.” I wanted to say, “Neither did you,” but I wasn’t that young or that stupid. Frannie and I hung our tea towels up and went out to the back porch with the mop and the dishcloth, leaving her talking to herself. We sat on the back steps with our arms laid across each other’s shoulders for a moment. “Is Killer coming to the funeral?” I asked. “No, Daddy doesn’t want him to, so it’s not worth taking time off work.” We decided to take the ironing board up to her room, which was bigger than mine, and do our dresses there. We drove to Mackenzie’s with Father in our own black car, all three of us in front. We hadn’t worn our crinolines, and we fit together nicely. Myrtle and Eugene followed us in the undertaker’s limousine. We went in last, from a side door, and sat in front where we could see Mother, in profile, in her coffin. I felt as if she was sucking me in there too, and I wanted to cry. Frances sniffled. The man who played at Rotary Club meetings played the Hammond organ. I listened to his low medley of oldfashioned hymns and tried to remember whether his name was Perce or Cy. Father got up and went behind a curtain and had an argument with Mackenzie’s helper. I concentrated on the baskets of flowers, all florists’ flowers, mums and roses and carnations, not a peony among them. Mr Mackenzie came out huffily and closed the coffin. The Minister came and we sang “The Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll Not Want” to the old Psalter tune, not to “Brother James’s air,” which is too cheerful for a funeral. Then he told us that Mother was a good woman taken before her time, and read

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passages from the Bible to demonstrate this. I kept wondering what Myrtle was thinking. She belonged to some religious sect that was strange to me, the Pentecostals or the Holy Rollers, and was always critical of the bland orthodoxy of the United Church. My hat was riding up. When I put my hand up to squelch it down, I realised that someone had removed the wreath of cotton flowers I had put around it in the spring. Frannie’s was plain, too. I didn’t listen to the prayers. I sealed myself off from my feelings, and played with my Sunday gloves and pretended I needed to pick my nose. Father didn’t close his eyes: he sat and stared at his dry, white fingers. Six members of the Bar Association, including the secretary of the Golf Club, carried Mother out to the hearse. They wore morning coats and striped trousers. Then we went out after them, and I saw that the parlour was crowded: there were the wives of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; there were our teachers, who were free now exams were nearly over; there were women from the church. I thought, they loved her. We drove to the cemetery facing Father and Myrtle and Eugene, in the fold-out seats of the black limousine. I wanted to skew my neck and look at the hearse carrying Mother. I kept thinking woe, woe, woe, they’re going to put her in the ground. I switched to thinking how much I hated Daniel Mackenzie, who had thrown a baseball at me and chipped my front tooth (he may have expected me to catch the ball with my hands, rather than my face, but that proved he was unobservant), and how I hated his mother, our supply Latin teacher, who wore heavy grey crepe dresses and had heavy legs, one of which she always planted on a seat in front of her desk as she talked. It didn’t help. I started to cry anyway. I had played a lot in the cemetery, climbed stones, read epitaphs, scuffled through leaves hunting chestnuts, always taking a kind of proprietary pride in the Laird plot: but I’d never thought of putting Mother there, next to Grandma Laird who didn’t like her. They had one of those big Scots crosses on a pillar with a lot of names on it, maybe trying to prove they were a better class of Scot than a covenanter or a highland sheep-stealer; but I didn’t want her to go in there, I didn’t like it. I almost dashed forward and threw myself in the hole so they couldn’t lower Mother, but I found Father’s hand on my shoulder, and gave in.

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When they said ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Mr Mackenzie, who looked more and more like Quasimodo, pulled a glass vial out of his pocket and poured sand on the edge of the coffin. Frances and I clutched each other’s hands. I thought, the only thing to do is throw yourself on the pyre. Myrtle sobbed. The church ladies had made tea at home, but as soon as I headed in the door I put my head down like a bull and bolted up the stairs. I went to bed with my clothes on, even my hat, and slept until it was all over. When I went downstairs again, the house seemed to be bare and stripped. The chest of silver was gone from the dining room, and although the church women had put things away neatly, they had not fixed the place up the way Mother had taught Frances and me to do it. The dining-room table looked bald without its lace runner, the china figures on the mantelpiece were too far apart. Myrtle and Eugene and Father were talking in the living room. “She hoped to live longer, of course,” Father was saying, “but we did all we could.” Then, “The advantage of her long illness is that the girls learned to manage the house. Frances is a very good cook. We’ll be all right.” It was dark. The night was soft. I found some party sandwiches in the fridge covered with waxed paper, and took a handful, sat and ate them on the back steps listening to the crickets. Something was going on. We were going to be poor. Maybe Dr Duff charged a lot: it was three dollars to go to the office for a shot or a medical for summer camp; sometimes he’d come twice a day. Poor Mother: it must have been awful to know that she was not only dying, she was bankrupting Father. I thought of the funeral. It was not like church, where on a good Sunday the congregation seemed to breathe with a single breath. People had stood at angles to each other in the graveyard, someone had said, “Not very many relatives” in a small voice, nobody looked my father in the eye. When I went in again, everyone seemed to have gone to bed. I went upstairs and found an envelope on my dresser, labelled “Take at bedtime, E.J. Duff.” So I cleaned my teeth and undressed and took it, drifted off again, not knowing where anyone was, simply solitary, but in my own bed. When I came down in the morning there was no one around. I thought of going up and getting Jane Eyre, but that would re-enact the death, and I couldn’t bear that. I set the table for breakfast, five places. When Father heard me, he came down. “They’re gone,” he said. “Did they take the silver?”

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“No. That went to pay Mackenzie. We’re running low. Don’t mind, it’s old-fashioned stuff, you’ll never want it.” “I don’t mind. I’m never going to get married anyway.” “Tell me that in five years. Just tea and toast this morning.” “Where’s Frannie?’ “Sound asleep.” There was no morning paper for him to hide behind, but he never talked much in the morning. He drank his tea and I played with a bowl of cornflakes. Then he said, “You’ll write French tomorrow in the principal’s office.” That night he said at supper, which was ham brought in by someone from the church while I was studying, “I’ll be away most of the summer. Frances, you ought to go to camp with Lizzie.” “She hates camp,” I said. I didn’t want her on my bailiwick, the place where for a month I got away from sisterhood. “Creepy-crawly,” said Frances. “I can stay here, Dad.” “I’ll talk to the director. There must be some way you can make yourself useful. Get those baskets of flowers out, they’re morbid.” We took off the cards first, and divided them in two piles to write thankyou notes about. We washed up. “You’ll hate camp,” I said to Frannie. “You know where Killer’s farm is. I won’t interfere with you and Martin one bit.” That was how it was after Mother died. We did our jobs, amused ourselves as we saw fit, and waited for decrees from on high. They came with regularity and made me see why he hated his mother. “You will do this,” he said, and “You will do that.” None of Mother’s “Would you,” and “Do you think you could see your way to?” Just bald commands. We were to get our clothing together. We were to leave a list of supplies that needed to be bought. (Would he really go downtown and get a large box of Modess?) Frances was to work in the camp kitchen with Annie Forrest. I was to take my usual position as counsellor. We were to stay all three terms. We were to go out on the bus. We were to contact his clerk if we needed him. “Well, at least you’re coming,” Martin said. “Listen to this.” He played a bouncy tune on the piano. “It sounds okay; what is it about?” “It’s a love song. Harold and Margie’s duet.” “Love songs don’t bounce, Martin.”

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“Harry,” he sang, “you’re hoary but Harris Tweed turns my feelings to tap Ioca and turnips and glue. My Joy in your journeys, my Jouncing and bouncing de Sire for your sirname shall make you my Sire. Then there’s a chorus of campers that comes on singing, ‘Fisheyes and glue, fisheyes and glue, fisheyes and glue, there’s nothing so stuffing as fisheyes and glue.” “Jeepers, Marty.” “Isn’t it terrific?” “It isn’t a love song: I mean, turnips and tapioca, really.” “Well it’s not a Frances and Killer sort of love song, but it’s entirely suited to these two, who are old and sensible.” I looked at Marty and saw love as frogspawn. Then I had a weird vision of my father under his mother’s window with a bouquet of everlasting and feverfew. I started to giggle. “Yeah, it’s great,” I said. The land for Camp Coralinda had been donated to the Y by a Mr Lindner in memory of his wife. It was a spectacular piece of land: a great bend where the river had a wide sandbar, and a high cliff with a jiggly wooden railing leading up to the tent rows and dining hall and craft shed. It was a small, local summer camp and Martin and I had gone there since we were eight. Frannie had hated her first summer and never come back except to see me on Visitors’ Day. It was strange to walk into the dining hall and see her in the back with Mrs Forrest and Edie, who’d cooked there for years. She slept in a staff tent with them, and at six when the cookhouse shut down, she went out to the road to wait for Killer, who passed by every night on his way home. During boys’ camp I lived in a counsellors’ tent, and during girls’ sessions I had a group to superintend, which only amounted to making sure they had the right clothes on at the right time, herding them places, and telling them ghost stories. In the morning, I did Swim Patrol, keeping the juniors well out of the way of the river’s potholes (which were marked with silverpainted floats), taught what arts and crafts I knew (the beginning of boondoggle, egg-cosies), and geared up for the lunchtime sing-song, which Martin

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and I led together. During Rest Hour, we worked on our songs, as we did every other moment of the day we were allowed to. There were camps like Coralinda all over Canada in the thirties and forties: assemblages of tents or cabins, wooden dining halls, flagpoles with morning circles of white stone at the edge of the baseball diamond. They were dedicated to the proposition that outdoors is good for you, that the lore of our pioneer forefathers (at least, the names of six flowers, six stars and six trees) is worth remembering, and also, at heart, I think, were a means of helping children grow up by providing for small, annual separations. Paid staff were few – usually a camp director, who functioned for a separate organisation in the winter, a matronly woman who helped the little children cope without Mum, a lifeguard with papers to prove it, kitchen staff and some sort of nurse. Campers automatically grew into counsellors, so that the ones who loved it there obtained a couple of summers free; hence the presence of my circle: Mad Marty, Leaping Lizzie, Sing-Sing Bennet and Enough McDuff: friends of a sort in winter at high school, Musketeers at camp in summer. I was afraid that Frances would ruin my summer world, but that did not happen. I saw her every morning, sweating already over a huge oatmeal pot, and prettier as she suffered; we exchanged the briefest of greetings, but her real relationship was with Mrs Forrest and the country girl who helped her, and mine lay with Martin and The Gang. The only negative encounter I had with her that summer occurred when I was taking a group of timorous little girls, juniors, I suppose, in a first encounter with crickets and frogs and grass snakes, along the riverbank for an evening cook-out. I had two of them rigged up as porters, carrying an egg box containing a supper of wieners, marshmallows and canned beans. I hope there were apples for a balanced diet. I had one little girl at the head of the line with me as Guide and Scout. She shot ahead around a bend in the bank and came pelting back. “There are some people there,” she said. She looked scared, so I advanced cautiously myself. Frannie and Killer were having at each other on the mucky sand under the bank. I went back and sat my campers down for a break. I started them singing those idiotic summer songs we loved: “Mr Wing,” “A Capital Ship,” “Green Grow the Rushes,” “A Keeper Would a Shooting Go”… where they came from, I don’t know. Finally my scout nosed around the bend and reported that they were gone. I moved my party ahead, but stealthily, and we

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made a fire where they had made their fire, burned our wieners, charred fingers and marshmallows, sang more, and, when it was dark and the stars were out, I led them the long half-mile home up the bank and over the meadows. I showed them all I knew about the stars: the big dipper, the little dipper, the big P, the big C, the big W. I tucked them into their tents and took the kit to the dining hall. Frannie wasn’t there, but Marty was at the piano as usual, working on his musical; the story had developed prettily into the saga of two rather elderly people (Harris and Emily) who ran a summer camp on a river, and though they were too old, fell in love. Their difficulties were compounded by the fact that he was a widower with two demanding children who disliked Emily, that she lived in a different town, as she had always, and the Medical Officer of Health was pursuing them and all the campers out of an erroneous belief that the outdoor toilets were too near the well. That night I wasn’t as impressed by his work as I usually was. I told him I thought Emily was silly not to want to leave home, she had to have someone holding her back, like an elderly Mum; that the “Father Dear Father” song was too much of a steal; that the part about the toilets was vulgar. I had no sympathy. “What’s wrong with you?” “I just think it’s stupid. Not everybody thinks toilets are howlingly funny and Mr Lauder will probably ban it.” “He said it’s great. I played it to him tonight.” “Who led the sing-song?” “Sing-Sing and his magic violin.” “Cripes. Well, why don’t you talk about polluting the river instead?” “It doesn’t have any punch.” “Well, it’s real.” A hundred and twenty campers were too many for the river, and by mid-August it was green with slime, the camp was shut, and unlike our rivals, Camp Bowood and Camp Kitchicoma, we were deprived of a late-summer Young Adult session, complete with mixed canoe races and square dances. I thought this was a great pity. Martin turned his back to the piano and adjusted his glasses; played on. “Listen to this.” It was a tune for a new waltz. “Country Gardens,” I said. “Whaa?” “You stole it from ‘Country Gardens.’ It’s just like it.”

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He played the air again. “Damn you, Lizzie,” he said. Because it was. I faded back to my tent and crawled half-dressed into my bag. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of Killer and Frannie on the riverbank, wiggling on top of each other. They kept turning into a knot of garter snakes. Finally I got up and padded out into the empty dark, through the haunted forest that was really an old apple orchard, down to the riverbank, where I sat and thought and perhaps wept. In the morning Martin said, “You look like Mr Toad.” Then, “That’s it, Lizzie: we’ll turn it into The Wind in the Willows. We’ll make a musical of it.” “By next week?” “Well … next winter, won’t we Lizzie?” “Your mother can help you.” Frannie looked prettier than ever that morning, and the morning after, and … I slipped away from Martin. My part of the show was done anyhow: I had copied the music and taught the senior campers their parts. It was his show, book, music and lyrics. I hadn’t even been given a credit on the programme I typed out to send in to be copied on the Gestetner at the Y. I spent the evenings now wandering in the green dusk up and down the riverbank, sometimes taking out a canoe alone, pretending I was a silent Indian, in spite of my drippy j-stroke, going as far up as I could into the shallows, as far down as I could before the current got dangerous. I persuaded myself I was looking for birds, for adventure, but I never saw Frannie and Killer again. I kept on at this every night until two country boys overturned me and tried to chase me through the water. Then I went back to helping with rehearsals. The show was for the last week of the last camp session, and a lot of parents came. Oonagh McDuff came down with a cold, so I had to sing Emily. Martin made me up to look like his mother. Everyone said we were all wonderful. We felt wonderful. Frannie and I both stayed behind for camp clean-up, helping to fold the tents, burn rubbish, turn the site back into the piece of farmland it originally was. Killer took the day off and worked. He wasn’t tanned, like the camp boys, but he was strong and he knew how to work: he made them all look like minnows.

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We all cried over our last pot of tea in Mrs Forrest’s kitchen. “You’ll be back next year,” she cried. “Dinna carry on, girls.” We swore we would. Father, who did the legal work for the Y, came to get us. He paced the grounds with the camp director, who had already reverted to his city name, Mr Lauder, rather than Big Al, and congratulated him on an accident-free summer. The place looked big and poor. I knew girls who went to expensive summer camps where they wore uniforms and had sailboats and horses. I didn’t think they could have had a better time than here. The house was big and empty too. Father sat us down at the kitchen table, and we made plans for the coming year: that was what the end of August was about. I was afraid he was going to say we were poor again, everything was over; instead, he offered to take us shopping to Toronto, for material for winter clothes. “Make out a list of what you want,” he said, “and divide it in half.” Frannie’s eyes flashed. Then he announced that he had arranged for Frances to go to business college. “I don’t want to!” she cried. “Typing isn’t hard.” “You know I’ll fail.” “You don’t have to take shorthand, Frances. Typing and bookkeeping will stand you in good stead.” “I could be a cook. Mrs Forrest taught me a lot!” “You’ll go to business college for a term, Frances; you’ll have enough cooking to do here. Elizabeth, I’m expecting good things of you in grade thirteen. You will also help Frances in the house.” “I’m taking eleven subjects.” “Nevertheless.” We went to Toronto and bought length after length of material, a load of orlon sweaters, correct white blouses for business college; had lunch together in the Round Room, met Father as we were instructed at the corner of College and Bay. When we showed him our purchases he gave us a tiny little smile and drove us home. School was my real life, and I loved the intensity of its recommencement: Martin turning up on the doorstep, finding out whose form you were to be in (though in the top year, you knew), going to the bookstore, covering the new texts with Royal Bank covers, sharpening pencils. By the time the weather got cool, life had a routine, a rhythm, that was as satisfying as

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bread, and it seemed right entirely that one started down the hill in the heat, that the heat turned off, that one scuffled through the leaves, then snow, then slush, then rain. At home, things were different. Father was sometimes there, sometimes not. When he was there he looked over his dinner as if he were hunting for fleas, ate carefully, and moved few of the muscles in his face. When he spoke, it was to check up on us, were we doing our homework, why hadn’t Frances been at the college Friday? Why wasn’t I helping Frances more, and who the hell had scorched his shirt tails? Finally, he said to Frances, “I don’t want you going out with that Flynn boy.” “He’s my boyfriend.” “Break with him.” “I love him!” “He’s no good.” “He is too, you’re just a snob.” He slapped her. She went into one of her little nervous fits and I had to get a cold cloth for her forehead. Then he said, “I’ll be in Toronto for a few days.” That must have been just after Christmas. When he returned he had someone with him. “I’d like you,” he said, “to meet Major Silliker.” A blue-eyed man with a high colour and dark red hair. A hooked nose. A military carriage. “Major Silliker and I worked together during the war. I have to go away on a trip, and he’s agreed to stay here with you while I’m gone.” “Is he to be our nanny?” The idea struck me as droll. So did the Major. Frances turned red and said, “We can stay by ourselves. We don’t need anyone.” She hated the business school and had stayed away the whole time Father was in Toronto, drowsing in bed and listening to the Hit Parade, whose songs, I thought, were inferior to Martin’s. “You certainly,” said the Major, “don’t need a nanny!” “Nanny goat,” said Frances, dangerously, under her breath. Father flashed her a look and I scrunched myself up small inside. “Frances,” said Father, “is seventeen and wilful. Lizzie is sixteen: she’s our good student. She is not interested in housework: only the life of the mind.” The Major giggled. That had an odd effect on me. I felt we were entering into a conspiracy with him against Father. I felt good. I looked from face to face. Father was

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smiling for the first time since Mother died, really smiling; his whole face was alive, not his little crescent mouth under his little crescent moustache. “The Major will be looking after some of the details in my office,” he said. “He’s a Justice of the Peace.” He can marry Frannie and Killer, I thought. I’d been worrying about them, waiting for Frannie’s figure to change, like everybody else’s who’d quit school. It was so long since happiness was in our house that we had forgotten what it was like; but here it was like the sun coming through the clouds, and I realised that we had been thoroughly miserable for more than a term, Father fussing about Frances’s schooling, Killer’s devotion, my lack of domesticity, the bumpy skirts I had made myself, the way I did my hair, or failed to do it, the consistency of the breakfast porridge, which was excellent but not my mother’s, the way the table was laid (we rushed in and skipped procedures in order to get dinner on by six), the fact that we had been doing, as we had been doing for years, the laundry on Sunday, getting out the old Gilson Snowbird and cramming it in the scullery door so we didn’t have to fill it from pails, clomping around in our rubber boots so it wouldn’t electrocute us, washing first the shirts and underwear, then the sheets, then the socks and coloured things all in the same water; not as nicely as Mother had done, lovely Mother with her hair streaming down her face, failing each breathless laundry day, but only just, to put her hair through the wringer. We had done it on Sunday in order to help her; washed on Sunday, ironed on endless Monday nights, and now it was bad, as it was bad to shop on Wednesday after school and ask him to bring the stuff home in the car. Everything had turned sour for him, the way things were done was not good enough, we were not good enough, he was as bad as his mother, there was no pleasing him. We had muttered that he wanted not daughters but slaves, and, spitefully, stopped putting the sheets through the rinse water, so they were stiff with soap on our beds and we scratched a lot. Once we’d sent them to the laundry anyhow; it wasn’t much money; he could start that again. But no, he was going: that made us all beam. He was getting out, and he was high and happy on it. We found his old club-bag and scrubbed it inside and out. We found Grandpa Laird’s suitcases, the black leather ones, and took them to the shoemaker to be mended. We didn’t tell anyone he was going, because he told us not to, but we bustled that week, saying, “Oh, would you like to take that?” And “Can I help you find this?”

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And in the background, the Major buzzed and beamed. He went to the office every morning with Father, then picked Frannie up at the business college and took her to the Metropolitan Store for lunch, sometimes even to the White Spot for a vegetarian plate. He said, “Can I help you with this?” “Would you like me to do the shopping?” and “If a person wanted a nice little drink in this burgh, where would he go?” He wasn’t as tall as Father, but he was better looking. He had a profile as noble as the Duke of Wellington’s and an eye as bright as a bird’s. He was English, and his accent was as refined as Michael Redgrave’s. He stood straight and walked fast, as I learned the odd morning when he took his constitutional by marching me and Martin down the hill in the morning. He had red cheeks for his blue eyes, and nice, square, practical hands. He cocked his head back when he looked at a situation and said things like, “Now if you put the armchair there, we’d be warmer by the fire all of us.” And the vacancy left by Mother closed over a little, because the house wasn’t the same any more, it wasn’t sitting on Spruce Street bereft. We spent a week getting Father ready to go, and then he went. In the evening, he had long conferences with the Major in his study over bottles of whisky (the Major had no hesitation in going to the liquor store, he simply marched in and filled the chit and marched out with the stuff again, without looking guilty or ashamed or afraid his mother would see him: he just bought it) and I, who was upstairs swotting five hours a night in order to get to university (but not to the same one Martin was going to, not that, oh, no, never: I wanted a new life; the love songs were really bad now) heard phrases like, “Now this is in their name, and this,” as filing drawers opened and filing drawers were shut and papers changed hands. Then Father went; the Major drove him to the station, leaving us behind at home because he had said public farewells were corny. Father had explained the situation to us as follows: during the course of Mother’s illness, he had, in order to provide funds for her care, made certain investments which had turned out unfortunately. He had also, at her request, provided funds to a relative of hers who had let him down. It was better, therefore, that, for the moment, we remain in the house with the Major, while he hunted around Toronto and Montreal for backers who would help him build his business back up again. I took it all at its face value. Frances said to me afterwards, “He’s running away.”

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The Major, who was everywhere like the air we breathed, said, “You wouldn’t want the beaks after him?” “The what?” “The you-know.” “Why doesn’t Uncle Gene sell the farm and cough up?” “It wouldn’t be politick.” “Huh.” “Courage me hearties; he’ll find a new partner and it’ll all be over in a while.” Father gave us a big hug and went off whistling, “Wish me luck as you kiss me goodbye.” The day after he left, Frances quit the business school and started running the house properly again. I put my head down in my books and worked like a demon. The Major started driving me to school to save my energy, but didn’t pick up Martin. There was a small fuss in the community once they found Father had been replaced by the Major. [Jean] Mackay invited me over one Sunday afternoon while Marty was at his piano lesson and grilled me. Who was he, what was he like, what were we doing? I said I thought he was super, had been everywhere, had done everything. He’d been a War Hero, he knew Daddy from Ottawa, where he’d been seconded (and I said secunded, properly) to the Canadian Forces on a special mission, he was terribly well read, knew his Shakespeare and his French inside out and was helping me with my work, and knew how to live. We even had French wine for Sunday dinner sometimes. Well, he had it, we had a bit with water in it, so we would learn how to hold our drink. He was interested in music, I said, and knew his Bach from his Beethoven; he had a friend who played the pipes, and he said he’d been a fiddler in his youth. He was interested in art, and valued Matisse over Picasso, Turner over Constable. One evening he’d taken me on a walk through London from the maps on the end papers of a Sherlock Holmes book I was reading. He’d been to Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived, and grown up in Devonshire, near Dartmoor and Lorna Doone’s valley, though I thought Silliker was a Welsh name. He was a good dancer, and was teaching Frances and me the foxtrot and the tango. I could have gone on, but a frost fell in Jean Mackay’s living room, the glass curtains stirred in their stiffness, the maroon leaves on the grey and green tropical curtains frowned on me. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s only for a little while. ’Til Father’s partner gets things together.”

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“I see,” she said, “I see.” The Minister came to call. Frances gave him a perfectly proper tea, trying to hide her nail polish while she poured. The Major asked the Minister all about his origins, and they had a long discussion of the Devon moorland valleys. Buckland Brewer, they acknowledged, was a fine little village. Two of my teachers, female and single, tackled me. Everything was fine, I said. Frannie was ever so happy running the house, and the Major went to the office every morning, and Father would soon be back. I buckled down to my books, cursing the French book for being so simple and dumb and the German book for being so hard, underlining Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth where I thought the exam questions would lie, trying to separate xylem from phloem. I was only half home most of the time I was there; I stopped babysitting as Martin stopped writing musicals (though Music was one of his subjects and he was doing it Sundays across the river in another town), I stopped being everything but a student, which was what we did in the last year of high school in those days, because I wanted a place in university and I was one of the few who would have the privilege of going if I was good enough. There was a trust fund for me, I knew. It was hard to study in the robin-sobbing spring. We were all fagged out in our form, and the teachers kept telling us to take a bit of time off and go to the movies. We were racing each other like greyhounds and getting tired. Eager to please, I bought a subscription ticket to art movies at the Globe, and sat with Martin through a performance of The Spectre of the Rose that he thought nauseating; I disagreed. We also saw Stagefright, I remember, and a musical called The Pirate. He fell in love with Judy Garland and I couldn’t think why he liked her at all. The Major continued to cry, “What ho, me hearties!” and take an interest in what I was interested in. Frannie made superb meals and looked lovely all the time … the morning curlers were gone and Major got her to shorten her New Look skirts to make herself look taller. I don’t know when I noticed that Killer wasn’t coming around any more. I should have asked her about that, but I was too busy to talk to her. We were living in different worlds now, and I was gearing up to leave this one anyway. Martin had applied at Western and Toronto. I didn’t know where I wanted to go to university, maybe Queen’s or Toronto. I knew I didn’t want to go tandem with Martin any more, and the more I avoided him, the more he nosed around the house, so Toronto was dicey. Where should I go?

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“McGill,” said the Major. The McGill calendar, scarlet, was in the guidance office. I asked about McGill. “It’s for snobs,” Miss Brissenden said firmly. “It’s for snobs,” I said to the Major. “Nonsense,” he said. “It’s the only Canadian university of repute in Britain. You’ll go there. In fact, we’ll all go there.” So we filled out the forms. I didn’t think I’d get in. I knew I wasn’t from the Great World, and I knew the universities preferred students from the Great World, Toronto and Winnipeg and Vancouver, the cities. I had good marks, but the Great World was about sophistication, and I knew I wasn’t sophisticated. “Nonsense,” said the Major, “you’ll see.” That term was a hum of work and when the Departmental Exams came I felt I was being fed into a machine, I was a sentence-producer, a correcttranslation device, a calculator, a reiterator. I wrote each exam, fled home without allowing the outside world to enter my perceptions, and spent half an hour picking my forehead before I started the next subject. I was subliminally aware that things had changed in the house. Killer wasn’t coming around for Frances any more. Martin wasn’t coming around for me any more. The physical body of the house was neat and tight, and the Gilson Snowbird had been replaced by an automatic washing machine. The Chrysler sat most days in the garage now, surrounded by all the license plates Ontario prisoners had produced since 1927. The Major went shopping in the morning, and gardened in the afternoon. Mother’s flowerbeds were ablaze. Frances was radiant. On the night of my last exam I was half dead. There was a party at SingSing’s house, and a bottle of wine for dinner. The Major kept filling my glass and by seven I was groggy. “We’ll be away for the weekend,” he said. I staggered to bed and slept ’til noon on Saturday. No one phoned to see why I had missed the party. I wandered around town on Saturday afternoon and I might as well have been transparent; or I might have moved away. The librarian was the only person who recognised me and she chided me for wanting to take out a stupid romance. Martin wasn’t home. That night I read my romance and picked my forehead and realised it was the first time I’d been left alone in the house for years. I took off all my clothes and ran from room to room, looking at myself in mirrors. I had

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huge breasts, a big bum, and so much stomach I was ashamed. But I wasn’t the shape of Mrs Mackay, so maybe something, some day, would happen. I went into Frannie’s room and got out all her scarves, the silk ones (some of which were mine, but I hated ironing) we’d got just after the war was over from Milly, the patterned ones Frannie had taken up in her New Look Period, when she wore scarves with her sweaters and I wore Peter Pan collars. I put scarves around my breasts, I put scarves between my breasts, I diapered myself, I danced in front of all the mirrors in all the rooms of that great hollow house. The doorbell rang. I didn’t answer. I went on dancing. I was a houri, I was an owl. I was a harlot, I was a saint. I postured and gestured, I went down to the kitchen and got the Major’s salami and danced with it between my legs. I went into the Major’s room, once my Mother’s room, and looked for one of her evening gowns. They were gone. I put on his scarlet military tunic and danced in it. I lay down on the green spread and fucked myself with the salami. It hurt. It was too big. It stung. It was too salty. I wondered who had rung the doorbell. It was too late to phone anyone and ask, so I took a bath after carefully washing the salami. I have never since eaten salami, except with deLesseps. I went to bed. The next morning I decided that the thing to do was to go to McGill and the thing to be was a novelist. I ran over to Martin’s to tell him but they were away. I came home and tidied the house: ironed all the scarves and the green spread, with the iron on “silk” and a lot of attention to detail. About four Frannie and the Major walked in, radiant. She was more beautiful than ever. “What ho! Me hearty!” “We went to Niagara Falls! We got married!” Part of my innards fell out, but I kissed them anyway and said I was going to McGill. “My ducks, my doves,” he said to us at supper. “My two good women. We’ll sell the house and move to Montreal. The Trust Fund will look after us.” “What about Father?” “It’s not his house; it’s yours. It was in your mother’s name: they couldn’t take it, she left it to you. Time we wiped the dust of this place off our heels. Killer Flynn and Martin Mackay, what a fate, Montreal’s the place!” “Toronto’s too grey, nothing there for us. Montreal’s the place, home of the Beaver Club! The barons of St James Street are waiting for us. Heigh

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ho.” As he spoke, it occurred to me to wonder what had happened to his first wife. Surely he had had one. I had, in my anxiety to beat Martin at the academic game (because I was getting nowhere with him as a boyfriend, nowhere, and Sing-Sing and Holly his girlfriend had followed us home from the spring formal to watch us shake hands at the door, and told everyone; it was better than being picked up at the school door by Jeannie, but not much) taken in very little of what was going on in our house. So that those few days after the exams were over were a revelation to me; it was as if I had awakened from some grave and seen Frances and the Major as trees walking. I saw first with some sort of despair that she was perfectly beautiful. I looked at her and saw why men desired women: the pinkness of her skin, the fine perfection of her nose, the perfect roundness of her breasts: she was a rose-breasted grosbeak on a winter branch, a summer tanager, a thrilling spring robin-mother. She was small and dark, perfectly formed, not thin enough to look as if she would break. Thinner than me, though. Next to her I was hairy and careless and fond of poetry, no competition. If I were to live my life again, I would at this point simply leave home. It wasn’t done, then. No, girls were in some way property – as indeed lads were, when one didn’t come of age until twenty-one – and it was unthinkable for them to break away except under supervision. And certainly our Major wasn’t giving up on us, for, having married the one, he had plans for the other as well. “We’ll spend the summer camping,” he said, “you girls are badly travelled: time we went somewhere. You have to get to know the world. And Liz needs a rest after all her travail. We’ll go north and then head east and down for an interview at McGill.” From the basement he had unearthed an old safari tent that Grandfather Laird had used when he went north to look into his gold investments, though I never heard they brought him any profit. He had had it set up in the back yard for a week, flamboyantly brown among the peonies and delphiniums, mending it and coating it with waterproofing, but I had no more noticed this than I had, all spring, noticed the fact that he and Frances were close in a different way; I had glued my face to my books because I had, somehow, to beat Martin and not seen what was going on under my nose. I protested feebly that I’d said I’d do camp again. The Major said, nonsense,

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it was time I grew out of it and that Martin didn’t need anyone to massage his ego. He showed me a pup tent he had bought for my own private quarters. “That’s good,” I said, “I won’t have to listen to you two puffing and panting.” The Major raised his head and said, “We’ll get along better if you don’t say things like that.” We did. While I had been studying they had been closing the house up around me. I phoned the camp to say I couldn’t come and found that the Major had got in before me. I went across to see Martin and say goodbye, but they had gone somewhere to celebrate the end of Martin’s exams. In the end I phoned Oonagh, who wasn’t interested, and told her we were going up north. I had to tell someone. Frances had never liked outdoor life, but that summer she was a trooper with the Major. We went west, and then up through Michigan, detoured to bicycle around Michilimackinac, headed along the north shore of Lake Superior because the Major had always wanted to see it, then explored the islands in Lake Huron – St Joe’s and Manitoulin, principally. I enjoyed being with them, though the nights were bad, because I had finally taken in what had happened, and I didn’t like it. They were discreet enough, and I always put my pup tent on the other side of the fire from them, but sound travels through canvas, and it wasn’t the raccoons that were making little expiring noises in the night, keeping me awake imagining. The days were better. The Major always managed to lay hands on a boat of some sort, and he and Frannie went fishing. I would tidy the campsite, bury or burn the garbage, and then set out for the most isolated piece of beach I could find; sit there and draw my thoughts together again. I had a lot of things to figure out. I was seventeen now, and it was time to plan my life. I wanted, like everyone else then, to get married and have children, but I also wanted my education, as I had been promised it since I was small by Grandmother Laird. I wanted to stay friends with Martin without going to the same university he did. I wanted a boyfriend who was more of a boyfriend than Martin. I wanted to figure out what was really going on in our house. Why had we no word from Father since he left in the spring? Toronto wasn’t a hundred miles away.

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Why were his friends mumbling at us and looking away? Obviously it had something to do with money: he’d gone broke, or embezzled, or was in disgrace. But I read the evening paper carefully and he was not mentioned. Why were Frannie and the Major thinking of coming to Montreal with me? Going to university did not usually mean taking your family with you. It was a way of leaving home in a controlled and organised way. I wasn’t a snail to carry them on my back. Though perhaps the Trust Fund was. Trust Funds had to have trustees. Who was the Trustee? Someone in the firm? Major Arthur Silliker, J.P.? What, in fact, was going on? They usually came in from fishing about four. He cleaned the catch while Frannie had a nap. Then we cooked supper. He had laid in Beaujolais he had bought in a ship chandler’s in Michigan. We ate bread and butter and fried fish, what vegetables we could lay hands on in the north, apples and chocolate, and washed them down with wine. The wine made him garrulous and by the fire in the evening he opened up and talked. He may have been trying to give us a rough sort of education, he may have been satisfying the needs of his tonsils. He talked well; he told us of his childhood in the valleys of Devonshire, of the first lonely years at Military College, of his postings in Italy during the war, of the thrill of being invited to advise staff in Canada. He told us how he loved his mother and his sisters, who all now lived in Stonehouse in Devon, how he had fought with his brother Rupert as a young man, how his godparents in Wales had left him a house, how one of his cousins was a brilliant engineer who had been sent to America to work on the bomb. I didn’t like him as much when he talked history. We had grown up in a country that was formerly a colony and in a family that had been solidly on the British side in the war. I had also, however, taken from the conversations at home and the radio programmes we listened to, a distinct impression that we were Canadians and that it was disgusting that there had been no such thing as a Canadian citizen until recently. I had had a spanking from my father for telling someone I was Irish. I wasn’t impressed by the Major’s account of the adventurous joys of the fur trade, or the pioneers, because I knew that the fur trade had been dangerously exploitative of the native people, that pioneering was hard, mean work, that farming was, as Eugene had said when I was little, following a horse’s ass down a furrow. I

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hadn’t been brought up with any sense of the Dream of the Empire, because I was in it, and not outside it. And often enough I had heard people say of men with accents like the Major’s, upper class though it was, that they were nothing but remittance men and they wished they’d stayed home. Frannie drank in his words and his values with them, but I sat, tugging at the hem of my homemade chambray shorts and pulling my sweater, chewing the cuffs and twisting my front hair, arguing with him that Wacousta was the worst piece of romantic fiction ever because it foreshortened the distance between Mackinac and Detroit, that the Riel rebellion was a mean thing, depriving the Métis of their lands, that the Corps of Engineers was not God’s gift to Canada. “Shut up, Lizzie,” Frances would say. “You don’t know anything about it.” “She does, but she’s been badly taught,” the Major would reply. “I can see for my own self,” I would say. “It’s OUR country and other people shouldn’t come in and make the rules.” “There is something known as the British tradition; there is the Commonwealth of Nations.” “At least we aren’t brown,” Frances would laugh. “If we were, he wouldn’t have married you!” I snapped. His history lessons were not a success. Nothing seemed to faze him, however; he was our leader and rose cheerful in the morning to make a fire and put a tin billy on the coals for tea. He wore absurd military shorts, and looked well in them, in spite of his short legs; he carried his red-checked Mackinaw, that had made my father look like a lawyer trying to look like a voyageur, with such assurance that it seemed that the British had worn Mackinaws in the war of 1812. He took Frances on his arm through the bush as if she were a queen. Manitoulin has always been my favourite of the Great Lakes islands, a ghostly grey triangle that nudges against the high north shore of Champlain’s “Mer Douce.” It is flat, and laced with inland lakes. We had gone there just after Father came home from the war, to stay with some connection of his who had a lodge there. Now the Major decided to explore it, and put in at a camping place where there were tumbledown cabins and leaky boats to rent, an isthmus of sandy land between two lakes, one reedy and fish-haunted, the other shallow, sandy and perfectly clear. The weather was hot and overcast; at the end of July there was no question that the water was anything but warm. Frances and the Major set up

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housekeeping in their little cabin. I put my pup tent up on the shore of the sandy lake. While they came and went with fishing rods and cans of gas and oil for the motorboat, hooked chains of bass and pickerel, cries of glee, I was vouchsafed something I had badly needed: time to think. I have never liked the sociable-unsociable activity of fishing: sitting notalone in silence, unable to move, conscious always of the body that might rock the boat and send the shadowy minions of Neptune away into the reeds and shoals. My life swings between the very active and very contemplative modes always: I don’t know what to do with periods of being half-alive and half-attentive. I let them do the fishing, and gladly ate their provender. For me, the six or seven days we inhabited the ghost-haunted island (for it was always the habitation of Manitou) was a time to think, and I needed to do that, for I had sped from Mother’s death to the intensity of Martin’s summer-camp production to the dark competitive earnestness of the last year in school without a shrug; and not only had my mother died, my father had gone away and left us with this … phenomenon. Who had somehow arranged that we were separated, like plants he was collecting in a rainforest, from our context and transplanted into the matrix of his own personality. Killer was gone, Father was gone, Martin was not the same any more, and we were about to leave a town which, although it did not appear either to respect or trust us, was nevertheless home. And much as I had gnawed and champed at the bit of smallness, lack of aspiration, “refinement” defined as an unwillingness to differentiate oneself in any respect from one’s neighbour without a reel of apology, I knew this world: I was afraid of the next. The sandy lake where I pitched my tent was small, only a mile or so across; but like the others indented in the worn limestone of the island, it had a shoreline as complicated as the outline of a snowflake, and I was able the first day to swim to a small bay which was reed-enclosed for privacy from the causeway that separated it from the large lake, and provided with three sandbars and numerous flat stones on which I could retire to contemplate myself and schools of minnows. I thought of Martin, first. I had known him since we moved to town in the fifth grade. I had liked him, loved him with a brief passion in seventh grade because he had a flat container of Eagle pencil crayons, become his friend. It was I who had suggested that we were “going steady” because everyone else was. He took me to dances because both our mothers thought

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it would be good for us to go to dances. He was a terrible dancer: I always had to lead. His hands on the piano had rhythm; on my shoulders they stopped dead. What I liked about him was his handsome profile (beauty always sells you down the river, but I continue to adore it) which, though it changed in adolescence, changed further when he was twenty so that now he had a perfect profile, and his active busy-ness, the way he took up ideas and threw them in the air as if he was saying, “Well it’s only a small town but you do get a chance to think.” So that from an early age we were throwing ideas at each other, and if we disagreed on the relative value of the Great Women Writers as opposed to the Great Composers, we still had expanded our horizons by the age of twelve beyond the limits of that small town that bred us. To what degree our parents manipulated this, I do not know. Certainly my father had nothing to do with it: he loved to growl rudely that Martin wanted lace on his pants and Jeannie was doing him no good; but then Jeannie was his conscience, I think, the survivor of his mother’s vigilance for him, and disgusted him. I could visualize their one-day romance as teenagers, Jeannie surging towards his beauty, he moving horrified away, but attracted, because she was like his mother, and not. For me, the situation was different. Martin was the only boy I could talk to, and I couldn’t talk to girls either; I could, however, talk to his mother. And my mother? She had said to me once, working her way through the tats in my hair, “Don’t jerk. I’m trying not to hurt you. What I was saying is, it’s wonderful you and Frances are so different: you’ll find your place.” It was she who gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, her school prize books, Lorna Doone and Wuthering Heights for my birthday. And Frances, lipsticks by Elizabeth Arden and Dorothy Gray. What was she, Mother? I lay and wondered while the minnows nibbled at me. Like me, I thought, a Small Town girl with Aspirations. We were her aspirations. What were we becoming? (Interval around a campfire, sated with Michigan-bought Beaujolais, Frances, Arthur Silliker, the Smithsons from Hamilton in the next cabin, holding their babes in their laps and softly singing, “Sweet the evening air of May, soft my soul possessing …” stories to follow, broad and tall.) Mother, what was she, who was she; how did we manage to part with

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her, what was it for her (and I have known that feeling now … the soul screeches) to part with us, what was happening? A soft woman, a lady. Not certain of herself. As good as anyone, she always said. Not her fault that her father’s farm was lost in fanatical moraines and cedar swamp, that her mother’s aspirations to culture were dimmed by a bad heart, that her brother was a self-chosen moron; she had been given the privilege of going to the city and she had used her time there to learn not only how to be a good secretary but to dance and dress: to please. To get out of grey grim striving against the land, competitive doily-making, compulsory baking powder biscuits. And I thought of her story about how she had gone down to university, to the University of Toronto, and studied for two years, and then the crash came, and a year of drought, the barley failed, and she transferred to a business college and by a miracle got a job, which is how she met Father: he was devilling in a dull lawyer’s office and in his daydreaming looked across the street to her window, and waved when he saw her: Belle, my perfect beauty, he called her. After a week of waving, he waited outside with a nosegay of florist’s flowers. He took her dancing. He took her to the theatre. He courted her three years, until he thought he had his career established: they married. They had me and Frances. His mother didn’t like her. She thought that was normal. “If I were a Ford or a Rockefeller,” she said, “she still wouldn’t have liked me. He was her only son.” She had had an only daughter who had run away and been killed in a car accident. Jeannie Mackay told me about that. “Oh, it was terrible about Belle.” And my mother’s name was Belle. My father’s parents took everything he did badly: he was delinquent, he went to his wife’s church instead of theirs, he had daughters rather than sons, he was financially unreliable, he was no lawyer, wouldn’t, like his father, become a Q.C., danced too much and worked too little, kept his family badly, joined the Army when he might have contributed to the War Effort another way, argued with Old Querrington, the clerk, claimed Querrington had sneaked on him since he was a boy … This was family life.

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Nibbled by fishes, I lay and stared at the clouds and thought, everything’s a mess but I wouldn’t have done what my mother did. I would have stayed in school, I wouldn’t have married, I wouldn’t have stayed with someone whose mother didn’t like me … Yet I wondered. Something in me was a rebel against marriage, this belonging as a chattel of a woman to a man, so that he can walk into the house and sniff and complain about burnt supper when he’s an hour late, or a floor not clean enough, or a child’s hair being too straight or too curly. I didn’t want that. I thought it mad of Mother Belle to have subjected herself to infinite complaints about Sister Belle and daughter Belle. To give up earning her own living for a life of scrubbing floors and starching little dresses, running ever more dangerously the whirling Gilson Snowbird, trudging through wind and rain with a bad heart for prescriptions and potatoes. What kind of life was that? And yet, and yet … Much as I disapproved of Frances and her foolishness with Killer Flynn, I had found fault with Martin for never touching me, hadn’t I? And the very week they had got married, Frances and the Major, I had done that peculiar dance with scarves, and made a fool of myself with a sausage: could you not make a fool of yourself with a man as you did with a sausage, Elizabeth? I asked. There’s apparently a hole in you somewhere that asked to be filled. Maybe Frannie’s asked more. And she married the Major; they actually came back from Niagara Falls and said they were married: she all pink and perfect, kind with it. And I had nodded and gone back to Livy and Cicero and the bits of Catullus we were allowed: oh sparrow, sparrow. Yet, as I lay on the sandbar, screened by the reeds in so thin a number as to be countable, blurred with blue blossoms, nibbled by minnows and warped by water, I remembered a voice: my father’s, saying, as he put down a letter in the diningroom, “It’s from the Sillikers; Sidney’s sick again. They won’t be coming.” It’s not a name you forget, Silliker, Welsh or Cornish or whatever it really is. Sidney. If Mrs Silliker were dead, where was Sidney? What business had Major Silliker with us? Who was our Trustee, and where was Father? And who was Father? A strong man or a weak man? Oh, when I was little and he came home on leave before he went to England, I thought he was a beautiful man, and knowing I resembled him I thought it was a pity I wasn’t a man, because I would then be beautiful. But was he a strong man? Or was

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he a weak man? And did it have to do with Uncle Gene that he had gone away? If he mortgaged Gene’s farm and Gene couldn’t or wouldn’t redeem the mortgage, Myrtle would have all the lawyers in the country against Father. And Father was a Liberal, and they and the government were Tories. Perhaps that was it. In a small town you grow up knowing the difference between justice and politics. When I was little I had loved Gene as much as Father, Laughing Gene, my Mother called him, or You-Gene; and we had gone often to the farm before he married Myrtle. To help him, as mother said, “Redd it up”: taking Milly with us, sometimes driven up by one of Milly’s wartime beaux, though there was another way you could go, on a big train to London and a huffing-puffing train to the nearest town, and then Gene would meet you with the buggy or the sleigh: we must have been very young then. And Mother would work in that big kitchen, and then go out and tell him what to do in the barn. “Top him up,” she said. And she and Milly painted the kitchen one year, green and yellow, and made her mother’s house look fine again, against the wishes of the Country Girl who had been living in. She must have shaken her out like a feather bed: I never saw her. But Myrtle got Gene and Myrtle hated Mother. Wasn’t it, I thought, a good thing not to have a family any more? They seemed to be organs for destruction. But I had left out the Old Aunts: there were many of them when I was small, only Lois and Vivvie by the time I was older. They were lovely, I remembered, all powder and stories and blue eyes and cologne. And Father had Aunts, too, though he never saw them, his father’s and mother’s sisters, in Montreal and Chicago and fabled Philadelphia. But of course he was the Bad Boy. Everyone else I knew came from a big family, had living grandparents; but the breeding line in ours was thin, people quarrelled, disappeared, did not return. And perhaps it was a good thing not to perpetrate bad hearts and bad blood. Just then, and it must have been the fourth or fifth day of my lucubrations, I saw the Major. He was squatting on the shore of my little bay, drinking from his hands, or running water through his fingers, whatever it was, I couldn’t tell. Then he stood up, and, fine and well-formed that he was,

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straight, even moderately tall, a handsome shape against the sun, cutting the light away from me, began to recite. And what he shouted was this of Wordsworth: There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander! – many a time, At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone, Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the owls, That they might answer him. – And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, – with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill: Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake. There’s no trick to it: you, too, can recite memory-work to a seemingly empty lake, making your hands as you do so into a hollow conch. But I was moved because it was a poem Jeannie Mackay had liked to recite to me and her son Martin; I was moved because I loved poetry, and owls, and Nature in the Wordsworthian sense, and men, and that way Wordsworth has of building to an unexpected flamboyant climax, and then letting reality in. I knew, suddenly, why I had danced, why Martin would not do, why the big world was more important than the small. I fell in love with him.

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I have never found out whether he knew I was there or not. I can still hear the Magnificent Voice against the still flat waters of the lake. There was a boy, ye cliffs and islands of Winander … There was a girl, O flat, clear lakes of Manitou. I flattened myself against a thin curtain of reeds and slid off my rock silently, like a turtle, and swam away. Another poet, not so good and gracious, wrote an ode with a chorus, regarding the veiled Discobolus in the Museum, that went, Montreal O, Montreal! The Major was all too fond of quoting this and for that I could not love him. I could, however, love him for taking us to Montreal. At first it threw us: a bigger city than either of us had ever seen, grander than Toronto in its conception, as Paris is than London, an ambition of grey stone thrown against a cross-laden mountainside, a conglomerate of stone terraces, monasteries and motherhouses, forts, bridges, tunnels, courtyards, squares, all forms foreign to us farther west; and to boot, in all parts of the city we seldom visited, stone and brick terraced houses, much like the mill workers’ stone houses we knew from home, festooned with iron exterior staircases that curved and angled their way to upper stories in a way only familiar from the anti-vd films they used to show at Church. The Dean of Women at McGill, with whom I had an admission appointment in the second week of August, to which I went reluctantly, ironed by Frances, accompanied by the Major, inhabited a fortress at the corner of University and Sherbrooke with such a grand staircase as I had never seen before. In the middle of it, staunch, sat Queen Victoria as sculpted by the Princess Louise, not as forbidding as she might have been if you had ever seen a statue quite so large before. I stood at the bottom of it, balked like a horse, and rolled my eyes. The Major nudged me. I stood still. “Now Elizabeth,” said the Major, “you wanted to go to university.” Gingerly, I took the steps one by one. Inside the great glass front door was an ironed woman in a glass booth. “I wanted to see the Dean of Women,” I whispered. “Miss Laird for the Dean of Women,” the Major boomed. Like a crumpled leaf I settled beside him on a bench, and when a young woman in a suit arrived to solicit me I was so feeble that he had to accompany me past the great doors of the dining room down a long hall to a smaller, more domestic wing. He was banished to an outer room while the

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young woman asked me questions like, “Why do you want to come to McGill?” I stammered that I wanted an education and I had heard it gave the best. I didn’t feel convinced. Eventually I was ushered into the Office of a beautiful woman with wings of white hair and eyes of a submarine blue. “Your credentials are impressive, Elizabeth,” she said. “What do you want to do with them?” I blurted, “I don’t know yet. I just love books. Maybe I’d like to write them, but I haven’t started yet. There’s a girl at home who has, but I can’t do it.” She asked me kindly enough what my particular interests were, and I said English and French, muttering that I did not know if Ontario French was good enough; she said the proof of the pudding was in the eating, what did I think I’d done in the Departmentals? My mother, I said, had died, and I wasn’t sure what I could do any more, but I had worked hard and done well, I thought: but I couldn’t speak it. “Who do you live with then?” She had a nose like an eagle’s beak, and she wore a dress the bright turquoise of her eyes. When later I was told by a professor that she had been plain before her hair turned white I couldn’t believe it. “I live with my sister and her husband, Major Silliker. They’re going to move to Montreal with me. He’s here, if you want to meet him.” She did, and while they talked I toured the formidable buildings with an underling, who did not appear to have a first name. I was not, having grown up in smaller places, prepared for the grandiosity of that city. I had been in big buildings before – department stores and churches and Loews’ theatre once in Toronto – but I had not before been in buildings which were socially pretentious as well as large, by which I mean that in their size they announced their security, whereas department stores are modest and compartmentalise themselves into little haberdashers and glovers and United Churches, though they are large, are low-ceilinged out of a fear of Popery, or divided into little Sunday school rooms. But the Royal Victoria College was as grand as the grand hotels of its own era, the Chateaux Laurier and Frontenac, the Banff Springs, possibly designed by the same architect, and it had no room for the “’umbleness” I had felt it necessary to conduct myself with at home: it was curiously grand, when you consider it was only for women; but then it was designed when a woman was on the throne, not for humble country girls but for young women of good families who brought their maids there. It met, being donated by Lord

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Strathcona to the citizens of Canada of a better class, all the Major’s criteria for superior colonial achievement, and it scared the hell out of me. If I had gone from home and been a resident, I might have learned to run up and down its stairs like one of the entitled, rolling my pant-legs up to pretend I was wearing a skirt under my winter coat, to breakfast at Hymie’s for a dime because I’d slept in, as my friend Mary Hooper did. For my sins and my father’s, I did it differently. The Major and the Dean appeared to have got on famously, and when I returned from goggling at Turkey carpets larger than any I had ever seen, they were fast in conversation. I had one of those heart-failing moments that punctuate the lives of adolescents, in which I thought, “She likes him better than she likes me,” and realised I had been involved in a long seduction that would never work of Martin’s mother; and then I sank with relief into her sentence, “It would be better if you were to live here; if, however, Major Silliker has taken employment here, Elizabeth, I would be prepared to accept you as a day student; your placement in first or second year will depend on your Ontario marks.” Because Ontario has an extra year that puts it out of rhythm with the other provinces’ educational systems. I still could hardly raise my eyes; but I assented with gratitude. I thought she was as grand as the Turkey carpets, the wide arches of the stone veranda; she herself ought to be seated on the throne outside the college. Much later I learned that her name was Victoria. I went down the stairs with the Major convinced not of glory, but of perhaps eventual ability to comprehend the situation I was in, however much too large it was for me. The student who showed us out had asked at the wicket whether Lady Rose had kept her appointment: that floored me, and impressed the Major. We had been staying in the cheapest of cheap hotels, three to a room. We went out that night and ate good French food in a small restaurant, packed, left early in the morning. Frances showed no jealousy of my appointments: she had spent the day wandering in the stores and pronounced Ogilvy’s the wonder of the world, not in quantity but in quality. And Morgan’s, she said, was almost as good. Montreal was going to be fine. The drive home was hot and harrowing. Frances was car-sick for the first time I could remember. The old car fumbled and itched. The road went on forever. I was conscious for the first time of living west of somewhere. All we had heard in our childhood was of “The West.” The east meant only

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fishermen and lobster to us. Quebec was another world, separate unto itself, somewhere where priests told the people how to vote and women had too many children and men wouldn’t fight in the forces: not that city at all. I have since been to cities grander than Montreal can achieve, though I think it was dreamed hard, by both French and English. I have never been so frightened, except by New York, which discomfits me still because its people are so quick and irritable. Home seemed small, after that, but, at the end of the road, welcome and indivisible: us, ours, all we were and meant to be. And there were two men in the house. “You can take that,” they said, “but not that or that.” Bailiffs with lists. The Major was calm. We went to bed and cried. We could take our beds but not our dressers. The dining room suite because it was in the will of our grandmother and given to us, and the sideboard, which fitted the Royal Victoria College better than it ever has the houses we have dragged it at great expense to. The rest, except for the new washing machine, which Major Silliker’s name was appended to, was to be sold. And the house. “But it’s our house,” I cried. “Mother had it in her name and when she died she willed it to us.” But it had to be sold because the mortgage on it was in Father’s name. I was below the age when I could hire my own lawyer. I went through my own things rebelliously, in front of the Bailiff’s man; it made it worse that he was a Sunday school teacher in church, one of the faithful like Martin and me, who liked to creep into Evensong for comfort. “Can I take my clothes?” “Sure, Lizzie.” “My books?” “Are they all yours?” “Oh God, yes.” “You’re taking the Lord’s name in vain, Lizzie. That’s wrong. Take what’s yours, but you have to understand, and it’s sad, your father owes a lot of money.” “He had to pay Dr Duff.” “He defaulted on a trust: it says so here. Look, you can take your bed and your clothes and your books, and if you want anything else, I’ll close my eyes, see?” Gentlemen do not say, “See?”

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There was nothing much to move but two tin beds and a dining room suite. I went over to Martin’s for comfort but they weren’t there, and when they came back I only got a small goodbye. Jeannie looked scared and Martin was all excited because they’d let him into a combined Music-andLiterature degree, the first, it had taken them a long time to work it out. With what-I-don’t-know the Major rented or bought a little trailer to tack on the back of the old Dodge (made by Chrysler, my Mother always said), and we were to take off, checked by the bailiffs, on a Sunday morning. I decided it was all right to miss church, they weren’t that charitable, they didn’t know what to do with us any more, we were too complicated. But that Saturday summer night when the Major and Frannie were toasting themselves on a new adventure I didn’t belong to after dinner, I walked down Main Street, looking at myself in the ugly big square tiles people had plastered over their old brick fronts, forbearing to hang over the corner of the Forrest House where there were mirrors one could dissect oneself in by wagging arms and legs and become a mirrored space-child, walking simply by Neill’s Shoes and the Metropolitan, the People’s Jeweller and Shapiro’s Classic Furs, Randolph’s Books, where I had aspired to work, and Father’s office over Briscoe’s department store. The Metropolitan Life building with its absurd dome, which after I had seen Montreal seemed logical. The new post office, which was a chrome aberration; the old, which was partly now Schumann’s storage: red sandstone and ugly. The library, where I had begun and spent my life. The Mill End store. Mrs Mackenzie’s hats. Up around the corner, the fire hall, where I had conned ice cream from the firemen on the grounds of being a blond. The Market Square. The City Hall, that the Fathers, against the objection of my Father (his fire in some departments all undimmed) had painted aluminumsilver. Our church, their church, the Other United Church, St Andrew’s Presbyterian with the curved pillars. Behind a wicket gate – and Jeannie Mackay had always called it a “wicked” gate, because the English were wicked to say they were better than us – the Anglican Church. The White Spot, the Crystal Grill, and the French Fry truck. The Kineto Cinema and the Grand where Jeannie and Martin and I used to watch Stewart Granger swashbuckle and pretend it was literature because the movies were English. Moodie’s store on the hill, where I spent the dime I stole. At the corner of Rose Street towards the top of the hill I turned and

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looked over the steepled town across to the winding river; far away I could see the trestle bridge over which Frances and some friend of hers and an old blind dog had dragged me when I was eight; my stomach rolled in fear. I looked at the Main Bridge and the top of the library, a squat little dome; I saw the law courts and the Insurance Company building, and I thought: I’m leaving. I’m not sure I didn’t hum a bar or two of that hymn, “There is a better land, far, far way.” I was going, I thought, far away from here, where no one would reproach me ever again for having a mother who was sick, a boyfriend who didn’t kiss me, and a father who was a disappointment to his father; they wouldn’t know that my sister was prettier than I was, they would never be able to tell that the dashing, elegant Major, erect as a wooden soldier and as highly coloured, was our guardian and a possible bigamist. They wouldn’t know that Frances and Killer had left a condom on the river sandbank, that the Bailiff had taken away Grandma Laird’s chest of quilts, and Grandpa’s photograph albums, even the wind-up Victrola and the key to the shed downtown where his old Rockney was stored. They wouldn’t know anything about us from now on, we were going to be people without any past but a high school record of excellence and quality. We were going to a bigger place, a better place; a place so sophisticated they’d never phone home to ask if you were allowed this or that book from the library, or whisper that your father hadn’t paid his telephone bill, or steal when they were the Help because you were the Quality. Everything was going to be different: I would learn the secrets of the universe, and even if happily ever after was a soppy idea, as Martin said, I, Elizabeth, was going to have a crack at it, and such a crack as Martin wouldn’t have the grace to dream of. I turned and went up the street to the future. Mother wasn’t buried in Montreal.

The Major and His Diary, I

“The Major and His Diary” is written in the Major’s voice rather than in Elizabeth’s voice, which narrates most of the manuscript. Engel experimented with both first and third person narration for “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” but as the various drafts show, her preference lay with a first person narrative, and specifically Elizabeth’s voice. “The Major and His Diary” would therefore seem to belong more to the experimental phase of the manuscript. Where it would have gone in a final version of “Elizabeth and the Golden City” is uncertain. I have placed it here, in two parts, for the background it provides about Arthur Silliker’s life. The first part reveals obvious parallels with Major Rains. For example, Silliker has a house in Wales, and an apparently loveless first marriage, the fruit of which has been a single son (Rains and his wife Ann Williams had six children) whom Silliker calls “Silly Sidney.” Other details of Silliker’s background draw on Engel’s own life and experiences, in particular the two years she spent in Cyprus, 1960–62. Major Silliker travels to Cyprus, where his estranged wife is living with their son in Kyrenia, a city Engel knew from her time on the island. Other elements are fictional, in particular the characters Frank Lennox (Frank Laird in the previous segment), Kenneth Duffy, and “the fair Corinna.” These were the Major’s teammates on a war-time assignment. They part paths after the war, but meet up again years later in Canada. Frank Lennox/Laird practises law in a small Ontario town called Scanlon’s. His wife Belle (short for Isabel) has just died, leaving their daughters, Frances and Elizabeth, motherless. Frank has run into financial straits and Duffy, who works in Ottawa, travels with Silliker, who is out of work, to lend support, if only of the moral sort, to their former team member. Frank leaves town, entrusting his daughters to the care of the Major – a direct parallel with Rains’s story.

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I drove through the beautiful August weather, the hot south-west wind grilling the corn golden as it swept through the fields around me, in a state of elation. I felt young. The good things of life were falling in my lap again. I was running, again, from Corinna to Duffy to Frank, and when it was over I had my two goddesses in Montreal to return to. Who were now safe in the keeping of the Wise Virgin, as we used to call her. I had all day to get to Kingston, for Duffy was not to be free until four o’clock, and spent some of the time parked by the river at the beginning of the Thousand Islands meditating the history of my good fortune. I cast myself back to the summer of 1943 when, having come through nearly four years of war with only a broken collarbone and sprained ankle, I was recuperating in Alexandria (also doing a little reconnaissance with regard to a chap at the High Commission: that was my job) when the signal came through to join a certain party at the raf base in Cyprus. I packed, was picked up, sailed by ridiculous bumboat, cooled my heels ten days on the baking base until one day I was summoned to the presence of the fair Corinna, all neat in a cwac uniform. She was General L’Anglais’s driver, and about to take me to him. Sans jokes: she was very formal. The neat small head buried under the peaked cap, the summer uniform loose over her breasts, but still, fine, fair, woman-sweet: a vision after years in the hairy east. As we drove we could smell the first fall rains to the east of us, wet earth mingling with the scent of orange blossom. I was desperate to get into action, off the island. My termagant, failing to appreciate the English clime, had packed up and purchased a house in the village of Kyrenia on the north shore in 1938, and, assigned to Cyprus, I had had perforce to visit her. The village was beautiful enough, her cottage a sacrilege of lower-class bondieuserie among Turkish arches and lemon trees. My sad son Sidney a pimpled adolescent, attractive as a wormy apple, asthmatic, frightened of me. She asked for money, she to whom most of my wages were automatically supplied. I spent an hour with her, persuaded Sidney to accompany me to the harbour. There was no boat to be had, and he announced that he was phobic about water, would not sail with me if I found one. When my driver joined us I sped like a skinned rabbit across the pass. I had to get off the island. My chance, the General – a French-Canadian, but very fair, unaccented, lean, charming – announced, in his roundabout, very roundabout way, was coming. First he took me through my entire military history: England, Gozo,

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Corfu, the base here, Egypt, North Africa. “We are looking,” he said, “for someone who sails.” That’s how they found me: they used to call me “sailing Silliker.” Were it not a rich man’s sport in Canada, I would be sailing in these blissful waters still. Of course I sailed. “And who knows,” he said, “a certain coast.” Maps. Charts. The coast of Sicily – of course, from the time at Augusta. Further north. Brindisi? I had sailed out of Brindisi. Briefly, mind. Further north? Well – a clandestine adventure north of Bari, once. And of course, from Corfu, one could … Enough, I was his man. Wrenched again from inactivity, I became once more my better self; for I am one of those for whom, sadly, there is more to do in war than in peace: a man of decision, a man of physical action, a man of command. I have found no life but the scoutmaster’s to suit me in what they call Civilia. I was introduced to the two men who were to make up the expedition with me, Frank Lennox of the Attorney General’s Office in his home province in Canada, a lawyer by profession and a mechanic and radio operator by avocation, and Kenneth Duffy, a kewpie doll not to be knocked over in a coconut shy: a solid little fellow, our leader. And the fourth? The fair Corinna: though the reason was not for some time revealed. We were to be a team, a crew. Our destination was secret almost from ourselves, our operation was secret, but we were left to memorise charts of the lower Adriatic; the promontories, reefs, river mouths, beaches and islands of the Italian coast above Mt Gorgona, and the opposing Dalmatian coast – those sweet islands which once rejoiced in the names of women – Lissa, Melita – and now rasp monosyllables like Krc and Split. We were well-chosen: Frank was phlegmatic, Duffy earthy, Corinna and I were air and fire. Our instructor was a young Sandhurst man who knew nothing about sailing and everything about clandestine operations. What is told in the postwar spy-novels that are now beginning to be popular is true. Fighting was well advanced in Italy and by that spring the Hun had been routed if not from the Adriatic totally, at least from the land part of Italy we needed to pass through. We travelled north from Brindisi through country I had known well in my single days, country now devastated by what seemed to have been hand-to-hand combat, fording rivers where bridges had not been replaced, riding whatever vehicles – donkeys, mules, old bicycles,

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half-ruined jeeps – our agents had been able to find for us until we reached a small round harbour in the Molise and a hairy, cheerful little man called Pietro, who had restored a small sloop for us, painting it a disguising mixture of black and blue and dyeing the sail a handsome and uneven and nowfading brown. The spring fields were gorgeous with wild mustard; where houses had been wild poppies bloomed. The line of the Apennines behind us was a theatrical purple stage backdrop. But our “work” lay ahead. We had only to sail across the Adriatic to the Montenegran islands with certain objects, certain messages: and at night. If, as I said, Duffy was titular head of the expedition it became even clearer when we settled into the remnant of the village hotel (dining room, kitchen, wine cellar and two bedrooms were still intact) that only sexprejudice had prevented Corinna from being appointed to that office, and that, as he set up his radios and telephone apparatus, Duffy was acting on her instructions. Although she was with the Canadians there was nothing colonial about Corinna, none of the puritanical false humility that creates sexual and behavioural ambivalence in the Canadians and Australians I have known. She was a genuine, an ideal, sophisticated, able to swear and drink and smoke with the men while at the same time maintaining distance from them. She had announced from the start that she had a sexual commitment elsewhere (we deduced it was to General L’Anglais, and we were right) and there was never any flirtation in her manner to us. She was, nevertheless, even in khaki uniform, full feminine and if I had not seen her wrapping her coppercoloured hair around an unerotic rat of cotton batting I might have lost the entirety of my heart. As it was, I retained part of it. She spoke many languages and began to exercise them as soon as the radio was set up, closeting herself with Duffy night and day while Frank and I experimented with the little sloop that had been provided, testing it against the half-repaired shallops that lay in the harbour to provide its cover, adjusting its brown-dyed sails, plugging its night-coloured hull. Fishermen who straggled down from hill hideouts to reclaim their village nests showed us how to mend the nets that were to explain our presence on the sea. We made several half-hearted trolling expeditions, sometimes netting enough herring or rascasse for a modest supper, sometimes more, at which point the village proved itself more populated than we had expected.

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The war was by no means over. There were still bombers in the sky, and the Hun in the north of Italy and Yugoslavia. Many harbours were mined on our coast, and God knew what we would find in the islands. Still, it was spring, we were at the seaside and there was a wild joy in our idlings as we waited for the call to start our deliveries – of what I was never told: radio parts and ammunition, maps, charts, whatever, I suppose. I had been a daytime sailor in my other life, but Frank, for some reason, knew his stars – claiming, I think, that he had escaped the family summer house by boat at night – and part of our exercise was to navigate by these, clinging to Cassiopeia and hunting the bear as the clouds scudded uncertainly from the mountains on all sides of us. When, finally, we were summoned to cross the whole of the sea, tucking Corinna and Kenneth in the cabin, we stood like pirates at the compass and the wheel, manipulating our bearings as the radio or Corinna instructed us. I had been on this coast once before, but I could not claim, when I saw them lying like low-backed whales against the sky, to know the individual islands, and it was again Corinna who, after 36 hours of fighting vagrant winds, took us in to harbour – not there, but there, she would point. “It’s all right,” she said finally, “my grandmother lives here: I know them from my childhood.” And the islands were like friends to her, she knew their monosyllabic names, their tiny harbours, their illicit folds and crevices. The first landing was made in a creekmouth where more by luck than science we were able to hide behind the long shining hair of a willow tree. She appeared from below in a peasant dress and thick boots, leapt up the bank and climbed in away amongst the trees like a female Mercury. Soon afterwards a giant peasant appeared with a note from her (this man is safe), built a fire, handed us wine, and began to grill a leg of lamb over a fire of olive twigs. She appeared rosy in time for dinner, ate hastily, muttered to the peasant, and caused us to cast off. “Melita’s mined,” she said. “We have to go to the other one. South, south-west, and I’ll try to bring us in below the castle.” Which she did. Nights on the dark, undulating sea; sometimes the drone of an aeroplane far off. If we were fishermen why were we not showing lights for the spring sardines? We chanced it, holding our breaths. We had no life-saving apparatus: if they got us, we would go. It gave us an edge. But when a soft wind blew us where we needed to go we could lie back and luxuriate in our escape from the sordid actions further north. Only once were we in danger,

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when we sprang a leak in the keel, and forced ourselves to bail, bail, pump and wallow against endless winds; and finally, sinking, turn back towards our own harbour, to which a kindly summer version of the Balkan bora blew us with dispatch. I remember myself at the prow reciting Byron, “Roll on thou great and dark blue ocean, roll, / Ten thousand ships pass over Thee in vain” and Corinna yelling from the deck, “Has anyone seen my plastic nose guard?” and our heaviness crossing the bar into the harbour, home. Soon enough, that lyric half-dangerous summer that bonded us together was over; we dispersed. I heard that Corinna was sent to do inside work with the Partisans; I heard that the castle was her grandmother’s; I heard that Duffy was injured in Normandy, that Frank was seconded to Whitehall. I heard that the war was over and that one by one they had gone home. Where was home for me, what was what, I wondered? My house in Kyrenia belonged to her I scorned, the young woman whose age was entered in the marriage register as 35 to my twenty, mother of Silly Sidney, termagent to the troops. My house in Wales had been used as a school, and was in virtual ruins, and no supplies were available to mend it. I spent the years of Austerity trailing with other disbanded gentlemen of my kind office to office, doing odd jobs involving the clean-up, putting together dossiers for Nuremberg, delivering messages to generals among the Hansa of occupied cities and camps, retreating between appointments to Milford Haven and my ruined estate. Finally, word arrived from Duffy that there was work in Ottawa, and I leapt at it – only to become in a year unemployed again, and in what had turned into a strange land. And here I am, sitting, as my old mother would say, with my feet in a tub of butter. Butter indeed! How can I be, lying on a pee-stained mattress in the little guest room at Duffy’s, surely the smallest house in the world, possessed by erotic imagery. I conjure up the land of Italy as a woman’s body, the Apennines her prominent spine, the lovely mountain valleys and undulating hills her rich, down-sloping flanks. The memory of the Adriatic rolls me against its female curves as well. I am all love, and for my darlings, and in return for the wonderful epiphanies I have been offered: Mr Linley’s Wales in exchange for my mother, sailing in the Mediterranean in return for my dreadful marriage, a summer’s happiness on the Adriatic (what was most magical was

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that the war was being fought all around us, and we dabbled in a pool of peace) in exchange for a bloody war, the girls for my exile. I am blessed. If I am not going to sleep. While all around the Kewpie family snore.

Next day I was wakened from rude dreams by a small Kewpie with a cup of tea; proceeded then from Kingston to Scanlon’s via Toronto with Duffy. We picked up Frank at Six Points. He has a defeated look, like an empty costume on a wire hanger. Duffy and I had had a good three hours to discuss the case on the way; refrained from talking about it with him. None of Duffy’s news was good. Frank, it seems, had simply left the financial affairs of the firm in the accustomed hands of old Lawson, the father’s clerk. Overspent on the redecoration of the house, took Belle to the Mayo clinic, gave an unsecured mortgage to Gene to keep the farm in the family, without seeming to notice little was coming in. The sale of the house will go ahead: Frances’s marriage to me has convinced the judge that the two no longer need a home in Scanlon’s, but realestate is depressed. The sale of house and farm together might cover the trust losses if not the personal debts, but Myrtle has hired a lawyer to claim that Frank didn’t deliver the mortgage funds to Gene; she hasn’t a hope of winning her case, but Duffy thinks her chicanery is enough to tie up the good will of the judge. I’ve copies of Elizabeth’s acceptance at McGill, which will secure the educational fund, but if he gets Garber – and Duffy thinks he will – who was no friend of his father’s, Frank will be ruined. On some level he knows it. I wish he would fight. This hotel has cockroaches.

Thursday: Frank was not entirely passive in business matters; he managed to scurry about and realise enough to cover his local debts to the butcher, the baker, the druggist (and what enormous debts it is possible to run up in those fine emporia, where more than the English chemist dreams of is sold!

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They are a magnet for young women) and he had by now a thorough accounting of the cheques old Shearing the clerk had signed his name to. Some of these had involved an employees’ pension fund he had been able to attach, considering that the employees at the end consisted of Shearing and a typist who was Frances. Out of his wages at a dreary job in Toronto he had been able to pay interest to two old women who counted on his trust fund for interest and he had similarly extracted a sum of money from Gene regarding his mortgage interest; which left him only two hundred thousand dollars in debt. The judge was not a local man, but someone the courts had had the decency to import from Ottawa, and the hearing was private and more sympathetic than might have been expected in these bloody-minded Ontario Presbyterian towns. All the same he was disbarred and disgraced, and his house ordered into the hands of the bailiffs on the grounds that Frances, having married and being in a position to be supported, needed none, and the Educational Fund, small as it is, was pronounced sufficient for Elizabeth’s needs. If the legal process does not consume the entirety of the sale prices of the properties Frank holds mortgages on, there is hope of his being able to make some kind of restitution, fifty cents on the dollar, perhaps. Property, however, is depressed. The only old friend who sought him out in Scanlon’s was a squat, spidery person, the mother of one of Elizabeth’s boyfriends, the boy who wrote music. She wrung her hands at the sight of me. I am a seducer of Young Women: no doubt about it. It’s a wonder she didn’t refer to me as “Your friend the White Slaver.” Frank is not far from that point of view himself, though he admits that Frances was an apple falling from the bough. His words get lost in his moustache when he speaks of the situation. I shall not let him interfere with our happiness. He approves at least of Elizabeth’s registration at McGill. We intended to drive him back to Toronto, but after the hearing, and a fried supper at a dull restaurant, he took his bag to the bus station, looking even more like a coat without a hanger. He said the girls would hear from him through Duffy. Tomorrow we drive back through the countryside to see the lawyer who is to handle Myrtle and Gene. Wipe Scanlon’s from our feet forever. Duffy says I exaggerate the malice of small towns. I doubt it.

The Major at McGill

This section presents Elizabeth’s version of the move to Montreal and the first days at McGill – and the Major’s involvement in the latter experience. Montreal and McGill are depicted as Engel knew them when she was a student there between 1955 and 1957. This was a time when Hugh MacLennan was on faculty, working on The Watch that Ends the Night, and writers such as Leonard Cohen and Louis Dudek could be seen around the city. In this section of “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” Engel presents a studious Elizabeth, a contentedly pregnant Frances, and the Major making the most of Montreal and McGill.

The Major had a wonderful time at McGill, as he should have, for on an orthodox level, it was made for him, a minor member of the British establishment, the only Canadian university that Britain at that time chose to notice. As we walked through the curved stone gates to deal with the bursar and the registrar, he whistled and bustled and pointed out the beauties of the campus, stopped respectfully and pulled a forelock at the grave of James McGill under the gingko tree (we must read about him, Lizzie) and steered my trembling feet to the right offices. I felt angry with myself for being angry at him; I felt as if he was usurping my experience, but to tell the truth I was far too frightened to deal with anyone. You don’t leave Scanlon’s in a day. While I bought textbooks, he bought himself a grand old gilt-stamped Debrett’s Peerage, bigger than a bible, and when the students’ directory came out, he had a field day. “Now that Fiona Bagot-Clarke, she’d be Lady Fiona, wouldn’t she, one of the Clarkes of Barrington Manor, probably

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Lord Ronald’s daughter, wish this thing was up to date. Cultivate her, maybe she’ll take you home for Christmas.” I didn’t tell him she was Fudge Clarke in my English class, a plump girl with beautiful blue eyes, friends like a cloud of midges, all of them living in residence. He had Leacock’s history of Montreal, too, and on Sundays took us on long romantic walks on the upper reaches of the mountain, past the grand houses, explaining who built what when, and how he got his money. The only way to shut him up was to say, “Oh, skinning rabbits?” I hadn’t intended to go to university with anybody else’s head tucked under my arm. He set us up in Montreal with the efficiency he had used setting up bivouacs in Italy, boot camps on the Salisbury Plain, finding first an apartment on Sherbrooke street over an art gallery which was a model of all the others we shared in Montreal, wide in the front, narrow in the back, with a miscellany of rooms and light-wells and wooden porches in between. Frances set to with a will to make it attractive and comfortable with the furniture we had been able to save from the sale: our bedroom suites and the leather suite from Father’s office and the Herkimer Street treasure, which included many pairs of curtains which received their first letting-out here. I had the small front room, one of the many, and they the big back one, and although she had to make do with the plunder of second-hand stores (we’re all students and Bohemians, he said), she furbished us with style and dignity. She was happy and rosy, and I suspected she was pregnant and was told she was soon enough. The Major looked up a number of “chums” who were now settled in Montreal. Very few of them came around to see us – occasional red-faced fat men I didn’t like – but a couple of times he and Frances departed to dinner in evening dress leaving me where I wanted to be, at my books. I had a funny linoleum-topped kitchen table instead of a desk, and it suited me perfectly. The Major fitted a pencil sharpener on the meat-grinder holder. I had thought he might go out and get a job, but it seemed there wasn’t much in his line, what with all the “Frenchies” about. He spent many happy days hunting, however, leaving me at the corner of McTavish Street and bustling off towards the centre of town. I felt as if I were being walked to kindergarten. Perhaps I needed that, for my every approach to the great grey buildings and even smaller rosy ones filled me with cold terror, so that I was incapable of responding to the other students’ approaches and lived encapsulated in gruff solitude.

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After he left me every morning, the Major stopped at the Students’ Union for a copy of the McGill Daily. At lunch time he would confront me with the list of the day’s events, saying there was this to go to, and this, and this, and why didn’t I take advantage, why didn’t I go. The mere suggestion made me want to crawl under the table and I would blush and bluster until Frannie said maternally, “Leave her alone, Arthur.” If it were a public lecture, he would go himself, craning to match the students with their pictures in the Daily, so that he knew the leading figures on the campus long before I did. Frances shook her head. “I guess he always wanted to go to university.” “He had a fair education at Woolwich; he doesn’t need all thus stuff.” (He was reading my history of France in the eighteenth century, and I needed it back.) “Well, I don’t want to go with him tonight. You’ll just have to.” “He can go by himself.” “He needs somebody our age to get in. Do you think I should use the blue gingham for a top?” She showed me a piece of blue material long ago put aside for a dress for one of us. “What about the Philosophy Club, Lizzie?” he asked. “I have a paper to write.” “Take advantage, Lizzie, profitez, go whole hog, you’re only a student once.” “Give me my book, for heaven’s sake, I’ve got to go to the library and get this essay together.” “No need to be rude, child. Frances, that’s apron material, use the other for a smock.” Picking up his pipe, tamping it irritably. Harmony in the home was important to him, he said. I liked the quiet of the library in the evenings, I liked the actual lectures, although I was terrified of being too young to understand everything, and most of all I liked the warren of second-hand bookstores on the side streets running down from the university to St Catherine Street. They were what I had wanted all my life, and I fondled volumes by T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, happily running my finger down the woody English paper, staring at the rounded typefaces as if by eating with the eyes I could assimilate information. The brilliant fall weather was for the others, these were my Aladdin’s caves. I made friends with a bookseller called Mendel who was open late in the

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evening around the corner from us. His shop was subterranean and crammed. The material got more and more scholarly as one went further through the network of rooms. The back room was Judaica and he disappeared in there with men with funny hats. At the corner of McTavish and Sherbrooke those first mornings, I lingered with the Major like a child unwilling to relinquish her mother’s hand outside the door of a kindergarten. And I was like a child, too, in that as soon as he had disappeared from view, I went quite gleefully towards my goal, and further, childishly crafty in that I did not vociferously protest the arrangement, that he should learn to know the best people while I learned to know the best that was thought and said. Some part of me, like a wasted tree-limb in need of exterior support, wanted his propping, rejoiced in his foolish participation in the fringes of my education, so that I smiled before I shuddered when he turned up to meet me after a class, or accompanied me to an evening public lecture. His presence was noticed, however, and it gave me a bad reputation. He might better have left me alone to be stuffed with lsd by the psychiatry department. The university was a large one, but carefully compartmentalized, so that students in any discipline were in manageable divisions. Most of my lectures were held in the large hall behind James McGill’s tomb, the largest in a lovely auditorium with coffered ceilings, the smaller in classrooms with oldfashioned double desks. One inevitably had a seat-mate so that shy as I was, I made friends: a little Jewish poet in freshman English, whom I had seen at Mendel’s, a fair girl with an English accent who liked also to sit at the back in first year French. I was terrified of the work, for I had left high school a year earlier than my friends in Scanlon’s, and was sure I would fail. I found, however, that I was quite as well-prepared as the others in all subjects but French conversation where, when I stumbled out a word at all, I did so in the inelegant accents, I was told, of the seediest part of Alexandria. This was before public recognition of the Durrell Quarter made it possible to romanticize the city, and I had to spend a lot of time mouthing vowels in a mirror with the accent of Amiens and Paris and Lausanne, never that of Montreal, because of course our professors were French from France. The atmosphere of the campus at that time has been beautifully conveyed by Hugh MacLennan in his novel The Watch that Ends the Night, his workin-progress then, and I leave to his readers the descriptions of mellifluous

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autumn days and snowy evenings on that lamplit avenue leading from Moyse Hall to the Roddick Gates. There was beauty and dignity there and, I think, a lot of magic left from the time of the great Osler and Leacock. I was not conscious, then, of course, that I was, too, living in a great time – that of MacLennan and Dudek and Penfield and Cohen, but as the year snuggled in I began to be able to speak to people I shared seats with, and a small happiness entered the misery of change and loss. Frances was happy, too. She began each morning with a little gentle vomiting, a sign, she said, that her body was making necessary changes, she went each month to an expensive (the Major said) gynaecologist, she begged knitting wool and needles and patterns from him, speculated on whether it was a girl or a boy and waited desperately eagerly until her pregnancy was old enough to show. She wanted old widows in the streets to pat her bump, women to exchange old wives’ tales and feeding formulae with her. She was sleepy and good-tempered. I found her chatter tiresome if I was trying to work at my books, but some days I was as excited as she was and half jealous, because although the idea of having a creature in my belly repelled me, I identified with her desire for a baby, and was excited at the prospect it brought of a richer family life. No couple was real without a baby. That’s what Mother always said. The Major was casual and unmoved. Babies, he said, were women’s things, you had to give them to them to keep them happy. After a while they became children, that was another thing, they were troops of a sort, but a baby was a squally thing best left to its mother. The father’s part was the naming where he came from, he said, and there was no point in our fussing around in the dictionary for names, it would be Owen or Olwen according to its sex, Welsh in honour of his guardian, who had had the decency to make him a man of property. I pricked up my ears and said he’d told us Silliker was a Plymouth name. “I was raised by Mr Owen Evans in Milford Haven after the age of six.” “Did your parents die or something?” “Mr Evans was a friend of my father, a solicitor, who wanted an heir.” “So he took you in and sent you to boarding school. I love the English! They never bother with their kids.” “They give them an education that fits them for a life of independence.” “What did it feel like to leave your mother when you were that age?” “I hardly recall, child. Mr Owen said to me, ‘All this will be yours,

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Arthur, if you come to me,’ and he swept his hand towards the boundary of his property, which I then thought included the Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea.” “You little beast. And how did your mother bear to part with you?” “She had five others with which to console her heart.” “And wasn’t the property worth anything, is that why you came here?” “It was worth a good deal, and I ran through it pretty fast. I came here to work and I dearly wish I’d find some.” He changed the subject, but that night in the kitchen, Frannie said, “Don’t bring it up, you know how it hurts him, you know he was married before and it was a mess.” “Did you ever see the divorce certificate?” “Elizabeth: when you’re mean to him he takes it out on me.” “Twist your arms?” “Grow up, I mean he bitches. Will you ever learn to dry dishes properly? You’ll chip the plates if you don’t do them one at a time.” “It’s faster this way. I have an essay to finish.” “I don’t know where you think it’s going to get you. You should try washing your hair, maybe you’d get to marry someone rich.” “And then you’d get to stay on in Montreal on my educational fund.” “It’s mine too; and there’s Arthur’s pension.” “Well, I wish Daddy would hurry up and write. Doesn’t Arthur know what’s happened to him?” “He just says he’s having more difficulty than he expected clearing his name.” “Did he say where he was writing from?” “No.” “Why couldn’t we have stayed in Scanlon’s? I thought the house was in our name.” “It turned out that that wasn’t confirmed or something, you know that.” “So they can just sell you up if your father runs away.” “You’re over sixteen, you can quit school and go out to work.” I was over sixteen, and I could have gone out to work, I could have done many things, I suppose, but I was determined to go to university, I had planned this education since the first time I opened a book and spelled out the name of Mr McGregor; and I wasn’t quite free to walk out, for it was

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the talk of McGill that Quebec was still under Gallic law and a woman was her father’s possession until she became her husband’s, or of age at twentyone. Still, there was a guilty corner of my heart that knew that people who were unhappy at home ran away and made their way alone in the world, and I had not. I went back, chastened, to the study of Racine, whom I hated. I persevered, however, not because I was conquered, but because as term went on the results of my work got better and better, so that I had a sense, not only of living in a great city at a great time, mellow with delight in its poets and art galleries, fine universities and fine food, but of, very occasionally, being good enough for it, strong enough to participate in it and of a quality worthy of its respect. This feeling did not often last for very long; just long enough, most days, to free myself of the Major at the street corner; it was a mere flicker from a distant, twinkling, intermittent lamp or lodestar, and it said, “Come, Elizabeth, there is something here for you to do.” My friends, when I acquired them, spoke of me as suffering from an inferiority complex, and were indignant, particularly if they were men, to see this spark of confidence shining: it was not consistent with my hesitancy, my hunched shoulders (a good woman is not too tall), my fear of never equaling my sister in beauty and domestic tasks. But something in me knew, and rebelled lustily when it was told differently, that it was possible to be a woman from Scanlon’s and a full participant in this place. The fact that others did not agree, that they thought it “low” to be from a small town further west in Canada, to be female, to be intelligent and not a beauty, made me angry, and through my anger I was able to see things they were not able to see. The smooth young men with British accents, flowing locks and flying scarves took no more interest in me than I in them: our minds crossed pleasantly sometimes in our work but I don’t think they ever noticed me, pace the Major. My professors noticed me, and the Dean of Women invited me for sherry in order to tell me she had heard good things of my work. Slowly I acquired a pleasing drift of acquaintances among the other students, not the denizens of dances and ski weekends, but shy poets (each one hoping to be the same sensation as Leonard Cohen) and shyer women academics. After classes we drifted, when we could afford it, into the coffee houses that were opening up in the streets below Sherbrooke, around Mendel’s and the other second hand book stores, and the little art dealers’

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shops among the tiny French grocery stores and Swiss restaurants. I have a fancy that the first joints of marijuana changed hands there among a crowd of expatriate Beatniks from England. There were refugees and chess players and intellectuals and hangers-on. Hungarian and Yiddish were the primary foreign languages but in the evenings, rarely, when I went there, I heard French. The Major, meanwhile, practised his contacts among the Best People and produced a cast of characters who seemed eccentric enough to spring from the pages of the new novelist Iris Murdoch: red-faced men who had served with him, for whom whiskey had to be produced, were succeeded by women of a type I had never seen before, rich or once-rich, bedizened with long necklaces and dangling false earrings and the wisdom of the world. They wanted young girls to educate for wasn’t this a French city, and hadn’t they all read Colette?

The Major and His Diary, II

Silliker’s reminiscences of his childhood in Plymouth, growing up in the home of a childless family friend (referred to both as Mr Linton and Mr Owen Evans of Milford Haven) and moving on to “a ridiculous marriage, at the age of 19,” mirror facts of William Kingdom Rains’s life.

Montreal, Sept. 6 Lodged with Corinna (girls in her guest room, I in dressing room) a fortnight after my return, while hunting accommodation. Frances a delight in her enthusiasm: a sponge for everything C. knows and can show her. They’ve hunted down all the second-hand and nearly-new shops run by private schools, Junior League, etc. where it apparently is possible to find excellent clothing for a song and F. is now a fashion plate: twice the young woman who left Scanlon’s. She has given up her mad early resolve to work as a waitress and now concedes that young wives ought to look after their husbands. Eliz. much more difficult, alas. Corinna’s opinion: she has cold feet, going from a good intellectual position in a small town to an excellent university. She has not written the standard exams that would pit her against her peers, thus has no knowledge of her place. She scorns Corinna as “worldly,” and our narration of wartime adventures (Corinna remembers Frank as perpetually longing for Belle and his daughters, which pleases Frances at least) evinces a kind of jealous boredom. With a flounce, she has given up her bed in the guest room to me. She will not wear second-hand clothes; says she

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will make out with the schoolgirl outfits she had before rather than sport “castoffs of the upper classes.” Wish Dean of Women had not suggested she be in residence. Jealousy of her sister’s position is an element, I suppose; also resistance to sophistication of Corinna. She persists also in wearing her hair in an ungainly schoolgirl plait down her back. Sept. 7 Have taken as subtenant a flat over an art gallery on Sherbrooke Street belonging to friend of Corinna’s who’s had heart attack. Saves trip to raid Herkimer Street Hoard, is not badly furnished, though Eliz. will have to sleep on sofa: not well pleased. She is more pleasant since she found that this area of the city is honeycombed with second-hand bookstores. Disappears for hours with pocketful of change, reappears satisfied, willing to help wash up after dinner. Corinna’s “help” is a little soubrette with ulcerated legs who cleans once a week: we do as much as we can, smuggling laundry out in briefcases etc. as the General did not leave C. as much as she really needs and like me she is finding employment difficult after her active war years. My hopes of minor court employment dashed: these jobs reserved for the French, damn them. Situation should improve when we have own quarters. Sept. 18 Eliz. is registered at McGill; not, as I had hoped, in Classics, but in a combined French and English programme the university is certainly equipped to instruct. Has chosen Botany as a science to please the beauteous Dean and Old French rather than Latin. My advice rejected by both E. and the professor who assisted in the registration. Apparently the piper-payer has no influence on the tune. I am annoyed as I fear her programme is too American to be solid. Good class of students for the most part. There is a week of “orientation” before classes at their leisure begin. Sept. 21 Installed in our apartment, finally; and this morning I walked with Elizabeth to the corner of McTavish Street for her first day of classes; most will be held in Moyse Hall, a charming building just beyond the circular park that holds the urned grave of Jas. McGill. She did not wish me to walk with her all the way, but showed some balky shyness on parting with me. A difficult child. Returned to assist Frances with hanging curtains, organising the small

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galley etc. Apartment pokey, poorly finished: another dame whose fortune will not outlive her. Streets of Canada certainly not paved with gold. At three, Eliz. burst in wreathed with smiles: says she feels her real life is beginning; Corinna followed with sheaf of flowers, pronounced the apartment greatly improved. In no time we had produced a lively tea. Perhaps our life IS beginning? Yes, says Frances, with a secretive smile. Sept. 24 Eliz. has found employment for Saturday and Friday evening in the bookshop of one Moses Mendel, a Jew. It is a backward-looking jumble but her wages will be a great assistance considering her appetite for books. Sept. 30 Corinna chides me for my sentimental love of my two girls. Peter Carrington, with whom I lunched yesterday, says I will never support them. “The trouble with you British military men is that beyond your wars you have no education. You know a smattering of French, a smattering of engineering, and all about the military system. You know your way through the British class system, which is enough to make a living over there, I guess. But what kind of expertise have you got to bring us here? How to label a camp in a border of little white stones?” Striding along Sherbrooke Street, however, in fine weather, I cannot think my enterprise will fail. True, in the three years I have inhabited Canada I have not been fully employed above a third of the time; still, this is a fine place: it has the grace of Edinburgh and the energy of New York. If its architecture grows absurd as you climb the mountain, if lines crossed plunge one into neighbourhoods of pure poverty, whilst I live I shall make something to my advantage here. I know it. I was not born a gentleman. I was the middle child of a very middling family in Plymouth, Devonshire, my father attached to the harbour master, my mother to her offspring, but distant from us, weakened, probably, by childbearing; so that my elder brother Rupert and my sister Edith are the ones I remember as elders and betters and it was with some surprise that I found myself removed from them, and Beth and Archie, the younger two, at the request of Father’s friend Mr Linton, who, having been unable to bring himself to marry, was yet in need of an heir for his large property at Milford Haven. “Mr Linton will make you into a fine gentleman, Arthur,” my mother said as she fussed at my collar and buckled my small valise, “and we’ll never lose touch with you.” I traveled with Mr Linton by first-class

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train over the moors and the Mendip, and it was that first night in a hotel in Bristol, that, losing my litter, I learned to cry. But children are nothing if not philosophical and the process of making me into a gentleman was not at all unpleasant. It involved, at first, studying in the great house called Linwood, which is actually a relatively small manor house, studying Latin with a tutor, and then, because the Great War saw fit that summer to break out, removing myself two miles along the road each morning to study with the vicar, while Mr Linton pursued his solicitor’s work in Milford Haven. In the afternoons I roved through fields with the Vicar’s daughter Barbara on the pretext of studying the works of Nature and since I was precocious and she was lonesome, we studied more than that. I missed my sisters and replaced them with her; I missed Rupert, an officious fellow, not at all; I stayed away from the local boys who wanted to beat me up for a great swell. On summer evenings Mr Linton and I sailed in a catboat on Milford Harbour, a very fine one overlooked by a formal terrace not unlike Prince of Wales on Sherbrooke Street. (I feel at home amongst grey houses). I was provided with a pony and then a horse and taught to ride. At the age of eleven I was sent to a military crammer’s in preparation for Woolwich. With other boys to play with as we pretended to study, I was comfortably surrounded again. I did not look back except when I wrote dutiful letters to my mother once a month on a Sunday. I do not think I suffered. This severance from the warmth of human feeling (for Mr Linton was kind to me but inevitably distant) accounts I think for only one error: my ridiculous marriage, at the age of 19, to the first Mrs S. whose age, which I had not thought to ask, was entered on our marriage at Gozo as, “spinster of this parish, 35.” She got what she required of me, a son, poor sickly Sidney, receives now half my pension and is, I hope, content with her discontent. Surely now that a new life has been given me, I shall find a way to spend it usefully on my darlings. Oct. 5 The man whose card Carrington gave me runs a kind of agency for superior servants. Oct. 18 Tea with Corinna who suddenly burst out at me, “Can’t you see, can’t you see? Elizabeth is trouble because she is a puppy: only she has a flapping brain where a puppy has big feet. She’s full of ideas she’s too callow to work

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out and she thinks she can’t stand either men or class when in fact her busy little romantic mind already has her married to Guy of Mullhare or the Lord of the Isles or someone: she doesn’t need you to push her. You should have put her down in a cow college in the Maritimes till she grew up. Frances is perfect but she’d be just as happy at the checkout desk in the supermarket, married to a cowboy. I used to think you were smart, Arthur. The time for ladies is over.” With that she burst into tears and confessed she had been having a difficult time herself. She had waited so long to marry the General that little of his life was left for her; and, his wife having attached a good deal of his property, there was not enough for her to live on in style when he died. She was now employed as a part-time driver for the Red Cross and finding herself badly placed socially in the search for work. “This must be the last city in the world that expects ladies to go to tea in the afternoon,” she said bitterly, “except London and Paris, of course.” She confessed she longed for a world where there was more energy and initiative. “Perhaps one simply has to move to another city and change sets,” she said. I suggested dryly that she write the Civil Servants’ Examinations. “I might just,” she said. “And you’ll have to find yourself something more substantial than walking Lady G.’s dogs.” Which is, alas, my current employment. They are three disagreeably nervous Shelties who foul the footways of the campus every morning with aplomb. Home in a brown study to find an elegant dinner spread, Elizabeth interesting on the subject of Shakespeare, and my darling Frances pink from an encounter with a doctor who assured her that she was indeed enceinte. I shall have to sell part of the land at Milford. Dec. 15 The Montreal winter is colder than that west of Toronto in Ontario; colder than anything the girls have ever seen. After a long discussion of how she might make a shammy lining for her winter coat (apparently the old one fell out, was discarded, used as a car-polisher etc) Elizabeth has at last conceded that a coat from the Nearly New will serve her purposes better, as the old one is both thin and childish, their annual trip to Toronto having been annulled by their mother’s death. The girls also agree that they will give up the futile Scanlon’s custom of going bare-legged in winter: girls in

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short white socks with long red-and-white circled cold legs were among my disgusts in that community, the only reason I can advance for the growing custom of their wearing trousers. The architecture – French and English and how well the Scots and French baronial styles accord! – here is enhanced by winter. The first preparations are noisy, as hemp carpets are laid on marble entrance-staircases and wide boards laid over them to be held with iron staples. With the first storms, the ploughing begins. M. Robitaille, our concierge, says the streets were once ploughed by teams of horses, but now there are narrow machines for the sidewalks and wide ones for the roads. Banks are already forming between walk and road, and M. R. says that by winter’s end they will be higher than one’s head. This eliminates irregularity in road-crossing. Signs are also being erected at certain parking-places beside buildings, “Watch Out for Falling Snow.” I understand that the students make ice-sculptures. Dec. 15 cont’d Winter here will be more picturesque than in Ottawa, but apparently the pleasure of Carnival in Quebec City cannot be matched. I do not remember that it was dark so early in Ottawa. Frances says she finds the winter dark snug. There is something menacing about the onset of evening at 4 pm to me. Dec. 20 We shall have a lean Christmas but I have ordered the girls that “made” presents only will be given. Elizabeth is nervous about the outcome of her exams but she has not done badly on her papers, which were numerous: nothing below a B. I have put the estate at Milford in the hands of my brother Rupert, who knows, he says, an honest estate agent. Jan. 19 Women! Lady G. refuses to pay me for the exercise of the shelties on the grounds that it was ordered by the Tenants’ Association who should pay and that no gentleman would charge for services to a lady. Corinna and Elizabeth are after each other’s pelts again, and our landlady has recovered from her heart surgery and demanded the apartment. I have been seeking accommodation further east, on the other side of the campus, where rents are more reasonable: no gentleman would live there but I must cut my garment to suit my cloth. Apartments are student-warrens, under-heated and shabby, but I shall find something. Frances grows large and sluggish.

Middle-age Memories of Montreal

Elizabeth becomes sexually involved with the Major, and eventually pregnant by him. Meanwhile, Frances gives birth to her first baby by the Major, a son named Owen (a Rains family name). This brief section, by including the voice of one of Elizabeth’s classmates, affords a glimpse of how she – and the Major – appeared to the other students.

In my day – and it strikes me as strange that I am old enough to use that phrase, dans mon jour, in the olden days – there was little to interest us in the way of politics, Europe was still cleaning up from the war and unvisitable except by the rich and the brave, and there was a long, dull war in Korea that did not bear discussion. Television had just been invented and seemed beneath notice, it was so oafish, and the art form that everyone was preoccupied with was the musical comedy. Hundreds of Martins were at work in the world turning old stories into new songs. After the success of Oklahoma and Guys and Dolls, Pygmalion and Candide fell to the musical axe and one feared for Crime and Punishment, The Wasteland and The Waves. Canadian culture, which was suspected not to exist, became a subject of rills and trills just after I left McGill. But musical comedy, like memory, is selective. It can deal with romance, not with tragedy; with love, not with hate. It seems forever to blot out the darker emotions, to persist in chalking its green happiness against a blue American or Transylvanian sky. It belongs, however it tries for emotional

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effect, to the work of Ronald Firbank and bishops’ nephews. Dry seriousness bores it, the philologist is a figure of fun and the murderer is redeemed even in the hereafter. It is not wrong – it brought us a lot of joy and I still listen to the sprightly old records – but it is not all-encompassing. It leaves too much out. So much of my memory of that time in Montreal is like a musical, however, that I have to wonder what my blinkered and blindfolded youthful perceptions were blotting out, what my middle-aged meliorism refuses to see. I look back and see a chorus of Landlords – fat, jolly, all called Hormidas, lying back in Laz-E-Boy chairs watching the hockey on television with the Major, scraping sloped sidewalks with aluminum shovels early in the morning; dumping our possessions happily on sidewalks at the end of the month. I see a condominium of apartments, long, generous places, two rooms across the front tapering to a string of little rooms along the back, balconies where people rested their quarts of Molsons in buckets in the shade; many bald kitchens and peeling bathrooms, much talk of the limits of the Educational Trust. Other men in other costumes: Hassidim on the north, their fur-rimmed hats haloed Russian and Polish against the autumn sun; on the McGill campus, a chorus of learned professors in greenish tattered gowns; along with them the scattering of women with thin necks, eagle profiles, a passion for the Education of Women; whereas the men were grey and diffident and solemn; one figure among them wearing not a mortar board but a French sailor’s red-tassled capot. In and around and between them dance men in cassocks and bare feet: brown Franciscans, black Benedictines, white redand-blue crossed Dominicans. Counter crossed by a line of businessmen in long, beautiful fur coats, coats of a gloss and fullness you don’t see in women’s stores. Five aristocrats: one addle-pated, one toothy, one elegant. A chorus of booksellers saying, “Elizabeth if you could only get here on time,” and “I’ll have your pay check next week.” In the foreground, Frances, Elizabeth, and Arthur: dancing. One waltzes, one jitterbugs and the other trips over her feet. The song is called, “I am the snail. I have my house on my back,” and the chorus keeps yelling, “If you’re going away to school, why are you bringing them with you?” The show is called “How to Leave Home Without Actually Leaving

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Home, and How I Failed to Notice.” The conductor of the five-man pit orchestra beats them with stuffed French letters (or English letters, depending on where you come from), the cello player has no nose, one of the leading ladies is vastly pregnant, and the English aristocrats decamp the second night. I was in my room. I had English literature stacked on the floor on one side and French literature on the other. I figured that if I read four hundred pages an evening I might get far enough ahead to work three evenings a week at the bookstore next term. I had started to smoke. It would make me thin. I needed the money. “Do you, or do you not, agree with me: she shouldn’t work in that restaurant?” he said. “Arthur, she always does what she wants, and anyway the boss will fire her if you give him another fortnight.” “You’re not being very helpful, Elizabeth.” “I’m being very helpful indeed: you’re living on my educational trust. I could be safe in the Royal Victoria College.” “You hate the Royal Victoria College.” “Arthur, they put me straight into second year because my marks were so good. Now I’m in third year and I find I’ve read less and less: I have to read one book by everybody in addition to the assigned text, and one book about everybody. I have to read Ulysses, I have to read A La Recherche, and I have to read the whole of Racine. I hate Racine.” “Racine is a great writer.” “Okay, so you read Racine and crib him for me.” “It’s very hot in here. It smells of smoke.” “Then leave.” Half an hour later he was back. “She’s still at the restaurant.” “As her legal guardian and her husband under French civil law, not to speak of English law, which you have often quoted, you have the right to go there, buy a cup of coffee, sit and watch her, and get her back.” “Can you lend me a dollar?” “No. I need cigarettes. Here’s a quarter.” “I need more than that. You didn’t make me any supper.” “Shut up, Arthur. You can cook, I’ve seen you. Pretend you’re camping.” “Elizabeth, you are unkind. The French are making you cynical. You consort with Jews in your bookshops.”

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“Lay off the Jews, Arthur. They’re the only ones who speak to me in this town.” “I speak to you, and what response do I get? Perhaps you prefer the crooked noses?” “You’ve got quite a beak yourself.” “The better to smell you with, my dear.” “Amscray, Arthur.” He was like a child. He wanted attention on any terms. He paid back nothing. “I think you ought to run down the hill and see if she’s all right. She’s late.” “She’s working till midnight.” Finally, I threw him a copy of Phèdre. He claimed to have fought in France. He claimed to parlez-vous. He sat beside me on the bed and pretended to read. He was heavier than I was and the bed slid out from the wall. He pushed it back and resettled. I was reading Dorothy Richardson. I liked her, but I had decided she wasn’t essential. I was wearing one of his old shirts and a pair of shorts: it was that hot. My hair stuck up in spikes. “Mousy, mousy, mousy.” “For God’s sake, Arthur.” Up the sleeve and into the forbidden armpit. Up the shorts and now he’d know I wasn’t wearing any underpants; Mother and Frances would have a fit. “Arthur, I’m reading.” “Are you?” “Well, not now.” I had a dollar and a quarter. I could give him the dollar and make him go away but cigarettes were 34 cents. And besides, it was fascinating. Where would the mouse go now, and they did it all the time, didn’t they, and she had a job, didn’t she, what was she doing leaving me alone with him, she and her Killer, she and her sex, sex, sex, crying out in the night, and I had tried to insist on going into residence but he outsmarted me at every … Jeepers. So that’s what it feels like. Passing, as we say, strange. One knows by instinct (and one has learned much from the existence of the French impersonal) that the cavity is there. One wonders constantly … “I don’t think you’d better do that. You’ll get me pregnant, and you’re married, and to her.” “Elizabeth, Elizabeth: you’re so difficult … and so different.” “Really, Arthur.” “Don’t you want it? Don’t you want to know?”

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“Well, sure, but … don’t do that. I’m scared.” “Nothing will happen, love.” “Go get something.” “Nothing happens the first time.” “That’s not true; go get something.” Does she count them? What am I doing? This is wrong. But she shouldn’t hog him, and I’m not free, and I can’t go out and find my own, I have to run home every night for supper, no one’s asked me for more than coffee, it’s the rich kids who go to dances and … and … Shucks, he really has them. They look better on than old and white and empty on the beach. A solemn moment. Yes or no, he says, his cruel and ridiculous tool projecting like Punch’s rod in front of him. “Yes or no,” I say. “Yes,” he says, and goes to. Sweet Sir Walter, oh sweet Sir Walter, though not quite. “You’ll get better at it,” he says, leaving me with a kiss. “I have to go and pick her up now.” Taking my dollar. “Cigarettes,” I yell. “Of course.” Sex shouldn’t be important, but it is. We are creatures meant for copulation and if our minds will not make way, our bodies will. Three days in bed saying, “I have spoiled my life.” Reading Crime and Punishment. An emergency, return to the bookstore. “There wasn’t anything to do, but I missed you,” my employer said. I turned around and found him desirable. His wife sat knitting at the cash. Over breakfast I sat staring at Frances. How could I have done this to you, I said in myself: and how I have wanted to do this to you. Get out, bitch, and, stay and take care of me. I love you. I have been baptised. The next time she was working at night he came and showed me how to do it properly and we did it, much to my satisfaction. I looked at her in the morning without guilt. I was too happy. Then she was fired. The bookstore-boss said, “Elizabeth, you’re looking very well, but abstracted. You must be in love.” The knitting needles, smelling musk, stopped their clatter. He said no more.

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Frannie said, “Can’t you make supper tonight? I feel so sick.” And then, “Haven’t you learned anything? You’re a joke, Elizabeth.” Sulkily taking over as I had tried to peel the beets. “Ho-ho,” said the Major, “what ho my hearties? Isn’t it time to go camping?” “We haven’t any money and I’m too pregnant,” Frannie said, whose restaurant apron certainly rose high. “We’ll go to Lac St Jean, Hormidas knows a place where they don’t charge, there’s only gas and food.” He bought her a camp cot. I slept in the pup tent, on the shores of that blissful lake where floating timber prevents motorboats. In the morning, I helped with breakfast, she went back to bed, I swam to the next beach, and he joined me and we made love. Somebody told her. “I’m too tired,” she said. “I’m having a baby.” “We’re all living together. I have desires too. We’re living on my educational trust. Nobody else wants me.” “Lizzie, how could you?” “I don’t know, Fran, it just happened; and then it was good.” “Well he is, but couldn’t you have … Lizzie, what will we do?” I wouldn’t, then, have dreamt of parting with him, though he never wrote me a crib for Phèdre, and I continued to battle with Racine. “Lizzie, surely you don’t have to share everything. I never ran after Marty.” I bowed my head. “I don’t really think he’s a JP at all; I think he’s a crook.” “Are you really married?” “Only … sort of.” “Why did Daddy leave us like this?” “He hated me!” “I thought he hated me! But I adored him. And we’ve never heard from him.” “And the only person who would have his address is the Major.” The baby was due on the sixth of September. Her waters broke on the 8th, and I mopped them up while the Major took her to the Reddy Memorial Hospital behind the Mechanics’ Institute. She had a beautiful baby boy called Owen Arthur. I went to see her. She had worn the skin off her elbows propping herself up in labour, but she had

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had him in eight hours, very good for a first. He had a nose like a little bird’s beak. He was beautiful. I went back to lectures on the twelfth; the Major was lusty: deprived of one woman, he wanted another. She had to remain without him for six weeks, the doctor said. She believed in the doctor. She even made Arthur pay him. In October I got a notice saying my fees were not paid. I protested. “We’re under age,” I said, “even in Quebec there must be an Attorney General I can protest to.” “I paid the doctor.” “And now you must pay the Bursar.” “You’re a hard woman, Lizzie.” Fool, I believed him. I made friends; it was not all a wasteland; but I tended to make unconventional friends: small poets, women who could only be described as lost ladies. I didn’t bring them home. We tried out the coffee shops when I was not reading, when I was not working in bookstores to supplement our income. What did the Major do, besides watch television with the concièrge or the landlord? He was a brilliant shopper, and an artistic scavenger. His day began with tea at seven, when he set out to find a Gazette in a civic wastebasket. He came home and read it over bacon and eggs while Frannie, still beautiful though a little less glamourous, nursed Owen. Then, if the weather was right and the old Dodge still worked, he would set out with his list of bargains and bargain places: he picked up cases of baby food, cartons of beans and fruit cocktail; dresses for Frances, winter coats for me. Wherever the Major went, there was a sale on. We moved a lot, but we looked all right. For Christmas that year I gave him a Burke’s Peerage with a broken spine. He loved it. Therefore he loved me. Or so my body said. Frances was a wonderful mother. Her boy was clean and content. We were still ahead. The delights of seduction are these: to feel firm-fleshed, yet yield. To approach the forbidden act, the forbidden object, to tremble; to be brave in order to be pleasing. To feel, at last, capable of filling the destiny mapped by others, instead of the wilful, self-chosen destiny: to feel feminine. To be strong enough to be weak; to vibrate on the tip of the lash, to linger at the

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approach of the spider and say, I don’t care. To be killed with kindness. To have revenge. To avenge: there, see, look what you got for yourself! To pay in fool’s gold. ⡊

There’s that Elizabeth who sat beside me in taxonomy last year; we both took it as a science option to please the Dean. She’s the one in the rather faded blue coat. She’s in character, faded but good. The man she’s with is in the French department. She’s not his girlfriend; he lives with a gorgeous blonde who wears a black coat and a long red scarf. She lives around the corner from him, they walk together this year; she lives with her sister, who’s wildly pretty, and her husband, quite an old man. Elizabeth’s not bad, very bright. She lent her notes to Corrievale and they came back stained with blood and brandy: after she had asked every day for a month. Ask her a personal question, though, and she’ll shy away like a horse. How can you like a person when you can’t get anything out of them: they won’t let you know them? There he is, that’s the brother-in-law, the man in the astrakhan hat. Miles older than even the sister. He walks dogs for a living, isn’t that killing? I mean he’s a retired Colonel or something. I got Father to look him up, he was in the Welsh Guards in the war, so he must have some sort of pension, but you see him all over town, walking dogs. He has the Scottie in the morning, and then old Miss Percival’s shelties – they’re a picture, really beautiful little things, the three of them fan out on their leashes like dancers – and I don’t know, you see him around, letting them pee all over the ice sculptures in front of the fraternity houses. I saw him up on The Boulevard once with a beautiful Irish setter. Apparently he has the touch: the old women are delighted with him. I suppose it’s quite a useful thing to do. ⡊

When she first found out, she shied a dozen oranges, three grapefruit and four lemons at me, broke the glass in the apartment door. The Major kept trying to calm her down and she called him a string of names I didn’t know she knew. Then she went out and sat on a park bench half the night. He brought her home half frozen. She stayed in bed three days. “She’s never liked being crossed,” I said to him.

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Then for a month it was, “You don’t help with this, you don’t do that,” bitch, whine, complain. I thought of leaving. If I walked out they’d be sunk, they’d have to find some other way of living. I could work at Lemire’s a lot of the time, my last class most days was at two. Then Lemire went broke, and I found out how much a room cost: twenty-seven a month for a freezing corner of a basement. I couldn’t face it. In the end, I just waited the storm out; immured myself in the seventeenth century, reading about the sin that I was in, figuring I was already condemned anyway. She pulled out of it. She needed someone to talk to. Sometimes in the night I heard her crying and cursing him. I had no sympathy. I didn’t know why my heart was hard. I will leave them when this is over, I thought, and I’ll stay away from him. But giving up sex is like giving up smoking and drinking: the temptation is equivalent to the pleasure, and a strain of interdiction makes it all the harder. Sometimes in the night I wallowed in Baudelairean spleen. I must have been reading him and attempting to duplicate his world of weariness, disillusionment, the perfect beauty of odalisques and cats. Twenty is the best age at which to be world-weary, after all. I can’t remember what age I really was. It’s having a summer birthday, which doesn’t manage to get celebrated. Sometimes at night she would come into my room and curl up under my comforter and talk, talk, talk; sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn’t, but she, who had been so long silent with me (Do this, Liz; do that; don’t do that, and don’t fall!) turned into a sparkling fountain of words and speculation. She was pregnant with Owen then, and looked well, round, but still elegant; rosy with hormones. She was working in a restaurant because he had said she wouldn’t be able to buy a baby buggy. She would come home tired; he would doze off and leave her feverishly awake; I would lay down one of my tomes (what was I taking that year? The French Romantics, the English Romantics, the modern novel, Anglo-Saxon, Russian Literature in Translation, French Translation, I think), and try to think [of] her as an interesting character in a book. “I don’t know what we should do, should do. I mean, with the baby coming. Don’t you think you should leave us, but what would we do without the Trust?” “What will I do without a degree?”

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“You can work in a restaurant. Anybody can work in a restaurant, I meet a lot of people, the trays aren’t too heavy, Orloff tries to steal my tips, but anyone can manage, there’s work out there and you speak French and what happened to Father, Lizzie, Arthur won’t tell me.” “Won’t tell me either: and he’s always there when the mail comes, we’d never know if there was a letter.” “But what happened at the beginning, when Mother died? Why did he go away, was it just because he couldn’t stand me?” “He was in some kind of money trouble. And I think Gene owed him some but Myrtle wouldn’t let him sell the turkey farm and pay up.” “Well I know doctors cost a lot of money, Arthur hates me for going to the doctor, but it’s better for the baby.” “There are some things he’s very old-fashioned about.” “But Father just went away and said well, here’s Arthur, look after him, I’ll be back; and he never came back and now we don’t even have the house.” “Arthur has the money for the house.” “That’s right; he says we can’t spend it, it’s for another house when you’re through and we settle down in Toronto.” “I didn’t know we were going to Toronto.” “Well, he’s a JP but he can’t work with French law, so we have to go there … unless we want to go home. Oh, what would Jean Mackay say!” “I don’t like it the way he just pushes us around as if we were his troops. We could both leave, Fran.” “I don’t want to leave him, I love him; he’s wonderful; it’s just that I don’t understand where Father went.” “He went somewhere to raise money.” “Money, money. Nobody ever mentioned money at home: it was just there.” “Grandma talked about money: she said he went through it too fast and he’d pay for it.” “She had lots, what was she worried about?” “I’ve been thinking: maybe she didn’t. I mean, here, there are so many rich people, rich like nothing we ever saw at home; we were near the top, Fran. There were the Mosses and the McBrides of the insurance company, but we were pretty rich compared to everyone else. Everything in our house

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was nice, and everything was new: that cost money. Maybe he just ran through it all and had to get out.” “You mean, he won’t ever come back?” “Well, if he does, how will he find us?” “Betty-Ann knows.” “I wrote to Martin but they didn’t answer.” “Oh, Martin and his mother. How you got involved with him I don’t know. All those poets and song-writers, I don’t know how you stand them. But if Daddy doesn’t come back, what will we do?” “We’ll just go on, that’s all. We don’t need him. I’ll finish school and get a really good job. You’ll stay with the Major.” As I spoke I heard my grandmother saying, “Frank, you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” She rolled over and grabbed me and flung her arms around me. “Oh, don’t leave me, Lizzie, don’t leave me ever! I need you.” That went on night after night, until I was groggy with fatigue and had begun to neglect my first class. Then it stopped. ⡊

“I’m tired, my paper’s overdue, I’ve got to work all night, get out.” “Oh, we’re a good girl tonight, are we? Let us know, then, when we feel like being bad.” ⡊

“Arthur, get that Weirmaraner out of the house; he’s got pale eyes and he looks as if he wants to eat me.” “Now Frances, it’s the hamburger he’s staring at: aren’t you, Bob? We’re just on our way. But I ought to remind you that this is no way for a lady to speak to a gentleman.” “If you’re a gentleman, where’s my father?” “I haven’t the faintest, my dear, but I live in hope that he will return and relieve me of my miserable curacy.”

Elizabeth on Her Education

Elizabeth’s reflections on her years at McGill signal the end of her formal university education and her time in Montreal. As the passage closes, Elizabeth graduates and turns down an offer to graduate school. She now has a baby, Alan, to look after and, as the next section “Leaving Montreal” will reveal, money is tight in the Major’s household. A move to Toronto is imminent, but not before a few more memories of McGill and Montreal when it was possible to catch Leonard Cohen in the coffee houses and buy a book by a local writer named Mordecai Richler.

The process of education has always involved the process of the student’s leaving hearth and home to absorb and delineate the values of his own generation in opposition and apposition to those of his professors. This was harder for me to do, perhaps, than for Student A, who lived at the university, while I was living with Frances and the Major; but it could not be said that I had failed to wipe the dust of Scanlon’s off my feet; the renegade position was easy to achieve. The ideas of my generation were hard to define, however, though in retrospect they have become clear. We did not, at the time of the Korean War, feel that we were living in great times. There was a restlessness, a feeling that Canada could not be the backwater that the major powers said it was since we had taken an independent position at Suez; and I had no feelings that my professors at McGill considered themselves mediocre: they saw themselves as denizens of a great international city, one that had benefited from European immigration before and during the war and which, with

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contributions from the great companies and institutions like the Neurological Institute and the medical school, the Arctic Institution and the International Aviation Agency, moved out of the bush into the forelands. They tended to be from Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, and as often Maritimers who had trained there as immigrants, children of manse and farm and parsonage who had taken their Rhodes scholarship or their parents’ poor stipends in their teeth and made their way in the world. This was the city of Osler, of Leacock, of the fur barons, of the great capitalists. It was a pity that it was also the city of Chauvin, and of Duplessis, but we needed only to bide our time before the French saw the light. The students made their way towards that light like moles. There were a few communists, and a few enthusiasts for modern film. There were a great many skiers and a few scions of the British aristocracy who kept wine cellars in residence. For the most part, however, my friends seemed to be eager to get away and branch out: it was the time of Dylan Thomas, the time of On the Road and for us, too, of Existentialism, which although it might have passed its bloom in Paris was beginning slowly to disseminate itself abroad only now, its French vision assisted more than we wanted to admit by movies like “An American in Paris.” I picked up a mishmash of mottos as I fled through time. “Il faut être absolument moderne,” “to burn with a hard, gemlike flame.” “Is it Proust this week?” the Major would ask, teasing, “or Virginia Woolf?” Or Sartre or Rilke or de Beauvoir; Eliot, Pound, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, Gide, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen … A time of elective affinities then, but also of rebellion. Why was it inferior to be a woman? No one could answer that, but the men all said it was: leave off this trying to think, this competing with us, they said (though not to me, they didn’t see me), go and do what you are best at: come live with me and be my love: and though the Dean of Women inveighed against it, the women did. To be a scholar was to be an old maid and who wanted to be the worst card in the game, eternally passed on? Wasn’t it possible, I sometimes asked, that married women thought? Some few of my professors were married, one was even a widow with children. But the view was on the whole that the mind melted when confronted by a child. The campus was devoid of infants and wedding rings were a secret. There were, with regard to matters Canadian, small presses … murmurs in the coffee houses when Leonard Cohen passed by; the first joints; elegant

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Frenchwomen in black knit trousers and short hair spirited the young men away. I was always on the periphery, but even I was close enough to catch a whiff of complicated destiny: if one could get to Europe, if one could overcome bourgeois cant and cease to live for heaven and eternity, see the here and now … A young man in England had written a book, said to be inaccurate, about how all the greatest people were outsiders; I had picked up a copy of a book by a Montreal man named Mordecai Richler for 17 cents at Eaton’s which proved that Canadians could be modernists too. A woman named Iris Murdoch was writing philosophical novels in England. A duffle coat was a kind of passport. I had a couple of letters from my old friend Belva at Victoria College in Toronto. She was taking wonderful courses in religious studies from Professor Frye. I pitied her, I who was taking courses in the history of prose from Professor MacLennan, said now to be at work on his greatest book … It could not be said that nothing was going on. The difficulties were not small, and many of them were financial. That last winter we lived in a two-room basement hole so cold that the three of us often slept in the big bed together with the babies on either side of us, pretending we were in revolutionary Russia. When spring came I wrote my final examinations with shaking hands and when it was time for Convocation on the great campus front lawn we felt, as we polished ourselves up and hired, for the first time in months, a child to babysit a few hours, as if we were climbing out of a dung-heap. When I was told that there was a small opening for a graduate student of my ability I turned the offer down with horror.

Leaving Montreal

Engel’s handwritten notation “Expand vastly” on this section indicates its incomplete status. She had not yet decided how the move from Montreal to Toronto would figure in the novel. This excerpt from the opening pages of mea box 34 file 52 offers a transition bridge to the Toronto setting of the second half of the novel.

The Major groaned about expenses. The shipping agency was not doing well. Overloaded with five courses and a baby, I cared little, ate little, tended my child, helped Frances where I could. The Major could be as unhappy as he wanted, I had my child. Chameau went on sabbatical to Paris, my little group of poets found me too domestic, I did my work, paid no one any mind. When the Dean remarked that I had thrown away a graduate fellowship, I said I was sorry, my husband was coming home and we were moving … To Toronto, the Major said, where there was sure to be work […] He had been there earlier to spy out the territory and put what was left of the shipping money on a house in an estate sale. When the long tug in steaming hot weather was over – June was early but throwing one of its curves – he settled us in a leaking cabin on the Kingston road.

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Toronto

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Toronto

Like the opening segment titled “Elizabeth and the Golden City,” at the beginning of the Montreal portion of the story, this first Toronto section is long and well written. It introduces several important characters, including Alexander Maugher, aka The Merchant of Seaman (Engel’s witty play on the word semen), who is Elizabeth’s imaginary husband. Created to satisfy the curiosity of one of her co-workers, Wallace Merman, at her new but deadly dull job as a translator for a bank, Maugher is also the implicit father for Elizabeth’s son by the Major, Alan. Together with Frances and her two sons, Owen and Pip, and a lodger named Perkyn Warburton, Elizabeth is now living in the large, rambling house that the Major found in downtown Toronto and purchased with money from the sale of the house in Scanlon’s. Elizabeth lands a new job as a translator for a small publishing company called Roe, Allen, Levy (or Cherrystone House) which publishes romances along with pamphlets. In addition to Elizabeth, the company’s employees include Ron Catherwood, who will later play a role in Elizabeth’s life. Meanwhile, the Major displays an enthusiasm and energy for matters related to housing that evoke the real-life Rains, who established many houses.

I arrived in Toronto at 11:15 at night on May 19th, 1956, the year I graduated from McGill, the day, indeed, with two young men who had similarly been knighted, in a Baby Austin. At a service station on the Kingston Road they transferred my luggage from their trunk to that of the Major’s bomber

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and took off. My bus fare had paid for their gas. I felt grown up, firm, and rather strange. I had been living alone and childless in the box room of Corinna’s apartment building since our lease had expired on the 30th of April. I had finished my examinations, wandered for a week, and acquired a degree: all without sprouting wings. Like thousands of my fellow citizens at that time I had vowed that I would never live in Toronto, the grey city that gave virtue a bad name. It was a joyless place where the buildings, with their low Buffalo-Romanesque arches and stained-glass gussets, squatted on the ground like fat women with elephantiasis; a city where one was required by law to dress in navyblue and forebear from smiling. A fine place to go to the hospital or buy a durable winter coat or visit the Museum – they were good at seriousness – but living had to be differently defined, we thought, before it was actually a place to live. Time, alas, had taught me that even if this opinion was true, Toronto was the only possible place: the Major wanted to move there, claiming that he could get work in the office of a friend of Duffy’s, the publishing industry was located there, and I had two letters of invitation to interviews in my purse, and the wages were good. Like most university students I had hoped to fall into a prepared slot at the clink of my ba, and found there was none. If I was not to take a secretarial, librarianship, or teacher’s training course, I would have to go directly into the workforce. The Montreal workforce was surfeited with young women, most handsomer than me, and unprepared to pay wages sufficient to support a young woman with a child. They wanted girls who lived at home with Maman and spent their wages on their backs. I would have to go west, I would have to stay with Frannie and the Major and I would have to find an opening that would fit me. No matter that I had decided to be a translator: in the city of the Two Solitudes they were a dime a dozen, elsewhere they were not wanted. A job in publishing with some translating on the side was all I could hope for; that I would have to find in Toronto, and that was that. Alexander Maugher had slammed the other doors of accomplishment in my face, and who had invented him? So I confronted Toronto with some bitterness and a curious relief; eighteen days without my child was a long time, and I knew the move was forcing me to meet the world in a way I would have liked to refuse to do. I had had bitter conversations with the little poets about others who were going on to Oxford, to Harvard, to Brown and Radcliffe, but I knew that their

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Marxist solutions did not apply to me. I had made my own bed, here was its keeper and at last I was going again to lie on it. But he was different, grim. “Get into the car,” he said. It had been raining for a week in Toronto, the river valleys were in flood, the spring parks were soggy. He and Frances had taken, because it was cheap, a cabin in one of those strange settlements that then mushroomed along the highways, collections of little painted huts behind rows of gas pumps embellished with peeling plaster statues of the Quintuplets or the Seven Dwarfs, a couple of miles west of the Beaches on Highway Two, a nasty little place, but for a song. Frances had managed admirably at first (he had been in town every day negotiating for a house that was available through an estate that was in Duffy’s hands – money from the house in Scanlon’s had come through at last and this place was a bargain) “but you’ll get a shock when you see us now and you’ll have to do something about it.” The door of the little white cabin – a doll’s house, or the front of the cuckoo clock – swung open as we drove up to it through the sucking mud around it. There was Frances silhouetted against a swaying light bulb: gaunt, hollowed-eyed, her cotton dress become a flapping Depression wrapper, a limp child in one arm, another on a hip. “We had the doctor,” the Major said, “and he said the well must be contaminated. We’re just waiting for you and then we’re getting out. Oh yes, she boiled the water, she’s not mad, but you can see, the place is infected. Once they’ve gone to bed at the house we’ll skin out down to the hospital for sick children.” I rushed in and opened my arms for my boy, who beat his head against my breast and then relaxed against me with a sigh. All three of the children were emaciated, limp, stringy with fever and diarrhoea; they were distant, unreal, not the pink fervour I had known, they were the opening of Manhattan Transfer, the baby squirming like a knot of worms, not us. I opened my mouth to blame and shut it again: how could I, who had left her to do what I could not have done, manage three babies? “Lizzie,” she pecked me. I wriggled away from the smell. They hadn’t even bought paper diapers; she had been washing the foulness by hand. “My God, Frannie, you must be exhausted.” Without closing the car doors he had slid the suitcases in from the cabin, so he could load up the car without their knowing at the manager’s house. He shut the door at last, but the damp stayed inside with us. Owen was asleep, Pip was howling, Alan still clung to me; there was a

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pot of tea on the table and we drank it. The doctor had told her to give them weak tea with sugar to stop up their bowels; it was working and they were keeping fluids down now, but they were restless, jerky in their sleep from the caffeine. “We’ll be glad to get out of here,” the Major said. I could tell from his face he wanted to ask me if I had any money, did not quite dare. I had fifty dollars that Mendel[ssohn] had slipped me when I went to say good-bye to him. “For the boy,” he had muttered. For the boys. In the morning I had bowed my head to receive an academic hood. At noon I had lunched at the Ritz with Professor Bingham. At two I had punch with the parents of one of the boys who was headed to Oxford. Now it was time to forgive Corinna the box room. She was courting another general and did not want me up in the apartment, and the box room had been a good place to study. Dry. The cabins were owned by a couple who spent their evenings drinking and throwing things at each other. When I opened the door I could hear them shouting and growling. Soon they would subside. They had refused to pay the doctor bills, we were going to leave them in their Inching. I clutched my dry, fevered baby, who clutched me. I put him down and changed Pip. I covered Frannie so she could sleep for an hour: she needed it. “Where are we going?” I asked the Major. “I’ll find somewhere.” Sometimes I had asked myself why I wanted an education, why I avoided what people called reality, the world. There was in my mind no question now. Only, perhaps, “where will we all go when there is no upward layer to strive towards?” Under the blazing lights of the hospital emergency rooms the children looked dirty and grim. Frances dabbed at them with a washcloth she had brought in a plastic bag. “The water came in pails,” she kept saying. The interns looked as if they didn’t know about that. One of the nurses sensibly brought basins, and while we were waiting we bathed them and cleaned them. “It will be good for the fever,” she said. We laid them in a row like fish, Alan the long one, the poor misery. Then we sat and rocked them while the staff went away making blood and stool cultures. Frances was guilty almost to a sob, and it didn’t help. “I couldn’t have done it. Nobody could have done it. Don’t worry. It just happened,” I said. But she kept moaning,

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repeating. I wondered if she had finally realised that Arthur was an enjoyer rather than a provider. I wondered if that would help. Arthur went out to try hotels, and could find nothing that would not entirely consume the down payment on the house, he said. I knew he had money from the sale of the property in England, and would have thrown that in his face if the nurse hadn’t come in and told him where to get us coffee and where to find a social worker, who had lists of accommodation. She was the one who managed to calm squalling Pip. “He’s a feisty one,” she said. Frances began to smile again, tentatively. “Oh,” the nurse said, “he’ll live: it’s always a question, will the mother?” We had to fill in a report for the Medical Officer of Health. The next time we went back, there were no cabins. By noon we were installed in a Finnish boarding house, and Mendel[ssohn] had paid prescriptions of antibiotic against a specific bacterium. Twentyfour hours later the boys were a brawl of pink again. The Major left us rocking them and went out and bought his house. I hated it on sight. It was one of the big brownstones near the university – knees-apart-fat-lady – dark because squashed against its neighbour. Its stained glass eyes were broken, its frizzy tile hair was falling out. Inside, acres of hardwood floor told daughters to stay on their knees. But even I had to admit it was a bargain, twelve rooms for under twenty thousand dollars, vacant possession (and it was vacant and possessed), room for ourselves, a flat and perhaps a roomer until the children were older, just on the other side of Spadina Road, we could walk anywhere. The Major smacked his lips and rubbed his hands together, a man of property again. There was no mention of whether Frances and I were entitled as well, and somehow no opportunity to mention it. And he was happy; in no time he had a crew of Indians and University students working for him, presumably paid from the sale of the property in England, stripping out plaster, reattaching roof tiles, soldering pipes so that it no longer rained in the front hall when the bath was run. The last year in Montreal, reduced even from dog-walking, he had seemed old and flaccid, but the spring came back to his step, he had his regiment back, he was doing what he knew how to do. He built an enormous sandbox in the backyard, one with an element of cage about it, where little children could be

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left safely alone. He put swings in the ubiquitous Annex mulberry trees. We camped out at first as the place was restored around us, but it seemed no time at all until he had a proper living room for us, with a Turkey carpet and a round table and a serpentine sofa he had found at a sale. When I said the house was too big for one woman to keep he said, “But there are two of you, aren’t there?” If it was his happy summer, it was my sour time. I went to publishers’ interviews and found no need for my services. Collected, instead, lectures on the superior and snide mannerisms of those from Montreal. I came home and cried and slammed doors, vowed not to work, not to confront the world again. “There’s nothing out there for me,” I said bitterly. “There never is,” he replied. “You have to make it.” “You should know.” “I have to get the house in order before I start work.” “Frances can use me here.” “We can’t afford it.” We. My sulks kept him away sexually. For a while I felt good about that. I made the rounds of the bookstores; found them inadequate, inferior to Montreal’s; found, of course, no work. I went to the library, read immensely, clung to my son. When I wasn’t sweeping, painting, pounding streets. In that atmosphere, however, and this was part of the Major’s ebullience, his ability to swim with any number of infants on his back, good cheer kept breaking in. He found a Domestic Science student to live in one of the back rooms upstairs and help Frances when I was out – as he promised I would be, most of the time, soon; he found a steamfitter to put the monstrous heating system together again, cheap. He found Perkyn Warburton. First he found Perkyn’s mother, a large lady of the sort my mother used to call a “damesky with her hat over her left earowitch,” big-bosomed and mink-slashed, the kind of woman transvestites hope to grow up to be, who answered his advertisement and wanted not a flat but “rooms” for her son who was travelling in Europe but returning, perversely (she had wanted him to go to Oxford, everyone was wanted to go to Oxford but me) in order to go to library school. He would require dry quarters with built-in book shelving, comfortably furnished. They spent a long time inspecting the upstairs flat, where, fortuitously, the crew was just now replacing crumbling plaster. Yes, the antique overflow tank could be boxed in, yes, it was adequately heated (Perkyn had weak lungs), yes, for a price bookshelves could be built in. He struck a bargain with her and rushed down to the Crippled Civilians to check the new furni-

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ture for floppy English armchairs and Tudor tables. “She lives in a mining camp in the north,” he said. “Doesn’t speak to her hubby from one end of the year to the next, I reckon. Her boy is her only love. We’ll set him up.” When he appeared he was a shiny young man with a cap of yellow hair like Father’s and the highest voice I have heard on a man who wasn’t deaf. He approved of the rooms, was courteous to his mother, fetched his trunks from Trinity College, and unpacked endless mufflers and pairs of galoshes. His books appeared separately and were carefully ordered on the new shelves. Mother and son went shopping for cutlery, tea towels and china. I was fascinated that they simply went out and bought things, had them delivered: it seemed too simple. I’ll give my son a dollar and an old tin pie plate, I thought. But Perkyn was her son, her daughter, her world, and he had his trousseau as well as a hot water bottle and a new down comforter, and I have paid over and over for scorning her for loving him. Although when she left his voice dropped half an octave. He knew books, Perkyn, and, surprisingly, he knew whisky, and got on with the Major. Once you got over the fact that he both screeched and waltzed he was extraordinarily good company, the man made for our Turkey carpet. Presently it became difficult to maintain the sourness, and I found a job, translating deadly documents in the head office of one of the banks at the behest of Malcolm Wilson’s father, who was a director. The wages were almost nothing, but they existed. When I needed clothes the Major bought me a bunch of navy blue outfits stamped “property of Dept of Physiotherapy, Toronto General Hospital.” Where we couldn’t pick the stamping off, Frances and I reversed the panels of material and added braid trimmings. The effect was only a little bizarre, for they were very well cut. I wouldn’t hand over my pay packet on Friday nights, as I was asked, but I paid for a washer and dryer installed in the smallest bedroom, and for my keep, and burgeoning Alan’s. Life began to be possible: I’m not sure whose. And after all, it wasn’t until they were thirty that the Noras of my generation began to slam the door. The work at the bank was dull and undemanding; if I had had a job I liked, I might have been less able to tolerate the atmosphere at home; but as the weather turned there was a splendid muzziness in the house, and to walk in from the sterile bank, where even one’s posture was checked every

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hour, and be greeted by babes with their arms in the air, hot tea, Perkyn’s accounts of the absurdity of library school, the Major’s guffaws, the latest improvements, Frannie’s good baking: it wasn’t the life I had intended (rising incandescent from university to fame) but it was ours. By Thanksgiving, the Major himself was employed, though he didn’t tell me his wages, doing research in a legal firm of a friend of Baggy Duffy’s. He started late, so he still had time to cruise the bargain shopping in the old Bomber, but he started. We were a family, considering our prejudices and eccentricities, at last. Perkyn quite liked the Tale of Alexander Maugher.

she murders maugher The city had a moment of brazen glory in the autumn. Then sullen weather set in again and nothing could hide from me the fact that as far as work, location and home went, with the constant exception of Alan, who was a dear child, superior to his half-brothers and cousins, I thought, in temperament if not in constitution, though most of the time he had “jade pillars,” my life was stale, dreary, flat and certainly unprofitable. I was not overtaxed at work. The personnel officer in charge of me, a young man named Wallace Merman, assured me that all the French correspondence that came to that bank came to me, but there was not much of it then for a bilingual country; I was left to the financial sections of Le Devoir and La Presse most of the time. Since he had firm ideas about the separation of the educated from the unschooled and the married from the virginal, he put me in a basement office with two men I inevitably styled Bouvard and Pécuchet, the German and Italian specialists. Bouvard, who sniffed and wore salt-and-pepper tweeds, did foreign exchange on a kind of calculator with brass cylinders. Pécuchet wore odds-and-ends suits which he said came from dead relatives – funerals caused him to salivate sartorially – and used, and I do not know why this appalled me, an abacus to work out his sums. I learned to use the brass cylinder for British exchange and decided that threecolumn mathematics was what gave the British the edge to establish the hegemony of the empire over the rest of us. My arrival meant that they could lunch together. The later hour that was assigned to me separated me from most of the female staff. Before the tunnels were built to connect the subway and the new skyscraper complexes, going even to Woolworth’s for

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lunch meant confronting the icy winter winds of Bay Street. I therefore spent a lot of time in the cafeteria looking for someone to sit with. I hated going up to a table, being looked over, [and] grudgingly finding a place made for me, so mostly I sat with Wallace. I ought, of course, to have smiled. Wallace had theories about Women. They were old, and do not bear repeating. He thought he was looking for a wife. It was Wallace’s pronouncements on Women, frequently repeated, that gave me my inspiration for that winter’s work project. I knew I was given to mourning and moaning, proceeding by wail and complaint through tantrum to change, and I knew that this irritated others, who kept their woes to themselves. When, however, I became conscious that I could not remain in this poor position, that I could change this eventually if I worked out a way, a sort of leaven entered my spirit and gave rise to a gaseous state of irritation. I had Wallace to complain to: the rest was inevitable. When, therefore, my own perceptions of my moanings caused it finally to occur to me that my unhappiness was unnecessary – after all most people lived in that city happily enough, I ought to be able to adapt to it – I began to look around for the cause of my grief, and settled on Alexander Maugher, about whom Wallace Merman was all too curious. (The fact that he, scaly of skin and ignorant in the grammar department, thought himself as superior to Maugher can be laid aside.) I could easily, of course, have pinned my plight on E. Lennox, who had a martyred streak, or Al Silliker, a foolish financier. Al Silliker’s wife, though I tried to be loyal to her, had recently committed the hypocritical step of joining an adult catechism class with a view to becoming, like her husband, a High Anglican, and chided me now for not being religious, I who in my youth had spent more time in church than she had in high school. Wallace Merman had cut me off from any chance of making enjoyable acquaintances among my fellow workers, and even Perkyn Warburton, I suppose, could be blamed for something. Alan was an impediment, but a soft and lovely one. I excepted him. He was what I worked for. But who, nine times out of ten, makes a woman unhappy? Her mother? Mine was dead, and there is no satisfaction in blaming a dead woman for long, though she had favoured Frances, and lost, in her dying, her sense of humour. Anyway, husbands were beginning to be made to take the brunt, and why shouldn’t mine? I realised bitterly and vengefully that Alexander

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Maugher it was, who had been standing between me and happiness, and I resolved to take steps, whether he was beautiful as a butterfly and brave as a queen, to avenge myself on his sharp nose, crisp curls, absence, watch cap, and manly bearing. “The whiskery bastard,” I said, “he walked into my life, destroyed it, walked out again. I’ll get him.” It was since I had married the Merchant of Se[a]men that everything had gone wrong, wasn’t it? It was he, not her mother, who had finally cut off my friendship with Lalice; and with the Dean of Women! who had separated me from the possibility of a scholarship to graduate school and involved me in this ridiculous situation at the Bank. It was he who, by not supporting Alan and me, left me subject to the eternal machinations of the Major. It was he who separated me from my peers, wise and foolish virgins in the fifties being always kept from married women, Who Knew. It was he who was hindering me from operating as a proper translator as well, for surely only someone who was a person in her own right could get close enough to an author to become his English voice. It was he who brought me to this vile city. It was obvious that Alexander Maugher was a bad man. I had been connected to him for nearly three years now, and he existed with a wonderful consistency. He was tall, black-bearded, quiet and excitable by turns, given to extravagance in drink, and obviously addicted to women in foreign ports: which it was why it was probably a Good Thing that he had never come home to see his son. He had fine, regular handwriting, much like Le Chameau’s, he read a lot (he could not always be on watch, which was all I knew that merchant seamen did; I took his career from Conrad, changing the names in case Wallace had accidentally been assigned good books in high school) and played, like a friend of the Major’s who had delighted us one evening, old Irish songs, real ones, on the mandolin. And like all men, like the Major, like my father, he promised everything and gave little in return. Love, joy, security, home, hope, regularity, comfort, strength and serenity were his promises. I had traded a few nights in bed for the hope of heaven and here I was in Toronto eating a late lunch with Wallace Merman in the basement of a bank, after a morning between Bouvard and Pécuchet. Alexander Maugher was going to have to pay.

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I almost became fond of Wallace as he allowed me to dilate on the evils of Men. How they deserted us and deceived us, treated us like beasts of burden leaving us to raise our children alone. But of course I could not reveal the whole of my plans to him. When night fell early and we had put the babes in their beds, the Major busied himself with his eternal work on the house, Frances attacked the sewing and mending, and I, if I had not been assigned a task in the Augean Stables, which were much too big for Frances alone, sat up reading and thinking in the big front room which was partitioned now between Alan and me, thinking of how to dispose of Alexander Maugher. Of course it’s the research that is most pleasurable in any sort of project: the execution is work. In order to give point to the vagueness of my reading, I enquired into poisoning, garroting, strangling, skewering, flaying, and the general history of murder. I read everyone from Agatha Christie to Simenon (to keep up my French) to William Shakespeare, and a good many persons in between. I rose bleary with bloodlust every morning until I had decided what to do. Then, much to the Major’s annoyance, for it caused me to spend my own money, I signed up for fencing lessons at the local gym, which was the Jewish “Y.” The Christian one was segregated, and too far away. There is death by drowning, too good for a sailor boy, and death by fire, which does not bear contemplation, and poisoning is said to be a woman’s method, and I had never accepted women’s methods. But the best deaths are all in the last act and there is no death which satisfies the military artistic and dramatic instincts so much as the death of Hamlet. Screw the four captains and the poisoned onion, I thought as I thrust, parried, floundered and jabbed, take that, A. Maugher, take that. The downy head of Alan brushed a violent bosom Tuesday night, the blood of Maugher ran through the corridors of the Hebrew Association, vengefully lapping locker doors all I could give them for their holocaust [sic]. I lost my terrible post-pregnant slouch, spent money on my hair, apologised by doing all the floors for Frances, and, when I was tempted to confess to Wallace the nature of my project, surprised myself by leaving my job. The Major’s employment was not as permanent, and he made it clear to me that we could not manage without my regular contributions. Failing to convince him that it was lower-class to stand in the front hall and collect one’s dependant’s pay packet on the appropriate day, I clerked at Britnell’s

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bookstore for a while, found the merchandise too tempting, and spent a wandering period working for an office employees’ pool, where I learned to file fast, and lie about my typing. I lost a lot of shyness before I shot my albatross. On the last evening of the fencing course, Frances skipped her Altar Guild meeting at the church so that I could dine with my instructor, a Belgian ballet dancer, and the others after class. We went to the back part of a Hungarian restaurant and plunged into schnitzels that were bigger than our plates. After the fencing, our elbows flew freely; we laughed and joked and drank beer. There was a Danish couple there, and two Jewish girls I had at first called princesses – then I discovered that Sara “went to business” – i.e. ran a store, and a good one at that, and that Hana was an art student of the Beaux-Arts persuasion, who had wanted to use the muscles she had so frequently to draw. There was an interior decorator’s wife who wore her hair like Anna May Wong, and a medical student called Godfrey who could barely be persuaded to say a word. Leon, the Belge, grabbed me by the thigh and shook me and said, “See, we have done something for Elizabeth, and she has not softened herself again with the beer.” They made much of me: it was the one chance I had to howl with them. I came home high and happy and saw Frances through the plate glass front door. She was polishing the Major’s desk that stood against the wall of the dining room and I could see quite clearly because she had taken the glass curtains down to wash them and it was my turn to iron, that she looked as old as Mother, and thin and worn. She had been nice to me lately, for the Major didn’t think it good to visit me in my room with Alan there, and she seemed happy in her house. I wondered, though, if her dream of domesticity had included being so worn. Her breasts are like udders, I thought. And, how does one make love to a woman? And why? The way they went at their bodies without nun-like pudeur in the Jewish Y. The Major had made fun of my Jewish connection again, but I thought, they live in the here and now, they’re not living for another life. The sins of the body are not the same as the sins of the minds; they can afford to touch their bodies and keep them clean. Jewish doctors washed their hands. And “to-night’s the night.” The Major was upstairs working on Perkyn’s pipes. I put the kettle on for tea and told Frannie I’d scorch the curtains. I’d have to do them tomorrow. She came into the kitchen and sat down gratefully, with her knees a little apart: the posture of a mature woman. She

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had had a miscarriage in the summer but I was sure she was pregnant again. Her new doctor had warned her not to wear herself out but she was determined to repopulate the world with the Major’s seed. I’d gone to a different man for a pessary. I did not envy her except for her moment of victory, when the baby popped out and became an unwilled contribution to society. The rest was slavery, I thought. She didn’t. After they had both gone to bed I crept down the creaky stairs with my mask and gloves and removed the curtain rod from above the door. Then I went up to the park in the dark and with a whip and a snap and a snickersnee, ran Alexander Maugher through. Left him lying with a white face like a full moon dead on the grass. The Globe and Mail failed to find him. In those ancient times, the government had little record of us. I told the agency I worked for that I was returning to the use of my maiden name, and wrote to the office that issued Alan his baby bonus with the same information. There was no social security number to adjust; I owned no property and no passport. I moved the thirty dollars I had saved to another bank. I was Elizabeth Lennox again. I put the scaly skin of E. Maugher, whiner, in a green garbage bag and went out to meet the world. I went from office to office, doing the simplest work for the simplest wages cheerfully. Easy jobs leave no time to think, and no hangover. Young men began to ask me out and I went to silly movies with them, and to dances. The Major didn’t seem to mind, though as Frannie’s pregnancy advanced he began to fix Alan up a small back room. For a few months that year I lived the silly life of a silly woman, helping at home, working abroad, and enjoying myself. Then one spring evening when the trees were alive with robin-throb, I piled the boys in the wagon and took them to the big park where the sandbox had just been opened. It was cool enough for them to wear jackets, but the sand was dry, and they settled down with their tin trucks and wooden spoons and left me to read beside them on a bench. There was no one else around. Frances had got them ready to come out and combed their hair with water, leaving their fine curls immaculately parted: three, clean, contented little fellows, a job to observe. And Camus in my lap. A man came and sat beside me. I moved over to the edge, to see what kind of man he was, if he would follow. He stayed put. “You read French,” he said.

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“I try to keep it up.” “Camus is a fine writer.” “I’m glad you like him.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I could use someone to translate some French,” he said. I turned and had a good look at him. He was short and stout and his hands lay like fish in his lap. He wore a grey overcoat. He looked like a bum. “What do you do?” “I’m a publisher.” Not bloody likely, I thought. “I wrote to a lot of publishers last year,” I said. “Nobody wanted translations.” He dug messily through his overcoat and several layers of woollies. I still didn’t think he was up to much. He extracted a card from an interior pocket and held it out. His fingernails were clean enough. “Roe, Allen, Levy,” the card said, “Publishers.” The address was on Davenport road, not far away, though I didn’t recollect ever seeing the building. Davenport wasn’t one of my streets, though, I thought. It was a cow path, and Indian trail, a diagonal, not a street you walked from here to there. There was everything on it, from castles to slums. “What are you doing now?” he asked. Pip hit Alan with the biggest wooden spoon. Alan’s only advantage was his length. He rolled away and kicked Pip in the nose. “Yours?” the man asked. “One,” I panted, separating them, propping Alan into the wagon. First strike, go home, was our invariable rule, and it worked. Alan. Pip. The tremendous solid weight of Owen. Camus lying on the grass. Sisyphus never knew. “I work in an office,” I said. “I write letters about peas in flumes.” “I’ll interview you Saturday at ten, Miss …” “Lennox.” I was bending down picking up trucks and spoons. “I have to take them home.” “I’m Alan Roe,” he said. “You will come. You look … as if you could.” “Could what?” I panted. “Translate?” “You bet I could!” I said vehemently, tucking them all in. “But not peas in flumes. Literature.” It came out “Lidderchure.” I was back in Ontario. He handed me my book, I stuffed it in my purse and breathlessly hauled the wagonload home. Otherwise now they’d started they’d kill each other. Dinner was in the oven by the smell. Perkyn and Frances and Arthur were having drinks: Perkyn had finished his exams. There was wine for the table. I flung the business card down. “Now who’s that, you who know all, Perkyn?”

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“Oh God,” he said, “The Cherrystones!” The Major and Frances undressed the little boys on the porch and dumped sand on the geraniums and Perkyn told me about the Cherrystones, the Allens and the Roes. “Her father was the old herbalist my mother used to get her henna from when we lived here,” he said. “Old Mr Allen. He was a British Israelite, and a Mason, and he wrote little pamphlets about, well, cherrystones. The Roe brothers had an orthopedic shoe store next door. Mr Allen’s daughter married Norman Roe. During the war she worked on one of the papers, and then she started to write romances. And somehow, Allen being a dedicated communist and Norman ambitious, they got into publishing: they’re still doing it. Levy’s new. I didn’t know they had anything to do with the French. They sell mostly through herbalists at the store, but you see their political books around. She calls herself Amelia Allen.” I remembered Amelia Allen with a gulp. I had given her up, along with Grace Livingston Hill, for the pious librarian. You might as well go along and see them,” he said. “Some men,” Roe used to say (because Alan Roe was called Roe and Norman was Mr Norman; Melie Roe was Amelia Allen in print and Bette Allen used whatever name she felt like using) “are born publishers, some are made publishers and some have publishing thrust upon them by the trade in orthopedic shoes.” Similarly, “Dent’s have a bow window on Bloor Street, Macmillan’s snuggle next to William Lyon Mackenzie on Bond, and we have two cinder blocks by the railway tracks.” The brothers had grown up not far away, at the edge of the cpr tracks, scavenged coal in the dirty thirties for their widowed mother at Dominion Coal and Wood, and stared wildly at the stuffed alligator in old Mr Allen’s shop window on the way home from Jesse Ketchum School. Norman had conceived a passion for Bette Allen in the fifth grade; when he was in the seventh he got a job as messenger boy for the boot man, Orrie Parker. By the time the war came he was his clerk-salesman: he could sell anything. Bette wouldn’t look at him, but Melie Parker, the boot man’s daughter (the mothers were lost in the vagueness of history) liked Roe, and Roe was fascinated by the group that met in the back of the herbalist’s store, a mixture of British Israelites, pious Methodists, communists and cabbalists, never the same combination twice, all attracted by the magnetism of old Allen,

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who was something of a pamphleteer; not, either, averse to picking up money by having a friend of his print books of poems, rule books, sermons and inspirational essays by his hangers-on. The intellectual drift was so confused that Roe’s head spun as a youngster, but gradually he separated Gurdjieff from the Second Coming, Lenin from Paracelsus, Nostradamus from Nostrums, and became, for a meagre wage, the old man’s assistant, laboriously typing out pamphlets on important aspects of bodily health when he was not ladling cherrystones and kidney mixture, honey or henna. Bette Allen hated the place, became a speed typist and went to work at the Toronto Star. “No Depression ever stopped me!” she said. Melie Parker got permission from her pa to sneak down and use the typewriter late in the afternoon when the housework upstairs was done and the tea was ready. She was small, dark, unprepossessing, even at seventeen, but when Roe finally noticed her and asked if he could read what she was writing he was intrigued by the skill with which she concocted her romances, and suggested she send them to be published somewhere. Grudgingly, Bette read a manuscript and declared it almost professional. “Do you think we could sell a thing like that?” Norman asked, and set out to see how it could be done. Their first effort was crude, but proved popular, in lavender bindings, in the lending libraries. Melie slugged away at the old Underwood at the back of the store every day, and Roe became fond of her. They married. Bette turned up her nose at Norman. The war came. Roe, fat and four-eyed, stayed home, but Norman had four years in Europe in the infantry, slithering, his thin barracuda profile peering around every door, from assignment to assignment. He learned a thing or two and came back knowing what he wanted to do. “They look that way because they spent their childhoods with their heads down hunting for nickels in the gutter,” Bette told me. “But you watch them: they never miss anything.” Old Allen was still alive when Norman came back; she was a war widow on a tiny pension from an American doughboy. She had a little boy she wasn’t proud of, wry-necked and none too bright. Old Parker had died and Roe hoped the boot business would pick up. “We’re going to be publishers,” Norman said, “in the herbalist’s line, of course.” “Publishers are gentlemen,” Roe objected, not having failed to notice the profession attracted private school men. The book world, he had decided, was his, but he had no entrée. The crowd around Allen’s cracker barrel had thinned and he was not quite satisfied to replace it with Trotskyites.

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Norman and Bette put the firm together. Amelia produced a book every six months. The hymn singers, as Norman called them, had already contributed twenty or thirty volumes of verse to their stock; it wouldn’t be hard to find a few better ones. The pamphlets could be redesigned and sold in other stores, “You know books,” he said to Roe. “You can find other books. And we’ll keep right on with the kidney mixture.” He told them of the rich and varied stock of their counterparts in Europe. It was the boots they would get rid of. Just looking at them gave him a limp. When they began, they were laughed at, but the trade had acquired a respect for them by the time I joined them. They were smart enough to eschew false pretenses and they knew their limitations. Undercapitalised, they were driven by Bette’s ambition and her ability to turn an amateurish creed of unconventional interest into a smooth pamphlet of instruction. Bee-keeping and wool-carding, cough remedies, yoghourt-making, feminism, intimate Trotskyite memoirs (and later “Why I Lost Faith”) supplanted British Israel, though they still sold charts indicating the descent of George VI from Jeroboam and Rheoboam. Melie took up the cause of vitamins. Norman acquired agencies from similar companies in the United States. When I met them, they were still on the part of Davenport Road now inhabited by smart interior decorators and literary agents, eiderdown shops and left-wing lawyers. Norman and Bette in one of their sallies overseas had encountered a French publisher, Gaetan Levy, with whom they had entered into a complicated partnership that gave their books rights in Belgium, France, Switzerland and Quebec. He had a large sideline in what they called “botanicals”, and he did a good deal of publishing for the cosmetic trade; they needed a translator for these. I blessed the Dean of Women and Plant Taxonomy. It was a funny-looking place. Old Allen’s alligator still sat among apothecary jars and fading pamphlets in the left hand window. In the right, behind a mauve rank of Amelia’s romances, the shelves of the shoe store held the rest of their stock. Desks were scattered about. Grace the receptionist sat in the full draft of the double front door and snuffed all winter until Norman thought to put a baffle up (no one thought to move her: no one but Bette ever changed anything and she, in disgust, hardly came in any more), stolidly taking phone calls and typing invoices. Melie worked in the back

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room with Roe, or upstairs in the bedroom when her arthritis was bad. They had just hired a huge man called Ron Catherwood who was so gaptoothed that he looked utterly different from the front and from the side; long-legged and hyperactive, he was stock boy and salesman at once. My job was to translate what I thought would sell of Levy’s stock and help Roe deal with the new lot of literary manuscripts they were being flooded with: the new generation of Canadians all wanted to write. The pay was almost insulting, but better than the bank’s. “If you hadn’t known them I wouldn’t have touched them,” I said to Perkyn. “They’re absolutely peculiar.” “They’re exactly what this country needs,” he crowed. “And you can be their middle-class front.” I wasn’t sure I was flattered. Frances, surprisingly, defended me by pulling [a] limp hank from her apron pocket. “Could this,” she asked Perkyn, “be your blue hairnet?” He had the grace to respond with cracked falsetto laughter, on which I sailed in to the sixties with a firm with no assets but nationalism, Zen, macrobiotics, herbs, how-to books and Mr Marx. I scorned it often as not-literature, but it became life.

Elizabeth in Her 30s

A great deal happens in this long segment of the novel. Elizabeth and her son Alan move out on their own, save for short stretches of time when Ron Catherwood keeps Elizabeth company. It is the 1960s – McLuhan times, Trudeau times, Centennial times – Elizabeth recalls, when Canadian writing flourished; when the Writers’ Union of Canada was formed; when the Quiet Revolution was unfolding in Quebec and the Algerian and the Vietnam wars were being protested. In the course of her work, Elizabeth meets the writer Jo deLesseps (also referred to as Andrew deLesseps) and surprises herself by accepting his proposal of marriage. They have a baby, Agnes. The marriage does not last, however, and in a draft end to this section, Elizabeth, with Catherwood for company once again, takes her children Agnes and Alan on a trip to the east coast. This recalls the trip that Engel made with her children to Prince Edward Island after the end of her marriage and the successful publication of her novel Bear (1976). The draft end of “Elizabeth in Her 30s” is not included here as it introduces characters who are not sufficiently developed in other parts of the manuscript and that therefore cut the narrative flow.

Suddenly, it was over for me, and like all the fundamental changes I have made in my life, the change was made internally, and over a period of time rather than by conscious decision; so that I began first to take less joy in their company, then to resent the programmatic schedule the Major insisted on maintaining, then, finally, to refuse what I had previously assented to. I went out when they expected me to babysit, I brought, shockingly, a man home after a party (I was shocked myself and disapproved of myself but I

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must also have enjoyed it because after many years I still remember the encounter in detail) and was lectured for promiscuity, (even by Perkyn, who did not avoid hearing of the event) and, finally instead of giving the Major my February pay check in my 30th year, I spent it at Holt Renfrew’s department store on wonderful clothes for work. I let my feet carry me, submitting to no will. I prepared for a storm, and stiffened my neck to stand straight and breathe in the intervals while the waves rolled over me. I had told myself intellectually several times that this must be the procedure, but instinct was superior to intellect as it usually is in these emotional matters: when the time came, I stood the test. I was thirty years old and I had a child, who was eight. I had a good job, and, unbeknownst to the Major, who had attempted the heights but not been allowed to take over the role of accountant for my income tax, money in the bank: some of the translations I did for Roe bore a royalty. The Indexe des Plantes médicinales had been a success and sold its British rights: even the Times Literary Supplement commented on the elegance and accuracy of my five years’ labour in the translation. Besides the gentleman I had brought home, I was meeting other men, men who were, unlike him (he suited me exactly and I regretted him, but not hard, because I liked his wife and did not want to deceive her), free. In short, for some time I had been growing an independent life, and it was ripening. The Major pranced, the Major danced. He roared in fury, “Frances, put those children to bed,” and shouted at me that I was deceptive and disloyal, et cetera, et cetera. The roll of accusations became so long I was amused under my whiteness: it was Frances who shook when she came downstairs again. There was not one thing he did not accuse me of. I was an incubus, a succubus, I had taken advantage, I was a scarlet woman, the whore of Babylon and dependent on my sister to boot. He was grotesque, a stage Irishman in a bad comedy, the man in Dickens who died of internal combustion. “And I’ve been supporting you all these years,” I said. When he undid his belt I put my hand on the telephone, and he knew I was going to call the police. He stalked out of the room. Frances wept and pleaded. I couldn’t leave them, she needed the help, Alan needed her, she was sorry if sometimes she’d been jealous and bad, it was hard to share but if I left them … what would they have to eat? “He gets money. There’s his pension.”

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“It’s nothing, I know it’s nothing.” “He can go out and work like an ordinary mortal.” “You know he can’t get work. There’s his accent, and he’s, well, he’s old to start again.” “Frannie, the house is paid off and there’s the baby bonus and Perkyn’s rent …” She wept until I felt like promising her I would help. But my other self was saying, from now on my life is mine, whatever it is like. I did not promise. I had seen a little house for sale between ours and the office, a little white house set back behind the others, reachable from an alleyway only. Something about it reminded me of our old house when I was small, or Belle River’s house: it had a call. I knew I belonged in a little, low white house. I had enquired and found its price reasonable, its condition bad. There was a problem about the mortgage: as an unmarried female I might have trouble. But our accountant had said that it might be possible to get one through the real estate dealer on Roe’s recommendation, and that proved to be so. It was empty, though not occupable [sic] until the wiring had been brought up to standard and several work orders obeyed. The next day I set in motion the process of purchasing it, which was as well, for on my return from the office I found that my possessions and Alan’s had been packed. Oh, I was a devil, I was, the young are strong. “We’ll have to talk,” I said, “about what happens to my share in the house.” “Your SHARE?” He went to explode again. The veins in his nose were very red, and his skin was falling in, he was getting to be an old, old man. “If this house was bought with money from the Scanlon’s house, I have a right to a share.” “After all these years …” “Stuff it, Arthur, who’s been keeping whom?” I wanted also to mention sexual services but the matter was not one I had been able to work out. Who pays for what when sex is involved? Who owes whom? I could not ignore my enjoyment, and I felt guilty for it. And somehow I felt I owed him, somehow, somewhere, a little consideration … perhaps I was only expressing the guilt to the victims but I was not quite the fly who had walked with the spider, I knew. Still, I knew also that I had to fight and I was amazed at my readiness. Talk of lawyers forced him to concede that I might need a couple of chill months to put my new house in order, and we came to an arrangement, and the months I stayed on were chill indeed.

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I did see lawyers but I began to understand that to recover anything from him might be very expensive. Certainly, they thought, he owed me: they were shocked by the looseness with which he had fulfilled my father’s trust; but forcing him to produce evidence (and he was the only one who had any) of ownership meant engaging in procedures that I knew I could not afford unless I gave up the dream of my snug little house. And it occurred to me that we were, up to this point, sharers. The sharing had begun to tip over one-sided some time ago, but if I left now, left them with a house big enough to rent rooms in, left him still young enough to seek employment (oh, it would be temporary, but perhaps she would stop having babies and go out into the market herself, she had never been afraid of it), just left them, things would work out. There was enough of us left after our tenyear siege of madness. The person who was excited was Alan. He had a house. He was going to live with his mother. His teacher had told me that Owen and Pip were bad to him, they had taken it personally that he had turned the tables and grown larger than they were (he grew to be called Alan the Giant) and they wore his hand-me-downs and could no longer beat him up. He was a tall, frail, fair boy, eight years old, quiet, but open to adventure and there was a school between the house and the office that he assured me he would attend happily, and then, he said it himself, he could come to the office after school and wait for me, couldn’t I? And he could help in the house Mum. Every day after school he went to the supermarket and got boxes. The little girls, Connie and Edith, sat in them and wet their pants and he waited patiently for them to dry out. It was a happy time: Alan and me, finding our house. The Major said I didn’t know anything about running a house, and I was not the equal of Frances. But we have all lived in houses, and we learn in time that they are only the boxes that we draw around ourselves, and learn to make them weathertight. Women have these surges of nestiness, and men who haven’t delegated their domesticity have them too: monks have icons in their cells. For a year, we were Pooh and I, hand in hand, working on our quarters, quiet ever-growing Alan saying, “Well, maybe we can do it another way, Mum,” joy in his eyes if everything went right. We papered and painted and put up bookshelves, found people to help us (Perkyn was helpless, Catherwood hopeless, but he had a nephew) and though even when it was finished it

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was only a sort of a house, it was our house and Alan and I were proud of it. It stood back from the street, behind the other houses, built just before and just after the First World War, because it had been the original farmstead from which the properties were developed. It had been a very modest one, three bedrooms under its tiny gable and a kitchen tacked on at the back that needed and finally got an expensive new foundation. Its wiring and plumbing had when I bought it hung like offal from the walls and we lived on air as we had it put to rights. But the process was satisfying and with the whole of my salary to spend – though the Major came round often enough to see if he could attach part of it – there was money, if not money over. I felt like a grown-up at last: a mother who had at last sent away the teenager whom she had given birth to when she was far too young. For when the Major came, he sulked like an adolescent; every “no” reddened his strawberry nose and sunk his head on his chest and yet somehow made him grow, every “yes” relaxed him back into some kind of vile domination, so that his eyes glittered and he began to complain again, “You never offer me a drink,” he would say. “We can’t manage the gas bill, have a heart, Lizzie,” “You’ve been a disappointment …” Like a wailing woman: “After all I’ve done for you.” He was never afraid to make himself ridiculous, our Arthur. He could have picked up a tool, but he did not. His eyes glittered maliciously at a crack in the woodwork, a lump in the amateur taping of the new drywall. He laughed at our discovery of Sloppy Joe sandwiches, our consumption of macaroni and cheese, the evidence that I needed a sewing machine to handle the rips and tears of poor Alan’s clothes. We put our snoots in the air, Alan and I, Liz and her boy. We knew where to go for cheap clothes, and sometimes to save a mere quarter Alan walked all the way to the office from school, though I disapproved of that, because I worried so much when he was on his way. Skilla in the office bought him cakes and doughnuts, to make sure he didn’t, as she said, gangle right out of existence; he had got his growth early and he was a wobbly thin shoot. Frances could not often visit, hampered by her tribe, but sometimes of an evening when Perkyn was home, or on a Sunday afternoon when the Major had agreed to keep them all through their naps, she came with the littlest one, Edie, in her arms. I was glad to have a baby to hold again, and we talked softly about the house and work and how things were going there. He was losing his anger, she said, he was looking for work, I was right,

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there was enough with Perkyn’s rent and the pension and the baby bonus, just enough, mind. And she shared; she would come with a vase or a spoon or a little leftover paint, a jar of jelly, something she had made, or something from home. “I shouldn’t have everything,” she said shyly. “You damn well shouldn’t,” I wanted to say, but I knew I had taken too much of her happiness, I knew she had done more for Mother than I had! I tried to hold my peace. She brought a length of material the Major had scavenged years ago, and we sewed curtains; she brought rings for the curtains, she brought bedspreads and odd pillowcases, the detritus of his auction-goings; a picture frame that made a handsome looking-glass, a shrunk pullover of hers that looked odd on Alan but kept him warm under his thinning duffel. We talked about colours and spoons. They took an interest in the office, too, and sent their sons over to help. Amelia produced odd objects from what she said had been her hope chest – crocheted afghans, pieces of unfinished patchwork. My house became a project. The property was coffin-shaped, lopped as it was for lawns and alleys, and open to the backyards of the houses around it. It was, however, protected by two old apple trees, one beside and one before. The front one was obviously dying; it looked plain brave as it strove to push out its few blossoms in the spring, and I knew that once it was removed we would be exposed to rows of garbage cans and the terrible tin doors they confected for garages now. When a cheque came from England – and it was not a large cheque – I took my courage in my hands and called the only female landscape architect in the Yellow Pages. She was a big cushiony woman with remarkable green eyes and a sheaf of yellow hair. Her eyes glowed as she discussed the property: it was a difficult shape to disguise, a poor proposition for privacy, but surely something … “What kind of a garden would you want?” she asked. “We want a secret garden, Mum,” piped Alan the Wise. And with much chopping and changing and economising, a secret garden we made, the three of us racking our brains for hedging and fencing and disguising so that eventually a hedge of sprawling roses ran out from the side of the house to the lot line, where a row of juniper took over, to join another line of shrubbery interspersed with trees that she said would do interesting things with the seasons. I had to wait a year before tackling the

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flowerbeds, in the midst of which she inserted a tiny patio, “So you can sit out and read to each other.” At the front she installed a lattice, up which she trained an old grape vine that had languished unnoticed before. She showed Alan which plants would flourish that he could find in the grocery stores, and he bought tiny flats of squash and cucumbers for the lattice with his pocket money, and, where the roses were thin, put in his own stakes and scarlet runner-beans. I had thought at first that the estimate ran to a shocking amount of money, but the new soil she put in would grow anything, and summer mornings we sat out watching our produce grow. The Major divided his phlox, but I wouldn’t let him give me Sweet William, which I had disliked as a child. I had thought that our guide would be discouraged, because we economised on every estimate and said no to her best ideas; instead, she took delight in helping us do what we could, and became a friend, and even found us some wire with maple-leaf finials at a country auction for our garden gate. It was a year of dreams; things went smoothly at the office; it was one of those years when the economy was more or less in equilibrium, and people felt free to buy books. The staff were getting on with each other at the office, Amelia was stable and my two good outfits from Holt Renfrew seemed to take me everywhere to lunch. One knows, of course, that trouble comes after these periods, but it is never welcome. Lyrics are brief and have endings. We had a happy time that summer, traipsing around Quebec for a week with Catherwood in search of his Elixir, driving through forests where road signs warned us of moose-crossings, staying in minute hotels where the food was good and the gin-bottles flew every night. They drank Dutch gin in stone bottles, for some reason. But the three of us boldly shared a room, for economy’s sake, as we explained it, and Alan didn’t like it, though considering Catherwood’s state at the end of each evening and my own, there was no sexual activity; still it was not happy for him even when I slept on the couch or he shared the bed with Ron and I took the sleeping bag on the floor, though my back protested. We had meant to prolong the trip, go as far north as the man’s restless spirit took him, and I was fascinated because the accents became easier rather than broader as we went north and the further we were from Quebec

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City the more welcome we were. People were warm, mothers took Alan into their arms, a child was a badge rather than a trial: I liked that. I was, however, too aware of diffidence, peakiness, to prolong Alan’s agony; he didn’t understand when I said there was nothing going on. He saw himself as betrayed, having to share his mother with another man, and that was final. So we parted with Ron at Chicoutimi and made the long trip home by train. The experience broke into our solidarity and in my heart I was glad it did. I had known too much of Martin, too much of Perkyn and Clive Beynon, young men who were married to Mother, to want to protect my son from my sexuality; still, he was young for me to say, “You go out and have your life, I have mine,” and I had to do it with signals, and he began to retaliate. He took less interest in the garden, found rowdy friends, even brought Pip and Owen over to savage the bean-patch, lost towels in summer flings over to Christie pits, absented himself from regularity, worried me. I said to myself that that solidarity had to go, and I hated to part with it as I did with his downiness, his heroic concern for his house and his mum. And there was danger in the times, for drugs were abroad. The Major consistently warned him of nasty men in the park, but the schoolyard was more of a menace with its pushers, and its vocabulary that had turned fashionably blue. He wasn’t bad, that next year, and compared to Pip and Owen, who were young voyous, always in trouble for nicking things in the variety stores, popping up behind the dirty magazine racks, riding forbidden elevators in the apartment buildings on the way to school, he was angelic. He was simply not as easy as he had been before, and it cut into my work. There, too, life was more difficult. The Vietnam War had brought American capital to the city and several publishing houses had been bought up and become branch plants. We all knew in our hearts that they were branches that would eventually be lopped, cost-accounting being an American specialty and Canadian publishing ludicrously unrewarding. Protective, nationalist organisations sprang up. Hearings were held. It was exciting to me because a number of people just under my age had begun their own publishing houses and two of them looked to be very good. It was hard to tell whether the good new writers were springing up because there was a market for them, albeit a small one, or the publishers were surviving because they had scented out the work of their friends.

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And themselves, as Catherwood pointed out. I was filled with joy by their posters stapled on telephone poles at night, their poetry readings, their rallies and cries. Catherwood was more cynical, as I have said, perhaps jaded by drink or reality or his failure again to find the rheumatic elixir that was his constant summer quest. And his marriage was breaking up. His wife had grown tired of his working for twelve hours and drinking for six and going to bed incapable, and gone out and got a job, a good one. She didn’t need him, and he felt it; yet nothing would stop his hyperactive spring. Roe was more conservative. He did not, he said, want to discover the new authors himself; he had not the capital. These young folks must have got it from their fathers, but his shoe store had been spent long ago. Carpenters stuck to their last; we were to remain the Cherrystones and the work of Amelia, church poets, the usual things we did. The good-fellows will go to the big fellows, he predicted, the ones who can afford to try to support them. And I had to admit that from the look of our books we couldn’t keep a young genius on a string even if he was supported by the Canada Council one year or two. But I envied the young publishers, their bicycling enthusiasm, their cost-cutting with unjustified type, their search for new methods, new manias. I read as much of the new work as I could. Some of it bored me, some of the design was so bad I could hardly bear to hold the books in my hand; but I became convinced that something new was happening, because the work was bursting with liveliness. The papers were full of the new movement’s push and enthusiasm, and when you consider that the writers who were produced were the likes of Matt Cohen and Graeme Gibson, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, and that they threw into relief our new enthusiasm for Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler and Rudy Wiebe and Alice Munro and a host of others, there was no denying that a literature was emerging, free finally of the need to set Toronto chronicles in New Jersey and Montreal extravaganzas in Hollywood. More interesting to us, perhaps, was the fact that organisations were also being created to push for better terms in trades, a nationalist publishers’ association to vitiate the special terms that had existed for branch houses, a Writers’ Union eventually, an umbrella group where even librarians were dealt into the fact that Canada was no longer dull. And in Quebec things were happening too, as they had been, for a long time; the new generation’s Puritanism was angry, and unattractive to a degree

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to the Anglo-Saxon mentality (two forms of Calvinism eternally in conflict glowered at each other), but the technical brilliance of the nouveau roman had excited the young Québécois, and the energy of the hope for a separatist revolution, the hope of release that the end of the Algerian war and the retreat from Vietnam produced, the movement to write in joual, real Quebec French as opposed to the proper form promoted by the clerisy; these had their effect. As in English Canada, by the end of a decade there were sixty good writers where there had been six. It would not be correct to say that the general public was excited. When the small publishers tried to move out of the central Toronto market, they found themselves blocked by lack of enthusiasm and the inability of their publishers to market their books further abroad than forty miles. Marketing through larger publishers was tried, and a central agency, but it was literary journalism and the diffusion of short stories and poetry on cbc radio that brought the writers their fame. The young publishers began to turn grey and fall out. Roe had his eye on what was happening as surely as he had a restraining arm on me. We were getting a new kind of manuscript: even Cherrystone House was considered an outlet when energy was bursting its seams. To contain my energy he nominated me to his place on the publishers’ organisation. I sat silent, mostly, so I wouldn’t have to admit that we, too, were partly foreign-owned, but I was fascinated by these young men and women who were very young and very tough. They wanted to push their own material into the bookstores of their own country, they considered it their social right to have the government’s assistance, and the products they produced were good enough to make their arguments most of the time. It was a new turn for me, a swing to the outside world. I would have been more active if the meetings had not almost always been held at the child-vulnerable hour of five o’clock. Roe studied the rafts of paper I brought home with a chuckle or a sneer. “Don’t be too forthcoming,” he said, “I don’t want them to know all our angles.” And our angles were good ones in those years, for the sixties brought not only nationalism but the pure food and back-to-the-land movements, and we had the material for both of them. We hired a new designer, who put out our pamphlets in oatmeal-textured papers and wild type-colours so they reminded me of Mother’s old books

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by Elbert Hubbard. When it was possible, we tampered with texts to suit the times, collating material about dye-stuffs that occurred in three separated Wilfred Allen pamphlets into a sturdily illustrated book that sold wherever granola did. I reached into French volumes on the manufacture of non-poisonous cosmetics. Anything to do with honey sold. Levy bustled over, conferred, returned to Paris with volumes on couscous for Quebec, and a cousin from Lebanon who searched Yonge Street for a slot for a natural-food store, and was the first to popularise sheets of apricot-paste. Catherwood’s scorn for innovation, his innate conservatism, was balanced by his enthusiasm for sales; he adopted jeans and lengthened his hair. “Cookbooks always sell,” Roe said. “And diets.” So we did cookbooks and found a doctor to underwrite a diet. A million volumes came in from the States before ours, but ours covered their costs in the right places. We were doing all right. Roe had never pronounced himself an antagonist of literature; there were writers he would have groaned to publish – Farley Mowat was one – and sometimes I caught him dreaming and knew he was thinking of Orwell and Wells, the kinds of authors who had a political platform as well as a story to sell. “Women’s stuff” was what mostly came over the transom, and romance at that. This he would not accept, though some was saleable, in deference to Amelia, whose series still sold and was annually added to, no matter how busy she was confecting books on hand-sewing and cucumber cream. And one day he thought his dream had come true when a manuscript came along containing the poetic works of Jo deLesseps, whom I had seen, dark-bearded, mysterious and half-coherent, at a Bohemian Embassy reading. He threw it at me, “See if you can tell me what that man means. Does he get along with me?” I told him I wasn’t sure he did. For weeks he glowered. Then he picked up the telephone. Put it down again. “Gone to India.” The figure that returned from India was gaunt, and not sure that it wanted after all to be published by Cherrystones. “Feed it up,” Roe said. He had had another good year, he had capital for something new. I had been to Frankfurt with Levy and sold a number of the poorer countries translation rights in competition with the Americans, which offset my feeling that a new thing would come along: people get tired of homespun and move back to silk. But I had also discovered nouvelle cuisine: I had hope.

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Jo deLesseps was five, I thought, and then discovered, eight years younger than me. He had a deep voice and a lifestyle that depended on living on air, in the air: he moved from pad to pad and made telephone calls from airports: Canada Council poetry readings were his best source of income and he thundered his mellifluous lines at Eskimos and fishermen, lumbermen attending Frontier College, university students everywhere, anyone he could. He was unwashed, hairy, disorganised and ulcerated. His feet hurt because he had traded his industrial shoes for a pair of thigh-high green boots. He wanted a cape, but another poet was wearing a cape. His mouth was red, and shone like a wound through his beard. I got him, finally, to shave it off experimentally, and he discovered that he was a handsome man. Picking manuscripts for a commercial market is a commercial affair and we were all experienced at it at Cherrystone House. Literature or the pretence of publishing literature is another matter; standards cannot be absolute and the market is wildly inconsistent in its application to such things. Dickens may well have been a success, and Byron, but Goldsmith and Gissing stand as examples of taste and commercialism out of gear with each other. Roe had refused to take the risk that the small publishers did, having, perhaps, more to lose (and some of them lost their shirts) but once subsidies were in place he became interested in finding a “real” poet as opposed to old Mr Allen’s fading friends and he fixed on deLesseps fairly firmly as a coming young writer. I was not as sure. His pyrotechnics seemed to me to derive more from Paris France than Paris Ontario, and there was a greasy gloss of Hart Crane and Ginsberg at one juncture or another; he fell, to my mind, just short of hard thinking and tough writing. But he was working hard at making himself known, and when the publisher who had brought out his first volume disappeared into his own ashram, Roe took him on. I was at a loss, and I was to edit him. I was also exhausted by Alan, whose after-school disappearing act did not always include hockey, and who, evenings when deLesseps phoned from bars and his favourite openkitchen restaurants, I felt I had to be home for. Which is how I ended up feeding him very regularly indeed. The first book sold five hundred copies, good for a book of poems distributed by Ron Catherwood; a second came very quickly, though we fought

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over what I thought was a certain sloppiness in the text, which reviewers and (more important) critics took for a branching-out, a welcome expansion of form into freedom. “And you damn near turned me into Emily Dickinson,” he said. He was a handsome man and mysterious about his backgrounds. Been everywhere, done everything, was what he would say. I suspected it was much like mine, but with expeditions to Katmandu and Sausalito, I suspected his women were ordinary Canadian girls, that he had to have, like the rest of us, feet of clay. But there was magic in him, too, and a wild, lurching humour, and best of all, he got on with Alan. Alan had greeted him at first with the usual truculence: he was not about to adapt to new men in his house, and that was that. But deLesseps knew odd things, like the names of the odd parts of skates, and how to put your hockey pads on right, though he was so slender and tender I wonder if he had ever been on ice. He rejoiced in word games, and he was interested in homework. He seemed genuine when he came over to know what Alan was being made to tackle in school, and whether calculators helped or hindered, and how the New Math worked, that I couldn’t fathom. Often the evening sped by without any work, while I made popcorn for the scholars. And he liked the garden, and the seed catalogues, and the gardener; he almost took it over; the names of convolvuli wound themselves in his verses. He thought I was a very funny cook. He thought I was good in bed. He thought he would like to live with us. He thought Ron could try to sell him harder, but managed to sell himself at his readings very well indeed. He thought I was square about dope. I went from thinking, this man is very young and cannot look after himself to, this man is mysteriously mature and works from a different viewpoint than I do. I thought, I’m glad he’s gone, I like having my house to myself, he wants to paint the kitchen brown, he’s too opinionated. I thought, wonder where he’s gone, to that Lynda with a Y he prates about? I thought, that was a strange thing he said about eternity being a ring of darkness rather than light, where is he going to work it in, how can I help?

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I thought, tomorrow I will put my hands in his hair and pull all his ideas out. Even at Cherrystone House, we were suckers for genius. If there were legions of novelists springing up, there were armies of poets. They held festivals and argued and screamed with each other and tried to keep the women out of their ranks and formed organisations and failed to agree on procedures and had conferences that were love-ins and love-ins that were conferences. They published wherever they could and with whomever, and published their own precious numbered editions, sold each others’ letters, stole each others’ women, rose in flames and threatened to evaporate, threatened to cut each others’ throats over anthologies and clogged the Canada Council’s reading budget. A few presented themselves as bankers, others adopted the working class, most of them went about in heavy pullovers cadging free drinks, wheeling and dealing for places at the universities, hoping for prizes, finally admitting that Atwood and MacEwen were good, finding what pathetic place they could in a society that hardly knew what to do with them. DeLesseps was not, I thought, the most talented, but there was no doubt of his value or of his intelligence, or of his growing ability to get script work at cbc, and write short stories that would at least provide him with pocket money. He was a serious writer, not as I had feared when I first met him, one of the Chameau’s young revolutionaries who would flicker out and die at the sight of prosperity, but someone who wanted to write and worked at it, and would some day write better. What he needed was a steady place to work and grow. One year he got a Canada Council grant and found this place in France, where, with a small piece of collusion from Levy and a manuscript and Frances, who took Alan, I was able to visit him. Then, reader, I married him. We did it almost on impulse. He had been at the house for six months after France, and my cooking was improving, and I was used to the sound of the typewriter, and very glad of his body in bed, for although I had told myself when independence set in that sex was not important, sex was important, and good sex was more important still. DeLesseps had a fastidious side, and even a compulsive one, but he worked at a woman with a will, not as often as one hoped (she was a kind of sleeping medicine to him) but when he remembered to surface from his typewriter or his conference (he

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was well enough known now to be invited to things) he returned with an enthusiasm that might only be called boyish and made naive and gentle love and was very satisfying. Still, I would not have thought of marrying him: the idea came from him. He had been watching his friends, their revolving, their shuffle, their eventual subsidence, their caving in to domesticity. He envied their homes, he wrote about their stability, the good women who went out to work to haul their poems along like the carts of Mother Courage. He was thirty, it was time, he said, to admit that he had not the makings of a romantic suicide, or a tramp; he had not the digestion of a flower figure of the South Seas, nor the income of one who could live on frangipani in the southern ocean. He wanted a home. Alan, he pointed out, wanted a father, would I marry him? “You want someone younger than me,” I said bluntly, remembering him surrounded by full-blossomed damsels at parties while I stood alone. “What’s so bad about you?” “I’m old and I’m your boss.” “Fuck, Lizzie, if you think you’re my boss … think again. You haven’t done anything this year but move commas and second it to the printers.” Which was true. Something in me held back. “I don’t feel right about it.” “We get along fine. We can have a ball. You can have a baby, if you want. You’ve got your job forever, Weaver’s bought a new prose-poem, and there’s this guy in tv …” I hung back. It was my house. He kept moving things on me. On the other hand, why not? If it didn’t work, we could divorce. And to be married at last, a legitimate missus, one in the eye for the Major; the Poet’s Wife was as good a title as The Publisher, surely. It would not, at least, take away from me and it would cure this tendency to jealousy, insecurity. Though another part of me said, things are all right as they are. Now he can come and go. But no, he had decided to marry. He was aging, he said, and his rolemodel was Wordsworth if I liked, rather than Byron, he was tired of screwing around, he wanted a home and he liked this home, it was quiet. He had an interest here, an investment of time and effort in Alan, who was taking this part of his adolescence easier than he had taken the earlier. There was the garden. There were the things we liked to do together, the things we

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liked to do apart. And if he got a grant again I could take leave and come with him. Cohen wasn’t the only one who would conquer the Greek islands. He wanted the stability, he wanted me. So in spite of the still small voice inside me that said, no, this isn’t for you, or because I thought that still cold voice was neurotic, or just to spite it, or to delight myself, I said yes. He bought me a pretty ring, a circle of garnet, in an antique store. He had told us very little about his background. I knew he was Jewish, and I knew that he had manufactured the name of the canal-builder as I had Maugher, in order to get away from home. I knew that he had dropped out of Harvard but was not American. I knew he had friends he would not introduce me to. I knew too, that he liked to be clean and drank moderately: underneath a surface of showy disorganisation, there was a kind of control. You could tell that by looking at his desk. It was easy enough to get married: we made an appointment at City Hall. The difficulty lay in the fact that I felt I ought to know more about him. “You know everything about me now,” he said, “You write the jacket notes.” I knew he was born in 1939 in Toronto and lived for some time in Buffalo and Boston, travelled in India, had published four books of poems and was working on a novel. Liked wine, hated couscous, called the Major my nine-dollar bill. Joe Rosenblatt was best man and Frannie stood up with me while the Major babysat: and then we all went to Frances’s for one of her wonderful buffets, which I paid for. The whole of Roe, Allen, Levy came, and half the poetry establishment. And then we went to Niagara Falls and sat in the dark in a motel room watching the illuminated cascade as if it were television, the beginning of the “Falls in the Forest” sequence, in which, gradually, I became the forest. The house was a boat and in that boat, our weight quietly shifted. DeLesseps took on some kind of authority I had not seen in him before, and I found myself unable to resist it. I had been raised to be obedient, I had an insecurity that hesitated to offend. And quickly, he seemed to become irritatingly exploitive. He rummaged my books with an aggression that almost frightened me, and began to rummage my acquaintance for a better publisher. A couple of times he was openly rude to Roe. He was paterfamilias, proud of it, the dominant one: I

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suddenly knew that he had had such a father, and that I had lost my lyric empire, and I lay awake nights longing for a way of arranging to have things both ways again. He took to calling me “Wife” and shouting for coffee on Saturday mornings when I was home and he was working. He took to going out with the boys, and bringing writers home without notice for supper, and complaining if the house was untidy. He wanted better wine and me to pay for it. I would have socked him in the jaw if the cbc had not sent him to Vancouver. And by the time he returned I discovered that I was pregnant. I prayed for a daughter, and the pregnancy brought out a new softness, so that the authoritarian act appeared to have gone away; or I had given in to it to the degree of being a little more suitably submissive, a little less insultingly independent, and more careful about his socks, which he now wished me to tend, though before he had done so himself. He remained friends with Alan, and good to him, and his authoritarian streak there was well placed; he brooked no delinquency, and they talked long evenings away like men. But I was thirty-six, and the office was busy, and when I came home I was tired. Sometimes it was intolerable to hear him complain. And the sound of the typewriter at night would hammer into my spine and I would lie and worry that he might write a book as good as he wanted to write and then not give it to Roe. I knew better than to ask to see it. I suppose he was no worse than most husbands, my experience being limited. My father was weaker, I think, though just as petty; Arthur compared to him was an absurd parody of paternalism. But I didn’t like being hailed “Wife,” or being asked for socks, or picking up underwear or being told that the sheets on the bed were pilled, we needed new ones. And I never knew who was paying for what … it seemed a pity to violate his limited income with domestic things like that. I told him that if he wanted better wine, he should buy it, so that he became the gourmet department, the back-rubber, and, to a degree, the fusser. He was afraid he would not be a good father. He was afraid the child, because of my age, because of his family tendencies, though he would not tell me what they were, would be imperfect. He was afraid his talent was a soufflé and did I have enough savings to get us through the post-maternal period, or did Roe, Allen, Levy have maternity leave (Roe, Allen, Levy had no benefits, like most publishing houses.) He offered to take a job as a radio

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announcer to keep us, then he thought he would do as a doorman in the uniform of a Russian count and leapt out of bed and wrote a poem about it and then went downtown and got drunk with a bunch of Maritimers. But when he brought them home and I got drunk with them, as I had done before, in my free days, when I allowed myself to get drunk if I wanted as long as it was not too often or with Catherwood, with whom one had a tendency to get arrested, he was angry and said it was bad for the child, which it was, and that I was disgusting. I suppose I was. When the baby was born, not easily, but with good help, he insisted on calling her Agnes. She was another of my long stringy ones and he and Alan were endlessly sentimental about her. She was not a pretty baby indeed, but well-formed, long in leg, arm, finger, absurdly long in the foot; straggle-haired. Hungry. “My god, she screams,” he said. I had not enough milk to feed her. I stayed home and stirred manuscripts as some women stir pots and fed her can after can of patent formula and she never got round and rosy. I thought she had worms. He said she was the world’s first anorexic baby. In fact, she was solemnly healthy, and utterly hungry, and … Agnes. Within three months she had a nose like the beak of a bird, the temperament of a seagull and the whole of the men’s hearts. I was somewhat divided about her, because her will was always allowed to prevail over mine. For the first year, we shared her responsibility, deLesseps carefully supervising my care of her to make sure it was adequate for his Cynara. I was able to work a good deal at home and he delighted to parade her about town and Alan was old enough to babysit and even change diapers. I was irritated by the fact that deLesseps took me up on every procedure and thought I did not keep her clean enough, and wanted her in the kind of little smocked dresses his sisters might have worn and which now sell [sold?] for a hundred dollars, but I kept my temper. Because she delighted me even if she was my rival. When Alan duplicated his uncertainty I brushed him aside. “She’s got to toughen up a little,” I said, “She can’t always have everything she wants. She’ll not only be spoiled, she’ll be sick.” DeLesseps did not think a child should be crossed, and neither, it seemed, did Alan. It made me want to stick pins in her, and she knew it, and was defiant to me when he was home. When we were alone together she was a staggering, funny baby and I loved her.

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At the end of the first year, we began to have trouble with the spring list. The health-food market was declining, and our cookbooks had not turned out a success. The price of paper had risen sufficiently to put several of the bootstrap publishers, who were no longer young, out of business, and competition was a good deal more aggressive. In addition, one of our printers went out of business, another had a nervous breakdown and became unreliable and we had, with two or three books, to stand last in line in front of a door everyone else was also using. Catherwood drank more than ever when his orders were thwarted and more than once I had to leave Agnes early in the morning with her sleeping father and get him from the jail. Jo’s novel was not going well. Alan was smoking a little marijuana, which made him sleepy and difficult. Jo dismissed it on the grounds that everyone did, but eventually agreed it was hard on changing chemistry, and tried to sidetrack him. But his eyes were often fixed and far away. He applied for a grant and was turned down. His new volume of verse, which I thought was really splendid this time, did not win the Governor General’s award. His temper sagged, and my figure began to as well and a general irritability and sloppiness set in the house. I thought I ought to cut into the savings account and send him on a trip somewhere (the Canada Council tours had been cut back, and paid now proportionately less at any rate, the novelty was off them, and he was old enough to find them tiring) but I did not quite like to. I knew that I needed him still to help with Agnes, no matter how exigent he was about her care – she had to have high white leather boots, I must curl her hair – and I felt poor enough that I knew I would resent it if he accepted the offer with too much alacrity. And he was restless, working at home all day, and went out every night, at ten o’clock, to count the cash, he said, as his grandfather had, who had had, he said, a store. He was bleary in the mornings, and I wondered if he had been in another bed. Levy seemed to have lost his enthusiasm for Roe, Allen: neither visits nor manuscripts nor invitations were forthcoming, though he sent Agnes (la petite Agnès) a charming petticoat for her first birthday. I told myself, well, we all have our bad times. Then a Vancouver Cherrystone writer, of prodigious appetite for his own unpleasant jokes, perhaps unseated by decline of the Whole Earth movement, brought his wife to dinner, who cried at deLesseps, my Jo, “Why, you’re Shelley Cohen from Hamilton, your sister wonders where you’ve been all these years. Honey, his father was the best orthodontist you ever

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saw, he was a whiz with my teeth and remember Abe Lincoln’s and George Washington’s for elastics? How are they all? Rachel said you just walked out one day, you broke your Dad’s heart, how could you do it to him? Why haven’t they seen your picture on your books?” “They can’t read,” he whispered. The house was full of American best-sellers and all the things that Jo deLesseps, I knew, most hated: brass lamps and tinted French-provincial furniture and silver boxes of coloured cigarettes. They killed the fatted calf for him, and effused over me, and told us Agnes was beautiful (though she has a schnoz, his mother said) and the sisters and their husbands, all well-dressed, and not, I thought, fools, and well up on their subjects (they had decided that since he was an artist they would talk about what they had seen last in New York) and then about Israel, and then about whether Agnes could be raised Jewish or not; and he sat there gutted, limp, as if he had been run over by the rototiller. I had decided not even to think about his Jewishness. I had had my Jewish friends, I had been devoted to Mendel in Montreal and others in Toronto, but I knew, too, that their lives were different from mine and more complicated and that family relations had different corners to turn than mine. And there was a kind of smartness, a slickness, in his family that I knew was what he had turned away from; they had a face to present to the world that announced that they were not poor, and that they were not from the village, and I knew that somewhere in their background was a village that had not been safe, and a life that had to be hedged with money and a kind of glamour to make it worth hesitantly claiming. What was simple in them had been paved over, even their bodies were cities. It seemed to me obvious that they had been maimed by their history, maimed, that is, in his eyes (for in their own, they were obviously doing well, and what they wanted, and happy except that they had lost their one male heir) because as a child he had decided that they would not do, he wanted something else: perhaps only the grass of the neighbouring field, which was now a suburb, or just to be an ordinary kid in a hockey sweater not pulled out for Jewish holidays and worrying about Israel and going to school on Saturday. And it can happen in families that the other members are simply not to one’s taste, for children diverge. Why had I taken up books instead of following Frances’s normal course in the kitchen? He spent the afternoon with them white and gutted and then we shook

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hands with them and drove away. He did not speak for the ride. Then he said, “So now you know.” “We can’t choose our families. Anyway there’s nothing wrong with them.” That made him angry, but he did not put it in words: he sat and shook. For the whole journey. And the next day, he went away. For three months I had phone calls and notes from his mother, asking first for Shelley and then for Jo. I said he’d gone on a trip. She wanted his address. She came to see his baby. She said his father was worried about him. She knew the breach was not healed but she was determined to set about the mending of it. He phoned once, from Acapulco, and she was there, and wanted to speak to him, and he hung up. “He has a problem,” I said. “I think you’d better let him go. He’ll get over it.” The house was a mess that day, I’d done nothing to it in my discouragement, and Agnes had impetigo from nursery school, and when her taxi came, she ran out to it. I felt sorry for her, but I did not want her around. When he came back he railed against me for letting her in, and complained about the treatment of Agnes and changed nursery schools to one I could barely afford, and went upstairs and finished his novel and sold it to McClelland and Stewart. It was a very good novel and sold well in three countries and gave him enough money to go away. Initially and superficially, I was relieved when he left. It was good to wake up and know that my domestic modus operandi would no longer be compared unfavourably with that of Grace, his mother’s early maid, a country girl of some skill and a physical charm that had stamped him with lubricity. But I was hurt in my pride as well, and spent a good deal of time moaning to Frances, who came over as often as she could. She had found it bizarre for me to marry him. “You didn’t know anything about him,” she said. I remembered the things one does know about lovers – the way the shoulders settled, the feel of the warm chest, the wen-scars on the back of the neck, the width of male ankles – and I tried to explain to her that I knew a good deal, I knew that he was a type – the alienated hippie, the man who had left home, the person whose abilities are incapable of pleasing and must be isolated before they can be developed. I had known he was a man of education, a man from not far away, a man with an education. If he had not

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been Shelley Cohen from Hamilton he would have been Rudy Berkowitz from Thunder Bay, and the same strictures would have applied to our intercourse. What I had not banked on was the fact that a man who is alienated from his family will choose eventually to be alienated from his wife. “But would you have married him if you’d known he was a Jew?” “I knew he was a Jew.” “Well, why did you marry him, then?” “You’re as bad as Arthur, always going on about me and my Jews.” “I know you don’t like that, but they’re different.” “It’s a different religion, but other than that they’re the same.” “But they’re not. They’re the chosen people and they’ve got all those rules about food. It’s what made him so picky. He could hardly eat at our house.” “He loved your food.” “He picked it over with his eyes before he tasted it. He was the worst fuss-pot I ever met. I think you’re lucky. I mean it isn’t as if he contributed anything, is it?” I wanted to say, “He contributed sex,” and “He kept Arthur away,” but chose not to. The subjects Frances and I avoided made our friendship possible. So I said, “He did more than I realised. I miss him.” “You’re drinking as if you miss him. You’d better watch that.” Always the big sister, I thought bitterly as I saw her down the street. But as I closed the front door I looked at myself in the hall mirror and saw the swollen pudginess that alcohol inflicts, the coarseness Mother had deprecated when she hissed, “Mrs Lewis goes to the beer parlour.” It was not only that in my thirties I had lost my adolescent fine-ness; the pool of scotch the book business swam in had gone into my pores. Frances likes a drink, too, I thought, as I put our bottle away; but I knew she could leave it alone, that drink was not part of lunch, and that the heavy indulgence was left to Arthur and his cronies. And she was always shocked by the costs; mere frugality would keep her away from it. You’ve got to take yourself in hand, I thought, Lizzie. Part of you is hurting badly and it’s not a part you want to reach or acknowledge. I had to rely on moments like that to tell me the truth because during the years we lived as a trio I had taught myself to skate on the surface of busyness without feeling my feelings; I had dug holes in myself and shoved them down and shrugged and said, oh well, tomorrow’s another day; and now I was full of holes and gas like Emmenthal and still counting myself possible

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because you could eat the part around the holes, though the area was getting smaller. So, ignoring Agnes, who had wakened as the door was opened, wakened determined to start a new day two hours after the old had ended, I made coffee and curled up in the living room and thought, all right, I am lost and abandoned and what have I lost besides his carping and by whom have I been abandoned but by someone who used me? Jewishness was a red herring, and I was not going to pursue that. Everyone has a religion. I got out his book. While he was writing it, we called it “Ulysses Under the Volcano” and although I had not been allowed to read the drafts I had heard a great deal about it, some of which I admired. When it was first published, I read it, not as a publisher, but as a member of the family, with that mad eye for selfreference that families apply to texts, so that they find in them figures the author has never intended and others he has intended too well indeed, the text becomes a kind of seersucker, puckered with utilitarian disguises, and the act of reading becomes a decoding of what one supposes but cannot know is the author’s experience, attached to a backing of the reader’s fears. I nearly poured myself another drink in order to open it; but drink is the great exaggerator, and there was something in what Frances had said, not about drink, but about Jo and his exigencies, that I wanted to decipher in his book. I suppose I was setting out to find whether living with him, marrying him, even, had been worth it. It was a seemingly simple novel, which had pleased the public, and endearingly free of the narcissism that affects most first novels. When poets write prose they are also, often, stricken by a kind of pretentiousness: they are afraid of losing their licenses if their sentences are not sufficiently complicated. DeLesseps’ love of clarity had driven him beyond this point. His prose was clean. The first point in his favour. The structure was episodic and simple: a night in the life of a taxi driver, a man who feels like a failure because of what he does but is fascinated by the night-ramble his profession leads him through, and happy it keeps him away from his clumsy wife, a big, fair woman called Annette who calls him “Mr Five by Five.” The mistake – she means Mr Five to Five, for those are the hours of his shift – is typical of her, she is a woman who never gets anything quite right and he is beginning to go crazy with her continued insults to his compulsiveness. On the other hand, he looks forward to getting home

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to breakfast with the children, one of hers and a young one which is his, and crawling into her big body and their big bed after dawn. But the night holds him, and the people he meets in the night, and as the book builds, the true virtues deLesseps has as a writer begin to predominate. What I had disliked in his poetry, a certain false devotion to Mother Nature, a sentimentalisation of spirit in its relation to weather, is entirely absent; he avoids the imitation-American trap of taking his driver into violence, though there are episodes in the tenderloin, and as the book builds through his experience with his passengers, his weariness, he does what he is best at, applies to the city a kind of magic that makes it rich and strange. There is an episode with a rich, drunk homosexual, there is an episode with a hooker, there is a lost girl from New Brunswick who might turn out to be anything and eventually threatens to kill him: the book might be a thriller. (Later he told me he wished it had been, but I do not think he was sincere). But it remained true to its genre and became, I think, that elusive thing we call literature, because it balanced action and contemplation, and because although he resisted the temptation to over-decorate, he applied the best qualities of his poetry to the formation of his prose. It read well. When I clapped it shut the sun was coming up and I was excited. I had fostered a good book, and I knew there was a career in it for him. Whether I was Annette or not (he had given her the background of Gracie, and Gracie’s firm arm in the bath) I had supplied a context for him to write it in, and I was in that woman’s self-sacrificial way, entirely pleased. At that time, the new figures who were emerging as novelists were mostly women. They were having trouble with husbands who had discovered they were not made for self-sacrifice once their wives’ pictures appeared in the paper. They were making it clear in their books that marriage was not made in the pages of romance novels, and presenting the country with images of a real domesticity, and the beginnings of a female culture that had us all fascinated. By comparison, male writers seemed frozen in the chase, as if their destiny was to be engraved on a vase stamped “made in Canada” with their arms eternally raised against the wolverine, the wolf, the Indian (a brother, a collaborator, but eternally alien) and the bear. The victory of Jo’s book was that it was as urban as most Canadians’ lives, for although Europeans dream of us in the wilderness and Americans keep us firmly in the context of “Rose Marie,” the thin strip of the country along the lakes and the seaboard is urban, and we are human, and we live

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there, even though our imaginations would peg us into the landscape because they are formed by foreigners. DeLesseps’ novel acknowledged this and presented a Toronto urbanity that was warm and even endearing. There’s a career in it, I thought, as I watched the sun come up through the alleyway; and I saw him wheeling and dealing for teaching positions, for journalism, for jobs in radio and television. I knew from what he told me of the offers he had had before he left that there was not the career in it that other people imagine. Whenever Norman Mailer is offered a million dollars the public decides that every writer in the country is overpaid, but in fact, in Canada, where a good sale is three thousand copies of a book, a good income from a book, even one that took three years to write, is three thousand dollars, or was at that time; and I knew that his American offer had not exceeded five. He had earned enough, that is, to scrape by for six months, eight or nine if he left Agnes with me and went his way alone. But with a book like this behind him, and four volumes of poetry, and a certain facility for literary journalism, he might, I thought, establish himself exactly where he wanted to. And although I had found him increasingly annoying, and although I knew I annoyed him, there was a part of me that loved him, and wanted for him this identity, Jo deLesseps, man of letters, even so late in history that people are thinking of discarding letters, and wanted him to be happy. But I was not a good Annette: I did not want him to have this happiness at my expense. I bathed, conscious again of my fat, my bloat, my aging body in the bathroom mirror. I cleaned up the wiggling Agnes and fed her and cleaned her again, and got her ready for daycare, and cleaned her again. Alan, who usually got her up, had overslept. I hustled him off to school, thankful it was not yet time to remember where his equipment was for hockey. I went into the office and slapped the book on Roe’s desk and asked him what he thought of it and whether he had seriously intended to publish it if it was offered to him – because he had been as upset as I was when he was not. He turned away as if I had slapped him on the face, avoided my eyes, began to flutter with his hands, muttered “Catherwood,” muttered “Amelia,” muttered, “you were married to him,” avoided, evaded. And I knew that he had never had any intention of forwarding deLesseps’ literary career, that he had taken the poetry so that the house had one author who qualified for

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Canada Council grants, one person possible for the Governor General’s Award shortlists, one way of getting its name into the papers. But the novel would have been a real job of work, and down a line Catherwood was incapable of exploring. So Jo had done the right thing. I told him I wanted a week off. To think. The year had been a strain. He never minded giving me a week off when there was nothing in from France. I went home and slept. For the next ten days I scraped and polished and laundered, racking my brains about my work and my life, for my job and my fading relationship with deLesseps were indubitably connected. Had I been in another business, I might have been idealistic enough, for instance, to decide to support him: then I could bribe him back with offers of comfort. On the other hand, if deLesseps had been more of an idealist, he might have let me publish his book; to his financial detriment and my prestigious advantage. We were a pair, I decided, and both with a cold, practical streak that said, “That’s not quite good enough, is it?” We were better apart. Housecleaning is loathesome, but maintaining order is maintaining pride. I went at the Augean Stables thinking to rescue myself from the shoals of the Slough of Despond. Clean curtains, and what should I do next? If I was to call myself a translator hadn’t I better get down to something? Levy hadn’t sent a serious book for a year … a few pamphlets on cucumber cream and cellulite did not count. If I was to be a publisher, I had to have a writer to promote: that was Roe’s department. And even the young new publishers had put in their capital. I was turning into an office dogsbody, Mrs Maugher knows where it is, there’s Liz, she’ll find it for you, Liz Lennox knows. But without my poet – and Jo would take all his business to McClelland and Stewart now – and without my botanical index, I was going to have to watch both my status and my interest. These were McLuhan times, Centennial times, the country was still buzzing with ideas and new forms of financing them. Quebec was in a ferment. I combed the bookstores for new names the competition might not yet have found, stopped always at the same semi-colon; could we sell that? Catherwood could foist a few poems on his book dealers, but he would have to have the whole establishment behind him to foist the experimental revolutionaries on the Anglo-Saxon public, resistant as it was already to the other culture’s form of Puritanism. I wish now I had found the new feminists, but their virtues were hidden from me.

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I lugged Agnes to her daycare and pushed Alan off to school, returned to trim up the house with a goffering iron. I would come out of this, I swore, I would come out a person, a person with a métier, instead of a kind of superior servant. If I couldn’t find what I wanted inside Myself I would go down to Montreal and find the Chameau and talk to him, I’d get out of here for a while, pay Frances to handle the kids, find something new and fresh. Botany spilled over easily enough to cookery and cosmetics, but they were hardly my line … oh, I knew cookbooks made money, but wasn’t there another direction? Something less domestic, even if not literary more … respectable? Other people are given things to do I thought with self-pity and then pride. I have to make my own way. Medicine? Where was Lalice? Towards the end of the week they began to phone me and by Friday I was in the office again, relieved to be rid of cleaning. Roe said nothing, watched me like a frog on a lily pad. A parcel came in from France: Levy had half a dozen ideas for us. One was called “The Encyclopaedia of Rheumatics.” Roe clicked his tongue. “See what’s in it. European medicine generally gets us into trouble.” Saturday I decided to paint the front door pink, and was hard at it when Jo deLesseps came up the front walk. I was in an unfortunate position, hunkered towards him, painting around the masked mail-slot, and nearly fell over attempting to greet him. He turned his attention to his daughter, who was harnessed to the verandah railing, digging in a heap of sand the Major had not yet made a box around, making the universal chuff-chuff noise allotted by God to children operating small vehicles. “Is that good for her? Won’t she get worms? For God’s sake you can’t tie her up.” The phone rang and by the time it was half answered we were involved in a stew of Agnes, Jo, and three quarters of a quart of pink enamel. Then there was the problem of whether she was allergic to turpentine and how to get the smell out of the house. “I’m not here for long,” he said. In the evening he narrated his triumphs: there was work coming in, from film scripts, from cbc. He thought he wouldn’t go to California. I said firmly, “You’re much too good for California,” and he was pleased. I had sheaves of phone messages for him. He had plans. “I’ll let you keep Agnes,” he said graciously. He, also, suffered from a practical streak. I didn’t ask who the girl was.

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We slept together that night, more because we didn’t want Alan to see him on the sofa than for any other reason, and we enjoyed each other equally, I think, but there was a curious caesura between us, we were not the same as before, the break was made, we did not quite fit together in the old way, or perhaps were only incapable of pretending now that we did. I wondered if something had happened to me early that gave me contempt for men: I couldn’t take him seriously. He seemed to have the same trouble with me. On Sunday we worked it out with pen and paper. It would be cheaper if we sent Agnes to Frances rather than daycare. He would see Alan on weekends when he was in town, though he didn’t expect much to be. And for God’s sake what was Agnes doing in those ghastly pink dresses? That spring I had had a strange obsession with pink, had made staggering piles of little dresses for Agnes in rosebud flannel and pale strawberry broadcloth; even a Liberty remnant with William Morris roses all the way. I suppose I was trying to cheer myself up, or prove my femininity, or … pink is one of the possible colours, why does one have to apologise for it? It wasn’t the colour I thought, when I looked at his objections, it was the craftsmanship: she was the wrong kind of child for crooked seams. And he was inimical as ever to my handling of her. Nevertheless, he said grandly, I was to have the privilege of bringing her up. They offer you everything, these men. I smiled through it all, there seemed nothing else to do. It was better when he was beastly, I had not such a sense of loss. He was better than some men with the children, and he was going to pay for part of her care. I couldn’t write him off as a monster, I told him I had been over his book and found it fair, and he was glad. We managed. I had not been able to improve my situation vastly, but now that I was to a degree aware of how thin I had spread myself, I found myself better able to make decisions, to see down the tunnel of my flaking life and I thought, if I am only a part-publisher (I have small power and no capital) I’ll still choose well; and if I am only a part-translator (only a handful of people, as far as I knew, were able to support themselves fully outside the government service this way: most had ancillary occupations, as I did) I shall admit I’m not literary, and if I am only a part-mother, I ought, considering the amount of work the others have to do, to rejoice. Focus provided some kind of resolution, and, since those were extraordinarily interesting times, I shook my mane and began to run with the rest of the horses.

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Children resent it when their parents say, time flies: but in a good era it does. There was McLuhan, there was Betty Friedan; writers were emerging in Canada, publishers were creating and recreating themselves. There was a Royal Commission to watch and speak to, there was a Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a prime minister shaking a big stick and crying, “What need one?” [sic] Once again I lived with the right and listened to the left, not liking totally what I heard but watching in fascination Quebec tear its opaque layers of feudalism away. Nationalism, bilingualism, biculturalism, separatism, the Vietnam protest; the draft dodgers, hippies, yippees, marijuana; the Royal Commission, publishers’ grants, the division of Cherrystone into two arms – Cherrystone House, nationalist, Canadian-owned and grant-eligible, Roe, Allen, Levy, foreign, and, for a thousand dollars, just a little bit mine. The Trudeau phenomenon, French-love, French-hate, back-to-the-land. Roe published four books on the Quebec crisis, two of which were a success. A number of our pamphlets were listed in the Whole Earth Catalogue, we redesigned, made money. Amelia celebrated her 50th romance, continued doggedly. The country was in a maelstrom of cultural resounding excitement and some of its waves broke on our shore.

Elizabeth at 50, Remembering Her 40s

In this section, which Engel entitled “Fails to Confess” and for which she considered including “that old poem ‘Time stretches and snaps,’” Elizabeth makes the transition from publisher to writer. Now in her fifties, she looks back over her forties, a decade during which her daughter, Agnes (Ag), despite an age difference, married Levy of Roe, Allen, Levy publishers, and then left him. Also during this period the Major has his first heart attack. Elizabeth’s health is under attack as well. As the section opens, she awakens in the hospital where, later parts of the work reveal, she is undergoing treatment for cancer.

I have lived now for fifty years, and at last understand old women who wear young women’s clothes: inside their bags of skin they are the same people they were at two, at seven, at twenty-nine: time passes them like a toboggan and they forget that they have aged. I have seen some of the Depression, more of the Koreas and Vietnam imbroglios. I have lived through the Beatniks, the Hippies, the Yippies, the ages of William Lyon MacKenzie King, St Laurent, Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, that which will be called the golden or asinine age of Trudeau. I have lived through the construction and the deconstruction of the Author; under my eyes the Unreliable Narrator has burgeoned, deflated himself, and staggered on his way. I have read the Confessional Narrator, I was nurtured on the Reliable Narrator. From them I have learned a great deal. Enough to decide that I shall not be the Suicidal Narrator. So it is enough to say, at this point in my life, I waved, staggered, and fell.

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Because Ag had stowed away in Australia where her father was being feted at a Festival? Because she tried anorexia (and was not, fortunately, sufficiently nervous to achieve the required sixty pounds: she lived). Because it was Frances and not I who succeeded in reclaiming her? Because I was myself, I suppose. And I was forty, and things were difficult, and my strength was not the strength of ten. I have excuses. I woke up in a hospital knowing that I would have to reconstruct my life. And, since Roe, Allen, Levy lacked literature, and I had provided it with enough to subsidise my own contribution, I began, at last, to write a little in my own voice. And publish it a little: in a voice that was very small. My little books did not make me a culture-hero – in a way, I was last on the bandwagon, others had used a good deal of my material, and I had less than I thought to say and it did not deal with the fact that I was ill, but satisfied some craving and I slid away from self-destruction. To utter minor prosepoems in one’s own, however French-accented, voice is a relief after a career of ventriloquism. Agnes and I pulled out of our careers of delinquency at about the same time. Alan was by this time long departed to his Arctic solitude, and for a few months I lived, childless, alone, and enjoying it, in the white house, while Frances and the Major provided for Agnes the starched framework she was said to need. Eventually, she decided that her restlessness was caused by the fact that she was an artist by nature, and enrolled herself as an apprentice dancer in Montreal, this after participating in the gallant show the streets of Toronto turned into at that time, where we saw her sometimes on corners as a performer and sometimes as a clown. We were surprised that she had earned admission and there was no point in not allowing her to go. She was seventeen. I paid, but by now I was used to the fact that if you have children, you pay. That is what they are for. They cost you the dream of the house in Avignon with the Bechstein, and that is the Reality Principle. And if martyrdom is meat and drink to you, they keep you well fed. Or you can simply say, “That is what I work for,” or “I did it to my parents, too.” Sometimes I tried, “Write to your father,” but that year he was living on a Canada Council grant. Naturally I asked Levy to look in on Agnes, see how she was doing; without supervising, perhaps to soothe. She was, after all, of an age with his own daughters. And his Adèle had died, I thought she might cheer him. I had not seen him for a long time, but like le Chameau he was lean and

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dry and somehow ageless. A grandfather through Emilie, who had married very young, as he insisted. Still very much our partner, but now that the firm was running smoothly and there was less political excitement in Quebec, he came to Toronto rarely. And I kept away from him because I had lost some of his good opinion. Then he came with a suitcase of manuscripts, and was oddly diffident, strangely light-hearted, careless of the Cherrystone meeting, almost indifferent to the figures he and Norman went over. Once, we heard him humming. “I would like to lunch with Elizabeth alone,” he said. “I am in love with Ann – yes,” he said. I thought, she must love being Ann – yes, Ag is such a terrible name, why did I let him? I had not taught myself to think in prose-poems. I cannot; yet. I am in love with Ann, yes. Well, I’m not, I thought. She had phoned the night before for a hundred dollars, and I was guilty because I had said yes, and it was over her allowance, but I would have been more guilty if I had said no, we were that way with each other. “I’m astonished,” I said. “Agnes and I wish to marry.” “She’s awfully young,” as every mother has said since the beginning of time, calculating the age of the postulant, fighting back the thought, “I might have wanted him for myself,” wondering how she has instilled such good taste, such foolhardiness in her daughter; for she knows it will end badly in conflict or nursing. “She is very mature for her age. She confesses to a wide range of experience. She was not much protected.” “Protecting Agnes was not a job I was up to.” “You must think I have taken advantage of her.” He was very nervous, old-fashioned, formal. I thought, I mix him up sometimes with the Chameau, he’s much more correct, Agnes will be agony for him. It’s his loneliness. “What does Tulippe have to say?” “Oh, she is delighted: Agnes will be a mother and a sister.” “And your mother?” “Naturally, we have not talked to the family yet. Since Agnes is not of age, it was my duty first to speak to you.” So it was that formal. Something out of a nineteenth-century novel. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

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You think you know a colleague well, you have worked with him for many years, talked about money, knowledge, whooping cough; you know some of his enthusiasms. But as my disaster with Catherwood had proved, there is knowing and knowing. And how well did I know Levy, how well had I tried to know Levy? I had embalmed him in his own Frenchness, his own Jewishness. I knew he was careful, well-mannered, organised, neat. I had no idea what Levy-in-camera was like. I had been to his house for formal dinners when Adèle was alive and well: but that was the house of precious Levy and Adèle, a “jeune ménage” with two children, the union of two people of good family, both French-from-France. I had romanticised their formality. For all I knew they spat in the waste-baskets. He sat across from me twisting his hands for love of Agnes. There was that in me that had found it, always, difficult to love the hectic Agnes, who twisted into adventure from my embrace. This did not mean of course that Agnes should not be loved; but she was no teddy-bear; and he was at a vulnerable age. He should know about the books of psychology; for heaven’s sake, he published some of them. I remembered the old rule, do not attempt to come between the lovers. I nosed my Perrier water and tried to be a good girl. “I’m amused at the thought of Agnes’ trying to keep a house,” I said. “It’s difficult to think of her as a grown woman.” Which she was not. “She said you would say that.” “I’m delighted you have found someone to love. I’m delighted Agnes has also. But the combination is dumbfounding.” “We were hoping for your blessing.” I thought of Agnes at the head of his table in the house at Outremont. In her dignified mood she would look well. But when I had last seen her she had been got up to look like a street-tart, it was the fashion among her age group. The picture made me want to giggle. The malice of mothers is fathomless. Once, after a long evening meeting, when I was in a needy phase, I had almost asked him home with me, picturing his long, twisting, ugly face against my body. “Where would she fit in socially?” “The revolution has come: one hasn’t to think like that any more.” “But surely, one always does. There will be friends. You will want to go out together at night.”

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He smiled bashfully, and Levy bashful was a different person, one could see his youth. “I am quite fond of discos,” he said, “which were of course not places I went with Adèle.” Adèle’s death was a mean one, of breast cancer. Lalice and Ennis and the Medical Series and all the prestige of medicine in French and English could not take its vileness away. She was a young woman, less than forty. I had seen her depleted, a big-eyed skeleton, at the end. It was good for him to forget that a little. “Look,” I said, “it’s a shock. I can’t imagine it. You know the struggle I’ve had with Agnes. Agnes can be wild. You know a different side of her. I think you should get to know each other better just in case it is a whim. Let her finish her apprenticeship.” “Of course,” he said, well pleased. “We shall of course be talking to the other side of the family.” I thought for a moment he meant Frances and the Major. “Oh yes, or will Arthur be difficult?” “He can’t fault the difference in your ages without referring to their own.” “Excellent. No, I was thinking of my mother who is something of an autocrat.” “Jo may have a thing or two to say.” “Your family is so complex, Elizabeth, it is hard for me to decipher who belongs to whom.” “Tell her to write to Jo herself. And the Major would love it if you dropped in for a drink. He’s getting old.” I went straight home after our lunch intending to lay my pounding head on my pillow, stifle my imagination with a tranquilliser, sleep; of course, Agnes phoned, wanting to know if I had heard her news, what I thought of it, wasn’t he wonderful. “Why didn’t you tell me he was like that?” “Like what?” “Oh, everything: funny, sensitive, intelligent, kind … and a fabulous dancer. That’s why I wanted the hundred dollars, I have to have a dress.” “I’m glad he’s not playing sugar-daddy.” “Mother!” And her voice spiraled into coils of praise. I was amused, exasperated, she had reversed the charges, it was good to hear her happy,

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but still, this was not the Levy I knew, not at all, and perhaps I was jealous. No, I thought, they all want their houses kept and I am past that. Illness has its privileges. “I’m happy you’re happy; but you must finish at the school.” “I wouldn’t dream of quitting. He’ll be so proud of me! But right after that, we’re getting married. With a rabbi and a huppah and all, can you believe it? Won’t Daddy be proud?” “Not unless he’s changed. You’ll have to watch that.” “A Cohen and a Levy. He says it’s magnificent. And my French is so much improved.” “I should hope so.” “You don’t sound pleased at all.” “I’ve turned into the Human Cash-Register again, Ag; I’ll write. I sent him off with my blessings.” More or less. Something serious happened a few days later – the Major’s first bad heart attack, I think – and then the price of paper took another leap, and there was a fuss over whether Roe, Allen, Levy was Canadian-owned or not in terms of one of our grants, and we created the new division, which we tried to get in under the banner first of bilingualism and then of multiculturalism. And I was working on my second bouquin, only half well and trying to hide it, scared. Amelia’s rheumatism had got worse that year, Roe had a long flu, production was held up at one of the printing plants. I didn’t somehow find much time to worry about them, and when I saw Levy his face was strained from worry about business subsidies; it cracked a wide smile at the sound of the name of Agnes, then fell together again as we tried to reorganise ourselves. Little firms were falling. I went down to Montreal for a recital she was in; he was in Brussels. I was relieved that she was living with a roommate on St Mathieu. I showed her the houses we had lived in when I was at McGill. I felt elderly in the new cafés in the rue St Denis. “Drapeau is moving the centre of the city,” she said. Le Chameau met us briefly; I had an odd feeling that he was both our fathers, age was dislocated and had deferred to him intellectually too long. He was amused by the romance of Agnes and Levy and made ironic remarks that she did not quite appreciate. “They’re very serious,” I said disapprovingly when she was in the restroom. “She will tire of him in two weeks.”

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“Let’s let her find that out before she marries him.” She said she was going to move in with him when her term ended. “I don’t think his friends will like that,” I said. “That doesn’t matter. And Tulippe is going to France for the summer.” “Well, I’m glad you told me.” Then there was a long silence. A few years previously I had bought, for a very small sum, a small house in a derelict village fifteen miles from Deborah’s farm. It was the place I had always dreamed of owning, small, symmetrical, capable of being whitewashed and decorated with simple crafts like something in a good French magazine. It stood near a crumbling wharf on an estuary and was Japanese with herons in the early mornings. I had not had much joy of it, however. The lyricism the country believes itself to be infected with did not reach this community. Most of the decent houses had been hauled to other ports as the fishery closed down, and those which were left were occupied by people I liked well enough who were there for the most negative reasons: illness or alcoholism, bad luck, lack of imagination and poverty kept them glued to the landscape. The fierce wind blew the gardens out. Drunks at night pounded at my door. I rolled them into the lupin-filled summer ditches without compunction after a while. If you sobered them up they chased you around the kitchen and the children were frightened. As Ag grew, the local teenagers pursued her. There were things she did not yet need to know. Alan had viewed the place with disgust when I first bought it. I remembered my mother saying, “For heaven’s sake, don’t be romantic about the country: it’s something to get out of.” There was nothing but the view to compensate here for life’s being nasty, brutish and short. Without access to books and music the residents lapsed into triviality. It was a good place to come for the writing when I could, however, to feel long strands of uninterrupted time being drawn through the sky’s spindle; it had a kind of squeak. An adult does not have to fit in, only to be. I retreated there, distracted by my longing for my daughter, and guilty with it. I broached Frances’s door now with a whiff of nostalgia, but I did so before I went east. The neighbourhood had become fashionable, the house was worth a quarter of a million, they said, and, although they had shrunk with age, both she and Arthur were still bright with activity. She ran a little cater-

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ing business, an offshoot of the parties she had given for Roe, Allen, Levy; he still bustled and busied himself about the house. I had to admit they had been excellent parents. He had plunked the boys in the military at the first sign of adolescent rebellion, and they had made good careers. Constance was in Switzerland taking a course in hotel management – Frances’s earnings went to this, I was sure; and Edith was working on her second degree in psychology. Perkyn, now an important figure in the library world, was still with them. They had pulled Agnes through her adolescent knothole when I could not. They were not worried. “She falls on her feet like a cat,” said Frances. “And the Jews take care of their own,” said the Major. He thought she ought to have snapped him up at once. He would. I thought wistfully of children who were safely snapped in bunting bags and carried under one’s arm. She might fall on her feet and break them. I sat by the shore hoping they were not quite tearing her skin off. The sound of the waves, the long, slow pull of the tide always healed something in me here. I could put my mind in low gear, tear it away from the practical affinities of business for a while. I knew many successful people who spun with relentless activity, never ceasing to concentrate and to act; but I knew myself now. Without periods of detachment from reality I fell ill in one way or another. I tried to free myself and hang against the clouds like a bird. Sometimes I succeeded. I ate mussels and winkles, failed as usual to appreciate clams, drank with one of my neighbours on Friday nights, saw Debby and Gabriel, Stanley and Anne. Let the time slip through my loose fists like sand. Eventually, the letter came. “Dear Mother, send this on to Father and Alan: I hate you all.” She was in Nice, dancing with some kind of troupe that just avoided white slavery, she said, she was beginning again, she knew the mistake she had made, it was over, she hoped it wouldn’t spoil my business relationships, though if it did it was hardly her fault, she had walked into, she felt, an elephant-trap and what had we all been thinking of, sitting there calmly smiling? Her humiliation? Oh, we had done that. “Not one of you lifted a finger. Not one said no. Old Mrs Levy gave me embroidery silks and patterns for my trousseau. Tulippe copied out her mother’s favorite recipes. Emilie made jokes with her baby about my being ‘petite grand’mère.’ You were like a nodding chorus in Madame Butterfly or something. Aren’t you surprised that I’m alive?”

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“It was wonderful at first to be treated like a real lady, a grown-up person. I went to the theatre and the opera with him. Old Corinna invited us to her cocktail parties. He came to the clubs with me, and all the rehearsals (he looks adorable in an open-necked shirt with a silk scarf or whatever you call it, you must encourage him to wear it … I mean he bursts almost into the 20th century). “But as you warned me, after I moved in with him he seemed to feel he had to keep track of me. He got upset if I slept in in the morning, me who was often working until 4 a.m. What would the maid say? I didn’t care what the maid said. ‘Madame is asleep,’ sounded okay to me. Then I was offered a little job in Oka, and he didn’t like the sound of that, but I took it anyway, I needed the money, and he was in Belgium. I couldn’t stand the way he fussed over me and when I didn’t do what he wanted he treated me like a disobedient child. And I never saw enough of you, Daddy, to be a very dutiful daughter, so we started to fight. And there was this little apprenticeship deal in Paris, I’d have sold my body on the street to get the money together to go over and do that, I told him. So he helped me come here; but when he came, he was impossible. He had to introduce me to his cheesy colleagues and the French are much more correct than the Québécois; or maybe it’s just that I didn’t have anywhere to hide. Anyway, with everyone still smiling and nodding, it all went to rat shit. “If you don’t want me to turn myself into the slavers, you can bail me out. I mean, after Nice, it’s Marseille, and then you ship out to the ports. I’d rather be doing street-theatre in innocent old Hamilton or somewhere. I’ll trade you my trousseau if you can scrounge up a ticket. “I bet Uncle Arthur thought I should marry him and collect alimony. “I thought my heart was broken, I thought I would die. But I heard my first nightingale here and discovered I have a rubber heart. I’ll try to be a good girl from now on. “The old prick was good in bed.” “Yours forever and ever and ever Agnes Audrey Cohen-deLesseps LevyLennox Stringball Frump.”

Elizabeth, Publisher and Writer

The first three manuscript pages of this segment present a slightly different version of Elizabeth’s departure from the Major’s house, in which she moves into a rented apartment rather than her own house. These pages have been set aside and the narrative continues with Elizabeth reflecting on her work as a publisher. Her reflections offer an intriguing view of the writing scene as Engel knew it at the time, when psychoanalytic and postmodern criticism were being applied to literature. This chapter ends with the announcement of the Major’s funeral.

If I have had any usefulness as a publisher it is not because I was a clever girl. Anyone whose favourite authors are Virginia Woolf and Henry Green should not be allowed near a selection of manuscripts in a publishing house that hopes to survive financially in modern Canada. In non-fiction, however, the mediocrity of my taste and scientific education led me up useful corridors: I seemed always to know just what the average book-buyer would want to know about a year ahead of time, a useful time lag in terms of selection. I would wander the stores shopping and suddenly decide to produce a pamphlet on gerbils or the restoration of thirties furniture, the sociology of open marriage or (after reading Dr Faustus and a novel about Edward McCormick in the same week and being sickened by the subject) syphilis and the arts in the 19th century; bromeliads would strike my fancy, Pekinese, peonies, computers, the social geography of Central America … I would mention it to Roe, look through the card catalogue we kept on stray writers, pick up the phone. It was publishing by association and, in cheap formats

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and modest bindings, backed up by Catherwood’s ability to sweet talk his storekeepers into carrying almost anything, we made a profit on these little books. Susan Savage wrote most of the medical and scientific ones. She had trooped in with every bad book on federal politics, but both Roe and I had noticed that she was brilliant on the health system, and I called on a fluke, wanting her to do a short book about leukemia, which more and more of my friends seemed to have developed. She came in at once, with a manuscript she had begun on the same subject. It was more complicated than the one I had in mind for a popular audience, but it was a mine of medical information (she had gone out for two weeks with a hematologist and wasted no time) and together we hit a level that began the ral Medical series. She was useful on natural history and wrote those books, for reasonable sums because she wrote and researched so quickly, under the name of Eleanor Lumley. She was a tall, languid, glamorous woman; it seemed to me her research was mostly done at night. I used to be afraid I would lose her to Bantam, one of the big chains, the Americans, but she tried once, didn’t like the editors, the pushiness, the pace, and has been with us for years. Still tall, languid, glamorous, a little wrinkled, and researching at night. I often rather than choosing a subject now, dream her a man; I know she will find him, for two weeks, and write about his specialty. They never seem to mind, she says. She puts them down as advisors and they are pleased to have their names in print. Vanity I have, too, and if I ever have the courage to write a book for myself, the publisher’s vanity, his way of competing with his authors, competing against his own record, I shall do a book on apples. Often now on white winter nights I lie in bed and think about apples. I think of them first in rows, like the fruit in John Drinkwater’s poem in the school reader that contained the terrifyingly banal internal rhyme “dapples the apples” (you can hear some King exclaiming, “by George, that’s poetry”) but the light and the sense of roundness compensate for it, and then I began to think of their moonwashed yellows, reds and russets and greens; and then of their beautiful names: Snows, Spys, and Mackintosh Reds; Cortlands and Russets, Winesaps (Winesaps!) and Pippins and Talman’s Sweets; Yellow Transparents, that wither in a day, Delicious that aren’t, and the coarse, warty, yellow apples the French calls Canadas.

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I think of the matte paper I will order for the making of this book, the format, rather like a beautiful old King Penguin, I think of the typeface (perpetua, my favorite, why not?) and the watercolours by a man in the country I will have for my illustrations. I dream of the words I will use, the words for roundness and fullness, dryness and sharp flavours, the deliciousness of small white teeth biting into the pink flesh of a Snow Apple, in its bummy roundness, its pearly whiteness, becomes everything and fills my world. I become the Basho of apples. I will, yes, write about apples. Perhaps I will not write about apples. Perhaps I will lie in bed and dream of apples for the rest of my life. It is all I need. Much later. As far as fiction goes I am publishing some now because I think a well-balanced list needs some. I have found two very good writers, Aphra Franklin and Burton Stead, whom I have promised to foster. I am conscious of the fact that options do not hold up in court and they are therefore free to run away any time; my investment in them is not so serious that the House would collapse without them. They, on the other hand, are conscious that I have the material to publish them, but I cannot really promote their interests in New York and Frankfurt in an important way. Aphra will stay, I think, because she lives small and needs a constant supporter. Stead is hoping still to write a best-seller and move to a better publisher. Since I have recouped most of what I have paid him in advances from his paperback sales I don’t mind. I will only recoup the expense of Aphra in prestige. My two young editors argue that I ought to take more fiction and postmodernist fiction at that. I am divided on that. I agree that “il faut être absolument moderne,” or I did at twenty, but the post-modernist mode seems to me to be most suited to European societies where one lacks political freedom. My editors say one lacks it here, but I don’t feel that. I always know my mps and I can do what I like: how should I feel oppressed? But this point is not serious. The post-modernist writers are post-psychoanalysis, conscious at every point of what they are doing, and able to make the reader see that they are doing it, and engaging in this effort. But it takes a certain, invariably male, self-consciousness to pull this off, and there is something condescending in post-modernism, you see, I know something I can share with you in this way, and it is all a game, or is it, even when prac-

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tised by Günter Grass, whom I like enormously. Still, it grates a little and I cannot help but see it as a posture, a boxing-in, a distancing of reader from writer, which is intellectually most respectable, but not about selling books. Canadians read but I am not sure that they want to be made conscious of the act of reading. Perhaps only people who have read almost everything can afford to be so conscious: this is why psychoanalysis works only for the middle class, who have been brought up conscious of consciousness and mostly wind up with analysts because they have been trying to blot out consciousness, and therefore have to become hyperconscious to cure themselves. The very great artists play with consciousness, but not in such a conscious way. They have a conscience about engaging consciousness therefore. They are not, like the post-modernists, puritanical about putting on masks. They do not say, “Here I am, putting on a mask, and at the same time myself, someone who is selling you something, telling you something.” Their game is much more complicated. The mask is there, and they let you know that here and there – think of Joyce, think of Shakespeare, Chaucer – but they dance above the shadows, rise above the elements of their craft. When I was young I was interested in both Picasso and Matisse. Later I was interested in a kind of critical war between them. But I was always interested in the play of line in their work, which satisfies me here and there – not in everything – as it satisfies almost everyone. I still prefer Matisse, but I respect Picasso’s ideas embodied in energy. Consciousness, self-consciousness, this, that: they still draw. The same endure with music though I have not kept up with the modernists to any extent. When I play, I go back to Mozart, because my hands are not large and my technique is not great, and when I get beyond the fussiness to the melodic line I rejoice. Yet I understand people who hate him because I did when I was young: I could see only the fussiness. What interests me now in writers, because I am getting seer and yellow, is this quality of beyondness, of rising above storyline or melodic line to some soaring height. What interests present modernists is something else, I think, rising with the line and then dispensing with the line. That bothers me. I’ve had many friends who were communists, and that made me a little ashamed, they burned with a passion they wanted me to share, and I could not. I was conscious always that I couldn’t be sentimental about the work-

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ing class: they were the guys who pelted nice little girls with horsebuns on the way to school by the foundry. Yet I’ve never, either, been able to be an elitist. I never felt I deserved those horsebuns, but neither did I figure I was better than anyone else. Frances might have been, but I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to be. At some level I had a sincere desire to get along with people, understand them, connect. In fact, I am middle-class, although alienated. And it is by line, by melody, by story, that artists connect to the people. And in some way they know it. Every generation or so they have to change the connection because the people aren’t connecting with them, are arguing to change the connection, or, because they are artists, they know that this just isn’t going anywhere. I respect their desire to make art which can only be seen by spacemen or on strange machines, music that is too complicated to be performed or books that can only be read by four PhDs, but in my heart, I’m a populist, rushing around telling the boys not to throw horsebuns (what do they throw now?) (spitballs, computer slips, dead frogs as usual) but to read this or that. It won’t work, but it’s something I have to do. I think of Catherwood years ago saying, “What are you looking for here? It can’t be money.” I said then, “Praise, I guess.” I’m much more conscious now of wanting what I want, to find some writers who will make money to sustain us, and some writers who are worth promoting: to do good. Every once in a while real crassness takes over. I want a pure and simple caddish best-seller. I don’t get them because I don’t have the money to put on their heads. I have some craftsmen, I have my botanists, and I make a lot of mistakes. The genius-publisher is tuned in to public taste. I am not. I am afraid it will throw horsebuns at me. But I manage. I may have had a very bad education, having learned neither Greek nor computers. But I had a good education by my standards, having had Euclid and grammar. I am therefore some kind of aristocrat, looking for some kind of magic stylishness – line, melodic line, storyline – and technique. And I had a middle-class upbringing, and I can’t bear art that’s untidy. But I think I can see art that’s good here and there, and buy what I can afford. That’s what it’s about. What do I get out of it? You have to do something with your life. I wish every so often that I could have stayed in university and done a PhD. But every time I meet someone with a PhD I am appalled by the narrowness of disciplines: I

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wanted to range the world like an eagle and do everything. Nobody can do everything. So this something I’m doing is as trans-disciplinarian as one gets. I have an awful suspicion I’m a success. I still can’t sew. I tried to smock a dress for Agnes’s Solange, and it came out so crooked and awful I had to throw it out. The last time I had a dinner party I made a shepherd’s pie. Alone, alone, alone, alone on a wide, wide sea. And if you’d never been broke before, you’d never be broke as me. Uncle Eugene. I don’t have such a bad time. * Now I am sitting at a round table, my own, the only good tables are round, I have the sense to know that, with four of the most interesting people in the world, no, three, then, and me, and I am happy. We are here because the Major is dead. (…) I don’t need to mourn, Ron Catherwood: I need to celebrate.

*In the archival arrangement of Engel’s draft novel, a short section here in the third person singular recounts a dinner to which Elizabeth invites Frances, Levy, and Amelia.

The Major’s Funeral

Elizabeth’s description of the Major in his coffin is highly evocative of Rains’s portrait in military uniform. The Major’s funeral brings together various members of his families and entourage and Elizabeth reflects on her life with them. Some contradictions between the Montreal and Toronto sections of the manuscript with regard to characters’ names and/or parentage (the characters Agnes and Constance in particular) have been corrected in this segment.

When my mother died, I was reading Jane Eyre. When the Major died, I was either reading the proofs of, or arguing with Ron Catherwood on the telephone about the title of, an excellent manual in our new Medical series, entitled chemotherapy and you, a subject in which the Major’s terminal illness had made me become interested. In fact, it launched the whole medical series, which is now an expensive embroilment, but which will, I’m convinced, eventually become profitable, particularly if the Americans pick it up. But Catherwood’s suggestion that the titles are all wrong is probably correct; the buyer of a volume entitled chemotherapy and you may well assume that the bookstore clerk will assume that the “you” refers to the buyer and shy, finally, away, no matter how curious he is about the subject. Similarly, venereal disease and you is a risky title. We must think of a comprehensive new approach. what ails them? Would that be a good title? Fustian, I think. I never meet anyone but me who is fascinated by old uses of language. We’ll have to use a dignified comprehensive title to sell the libraries, something like problems and solutions in modern

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medicine and psychiatry (for I insist on publishing my own pseudonymous volume “Romance, a Disease of Our Time” (or could we knock out the “our”?) which I am collaborating on with a prominent Toronto therapist) and then individual brief banner titles: V.D.: Old Causes, New Approaches, would be one; the chemotherapy book might be subtitled, “What it is, what it can do.” No negatives in titles, I think. We don’t like to mention the things medicine can’t do. So there he lies in state, the old dodger. Medicine couldn’t, at the end, do much for him, but how old is he now, seventy-eight? He’s been gorgeously restored and I’ve always loved his dress uniform, all red and gilt with its yellow Welsh collar. How the little kids used to goggle when he dressed for a military dinner and appeared at the top of the stairs in his red coat, carrying his polished helmet, his polished, hilted sword, his striped tight trews. A fine figure of a man indeed. The little kids would goggle and skip and ask him what it was all about and he would explain about miners and sappers, dragoons (which they were always sure were dragons), cuirassiers, infantry, artillery, cavalry, and fusiliers. He made it all very real to them: it became an honour to polish his buttons and blanco his sashes. And now he lies here, in his ribbons and flashes, against his white satin, without his boots on. I thought of it when I was visiting him a couple of weeks ago: he has the perfect profile for a death scene. With his fine white hair and his beak of a nose exposed by illness and age, he looks positively noble. Just right for a coffin. Frances didn’t invite me to come to the funeral home to make the arrangements. I suppose she thought I’d advise her to skimp on the coffin, which I would have, but I came early this afternoon to help with the official identification, that gasping moment when one is presented with a perfect corpse and the undertaker stands back with a secret smile attesting to his art; and one knows that some horror has been drained off, smoothed away, and that what was once a person is now an artefact for public consumption. We held each other then, remembering the terrible day of our mother’s funeral; and the undertaker and his assistant, a young woman in a black velvet jacket with the smallest swallow tail, a blouse with a frilly jabot and a skirt made of morning-trouser cloth, stood back and nodded at each other over their masterpiece. He’d have liked that. He was always vain.

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Then we arranged about visiting at the funeral home, and the undertaker-girl kept using the word “visitation,” to which I objected, being always fonder of words than of tears in a crisis and wishing to reserve that word for its proper religious connotation; Frances poked me, however, and I clapped my teeth shut in mid-sentence, not wishing to return to the old habit of purposely annoying her. And we arranged to receive our friends and relations for the afternoon and evening before the funeral. In the middle of all this, an attendant brought in a dignified wreath from the Retired Welsh Guards’ Service Association of Toronto, and we had him place it respectfully on the foot of the coffin, retiring our standard of red roses to the centre background. If you are going to indulge in theatrical display, do it properly. It’s a pity he’d had a falling-out with the church, because a state funeral in a high Anglican church would have suited him perfectly. A tune started to run through my head, and during all the conversation with the funeral director I kept trying to identify it, wondering if it wasn’t the elusive Irish air that ran through my head after we buried Mother, which I cannot identify when I cannot hear it, though it is like “The Vale of Avoca” – perhaps it’s “A Glen in Agadhoe” – but it recurs in my life when I am involved in emotional crisis. It wasn’t that, nor was it “Jerusalem the Golden” which they often play at funerals and it wasn’t until we came out of the funeral home that I realised it was “Poor Jud Is Dead” from Oklahoma, which ends lugubriously, “And his fingernails have never been so clean.” I didn’t tell Frances, who would have broken a chair over my head. We came out of the funeral home and went over the list of things to do – you phone A, B, and C and I’ll phone the rest – agreed on what to wear when, and then she went east and I went west. Home again, home again. It was a relief to get back to manuscripts after the frustration of trying to find all the children, Alan in Yellowknife, Owen at Cornwallis, Constance in Lausanne. I had agreed to try to locate Ag as well, which was fruitless. But I phoned the Star and made sure they were putting in a large-type obituary: she’d be sure to see her own name, she’s like that. And I found his sister at home in Lyme Regis, who’d have been glad to come if we’d sent her a ticket. I thought maliciously for a moment, he was as expensive in death as he was in life, and failed to offer her one. She’s 85 if she’s a day and travel wouldn’t be good for her … I had just settled down to the text of “Romance” again, trying to figure out how I could get in a passage on the Romance of vd – has it ever occurred to

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you how many people in novels written even 30 years ago contract venereal disease (if writers are not being specific count the references to mercury) from one sexual encounter? And how many of these syphilitic creatures are artists or associated with artists? The prize goes to Flora Gordon in Isaak Dinesen’s “The Cardinal’s Third Tale” who contracts a vile disease from kissing the warm “brass foot of a holy statue.” It is no doubt true that a good deal of disease goes with sex, but there’s a basic puritanism involved when disease is connected with the minimum of sex. I suppose I’m bitter: after I had my hysterectomy some woman told me cancer of the cervix is a venereal disease. I am not one of these who are bedazzled by myth. Myth is artistic, it draws our ideas together as alum [?] purses our lips; it is a boon to form: it creates patterns as quickly as a kaleidoscope does; it is death-inlife: it brings back the bogey-man. But then I am a Victorian. So was he, the old Major, born during the Boer War to a poor-but-wellconnected Devonshire family, committed to a family in Wales, his godparents, in his early life, in order to relieve his poor mother, committed to the military college in Woolwich as soon as possible after that. He strutted, he preened, and no wonder. When Ag phoned I told her of course that I was working but my thoughts had been bouncing like ping-pong balls and she knew it, and I told her about the funeral and of course she burst into tears. I waited until the storm was over, made sure she had pen and paper and gave her careful instructions. “Oh Dizzy,” she wailed, “he’s gone! Whatever will Mother do?”* I never saw anyone looking so confident and competent as Frances in the sickroom, Frances on the top step of the funeral home; but I did not tell her that. She is too fond of the myth of Incompetent Mother. I was late going to the funeral home the next night. Alan had phoned from Yellowknife to say he couldn’t make it, he couldn’t leave Charmaine and Sara, and I agreed he shouldn’t at soothing length; and then Cather-

*Agnes appears here to refer to Frances as her mother. This is one of the internal contradictions mentioned above. Alternatively, it is possible that, in her upset at the Major’s death, Agnes, who lived with Frances and the Major after Elizabeth and deLesseps separate, momentarily lapses back to that period of her life when Frances and the Major could have seemed like her parents.

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wood called about the series title and we ran through about fifty of them before I looked at the clock. When I got to the funeral home it was crowded with members of the Regiment, broadcasters, handsome women who owned borzois and afghans and King Charles Spaniels, writers and publishers, and of course the family. I was out of breath as I came in and felt faint from the heat. I thought of beating a retreat when I saw a long white mobile arm raised at the front of the room near the coffin, and underneath that arm, from the axillary gland to the elbow nearly, a long narrow spur of black hair, like the arching beard of an iris, but inverted, waving too, “Hi, Dizzy, Ma, here’s Dizzy,” and then the arm was yanked down, the arm with its wonderful flag of unacceptable hair, and I felt I could go on. The Major produced Agnes*: he has not lived in vain. On the other hand, thank God she married Levy and got him to pay for a new front tooth. When I got home the house seemed tired and damp, and I slouched in the armchair, rolling my head back, trying to organise the images from the evening. I had seen too many people, heard too much, thought too much. Around his handsome self the Major had drawn multitudes, as he always had, and I felt them as always as a kind of group assault, and with jealousy: the nudging swarm that would not come to me, the float that belonged to Frances, whereas I was alone. I pushed the sickening wave of self-pity back and got up to make some coffee when the doorbell rang. Ron Catherwood ranged in the frame. “Lizzie, babe.” “How would you like it if I called you Ronnie-babe?” “Love it.” “Come on in.” These men, I thought: they learn early to charm by trespassing. He was, as always, too big for the house, and had to lean through the little hallway. He had a bottle of Scotch. “I knew you’d be sitting bolt upright forgetting your mourning.”

*The reference to the Major as Agnes’s father appears to refer back to the earlier Montreal section of the manuscript, where Elizabeth’s children are by the Major, and not by deLesseps, as Agnes is here in the Toronto section. This textual inconsistency reveals the not-quite-finished state of Engel’s manuscript.

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“I was lolling in a chair feeling sorry for myself.” “He’s the one who’s dead.” “If I looked that nice in a coffin I wouldn’t complain.” Come to sugar me, I thought, in the grim voice of my own grandmother. Large as life and twice as handsome. How many years, now? We aren’t kids any more. Two glasses, ice, water. “Not here. The kitchen table.” Everyone loves a circle. “I’ve watched you again and again, Lizzie; whatever happens; how many years; always the same; everyone dropping off … You sit straight up, your eyes kind of sparkle. You never mourn. You get a kick out of it; someone’s passing on, there’ll be room for more, now, more things will happen, things will change: you like it. The colours shift and stir. You get a glitter. Three months later someone in the office says, er, well, I don’t think Mrs … ho, hum. Then you start to have accidents. You’ve got to mourn, Lizzie.” There are all these songs, “O Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.” “Obviously you must have loved him.” “That was a long time ago.” “Obviously he cared about you.” “I suppose he did. Unless it was possession.” “Well, you know it’s always partly possession: for both of you.” “Where did you do your psychiatry?” “Shut up, Lizzie, I’ve known you a long time.” He’s long and loose-bodied, soft as a fat kitten in the middle, has eloquent hands, an accent he left south when he came north to Canada. When I first met him I thought he was dumb. Has white hair and no more wife and little children to give him agony; girls who come to me and say, “What shall I do with him, what did you?” “Leave him,” is the only answer. It makes him happy. “Lizzie, you loved him, get it out.” “It’s nothing to do with him.” “What does?” “Freezing. Laughing. I don’t like losing people, but the shock delays itself. You have to be polite.” “You keep it all inside.” “Where it belongs. There are stalagmites on my soul. Ever heard anyone say that before? There are stalagmites on my soul.” “Now tell me which goes up and which goes down, stalagmites or stalactites?”

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Whisky goes farther when you’re fifty, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t overdo it, I’m a little cross with him. “It’s good to see so many of the kids home,” I say. He gets up and walks to the tap with a kind of strut men used to have then, chin and butt in at the same time. I think how much I like this man, how much I like men, if they weren’t impossible to live with. Not for everybody: for me. But this one doesn’t give out ownership papers any more than I do. The silence is broken by two mufflerless motorcycles. “Christ, how do you stand it?” “They have to do it. It’s a tribal ritual. But I call the police after eleven.” Suddenly I see our driveway littered with wrenches and parts! I begin to fill up … All those boys. They got motorcycles, then they rode away. He was a good father, brooked no rivalry. I thought he was awful to send them away so soon – school, the army, anywhere – but his sons grew up to be men. The phone rings: he’s the first to grab it. I hate that, it’s my phone. “Connie!” he cries. She’s at the airport, taking a limousine, in from Lausanne. Death has its compensations. “He was a good father,” I say. He looks satisfied. “You’re crying.” “I’m worried about the medical series.” “I’ve got three thousand pre-sold, it’s going to go all right if you can keep Belocchio away from the gold lettering; there’s only yours to worry about: they won’t take Romance on as a medical problem.” “The whole trouble with the world.” “Lizzie, I could lay you out on a table and peel the cynicism off you like a layer of pink plastic. Underneath you’re all soft.” “People are destroying themselves with all that gore about true love.” “You and the women’s movement have got it bass-ackwards. Maybe just you … There’s nothing wrong with true love, it’s the fact they think they can lay down their tools and get a free ride when it happens.” “Both sexes?” “Sure, both sexes.” “I’ll listen to you on the basis of that.” “Keitel’s good. The two of you can do a dynamite book and it’s time you did one. I know what you mean, it is a disease, all this stuff about true love forever and a free ride and away from the factory and he’ll look after me – or she. It’s sick. But damn it all Lizzie, some people do get on with each other, they form a co-operative, they hit it right and it lasts through thick

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and thin: Roe and Amelia, Frannie and the Major, Mike’s got it pretty good: something happens with the good ones. Something gets formed. A bond, I guess.” “Adult Bonding. We could call it Adult Bonding, and turn it around.” “Play the white keys instead of the black; you won’t have to throw out all your stuff about romance as a disease Lizzie; you can keep all that and just do a few chapters – I know what I’m talking about; you don’t have to roll your eyes – on adult bonding. That’s where it’s at. Wow, that would go. It’s what everybody wants to know.” Catherwood sells books. He walks into those bookstores like a crazy galoot and before he knows it the bookseller has ordered stuff he’s never thought he wanted, which is why I have a roof over my head. Catherwood swings across the country two, three, four times a year, comes back holding his belly against the French fries in Kamloops, the half-cooked perogies of Edmonton (but could he see?). He plunges into the health-food stores with the Levy Line, white and shaking with hangover and before they’ve managed to fill him with vitamins he’s managed to fill the racks. The firm, like many other publishers, is shaky, barely profitable: he is the person who sustains it. We are both getting older; sometimes now I wonder whether we will be eliminated soon by changes in taste. The part of me that is still all-wooland-a-yard-wide Ontario and believes in the eternal verities, says that nothing as good as the book can die. But why should things stay the same? And we could lose our touch, as people do in other businesses, providing a commodity no one wants anymore. And is the book democratic, when such a small part of the world is willing to read? I, like a good Victorian, have given many speeches defending the book as a permanent repository of information, but the fact remains that most popular literature has nothing to do with information; literary quality is often an obfuscation of emptiness; the wall could fall down and expose us to reality. “You’re not listening, Lizzie,” he says. “I wanted you to mourn. Why aren’t you screaming and crying and cutting off your hair?” “Ron, when I want a good psychiatrist I know where to find one.” “Ah, gawd, you don’t even know what I mean, you’re …” He is cut off by the arrival of Constance at the door, the masses of whose body, in European clothing, are arranged in quite a new way, pos-

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itively pimpante. And Levy is with her: they met in Paris, when she was changing planes. We replace the proletarian whisky with a fine cognac. For much of my life I have thought of myself as a failure, never having been able to achieve what other women have, a legitimate home and family, a neat pie crust, a tidy house. But now I am surrounded by three of the people I have known longest and loved best, Constance adorable in a plain grey suit, the round mass of her breasts set high to echo the round mass of her cheeks; Levy, my proprietor and collaborator, briefly the Major’s son-in-law; Catherwood the vile, the intrepid. Levy is not impressed by Catherwood’s theory that I should mourn. “But she is now liberated,” he says, raising his glass to my invalid future. “I am the one who should mourn,” Constance says quietly, but in new accents; her words fall out separately, as if she is thinking in French and translating: was there not a princess who spoke in frogs and toads that turned to jewels? “And I do, but I am also aware that there is a time for one’s parents to die when they are old, and that his time has come.” “Toast to the old bugger!” Catherwood cries. We drink; I see him leading his battalion to Paradise. He should be damned, but he always got away with things. I cannot avoid envisaging a future life for him – discontinuity is unimaginable – and I cannot think of a future life in which people change their characters. My mother sits in eternity smoothing and soothing silk. The Major will lead his minions, while my father eternally reads the newspaper, smiling his small, dissatisfied smile. I am surprised that Levy is here. “Ma belle,” he says, “to fail to participate in the history of your strange family would be pénible.” He nods his great patriarchal beard towards Ron: “And of course I have come to do the accounts.” When he is in this mood we lean back and laugh and scratch our bellies like a bunch of chinchillas around a tea table. Levy the expansive, the generous, the benevolent, is a gross parody of goodwill. We know that underneath the broad beard, the attempt at a belly, the loosened vest and relaxed coat jacket, there lurks the accountant, the classic and eternal Jew, the counterweight to Catherwood’s expansiveness: he needs us and we need him and when we imitate each other we are at our best. “I saw Agnes* at the funeral home tonight.” *Here, “Agatha” in Engel’s typescript has been changed to “Agnes.”

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“Ah, Agnes: how was she?” The flag of hair returns to me again, waving like the hairy spinal ridge of a peccary. “Herself.” “I do not begrudge myself that adventure. On her own terms, she was exquisite.” This makes me curl up and laugh with the chinchillas again: he spent most of that marriage bailing her out of jail. He had to have her. He was newly widowed, and she gave him hope, though of what I will never know. Graciously, when he realised he could not keep her, she was anarchy personified, she was ruining his business, his children, and his life, he settled enough money on her to compensate for the education she could not settle down to. “And it was her family I loved,” he told me. “If I made peace with them I could keep them.” He has a bad case of the smarts, Levy. Constance is telling Catherwood all about the hotel management school she attends in Lausanne, the fussiness, the precision, hither and thither, come and go, and perfection. She wonders if she can adapt its principles here, thinks we need something entirely different, cheap and independent, to conquer the camping movement now that the parks are full. “But if you know how to do things the hard way, you can figure out the easy way better,” Catherwood says, “Not that the easy way is easy. I guess I mean that if you know what perfection is you can saw off the imperfections. Right now it’s cheaper to fly to Europe for a holiday, right? You can get three nights in Muskoka or a week in Amsterdam. You figure out how to do a week up north for less than five hundred and you’re made. I mean if …” In seconds, he creates a hotel, the hotel, in the sky. I am deep enough into the drink to think the Holy Ghost is delivering ideas to me personally. “Vegetables,” I say. “The clue is in vegetables. You go north, you have to do without fresh food. She can open a lodge and do anything she wants, the problem will always be vegetables …” I go [start?] to go on but Constance interrupts. “Mother’s hungry.” She makes the supper we have all come to need.

Elizabeth Finds Her Father

Engel labeled this section “Coda 1.” It recounts Elizabeth’s unexpected meeting with her father, who is living as a recluse in Jamaica.

Things continued normally for a number of months, though I knew I still had not buried the Major in my mind until funeral music started to play during the empty spaces of my repose and small fits of weeping interrupted television programmes or evenings reading manuscripts. A sad parade of small incidents, a number of flashes that were as clear as photographs, preoccupied me for weeks on end: I had to do my mourning. I was alone that winter, and I could afford to wander wrapped in sadness. The next stage was less pleasant; though I had stopped drinking with Catherwood except for special occasions, or specially self-destructive occasions, the vortex began to summon me again whenever I drank, I quickly drank too much. It was as if instead of my seeking annihilation, annihilation was seeking me. I saw looks exchanged on social occasions and noticed that I was grubby and ill cared-for. I shut myself in the house over the Christmas social season, called Ron once or twice when the isolation was unbearable, terrified but unable to resist the urge to self-destruction. At the office, things were quiet. Our offerings that year were routine, the income from them was routine, we went on grimly doing what we had been set up to do.

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I knew I ought to go away, but I was deeply afraid to do so: it was hard enough at home not to lose control, and because of the other time I knew I could not afford to run as wildly as my inner voice was urging me to do. Staircases called, and the bottoms of escalators. I had to avoid balconies. Oddly enough, it was worst at the full moon, which is why I suppose lunatics are called that. Then the urge to run to the liquor store and drink and rampage around the house was unbearable. I knew then that I was kin to all the bums and bag ladies, all the mad angry Irish, the raging hill-tribesmen waving cutlass against cannon and the consumed and the consuming, the Assyrian and the wolf. I wanted the strong, rational part of myself to dissolve so that I could kill or be killed: but there was no one close to me left to kill, or to kill me. Frances had entered into a new life, taken a course in merchandising and begun to work with a cosmetics outfit. She was busy and fulfilled. Agnes had gone to a Saskatchewan repertory company to write her name on the huge prairie sky. Even Walter was gone to the west, and Frances and I had buried our closeness with the Major. But I had to get out; my energy was so depleted by controlling this mad wish for self destruction, I was a moth inside a lantern glass, a bee trapped between windowpanes, a pale, sick, tired thing. I therefore took the opportunity of consulting with a woman who had sent us a manuscript on primitive medicine cults from Jamaica and embarked on a cheap charter for the north coast of the island, a very beautiful coast which bustled and bristled with temptation. Like Ulysses tied to the mast, I avoided the rum bars and turned harshly away from the men who offered themselves for sale. For a week I basked in the sun, lay and smoked and read pointless detective novels in my room, acquired a tan, spoke as little as possible, hugged my own breasts in the lush climate as I slept. Then I hired a car and driver to take me to the Villa Derby to see my Miss Marshall, ascending long twisted green hills in one of those fine poetic landscapes inhabited only by the very poor. The driver was a quiet, elderly man: perhaps not older than me, I thought at last, but worn, weary. I sat beside him in his minibus, part of me white and haughty, part of me longing to lean against him as I had against Roe and the Major and the other men in my life, to take warmth from big shoulders and calm minds. He didn’t know the names of the trees.

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At last we pulled up a mountainside to a compound under spreading trees. There were a number of cars alongside, and, confused, I debated whether to go past the gate. “Come on, come on, you’re late,” a cracked voice said: the Villa Derby was a bird sanctuary and this was feeding time. A collection of Germans and Canadians and Americans were perched on plastic chairs waiting to dispense sugar water to hummingbirds. Miss Marshall gave a lecture on West Indian birds, Miss Marshall collected dollars: a little, hunched, yellow woman; of mixed colour perhaps, or just jaundiced, but of the old school, strict and British and correct, hard as a rock until she turned to her birds, which, innumerable as bees, whirled and fluttered before their silent audience, dancers for the delight of those few tourists who chose to leave the dugged [sic] beaches, the Dionysian town sites where everything was for sale, to watch the birds’ ballet. The last bird whirred its purple wings and left. The tourists trouped to their buses. “Well,” the old woman said wearily, “Why haven’t you gone?” I explained who I was. She had not received my letter. “Louise is dead,” she said, “and I shall soon be.” “I’m sorry. We’d been corresponding for some time.” “She thought you were going to publish her book.” “We couldn’t make a final arrangement without a copy of the manuscript.” “How was she going to get a copy here? She was too sick to go down the hill. Too sick to help with the birds. She’s gone and buried now.” Angrily. Then, “You’ve come all this way.” “I needed a holiday anyway.” Then she peeped like one of her birds. “I’m tired.” “Can I make you a cup of tea?” “I never let anyone in. It’s part of my policy. This isn’t a place where you can afford to talk to strangers.” “I was thinking something might still be done if I had the manuscript.” “Frank Lennox up the hill has all her stuff, writings. I told him to do what he could about them. But he’s retired, he never does anything. When you get old, you stop going down the hill. It’s that place up the path to the left. Go and see him and don’t come back. I’m going to bed.” Frank Lennox up the hill. The birds went silent. My inner eye rolled out across the floor. I walked, frozen, past the driver, along the shady path up the hill, to a gate that said “Lennox,” to a set of stone steps suddenly in the

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blazing sun, to a white villa set on a kind of pinnacle against the sea below. I walked without stumbling and without breathing, and I knocked at the door. Nothing, for a long time, nothing. But he doesn’t go down the hill any more. I refused to allow myself to speculate. Whatever was inside me, fear or cold anger or hot love, was not to be allowed to escape. I floated vertical in a hot, sour sea. A girl in a red dress with safety pins in the seams came to the door. “He don’t see no one,” she said. I gave her my card. She flounced off to ask. She came back and almost hauled me over the doorstep. “He’s out on the terrace,” she said. A small, thin, nervous man with pale hair and a white moustache sat under an umbrella with his back to the blooming sea. He was turning my card from side to side, trying perhaps to focus his eyes. He rose and extended his hand. He knew who I was. “Maugher,” he said, “is not a familiar name.” He was thin and correct and shabby. His hands shook. He called, “Doris, we shall want rum punch.” His accent was more or less English. “I came to see Miss Marshall about her sister’s manuscript.” “It’s on the coffee table.” I studied him. He was a little man. A little, thin, old man. There was no warmth in his eye. He fumbled with his cigarettes. “Why did you never get in touch?” I asked. Inside me, flakes of pastry flesh were crumbling; there’d be nothing but a few stale currants inside me when this was over. “There’s no point, Elizabeth, in reliving the past. I looked after you as well as I could.” “I found out from the law society what happened. You could have stayed in Canada.” “Plucked like a chicken? I had my pride. Franny married him, by God, she had her nerve. And what about you?” “I married him too. On the wrong side of the blanket. It was a mistake.” “By Jove, I’d think so. There’s more to you than meets the eye, then.” I thought, he never liked me, that was it, never thought much of me, not even enough to touch my rompered butt with his boot when he came home at night. “Why did you leave us,” I cried. “Why did you go to that war?” He frowned. “We all went to the war. What’s the fuss about, Elizabeth, you always were one to blame people, the men all went to the war in ’39,

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the women and children managed as best they could. Your mother was a wonderful manager.” “She was,” I said. “How’s Frances? How’s Arthur, the randy bugger?” “Frances has a new career now the children are grown. Arthur died in the fall.” “Fine fellow, Arthur. Your good health! How many children?” Behind him the sea was changing from azure to turquoise as the evening clouds began to gather. A jet streaked low towards the bay past the palm trees. This small pale head against the postcard scenery like a cut out. And I thought he was big. I thought he was clever. I told him about his grandchildren and their accomplishments. He seemed unresponsive and I wanted to hit him with the flat of my palm, in a bored, child’s way, but his eyes were brimming. He’s old, I thought. And then, sadly, he did the best he could. A little man, I thought. This man I’ve wanted all my life, this man is a little, shriveled man. “A soldier!” he would say, “I’ve a grandson who’s a soldier. Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Where’s Belle? Which one of them did you call Belle?” I told him Belle was an actress. He started to cry. Sullen Doris came and took the punch bowl away. “He can’t drink,” she said. “You’re upsetting him, you’d better go.” He gave me a sheaf of papers that had been on his coffee table until they were brown with age, he saw me to the door. “Don’t come back,” he said. “I don’t like the past. Give my love to Belle. I loved Belle, understand. Belle only.” Then, “I did my best. Remember that, I did my best.” I began to cry in the van. The driver said in a slow, cool voice, “Crazy people, up there, ma’am. Well-known crazy people. You come to supper with me.” But he was too soft and kind; I needed something else. I went back to my hotel, I moaned on my bed, I wept over the brown leaves of Miss Marshall’s pathetic manuscript, which was a diatribe against ganja tea containing no information about African medicine at all, and fell asleep crying. Later, I woke in the dark and went out on the beach and purchased myself coldly a sexual experience with a poor man who had a family to feed. Then I left that place forever.

Elizabeth in the Hospital

The final file in the “Elizabeth and the Golden City” archive includes a folder labelled “Last Chapter.” It is made up of fragments of text from one to three pages in length and in no obvious order. The breakdown of syntax, semantics, and punctuation in the fragments captures and reflects the deterioration of Elizabeth’s (and Engel’s) health, and eventual death from cancer, with which the narrative ends.

At first I came to in the recovery room or was it limbo where the bright ceiling lights shone through crossed sets of chromium refrigerator racks and there were racks of bodies and I was wracked I had been racked on the racks, they had cracked me open like a crab to get the crab in my bones, and the floor of the operating room had been white tile so they could hose down my blood and my excrement and there were counters over which hung mallets and bone saws as if it were a butcher shop. I was broken. I wasn’t grateful for their cleverness. “Poor Lizzie” I said, but I couldn’t speak, it was unspeakable here and I was floating and I could see my broken self, just a frail body after all, not an important person. And a man came along and jammed something over my nose. “Don’t fight, now, it’s oxygen, breathe in.” Then I was in a room and Mother was there, her face a little younger and clearer than the last time I saw her, filled out, squarer, but Mother, definitely, “Oh, Mummy.” “It’s Frances, Liz. How are you now?” I drifted on the river, trailing my fingertips in the water, trying to turn myself back into an I from an O and a year later I said, “I’m here.” Then I

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went under again, and it was like that for a long time, I was an amphibian, and I came up knowing little things, why people didn’t talk about operations, not to scare the others, what there was under water, a kind of sea lettuce with pink and blue flowers, how soft the world was. A man came in and said, “It was a good operation, you did well, you’re a brave girl,” and I wanted to say I hadn’t had anything to do with it, just lent them my body for a day, but instead I smiled like a baby and fell asleep but not before I heard him whisper to Frances, “She’s all right.” Which was permission. I was in and out for days and liked the dormouse life of out better; the rest was technical with equipment made of chrome and steel, a triangle bar to use to get on the triangle bedpan, huge surgical residents surging in like a football team, bloody, it seemed, from the or, to unveil the leg, pinch toes, pronounce it existed. And flowers, people sent flowers, so I could crawl into their corollas and sleep again. The time passed. I sat naked under a shower on a metal chair and a nurse rubbed me down like a horse. I was afraid of the black nurses in the night and then I was ashamed and then I fell into the teapot and slept again. Frances was faithful, afternoons she came and talked and we drifted during that dreamy time (I had been moved to a convalescent ward), we whispered about our childhood; and I told her how the doctor had said I had had tb and I hadn’t had tb, wasn’t that odd. Anne had it, not me. “Oh, you did, too. You were there for ages. I didn’t remember when you got back.” “No, it was Anne, our sister Anne.” “Anne wasn’t our sister. She was Millie’s.* That’s why Mother moved in with Millie, because you were both in the same hospital.” “I wasn’t.” “You were, from one to three.” “We sat on a wall. We said, ‘I don’t care about Anne, you don’t care about Anne.’” “Anne died. She was Millie’s little girl. I would get jealous because Mother kept going to see you. I wasn’t allowed.” The San.

*Millie/Milly was Frances’s and Elizabeth’s mother’s friend. She was a milliner at “The Hat Box.” Her daughter Anne died when Frances and Elizabeth were girls.

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… Fancy Frances telling me that, at the end of my life: that I’d been sent to the hospital, abandoned, sent home again at three.* That the Anne who died was somehow me. That I didn’t know, couldn’t look myself up in the psychology books: ignorance of the law is no excuse, but it’s better to know; now when I go to the hospital I can take a bucket big enough for all my tears. I just hoped every doctor was Daddy come to take me home. I still want to reach up my small arms. Bette,** who ill-wishes me and always has, says, “Well, Lizzie, you were always a death-lover.” No, sister, escape-artist: that’s different. Had more hatches than you, too. I can ill-wish in return. Frances comes. She’s happy again, with her job and her knitting for grandchildren, and her faith. I’d thought of being cremated, but I won’t do it, for her sake: it would give her pain. The resurrection of her body is real to her. That’s something I’ve not been able to understand, the degree to which Bette’s right: I don’t want another life. More of this one, yes. Further adventures, even through the looking glass, but that grand retrospective the Bible promises will only find me boiling in oil, and I’ve had enough heat. Enough cold. Was it terrible in the passes or did they fade out in their sleep? Was, for one, Death kind? That woman I met in the hospital, who shared my room, then went to another: she died hard. I heard her. They know that, though; I told them. They’ll be kind to me. Quick, somebody bring me some roses: I’m afraid. There’s Wordsworth, though, and Yeats. Eliot is not a comfort often now. I can just get up, there, and I know it’s on the end shelf in the passage if Ag – dear Ag, much improved and room to go – hasn’t taken it … I spent my life in the book business because I loved books. Some of the hours were very rich. There could be more. It’s all I can ask. They’ll find when they’re all gone that there never was anything so good as a book: portable, the best that was thought and said, cheap, capable of being with you in the worst of times. They’ll find when they’ve ground them into the mud that they had a generation of writers, especially the women. *Fragment page with “towards the end” written at top. **Bette/Betty Allen is one of Elizabeth’s co-workers at Roe, Allen, Levy. See Part II, Toronto, 1.

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They’ll say, those were grand times, then, people aren’t doing it any more, I wonder why, nothing’s as good here, now, was it what we did to the education system or when we took those ridiculous subsidies away? The mad glitter of fear. The glitter of mad fear. The flitter of … I’d like to know more about bats. Levy said something about a project on bats. A whole new project, a new vocabulary, I could get a cancer society runner for the books, maybe, work in a different sort of chair. There are almost as many bats as rats, when we begin to exterminate them the insect population gets ahead of us, they’re ugly, complicated, useful, little known. I shall study bats. I’ll find something. A new beginning? Or am I just trying to put my time in? What do you want me to do, siphon the dew off the rose? This is the lustre on the rose, the final statement – you cannot have life without death, love without hate, a full white belly without a starving black one.* The struggle to balance the paradox is the work of our lives – never to accept slavery, ugliness, death, incompletion, this is the importance of continuing to live, the squirrel circling in Iggdrassil’s cage: we were not born brute. Sometimes we sink from the fight, but the instinct in the good continues against cruelty, against hunger, destruction, death. Else why do I still live? Tom Sawyer, sing at my funeral in your sweet, high, country voice. In an hour, the pain will come again. In a month it will need injections instead of prescriptions and I will have to decide to live in hospital or not to live. So to avoid thinking of it, I write the night. The pain brings back all my bile to me, is a hive of angry bees, a bone saw. The other day it occurred to me that I live now entirely in a world of paradox. Illness has brought me a kind of health and happiness I did not have before, and in the midst of apparent poverty (Roe, Allen, Levy cannot pay me for work I cannot do) I am in wealth. Drugs have made me ugly but my friends assure me that I grow beautiful in other ways. I live entirely selfishly, am absorbed only by my disease and the world of pure idea grows steadily in perspective. I am dying and I have never felt more alive. *mea box 34 file 63. Holograph.

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Incapable of sex – not for mechanical reasons only – I am surrounded by men – doctors but also old friends. Drugged, I think clearly and see at last the truism that people have the defects of their qualities. Faithful Frances doggedly keeps me a younger sister, fears I will become a drug addict, advises me to exercise. Flighty Agnes is steady now but poised to flee when I do. Alan has rented a truck and come south to keep me company. He is as usual quiet, solitary, warm. I have servants – my cleaning woman and two Health Service helpers, and friends and family. This time of my life has been taken up with drugs, disease and revelation. I decided to examine during my lucid periods areas previously taken for granted because of course if one’s own personal history cannot be taken for granted – and mine could not, now, after Frances – the emotional sequences of a “hospital child” being different from those of one nurtured at home as carefully as Frances was and I had presumed that I was – nothing can be taken for granted. And if you have your own presumptions wrong you are clearly living someone else’s life. I recalled certain feelings of inauthenticity. They were now explained. So, perhaps, was my inability to write fiction. My life being a fiction, I lacked the strain of fantasy the reality-tied need to free themselves. What the adopted lack is a family romance. They cannot therefore enter into the changeling’s pretense and leave reality as Amelia can. One of my novelists suffers this. Ego – egg – if only the ego did shatter so obviously that one swam glaucous on the kitchen floor sobbing for the support of a shell. There was the death of the Major, the discovery and death of my father, the discovery of my disease. Some relief – life now being simpler, the tie to Frances loosened in its neurotic and heartening aspects both. I was unleashed, could grow more. And I knew why I was tired, followed directions, had the operation – hoped. Though they found it throughout the system as well. If I had kept on having lovers I’d have known before. There were no symptoms but a smoker’s cough, weariness, middle-age. I dropped one night like an egg on a terrazzo floor, wondered if it mattered; in the end, because of my strange inner voice (“You are better than that, you are someone, sometimes, Lizzie.”) I phoned my oncologist. And met, eventually, a young psychiatrist. I condescended to him. “I publish psy-

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chiatrists.” Being a man well-trained, he made no reply. Quizzical eyebrows. “But you notice,” I said, “I have not gone to one of them.” This is not social. Patients’ accounts of the process are tedious – the rummaging and ransacking of the inner life is all absorbing. And the outer still goes on. The past is assaulted as the present fails to hang fire and the future waits with a baseball bat around the corner. He was young, had no prejudices against women – though he thought they ought to be realists about taking care of children – he sat and pretended to be a stone while I thrashed my octopus resentments against him. I heard myself cry out for shape, form. Oh, the unsatisfactoriness of reality! The unravelling of resentment, the unwinding of one’s own spool, self-paring to the painful core. Oh, something hurt! The young man sat and listened. Hearing, I at least discerned not the story but the pattern (no – he was clever – missed no detail), repeated many observations I had forgotten. I reproached him often for his ordinariness, though that was his charm – a brilliant listener – and, when I got tired, said it was frivolous. Self-indulgent on both our parts. (There are easier ways to earn a medical living, he said.) A fine defender of the process. “It helps,” he said. “You no longer accept dying.” I expected that in the transference he would become my imaginary lover, was disappointed when he did not. Nor was he my son. He did not become God. Sometimes I railed against him. I thrashed my Jews against him. “It’s a religion,” he said stonily. “Mine, too.” He was my rock – remains so. I would rather lover, confidant, friend, but by agreement – I need to shelter in his shadow and admit the need – he will stay so. How, I wonder when I think of him, does he manage to take his personality off when he dresses for work? The past peeled off the foolishness, some of the fear. “Know thyself” was the motto of our Scanlon’s School. I swallowed, learned to know a Lizzie who was an entrail made of greed, a Lizzie who reappeared in crisis, lamprey-mouthed. Who could not care for children when she was a child herself, though she had managed, as she had walked, lame, and seen, blind, because she had to. I emerged with a certain respect for her and all those of us who function when we cannot – most of us, perhaps. How did she get that way? What happened? Frances had made her steady way through her life, never swayed or fallen – found her Major, attached

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herself, gone plodding on through the worst of things. But for Elizabeth it was all desert or jungle, the abyss or the mountain, fall or achievement. I recovered from my operation slowly, went back to work, struggled more than I see now was necessary, helped Frances with the correspondence regarding Father’s estate, then again collapsed – cancer is not an easy disease. I lay for days in hospital, unfocussed with painkillers, humiliated – the ability to go alone to the toilet began to appear to be the most important thing in life, which of course it is, and Frances, faithful, visited, leaving her business for an hour if I sounded weak or depressed – tender, kind, though I had my tongue out for the acid that had always given our relationship flavour. Those were strange days because although much was gone, including the acid that had previously linked us, and the talk was necessarily small, the removal of current convention allowed the past to surface differently. One day she said, “Of course, you must be used to hospital.”* “Why?” “You spent so much of your childhood here.” “No I didn’t. You must remember Anne. Our sister Anne.” “We didn’t have a sister Anne. It was you. You in the San.” “Anne died.” “She was Milly’s Anne. That’s how Mother got to know Milly again.” “In London? Windsor?” “Here, dodo. In Toronto. We lived in the Beaches, near the library. You liked the library.” “Anne, Anne, frying pan,” I recited. “Milly went mad when Anne died. Her husband had died too.” “Milly made hats.” “We moved to Scanlon’s.” “Daddy came home from the war.” “When you came home from the hospital I hated you. Then I felt guilty. I forced a whole lot of sugar, once, down your throat.” I remembered being face down in the mud. I remembered “black is white.” Fascist Frances. “Kids,” I said.

*The lines that follow repeat an earlier scene but are retained here for the sense they convey of how Elizabeth’s disease is affecting her memory and grasp of reality.

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Oh hey nonny nonny diddy drooo … silla!* Elizabeth lies in a sunbeam in a white crib, Little Lizzie looking for something to play with. Used to play with her feet, but what’s this, too far away now, something happening. Her hands just reach to her panties and what’s in them. Thwack! Splat! In comes nurse. I’ll get you, nurse. I’ll grow and I’ll get you. The first time she has eaten in a week. Hey nonny Elizabeth groanwise in another crib, thinking, change my life, know all the theories, take control, be a leader, lead oneself, not be a passive victim. But an active victim! They don’t know that one, do they, they don’t dream it, the diamond dildo, the planned accident, the drilled nervous system, drowned liver. Passive victim! None of that. Smile curves up her face in a cartoon-U. Cartoon you. Elizabeth, get yourself together; can’t Cath, dream wanting, watch me do my madness. Not what I once was, not who I once was, here’s Fran the Fan, smart face, visiting chair across, pretending Mum: thwack Fran, shit on the fan, that’s how it happened, there’s how it was. The man sits and stares at her. Live it again? she asks. He nods. She weeps. Slough off this skin and that skin, how many skins: alligator, crocodile, boa, rattlesnake, garter snake, copperhead (watch!), newt, toad, frog: will Little Lizzie croak? Same time next week. Who’s that man? Daddy? Doctor? Daddy doctor do? Take me home to dandle on your handle? Ho, funny Lizzie. Everybody has a daddy, Annie says so. What’s war? This one? That one? Ho, hairy hands. New moons. Shirts grow hands. Nice girls have blonde curls, take me home, Daddy, I’m yours. Regis Kanner, “There are child-seducers, I think. I’m writing an article about them.” Victim toddles to victor, slathers puppy-wise on feet. Do something dreadful to me, give me a trauma to get me out of housework. Elizabeth is delicate. This baby can hear, nurse. She responds to the tick of the watch. Child,

*New fragment, untitled.

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don’t be greedy. When they raise their legs that way they’re ready to be trained. Over-ready, some say. Try the protein pudding. The examined life, the only one worth living: unless you prefer the cloud, the mystical haze on the mountaintop, the vee-shaped opening there, the slit through which the unicorn just disappeared, there by the hippogriff with the ambergris in his claws: you can see her: Arethusa! A hard way after her: you can do it if you will. Go. Pick up and go; discipline yourself to wander. No charts, choplogic: chastity. With regard to the examined life, the men’s liberation movement, chapter 467, East Junction, has pronounced a ban on all books by female authors which advance the cause of the hero only when he has been symbolically castrated. Oedipus wrecks. Is it the erl-king, come, my changeling? Is it your time, your turn? Let me comb your hair, my pretty one, dandle you a last time on my knee. He will take good care of you; he wears a magic cloak. Made, I believe, of the skins of disobedient mice. Bad bunnies, too? No, I’ve never heard that. All grey, and very soft, with an edging of little pink tails in scallops. Very pretty, my jewel: and he’ll take you to a hole in the mountainside, strike the stone with his staff, and a great cavern will light up, a great white shining cavern, and you will go in. It is magic there, but oh, yes, rather cold. Iced sweeties to eat. And a little cake to bring home for Nannie? Perhaps, if you go without complaint. Here he comes with his sword. Oh, it pricks? Sleep well, my darling. The earth breathes through coils of round pink shrimp. Who is the old woman at the web? And will she unweave each day for me, too? Not for you child, you are not her child. You must find another way. Who are the old women with the spindles and scissors and string? Go with the dancers, child, don’t look that way. Why did they take me to the room with the saws and the tiles? Why were the lights bright? Why was I cold and alone? Until they broke me? Every crab has its day, my child. Elizabeth murmurs to no one who lives in the ceiling. I want to come back. I want to come back.

PA R T I I I

Trompe l’Oeil

Part III’s title is taken from the title Engel jotted on the segment she wrote about Agassiz’s and Bryant’s visit with the Major on St Joseph Island. From the French for, literally, “deceives the eye,” the phrase refers to an optical illusion, in particular the kind presented by painting styles intended to produce an illusion of reality. In the context of her project in this manuscript, this was an evocative choice of title on Engel’s part and is retained here.

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Agassiz and Bryant Visit the Major

The nineteenth-century Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz and the American poet William Cullen Bryant visit Rains. From early drafts of the novel, this section is unlikely to have been part of a completed manuscript but it illustrates very clearly the connection between the real-life Rains and Engel’s fictional Major.

It was August, but the air had the freshness of fall. Six men had set out from Michilimakinac in a little sloop. The wind was brisk, and the way the boat rode on the waves, the way the wind pushed and the waves danced, put the photographer in mind of music: brisk music. A minuet, perhaps. Something that harked back to Europe, formality, the artifice he loved. Reality dissected and rearranged, perhaps, he thought. Small pieces sawing against the fragments, patterned, light descending and fractured. Photographs with music, he thought. In series. Failing to invent son et lumières. The day was bright and they had begun early, at seven o’clock. He and his companions – the Great Poet, the Great Naturalist, the Surveyor, the Poster and the Boatman (called, like everyone else up here who wasn’t Duran, Cadotte) – were warmly dressed in knitted sailors’ jerseys and red and black chequered woolen shirts they had purchased at the Fort. Mr Schoolcraft, the Indian agent at the Fort, was sending them to visit his brother-in-law Mr Johnson, the Indian agent at the American Soo. Some of these waters, and the green island that floated on them, were, of course, in British hands, part of the Canadas, as the surveyor would soon

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prove. But it seemed to the photographer, as the hull of the sloop slapped the waves and was tickled back, that this body of water, where Lake Michigan trickled into Lake Huron and was buffeted by the current from Superior to the north, was indivisible. The clumsy-looking canoes of the Indians crossed it in all directions; he was informed that in winter, ice made a bridge between the Canadas and the Americas; a dangerous bridge, and many a woman was widowed on it in the spring when the ice was soft and slobby and the men were mocassinning [sic] to the American ports to find work on the ships, but it pleased him to think of the frozen water linking the broken pieces of land again. The photographer dozed on the bow of the sloop. What was missing was the smell of salt, otherwise he could have been sailing on Milford Sound again at his cousin’s in Devon, for the mixture of rock and green seemed the same to him. To the north there were high headlands, when you could see them, which he could not now, and the islands they ran into were as often green, grazing cattle. Schoolcraft said that when he first came here, the channel, spring and fall, was seething with commerce, the natives busy in their tribal migrations to sugar bush or hunting ground: trading, fighting, yowling, setting up wigwams or emerging as silent watchers, shadows swifter than the fleeting fish. There was no one about now. Bryant and Agassiz and the surveyor were talking quietly in the cabin. Cadotte was at the tiller. His man, who was half native (…) though there was something Irish about him, dozed beside him. The photographer’s large apparatus, including a fine tripod he had purchased in an instrument shop in Exeter which was the envy of the surveyor, three legs sectioned from one long mahogany pole, neat as buckwheat kernels, was safely stowed below. One of the comfortable cow-islands lay on the horizon like a floating green eyebrow. The sun beat down. He opened his woolen shirt and tugged at the collar of his jersey. The stiff breeze flew in and licked at his weathered neck. He pushed up a sleeve and rubbed at his mosquito bites. The New World was prodigal in its insect life. Cadotte was saying something: come about, he guessed. Cat’s paws on the surface of the water: there was a great deal of air above this expanse of water, America was like an elastic Europe, the distance between places stretched entirely. The air was entitled to play with itself, produce cat’s paws and squalls. It did. Before Cadotte had the next words half out the photographer had

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scrambled off the deck, flattened himself under the swinging boom, and slipped down into the cabin. “A squall,” he told the others as a lazy wave slapped the cabin and sent tendrils of water dripping down. The poet and the naturalist braced themselves and it was well they did: the boat heeled abruptly in the opposite direction. The photographer saw Cadotte scramble to take down the mainsail. There was no fear: this had happened before in their long journey up the Lakes. There was, however, respect. They had all long ago lost their European feeling that a body filled with fresh water was a pond. Bryant, the head of the party, eased himself out of the hold to speak to the crew and turned back to say, “There’s a headland coming up, and we’re putting in.” They were thrashed against each other, smiled grimly as heads cracked against shoulders. Delicate Agassiz sat somewhat primly on the surveyor’s boxes. The photographer glared at his tripod, to make sure it was fastened securely: a leg was one thing, but a beautifully sectioned mahogany pole was nothing to break: that would be sacrilege. The surveyor, a quiet, grizzled man, said nothing as usual. A black cloud passed over them: no, it was the body of the crewman, stretched over the opening to better manoeuvre his jib: a wide body, but not slack. The photographer noticed, because he had that sort of eye, that there were no buttons on his clothing. Buttons must be hard to come by here. Soon enough the grating sound of keel on gravel. The photographer reached for his cases, his tripod. So did the surveyor. This was a working journey. The poet and the naturalist slung linen bags containing their instruments of notation on their shoulders, then gamely helped the technicians with their luggage. The photographer made his leap, and wet his feet after passing his second case to the surveyor. Cadotte was last off with the tripod. Then all four grasped the rope in a routine they seemed to have developed years ago and hauled: their shallop was safe. The photographer never lost his sense of discovery, of being stout Cortez, the first one to look at new land. His first glimpse, the image stamped on the glass plate of his interior eye, was the most important. There was a man, and he had been braying something against the waves, and the retentive part of the photographer’s eye knew that what the man had been braying was Byron’s “Roll on thou great and … blue ocean, roll/ Ten thousand ships pass over Thee in vain.” He was that sort of man. They had or had not met him before. His aspect was the same as that of

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many others they had met on islands, headlands, shores of little bays: the demeanour of an officer, the leftovers of authority (buttons of brass) in his dress. The folds in the brow, the tan cheeks: how many years had he stood declaiming, waiting for them? “My home is on the next headland, come and refresh yourselves.” Mine host was healthier than some, and merry. A man of middle height, a brisk head of curly hair that was red once, red as a cat’s. Blue eyes and a nose that seemed to curl. And the settler’s longing for people from home. He was exchanging regimental numbers with the surveyor. The photographer had had enough of those. He was exchanging zoological information with the naturalist. The photographer took no interest. He shouldered his tripod, picked up his cases (though the crewman was glad to take one) and picked his way up the shingle, following. The home would be a lowly cabin: it was always thus. One or two vestiges of English graciousness, a worn pretty woman, a handful of scrawny babes. Manners recovered for the moment then subsidence to bare brutishness in a life where there was no time to look around or even read. They followed him across the low, flat landscape. A path had been cleared through the brush: there was that much evidence of industry. Yes, he said, there had once been a fort, the North West Company. Gone, now. Not enough trade. Island a disappointment, soil good, however. Maple trees were always ladylike to the photographer. Here a whole court was waiting. “In spring,” the Captain said (no, he was a Major), “the savages come to make their sugar.” The cabin was something of a surprise: wide and narrow, it appeared to have an extra wing. It sat away from the water, well sheltered, facing a sunny cleared yard. Two boys working a well-tended garden dropped their spades with a shout. The Major responded with a regimental bark. “My wife and her sister,” he said, “are from home, having decided that the weather was fit for laundry. In due time, you shall have a repast. Meanwhile, a tot of rum?” The photographer set his instruments down. He was not here to take pictures of cabins or retired officers or even kitchen gardens. It was the natives who interested him, and certain landscapes. And some, when he could arrange it, of the naturalist’s specimens; though Agassiz preferred him to

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draw, which was indeed, given the state of the art or the science (they had not decided yet which Daguerre’s primitive invention was to be), more accurate. But something else interested him more: how they lived here. “May I,” he asked, “inspect your harbour, sir?” indicating the retreating backs of the boys. Through the windbreak, a lane barely holding back hops and wild roses and burgeoning raspberry canes led to a small bay: a sailing sloop much like Cadotte’s was drawn up, its centerboard removed for inspection. Otherwise the shore seemed to be swarming with children. A gaggle were splashing about with bedsheets in the water, there were crows and cries. At the edge of the bush, a tall woman stood stirring the contents of a large iron sugaring kettle. She looked over at the photographer as the boys cried out. She laid her wooden paddle aside, straightened and rubbed her hands on her apron. Her belly was big with child. The other one sat on a chair, patiently rubbing a stocking with soap. She, when she saw the photographer, merely nodded and went on, handing the finished stocking to a girl child, who romped with it to the water, joyfully swishing it about in the little waves. They were a charming sight, that is what he thought, not, as he saw later he ought to have thought, how hard they work, how they are wasted and coarsened, but how beautiful it is! Miss Fan, Miss Eliza sporting with their brood on the shore, making a game of slavery, festival frolic out of laundry day … or, he suspected after he had counted the children, week. If they recognised him they did not show it at first. They shook his hands quite firmly, moved with the dignity of their immensity away from their chores, gave instructions to the larger children. The boys had already pelted back to the garden to dig and pluck for the visitors. “We have met before,” said the photographer to the taller one, the fair Eliza. “In another life,” she laughed. “Isn’t it true, Fan, it was quite another life?” “Indeed,” said Frances, “indeed it was.” “Twelve years in the Canadas. Six on this island. Three in this house.” “And are you contented with this industry?” “If our wealth could be counted in offspring, we are rich! There is much to do, we are never idle; there is game, we do not starve. William is an

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excellent schoolmaster, the children lack not for knowledge. If we work like savages we do so in our own interest, as they do themselves. It is enough.” If the women were both heavy with children, he could not tell which was farther ahead. Indeed, after they had approached the cabin, he saw little of them. Benches were set out in the sun, his party crouched around a crude table. Teacups and a rum pot were set out. A child had been sent to milk a cow, which bellowed somewhere beyond the trees. The party was deep in conversation. The Major was describing his world. For Agassiz he produced specimen after specimen: he was an amateur naturalist. For Bryant, he produced quotation after quotation: he was a lover of literature. For the surveyor, he produced detailed information of the bays and harbours of the channel, all of which he had thought of inhabiting. He described the coast to the north, where the savages obtained copper, a prospect that interested Mr Agassiz. He examined the photographer’s equipment with interest and some affectation of information. He was, after all, a cousin of the famous Mr Brunel, and had worked with him, though it was not, after all, his “line.” A myriad of little hands placed plates before them, filled them with steaming soup, handed out spoons. When they failed in perfect courtesy, the Major cuffed them like dogs, though not, the photographer saw, with unseemly force. They hustled away, but not to cry. Game appeared: venison and rabbit that tasted exquisitely of its grazing. The photographer wondered if anything was left inside the cabin. Much had been brought from England: pewter plates and spoons, silver knives and ivory-handled forks. Large iron serving-pots had some marks of local smithery. There was a crystal salt-dish, a vinaigrette that gleamed unseemingly in the sun. The children brought chairs from inside, one of which was an old Sheraton with which the new climate did not agree. Eliza sat further down, next to the photographer, who could not think of anything to say. The children were presented as a garland: Owen and Agnes, Allen, Hoel (the name gave the photographer a pang) down to little Walter. They blew off again like a cloud of midges, back to the garden, the poultry house and the shore. There was a floating island in a grand china bowl. The photographer wished their plates were made of leaves. Coarse conversation made him wince: but none started after dinner, for the Major was all Science and Himself. The photographer rose and adjusted

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his tripod against his vows and his best interest. He must record this chapter, this coincidence, yes, this evolution: from the drawing room to nature’s drawing room, perhaps. Yes, that would be a title. Ah, but they were both with child; it would not do. Instead, he must immortalize Mr Agassiz, Mr Bryant, the ebullient Major Rains. Inside, going uninvited into a house that was all kitchen, as these cabins generally were, he interrogated an unwilling Eliza. “So you are the two squaws who live with the half-pay man up there on St Joe’s.” “We have that reputation.” He said quietly that it struck him as a practical choice. “It is,” she said, “isn’t it, Fan?” Fan was sitting inside now, perhaps too weary to stir. Her time was nearer, she was heavy. The photographer noticed that she wore coarse workman’s boots. “Practical, yes, practical,” she murmured. “My father was put in prison after my mother died,” Eliza said. “He had gone surety for another man’s debt. Everything was sold. My sister and I were offered our keep in return for employment in a public house. We had an older sister, consumptive, married to a wretch who offered to take me instead. But my father had said to the Major, ‘take care of my ducklings,’ so the Major did, and in the end, I preferred to be with Fan.” To whom she offered a reviving cup of herbal tea. “I would not be able to live without her,” Fanny muttered. “We are too often with children,” Eliza said. “It is difficult in the winter. The Indian women help us and in return we have taught them to knot and sew; though they are very skilled and need not much instruction. At first they were frightening to us, with their sharp stares, the way they creep so close. We need them: they teach us how we may live.” Fanny had picked up her handwork: she was knitting a little pair of silken boots. “Some day,” Eliza said, “they won’t know how to unpick a jersey, cut moccasins, turn acorns into buttons for boots. We have had a strange education, haven’t we, Fan? And you, Mister?” The photographer opined that he had not learned so much. “All I can undertake,” he said in parting, “is to protect your reputations!” “Never,” Fanny laughed in sudden animation … so that he remembered the black-eyed laughter of another shore. “Never! You can’t. The church precedes us, follows us, advances on us. We are sinners, Mister, do not seek to take our station away.”

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“Fanny not only accepts her lot, but also defends it,” Eliza said briskly. “Good-bye, Mister.” The photographer left the cabin quickly. The Major glared at him as he rejoined the procession to the sloop. As they continued up the river, the photographer listened to the poet and the naturalist discussing their late host (the surveyor, who thought in numbers, was whistling off key through his front teeth), failing to disclose his prior knowledge of the women. He knew from Eliza’s remarks that the ménage has been a cause of scandal in the colony and on those shores not half a rod sometimes away that were the littoral of the great republic. He heard talk of immorality and immortality. Of genius and genes (with regard to the great Brunel); of the scandalous behaviour of the citizenry of Britain under the regency. He had a gentle smile; he knew that: it seduced his clientele for him. But as they spoke of the grave danger to society from such liaisons his brow darkened. Surely his boatmen, surely Cadotte himself, whose ancestry had brought no wife with him, were at some point in their genesis the products of unblessed and irregular liaisons. Where was the priest to hallow such unions as took place by campfires under August moons and produced the sturdiest stock of the continent? Where was the termagant wife of the Major, whose house, Penrhynn, he had also visited in the hope of a commission: the pretty daughter, Lissa, named for an island far away, had failed to survive and he missed the chance of committing her to canvas, though the termagant wife would cheerfully have had her sharp, mean countenance delineated. She had been boney and coy: that sort of woman who in the practical spirit of wartime procured a young officer of twenty and spent the rest of her years ruing her folly, growing long in the tooth as he grew large in his ways. There was no possibility of enjoyment: he cast her off somewhere and brought his girls to the colonies. It was immoral and sane. The photographer dreamed of riding two horses with one saddle, Fran of the Spirit, Eliza of the Soul, between them a complete woman, neither a termagant (because the old wife sopped the evil? Having cast her off, was the Major permanently glad and kind?) both gentle, pretty and poor. They would be indebted to him: he would pay out his favours generously. Roving the high hills with his rifle for their game! Casting a line for them! Taking the perch and pike and pickerel off in their nets! Oh, the dear, delicate

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white-necked girls, a thousand times blessed now the pianoforte was gone, what he would give for them! “Well,” said Agassiz, “every man to his own taste: when there are too many to feed we’re all out at the elbows. The pike is a rare specimen and well preserved.” The specimen jar gave off a reek of rum. “Schoolcraft said they were native women. I suppose it’s to his credit: protecting the reputations of gentlewomen. He knows a thing or two: your verse, as well, Bryant.” “Aye,” said Bryant, “he’s a gentleman; or was. Look, the night is falling and the geese even now begin to go south.” Great wings bent and blistered the air over them. The boatmen tacked towards the rapids at the Sault, and away and towards and away until they found their current. The wings continued to luff over their heads. I must marry, the photographer thought; but when I see a white neck I wonder if I don’t want to break it.

Elizabeth and the Golden City A Lexicon by Marian Engel Engel included her name on this cover page to a section she labeled “Elizabeth and the Golden City: A Lexicon.” Just how this material would fit into her novel was still a question in her mind; it was tied to “The Vanishing Lakes” manuscript, which was far less developed than “Elizabeth and the Golden City.” As I note in Lifelines, “The Vanishing Lakes” displays a science-fiction dimension, thanks to characters such as the Pythoness (the Keeper of the Information), the Queen (“I am nothing but myself”), an old man named Quair (an information disposer), and two sisters on a quest to find their mother, Iris. Names change throughout “The Vanishing Lakes.” The sisters, first called Iliana and Elva, become Ildehorn and Eva, and later Ildehorn and Tanis. The Queen’s name, Etoile de Scandelion, changes to Echine and then Ekina. These changes reflect both the in-progress nature of “The Vanishing Lakes” and the discontinuity in Elizabeth’s return, over the course of her life, to the fantasy of “The Golden City.” Situated here, and edited for length, “The Golden City” lexicon provides a suggestive, open-ended conclusion to the presentation in this volume of Engel’s final work.

In the Golden City two girls are sitting in gray togas by the well. They hold their clay water jugs in their laps. They are holding hands because they are sisters and they love each other. A centurion comes by and asks for water. Each of the girls fills his cup halfway and he thanks them gravely. The person who knows where the Golden City is is Belle Rivers. She is fat and she has big dark blue eyes and she lives on the flats by the river. I don’t know why she knows that, but she does.

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Elizabeth, age 11. In the Golden City there are a lot of different weathers because the people feel they need a change; but none of them is dangerous, except the storms, which they watch from their beautiful windows and are excited by. In the Golden City two young women, sisters, are sitting by the well, waiting for their Centurion to appear. They are Elva and Iliana, one dark, one fair. They wear fawn-coloured robes and carry pitchers of gray clay. The sun seeps through the yellow stones of the city and casts soft light on their young faces. When their lover appears he will have the hard name of Scad. And he will be unable to choose between them. In the Golden City everything is very beautiful but since Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder, it is sometimes hard to figure the interior decoration out. Fortunately, everyone is very kind. The people who like plastic flowers forgive those for whom nothing but oriental poppies of the finest salmon-pink will do. The poppy women are amused by plaster collie dogs and express secret longings for vulgar cut-velvet cushions. There is a mad harmony. But even in the Golden City they have not figured out what to do with plastic water-jugs made in the shape of ancient clay amphorae. In the Golden City, she wrote, both the body and the sexual aspect disappear, leaving souls free to conjoin without reference to race or sex, beauty or ugliness, health or hairiness. There are those who find the making of judgments this essential state imposes too much for them: they would rather have their dealings informed by superficial characteristics. A sense of moral value is essential if you are to choose a circle of friends, for if the good are not always beautiful, the choices they make among objects of clothing are sometimes a metaphor for the state of their souls. With no guideposts, many citizens are simply lost. And since the Golden City is not the territory of the virtuous alone, it is important to make the choice of one’s companions carefully, so as to avoid purchasing the wrong lampshades. A dilemma no philosopher has quite yet been able to solve for us. The Golden City has two shapes, or maybe three. It is built along a hill, in the highlands that rise from the end of the Vanishing Lakes, but there is a flat part in the centre, at the heart of the city, which is laid out like a square,

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with arches and arcades of the soft, yellow, worn stone that everything is made of there. In the centre of the square is a fountain. The water comes out of a moss-covered rock in the centre. There is a basin around the rock, and the women sit on the edge of it in the morning with their water-jars. The stores and the craftsmen’s shops are in the arcade, and some of the proprietors live over the stores. The houses of ordinary citizens are built in all four directions from the square, up and downhill, so that everything is rough and charming and uneven. Each house is built of stone and has two parts: the living room opens to the street, then there is a courtyard; the kitchen is at the back of the courtyard; the bedrooms are over the kitchen. Sometimes two neighbours pierce holes in their courtyard walls so that they can talk to each other. Uphill from the main cluster of houses there are a few villas occupied by the Elders. The castle is downhill from the square, on another piece of flat ground. It looks grand from the outside, but it was designed using tricks of perspective and is really quite small. It is inhabited by Etoile de Scandelion, Queen and Pythoness, who lives in the Keep. Elizabeth, age 14 In the Golden City there is no fighting. Elizabeth, age 9 In the Golden City everyone will be able to talk to everyone. In the Golden City everyone will be really equal, even the people who are not beautiful. GC 4 in the dark days of their short winter (for weather has no savour when it does not change) the citizens decorate their houses with the glowing beautiful colours of peacock feathers, the blues, greens and purples that shimmer and melt towards each other without consuming each other, or they paint with the ochre that abounds in the cliffs around them, highlighting their designs with traces of gold dust, product of the secret mines that are the city’s prosperity, wherein each year all the young men of twenty spend a month carefully with hammer and chisel, separating the mineral of the soft, thick

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veins from the harder stone around it; and the young women of twenty mix the powdery gold with ground alabaster, and form it into shapes like big buttons, and paint it grey. In this form it is sewn into the costumes of two men of forty, who set out over the mountains to sell it where it has always been sold. And if they are set upon, these are weights, are they not, to keep their soft costumes from blowing in the wind? And every household receives a small measure of fine gilt dust, to cheer itself. And there are also fruits: not only the lemons of the late fall season, to shed a yellow glow in baskets set about, scenting the atmosphere, but also a special apple, red as a pomegranate, which, as it ages on mantelpieces, glows rose-and-orange in the firelight. So in the dull season, they console themselves with colour, and the scent of rosemary, thyme, and bay in their fireplaces. So that it is soon over. Travelers tell of other wonders: magical animals, apes with jeweled foreheads. But these are the true facts. history of the golden city. The site of the Golden City has of course been occupied by one tribe or another since time began, but its foundation as a city, member of a network of other cities in the region, dates back many centuries to the period when, from overseas, the Britomartians arrived on the coast, and, because of their superior equipment, were able to penetrate the mountain ridge that shelters still the Golden City from the vicissitudes of the quarrelsome coastal regions. The ancients say that the shouts of the Britomartians could be heard many leagues away and when they arrived, short men with straight hair and red faces, inclined to stoutness, indeed corpulence, the citizens quailed. “They stalked the streets like self-important geese,” the descendants of the Bitter Ones say; but the descendants of the Fair Ones point out that they were not despots; that they were good organisers; that they were well traveled, and brought to the territory of the Golden City much of the vegetation that serves to feed it now. If they seemed in their arrogance to be locked into a fixed place and a fixed opinion of their place in the Great Chain of Being (whereas the citizens of the Golden City have taken pride in floating along its nodes), they were not despots. The pleasant idleness that had been a feature of Golden City existence vanished; in return, the houses were put

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in good repair, new palaces and hostelries constructed and the aqueduct system, which has always produced excellent water from the chain of Vanishing Lakes, repaired to a state of efficiency it rarely had attained. So that although there were complaints, the quality of life improved because of excellent management, and for a while under their rule the citizens were busy and happy. Conflict arose, however, when the Britomartians attempted to impose their religion, which the Elders on several grounds found objectionable, on the citizens. This religion was monotheistic – not a drawback – but also, it was felt, life-denying and masochistic. Many of its tenets and proverbs were felt to be quite irrelevant to the Golden City and special objection was made when the citizens were advised by wandering Britomartians (often of sallow complexion and such meagreness of form that the citizens wondered if they were red, stout, Britomartians at all) that the present life, being only a preparation for a life to come after death, was valueless and must be lived meanly and carefully rather than enjoyed to the full as was the habit in those times. Ethical rules were extended to all customs, including eating, drinking, ablution (which was almost forbidden on the grounds that it exposed one to the torments of one’s own bodily desires), relations with people of the opposite sex (reduced to a minimum for the sake of decency the Golden Citizens failed to understand, for they were not licentious, only human), indeed, every action a citizen performed between waking and sleeping was regulated according to these incomprehensible rules: life was reduced to a sacrifice to a martyred Godhead. The Elders conferred on the subject. “It cannot be true,” one said, “for the Britomartian officials do not themselves conform to these rules.” “They appear to give much power to the Ethical Tribe.” “They give the Ethical Tribe power over us, not over themselves.” “The Ethical Tribe have taken to telling our children that we are all unworthy.” “Unworthy of what?” “Unworthy of service to the Martyred God.” “They are therefore teaching our children that we have no worth: that the life of the Golden City is inferior to the life in Britomars.” “They are very clever: if our descendants feel unworthy, they will sink to the level of servants, and become extremely useful to the Britomartians.”

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“And in a further stage they will become rebellious and angry: this we must subvert.” “At any rate, I cannot tolerate this martyrdom: the bloodless God feasts on dullness, unhappiness, a leaching lack of joy.” “Yet I have laid hands on their documents: the recommendations of the bloodless God were not always so. The interpretation of the documents has been changed to satisfy a need for unhappiness that I dislike.” “Why would one need unhappiness?” “Happy people are free and self-willed. The Ethical Tribe are religious servants of the Political Tribe. Perhaps they do not even know what they do, which is relieving the Political Tribe of the necessity of military control.” “We must subvert them, then.” “It is better to prevent them from access to our children.” Now the citizens of the Golden City, while being human, were on the whole disinclined to quarrel and conflict; long tradition had accustomed them to settle their disputes with words rather than cudgels, and they were not acquisitive because the climate was kind to them. They valued the work of their artisans but were on the whole content to share what they had with their neighbours, because sharing reduced anxiety and covetousness. The rules that the Ethical Tribe were insisting they follow began, however, to make them feel that in lacking the covetous feelings that Ethical Tribe advised them were sinful, they were inferior in some way. Thus a certain proportion of them became guilty followers of the Ethical ministers and when in Council it was suggested that the Ethical ministers be prevented from teaching the children, these citizens protested: were their descendants to be deprived of absolute moral treasure? Were their children to remain happily unaware that there was something beyond happiness that could be attained only by undergoing misery? The Council members stood firm. “Yes,” they said. The Britomartian administrators, who were housed outside the City in a grand building that has now crumbled to dust, were angered by this decision and as a result withdrew from the Golden Citizens the privilege of descending the main road to refresh themselves in the Rose of Roses, the last of the Vanishing Lakes. When the citizens fanned out along paths that they and their sheep and goats had used long before the excellent Britomartian Road was constructed, the Britomartians announced that any sinner who bathed

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in the Vanishing Lakes would be put to death. The Ethical Tribe reinforced this message by saying that such martyrdom was for the good of the soul. The Council met again, and called the General Assembly together. “This is a mistaken rule,” they said, “and a short-sighted one, but they mean it, and it must be kept. Do not let even the wildest small boy go there to swim. The existence of an immortal soul is questionable; the existence of a mortal body is unquestionable; it is not in our interests to be destroyed for the good of a questionable spirit.” A woman who liked to be good said, “They make these rules in order to create virtue in us.” “There is virtue in order,” the Elders said, “but it is to their own benefit that they keep us thus in order, not to ours. To refresh oneself in the Lakes at the end of the day is not a sin, it is an Enjoyment.” “Enjoyment is sin,” said a dark man with a deep voice. “I have seen their Documents,” countered the Chief Elder; “that statement is a possible interpretation, but a wrong one. Their Documents advise a wise abstinence from aggression and lasciviousness, and one interpreter has given way to his fear of lust; on the whole, however, it is possible to subject oneself to their religion without losing everything we are: but not under this Interpretation, which would conclude that to be alive is Sin.” “What shall we do? Why should we let them remove our joy?” This question was asked by Miriel, a woman of beauty and sensuality who was yet a good mother and a fine soul, as everyone knew. “Refrain from the use of the Lakes. Keep your children close to you. Subvert the Doctrine by living quietly and with joy. Fulfill reasonable orders. Bring unreasonable orders to the Council before you defy them.” This policy produced an atmosphere of apparent docility, though the Ethical Tribe complained that the daily Groups for Youth were ill-attended; the administration, however, did nothing to counter it. The new vines were bearing their first crops, the olive harvest appeared to be near, and the lemons and hard-apples, grapefruit and sting-berries that the region was famous for were ready to bear bounteously. The people bore their sacrifice with patience, though they worked less well, knowing that their reward of transformation from hot citizens to cool fishes would not be available at the end of the day. Several asked the Elders to apply to the administration for a change in the ruling. This the Elders refused to do. “It is better to leave the matter alone,” they said.

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They did, however, speak to the Colonel when they were asked to refrain from sexual congress except to conceive a child. “This is too far from our custom,” they said. “We are a sensual people and not lascivious; we object to being ruled in such an intimate matter by those from another tribe.” “I agree that it is ignominious,” the Colonel said, “but I must bring up another matter. We have been with you many years, guiding your enterprise to good profit, and furthering the nourishment of the citizens of Britomars as well. But we are haunted by the fact that you have no class of prostitutes: this deprives us of sexual activity unless we marry, and your women are unwilling to marry us.” “But your Ethical Tribe preaches that this is wrong.” “Our Ethical Tribe is given to moral fault-finding to a degree which you have recognised. It is sometimes appropriate to practise hypocrisy, as you have learned, for we are saddled with the Ethical Tribe as you are saddled with us. If you establish a House of Pleasure, I will rescind the ruling regarding the lakes. I hope you are aware that we have caught several young offenders there and let them off with a warning.” The Colonel appeared to see himself as munificent in his kindness; his warnings were, however, beatings of a nature that repelled the Citizens; the Elders chose not to respond. “A house of Whose Pleasure?” they asked instead. “Why, the pleasure of my men!” “The Ethical Tribe would force it to close.” “The Ethical Tribe are here at my pleasure; if you establish such a house, I can send them away.” “No woman of good character would participate in such a House.” “Then find me some women of bad character!” The temptation to dispose of the Ethical Tribe, who were spoilers of happiness and leisure, was great, but the committal of women to the Britomartians’ use was a serious matter. One Elder pointed out that in other times and places, wives and daughters of citizens had been taken without permission, and that the Britomartians had heretofore taken their pleasure among the Hill Women: perhaps concessions could now be made. Walren the Facetious suggested that perhaps Citizens were, after all, possessed by tutelary angels as the Ethical Tribe tried to make them believe: they could send their tutelary angels to a whorehouse. During this conversation the Female Citizens sat silent. At length, their

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spokesperson, Miriel, said this: “You are talking about an abstract proposition, the disposition of bodies which you regard as your property. We, the women, are the actual bodies involved. Therefore I suggest that before you accede to the suggestion of the Chief Britomartian, you list the names of twenty Citinesses [sic] who would be suitable inhabitants of your state brothel. You may include mine, because my husband is dead, and cannot thus be dishonoured even though I am. Go ahead, inscribe the names of twenty women whom you would choose to copulate with the Britomartian staff. Which of your wives? Which of your daughters? Which of us are to be labeled exiles and go outside the City – would you have it inside, to teach our Young how to behave? – to be the receptacles of Foreign Seed? “There is another question you have not considered: such sexual activity as the Commandant suggests is expressly against the Commandments of the Ethical Tribe. What accounts for this divergence of will? Or morals? The Military Tribe would, I am sure, prefer, like their predecessors of Greece and Rome and ill repute, a squadron of Virgins, but have we any to spare? Where is Isla, daughter of Scad? Where is Anja, daughter of Thrum? Would they be suitable? Can you sacrifice them, Scad and Thrum? And will they not be sacrifices not only to the Military Tribe, but also to the Ethical Tribe, and because of their profession, also scorned by us when they return, pregnant or diseased by foreign seed, among us? And supposing they grow fond of their lovers, fond of a life of choosing among strong men? Rich and proud because of favours bestowed by a looting soldiery? We have no concept of an eternity that keeps our souls pure for a demanding God: we believe in One Life and one only. Who would blame them if they adopted the life we had submitted them to with an eventual joy and returned to scorn ours? Or left us forever in the belief that they could be equal citizens somewhere beyond the reach of either our simplicity or the sanctions of the Ethical Tribe? Your deliberations, gentle men, are incomplete.” Thus the Long Council came into being, which lasted from that moment until the time many moons later that Britomars recalled both the Ethical and the Administrative Tribes on the grounds that profits were no longer sufficient to justify the succouring of the Golden City and its neighbour states. Other realms had been found, the Colonel told the Elders, where the treasure was grander and the citizens were more amenable to rule. Before the Ethical Tribe withdrew, the weary leaders had extracted promises from the citizenry: you must keep our rules, you must work for the future, you must forget the pleasures of the present; look not at the ground

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before you, but into the sky; we will return, to offer you once more your salvation; you are doomed. You must promise not to forget us. It was easy to promise. The Golden City fell again into a gentle state of disrepair. The children played by the shore of the Rose of Roses Lake. Miriel returned to the compounding of essences and attars, which she had had to abandon in order to lead the children into secret places away from the Ethical Tribe. The men retired to their houses and spent days smoking their hookah pipes. Quiet sank over the city. Slowly, they stopped looking towards the mountains in fear of another, less reasonable invasion. Sometimes they said, as they watched citizens who had taken it all seriously walk the streets nervously in fear of the future that lay beyond the grave, that a warlike invasion was preferable; then they took the words back: life, they said, is always preferable to death. They maintained their innocence, if not their prosperity. There were years of hard weather, when the silkworms died and only the apple trees withstood the cold, after the Britomartians left. In these years, certain citizens consoled each other by clinging to discarded Documents, that promised better times hereafter. The Elders preferred to endure; the Golden City shrank in size and population, but maintained its nature for many centuries. GC Only the few are called to the Golden City, and this call exists only in the form of a high, sweet whistle, the warble of a strange small bird, which few people notice; once, however, a citizen hears it, it becomes a preoccupation, and then he knows that he must set out on the long pilgrimage. Eva and Ildelorn heard it one day when they were taking the long walk home through the woods at the water’s edge. They knew bird calls, and they knew there had never been one like this before. After attempting to spot the elusive warbler, they sat down on a bench, facing each other. They were reluctant to talk. Finally, Eva, the older, broke the silence by saying, “It’s Iris.” “I know.” “We must find out how to follow her.” They had lived all their lives in the same town, but not always with their mother, for Iris had one day departed summarily with a man known as Ivo the Preacher, leaving them with an aunt. Harsh words had been said about Iris, but Eva and Ildelorn were faithful to her memory. “But what do we do?” Eva asked.

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“We wait,” said Ildelorn. After that they heard the bird’s call everywhere and sometimes neglected their work and their lovers to follow its flitting voice. Sometimes it led them to the bridge, the square, other times to the river valley. One day, they were sure that they saw it perched on a bush, a small plucky yellow-green creature, by a shack belonging to the Fat Woman, whose mother was a clairvoyant and reprobate. They blenched, but they knocked. They had known the Fat Woman, Belle Rivers, in school. Never paid any attention to her. She had dandruff and hard skin on the backs of her thick arms. But they knew her voice and it said, “Come in.” To their surprise, the shack was a clean and seemly place, containing two made beds and a low table. There was no surprise in Belle. “I knew you’d come,” she said. “The bird brought us.” “So you’re going after her.” “Yes.” “I tried once. I turned back. It’s hard. There’s too much of me. I knew them, you know. I was … big for my age. My mother’s out. Sit down on the other bed.” They sat neatly side by side and prayed there was no malice in her. “If you go, you don’t come back. I wish I had got there. It’s long. It’s hard. I put on flesh with every breath. You have to find the Vanishing Lakes. But you won’t get back. Why do you want to go?” “The bird keeps calling us.” She nodded. There were rolls of fat around her neck and her breath came slowly. She had singularly lovely violet eyes with long lashes. “She got there. I know she did. I believe Ivo made it too. They were a handsome couple. Your father never understood, nor your auntie. “My mother’s in jail. They don’t like us here. It would have been better for me to go.” “Didn’t you hear the bird?” Belle Rivers frowned. “They say once you hear the bird, you can’t hear anything else. It’s over for you unless you go. I heard him once, then he went away. Many are called but few get up. Iris left me a map. Or he did.” She opened the drawer in the table and hauled it towards her enormous belly; pawing through its contents she looked like a kangaroo at her pouch.

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There were not many papers, and she found what she wanted at the bottom. “There.” A few squiggly lines, an arrow pointing west. “Where do you start?” Eva asked. “You go west. You don’t take a lot. The Indian will help you.” The writing on the paper said, “You approach the Golden City through the Vanishing Lakes.” “It’s hard,” Belle Rivers said. “But you’ll make it. Iris was nicer than people said. It was just that she got the call. You’ll make out fine. You were always good to me.” “But we never did anything for you.” “You noticed me, and you didn’t throw stones. Close the door when you go. It costs me a lot to get up these days.” “Do you need anything? Food, clothing? Heat?” “I have an arrangement. You’ll make out fine. I’ll miss you.” They felt like thin wafers as they walked away from the shed. Do not deceive yourself that all is blandness in the Golden City. It is ruled from a high tower by a dark woman who calls herself Echine de Scandelion after an ancient queen, who travels about the City (are these journeys forays? expeditions?) accompanied by twenty-seven tame leopards, a beautiful ram with golden eyes, and a flight of falcons. She is on the whole a generously neglectful ruler, respectful of the democratic institutions of her people; her own [only?] duty, aside from a ceremonial presence at seasonal festivals, where her costumes indicate a hieratic relation of sorts with ancient underworld queens and empresses, is to make somewhat arbitrary judgments separating the locked decisions of the high court. Otherwise, she figures not as a leader to the women of the Golden City, but as a rival. It is not her beauty that is astonishing, it is her sense of her own particularity; she is, as it were, her own moon, she puts a high value on herself, and when she walks, green-eyed, high-cheeked, clothed in garments of a stunning purity of line and colour, a woman of almost perfect beauty, but never innocence, the men’s eyes turn towards her; she is north to their swinging sexual compasses, they fall into a kind of madness and follow her, once and once only, one at a time, up to her high place, like sleepwalkers. She is feared therefore as a rival by the young women, and a group of

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them has organised to protect themselves against her. Others, who consider themselves wiser, regard her descents from above as a ceremonial and initiatory ritual for the young men. The two camps oppose each other and consider each other fools. The older women are divided also, but do not consider her important. No young man, nor any centurion of merit, has remained with La Scandelion for longer than three days. Only one has boasted of her sexual powers, saying that the diamond she bore was not in her soul: he left the Golden City subsequently and forever. Some hold also that baptism by sexual jealousy is an important maturing ritual for the women of the Golden City. Asa Meriel has sworn to avenge her sister Alys, who, impatient for her blue-eyed lover’s return, drowned herself in the communal well. Elva and Iliana are unsure of their attitudes, not having been tested yet, but one is inclined towards the protesting puritans, and one to the party of inevitability. Neither is sure that she would be able to endure the loss of Scad’s attention for three days. Neither is sure whose affections Scad’s feelings are directed towards. Ildelorn was distressed at this improbable offer from the hieratic queen, whose role she found distasteful. Surely the continual acquisition of other women’s lovers was a role that would pall. And it was almost shaming to be denied the role of one who had a lover. “Are you the current Pythoness?” she asked, aware that in some societies succession was acquired by the bold asking, though she did not feel boldness of the right kind was in her. The Queen laughed, “Goodness, no,” she said. “I am nothing but myself.” Then she called an old man who hovered in front of the rank of soldiers, “Quair,” she said, “explain to this woman the role of the Pythoness.” “The Pythoness is the Keeper of the Information,” he said. “Go with him and see,” the Queen said. “It is good you have come. The other has contracted the Disease, which I will later explain. Providence is in order, I am glad to say.” Ildelorn, helpless in her obedience, followed the old man Quair through a dank corridor, up a fanned marble staircase to a high, lighter, and altogether more pleasant level of the castle, and entered a bright white room with curious corkscrew vaulting and, at eye level, slotted trenches in the stone walls out of which long rolls of paper projected at odd angles. At a table in the centre of the room sat a woman, glaring. “You can’t come in,” she said. “This is Lady Ildelorn,” said Old Man Quair, “The chosen successor. She who has come at the right time.”

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Ildelorn quivered, fearful that her presence would cause the old woman to have a tantrum or combust; but strangely she did neither; she straightened her shoulders, sat erect, rose with a straight back, smiled, and shed a decade. She seemed almost young. She bowed to Ildelorn, waved to Quair, and slid out a door in the far wall. “Where will she go?” “Down the lakes,” he said, “to the mines; where she chooses. You’ll get it too.” “Show me how it works.” She had heard of information systems, but seen none like this: above the slots in the wall were rows and rows of keys; application of pressure to them in the correct order produced from the slots information on any subject heard of by man; and the information was ranked and coded according to the age of the person wishing to acquire it. “What do you want to know?” he asked. “The date of the Battle of Waterloo?” He went to a book on the long table, looked up the code, and pressed a series of buttons. A sliver of paper emerged from a slot, “Napoleon and Wellington, Waterloo, Belgium, Europe, 1814,” she read. It seemed simple enough. There should be a way, she thought, of matching the book to the code slots eventually, though she did not have a mechanical mind. “Had enough?” Quair asked. “What do I do with it?” He took the paper from her hand, screwed it in a pellet, tossed it into his gullet, and swallowed it down. “Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest,” he said, cackling. “That’s my job.” She stared at him so thoroughly that he explained that he was an information disposer: when the user of the information had finished with it, he handed it to Quair, who compressed it into one of the breakfast tablets that were handed out every morning in the Golden City. “The vitamins are in the ink,” he said. “There’s your room,” opening a door in the west wall, showing a plain chamber with bed and wardrobe. “Now go and look at the view.” It was magnificent: a wide window-door led to a terrace with a squat-pillared balustrade from which Ildelorn could see the mountains, the lakes and the whole of the city. There was also a small bathing pool and an arbour for shade. Leading her back into the library, Quair told her to sit at the head of the table. But soon the door opened to admit the Queen. Ildelorn was well brought up: she rose. “The Librarian does not stand for the Queen,” she

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was told. “The work is too heavy for that. Quair, to your baskets.” Quair mumbled and grumbled and shuffled to a row of woven baskets underneath the information slots, which he emptied one into the other with grunting and groaning and curses against women. When he had carted the result out the door Ildelorn said, “Do you suppose he’s the cause of the Disease? I haven’t heard anyone groan about women that way since I left home.” The Queen smiled. “He’s what you call a throwback, I suppose. He resents being ruled by women, and by women who are younger than he is. Now, do you want me to tell you what you are to do?” “I’m rather confused.” “You should be. An hour ago you had just entered the palace to complain that no centurion had selected you; now you are Pythoness, or Librarian. It is much to absorb. The cause of the Disease is, in my view, a plethora of information. You will eventually have to be replaced, but for the present moment you are to be quartered here and you will have much to do with centurions, because they are the purveyors of the information.” “I thought they were about drilling and fighting.” Ekina de Scandelion shook her head. “The Golden City is totally vulnerable to attack. The centurions are capable only of staging primitive performances that reassure our enemies that we know of their existence. Their main function is to attend the palace daily and in the course of their visits obtain for the citizens those pieces of information about events and societies outside ourselves that the citizens fancy they require. You are the person who, through the indexes on the table and the pressure-points on the walls, makes this information available to them. The schoolchildren wish it on one level, the adults on another. You procure it for the centurions, who master it, and pass it on.” “Aren’t the citizens allowed to find it out for themselves?” “There are too many of them.” “He who distributes the information has the power.” “She who distributes the food has the power. And you have less power than you think. You must pass what you obtain directly to the centurion who has asked for it. In this form, it is incredibly quickly absorbed by him, and he immediately seeks out his client and passes it on. “There is one other important point: all this information is, as far as is possible, primary information: dates and facts, rather than views. Historians of philosophy are overlooked in favour of the philosophers themselves. The

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basic religious texts from the other cultures are here, but not the commentaries. Those who were once Jews object to the loss of the interpretations of the rabbis but if we accept those we must accept the curious distortions of reality put forward by historical novelists. Look,” she pressed a combination of buttons that proved to pertain to the single date, November 11, 1914. Wheels whirred, and like a thin white tongue, a sheet of manna containing the events of the day poured forth. Ildelorn smelled poppies, heard dying guns, and read simply that the First World War had come to an end under the following circumstances. There was no commentary. “It is a dry library,” she said. “Is there no literature?” “There is information on literature and there is poetry and drama that is written in poetry. Novels, because they are essentially commentaries on contemporary history, are omitted. So is literary criticism. We cannot, my dear Ildelorn, contain everything. Besides, the greatest number of requests come for scientific information.” “Music?” “Ah, you must look to your index. Read me the numbers.” Ildelorn chose to look up the name of Beethoven, and information at the tenth level regarding the “Archduke” Trio. With lightning speed, a screed appeared and Ildelorn ruthlessly ripped it from the slot when the wheels had stopped moving. It was the complete score, printed in its three parts and with a clarity that Ildelorn could not believe. “Am I to eat this?” she asked. “It’s a treasure.” “No, that you take to your music machine.” “And the poetry?” “The centurions are the ones who recite.” “The Odyssey? The Iliad? The Battle of Malden? The Panchatantra?” “Naturally the longer ones take several days. And the poetry is assigned only to certain of them, who have eloquence, who meet us in the Hall in the wintertime and cite the great lies and accomplishments of yore.” A curious thought fled across Ildelorn’s mind, like Queen Matilda hustling through the snow: was T.S. Eliot reactivating cultural principles when he made his own poetry of quotations from others, or were his multiple but by no means overwhelming citations a protection from his own feelings – you say it, I can’t? With this equipment, which was essentially, if what the Queen said were true – and things in the Golden City had a tendency to be true – the memory of civilisation, it would be possible to play the most

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elegant games. The Queen caught her daydreaming, and smiled. “Yes, it’s extraordinary,” she said. “But even our people use it badly, and some not at all. They choose not to remember their old worlds, or to remember the bad things in case they are wounded by the loss of the good. They take refuge in comfort, in personal relations. They see the past as ‘battles long ago,’ the present as an escape from corruption. You are in a position to see much more; but it is the choice-making that will be difficult for you. You have only one lifetime, only a part of that, before the Disease strikes you. How will you decide what you wish to know? There are civilisations you have not heard of? What will you wish to master? And if you study night and day, what will it prosper you? You succeed a woman who was quite defeated by the question, and she succeeded one who devoted all his free time to learning in the little pool how to do the jellyfish float. You have not attained to heaven yet: nothing is easy. You have choices to make.” Ildelorn shook her head. “That has always been my problem: out of many things, how does one choose one?” “If you are mystical like Iris your mother, you will wait to be chosen.” Ildelorn shook her head. “I like choices that branch out from other choices, but one often loses the way. Because, you see, I am not one who is often chosen, I do not wish to spend my life waiting for others to decide.” “Yours is the painful way, and it is easy to be lost. You have four days to master the system, and in that time you will discover some new choices that there are to be made. Just as there are colours in the spectrum that human beings cannot see, there are cultures that people outside the Golden City have not heard of. I would advise you to investigate them, or at least to admit the possibility that they are worth investigation, particularly in the matter of epic poetry and scholastic philosophy. The hermeneutics are also worthy of attention. If I said more I would be guiding you by my personal taste, which is forbidden. You know the way. Good cess to you. And do not feel obliged to conserve the manna, or again to eat it: it becomes fodder for the fowl, and is easily procured.” She left as quickly as she had come. Ildelorn sat in front of the black volumes with a spinning head. Although Tanis [formerly Eva] and Ildelorn were not, in terms of their background, rich, they were middle-class young women, raised by an intelligent and progressive aunt in a clean little town, and spared much suffering. A term

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of approbation in those regions, “all wool and a yard wide,” had always made them laugh: “and it scratches, too,” they used to say. They were used to heavy woolen clothing in winter, strangers to the lush softness of silk and cashmere; but they had never, [sic] either, suffered. Childhood diseases reminded them not of pain but of bowls of warm milk in which fragments of toast floated in a flotsam of butter-beads. They had always had well-mended gloves and good leather shoes. They had always had good, if unromantic food: root vegetables and apples and beef and plenty of salted pig. Now, as they trod the long stoney valleys and the blisters on their feet calcified into a kind of horn, they looked down on their rough, chipped hands as if they were strangers. They laid their bruised bones down at night in sheds and shanties on rough blankets often inadequate to keep out the mountain chill and wondered who they were. Their lips bled, their skin was thin, peeled in the sun and chapped in the wind. They did not know how long they had been on this journey; they did not know when it would end; they knew only that they were bone-weary and disappointed; quests, should, after all, be left to the writers of fiction. One day, however, they noticed that, having made their way considerably north, the climate was getting milder. In the days that followed it became possible to shed some of their outer garments, vests and shawls that they had taken from the shelters. The landscape had not changed in texture or colour; they trod the same stoney paths along the lakes which were, at sunrise and sunset, flamingocoloured; the birds that passed were still silver or rosy depending on the light; only marmot-whistles disturbed their silence. But the air was warmer and seemed less harsh on their martyred skin. One day after the long march, Tanis said, “It’s warm enough to swim.” They folded their ragged clothing neatly on the shore, and stepped for the first time into the waters of the narrow lake. O! The warmth that flooded them, the silken softness; for they had expected these lakes, which flowed from the mountains to the north, to be cold as ice; yet they were warm here, warm and soft around their ankles, around their knees, and, as they walked carefully, hand in hand, across the soft sand of the lake-bottom, to the breast, to the shoulders, talcum-soft, soothing. Delighted, they began to move their knees like pistons so that they shot them into the air, causing their breasts to rise and fall on the water like apples or balloons.

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They then swam for a while, in long, swift strokes that eased the tension in their muscles. When they came out of the water, they felt renewed, restored, and they continued to swim in the evening for many days. As the lakes warmed, so did the climate; small succulent items of vegetation began to appear among the rocks, pale green leaves with miniscule florets of pink and blue; yellow specimens on a very small scale of St John’s Wort and spurge; small wild pansies and violets. The return of vegetation for some reason stirred their sexual feelings, and one evening, after swimming and consuming a simple meal, each set out from the evening’s shelter in an opposite direction in search of completion. Ildelorn, heading towards the western foothills along a path that did not look new, encountered, just where the small flowers increased in height to form a heather-bed, a beautiful young man, who took her immediately into his arms and made love to her. As her hands grasped his back and she gazed up to meet his face, she realised that his upper body was now that of an eagle, that she was grasping soft, firm, feathers. He made love to her with an eloquence that she was long to remember, and, brushing her with a firm-quilled wing, left her to drowse on the heather-bed. Tanis, meanwhile, seated herself on a large rock beside a lake. A young man appeared, beckoned. She rose to follow him and found herself prone with her arms around a torso that, although human, was smooth with the scales of a salmon. They made love, and he swam away and left her superbly happy. These experiences were, they decided, indications that their quest for the Golden City was turning in a better direction, perhaps even coming to an end. But for many days there was no other sign that the pilgrimage was over: it was only sweeter. The Golden City Towards evening we realised with amazement that the lake we were walking along was the last of them. We took hands and swung ourselves in a great turn to look down the length of the florid chain we had marched along for so many, many days. The Vanishing Lakes glittered in the dying light, and as they were wont to do, turned rose-madder in the sunset, receding one from

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the other infinitely, maddeningly (because we knew them too well) into the distance. Small birds rose in the sky. There was a great silence. We turned again and saw ahead of us at the end of the last lake, a great row of grey pilings incised with the faces of old, bearded men. They were like totems and unlike totems, for their lines were blurred as if the faces had been drawn with charcoal, and the faces were human and not stylised. Behind them bobbed and sagged a line of forms which might have been large-stemmed flowers but which became, as we approached, human figures, necessarily reduced in size by the scale of the piling-men. And as we moved towards them they stepped from behind the pilings and moved towards us with solemn smiles. Above them a pair of eagles danced and soared in the sky. Behind them were indeterminate fawn-coloured hills and gnarled trees. A tall woman in grey stepped out and extended her arms to us in a gesture that was both acclamation and embrace. “Welcome, O daughters of Iris,” she said, “Welcome, to the Golden City.” We were overcome with worry and weariness and began to cry. “Dry your tears, O daughters of Iris, for the night is come, and we will take you to rest. You have reached your destination. There is provender for you, and grace, the long journey is over, it is time to restore yourselves, to rest, to enter into contemplation. This is a place of plenty, and here you will abide.” So saying, she gathered us to her, and we rested our heads on her shoulders. We felt the rise of her bosom against our thin cheeks. “There,” she said, “Follow me.” And without looking at the other figures, but knowing they* were like her, dressed in grey, and solemn, and a rest to look at, Tanis and Ildelorn picked up their packs and filed between the tall wooden bearded and compassionate figures. Two young men took the packs from them and, lightened, they followed her up a soft, winding track among the brown hills and trees which the light was now gilding. “It is not far,” she said. Presently, a straggle of stone buildings announced that the city was near. The young women took comfort in the presence of soft yellow stone and shelter, and were taken to the centre of a square and told to sit on the edge

*Engel’s text switches pronouns from the first to the third person plural.

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of a round, ancient stone well. There, children and young women brought them water to drink and to wash themselves with, from stone pitchers without any weight, and sweetmeats unwrapped from napkins which showed no stain. The food was sweet but not sticky, the texture of watermelon without syrup, and left no sour taste. The people stood in a semi-circle around them and watched them consume the sweetmeats, and Tanis and Ildelorn watched them back, first searching to see if Iris was among them. She was not, but they felt no disappointment. It was enough to have arrived. They surveyed the faces before them and found them kindly. The women and children wore gaily-coloured caps with their sober costumes and the men a kind of soft turban. They were tall and short, bearded and clean-shaven, dark and fair. Their faces were tanned, their expression quiet and dignified. The houses around them were low and square and joined to each other. One was distinguished by a great stone stele. And on the other side of the Golden City from the lakes, the hills rose again, this time wooded with dark fir trees. The tall woman took them into one of the houses, into a low, quiet room dominated by a bouquet of flowers round as roses, waxy as camellias, and showed them their bed, blankets of feathers laid on soft stone benches. “Rest,” she said. “We will come for you tomorrow.” She lit a torch that hung in a bracket on the wall. “This will keep you company. You are safe here.” A young girl with arms extended brought her a parcel of linens. “Put these garments on. They will keep you warm.” They undressed when the door had closed and sank down on their sleeping benches. Enveloped in firm softness, they slept at once, though not without reaching for each other’s hands.

Archival Sources of Engel Material

montreal Elizabeth and the Golden City / mea box 34 file 36 The Major and His Diary, i / mea box 34 file 46 The Major at McGill / mea box 34 file 49 The Major and His Diary, ii / mea Box 34 file 46 Middle-age Memories of Montreal / mea Box 34 file 45 Leaving Montreal / mea Box 34 file 52 toronto Toronto / mea Box 34 file 55, part 1 Elizabeth in Her 30s / mea Box 34 file 56 Elizabeth at 50, Remebering Her 40s / mea Box 34 file 55, part 2 Elizabeth, Publisher and Writer / mea Box 34 file 60 The Major’s Funeral / mea Box 34 file 61 Elizabeth Finds Her Father / mea Box 34 file 65 Elizabeth in the Hospital / mea Box 34 file 66 trompe l’œil Agassiz and Bryant Visit the Major / mea Box 34 file 25 Elizabeth and the Golden City: A Lexicon / mea Box 34 file 40

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Notes

introduction 1 Marian Engel Archive (mea) box 32 file 19. 2 Other examples that might be mentioned from the same general period in Upper Canada are Elizabeth Simcoe (1762–1850), Susan Mein Sibbald (1783–1866), Frances Stewart (1794–1872), and Anne Langton (1804–1896), to name only these. 3 Gray, 71–2. 4 St. Joseph Island: A Tour and Historical Guide. Jackileen R. Rains explains that puddingstone is “a jasper conglomerate formed over a billion years ago when bits of jasper and quartz were gathered together with sand and other substances which were then bonded together by volcanic action … Pioneers, on first observing these unique stones, thought they looked like fruit puddings containing cherries, plums and raisins and so they named them pudding stones” (Rains, 16). 5 mea box 31 file 21. 6 mea box 31 file 21. chapter one 1 See the bibliography for details of key books and sources, including Bayliss (1938), Landon (1944), Jameson (1838), Agassiz (1850), Bryant (1850), Hett (1939), Hale (1952), Rains (1988, 2005), St Joseph Historical Society # 600048, “Rains Family History/Genealogy (2003),” and other papers and files in the St Joseph Township Library and the St Joseph Island Museum. 2 Bayliss references throughout this volume are to the 1938 book Historic St. Joseph Island not to Rivers of Destiny, 1955). 3 Bayliss, 105.

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4 The spelling of “descendants” as “descendents” in the original title of the geneaology has been silently corrected in references throughout this book, including in the bibliography. 5 Stories were not limited to the Major. For example, I heard that Mary Seton, lady-in-waiting for Mary Queen of Scots, was an ancestor of the Doubleday sisters. Marian Engel must have been given the same information, as it appears noted in one of her cahiers (mea box 34 file 4). Stories about the Major sometimes contradict one another: the Major was/was not a drinker; the Major did/did not get along with his sons. 6 The confusion may arise from the difficult-to-decipher birth date in Rains’s Field Book, which Marian Engel copied as 1 June 1789 (mea box 34, file 4). Jackileen Rains also records Rains’s birth date as 1 June 1789 in her 218- page compilation of “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains.” Other sources, however, such as the Baylisses, record Rains’s date of birth as 2 June 1789. 7 St Joseph Historical Society # 60048 states that Rains’s marriage to Ann Williams took place on 11 July 1811, but Rains’s Field Book, Jackileen Rains’s “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains,” and Bayliss all record the Rains-Williams marriage as 15 August 1811. 8 Frances’s children were named Tudor Madoc (Maddock), Owen Roland, Walter William, Edith, Alice, Arthur Morgan, Hoel Dah, Constance Keating, Rupert Raymond, Linda, William Wilfred, and Alma Maria. Elizabeth’s children were named Agnes, Allen Wilfred, Evan Ernest, Blanche, Norman William, Xavier, and Rose. 9 Ann also appears as “Anne” in various references. It has not been possible to locate recorded birth and death dates for her. Moreover, her place of birth (Plymouth) is sometimes confused with that of Stephen Rains (Royal Tunbridge). 10 St Joseph Historical Society # 600048. Date typed to file, April 25, 1996. Source – Census, “Historic Old St. Joe” by Joseph Bayliss, Church and Cemetery, Land Records, Vital Stats. Information provided by Mrs James A. Rains, August 1984. St Joseph Island Museum. 11 St Joseph Historical Society # 600048. 12 Birth dates for the children are listed in the “Rains Family History (2003)”/ “Rains Genealogy,” compiled from a document written by J.E. Bayliss from information provided by Owen Rains, and the “Rains Genealogy,” possibly written by Winnie Brayley (herein “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003”) as: John Soady, circa 1786; William Kingdom Rains, 1789; Ann Rains, 1793; Henry Rains, 18 December 1796; Sophia, also listed as 18 December 1796 (twins? clerical error?); Sara, 13 March 1798; George Brown, 24 May 1802; Frances Mary, 24 May 1802 (twins again?); Rupert Rains, 17 June 1805. The eldest son, John Soady, immigrated to America around the same time as his

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brother William Kingdom (1830). John Soady’s immigration accounts for a line of Rainses in the southern United States. A son of John Rains was a Brig. General in the Confederate Army in the American Civil War (document in the Rains Files, St Joseph Township Library). Meanwhile, Ann married a man named Clarke, and their son John may have been the family member who invested Rains’s money badly and lost it all – although this disaster is also ascribed to another John, son of the Ann Doubleday, elder sister of Frances and Elizabeth. 13 Archival research at the Pembrokeshire County Records Office in Haverfordwest, Wales in April 2006 raises questions about Rains’s relationship to Sutton Lodge and its family ownership. Lambston county Land Tax records from 1791-92, when Rains was a boy of two, list William Summers (also appearing as Sumners and Summons), gentleman, as owner of Sutton Lodge. Neither the name “Morgan” nor the name “Rains” appear in Land Tax records for the period 1792-1830, the year that Rains departed for Canada. An extract from the conveyance for Sutton Lodge dated 9 November 1869, however, states that the “premises were formerly in the tenure of William Summers afterwards of David Morgan subsequently of William Kingdom Rains and are now in the occupation of the said John Perry or his tenants” (Pembrokeshire County Records Office, Haverfordwest, Wales; photocopied 24 April 2006). The name “John Perry” may in fact refer to John Penry Jones, a name included in Francis Jones’s Historic Carmarthenshire Homes and their Families: “In the mid-19th century it [Sutton Lodge] was the residence of John Penry Jones, J.P. D.L., (d. 1872) descended matrilineally from the Penry family of Cwrt y Ceidrim, Llanedy, Carmarthanshire” (268). A letter written on Sutton Lodge letterhead, dated 1 October 1966, from James Hemmingway to Rains descendant Wilfred Harrison reads: “After a more careful examination of the deeds of this property I find that reference is made to William Kingdom Rains although the dates are not specified” (Pembrokeshire County Records Office, Haverfordwest, Wales). Hemmingway adds that the Lambston Baptismal Register is more helpful in establishing Rains’s residency in the area. Indeed, the Register records the baptism on 27 July 1819 of five of Rains’s children by Ann Williams at the church closest to Sutton Lodge. In eighteenth-century England and Wales, “Lodge” sometimes designated a secondary residence on an estate, in which case the “Summers, gentleman,” who appears in the Land Tax records for the period, may have been the principal proprietor, with Rains as the Sutton “lodger.” In the 1980s, Sutton Lodge was a hotel; recently it was under re-construction by a private owner. A photo taken in April 2006 suggests that it was the model for the first house Rains built in Canada, Penrains. 14 Bayliss offers the following details from the British Military Academy at Woolwich: “William Kingdom Rains entered the Royal Military College, Great Marlow,

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Buckinghamshire; and entries in the Muster Roll of the Earl of Chatham’s Company of Gentlemen Cadets, of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, show that he was admitted on October 18, 1803, as No. 137 in a class of 140 cadets; that he was No. 91, six months later, when he joined the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich … Upon graduating from the Royal Military Academy, in June 1805, he ranked No. 34 in his class of 245 cadets. On June 14, 1805, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Artillery. At the time he was but fifteen years and nine months old; at the age of sixteen, he was in charge of a battery” (Bayliss 88–9). This quotation and others dating from the Field Book and its period are in their original spelling and punctuation. Bayliss, 90. Ibid., 91. Copy of letter located in St Joseph Island Museum papers. Nugent dispatch to Lord Bathurst, Trieste, 1 November 1813. St Joseph Island Museum papers. St Joseph Island Museum papers; under the title “to the ‘Papage of Toro and Mura.’” “Copy by Pat Fleming of Kingdom Rains Journal,” 30 July 2003. St Joseph Island Museum papers. Bayliss, 90. Nugent dispatch, 1 November 1813. St Joseph Island Museum papers. This may account for Ann and Rains’s choice of name for their third daughter, Melita Katherine Fletcher, born 7 July 1817. Lissa, Italy. Nura, a river in Italy. Melita – old name of Malta. St Joseph Historical Society # 600048. Letter from Nikki Bosworth, Archivist, Pembrokeshire Record Office, 14 July 2005. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was responsible for building railways and bridges throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. Notable works include the Box Tunnel, the Maidenhead Bridge and the Royal Albert Bridge. He was also a marine engineer reputed for his three ships, the Great Western (1837), Great Britain (1843), and Great Eastern (1858), each the largest vessel in the world at the time. In her unpublished play for radio, Engel presents the following information: “Kingdom … was a Brunel. You remember the great days of steam … Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great engineer! Built the Great Eastern, Clifton Bridge, half the marvellous Victorian engineering projects were his. Think of

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Iron, think of Brunel. Now, Marc Isambard Brunel is the father; his nephew is William Kingdom Rains. So Isambard Kindgom Brunel is the son. So there were two misses Kingdom and one married Rains and one Brunel.” girl camper: “And there were two Misses Doubleday and one married Rains, and the other married Rains.” mea box 22 files 6-13. See also mea box 32 file 19. 29 Destroyed by fire in 1821. 30 Bayliss, 91. 31 A nickname conferred by Engel alone, it would seem, as the Pembrokeshire County Records Office turns up no references to a Francis Jack Doubleday, nor did enquiries to the Carmarthenshire Records Office. 32 St Joseph Historical Society # 600048. 33 Other sources state that he was posted in Malta during these years, but it seems best to rely on Rains’s own Field Book. 34 St Joseph Historical Society # 600048. 35 Lissa died in 1827, aged 15. 36 “It is the opinion of the writer that both Archer and Conrad emigrated to Canada with their father on May 6, 1830 – and that Ann Eve and the remaining children (Nura, Melita and Eva Sophia – Lissa having died in Mar. 1827) were already in Toronto – presumably to reunite with Ann’s sister Katherine, by that time, Mrs. John Fletcher. The date of Ann’s emigration to Canada is not known as of now, except that it was between 1827 and 1830 (…) It’s a known fact that his [Rains’s] son Archer was already living with him, and it is the opinion of the writer that his other son by Ann Williams, Conrad, was also with his father. If this is all true, it means that Ann Williams retained custody of the surviving three girls – Nura Dorothea, Melita Fletcher and Eva Sophia. With them she traveled [sic] to Canada sometime previous to 1830” (St Joseph Historical Society # 600048). 37 One source (St Joseph Historical Society # 600048) suggests that Ann came to Upper Canada earlier, “between 1827 and 1830.” 38 George Richard, whose daughter by his second wife Katherine Gibhardt, Nura Dorothea Turner, attended the 1982 Rains reunion; William (or Thomas William) and Charles Conrad. 39 Two sons (Robert William Sutherland and Norman Sutherland) and four daughters (Annie, Melita, Nura, and Katie). 40 James Henry Sutherland. James B. Sutherland was born in 1812 and died young (21 September 1846), just four years after marriage to Eva Sophia, explaining the fact that the couple had just the one son.

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41 See, for example: Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930; Bridge and Fedorowich, eds. British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity; P.J. Cain, “Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context” in Porter, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century; Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837; Cowan, British Emigration to British North America, 1783–1837; Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century; Harper, Emigration from Northeast Scotland: Willing Exiles; H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: Shovelling Out the Paupers; Porter, “Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” Porter, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century; W.S. Shepperson, British Emigration to North America: Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 42 Hoffman and Taylor, 3. 43 Ibid., ix. chapter two 1 The experiences of nineteenth-century settlers in the Peterborough region have been richly recorded in writings by Moodie and Traill as well as other women such as Frances Stewart (1794–1872), who arrived in 1822, and Anne Langton (1804–1896), who arrived in 1837. Their experiences are helpful in illuminating those of the Doubleday sisters. 2 This, and the information to follow, is from the Sibbald Point Provincial Park pamphlet, “Welcome to Eildon Hall.” 3 Moodie, Traill, Langton, and Stewart also devote considerable attention to describing their housing arrangements. Housing was typically very rudimentary at the outset, with improvements following slowly over the ensuing months and years. 4 Born in 1783, Susan Mein grew up in a well-to-do British family, married Colonel William Sibbald, of the 15th Regiment of Foot, and immigrated to Canada in the mid-1830s. She renamed the Rains house Eildon Hall, and lived there until she moved to Toronto, where she died in 1866. The Memoirs of Susan Sibbald 1783–1812 were edited by her grandson Francis Paget Hett and published in 1926. 5 Sibbald had her portrait done by Henry Bone, King George III’s enamellist, and by the Prince of Wales’s portrait painter, the Royal Academy artist William Owen (The Cultural Heritage of Sibbald Point, 1). The portrait hangs at Eildon Hall Museum today. 6 Historic Houses of Canada, 105. 7 They also had two daughters. In The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (online) Marian Fowler’s entry about Sibbald notes that “William was founder in 1833 of

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a short-lived monthly literary magazine in York, the Canadian Magazine.” The Sibbald Point Provincial Park pamphlet “Welcome to Eildon Hall” tells us a little more of what happened to some of the other Sibbald sons: “While some of Mrs. Sibbald’s sons farmed in Ontario, others had careers in the services overseas. One son, Hugh, was stationed in India for 40 years, where he joined the Civil Service, was involved in the Indian Mutiny, and later engaged in plantations of indigo and spices. He later retired to Eildon Hall bringing many of his treasures with him. In 1856, Captain Thomas Sibbald, R.N., Susan’s eldest living son, retired to Eildon Hall with his family. He took on the many duties of the estate as well as playing an active role in the Georgina community.” The Cultural Heritage of Sibbald Point, 2. Historic Houses of Canada, 106. Marian Fowler, The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (online). The Cultural Heritage of Sibbald Point, 6. Simcoe’s wife, Elizabeth (nee Gwillim, 1762–1850), was another valuable chronicler of nineteenth-century Ontario settlement. See Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary, ed. Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965). Letter from Francis J. Audit, Chief of the Information. Ref. No. 16388 or 85, Ottawa, 3 February 1936. St Joseph Island Museum/Library. According to “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003,” the business arrangement also included Scott’s son Henry and Captain Samuel Peck, a “United States Indian trader.” Bayliss, 95. Francis Paget Hett records in Georgina the following information: “Major R [sic] Raines: shareholder in the Simcoe, first steamboat to ply the lake, built at Holland Landing in 1832” (9). Hett further noted: “In August 1835 Major Raines took his departure, and apparently monopolized the transport facilities of the Lake … It is not known of what Major Raines’s family consisted, except that comprised in it were two beautiful sisters whose acquaintance he had made on a voyage across the Atlantic. It speaks much for his amiability and fascination that they for some years shared his affections” (15). Bayliss, 95. I have not been able to establish the exact date or cause of Archer’s death. If he is buried in Georgina, as some sources say, then his grave might still be found. In her notebooks (mea box 34 files 46 and 53), Engel records Archer’s death as 1831. If she got that date from one of the descendants it may be accurate, in which case Archer would have been just sixteen when he died.

chapter three 1 In her book, Jackileen Rains explains that “Anipich” means deciduous leaf, and

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seems to have been used as a general term for islands in the area having deciduous trees (25). For other accounts of St Joseph, see: “The Western Mail Welsh Roots Competition: The Rains Story,” 20 September 1979 (photocopy, Rains files, St Joseph Township Public Library). The author, unnamed, thanks “those, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have assisted me, and especially Mr. Wilfred Harrison M.A. of Tenby, who first informed me of the Rains connection with our home and aroused my interest in this remarkable man.” This account reads: “Saint Joseph Island was called Anipich by the Indians and is so marked on a 1670 map. The island, which is about 20 miles long and 11 miles wide, was purchased from the Indians in 1798 for the then equivalent of 4 cents per acre. The purchase price included the provision of 700 blankets, 3000 pipes, 432 butchers or scalping knives, and 182 looking glasses.” Rains, 25. Martin, 69. Rains, 25. Rains, 26; Bayliss, 6. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) travelled widely in the American midwest and the Great Lakes areas, serving in various government administrative capacities, including Indian agent at Sault Ste Marie 1822–41. He learned the Natives’ language from his wife and played a role in settling land disputes with the Chippewa. He wrote extensively on Native American cultures and history. Rains, 35. “Gosh-ka-wong,” the Indian name for peninsula. Bayliss (96) suggests it was John Walcott who lost the money but the “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003” records the malefactor as John Clark. Bayliss, 101. This account goes on to recount the fate of “Mr. Scott, former partner of Rains and Thompson, [who] died on St. Joseph subsequent to Mr. Jarvis’ visit in 1839. He had married a half-breed girl, and prior to his death made arrangements for Captain Samuel Peck to take his children to England to be educated. Peck later reported that through letters of introduction furnished him by Major Rains, he was welcomed at many fine homes in England” (Bayliss 103). The “Rains Family History/ Genealogy 2003” document confirms this information and adds further: “Scott died and Peck took Scott’s son Henry back to England, and obtained for the son an estate left by his father. Peck was not wealthy and later sailed the SS ‘Gore’ owned by Thompson, the first steamer to make regular trips from Penatang, via Collingwood, to the Soo, before the opening of the Soo Locks in 1855” (3). Jackileen Rains records: “Scott had withdrawn from the company leaving, of the original group, only Charles Thompson

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23

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as active partner. Mr. Peck, Acting Agent under Thompson, owned the store and carried on the trade. The site became known as Pecksville for a time” (36). Bayliss, 99. Ibid. Along with William Keating (Bayliss 97). As Bayliss explains, “prior to 1841, the local government of the country was conducted by Boards of Magistrates sitting periodically in their chief towns of the several districts” (97). “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003” provides the following information: “His finances gone, the major’s [sic] families were in rather difficult financial circumstances, having only an annuity of $2000 annually which came to frances. eliza and their sister ann (who had remained in England) also each received a similar amount annually from an equity in some houses in London. The annuities ceased in 1888 when the property reverted to the original owners, four years before frances died on 24 December 1892.” That this latter date is erroneous (Frances died 24 November 1892) raises some question about the accuracy of the preceding information. Bayliss, 97. There is some possibility of error here, however, since except for his last household – Westfield in Sailors Encampment – Rains lived on the south shores of St Joseph Island. There are occasional discrepancies in the birthdates of the Rains’s children born at Hentlan. I have chosen to follow Jackileen R. Rains’s “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains,” distributed at the July 2005 Rains family reunion. Other sources suggest that Arthur Morgan was born 18 April 1841 rather than 18 March 1841, that Hoel Dahl was born 5 May 1844 instead of 6 May 1844, and that Constance was born 5 May 1846 and not 15 May 1846. Rose died young (1860). “While still at Hentlan, Major Rains was visited by Professor Louis Agassiz, of Harvard University” (Bayliss 105). Agassiz, 27–8 Engel’s “Rains Notes” (mea box 34 file 53) record Walter’s death as occurring in 1847, while Jackileen Rains’s “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains” records it as 1849 (162). Either way, like Lissa and Archer before him, Walter died young. The date of 1854 (other sources, e.g. “Rains Family History/Genealogy 2003,” indicate 1853) is established through letters that Rains wrote at the time, such as the following. The text of the letter indicates Rains’s plans for purchase or rent of property at Sailors Encampment as well as on Rains (Neebish) Island, location of the third Rains residence, Basswood Lodge.

294

n o t e s t o p a g e s 31–2

Lochrains St. Joseph, Jan. 16, 1854 My Dear Sir, I think your terms for Campment Matelot high – the 100 dollars rent would be out of the question, but must be got over by paying all up. Mr. [Archibald] Stirling is to give me 250 dollars on Lady Day (25th Mar) 1855, as first instalment for this place [Lochrains], the rest I will make up, you will not refuse to take wood put on the wharf at market price, I should think, as part payment. Mrs. R. does not intend going there [Basswood Lodge?] till next autumn. I shall only plant fruit and ornamental trees and sow the garden this spring, having only to do with crops here – so, I will give you 500 dollars on Lady Day 1855, some pay in wood on the wharf, the rest you can put as a security but I must not allow you to receive it. The place would be too small entirely, besides being badly off for firewood but I shall take land on St. Joseph opposite [Sailors Encampment?]. I shall be up before spring, but you can if you please give answer to Mr. Lamorandiers [Lamorandiere, merchant at Kaskawan Point] as perhaps we shall put some wood over this winter. Please send me 8 roles of cotton batting by Charles [Lamorandiere]. I remain Truly yrs W.K. Rains P.W. Murray, who transcribed Rains’s letter, argues that it provides proof that the Major and his family did not move to Sailors Encampment until 1854, and “not previously as some believed.” What family Murray means here is not entirely clear. Frances’s last child, Alma, was born at Basswood Lodge on Rains Island, so it is probable that the family Murray meant was Elizabeth’s. In a note to another Rains letter that he transcribed, this one written from Sailors Encampment, 4 April 1856, Murray observes that “the half year’s interest he [Rains] mentions [in the letter] would be the interest on the balance owing on the property on Neebish Island (Rains Island).” 24 Bayliss, 106. 25 As explained in note 18 above, dates of birth are not always consistent. Thus Frances’s daughter Linda was born at Loch Rains on 1 October [or 11 October] 1850. 26 Letters of a Traveller, or, Notes of Things in Europe and America (1850), 274, in Landon, Lake Huron, 187–92. Rains’s first wife, Ann(e) Eve Williams, had in fact travelled to Toronto and settled there with their daughters.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 32–5

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27 The Island of St. Joseph and St. Mary’s River: Stories and Facts, 71. 28 Martin, 70. Gregory S. Lay, Memories of Early Days on St. Joseph’s Island: The Garden of Algoma and Tourists’ Paradise, records it somewhat differently: “At Sailor’s Encampment, H.D. Rains conducted a small store supplying groceries, etcetera to a small settlement in the section and also attending to the lake traffic on the St. Mary’s River.” 29 Bayliss, 107. 30 Ibid. 31 See note 23. 32 Martin, 74. 33 The name appears without the possessive, either in the singular (Sailor’s) or plural (Sailors’), and is reproduced as such throughout this narrative. 34 Lay, 6. Martin writes: “The French named the stopping-place Campment Matelots. Bayfield’s map dated 1822 has Campment Matelots marked on it. Other maps drawn up later call the area south of Johnstone’s Point simply the Encampment, or Upper Encampment. A boat anchored near the St. Joseph side of the river one fall night was unable to leave, because it was frozen in the next morning. The crew went ashore, and spent the winter there, thus it got the name Sailors Encampment” (69–70). 35 Martin, 72. 36 When Walter, who joined the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898, died of scurvy in northern Saskatchewan, his brother Owen Jr. replaced him in the building of Rainsmere. The hotel was very popular in the summer with Americans from Neebish, travellers from Detroit and Chicago, and residents of the Sault. But business ground to a halt during the winter, and Owen was forced to find steadier income. Clara closed and then re-opened the hotel, this time with her brother Harold. She was an excellent cook, and for a while Rainsmere was in business again. But the 1930s Depression years, followed by the 1940s war years, led to a permanent closing of the hotel in 1950. “The majestic hotel deteriorated over the passing years,” Bruce Martin records, and “was condemned by the Township Council, and was demolished in 1989” (77). 37 Martin writes: “The Coulter family came from the port of Collingwood on board the steamer Silver Spray, one of the two ships which brought most of the pioneers in 1875, 1876, and 1877 to the Island of St. Joseph … When David Coulter took over the farm in 1875, Eliza, son Alan, and the rest of her family moved to the southern end of Sugar Island” (75). 38 Mrs Sutton was the granddaughter of Peter B. Barbeau (Bayliss 107). 39 “At that time the house was called ‘Penn Range,’ and it was up for sale. With four hundred surrounding acres it belonged to a Major Raines, ‘a jovial gentleman, notorious for his successes with the fair sex.’ Little was known of his

296

40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50

51

n o t e s t o p a g e s 35–8

household other than that at this time it contained within it two beautiful sisters. ‘And it speaks much for his amiability and fascination that they amicably shared his affections,’ says Mr. F. Paget Hett in his study of the early settlement of Georgina Township.” Katherine Hale, Historic Houses of Canada, 106. Landon, 187. Rains knowledge of languages and poetry is recorded in Bayliss (91–108). The Sault Star, 19 April 1968. There are discrepancies between the publication information cited by Brayley and that found in library reference. The information provided in brackets here is from library sources and typically refers to first editions. This was a book of multiplication tables; given the date of publication it may not have been Rains’s. From Winnie Brayley’s description in The Sault Star. Bayliss, 108. Landon, 190. The lighthouse, located forty miles northwest of Thunder Bay and forty miles southeast of Old Mackinac Point, was completed at the end of 1896, and Xavier Rains became its first keeper, entering his first day log 30 April 1897: “We got everything ready and lit up at sunset. Raining all day and night, blowing almost a gale from the North.” Xavier remained the lighthouse keeper until 1910. Xavier Rains entered the following in his Lighthouse Keeper’s Log (40 Mile Point Lighthouse, Rogers City, Michigan): “February 27, 1899, Mother died at 3 a.m. from the effects of LaGrippe after a short illness of 10 days.” Following an article by Pat Fleming in the Island Clipping (30 July [2000?]). Connie Rahn, one of Rains’s great-granddaughters, wrote to say that her family had thought Elizabeth was buried on Sugar Island. As applied to the district of Algoma, the 1868 Homestead Act granted free land under the following conditions: “Firstly, fifteen acres was [sic] to be cleared in five years before a patent could be granted. Secondly, a house at least sixteen by twenty feet must be built. Finally no debt was to be considered valid if placed against the land for twenty years unless a valid mortgage or pledge had been placed before the issuance of the patent. The head of the family and children over twenty-one could each locate 100 acres. In 1877 the Ontario government opened surveyed lots on St. Joseph for settlement” (Rains 37–8). Rains, 39.

chapter four 1 In some cases the record left was visual as well as written. Traill, Simcoe, and Langton, for instance, were artists whose sketches and paintings of their new surroundings provide windows onto life in nineteenth-century Canada.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 38–42

297

2 Bayliss, 104–5. 3 This observation occurs in her introduction, x. She goes on to note that Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill “differed from almost all the other middleclass women who arrived in British North America in the early nineteenth century in one respect: by the time they arrived in Canada, both were published writers, with an intellectual need to capture their experiences in the written word” (x). If letter-writing served to maintain family ties stretched and strained by emigration, perhaps Frances and Elizabeth Doubleday felt fulfilled by the family they had on hand, their family with Rains. Maybe they were uninterested in keeping in touch with the world they had left behind because they were adventuresome women, eager for change and open to challenge. Certainly, the domestic arrangement they seemed comfortable with suggests they were somewhat unconventional. 4 Bayliss, 104–5. 5 Bayliss, 105. 6 Bayliss, 108. 7 Added by P.W. Murray to this letter is a note that “W.K.R. puts in brackets what must have been, at that time, the Americanized terms for suckers and comforters.” 8 Bayliss, 102–3. 9 “At Home, St Joseph’s Island, June 25, 1848.” The play was never aired. 10 Some authors who have drawn on the pioneer sisters’ stories are Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Carol Shields, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. 11 Lorna Crozier’s fictionalized Mrs Bentley (inspired by Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House) in Crozier’s poem “Wilderness” (from A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley) also turns to Moodie’s experience to think through her own: “Like Mrs Moodie I could say / the wilderness moved inside me / but where there is no bush, / the wilderness is different.” 12 Chapter 4, “The Nuisance Grounds.” 13 Engel, Sarah Bastard’s Notebook, 12. 14 For a full-length analysis of Engel’s novels and short stories, see Verduyn, Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings (1995). 15 Verduyn, Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings, 10. 16 Identified in a letter from the Child Welfare Branch of Toronto Children’s Aid, to Marian Engel, 16 January 1962. Eleanor Ryan had a photocopy of this letter. I first was contacted by Eleanor Ryan in a note dated 29 January 2001. It stated: “Christl Verduyn, I have just finished reading your book Lifelines. Let me say first that by birth I am Marian Engel’s twin sister Eleanor.” One of Eleanor’s three daughters, Bev (Prokopowich), had traced the family’s link to

298

n o t e s t o p a g e 42

Marian Engel to my books on Engel. I passed on the contact to Engel’s daughter Charlotte (letter dated 12 February 2001), and she and the Ryans arranged to meet. I too had the opportunity to meet Eleanor Ryan, the first time at McMaster University, where she came to visit the Marian Engel Archive in March 2002. The second time was 28 June 2003 at her home in Ashton, Ontario, just outside of Ottawa, where she showed me the Children’s Aid letter as well as other documents that shed some light on the early years of Marian Engel’s life. For example, “Background History for Eleanor Ryan,” prepared by Betty Phillips for the Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, 29 November 1989, provided the following information about the twins’ birth parents. Their mother was born in 1915 “in a large Ontario city,” and at the time of the twins’ birth she was living with her mother (her father having died in WWI), who worked as an accountant in a printing office. She attended three years of high school and one year of a commercial course, but left school at seventeen. The twins’ birth father was “a single man 24 years of age, of Roman Catholic faith,” who was attending university. The girls’ birth mother described the young man as “about 6 feet tall, with fair hair and blue eyes.” When the young man’s father died in the fall of 1932, he returned home “to a Prairie province where it was believed he remained.” 17 This information, and other details of the twins’ early lives, appears in the aforementioned “Background History for Eleanor Ryan.” 18 Eleanor requested more information about herself and her twin sister from the Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto. In response to an enquiry she sent 15 July 1989, Betty Phillips of the Society’s Adoption Disclosure Services prepared a report (29 November 1989), which was received at Ottawa’s Children’s Aid Society 30 January 1990, where Eleanor reviewed its contents. Upon learning that Marian Engel was her twin, Eleanor set about reading all her sister’s works. She also wrote to a number of Engel’s friends including Timothy Findley, Jane Rule, and Margaret Atwood, as well as Engel’s former husband, Howard Engel. All of them replied to her (Howard Engel on 1 May 2002, Timothy Findley on 2 March 1990, Jane Rule on 29 May 2002, and Margaret Atwood on 21 June 2002), with letters that Eleanor kept and shared with me. Other family information about Marian Engel’s life is presented in my earlier studies of Engel’s work (Verduyn 1995, 1999, 2004). 19 Engel and Eleanor never met again, even though Engel found out where her sister was living in 1962. A letter from the Child Welfare Branch of the Toronto Children’s Aid, 16 January 1962, informed Engel that “We have ascertained you have a twin sister, Eleanor, who was adopted and is now married … to Joe Dennison who is a traveller for an electric firm. The couple have their own home

n o t e s t o p a g e s 43–61

299

and car. They have two little girls aged 8 and 4. The family is active in church groups, and Mr. Dennison is described as being industrious and careful. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ryan feel that the girls should have all the information they wish about each other. Mrs. J. Dennison’s address is Box 32, Pembroke, Ontario, and Eleanor would like to hear from you if you care to write.” The letter was written mere days before Engel’s marriage to Howard Engel on 27 January 1962 in London, England, and the couple’s departure shortly thereafter to Cyprus; any number of factors could have influenced Engel’s decision not to write to her sister. Marian, the second-born twin, died first, in February 1985. Eleanor Ryan died in September 2006. 20 mea box 34 files 15, 16, 17, 18; Marian Engel’s Notebooks, 547–8. 21 See Verduyn, Lifelines. 22 Engel, “The Woman as Storyteller,” Communiqué 8 (May 1975): 6–7, 44–5. pa rt 1 1 : i n t ro du c t i o n 1 The letter is undated, although archivist Kathleen Garay suggests the possible date of 1980. In Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writing (Verduyn 1995) and again here, I am proposing 1985, shortly before Engel’s death, when she was working with her agent Virginia Barber on a selection of her short stories (The Tattooed Woman 1986) that would appear posthumously (mea box 34 file 43). 2 mea box 34 file 23. 3 Ibid. 4 That Engel referred to elsewhere (mea box 34 file 43 (Unsent) letter to “Ginger” [Barber], 7 January [1985]) as a “failed novel” and that might have been better entitled “The Fugitive Lakes” (mea box 34 file 23). 5 See Part III, “Trompe l’Oeil,” for an example of how Engel could present the tale of Elizabeth, Frances, and the Major as a historical novel. 6 mea box 34 file 56. 7 In an essay entitled “The Office on the Landing,” (in Cameron), Engel recalled attitudes that she encountered at McGill when she was a student (1955–57): I sure was a nothing as far as McGill went. I found out many things about McGill that other people didn’t seem to realize. I won’t forget the time the Dean of Women’s secretary said to me: “Miss Passmore, could you not arrange that Jewish gentlemen do not pick you up at the front door?” Things like that went on then. “The Office on the Landing” And in “A Woman at McGill,” (Verduyn, 1995b), she wrote: Ideologically speaking, McGill shocked me. I’d been brought up on the cbc and Canadian Forum, the Farm Broadcasts: thought we were all equal. Things kept happening to show we weren’t. I was asked not to go out with

300

8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18

n o t e s t o p a g e s 61–4

Jewish young men. I was frequently told I was not well enough dressed, though not by staff. Another was Trollope. “As I read more and more Trollope,” Engel noted, “it [‘Elizabeth and the Golden City’] got more and more detailed etc.” (mea box 34 file 23). mea box 34 file 43. (Unsent) letter to “Ginger” [Barber], 7 January [1985]). mea box 34 file 43. Woolf, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room,” The Common Reader, 1925. Religio Medici, part I, section 15, recalling the famous statement about the marvels of Africa by Pliny the Elder, author of the 37 volume Natural History. Virginia Woolf, “Sir Thomas Browne,” a review of the Golden Cockerel edition of The Worlds of Sir Thomas Browne, published in the Times Literary Supplement, 1923. mea box 34 file 23. As quoted earlier, the rest of this statement reads: “so McStews won’t lose their money.” mea box 34 file 24. Lalice is a classmate Elizabeth befriends as a student at McGill. She is the daughter of old English aristocracy, and her mother, “the Countess,” intervenes and blocks this friendship, and all of Lalice’s friendships with other women, in an effort to make a heterosexual out of her lesbian daughter. Engel was in the process of re-reading of all of Trollope’s work (mea box 34 files 15–18). mea box 34 files 15–18.

Bibliography

Agassiz, Louis. Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals, Compared with Those of Other and Similar Regions. With a Narrative of the Tour by J. Elliot Cabot. Boston, 1850, 27–8. Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. Baines, Dudley. Emigration from Europe 1815–1930. London: Macmillan, 1991. Bayliss, Joseph and Estella. Historic St. Joseph Island. Cedar Rapids, IA: The Torch Press, 1938. – River of Destiny: The Saint Mary’s. Detroit: Wayne University State Press, 1955. Bridge, Carl and Kent Fedorowich, eds. British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity. London: Frank Cass, 2003. Bryant, William Cullen, Letters of a Traveller, or, Notes of Things in Europe and America, New York, 1850, in Hett, Francis Paget (1939): 9, 14, 15. Cain, P.J. “Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context” in Porter, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cameron, Elspeth, ed. Hugh MacLennan. Toronto: Canadian Studies Program, University College, University of Toronto, 1982. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Cowan, Helen. British Emigration to British North America, 1783–1837. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1928. Dunlop, E.S. ed. Our Forest Home: Being extracts from the correspondence of the late Frances Stewart. Toronto: Presbyterian Print. and Pub. Co. 1889. Erickson, Charlotte. Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.

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Errington, Jane. The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987. Fryer, Mary Beacock. Elizabeth Postuma Simcoe 1762–1850: A Biography. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1989. Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1999. Hale, Katherine. Historic Houses of Canada. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1952. Harper, Marjory. Emigration from Northeast Scotland: Willing Exiles. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988. Hett, Francis Paget, ed. The Memoirs of Susan Sibbald 1783–1812. London: John Lane, 1926. – Georgina: A Type Study of Early Settlement and Church Building in Upper Canada. Toronto: Macmillan, 1939. Hoffman, Frances and Ryan Taylor. Across the Waters: Ontario Immigrants’ Experiences 1820–1850. Milton (Ont.): Global Heritage Press, 1999. Innis, Mary Quayle, ed. Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary. With illustrations from the original manuscript. Toronto: Macmillan, 1965. Jameson, Anna. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838, “Voyage Down Lake Huron,” 3:247–8. Johnston, H.J.M. British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: Shovelling Out the Paupers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Jones, Francis. Historic Carmarthenshire Homes and their Families. Carmarthenshire: Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society and Cultural Services Department of Dyed County Council, 1987. Landon, Fred, Lake Huron. The American Lakes Series, Milo M. Quaife, ed. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1944, 187–92. Langton, Anne. The Story of Our Family (Printed for Private Circulation). Manchester: Thos. Sowler and Co., Printers, 1881. Langton, H.H. ed. A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals of Anne Langton. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Co. Ltd. 1950. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Leacock, Stephen. The Boy I Left Behind Me. New York: Doubleday, 1946. Martin, Bruce. The Island of St. Joseph and St. Mary’s River: Stories and Facts – with Emphasis on the northwest part of Jocelyn and St. Joseph Townships. Bruce Mines: MacKinnon Printing Service, 1991. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush; or Life in Canada. London: Richard Bentley, 1852. Porter, Andrew. “Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” Porter, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford 1999.

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Rains, Jackileen and Elsie Hadden Mole. St. Joseph Island, a Tour and Historical Guide. Illustrations James Randall Stubbington. St. Joseph: Journal Printing, 1988. Rains, Jackileen. “Descendants of Major William Kingdom Rains.” Self-published. 218 pp. “Rains Family History/Genealogy (2003)” St. Joseph Township Library. “Rains Family History (2003),” appearing under the heading “Rains Genealogy” and described as compiled from a document written by J.E. Bayliss from information provided by Owen Rains (1926); “Rains Genealogy,” possibly written by Winnie Brayley; excerpts from “Historic St. Joseph Island” written in 1938 by Estelle (granddaughter of Major Rains) and Joseph E. Bayliss; excerpts from “St. Joseph Island, a Tour and Historical Guide” by Jackileen R. Rains and Elsie Hadden Mile; and the “History of Basswood Lodge,” recounted by Edgar E. Rains (1968). St. Joseph Historical Society # 600048. St. Joseph Island Museum. Appearing as 600048, with sub-heading description: sjhs (St. Joseph Historical Society) # 600048. Date typed to file, April 25, 1996. Source – Census, Historic Old St. Joe by Joseph Bayliss, Church and Cemetery, Land Records, Vital Stats. Information provided by Mrs. James A. Rains, August 1984. Shepperson, W.S. British Emigration to North America: Projects and Opinions in the Early Victorian Period. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957. Shields, Carol. Small Ceremonies. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976. – Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1976. Smith, Hermon Dunlap. The Desbarats Country. Chicago: Privately Printed, 1950. Thomas, Clara. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gallancz, 1963. Traill, Catharine Parr. The Backwoods of Canada. London: C. Knight, 1836. Verduyn, Christl. Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995a. – Ed. Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995b. – ed. Marian Engel Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute.” Waterloo (Ont.): Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999. – and Kathy Garay. eds. Marian Engel: Life in Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Index

Agassiz, Louis, 4, 7, 12; Engel’s fictional

Camus, Albert, 177, 178

presentation of, 253–61; St Joseph Island

cbc, 196, 199, 209

visit of, 30–1, 60, 62, 65, 293n20, 297n10

Canada Council, 191; Canadian publishers

Atwood, Margaret, 4, 7, 40, 61, 191, 196, 298n18

and, 196; deLesseps and, 194, 201, 208, 213 Canadian culture: Elizabeth on, 147, 158–9, 190, 207; nationalism and, 206–7, 111–12

Barber, Virginia, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 299n1 Basswood Lodge, 32–3, 293n23

Canadian literature: 1960s and, 4, 60–1, 211, 221, 159–60; deLesseps and, 207–8; publishers, writers and, 190, 191; Quebec

Brougham, Henry, 17, 18

and, 192, 196; sister stories and, 5, 40;

Browne, Sir Thomas: Engel and, 61–2;

small town Ontario and, 123, 160, 182,

Religio Medici, 55; Virginia Woolf and, 300nn12, 13

183; women writers and, 206, 224 Cary, Colonel, 4

Brulé, Etienne, 26, 71

Chameau, le, 154, 161, 209, 217

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom: engineering,

Champlain, Samuel de, 26

288n28; Rains and, 4, 7, 13, 16, 19, 57,

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 224

258

Christie, Agatha, 175

Brunel, Marc Isambard: marriage to Sophia Kingdom, 13, 16; relation to Rains, 17, 19, 260 Bryant, William Cullen, 4, 7, 12; Engel’s

Cohen, Leonard, 7; McGill and, 60, 61, 133, 137, 139, 158, 159, 198 Cohen, Matt, 7, 61, 191 Colborne, L.G. Sir John, 24

fictional presentation of, 253–61; St Joseph

Crane, Hart, 194

Island visit of, 31–2

Crozier, Lorna, 297n11

Byron, Lord: the Major and, 130, 197, 255; Rains and, 3, 7, 14, 35

Daumont, François, 27 Davies, Robertson, 297n10

Cabot, J. Elliott, 30

de Beauvoir, Simone, 159

306

de la Roche, Mazo, 23

index

Ginsberg, Allen, 194

Dickens, Charles, 35, 194

Governor General’s Award, the, 4, 201, 208

Doon, Lorna, 105

Grass, Günter, 224

Doubleday, “Mad” Jack, 18, 57

Gray, Charlotte, 5, 38, 40, 297n3

Doubleday sisters, Elizabeth and Frances,

Green, Henry, 221

xi–xii, 3, 4, 5, 12; “Elizabeth and the Golden City” and, 57–9, 61, 69; Engel

Hale, Katherine, 12, 22, 35

and, 42, 44; fictionalized visit of Agassiz

Hentlan House, 29–31, 293nn18, 20

and, 257–60; photos, 53; Rains and, 18,

Hett, Francis Paget, 12, 35, 291n16

19; St Joseph Island and, 29, 31, 33, 34,

Hudson’s Bay Company, the, 28

36, 37; sister stories and, 38–40; Upper Canada and, 21, 22, 25, 293n15, 297n3

Jameson, Anna, 4, 12, 29–30, 38

Drapeau, Jean, 217

Jane Eyre 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 81, 95, 227

Dudek, Louis: Elizabeth and, 133, 137; Engel

Jews: deLesseps and, 202, 204, 205, 207;

and, 60, 61 Duplessis, Maurice, 159

Elizabeth and, 93, 136, 143, 148, 202, 247, 279; Engel and, 61; Levy and, 215, 219; the Major and, 149–50, 175–6, 198,

Eildon Hall, 22–3; photos, 49, 50 Eliot, T.S., 135, 159, 244

219; McGill and, 299n7 Joyce, James, 135, 224

Engel, Charlotte, ix Engel, Howard, 6, 298nn18, 19

Kingdom, Ann, 12–13

Engel, Marian: Bear, 4, 40, 183; early life,

Kingdom, Sophia, 13; Brunel and, 16

42–4, 125; Eleanor and, 298nn18, 19, 299n7; the Major, the Doubledays and,

Lalice, 64, 174, 209, 300n17

xi, 3, 6, 39, 40–1, 58; McGill, 60, 133,

Lambston Parish Church, 16; photo, 46,

299n7; photo, 54; Sarah Bastard’s Note-

287n13

book, 41, 44; The Glassy Sea, 44; The

Langton, Anne, 30, 38, 285, 290nn1, 3, 296n1

Vanishing Lakes, 58, 59

Laurence, Margaret, 4, 7, 40–1, 60, 191,

Engel, William, ix

297n10, 298 Lawrence, D.H., 135, 159

feminism, 61, 159, 181, 206, 208, 233 Findley, Timothy, 4, 297n10, 298n18

Leacock, Stephen: McGill and, 134, 137, 159; Penrains and, 23–4

French Revolution, the, 3

Lifelines, 41–2, 297nn14, 15, 299n1

Francis I, 3, 15

Lochrains/Loch Rains, 31, 33, 294n23

Friedan, Betty, 61, 211

Lorna Doone, 114

Frye, Northrop, 160

Lytton, Lord, 35

George IV, 17–18

MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 7, 61, 196

Gibson, Graeme, 7, 61, 191

MacLennan, Hugh, 7; Engel and, 60, 61;

Gide, André, 159

McGill and, 133, 136, 137, 160

index

307

Mailer, Norman, 207

Proust, Marcel, 159

Malta, 3, 14, 16, 18

Public Lending Rights, 4

Mary, Queen of Scots, 286 Matisse, Henri, 224 McClelland and Stewart, 63, 203, 208

Quebec, 61, 183, 189, 191, 193; and the Quiet Revolution, 208, 211, 214

McGill University, 58, 60; Canadian cultural nationalism and, 158; Elizabeth leaves,

Racine, Jean, 139, 149–50

165; Elizabeth remembers, 217; Elizabeth,

Rains, Archer, 16, 19; early death of, 25,

the Major and, 107–9, 119, 121, 131–2, 133–6, 139, 147 McLuhan, Marshall, 61, 183, 208, 211

289n36, 293n22 Rains, Elizabeth and Frances; See Doubleday sisters

Michilimackimac, 25, 27, 110, 253

Rains, family reunion, ix, 6, 12

Milton, John, 35

Rains, Lissa, 16; early death of, 25, 289n35,

Montcalm, General, 27 Moodie, Susanna, 5, 20, 21, 38, 39, 40, 290nn1, 3, 297n3 Morgan, 13, 287n13 Mowat, Farley, 7, 61, 193 Munro, Alice, 7, 61, 191

293n22 Rains, Stephen, father of William Kingdom, 12–13, 286 Rains, Walter, 25; early death of, 31, 286, 293n22 Rains, William Kingdom, xi–xii, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Murdoch, Iris, 160

“Elizabeth and the Golden City,” 57, 58,

Napoleonic Wars, the, 3, 14, 20

and Bryant to, 253, 256– 8, 286n12; Field

Nicolet, Jean, 26

Book of, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22,

59, 61, 62, 65; fictionalized visit of Agassiz

North West Company, the, 27, 29

25, 286n6, 287n13, 291n16; the Major

Nugent, Sir John, 3, 14–15, 35

and his Diary, 125, 141; and the Napo-

Ondaatje, Michael, 7, 61, 191

Joseph Island, 26–37; and Simcoe, 21–5;

Orwell, George, 193

travels in Wales and Europe, 11–20; and

leonic Wars, 3, 14, 20; photo, 45; and St

Osler, William, 137, 159

the Duke of Wellington, 3, 7, 13, 104, 275 Rainsmere Hotel, the, 34, 295n36

Pains and Penalties Bill, the, 17–18

Richardson, Dorothy, 150, 159

Passmores, 6, 42–3

Richler, Mordecai, 7, 60, 61, 158, 160, 191

Penfield, Wilder, 137

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 159

Penrains, 21, 22–3, 25, 49; photos, 50, 260,

Roe, Allen, Levy (Cherrystone House), pub-

295n39 Peterborough, Ontario, viii, 21, 290n1

lishers, 58, 60, 165, 193–4, 196, 199, 201, 212, 213, 244

Picasso, Pablo, 224

Rule, Jane, 298n18

Pope Pius VII, 15

Ryan, Eleanor, 42–3, 291n7, 297n16,

postmodernism, 223–4 Pound, Ezra, 159

298nn18, 19

308

Sailors Encampment, 33–4; photo, 52, 293nn17, 23, 295nn33, 34 Saint Joseph Island, 4, 5, 24, 25, 26–37;

index

Traill, Catherine Parr, 5, 20, 21, 38, 39, 140, 290nn1, 3, 296n1, 297n3 Trollope, Anthony, 64, 300nn8, 17

Museum and Township Public Library, 11;

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 61, 183, 211, 212

Frances and Elizabeth Rains and, 26–37,

twins, 41–3, 72

39, 57, 65, 110, 292n2, 296n50; settlement of, 26–7

Upper Canada, 4, 5, 19, 20, 29, 36

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 159 Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, 4, 25, 35, 36, 261

Vietnam War, the, 183, 190, 192, 211, 212

Schoolcroft, Henry R., 26, 59, 292n7, 253– 4, 261 Scott, Archibald, 24, 28, 292n11 Scott, Sir Walter, 23 Shakespeare, William, 35, 175, 224

Wacousta, 112 Wales, 3, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 28, 111, 125, 130, 287 War of 1812, the, 27, 112

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35

Wellington, Duke of, 3, 7, 13, 104, 275

Shields, Carol, 40, 297n10

Westfield, Rains homestead of, 33–4, 36;

Sibbald, Susan Mein, 4, 20; Penrains and, 22–4, 35, 38; photo, 51; 285, 290nn4, 5, 7 Silliker, Major Arthur, 4, 57, 62, 77, 102, 106, 116, 120, 121, 125, 137, 141 Simcoe, Elizabeth, 38, 285, 291n12, 296n1

photo, 52, 293n17 White, Patrick, 72 Wiebe, Rudy, 61, 191, 293n17 Williams, Ann Eve, 4, 12, 16, 18, 19, 25, 125, 287n13, 289nn36, 37, 294n26

Simcoe, John Graves L.G., 23

Wolfe, General, 27

Simcoe, Lake, 4, 19, 21, 22, 25

Wolfe, Thomas, 159

Simenon, Georges, 175

Woolf, Virginia, 61–2, 135, 159, 221,

Sir John Colborne, steamship, 22–4 Stewart, Frances, 38, 285, 290nn1, 3 Sutton, Ontario, 4, 19, 22 Sutton Lodge, Wales, 13, 16, 18, 19, 47; photo, 48, 287 Talon, Jean, 26 Thompson, Charles, 24, 28–9, 292n11

300nn11, 13 Wordsworth, William, 35; Elizabeth reading, 244; the Major and, 197; poem 118 Wuthering Heights, 70, 72, 114 Writers’ Union of Canada, the, 4, 183, 191 Yeats, William Butler, 244