The Early Days
IF I HAD been given a choice to be born anywhere in this wonderful world, it would have been in either a scenic little community in Newfoundland or, failing that, the greatest city in the world, my favourite city, New York. As it turned out, Newfoundland won. Avondale was a nice little community nestled in Conception Bay. People scraped together a living by working in construction in St. John’s, cutting the forests of Grand Falls to support the demands of a wood-hungry mill or, in the case of my family, by travelling stateside to do ironwork in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.
Our community was one of five comprising Conception Bay Centre. We rarely if ever thought of ourselves as part of a central structure and, oddly enough, it remains so today. We were just one in a collection of small villages totally independent of each other without much concern for whatever the town next to us was doing.
I was last in a long line of children born into the Doyle family. Although I cannot remember a hungry day, it’s interesting to look back and realize that, like most families in rural Newfoundland prior to Confederation, we were probably poor.
My father had left home shortly after I was born. My recollection is of seeing him on four or five occasions in my lifetime when he would arrive for a week or so to do odd chores around the property before heading back to work in New York.
I remember viewing my father in a rather odd way. To me he was a strange man showing up every couple of years to take control of my life for a week or two, and then disappearing somewhere into the sunset until the next visit. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, I sometimes think it’s a mystery how my mother and women of her day survived the hardships they endured trying to raise a family under these difficult conditions. With the man away most of the time, his involvement with the family very often bordered on no involvement at all.
It’s strange being raised in a large family in which you’re the youngest member. In my case everyone, with the exception of my brother Jack, left home before I reached my teenage years. Some were raising families of their own or had moved elsewhere to chase their dreams, the same dream that had beckoned my father at an early age to pursue his future in New York. This same dream, however, had eluded my mother.
As the children left home, the thought of some rest and relaxation must have crossed her mind. However, instead of rest and relaxation, she suffered both physically and mentally.
Looking back, I often wonder how she summoned the endurance to go on. Hers was a difficult existence indeed, but one she lived out in patient expectation of the better times that never came.
From time to time I reflect upon her story and how she used extraordinary courage and strength to survive some unbelievably difficult years. You could almost say her story was one of never quite making it, always falling short of catching that elusive dream.
My mother was born in a small community in Conception Bay called Chapel Cove, just a few kilometres from where she would eventually spend most of her life. I was somewhat amazed as a young boy to learn that, while she was still a young girl of only eighteen or nineteen with just grade three or four education, she decided one day to pack up her few simple possessions and make her way in to St. John’s. From there she would board a steamship somewhere around 1923– 24 and begin the long journey to New York. From all accounts, she arrived at Ellis Island in good health carrying the sum of twenty-five dollars.
She told me that Ellis Island was the clearing centre for new immigrants arriving in New York, and that the only hurdle one had to clear upon arrival was to have someone meet you who had the wherewithal to supply some temporary support until you found a job. The Great Depression of the 1930s was almost a decade into the future, so the prospects of finding work would have been quite encouraging. She said it was a frightening experience in those days to leave your sheltered existence and set your compass for a city a world away. My questions, I remember, were never-ending, but she would always try to form the image in my young mind of what New York was all about.
How could there possibly be buildings that almost touched the clouds? I asked. Was it a fairy tale, or could there really be a statue of a lady in New York Harbor, hundreds of feet high, that held a flaming torch, a statue that symbolized everything that was so wonderful about America? This same symbol of freedom, generosity, and hope which stands so proudly today had also welcomed my mother. I could tell by the trembling in her sad voice, as she again recounted her story to her last offspring, that these were happier times.
She told me she disembarked the steamship probably after seven or eight days sailing. One can only speculate what it must have been like sailing on a cargo/passenger ship in the cold North Atlantic in those days. I remember she told me it was a very cold day when she first glimpsed New York Harbor. She said it was a vision that would remain in her memory forever. Where she went from Ellis Island and the harbourfront, I cannot say. I was probably too young to ask for such details. However, with her first step on dry American soil, the adventure began.
Finding a job is always the main preoccupation of a new immigrant, and it was no different for my mother. Even in the land of opportunity, you have to work to realize that opportunity, and the opportunities can be few when you consider the limits imposed on one by little or no education.
Be that as it may, fate would wave her generous hand and, shortly after she settled down in Brooklyn, a kindly Jewish family came to her rescue. How it happened, or why it happened, I do not know and was never told. Maybe the word “rescue” is not the appropriate one here. However, when a young girl, not yet twenty years old, leaves a small community in Conception Bay in the very early 1900s, makes her way to New York by steamer, and is given a job in the home of a wealthy Jewish family, then I can think of no better or more applicable word.
The Makarens were a well-to-do family living in Brooklyn. They were obviously wealthy enough to afford a housekeeper or two, and my mother must have fit the bill. Coming from Chapel Cove in the 1920s did not equip one with the culinary skills necessary to take up duties in the home of a wealthy Jewish family in New York. However, this seemed to be of secondary importance to these generous people, so she was immediately assigned the task of taking care of the two children in the Makaren household. She told me that, after a few months, the family, confident she was ready for more onerous responsibilities, assigned her the task of cooking the family meals. That was not an easy undertaking. She worried that she might encounter a strange fish that had to be cooked differently from cod, or a piece of meat that was not cut from a cow or a pig. Many years later she would laugh when she recalled how Mr. Makaren spent most of supper hour one evening picking sand out of his teeth because she had not washed the spinach sufficiently well or even washed it at all. She was quick to add that she had never seen spinach in her life and that it was not a vegetable one easily found in a Chapel Cove garden in the 1920s.
Being a good-humoured and forgiving man, Mr. Makaren was quick to overlook such trivialities and patiently tutored her in the finer art of properly cooking spinach. I have never since eaten a forkful of spinach without thinking of that story or of visualizing the look on my mother’s face when she was told that the sand had to be separated from the spinach before cooking.
After thoroughly settling into this strange yet fairy-tale way of living, it seemed only natural, I suppose, that the lure of a social life would begin calling her. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Canadians—and certainly Newfoundlanders— were living all over New York and especially Brooklyn, so it wasn’t difficult to find the companionship to form some sort of a social group. She told me she and her friends loved to go to a place called Prospect Hall in South Brooklyn for the regular Saturday night dance, and it was there that she would meet my father.
And what a coincidence it was! Here was a young girl from Chapel Cove meeting a young man from Avondale— communities five kilometres apart.
Prospect Hall was the focal point for young people to gather in those days, not much different than George Street in St. John’s today, although possibly a bit more civil. It was the place to dance and sing. I remember well as a young boy hearing my mother sing Irish folk songs around the kitchen. She had a beautiful singing voice and she would captivate me with her ability to deliver the notes so perfectly. Knowing her love for music and having experienced her talent first-hand, it was no surprise to me to learn from her friends that she often sang on stage during the Saturday night dances at Prospect Hall. Years later I would hear the same stories from her friends who lived in New York, that she and my father actually did a song-and-tap-dance routine at this grand old hall on Saturday nights.
Having had my young mind filled with these visions of glitz and grandeur, I remember as a boy telling my mother that one day I would also see New York for myself and visit this place called Prospect Hall that she talked about so often. I would just have to experience as vividly as I could what it was that held her so entranced for that brief but wonderful period of her life.
Things were going quite well for this young, hard-working Newfoundland girl, and I can only imagine that she was not spending too much time thinking about the harder days back home. After all, she was young, about twenty years old. She had a secure job and was living the good life.
However, I guess we’ve heard it said time and again that in one brief moment your fate may be sealed and your life changed forever. So it was with my mother. She had met my father at the Saturday night dances in Brooklyn and, while it was coincidental that they had been born and raised only five kilometres apart in Newfoundland, it was even more coincidental that they lived only two streets apart in Brooklyn when they met. He was living on Ninth Street and she on Eleventh Street.
It was just a year or so after their initial meeting that the knot was tied at St. Thomas Church in Brooklyn, just a few minutes from Prospect Hall. My mother was just twenty-three at the time, and I can only imagine the happiness and sense of security she now felt being married, in one of the greatest cities in the world, to a man who was working the tall iron buildings in New York City and making big Yankee dollars. Chapel Cove by now was just a figment of her imagination. Surely nothing could stop her dream of settling down and raising a family in New York from coming true.
All seemed to be going according to plan, if there was a plan. And if there wasn’t, it was still going well, because on a sunny morning in 1926, the first of the Doyle family poked her head out into the world of New York City. A beautiful baby girl would soon be christened with the name Gladys at the same church in which my parents had married.
As each day came and went, she became more confident of the future. Times were good and, as one year turned into the next, the same blessed event repeated itself. Another baby arrived: another girl, Mary. Mary entered a country filled with hope and lots of opportunity for the future. The world was unfolding exactly as it should, with marriage, children, and, before you know it, maybe a house somewhere in Brooklyn close to friends and old familiar places. That was her plan and she was confident that her dream would come to speedy fulfillment. What she had no way of knowing, though, was that lurking around the corner was a dream-buster of epic proportions, and she was right in its path.
How could the bubble break so quickly? The dreams of buying a house and raising a family in New York were quickly replaced by the brutal reality that the Great Depression was officially on. It was October 29, 1929. The stock market crash created a blast that was heard around the world. It was appropriately called Black Tuesday, and the depression was moving at bullet speed to every major country of the world. In no time, unemployment rose to over twenty-five per cent, and in some countries thirty-three per cent. Construction, especially heavy construction, came to a screeching halt, and soon the bread-and-soup lines began to form all over New York City. In the midst of all this, most Americans had no choice but to stick it out. For expatriate Newfoundlanders, however, the situation might be less grim. They could go back home and find some solace in the company of family and friends.
In spite of the depression, my mother did not want to leave the country she had come to love simply to go back—with two very young children—to what was to be a much harsher environment. “If they can make it, we can make it” was her clarion call. It was all but ignored. My father would hear none of it. He would have his way, and she was placed on board a cargo ship with two small babies to make the long journey back to St. John’s Harbour.
The magnificent New York City skyline that had welcomed her so warmly just a few years before was now looking down despondently on the New York Harbor and the boat that would take her back to the hardship she had so desperately wanted to break away from. She had left Newfoundland as a young girl full of hope; now she was going home to an uncertain future alone and with two small babies.
She told me that the voyage back home wasn’t easy this time. She almost died of seasickness and, with two equally sick children to care for, the trip was an agonizing ordeal. Still, in spite of what appeared to be very poor odds, she consoled herself with the thought that times would get better in New York and that she would eventually be back there.
Sometime later—once the depression deepened and hardened and thousands of Americans found themselves sleeping on park benches—my father, along with many other construction workers, were on the way back to a less hostile environment than New York City. Whatever the conditions back home, and however limited the opportunities for a job might be, one could still work the ground, catch a fish, and live relatively well, entombed as it were from the real problems that a depression presented to anyone living in a big city.
As the depression ticked away, my mother was back home in Conception Bay living with relatives for a while, clinging to every vestige of hope that somehow she might yet make her escape back to New York. The depression, however, was still on, and my father thought it a good move to use the money they had saved while in New York to start the family home. It was a big two-storey house, like most houses back then, built for the staggering sum of nearly $5,000, which was probably the equivalent of a pretty hefty mortgage today. After a year or so, the house was finished and the family started to expand. With each new pregnancy my mother became more painfully aware that New York would become a distant memory. After all, building a house meant sinking the roots more deeply in Newfoundland soil, and any thought of leaving the house behind to use later as a retirement home was not an option to be considered. So it was clear then she would take the brunt of the hard times raising the family alone, and that would prove to be a very difficult struggle for her, given the harsh winter conditions of the 1930s and 1940s in a house without plumbing or heating. My father at this point was back in New York working at ironwork while my mother was now caring for three young girls. The latest addition, and the first to be born in Newfoundland, was my sister Loretta Marie.
Today it is often hard for young people to imagine how difficult it must have been to survive the rigours of raising a family seventy or eighty years ago. For most of those years, in my mother’s case, not only did she do the raising, she did it as a single parent.
Large families were often the norm in those days, and I guess it helped to distribute the load when the chores needed to be done. The birth of a new baby could generally be timed to nine months after the visit from away, and I’m told that this occurred on nine or ten occasions in our family. Being the youngest of the brood, I was not around to witness the tragedy of what unfolded next; however, it would be enough to break the will of any young woman. For the next number of years my mother would witness death on an uncommon and unprecedented scale.
It began with the death of Loretta Marie. She was born in 1929, shortly after my mother arrived home from America. How this terrible event happened and what caused it remains a mystery. I cannot, in spite of my probing, find a clue to unlock that door.
It was obviously a nice fall day, because my mother and her little girl walked a short distance from the house to pick blueberries. After a while they arrived back home and all seemed to be normal with her little three-year-old girl until the coming of nightfall, when, without warning, my sister lapsed into a convulsive state and died. My mother stood by helpless and alone with her other two young daughters, unable to contact a doctor. No phones, few cars, if any, and poor communications added dimension to the tragedy.
It wasn’t until the next morning that death was pronounced.
The explanation of her passing was somewhat fuzzy. My mother would often speak of her and try to trace their footsteps to and from the blueberry grounds. She said that my sister had eaten some strange or maybe poisonous berries that day. Whether or not this had contributed to her death was not confirmed. Our community had the services of a doctor who also lived in the town, but he could not be contacted that night. In any event, the nearest hospital was over sixty kilometres away in St. John’s, and any thought of an ambulance or even an autopsy in 1932 was remote or non-existent. In those days the local doctor, when they located him, would probably just pronounce death and call the parish priest to take it from there.
AFTER THIS TERRIBLE event my mother went into a deep depression, with bouts of extreme nervousness for months afterwards. A relative living not far away gave as much help as she could.
I remember her telling me some years later that when the death of her little girl occurred, she was afraid to go to bed at night. I would think that the grief of losing a small child of three had imprisoned her in a state of shock for some time. Had she been fully aware of the horrific events that were yet to happen, she might not have been able to go on living.
The family continued to expand, almost on an annual basis. About a year or so after the passing of my sister, my mother was expecting her fourth child. This would be the first boy to be born into the Doyle family.
It was customary in those days, if not completely understood, that the first-born boy would receive the father’s first name and the grandfather’s second name, and so it was that George Patrick was christened on May 23, 1933.
How depressing the opening years of the 1930s must have been for people, especially my mother. The tragedy of her daughter’s death in 1932 was surely a heartbreaker, and now she faced the mind-numbing ordeal of getting through 1933 saddled with the demands of raising her new baby boy, in addition to her two young girls, all the while in a possible state of depression. If that wasn’t enough to challenge the most pioneering spirit, the next event surely would. Within the year, her one-year-old baby would die. To this day I haven’t been able to determine the cause of this second death. However, these two grim events would be the prelude to a number of other tragedies—tragedies that would test the resilience of even the strongest individual.
Without the luxury of having too much recovery time to assess her physical or mental condition, my mother would somehow still find the inner strength to continue the journey. After the difficult days of 1933 subsided, 1934 would see the birth of my sister Gerry, then Jim in 1937, George in 1940, Jack in 1942, and myself in 1945—a total of nine. A large family like this was quite a heavy burden on a woman who was only forty-three years old at this point, and alone.
Looking back on her commitment to her family and the hard work that went along with it, I often think of her situation as comparable to a kind of slavery, but with one important difference: there was no freedom to be hoped for. Her dream to go back to New York was long, long gone and could never return. The acceptance of her fate was not a problem with my mother. She knew what her responsibilities were and took them on as dutifully and as heroically as she could. The real hardship for her, I think, was coming to the slow realization that she was now regarded as a woman whose purpose was to keep a home, raise the children, and be thankful that they were being fed. Yet she was so much more than that. Twenty years before her last child, she’d had her dreams, too. Those hopes were gone, but she could still dream. My mother was forty-seven years old when the next hard blow would hit her.
Whenever I hear of bad news being delivered to a family, I often wonder how those words are first received. I wonder what the person might be thinking or doing at that moment when an army chaplain or priest walks up to the door, or what the gut-wrenching reaction might be to the news of a son or a daughter being killed in battle. I wondered for years what my mother’s reaction was when her telegram arrived. For some reason a telegram in those days generally signalled bad news. There were no phones in our community in 1948, so a telegram was pretty well the only means of communication, aside from a letter, which would take about five or more days to make the trek from New York to Newfoundland.
The terrible news was delivered by telegram to our house on September 9, 1948. I was not yet three years old and naturally knew little or nothing of the happenings of that day. The shock nearly killed my mother. She had been through the deaths of two of her children and had no previous knowledge that her first-born was in such serious trouble.
The telegram from my father was short and brutally blunt. It read, ‘‘Gladys died this morning. Do you want her buried there or in New York?’’ Some years later my sister would recount that story to me, and I went numb just thinking of how my mother must have received this news. The jolt would have been so unbearable.
A week or so later a New York newspaper would tell the story:
New York: September 12, 1948 Gladys Doyle 21 years old, who would have been a bride here in New York next month, will be returned to Avondale, Conception Bay, by plane on Tuesday to be buried in the town of her childhood. Miss Doyle died in a New York City hospital September 9th after she had been stricken Monday, Labour Day, by a kidney ailment. In October she was to marry John Hawco, formerly of Chapel Cove, Conception Bay.The couple had met in New York at one of the usual get-togethers held by Newfoundlanders here.The body, accompanied by the girl’s father George Doyle, will leave New York airport on late Monday and is expected to be in Avondale Tuesday. Viewing is planned for Tuesday and Wednesday at her former home. Burial will be in the Avondale cemetery.
In Avondale are the girl’s mother, two sisters, Geraldine and Mary, brothers Jim, 12, George 8, Jack 5, Norman 3. Miss Doyle had never seen her youngest brother, Norman, who was born in 1945 after she left Avondale for the United States. Miss Doyle had been in the United States three years. Born in the United States, Miss Doyle was taken to Conception Bay when she was six months old. She was educated in the local schools and remained in the Bay until she was eighteen.
The girl’s father had been employed in the New York area as a construction foreman.
Many former Newfoundland residents from the Philadelphia, New York area paid last respects at a viewing last week at a Brooklyn, New York funeral home.
Among those attending were her grandmother Mrs. Maryann Hawco of New York, an uncle, Leo Doyle, and an aunt Mrs. George White of Cambden, New Jersey.
As I read the announcement in the New York paper some years later, I was saddened by the lack of attention given to the most important person, the most affected person in the family—namely, my mother. It certainly was not the reporter’s fault. How could he know? It just struck me that this cursory glance, this afterthought, was an indication of the true estimate of her worth, the tallying being done by those engrossed in their own reporting and with no true appreciation for her suffering.
The body of my sister arrived at Gander Airport on Tuesday as planned. I have no idea why Gander was the plane’s termination point instead of St. John’s, unless weather in St. John’s was a factor. In any event, the long trek to Avondale began. Quite likely that distance, about 250 kilometres, would have involved an overnight stay along the route. No need to explain the sarcasm associated with the term “Newfie Bullet” when referring to the agonizingly slow narrow-gauge tracks our train ran on. Just about two or three kilometres from Avondale the train had to terminate its journey as well. Heavy rains had washed out the track. It was now time for a new plan of action to deliver the casket to our house on the north side of the community.
As in any similar situation, you get by with a little help from your friends. A young fellow named Gerry Kelly was quick to the rescue. He was about the same age as my sister Gladys and probably had attended the same community school. It was Gerry who drove his old pickup truck through the back woods, getting as close as he could to the train to retrieve the casket and deliver it to our home, a distance of four or five kilometres. All of us, I think, in our quiet moments, reflect on such difficult periods in our lives and wonder how we got through it all. Often our minds trick us into thinking that no one could have lived as primitively as we had. The truth, however, is that most people of that time period, which in my case was shortly after Confederation, could recall similar head-shaking episodes.
Anyway, the casket was set up that same evening in what we referred to as “the front room,” the reference being that this particular room was located on the front of the house. It was a room rarely, if ever, used except on such occasions. On this day the front room would house my mother’s most precious possession—the lifeless body of her first-born. Even though I was just three years old, I seem to have some memory of a white marble casket. There is not a great deal I remember except a lot of activity in an otherwise empty, quiet house. I remember people standing around talking loudly in every room, and I recall going to bed and hearing voices downstairs all night and into the morning. In those days wakes were held in the family home, and they were two or three twenty-four-hour vigils. Why, I don’t know. I guess it was the Irish in us. I remember also watching people trying to comfort my mother and lifting me up into their arms. I seem to recall from that vantage point a girl lying in a casket wearing a white dress. Some years later I would learn that my sister had been waked in her wedding dress. In thirty days she would have been married, in October, to John Hawco of Chapel Cove, a young man she had met at one of the local gatherings in New York.
I find it difficult to remember anything else related to the funeral. But every now and then I catch a glimpse of the day my sister was taken from the house and placed in a black car. I see my mother crying, but my three-year-old self cannot imagine why, since death is of no consequence to me at this young stage in my life. I have no idea who the deceased person is and why all this is going on at our house.
Whether these memories are the result of actual events or were formed by conversations I heard about the event, I don’t know, but they remain constant—fixed, even—after all these years. After a while I suppose things returned to some semblance of normalcy. The funeral was over, but now the grief was setting in for my mother. She had now lost three of her children. Coping with these losses must have been a terrible burden. My mother’s strong-willed, Victorian attitude, however, helped to keep the grief well hidden. After all, she had other children to raise, a cow that needed milking, firewood that had to be cut, and mouths to feed. By now my father was probably back in New York, and still she had no way of knowing that equally terrible days were yet to come.
While my mother remained shackled to her sufferings and a house that provided only memories of wakes and funerals, she still dutifully continued and kept the home going. There was a deep unhappiness in that home, an obscurity that hung over the place like a pall. Even as a young teen, I had a fear of going upstairs to bed. By now there had been three wakes in the room I had to pass to get to the stairs leading to my bedroom. While these events predated any recollection I should have had of them, the spectre of it all hung around and caused sleepless nights for me, with each conversation about this or that wake in the front room.
The lighter moments must surely have existed. There must always be happy moments even in the most difficult of circumstances. The lighter moments for my mother, sadly, were frequently interrupted by the tragedy of another death, the drudgery of the moment, or the separation from a husband who was a long way from her plight back home. However, in the middle of all this difficulty, she never gave any indication that she thought of better and easier days in New York. Already there had been more tragedy, more heartbreak, than she could handle. Already three of her children were dead. As if this was not enough to break the spirit of a much stronger person, there was also the difficulty of raising a large family winter after winter, with no plumbing or heating to relieve the burden. To make matters even more unbearable, the Grim Reaper was not finished with her yet.
New York, the greatest city in the world, was thriving in the late 1950s and 1960s when I was entering into my teenage years. Young men from all over Conception Bay were going down to New York to test their skills at ironwork. Frank Sinatra was singing on the radio what was on the minds of any aspiring young ironworker: “I’m gonna make a brand new start of it in old New York. If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. It’s up to you, New York, New York.”
I wondered what would happen to me after leaving school. Construction, ironwork, and New York were burned into my brain. My father was there, my sister was there, my brother George was doing well there, and my brother Jack would soon be on his way. My mother at this point had to be wondering why life had dealt her such an unfair hand. The opposition she had voiced about leaving New York to come home and raise a family by herself now gave way to the realization that her husband and all her children, one by one, were leaving for New York—everyone but her. Her husband had a life, a good life, and now her children would have a chance to enjoy an equally good life forging out a living in a city that she loved so well. Why couldn’t she be a part of that? Through it all I never once heard her complain in front of me, even though I knew full well what she had to be feeling.
Tolerance for whatever situation you find yourself in was my mother’s creed. Along with that went love for God and respect for other people, especially for your elders. Mistaken or not, however, I seem to recall a much different creed applied to the men of the day, a creed that was more tolerant, less fixed in stone, and broken without consequence.
In those days a man could have great liberties wherever he went, while the woman’s role was often relegated to a devoted, obedient servant who should be content to stay at home and raise the family. I think my mother, upon realizing that this was her lot, felt downtrodden, belittled, and frustrated.
The years passed with agonizing slowness. I hated school with a passion. My brother Jack had now graduated high school and was firmly entrenched in his life’s work. He would follow the way of the family. He would be an ironworker also, and settle down in New York and raise his family. He would be successful beyond expectations—certainly beyond my mother’s expectations. She worried about him a lot. He had played high school hockey and had suffered a hip injury. My father had taken him to New York for an examination while he was still in high school, but not much was done. He walked with a slight limp, and it was amazing how he could be such a great ironworker, but he was.
With my brother away working, I was now on my own, the last one left at home with my mother.
My sister Mary lived in the same community with her family, my brother George was in New York doing ironwork, and my oldest brother, Jim, was also doing ironwork in various places, including New York. My mother continued to do what had to be done to keep the household going, and, as for me, I was now in high school and not doing very well. For some reason I found it almost impossible to wrap my mind around school. I could never pinpoint the reason behind that, except to say that being the youngest in a family that was having some difficult times didn’t help my situation at all. Concentration seemed impossible. I certainly realized the importance of a good education, but at the same time I knew that I would not go very far beyond high school. I had failed grade eleven, and though I wanted to leave at that point, I still very much felt the necessity of obtaining a high school diploma, which I did the following year—but even then with difficulty.
TRAGEDY WAS NEVER very far away for my mother, and this time it was just up the road at my sister’s house. Mary had been born in New York shortly after my sister Gladys, and both had made the long voyage by boat with my mother from New York to Newfoundland in 1930. Now, at forty-nine years old, Mary died of cancer. My mother, who depended on my sister for comfort, was again struck with a deep and lasting grief. Her fourth child was dead and I could not help but remember what was so frequently said in these situations, that a child should not die before her parent. Now it had happened four times.
Whatever chance she might have had to recover from this latest blow was brief, because more bad news lay around the corner. Just three short years after my sister Mary passed on, another terrible tragedy struck home. My brother George, who was six years older than me, had left for New York in the early 1960s when he was about eighteen years old. He was determined to reach the “top” as the best ironworker the Big Apple ever produced. Whether he was or not I don’t know, but his reputation as one of the best was well-known. He was a good-looking kid who was well-liked, and made his mark quickly as an ironworker. I remember a lot of people around New York telling me that George knew how to run a gang better than most guys and that his men would work hard for him because they liked him personally.
He had been in New York about two years when Uncle Sam drafted him into the army and stationed him in Atlanta for basic training. Apparently army training wasn’t his only interest, because it was there that he met his bride-to-be, the daughter of a career army officer. The guys would often joke with George that after he met this new love of his life, the training became easier, maybe because of his connections on the inside.
Not long after the training was over, he was married and back in New York with his new wife, Etna. He loved his work, he loved New York, he loved to brag about the big jobs, and he loved to be the centre of attention. George had worked on the biggest and best iron jobs around New York and he was a foreman or a superintendent most of the time.
There are many stories I could relate about George, but the following story is noteworthy. He had gone pushing on one of the big jobs in Lower Manhattan. As was the custom in New York, when lunchtime rolled around, the boys on occasion would run across the street to the gin mill to grab a fast sandwich and a beer. Today was like any other day. The sun beat down on a hot Manhattan street and my brother George, along with his buddy Tommy Burke, were about to cross over to the bar and grill. Something, however, wasn’t quite right with George. In fact, something was terribly wrong.
He fell to his knees in the middle of the street, unable to move. His buddy was quick off the mark, dragging him to his feet and onto the sidewalk. What could this mean? he thought. Maybe just a pinched nerve in the back from the tough slugging that goes along with the job . Or it just might be a slipped disc—just what an ironworker needs at thirty-nine years old. He sat there for a while with an excruciating pain in his back which almost paralyzed him.
George was not a guy to miss a moment’s work, and this pain was not going to beat him, either, so after an hour of sitting, he was back on his feet and on the job.
I would imagine that his wife, upon seeing him that evening, insisted on some extensive testing at the hospital the following day. The doctors at Bellevue wasted no time in diagnosing the problem. George was not going to be leaving the hospital any time soon. In fact, he would never leave it alive.
I was back home in Newfoundland, and I can still see my mother’s face when she was told that her thirty-nine-year-old son was terminally ill with cancer. It was not a sorrowful look. It was not the look of shock. Her look showed no emotion. It was a blank stare. I had given her the bad news as gently as I could. She understood, but she almost seemed to be devising a method to file it away in a part of her mind that would allow her to retrieve it when she could better face the shock. Everyone in the room saw the same look. We were talking about George, wondering about George, and hoping for George, but my mother stared straight ahead, off into the distance, not making a sound.
I have often heard it said that when so much suffering takes hold of an individual, there is something in the brain that triggers a sort of defence mechanism to cushion the blow. I thought this might be happening to my mother. However, there is a more plausible explanation. She had lost a young girl at three, a young boy a year after that. She had then lost her first-born daughter at twenty-one, then her second daughter at forty-nine. Now she was losing her fifth child at thirty-nine years old. Shock was long past. Now it was quiet resignation, a void that couldn’t be filled.
Jack was still in New York and reported home frequently on the downward spiral of our brother George. He was now in a coma, probably induced because of the pain. I left immediately for New York to visit him, although I knew for certain that he would have no knowledge of my presence.
Jack and I went over to the hospital the same evening I arrived in New York. As I entered the hospital room and approached his bed, I suddenly had some idea of what my mother had already experienced on five separate occasions. Yes, it was shock—obviously not the kind of shock a mother feels when she loses a child, but shock nonetheless. It was hard to believe that this could be happening, but it was. And so quickly! As I looked down at him, all I could think about was the three of us talking together, being together, living together. He looked so healthy in the hospital bed, showing very little sign of being ill. How could this be happening to one so young, with so much to live for? He was married only ten or twelve years and had a young son. For some people cancer is a disease that moves slowly. It will give its victim years of living before the end finally comes. Some will even die of another ailment while the cancer lingers on without delivering the fatal blow. For my brother George the cancer had completed its journey within five weeks of his collapse on the street in Manhattan. He was now gone at thirty-nine years of age.
I LEFT NEW YORK for home again to be near my mother, who by now had moved in with my wife, Belle, and me in Avondale. The years had exacted a heavy toll on her, but through it all she never lost even a small fraction of her faith. She would pray morning, noon, and night, and was resigned to the fact that any trials and sorrows that had been visited upon her were all part of God’s plan and that she would understand it all someday. It was no small blessing that she didn’t have to see her sixth child die just a year or so after she passed away. My brother Jim would die of cancer at just sixty years old. Up to that point he was the only one of her sons who had reached the age of sixty.
My mother would live to the great old age of ninety-two, proof positive that hard work and heartache kills no one. In her declining years, when dementia had set in, she would sit on the sofa at night in our family room looking out at the station road in Avondale. Although there were only a few street lamps visible on the road from our house, each night she would stare into these small nuggets of light and make the same remark over and over again: “My heavens, Norman, the lights of Manhattan are so nice tonight.” I would agree.
Our sons, Deon and Randy, would often look at each other in bewilderment, wondering what it was all about. Then I would try to explain, in a few minutes, the events of sixty years past and why she was reliving some of the happier moments. I had long ago halted any effort at explaining to her that these were just street lamps and not the lights of Manhattan. She would ignore my interruption and continue her reverie.
There was no bringing her back to reality at this point, and I soon came to realize I shouldn’t even be trying. Maybe reality was not a place she wanted to be. Maybe she just wanted to escape that difficult place. After all, reality for her had been filled with sorrow, hardship, abandonment, and death. Why bring her back to that, even if it was possible to do so?
Now that my mother has passed on and I have the luxury of some extra thinking time, I often wonder what her life meant in the bigger picture. How did it add up and what was the sum total of all her suffering and heartbreak? That question, I suppose, could be asked of anyone. How do you evaluate all you’ve done or failed to do? There are, I’m sure, many similar stories of happy beginnings and sorrowful endings. In my mother’s case I believe that, while she longed for the easier life she almost had, she did not turn from the inevitable sorrow that dogged her to the end of her life. Eventually, when the past became too much to endure, she blocked it out and welcomed the oncoming dementia as a good friend.
What was the sum total of her life? Who knows? I do, however, remember one of her favourite lines that might offer a clue; she would say, “Our suffering is good only if we offer it to God. He will use it in His time and in His way.” I would nod in agreement. Yes, I think that’s a life well-lived.