SIX
A Futile Fussiness
LUCY STOOD IN THE doorway of her mother’s bedroom. Sailor scrambled to his feet, nosed his face beneath her hand.
“I am going to live in St. John.”
Josephine slid shut the drawer of Simeon’s dresser. She had been going through his clothing, which she had not yet removed from drawer, cupboard or closet. She sought frayed collars, loose buttons, telling herself she could not give away anything that showed evidence of her own inattention.
She sat on her bed, frightened by the expression in Lucy’s eyes. Josephine still wore full mourning. Black dress, black shoes.
“I am going for various reasons, Mother. One, because Uncle Charles has decided to take George as his ‘son.’ Two, because Grandfather has offered to pay for George’s education. Three, because no one has offered to do a single thing for me. You are not even my legal guardian…”
“But I—”
“I will go to work.”
A clatter. Downstairs. Something falling, ordinary.
“Where, Lucy?”
“The St. John Cotton Mill. I have secured a room for two dollars a week.”
Josephine clutched one of Simeon’s handkerchiefs. She had embroidered it herself and given it to him as a Christmas present. She had sewn his initials entwined with hers within a chain-stitched red heart.
“Oh, Lucy. Oh, my dear. I beg you not to do this.”
Lucy’s jaw crept outward, her eyes hardening. “Begging is entirely pointless.”
“Why are you angry with me?”
Lucy strode to the open window. She, too, wore a black dress. There was no sound but the hiss of rain, the dragging rush of wet leaves.
“Don’t you miss your father, Lucy? Don’t you…”
“Of course I miss my father.” She turned and sat at Josephine’s dressing table. She tossed her hands into the air. “I’m used to missing my father.” Her voice rose to a shout. Sailor slunk to his rug. “He’s been gone for half of my life, Mother. He could have been working here, in town. He did have that opportunity. And you could have been learning something. Doing something. Other than…sorting through your calling cards. Deciding what to tell Ellen what to make for your dinner parties. Living in this…ridiculous enormous house. Favouring your son.”
Her voice was strained, tear-filled.
“I…”
“I know what you’re going to say. This is what you were supposed to do. Well, I’m not going to do what is expected of me. I am not going to wait for a man to treat me like a princess, then expect me to behave like one. I will never marry. I will make my own money and I’ll keep it.”
Josephine folded her hands, crumpling the handkerchief so Lucy would not see the embroidered heart.
Sailor whimpered, repressing the wagging of his tail to a suggestion.
Lucy kicked a footstool, sent it skittering. She stalked from the room.
Josephine unfolded the handkerchief, smoothed it on her lap. Last week, George had made a visit. They had sat on the side veranda drinking tea and he had introduced the idea of selling the house. He was investigating how much money they might receive from the property if they sold it, once all three siblings reached their majority, and how much Josephine might expect to receive for her one-third. He argued that she would be better suited to a smaller house, with less to take care of. She imagined Lucy listening to his opinions, silent, hostile, evaluating.
What children do not know, she thought. What children can never know. How parents suffer their rage and always, always, always forgive their cruelty.
June 12, 1888
Dear Cousin Carrie,
I write to tell you about Lucy in the hopes you will look out for her. She has taken a position at the St. John Cotton Mill. She left this morning on the train. She will be residing at a boarding house. 15 King Street. She tells me the house is at the bottom of the street overlooking the water. I beg you to go look at it and meet the owner and see whether it is a safe place. I could do nothing to stop her. She blames me for my situation.
I cannot think what I should do to support myself.
Love,
Your cousin,
Josephine
Carrie stood on her doorstep, pulling on summer gloves. Elms arched over a grass strip dividing the street, where two gardeners knelt, planting geraniums. She set off towards the city centre. As she turned down the hill towards the harbour, brick houses with bay windows and decorative detail gave way to rows of Italianate commercial buildings.
A few square-rigged ships lay at anchor. She viewed them critically, comparing their shabbiness to her father’s ship, Traveller. Rigging creaked as the ships rocked on the rising tide; and memory came to her of the time Traveller had been boarded by pirates in the South China Sea.
It was a horror that had awakened her from nightmares all her childhood and, occasionally, did so even now: her nursemaid’s searing wail as she was carried off—Madame, Captain, Madame; her mother, Azuba, forcing her to feign death in a pool of her father’s blood; her mutism, and an English doctor, in Hong Kong, looming over her with an anxious expression, unsure of the cure. She knew that Azuba blamed herself for these terrors and for Carrie’s childlessness, as if the two were related; and yet had never said I should not have gone to sea. Carrie had overcome her resentment of this, respecting the risks her mother had insisted upon taking, understanding how a woman might feel trapped by a life into which she did not fit.
One day, she thought, Lucy will understand her own mother, as I now understand mine.
She reached the bottom of King Street. Number fifteen was a shabby, three-storeyed, flat-roofed wooden house. Horses stood in a yard next to it, harnessed to slovens; beyond was a maze of shed- covered wharves where water sucked and slapped, filthy with tobacco leaves, vegetable peelings and dead fish.
A woman let her in. Thin, unsmiling.
“First room on the right.”
Carrie climbed the stairs. Knocked. Lucy opened the ill-set door; she stepped back, startled. Carrie swept into the room. Another girl curled on the single bed, sleeping.
“That’s Min,” Lucy murmured, pulling out a chair for her cousin. “We have to share the bed.”
Min, evidently a sound sleeper, did not stir.
Carrie sat, arranged her skirt, surveyed the room.
“Good for you, Lucy. I’m proud of you.”
Lucy slipped onto the remaining chair. Her forehead bore a red crease from the elastic of a mill worker’s mob cap. Her face had lost flesh; her dress was loose on her frame. Intense eyes bore the narrowed focus of fatigue. The window was set in a crooked frame, or perhaps the house had shifted. Salt air seeped over the sill, bearing the squabble of gulls.
“Tell me about your work,” Carrie said. “What do you do?”
“It is loud. So loud.” Lucy fanned her hands beside her ears. “I can still hear them. The looms.”
Carrie, along with other reform-minded, well-to-do women, was working to improve the Factory Act legislation, passed but not yet in effect. She had toured cotton mills, rope manufacturers. She had visited confectioners, shoe factories, biscuit companies, box and match makers, brush and paper factories, potteries—all within the city of St. John. She and the others planned to tour the province and speak on the conditions. Lack of separate toilet facilities for men and women. Underage children. Unequal pay, unsafe conditions. Molestation. Punishment.
“I tend a spinning frame,” Lucy said. “Just one frame, till I learn. I have to draw out the carriage and revolve the spinner. I have to actuate the fallers. Check for broken threads; if there are any, call for the doffers. They come racing down between the looms, the little girls.”
Carrie nodded. She had seen this, on her tours. Wearing soiled aprons, the gang of doffers scuttled between the looms with their boxes, tearing off the full bobbins, replacing them with empty ones.
“It’s hot, too. They keep it hot and moist so the thread won’t snap. There are rules posted everywhere.”
Lucy glanced at Carrie, who was more like an aunt than a cousin. She looked down at her hands, worried at a welt. Carrie, for her part, gazed at this girl upon whom she had showered gifts. They sat listening to the gulls.
“I came, Lucy, because your mother is worried.”
“I’m all right.”
“I know you are, Lucy. I’ll tell Josephine that you are.”
Carrie was certain that Lucy was hungry; that she had not expected to have a strange girl in her bed; that she was appalled to be living in a place that stank of the privy and was liable to flooding by any exceptionally high tide; that she was shocked by the factory conditions. She saw, too, that the girl was fiercely animated by the death of her father, which she had not yet grieved or accepted.
She handed Lucy a slip of paper.
“This is my address. Women meet at my house every Thursday evening at seven p.m. We are trying to change the laws so that what happened to your mother—having no custody over you children, you know, and all the rest of what happens to a woman when her husband doesn’t…when a will can’t be found—can never happen again.”
Lucy did not take her eyes from Carrie’s face.
“We want to make laws so that no children will work in factories or be without education. So that not only young men will be expected to attend university or to become doctors and lawyers. So that women will have the vote to ensure these changes. Even become lawyers and write new legislation. The women in the group are not all privileged, Lucy. There are single and working women, too.”
Lucy took the card and angled it, tipping her head. She drew a long breath as if overwhelmed by the challenge she had imposed upon herself and which, Carrie could see, far surpassed her imaginings.
Flora stepped onto the porch of Fairweather’s Gentlemen’s Clothing store. A boy was painting the railings. The paint in the bucket was skimmed with dust and contained a half-drowned butterfly. A bell tinkled as she opened the door. Inside, it was cool and smelled of sizing. She approached the counter where a girl was absorbed with folding a shirt.
One of Mr. Fairweather’s daughters.
“May I speak with Mr. Fairweather?”
The girl’s eyes shifted with a sequence of expressions that Flora had become accustomed to: surprise, jealousy, disdain—the paradigm of finding Flora inadequate to her beauty.
They went to the back of the store.
“Visitor for you, Mr. Fairweather.”
“Come in.”
Over the girl’s shoulder Flora glimpsed the Overseer perusing a catalogue with drawings of men’s collars. He rose to his feet, flustered.
“I am the one who…”
“Yes, yes, yes. Of course. I remember.” He scurried away his papers. “Are you happy at…of course, such a sad time. Do close the door. Sit, sit, Miss Salford. Please.”
She sat, thinking of the butterfly and wishing she had paused to pinch it, for she’d seen its paint-coated wings stirring. Mr. Fairweather, too, resumed his seat, gripping his hands together on his desk.
A nice family, he’d told her. Where you’ll spend Christmas.
He coloured, a flush that began above his collar and streaked up his neck.
“Is Mrs. Galloway…something…”
“Please, I wondered if Mrs. Galloway told you about my sister.”
“Your—” The colour subsided as his thoughts cleared. “Ah, yes. She did tell me.”
His temporary confusion emboldened Flora. She sat forward on the edge of her chair.
“I want you to help me find my sister. Me and her were separated. Like them children at the auction. They told me I was to come to Canada and better myself. I was to make a home so me and Enid wouldn’t be in the poorhouse. I promised my sister that.”
Fists, white-knuckled. Pressed to her knees.
“I promised her.”
He drew a breath, picked up a glass paperweight, watched the play of light in its suspended flowers as he turned it.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you, Miss Salford. After Ada and Henry died, you know, there was simply no time. It would have taken weeks, perhaps months, to determine which of the philanthropic organizations brought you here. Or to search the ships’ passenger lists. We had to find a place for you.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Fairweather. You done a good thing for me. I am happy to be with Mrs. Galloway. But I have to find Enid.”
He nodded, held up a hand.
“Yes, yes. Of course. I will make a start to look for your sister.” He retrieved a sheet of paper, slid a gold pen from its holder, a tiny ear spoon at its tip. He rubbed the spoon between two fingers. “Let’s begin with what you can remember. All right?”
He met her eyes and she saw his shame.
At church, the following Sunday, the minister preached on the evils of the pauper auction and the need for an almshouse.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil, 1 Timothy 6:10,” he said. “We should not begrudge our taxes for this use. It is our duty to our fellow man.”
Permelia and Harland sat in their usual pew.
It was mid-July and the heat was oppressive, extending even into the night. Permelia chafed at Harland’s presence in the bed, calling him a stove. He began sleeping on the porch where he could smell the sharpness of dew-wet soil, loosened around his perennials. He listened to the town’s quiet—no horse hooves, no strike of hammer or cry of child, only the chirr of insects. Up the street, Josephine slept alone like Permelia, only not by choice. He imagined that she curled on her side with arms spread around the phantom shape of Simeon. He’d hardened and relieved himself, guilty, ecstatic.
He flushed, in church, remembering. Handkerchief in his hand. Washing it.
It would never happen again, never. He stared straight ahead, listening to the minister, but could not help glancing sideways. Josephine wore black, a lightweight crepe. Her face was veiled, her Bible bound in black Moroccan leather.
He would help the girl, he thought, and felt a lightening, a relief from the weight of guilt. He sensed the justice of doing so. The expiation. For he had followed the progress of the little boy separated from his sisters and discovered that he was hard used by the man who had purchased him.
He thought of renouncing the job of Overseer of the Poor. Paying the fine. Permelia shifted on her seat, plucking at her skirt, a sheen of perspiration on her face. She fretted over the fit of her clothing and complained of the cook’s food.
Maud answered the telephone. It was Mr. Fairweather.
“I have purchased bicycles. I wondered if you and Flora would like to try them. Perhaps Mrs. Galloway, too?”
Josephine smiled when told of the request.
“Goodness, no, Maudie. You go. You and Flora. Does he want you now? You go right down. The dishes can wait.”
Maud and Flora went to the store. Mr. Fairweather wheeled out two brand-new bicycles.
“My wife, Mrs. Fairweather, you know, she won’t try,” he said. “Nor any of my daughters.”
“You first, Flora,” Maud said, nervous.
He held the bicycle steady while Flora clambered onto the seat, hitching up her skirt. He held the back of the seat and ran behind, letting go only long enough for her to feel the thrill of freedom.
Fireflies blinked, the darkness lilting with their interrupted wander. Maud and Flora had taken to playing checkers on the front veranda, evenings, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Both would turn sixteen in August.
Josephine stood in front of the linen press, fingers lifting hair from her scalp.
She sighed to enable herself to breathe. Her body was as if drowning in something other than water.
Long ago, before Simeon’s death, she had agreed to host a tea meeting. The meetings, Permelia said, were to raise money for the projects planned by the beautification committee: paint for picket fences, new trees for Arbour Day, hiring a lamplighter for the new street lamps. Last Sunday, after church, Permelia had reminded her of this obligation, how it would need to take place soon.
“We usually put little tables in our front parlour,” Permelia had said.
“How many?”
“Oh, six or so.”
Tablecloths. The white ones with a pattern of embroidered forget-me-nots. Blue napkins to match.
On the veranda, Maud laughed. “Oh, you!” She did not mind being bested by Flora, who would not be smug, like Lucy, or dismissive like George.
Flora’s English accent, broadening. “Sorry, Maudie.”
Josephine heard the girls putting away the game, the scrape of chairs, their footsteps going through the parlour, their voices, muted behind the kitchen door.
Quiet.
Quiet was like the reaper; she felt his presence in corner or doorway, cold, silent—an essence, expectant. She closed the linen press and stood with her forehead pressed against it.
And there must be freshly polished silverware. Cucumber sandwiches and lemon cake. Bouquets of snapdragons and baby’s breath.
She went to her desk and opened a large black book. Every evening, she entered the day’s receipts in their narrow columns, writing carefully and with a sense of obligation. Mr. Eveleigh had shown her how to keep accounts. To prove to the court that you are not squandering the children’s inheritance.
The children, she thought. Not hers, as if the court-mandated custody rendered them more their own people, now, than their mother’s children. They seemed, all at once, to have become an independent unit, when such change should have happened incrementally, by dint of new loves, new friendships, new occupations.
She put her face in her hands.
Simeon must have left a will. Perhaps a maid, illiterate, tossed it out.
He would be so angry to know this. He would be furious to learn that all he had planned for her—the turret room, the greenhouse and roses, the house with its varnished maple floorboards—was in jeopardy.
The pulse of insects, a murmur of voices in the kitchen—she heard not the quiet of a summer night but the absence of Simeon’s voice. She felt the yawning stretch of her life without him, a pain from which she could not run, that she must accept. With which she must live. That could not be ameliorated, save by sleep.
Tea meeting.
If Mr. Dougan were here, he would have brought down the freshly painted chairs. He would have set up the tables. Margaret and Mary would have found and washed and ironed the tablecloths and the napkins. The details which must be correct—gleaming silverware; spotless, starched folds of linen; place markers on flowered cards—seemed an attention to minutia which Josephine, at this moment, saw as a means to fill the moments of a shallow life. A futile fussiness.
She broke into a sweat. She stood and staggered, light-headed, the black dress encasing her in heat.
She made her way down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door. Ellen was reading aloud from the paper.
“There was blood and plenty of it outside the left leg. I mean by plenty of it a stream as wide as one’s three fingers…Oh, Mrs. Galloway. I’m just reading that old axe murder trial. Mr. Dougan got me into the habit. They’re going over it now. They expect a verdict tomorr—”
Josephine collapsed.
Flora jumped from her chair, tossing down sock and darning egg.
Maud shrieked.
Sailor scrabbled from his pillow.
A tiny, muscled, sun-bronzed woman started up from the corner. Indigent Ida, well-known in the town and surrounding countryside, had just arrived, coming at nightfall, as was her habit. She carried herbs and ointments, asked for nothing more than a meal and a single night’s lodging. Always, she would be gone in the morning, vanishing into the dawn like a stray cat.
She knelt by Josephine.
“Water,” she said. Her voice was husky from disuse. “A cloth.”
Flora brought a basin and a cloth.
Ida bathed Josephine’s face, unbuttoned her cuffs, ran the cloth over her arms and wrists. She held a small leather pouch to Josephine’s nose.
“I fell,” Josephine murmured.
They helped her into a chair. Maud ran into the parlour and returned unfolding a fan—red, a golden crane spreading its wings. She stood by her mother, frantically stirring the air.
“The tea meeting,” Josephine said. Her fingers stroked Sailor’s head, automatically. He showed the whites of his eyes, looking up at her. “I can’t.”
“The likes of them,” Ellen muttered. “When they know you’re shattered.” She pulled the kettle to the hot part of the stove, jabbing a stick of wood with unnecessary force into the fire box.
“Tables and…Mr. Dougan not here for the little…”
“Them little chairs.” Ellen imitated a simpering voice. “And you with no Mr. Dougan. No Margaret and Mary.” She scooped tea leaves from the canister, an irritable motion at odds with the worried look she sent Josephine.
Flora watched Josephine straightening her sleeves, brushing down her skirts. She had changed from the self-possessed woman who had purchased her at the auction into a person whose movements were uncertain, half-formed. Who wandered the house, staring from windows at the flicker of tree shadow, the late roses; who picked up misplaced objects—an eyeglass case, a book—and put them down again. Who forgot to bathe. Whose hands trembled. Who slept on her chignon and did not notice when her hair slipped from its pins.
Ida settled back noiselessly in the corner. The lamp began to smoke and Maud turned up the wick.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Fairweather, Mother,” she said, her voice earnest. “I’ll call her on the telephone and say you’ve fallen ill.”
Maud was the best telephone operator in the household. She loved to use it.
They sat drinking tea and nibbling gingersnaps. In the circle of caring women, Flora felt a sense of being part, no longer abandoned: the house rising above and around them—closets, hallways, turrets, gables, verandas. The barn, with its empty loft, its vacant stalls. Her garden, growing in the darkness. Baby beets, slender carrots. Rows of potatoes, with purple blossoms. Mr. Fairweather, asking questions that might lead to Enid’s discovery. Josephine, always kind. Maud and Ellen, like friends.
“You should keep a boarding house,” Indigent Ida remarked, from the half dark. “Got the space. Got the women.”