DUCHESS STREET WAS TYPICAL of Toronto, a mixture of industry and residential. To get to our house, I had to walk past a delivery warehouse where idle vans lined up on the asphalt. I don’t know how they survived in this economy. They never seemed busy. At least the driver couldn’t take out his frustration on the engine with a whip.
I moved on past the row of residences. The McCraes and the Greens were entertaining or burying their misery or whatever the unemployed did to distract themselves. They were sitting out on their respective porches. Both families were large, the sons returned from jobs that no longer existed. Lights from cigarettes and pipes glowed like fireflies in the gathering dusk. Bursts of laughter punctuated the air. It made me feel oddly lonely. I wasn’t married, and with nobody in the offing I can’t say I was happy about that. I’d have liked to have a fella to snuggle up to, as my grandma would have said. I missed her a lot. She’d died suddenly four years earlier of an aneurysm in the brain. We’d been sitting around the kitchen table when she put her hand to her head. “Ooh. Ouch,” were her last words — if you can even call them words. At that she collapsed forward. That’s it. The end. She was dead. “At least she didn’t suffer,” said Gramps. I knew that was true, but it had been a terrible shock to both of us.
When I was effectively orphaned at the age of two, Gran and Gramps didn’t hesitate for a second. They took me in, showered me with love, and brought me up to be as independent as a girl can be in this society of ours. With Gran’s passing, Gramps and I turned to each other.
My best friend, Polly, declared that my reliance on my grandfather was what was contributing to my lack of romance. “It’s safer than trusting an available man. You’re afraid of being abandoned.” Polly took a university course in Freudian psychology, and now she puts it to use, analyzing situations whenever possible.
At the moment, she was up in Muskoka working at a summer camp for disadvantaged children. She didn’t like it, really. “How can you adopt fifty children? They all need adopting, but they’re going back to whatever situation they call home at the end of the summer, where they will sink into their miserable lives. What we do for two months is a drop in the bucket.” I’d tried to convince her that drops in buckets can add up to rivers and seas, but she tended to have a pessimistic turn to her nature. Since she had been gone, we had exchanged letters and a couple of phone calls, but I missed chewing things over with her.
My reverie was broken by a shout from Mr. McCrae.
“Good evening, Miss Frayne. Hot enough for you?”
“Indeed it is.” I waved back at him. What else was I supposed to say? No, I’m quite chilly as a matter of fact?
As I approached my house, the usual delicious smell of baking bread wafted toward me. The next house but one was the location of the Ideal Bakery, and the air was always permeated with the smell of their goods. Even in these stringent times, people wanted bread and biscuits.
I was reminded of the Paradise Café. I had to admit that even though the evening had been physically tasking, I had enjoyed myself. I hoped the case Hilliard had brought me would require investigating for a while longer. So far, I certainly wasn’t ready to point the finger.
I expected to see Gramps sitting outside, but the porch was empty. There were lights on in the house. I walked up the steps and let myself in.
Gramps called from the kitchen. “That you, Lottie?”
“Who do you think it is?”
I was irritable with the heat and exertion of the evening, but there was an odd tone to his voice. I walked through the dark hall, back to the kitchen where the lights were bright. To my surprise, Gramps wasn’t alone. Nothing odd about that, except for the fact that his companion was our neighbour, Mrs. Johnson. I could swear that a moment earlier she’d been sitting on his lap.
As I entered the room, she was smoothing down her dress, and Gramps was most definitely smoothing down his hair.
“Hello, Lottie,” he mumbled. “I wasn’t expecting you until later.”
“It is later,” I said, not too nicely. “It’s after nine.”
I looked at Mrs. Johnson.
“I’d better be going,” she said. “I was just keeping your grandfather company. He gets lonely when you have to work all the time.”
Her voice was polite, but she managed to convey a reproach that made me bristle. Gramps and I had had many talks about my going to work. He swore he was all right with it. He wasn’t home alone all the time, and if he was lonely, he went to his veterans’ club.
To tell the truth, my suspicions (and Polly’s) about our buxom widowed neighbour were confirmed. She had set her cap at Gramps, and from the way he was looking so sheepish I’d guess she’d introduced the powerful bait of her sex appeal to get what she wanted. What that might be I wasn’t quite sure.
“Good night, Mrs. Johnson. Thanks for keeping my old sad sack of a grandfather from dreadful misery.”
“Lottie!” exclaimed Gramps. “Bertha and I had a very pleasant evening.”
“I’ll bet you did, Gramps. But it is late, and I am tired. So if you don’t mind, Mrs. Johnson, I’ll hit the wooden trail. Shall I see you out, or do you know the way?”
“I can see myself out, thank you, Charlotte. Good night, Arnie. Shall I drop by tomorrow?”
“I certainly hope so,” said Gramps. “Thanks again for keeping me company.”
I can’t say she exactly flounced out of the room, but she gave a pretty good imitation of a flounce.
Gramps and I waited until we heard the sound of the front door closing. Then he turned to me. He was mad.
“Charlotte, I don’t know how you can be so rude. She is a very nice woman, and she’s lonely.”
“Gramps! She was sitting on your lap. You were canoodling.”
He glared at me for a moment, then he actually smiled. “And why not. We’re both single.”
“You’re seventy-five, for God’s sake.”
“So what? That has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t mean there’s no life in the old dog. Bertha makes me feel young again.”
“Really? And just how does she do that?”
Gramps got to his feet. “I’m not going to talk to you when you’re in this mood. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He stomped out of the room. I felt wretched, of course, but I just didn’t have the energy to settle the issue tonight. I didn’t think it was something that would be easy to settle anyway. He was quite right. Why shouldn’t he have a romantic life, no matter what his age?
Trouble was I didn’t trust Bertha Johnson as far as I could throw her. She’d only moved into the house next door three months before, and it seemed to me that as soon as she’d sussed out the situation, she’d made a beeline for Gramps. At first, I was only too happy that he had somebody to keep him company when I was out, but her attentions began to escalate. A little junket here when he was under the weather, a fresh piece of cake there, a nice pork chop she’d got at the butcher’s. You get the picture. So what’s wrong with that, you might ask? As Gramps said, they were both single. But I wasn’t a pi for nothing. Mrs. Johnson seemed inconsistent in her recounting of her own history. First she said she was from Vancouver, then she was from Victoria. Okay, they’re both on the west coast, but surely you’d know the difference if you lived there. One you needed a ferry to get to. She was also vague about her first marriage. At one time she referred to her supposedly dead husband as Tom, another time as Tim. He seemed to have died from pneumonia first, then resurrected him-self sufficiently to die later in a boating accident. When I casually queried Gramps about these peculiarities, he shrugged them off. “We all get forgetful as we get older.” And how old was she, anyway? She claimed to be sixty, but I’d guess she was younger. Most women shave off a few years if they have to rather than adding to them. However, if you’re hoping to snare a seventy-five-year-old widower, saying you were closer to that age might give you more credibility and him more security.
Gramps shut his bedroom door emphatically. I hated to upset him, but I also wanted to protect him from possible heartbreak and exploitation. We’d have to talk about it.
I went into the hall, where we had the telephone. I considered ringing Mr. Gilmore at home, but he hadn’t called me so I assumed there was no change in his wife’s condition.
I made my way upstairs, stripped off my clothes, and plopped on the bed. I had an electric fan that didn’t make much difference. There seemed to be nothing to do except wait it out until the heat wave broke. I vowed I’d never complain again in January or February about frigid winter temperatures.