Every Thursday afternoon at three o’clock Cora Burgher, the cleaning woman, left her job at the Oddfellows’ Hall and joined Mr. Arthur Coote, the Methodist choir director and church organist, for tea in his salon next door – every afternoon for two hours during the months of January through April. Tongues wagged without charity. On his sixty-fifth birthday Arthur Coote retired, and at the May-the-first dinner to honour his twelve years of faithful service, he delivered a touching valediction, concluding his remarks with the announcement of his engagement to “the lady who has been the subject of your most heartfelt concern these past months, dear Mrs. Burgher.” In the respectful silence that attended his sitting down, a teacup shrieked.
When Granny explained that she could not be married in the Methodist Church, Arthur said with a patient smile, “Well, then, how about the Anglican? I was raised C. of E. and didn’t terribly mind it.” When she quietly let him know that she meant no church of any kind, he paused just slightly, as if he’d lost his cue for a second, and said cheerily, “Then it will be the judge’s chambers for us, luv; just like my first time.”
Though she didn’t know him well then, she knew enough to realize how difficult a decision he had just made, for while he was no religious zealot, Arthur Coote had given many years of faithful service to his church, and he continued to be loyal to it – in spite of everything – until his death. Oddly enough, she felt even then that it was his own passionate commitment to certain ideals and principles which enabled him to understand so adroitly and without explanation her own position on the issue. At any rate he accepted her wishes as worthy of his own unquestioned support, and once he made up his mind, he was not one to glance back with a moment’s regret. Although he loved to regale her with tales of his legendary and shady past on the frontier, he was not one to dwell there. Those events, sad or comic, had been completed, lived-through, like the scenes in a play writing themselves so naturally they were now freed up to be re-enacted, shuffled, mocked, or adored – by the survivors – as objects of wonder. Often she found herself wondering what he dreamt about in his deep unhaunted sleep, or if he dreamt at all. “I certainly do dream,” he’d proclaim, feigning umbrage. “Why, last night I dreamt of sweet LuLu Sweet,” and then he’d wink his all-purpose wink.
With her and later on with Eddie, Arthur was lively and fully at ease, jubilantly talkative, and thoughtful, ever alert to the tones under and between their words. With strangers he was still diffident despite his years on the stage, and with those he knew casually – like his acquaintances in the Church and town – he was courtly and reserved. It was only when he got en rôle, as he was when she first saw him at the Christmas concert, that the hobgoblins and trolls and minor demons were allowed into the light, and only when there was enough music to animate and camouflage. The sparkle in his eye came from something so clear and aboriginal in his childhood, it was unquenchable. He reminded her of someone she’d known almost fifty years ago.
“Just because we’re gonna get ‘hitched’ in the judge’s broom closet doesn’t mean we can’t do this thing in style,” Arthur said. And he meant it.
On the first Saturday of June, as many of the labouring men traipsed home from the sheds and docks through the afternoon sun, and most of their women gathered on street corners or under the awnings of the shops on main street and all of the children roamed loose about the alleys and vacant lots – a buggy was observed conspicuously decamping from the livery behind the Queen’s Hotel and heading, without shame, up Michigan towards St. Clair, where it turned and in a sedate jog moved towards Sarnia. Everyone who looked, and there were few able to resist, recognized the vehicle at once. It was the butcher’s cart: actually a regular two-wheeled touring buggy of vintage descent with scuffed leather seats and applewood doors and a garish tin box improvised behind the passengers section just big enough to hold ‘on ice’ a morning’s delivery of steaks and roasts. Bobbin, the buckskin mare, was in her accustomed pace, a pertness in the arch of the mane and the carriage of the tail. Someone had tossed a sprig of lilac over her withers.
In the buggy where the butcher’s boy ought to have been sat three odd figures: an old woman dressed simply in blue with no bonnet to shield her silver locks or dampen the audacity of the single plum-blossom adorning them; a very old gentleman dolled up in his Sunday suit with boots polished and shining like sin and a gray top-hat to crown his snowy hair; and between them, a small boy with eyes bigger than his face, the mare’s rein curled in the glee of his grip. Many of the bystanders stood open-mouthed, some waved reflexively, a few waved anyway, but if the occupants were aware of such accolades, they acknowledged them only with their eyes. Likewise, when several young defenders of the public faith offered them a choice of catcalls, they responded to none, choosing silence and the dignity of their own company. As the wedding-carriage made the turn towards Bayview Park and the county seat beyond, three smudged urchins raced up behind it, caterwauling and hurling ill-rhymed taunts. Bobbin kept to her course and soon the boys fell back, winded and unrepentant. One of them, half-heartedly, flung a stone.
Arthur turned around, doffed his hat, and said without raising his voice, “Thank you, ladies and gentleman, for those good wishes”. And the carriage rocked with laughter.
Granny and Eddie moved from the cottage near the Lane to Arthur’s house on St. Clair Street near the geographical centre of the village. Arthur put a fresh coat of whitewash on the siding and managed to get one of the shutters to hang straight before losing heart. The only hammers he could use without injury were part of a piano. Granny got busy right away planting perennials and a bulb garden and vegetable patch in the rich soil of the yard. Often the three of them ate lunch or supper on a checkered cloth spread under the giant hickory tree where gray-squirrels convened and robins made their seasonal stand. Inside, the house was warm and cozy, with Arthur’s piano to brighten the evening gloom of winter and his stage-trunk crammed with the props and memorabilia of a lifetime. Arthur insisted that his wife would not work, as his savings and small pension would carry them comfortably as far as they could ever wish to go, but Granny decided to keep on working her two days a week at The Queen’s, partly because Eddie was doing well enough at school to be a candidate for high school and perhaps even university where extra money would be needed, partly because she still enjoyed working somewhere, and mostly because Duckface Malloney needed her. With the decline of his business in the 1890’s Malloney had seen the bustling, polyglot clientele of the boom years turn into a trickle of tired drummers and advance men. The aged chorus had longago deserted the lobby in favour of the barbershop and the livery stable near the racetrack. Just after the new century dawned and the last Grand Trunk car-man was removed to the Sarnia shops, Malloney had a slight stroke that left him with a shuffle and blurred speech. The only person he would speak directly to was “Mrs. Burgher”, as he still called her. Granny relayed his weekly instructions to the rest of the bewildered staff. When Duckface was removed to Sunset Glades in 1908, Granny’s life of formal labour came to an end. So did The Queen’s.
Arthur Coote was born in England in 1835 and raised very much to be an Englishman all his life, a not-inconsiderable challenge for his parents who emigrated to Montreal when little Arthur was only nine. To this day he retained much of the tripping cadence of his upper-middle-class upbringing in London and all of the courtly manners. His father was a furrier, his mother a lady of the lesser aristocracy who, if she had not had the misfortune of being overbred, would have spent her life on the illegitimate stage of music-hall and melodeon. Even in colonial, bourgeois Montreal she managed to find music teachers for her only son. And a boarding school that ranked good manners above mere academic attainments. He was such a deft improvisateur at the piano that the amateur theatrical groups among the better class vied for his services as accompanist to their farces and burlesques. At eighteen he entered McGill to prepare for law or commerce or some useful adjunct profession his father could deploy in the fur trade. In 1858 at the age of twenty-three, he left his father’s second-best desk and headed for Chicago, and thence to the gold fields of the Fraser Valley in New Caledonia, whenever that was.
“I wanted to get away, anywhere that wasn’t my family and their transplanted version of what life was. More truthfully, I still had a lot of the old Nick in me, I was young and I was frisky. But I’ll tell you, luv, I didn’t last two weeks in the mining camps along the Fraser where we froze at night and burned all day and nine out of ten ‘panners’ hailed from ‘Californy’ and spoke no English. I was very bashful in those days and though I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t know how to go about obtaining the least bit of information useful in becoming a successful millionaire in the gold business. I broke my left thumb driving in my first claimstake, and I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to play the piano again I ran all the way to New Westminster, got a splint put on it by a horse-doctor, and resumed running till I hit Victoria and the Pacific Ocean.”
Once there he got a job in a bank counting other people’s gold. To his surprise and delight, this frontier town – deliberately concocted to stand as a cultural redoubt against a riptide of Yankee pollutants – was alive with theatrical and musical enterprise. “I started out playing in the local orchestras and bands brought in to support the professional troupes from California. When the Chapman family started their stock company and built the Colonial Theatre, I joined them, playing violin, squeeze-box and piano, and getting a chance to act in bit parts. We even travelled back to New Westminster and followed the gold fields as far north as the Caribou County. But when we got back to Victoria, the company folded, the winter set in, most of the Yankees went back to sunnier climates for the season, and I slipped back into the safer world of gentleman’s theatricals, where I was often asked to sing as well as play. As no gentlewoman would ever be seen on a stage, the younger men like myself played the female parts. I discovered that I enjoyed these excursions; I did not creep out of my shyness, I burst out of it with a patter-song or a frenzied rhetorical flourish in one of the melodramas, or in the wee voice of the female I found way inside me. Occasionally several of the ‘commercial’ actresses would be asked to join us and that was great because then we could act out the tragedies, even some Shakespeare. Naturally such fallen women were excluded from the respectable dances and balls that always followed the play.”
But when the good weather brought a new crop of American speculators and entrepreneurs, Arthur was drawn back into the greasier, tinsel world of the troupes. In 1861 he joined for a spell the John S. Potter Dramatic Troupe, quitting his job so he could travel with them to the Lyceum in San Francisco. “And there I fell madly in love with our resident ingénue, Miss Lulu Sweet, seventeen-years-old with a figure like Aphrodite’s daughter and the lilt of a Siren. We billed her as ‘Juvenile Actress, Songstress and Danseuse’, and she was all of those and more.” “Do go on,” Granny prompted. “When I asked her to marry me, I was thunderstruck when she said yes, and we eloped with half the San Francisco police force on our trail, but not before we’d tasted enough bliss to make our trespass unforgivable.”
“How long did it last?”
“Longer than you might imagine. About two months, the first month being a disaster and the second a total disaster. The only thing sweet about Lulu was her voice. I think.”
The bank, short on men of probity, gave him his job back, and for a while he drifted again into the ‘English set’ of Victoria society where his soaring tenor voice and his engaging piano were in steady demand. By the mid 1860’s, though, the Colonial Theatre had become a music-hall – American style with minstrel shows, olios and seedy burlesques – and Arthur regaled Eddie and Granny with stories of his sneaking out of his respectable boarding house, incognito, and joining the banal drollery of the ‘box-house’. Vaudeville sketches and routines were added to the minstrels in the late 1860’s and Arthur’s versatile pianoforte was judged one of the wonders of the age. “Once I even put on a blackface when one of the regulars took ill, and I forgot to wash it off before coming down to breakfast at Mrs. Tiffen’s; well, she went white and green and raspberry, and before I could interpret her gasps and think up a plausible excuse – like having fallen down in the mud of Governor Street so perfectly flat that only the front of my face was besmirched – one of the young rams around the table quipped, ‘Why don’t you-all sing us a chorus of Massa’s in de col’ co’l ground?’”
Arthur was quick at arithmetic and helped Eddie almost every night during the long winters. Granny and Arthur took turns reading aloud to him. Between or after, there was music and treble singing and the sizzle of the coal-fire. Many hours were passed in silent reading, Arthur in his chair, Granny in the rocker, Eddie curled on the chesterfield. Arthur loved romance novels and devoured the latest works of W. D. Lighthall and Sir Gilbert Parker and a newcomer from the States named Zane Grey. Sometimes he would go on at length about a book like Lighthall’s The Young Seigneur or Nation-Making, amplifying its idealism and its plea for a belief in essential goodness till his eyes glistened and even little Eddie stopped his reading to watch. Later on, when Eddie brought some of his high-school chums to the house, Granny would use her special way to cajole Arthur out of his reserve and soon he would begin with a song at the piano, perhaps a vaudeville classic like:
I saw Esau kissing Kate
And in fact we all saw three
For I saw Esau, he saw me
And she saw I saw Esau
then, warming up, burst fully into the role as the Lord High Executioner, at which point the lads would join in and whole scenes would be spun out, impromptu and cavalier and self-engaging, and the mood set for one or more of Arthur’s true-life tales. When he was finished and Granny served the tea or mulberry wine, Arthur reverted instantly to his courtly, gentle self.
Arthur subscribed to all the papers and read them avidly. He regularly tried to engage Granny in political discussion, which turned easily into harmless jousts of words. He never did learn how she could dismantle one of his arguments, ardently developed from the latest hard-data and editorial disquisition, without recourse to similar foundations of fact and opinion. He tried to catch her reading anything but the local pages of The Observer but never did.
“How can you be so critical of the Tories when you haven’t looked at one blessed statement they’ve made since Laurier got in?”
“I’ve known about Tories for a long time, since I was a child. I don’t need to hear their latest lines.”
“No wonder they don’t consider giving women the vote.”
“I ain’t heard no one proposin’ it.”
“Well then, if you don’t approve of Tory policies, then you must be a Grit, deep down.”
“Worse than the Tories by half, they are.”
“But in Canada you have to be one or the other. If you’re not a Liberal then you’ve got to be a Conservative. Red or blue, it’s an axiom.”
“I’d put the axe to both of ’em.”
“Don’t be impertinent, Granny Coote.”
Though he personally admired Laurier and his optimism about the Dominion’s place in the twentieth century, Arthur was a worshipper of the late Sir John A. Macdonald and his ‘national policy’.
“The greatest man North America has ever produced, and that includes Lincoln. The epitome of the nineteenth century. Out in British Columbia where he was hated and loved, we called him the Old War Horse. He brought us the railroad and saved us from the Visigoths of California. He had a dream bigger than all of us.”
“Never cared much for the man,” Granny said as gently as she could.
Arthur peered out of his reveries long enough to say, “Oh, why is that?”
“He was a Scotchman through and through.” And I know, she wanted to say aloud, I met the gentleman once with his promises down.
Arthur seemed more puzzled than hurt by this odd remark. Finally he winked omnivorously and said, “With a Frenchman’s liver, eh?”
“Don’t be impertinent.”
Granny told Arthur only those few facts of her own life which she felt he could withstand. How much he guessed or she gave away, she never knew. The great advantage, she thought, of not having shared the same past at our advanced age is that we can choose to reinvent those parts that please us most or offer the best chance for hope or are necessary to our mutual living, here and now. What we dream in private must remain mostly our own; there is not time nor words enough to begin the whole retelling, and that is a blessing in itself. On his side, Arthur tried many devices to get her talking, particularly about the ‘pioneer days’ as he called them. One day he left The Observer open at the local page where she would be sure to see the lead story; it was a feature interview with one Bessie Sycamore: Pioneer of Warwick Township. Through a series of adroit questions, the cub reporter was able to elicit from ninety-year-old Bessie the fact that she had borne fifteen children in a log cabin snug in the back-bush, eight of whom, she was proud to say, lived to adulthood. Moreover, she seemed to have spent six happy, unscathed decades cooking for the survivors and caring for two husbands, thirty-one grandchildren and uncounted great-grandchildren. Apparently she was now distressed because just this year for the first time she had been unable to bake her two dozen blueberry pies for the church bazaar. Arthritis, you know. And the secret of her long life? Hard work and prayer twice a day.
When Arthur came in from the shed, Granny gave him such a look of malevolence he thought he must have inadvertently poisoned her tea. But later, alone, she realized that the article had dismayed her as much as it had angered her. Did such people exist? Were there ever lives like that? Was it possible to watch seven children perish – who had ripped their way out of your flesh and seized the air you offered them in hope and trust – could anyone suffer that and still go on baking blueberry pies as if God and not the world mattered? Someone, she thought bitterly, has a lot to answer for.
“You might say I squandered my youth leading a double life,” Arthur said, recovering from his nap and trusting that she was awake in the chair next to him. “I couldn’t stay away from the minstrels or the ‘Free and Easies’ as we called them back then. When Charles and Ellen Kean came to Victoria, I was in the front row of the Theatre Royal, I could hear the echo of the illustrious Edmund Kean himself, I vowed ever after to hold my appetites in check and feed only on a steady diet of Hamlet and Richelieu. I offered my services to one of the Anglican churches and rediscovered the organ. Still, I’m ashamed to admit I was not only present in 1875 when Charles McDonald’s ‘Occidentals’ performed Black-Eyed Susan and pranced about the stage like trained bears, I was in the wings supplying some of the traitorous music. Nevertheless, that night marked a turning point in my life, for I saw a side of the theatre, and of theatrics, I had refused to acknowledge before. This American impresario had gathered together from each of the tribes of British Columbia nine native people whom he billed as ‘the Occidentals’ and described on his posters as ‘four squaws and five men…the best specimens of the children of the forest’. Besides a repertoire of hideous farces in which he’d trained them to mime a grotesque self-parody, these wretches performed nightly an Indian War Dance, contorted their bodies into ‘sixteen different pyramids’ and concluded the evening’s spectacle with the Indian Feast of Fire. You won’t believe this but this so-called aboriginal ceremony consisted, as the playbill proclaimed in bold type, of ‘eating fire, drinking burning naptha, devouring burning torches, breathing smoke and fire, and pulling long poles from their mouths’. And this travesty was put on at the Theatre Royal before a cheering Governor Douglas and all the local, highborn pooh-bahs.”
Arthur sighed deeply. Granny shifted in her chair, audibly.
“Later on I heard that this monstrous troupe was feted in Philadelphia and Washington during the 1876 celebrations, and then went abroad to the Crystal Palace in England to be gawked at by thousands of foreigners. In Paris they were booed off the stage because they failed to closely resemble the inhabitants of the Punjab. Shortly after that night, a new customer came into our bank, and a few months later I was engaged.”
As Arthur was fond of saying in jest, it was the longest engagement in recorded matrimonial history – eleven years and twenty-nine days. Helen Driscoll had come out to Victoria with her father, a Methodist preacher, and although the old man liked Arthur a great deal, he forbade his daughter to marry an Anglican, even a lapsed one. In desperation Arthur embraced the Methodist faith but apparently after too much doubt and reflection. When the old bigot finally died in 1887, they married. By this time Arthur was a full-fledged communicant and part-time organist of his bride’s church. When a position as full-time organist back in Helen’s hometown became available, the newlyweds returned east to London, Ontario. A year later internal politics and factional rivalries in the London parish prompted Arthur and Helen to accept the offer of the Point Edward Methodists, who were more than happy to have in their midst a musician of Arthur Coote’s standing.
“But you still love the old ditties and the drumrolls,” Granny said. “How did you hide them all those years?”
“I only disguised them a little,” he laughed. “I don’t think there was a soul who didn’t notice.”
She waited a while until some tone in the shuttered room had imperceptibly shifted, then she said, “Why did you really give it up?”
He let the question get comfortable before responding. “I wanted something…authentic in my life.”
Granny murmured reassurance.
“I wanted, after a lot of wandering about, to come home.”
They listened to the tic toc of the rocker through the room.
“I’m still here,” Granny said.