3.

“NAN, HERE, LET ME HELP you with that.” Lisa takes the oversized purse from Ruby and continues, “Why did you bring such a big purse?”

“I’m an old lady, Lisa. I can’t travel light anymore—between bottles of pills, spectacles, tissue, and well, you know, ‘old lady candies,’ I need the room.”

Lisa smiles at the joke. Her grandmother has always carried candies in her purse. When she and Jacklyn were young, Nan would produce them like magic, scrounging in the bottom of her purse, a wizard with a bag of tricks. Humbugs were the typical offering, but sometimes lemon drops or mints made an appearance. But Lisa and Jacklyn agreed that humbugs were the best, and they always called them “old lady candies.”

“Before you put that away, honey, can you take out my book and glasses?”

“Sure, Nan. The bus will get us to Union Station in about an hour and a half, so make yourself comfortable.”

“Well, that would be quite a trick at my age! I can’t remember the last time I felt comfortable.”

Ruby moves out of the aisle and takes the window seat, placing her cane against the arm rest. She smiles at Lisa as she slides into the seat beside her. “You know, I really don’t need this cane. Sometimes it just feels like more of a nuisance then anything. And that’s not vanity talking either; God knows I’m too old for that.”

“I know. I have to say, for your age you’re pretty spry. I hope I inherit your genes.” Taking her grandmother’s hand, Lisa continues: “But don’t you think it’s reassuring to have it, since the stroke and everything, just in case you get dizzy or something?”

“It was only a small stroke, nothing to worry about!” Ruby shrugs her shoulders and settles into her seat before turning back to Lisa and continuing. “Well, it does help when I’m feeling tired I suppose, and that seems to be happening a little more often these days. When I was your age, my energy seemed boundless. And now? Well the spirit is willing but the body is weak. I guess that just happens. Youth slips away.” Looking out the window and smiling to herself, she adds, “Much like the years.”

The doors close and the bus begins to back up slowly, the gears and engine groaning like an old man complaining of his stiffness. Ruby closes her eyes, and the sounds and smells take her back to some of those lost years, to her youth in Montreal. When she studied vocal training under LeLiberté, she would travel by bus and train to Toronto once every month to study at the Conservatory of Music. How many times she felt the same feelings, heard the same sounds. The bus feels different somehow, brighter with more metal and chrome, more modern, less opulent. That’s how most things feel these days, she thinks. Even the seat, as she readjusts herself, feels harder, less inviting, less roomy. She was hardly aware of her surroundings back then, straining forward as she was toward the future, her career, the excitement life had to offer. Her father took her to the bus station every month, and every time she was excited to be heading to Toronto, toward opportunities yet to be realized.

“Have a good time, Jewely. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night,” Daniel says, kissing Ruby on the top of the head. “Say hi to Bob and Sophie for us, and tell them your mom and I will be down soon for a visit.” Daniel raises his voice over the slight distance between them as his daughter rushes with youthful enthusiasm up the stairs. Feeling pulled between worry and pride, he follows her progress into the bus and along the aisle until she finds a seat by the window and waves to him. Bob is a long-time friend of both Daniel and Jeanie. He knows his daughter is in good hands, but sometimes when he looks at Ruby, he can’t help seeing the child she once was. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow night!” he calls, hands cupping his mouth. I must be getting old, I’m repeating myself like an old man, he thinks.

As the bus pulls away, Ruby watches her father and the other people at the station recede into the distance. Daniel keeps waving even after the bus disappears around a corner. Ruby looks at the money her father has slipped into her hand—a ten-dollar bill. He is always so generous, willing to give her anything. Her thoughts stay with her father for a while, lingering on the invisible bond they share. And yet, as close as they are, there always seems to be another Daniel Kenny, a man she can never know. He has always been a loving father with her and her brother, a good husband, and a successful business man, and yet she has caught him sitting, when he thinks no one is around, lost in thoughts that seem too deep for such a joyous man. She remembers vividly as a little girl of five or six, finding him for the first time in his study, sitting at his desk, papers strewn around. He was sitting perfectly still, his eyes focused on something she couldn’t see. The stillness around him somehow evoked a fear that she rushed to extinguish.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?”

“Ruby, where did you come from?” Startled out of his reverie, Daniel is almost curt with her. “I mean, I was daydreaming and I didn’t know you were there.”

“What were you daydreaming about? You seemed so sad.” Taking her father’s hand, she asks again, “What were you daydreaming about?”

“Nothing, sweetheart.” Cupping her chin in his hand for a moment, his smile moves from his mouth to his eyes.

“Is it the war?” she asks, eyes trained on her father’s, determined to pull the sadness from him, to bring him into the lightness of her youth.

“Yes,” he answers with a slow shrug. “It’s the war.”

“But it’s over now, and you’re here with Mommy and Edward and me.”

“That’s true, it’s over….” His thoughts hang in the air. Ruby thinks that if she can just pierce those thoughts, she could let the sadness slip from her father like a lanced boil. Still holding his hand, she watches his face for any hint, any insight.

“You’re right, sweetheart. The war is over and in the past.” Daniel’s voice is low, his words coming from a place of regret that has nothing to do with the present, with his small daughter whose eager face lights up the room. She is too young to understand, but he continues anyway. “But the things we do—the decisions we make, right or wrong, in times of distress or whenever—are forever a part of us.”

“Is that what makes you sad, the things you had to do in the war?”

“The things I’ve had to do don’t really make me sad, honey, just responsible. And responsibility is a sobering thing.” Daniel is silent for a moment, lost again to his thoughts, almost forgetting Ruby standing anxiously at his side, her face fearful and confused. Finally, Daniel rouses himself, he continues, his voice bright with forced effort. “But this isn’t for you to worry about, my little Jewel. Now, go ask Mommy when supper will be ready. I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!”

WATCHING HER FATHER’S FIGURE retreating in the distance, Ruby thinks about the mystery that is Daniel Kenny. He is her hero, her greatest fan, her anchor in this world, and yet she perceives something else in him, a pain, a vulnerability that she can never understand. He is getting smaller as the bus moves around and out of the station, his hat raised in his hand to her. And then she begins to relax in the comfort and calm of the bus as it shunts and moves, eventually smoothing out with greater speed into the flowing traffic. She is looking forward to her lesson with LeLiberté, her anticipation picking up speed with the bus itself, leaving the past and heading toward the future. Smiling, she thinks of the aria she will sing. It is always a good idea to run it over in her head, and the hours on the bus provide her with the perfect opportunity. The sheet music is in her purse somewhere. Looking around for it, she is suddenly perplexed. I know it’s here. Did I leave it at home?

“You okay, Nan?” Lisa watches Ruby searching either side of her seat. “Nan, what is it? Did you lose something?”

“My sheet music. I’m sure I brought it with me. I just want to run over it in my head, but I can’t find my purse.”

“I put it under the seat here. Don’t you remember? I can get it for you if you like, but I don’t think there’s any sheet music in it.”

There is a long pause, both women waiting for clarification. Then Ruby continues, “No, no, there is no sheet music.” Slightly confused and saddened, she nods her head and takes in the moment.

“Are you okay, Nan?” Lisa takes her grandmother’s hand, searching her face for some sort of reassurance.

“Yes, I’m okay, honey. Not to worry.” Ruby smiles and looks over her glasses into her granddaughter’s concerned face. “It’s just these old bones, always complaining about something. Either I’m moving too much or sitting too long.”

Pulling out of the station, they move from shadow to sunlight. The bus manoeuvres in and out of traffic, stopping and starting and turning until it finally reaches the ramp leading to the highway, picks up speed, and falls into a smooth rhythm heading south. Half an hour later, as they merge into the traffic on the 401, Lake Ontario opens up to them like a silver disc and follows them all the way east to Toronto, the spring sky pale and fragile against the darker depths of the water.

“Dad thinks this is a crazy idea, you know, Nan,” Lisa jokes, shrugging out of her sweater and making herself comfortable, her green eyes paling in the sunlight.

“You mean going to Chicago to visit Phoebe?” Ruby asks, her words ringing with satisfaction.

“Yeah, he thinks you should wait until Aunt Phoebe comes home. Then she can make the trip from Vancouver to visit you instead of you having to endure the bus ride and then the train.”

“Honey, I’ve endured more than a ten-hour journey in my life! Besides, I’m tired of being at the retirement home. I can’t tell one day from the next when I’m there. It feels like a holding cell. Which I imagine it actually is! And all the ‘activities,’ as they call them—ha! Damn, I really don’t like them. I’ve participated in life all I want to. Now I just want to sit. I just want to be still. My whole life I’ve felt like a full-time participant, and now I just want to sit on the side lines.” She turns to Lisa. “You won’t understand what I mean, not at your age.”

“Actually, I think I do.” There is a seriousness to Lisa’s tone.

Ruby, taking in her granddaughter’s attitude, continues, “I think maybe you do, honey, but I don’t know if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.”

Smiling, both women look out the window at the landscape moving past to the rhythm of the bus. After a moment, Lisa continues, “I was listening to one of your albums with a friend the other night.”

Ruby laughs, the sound musical and soft like wind chimes. “Really? I haven’t heard one of my albums in years. I think the last time was when Jack was alive.”

“It never ceases to amaze me, Nan, every time I hear you. My favourite is ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”

“I remember recording that. It was Leland’s favourite too. I don’t think you remember Leland, do you, honey?”

“Vaguely. When I see pictures of him, I seem to get an impression that I know him. He seems so familiar. But it might just be that I knew of him from Dad and you.”

“Yes, your Dad and Leland got along well. Leland was really the only father the kids knew. After John and I divorced, he had less and less to do with them. His job didn’t help, with all the travelling, but mostly I think he was embarrassed.” Ruby nods softly.

“Embarrassed? Why would he be embarrassed?” Lisa asks, intrigued.

“Embarrassed by the divorce,” Ruby answers flatly.

“You think Grandpa Grace was embarrassed by a divorce, Nan?” Lisa’s voice is louder than she intends.

“Well, I don’t think it, lovey. I know it.”

“But I don’t understand. Why would someone be embarrassed because they were divorced?” Lisa looks squarely at Ruby, her eyes tight with confusion.

“Oh, Lisa.” Ruby almost chuckles. “It was a different time—it feels like it was a different place. People back then, well, they just didn’t divorce. It was quite scandalous really. They called it the D word, the same way they called cancer the C word. People just didn’t do it. It was a black mark. I think John felt that, felt the loss, felt the failure.”

“And what about you, Nan? Did you think it was a black mark? A failure?”

After a moment, Ruby replies, “Yes, honey, I’d have to say I did. That was the thinking of the time and it’s hard to go against that.”

“Then how did you have the, the…” Lisa searches for the word. Strength? Bravery? Fortitude?

“Nerve? Ha!” Ruby finishes for her.

“Well actually, I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But that’s what it came down to, child. Plain nerve.” Ruby shakes her head, proud of her choice. For years, she has pushed it away into the recesses of her mind, but here—sequestered in their own time and place, the world outside moving by without them, her life’s memories pulsing and insinuating themselves into every moment—there seems to be no reason to deny it, or to make it something it was not. It feels good to say it, to admit it. She says it again.

“Nerve. Yes, plain and simple. My mother believed it was a selfish decision.” Ruby smiles in recollection before continuing. “Nobody I knew was divorced. It just didn’t happen—well, not to middle-class working people. It happened to big stars or singers, but not to the everyday Catholics who went to church. Back then, people stayed married. Women stayed married. I call it nerve, other people call it selfishness, but I could never come to terms with being somewhere that felt hopeless, even if that somewhere was a marriage.”

There is a silence, both women lost in thought, and then Lisa wonders out loud: “It must have been difficult for women in the forties and fifties. There were so few options. What could women really do if they were unhappy in their marriage?”

“Not much, let me tell you! Women got married and stayed married. That was their lot in life. I always thought it was funny, you know, that in the Bible Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt. That was her lot, Lot’s wife.” Ruby falls silent for a moment. She watches the countryside pass by, but without really seeing it. “How many women turned to pillars of salt?” she continues, her voice quiet, thoughtful. “In my day, women got married and had children. And if your marriage wasn’t a good one, what could you do? Who even knew what a good marriage was? And women rarely worked out of the home. Without a husband, how could they support themselves and their children?” Ruby shakes her head. “Nope, divorce just didn’t happen in good families.”

“And yours was a good family?”

“One of the best.” Ruby laughs. “Yes, one of the best.”

“So how did you find the nerve?” Lisa watches her grandmother as she gazes out the window, lost in a past that Lisa herself can only ever glimpse vicariously.

“Yes, how did I find the nerve?” Ruby repeats. “I guess I had to find it. There was no other way.” Turning, Ruby studies her granddaughter’s intent face. “I suppose I was quite independent for the time. I had something of a career in music, as small as it was. I wasn’t on the world stage or anything, but I was singing in nightclubs and working at the radio station—they called it The Nabob Hour. This was in Toronto, just before your father was born. Radio was big back then, and I was lucky to get the job.”

Ruby remembers clearly the small booth, the large condenser microphone, and the nervous feeling clawing at her stomach while she waited for the light to flash on, the one that told her she was live. Reaching all those people at one time. It never ceased to amaze her how, standing in one place, she could be in so many other places. Singing to an audience she couldn’t see. The radio was exciting and new, bringing new hopes and dreams to a career she had thought lost.

“OKAY, RUBY, YOU’RE ON IN TEN. Studio B. The boys have already set up. You want to go warm up and get ready?” Graham Fraser, program director for CKLM, sticks his head into the ready room and spots Ruby seated in the far corner, a coffee mug in her hand. She is staring gloomily at the oily residue as it circles on top of the brown liquid, turning her tender stomach.

“Sure, Graham, just give me a minute,” Ruby responds with a weak smile, unsuccessfully covering the wave of nausea flushing over her face.

“You all right?” he asks, stepping into the room to get a better look.

“Yes, it’s nothing, just a little indigestion. I was rushing to get here. You know, work, the kids, dinner, streetcars. Next week I won’t eat beforehand.”

“Yeah, life can get pretty hectic at times. Your little guys must be getting bigger, eh?”

“Francis is almost eight and Phoebe is two and a half now.”

“Yup, busy times for you. How’s John doing?”

“Great, thanks. He’s not back until Tuesday, so I’m running the show.”

“Well, if anyone is capable it’s you!” He glances at his watch. “Okay, you better get to the studio. We’ll be counting you in in less than eight now.”

Ruby rises, putting down her untouched coffee. The nausea has receded somewhat, and she can almost imagine that it was just indigestion caused by the frantic rush to feed the kids, gulp down a bite, and settle the babysitter all in an hour and a half. The children crying as she left didn’t upset her as much as frustrate her. They are well taken care of. Audrey is wonderful with them; she is a god-send to Ruby. Audrey lives two doors down, a widow who loves children and has made a career as a homemaker. Now with her own children grown, Audrey fills her days with the care of Francis and Phoebe, affording Ruby the luxury of unencumbered time to pursue her burgeoning aspirations, one of which has become Leland James.

He fills her thoughts in the same way that music fills her soul, lighting every corner of her being, bringing her into the beauty of the present more deeply with every breath she takes. He is like a drug. She, who hardly drinks, who up until recently couldn’t understand the biting necessity of need, now finds herself an addict, stealing moments, ignoring her guilt, turning life upside down, risking everything to secure her ecstasy. His voice, his laughter, his thoughts, his touch, all pull at her with a force she’s never known.

She will be meeting him after the radio show, and the anticipation helps her forget, helps her blur everything else into insipid shades.

“When will you be back?” Audrey asked earlier that evening as Ruby was gathering up her things, running her check list through her head with practised agility.

“I’m not sure. Can you stay the night?” Tucking her sheet music into her carry bag, Ruby rushed on, her lie staining her cheeks, hindering her ability to meet Audrey’s naïve goodness face on. “I’ll be going to the Lounge right after I leave the radio station, so it’ll be quite late.”

“Mommy, Mommy,” Phoebe sang, hanging onto Ruby’s purse and swinging back and forth, her baby weight tugging at Ruby’s arm.

“Let go, Phoebe!” Ruby’s voice was harsh with impatience and stress. Then she added, more tenderly, “Mommy has to go to work. You stay here with Audrey and Francis and be a good girl.” Untangling Phoebe from the purse and, after a quick kiss, moving her toward Audrey, Ruby looked at Francis. “Francis, you be a big boy now and watch your sister and help Audrey, okay?”

Audrey smiled, lifting Phoebe into her arms. “She’ll be fine. As soon as you leave, we’re going to play Old Maid and then have a bath. It will be lots of fun, right Phoebe?” Audrey kissed the little girl’s dark hair. Phoebe nodded, buried tight against Audrey’s sweater, tears gathering in her eyes.

Francis came in from the hallway, taking up a silent stance of independence beside Audrey as the three of them watched Ruby run down the steps toward the street. Turning, Ruby raised her hand, the sense of freedom soothing her anxiety like a salve and spreading across her face in a moment of genuine happiness. Audrey returned her wave and smiled, hiking Phoebe’s small body up against her. Then she closed the door, happy to be needed.

READYING HERSELF before the microphone, focused on the music she is about to sing, Ruby feels a sense of calm come over her. More and more she is appreciating what she is singing—blues and jazz, her father’s favourite music. He loved the melancholy of the blues, the excitement of jazz. “Jazz is a sensual thing, Ruby, full of physical passion and creativity. But you couldn’t have jazz without blues; there is no joy without pain. They come from the very deepest part of the individual, and there is nothing else like them.”

She is pleasantly surprised to find her father’s enthusiasm seeping into her understanding of the music. Ruby relates to the blues; it is sultry, sad, and painful, yet it keeps moving, finding beauty in the harsh struggle of life. It is the sound of the soul that will not be defeated, and her voice hangs on the notes with the pain of her own struggle. “Love will make you drink and gamble/ make you stay out all night long/ Love will make you do things/ you know is wrong.”

She knows that loving Leland is wrong, but there is no escaping it. She needs him; she wants him, as she has wanted nothing else.

“NAN. NAN?” Lisa touches Ruby’s hand. “Nan?”

Startled, Ruby turns. “Phoebe, honey. Where are we?”

Gently, Lisa replies, “Nan, it’s me, Lisa. We’re on the bus.”

“Lisa.” Ruby’s expression has not changed. “Lisa, Gary’s daughter.”

“Yes, Nan. I’m your granddaughter. I’m your son Gary’s daughter.”

“Yes, Lisa, Gary’s daughter.” Nodding her head then looking down at her hands, Ruby continues, “Francis never had children. Two marriages and no children.” There is a long silence. Ruby’s mind tumbling along with the movement of the bus, unable to land on any one thought, consumed by a sense of fault, of confusion. Lisa cannot help. Holding Ruby’s hand, she can only wait, a comfort in companionship. When she continues, Ruby’s voice is strained with effort. “And Phoebe has a daughter.”

“Yes, she does.” Lisa smiles. “Do you remember her name, Nan?”

“Phoebe’s daughter is Jacklyn.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I never knew where Phoebe got that name from. Jacklyn. At first, I wasn’t so sure about it really—ha! But now I like the name very much, and I wonder at my own hesitation. I suppose children grow into their names, don’t they?”

“Yes, I imagine they do,” Lisa answers with a smile. “Jacklyn has two children of her own now. Do you remember their names?”

“Jeremy and Alex,” Ruby answers with a proud nod. “I’m a great-grandmother.”

“That’s right.” Lisa smiles again. Pushing her hair from her forehead, she looks out the window. Her reflection and that of her grandmother are side by side on the glass, vague ghosts against the landscape.

“You don’t have children do you, Lisa?” Ruby asks, her voice husky with confusion.

“No. I don’t.” Lisa turns from the window and continues patiently, “I’m not married.”

“Well, honey, you don’t have to be married to have children. Those days are long gone!” Ruby says with such enthusiasm that Lisa laughs with genuine amusement, dissolving the fear and worry of a moment ago.

“You’re right, Nan. Those days are long gone. I don’t have any children. Yet.”

“And don’t have them until you’re good and ready. Don’t even have them at all if you don’t want them, Lisa. That’s my advice to you, honey.”

Although she doesn’t add that she speaks from experience, the implication is there. Age has given her a freedom, an ability to stand in the harsh light of truth and not turn from it. Her dark secrets, kept hidden in the corners of her subconscious, have begun to float to the surface of her mind like driftwood, tempered by the years and becoming buoyant over time. They seem separate from her, drifting of their own accord through the passage of memory. They are no longer the heavy weights that held her down; they are simply part of her reality, a reality that moves and shifts so quickly that it is best just to embrace it all. She should never have had children. They were simply a by-product of sex, she thinks, a harsh and private thought. But if she hadn’t had children, she would not now be in the company of this lovely young woman, her companion, her grandchild, herself.

The irony of life, Ruby thinks, is coming to realize the truth too late. But there can be no regrets, life is what it is. “Maybe I was given children at the wrong time in life,” Ruby continues, unaware that she is speaking out loud, the thoughts tumbling out with a life of their own. “I loved my children, but I could not help feeling that they were a hindrance. Francis and Phoebe, and then Gary, all before I knew that there could be a choice not to have children. In my time, women got married, and married women had children.”

“Nan?” Lisa looks at Ruby and touches her hand, bringing her back to the present. “I didn’t know you never wanted to have children.”

Ruby turns, confusion edging her voice and lending a hollow sound to her words. “My children?”

“Yes, Nan. You were just talking about your kids. You said that you felt they were a hindrance, and that you never knew you had a choice not to have them.”

“Yes. That’s right! I did say that,” Ruby replies after a moment. “Don’t look so shocked, Lisa.”

“I’m not shocked. Well, maybe a little surprised. I guess I never really considered…” Lisa trails off, her look of surprise replaced with one of confusion.

Ruby, taking up Lisa’s hand, looks at her and smiles. “I know most women want children. Biologically and socially, we as women are programmed that way. There is no getting away from that. But in the moments that I can stare truth in the face and not look away, I can see that I never wanted children. It made me different.” Ruby nods to herself, Lisa momentarily forgotten. “I felt the difference in me, and it seemed to alienate me from other women. I simply did not and could not share their passion about children.”

Lisa nods with this new understanding, her own thoughts racing with bewilderment. Minutes pass as she struggles to find the words to reply, and the silence somehow seems to amplify Ruby’s confession. When Ruby continues, it is as if Lisa were not present, and she is thankful for the anonymity. “I wasn’t running headlong into marriage in order to have children. For a middle-class Christian woman in the forties, marriage was the only way to experience sex. When I met John Grace, I was twenty-three and more than a little anxious for the experience. I don’t know how other women felt. Mine was a time before the sexual revolution, before Oprah and self-help books began to examine the female psyche and sexual propensities. Ha! I simply knew that I was interested in knowing about sex. I wanted to know what it would feel like to be overpowered by a man, to have him, his physical presence above me, to be with him to the exclusion of everything else….” Ruby falls silent as she drifts off, becoming lost in thought.

She had felt the need, the curiosity, in the childish daydreams of her youth and later in the more informed desires of her late teens and early twenties. But to marry simply to experience that area of adulthood—barred as it was to single women—brought with it feelings of guilt and indecision. She couldn’t explain this to her mother, who married at eighteen, never knowing the frustration of spinsterhood, of forced virginity. Marriage could end that.

She remembered the old house alive with light and activity the night before the wedding, full of excited voices punctuated with laughter. Her father was in his study, leaving the living room—or parlour, as mother had called it—free for the women to finish her dress. Aunt Lucy was there, Mrs. Worthing, the seamstress, Catherine Lowery, her maid of honour, and her mother. They were flushed, energized by the preparations. She was standing on the old burgundy ottoman while Mrs. Worthing hemmed her wedding dress, and she had felt like an observer, an interloper, so separated from the excitement she could feel all around her.

“What is it, darling? You look so worried.” Her mother’s voice jarred her from her thoughts. How could she have explained what she was feeling? That she was stealing the life of a man by this marriage in order to satisfy her own curiosity, and her own cravings. She was being dishonest. She felt sure that she should have other reasons for marrying John Grace. But perhaps, she told herself, there were no other feelings; maybe there was only the feeling that she wanted to know more, to take the next step in adulthood, to marry and to have children.

LISA’S HAND IS ON RUBY’S ARM as she watches her grandmother’s fragile eyelids flickering with the movement of her dreams, so present and so removed. “Nan, wake up. We’re pulling into the station.”

Startled, Ruby looks around, her dreams receding slowly, disorientation in their wake.

“Are you okay?” Concern pulls at the corner of her voice.

“Lisa.” It’s almost a question.

“Yes, Nan. It’s me, Lisa.” She takes her grandmother’s hand.

“My God, I was dreaming it was the night before my wedding. I was in my mother’s parlour. I could even smell the room, wood polish and cold ash, and my mother, so young and alive.”

“Are you okay, Nan?”

“Yes. Yes, I am, honey. It was beautiful, really, being there again in the house I was raised in. Seeing my mother and Catherine Lowery—I haven’t thought of her in years. We were best friends until John and I moved to Toronto, and then slowly we lost touch.” Ruby stops, her mind still in the past, reluctant to let go.

“Well, Nan, we’re pulling into Union Station. We’ll get off the bus now and onto the train, but first let’s find a nice place and have a cup of tea, okay?”

Ruby shakes off the past and focuses on the present. “Never mind the tea, honey, I think I need a good stiff drink.”

Lisa laughs, always amazed by this woman. “All right, a drink it is. A toast to old friends.”

“Yes. A toast to old friends.”

It feels good to disembark. Ruby is stiff and slow geting off the bus and following the crowd along the walkway and into the station. The energy and the grandeur of Toronto’s Union Station and its Great Hall reinvigorating them.

Within minutes, they find a small crowded bar with tables and chairs spilling out onto a gated patio. The Great Hall is spacious, with four-storey-high vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tiles, the walls faced with Zumbro stone from Missouri, the floors made from Tennessee marble, the light natural and diffused from over-storey windows. The furniture is wrought iron and the patio is polished flag stone. Large double doors open onto the patio, exposing the darker recesses of the inside of the bar.

“You know, I sang in places that looked very much like this,” Ruby comments as she sits, nodding toward the bar.

“You have had an extraordinary life, Nan. Was it as exciting as it seems?”

“It certainly was. It had its bumps, but I was blessed right from the beginning. My parents, your great-grandparents, were very well off and they doted on me. I was well educated for a woman of my day, you know. My father insisted on that. I was in training for years with LeLiberté.”

“LeLiberté? Yes, Dad has mentioned him. He was quite famous in his day, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. I was being classically trained in voice. He was the renowned master of the time. Originally from Europe, he had a wide influence, you know.”

“But I thought you sang blues and jazz?”

Ruby laughs. “Yes, I did that, too.”

“Can I take your order, ladies?” A busy young waitress sidles up to the table, empty glasses on her tray, a practised look of boredom on her face.

“Yes, I’d like a vodka gimlet,” Ruby says, happy with her choice.

“I don’t think we have those, Ma’am.” The waitress replies, shifting her tray in impatience.

“Do you want something with vodka, Nan?” Lisa asks, leaning over to her grandmother.

“Yes, I do. That’s why I ordered the vodka gimlet.” Turning to the waitress, she continues, “You do have a full bar here don’t you, dear?”

“We do, but I’ve never heard of the drink you asked for.”

“Well, perhaps your bartender has. Take my granddaughter’s order and mine, and if the bartender doesn’t know how to make a vodka gimlet, I can give him the ingredients. Would that be too much to ask for an old lady?”

The waitress turns to Lisa, unsure whether or not she has been somehow reprimanded, and Lisa smiles with a look of commiseration. “I’ll have a white zinfandel, thank you.”

“Well, I hope they can make my drink. I’m feeling quite nostalgic. Now if only they were playing some Billie Holiday or Nina Simone.”

“You know, I’ve started to really listen to jazz. Dad has always loved it, and so I know about Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.”

“Yes, two of my all-time favourites, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I was even told once that I sounded very much like Sarah, and, truth be told, I used to try and imitate her style.” Ruby, nodding with pleasure, continues, “She was a contralto or mezzo soprano, and her songs were easy for me to sing. That music, it’s the beginning of everything when everything was beginning. I still hear it in some of the new singers today.”

“Yes, you’re right about that. Like Norah Jones and Diana Krall. Have you heard Duffy? I have one of her CDs. ‘Mercy’ is one of my favourite songs, but now I’m listening more and more to the older stuff, like Etta James and Lena Horne. I guess I have you and Dad to thank for my taste in music.”

“And I have my father to thank for my love of the same music.” Ruby smiles. “He got to hear many of the original players. Our home was full of the music he loved, and I think it just seeped into my bones. All my memories play out around that sound.”

“The soundtrack of your life. It’s a great one to have, Nan.” Leaning back from the table, Lisa makes room for the waitress.

“Your drinks, ladies.” The waitress, almost smiling, places their drinks on small square napkins .

“Thank you, dear. And is this a vodka gimlet?” Ruby asks, leaning over and peering into her drink.

“Yes. I don’t know what’s in it—the bartender had to look it up in the book behind the bar. Enjoy.”

Not waiting for the waitress to leave, Ruby barks, “Thank God for the book behind the bar. Ha!” She sips tentatively at the drink. “Not bad,” she pronounces. “You know, I’ve always liked being in a night club, or bar, as you young ones call them nowadays. I think it’s in my blood. My father and mother enjoyed it too. Well, perhaps my father more than my mother. I think she just went along with him, but my father loved it. Did you know he took me to my first night club in Montreal?” Her question is rhetorical.

After a sip from the cool, wet glass, Ruby continues with her story. “I was eighteen, and in Montreal jazz was big”—she learns forward to emphasize her point—“and bad! Well, most of my friends’ parents frowned on it, believing it to be an inferior type of music. They believed it ‘put the sin in syncopation,’ as they say, with its evil influence. Ha!” Ruby laughs, her wide grin dimpling her face.

“That’s the same thing they said about rock ’n’ roll when it first came out.” Lisa nods, enjoying the thread of this conversation.

“Yes, exactly! But my father was different. He loved the wildness, the improvisation of the music, the fact that it was made up as it went along.” Ruby smiles, remembering her father’s words. “He always said that there were two kinds of jazz back then, the white jazz and the real jazz.”

“Real jazz?”

“Yes, the hard-driving, high-energy music with ragged rhythms and complex melodies. This was the jazz my father craved, and he knew all the best places to find it, although they weren’t always run by the best people.”

Lisa looks quizzically over her glass at Ruby.

“Well, Montreal was ripe with organized crime, and a few of the ‘families’ ran some of the best clubs.” Ruby takes a long satisfying drink before continuing. “It was just the times. My father knew some of the men, I think. Well, I got that impression anyway. He could always get us in anywhere, anytime. But the place he liked the best was the corner.” Ruby’s voice drops as she thinks of Daniel Kenny, her father, and the mystery he remains to this day.

“The corner?” Lisa gently prods after a moment. “Was that a night club?”

“What’s that, lovey?” Ruby asks, roused from her thoughts.

“You said your dad took you to the corner. Was that a night club?”

“No, no.” Ruby laughs. “The corner was where St. Antoine meets Mountain street in Montreal and there are, or were, two clubs there: Rockhead’s Paradise and Café St. Michel. The Rockhead was a three-floor show bar where the best of the best played. The owner was a good-looking man, a black East Indian named Rufus Rockhead. He’d stand by the door of the club, dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, allowing only the people he knew and the best musicians to get in. He knew my father all right! Ha!” Shaking her head in wonder, Ruby sighs, her mind alive with the hustle and excitement of those evenings. She savours the feel of her memories—smooth beads begging to be handled—before returning to the present and continuing her story. “The Café was where Louis Metcalfe, the famous American trumpeter had his band. He played there for years. Both clubs would swing, let me tell you, with the best jazz, the best musicians. But it was a time when things were still segregated, and often we were the only white people there.”

“Weren’t there any clubs for white people?”

“Oh yes, uptown had some great clubs too, but my father preferred the sounds on the corner. He said they were authentic. He liked the free-spirited, rebellious rhythms and melodies, and they attracted all the greatest players. He was right of course. I first saw Oscar Peterson there. He was a few years my junior, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, and playing boogie woogie like a man twice his age! Everyone in the place danced to his music. I wasn’t formally introduced to him until years later when I was working at the radio station in Toronto. But even as a kid, he was something!” Ruby says, slapping the table top for emphasis.

“Montreal must have been something during those years, Nan. What an exciting city to live in.”

“Yes, it really was. It was an exciting time that passed too quickly.” Ruby nods, her voice dropping with a note of nostalgia. “But Montreal changed. By the sixties, there weren’t any more after-hours clubs. Rock ’n’ roll took over. I suppose they were trying to clean up the city and its reputation, but I think they just plain lost something. My father never did like Jean Drapeau as mayor. His campaign to clean up the city’s reputation ended up ruining its extraordinary night life. Clubs shut down, and places like the corner just faded away. Eventually the area was pulled down to make room for an expressway and blocks of social housing. It’s a sad statement about progress, let me tell you. But that’s the way life goes. I guess we never know what it is we have at the time we are in it, at the time we are living it. Everything is always clearer in retrospect. It’s the same with our own personal history as it is with a city’s or a country’s history. There is no plan, no road map; there is just doing what you think is best and then trying to make the choices acceptable in the retelling.” Ruby sighs, staring down at the table. She studies her hand around the glass; it’s a hand she can hardly recognize, dark with liver spots and thick with veins.

“Would you ladies like another drink?” the same young waitress asks, her eyes on the table and Ruby’s empty glass.

“Yes, I believe that would be in order. Wouldn’t you say, Lisa?” Ruby asks, looking from the waitress to Lisa.

“No, thank you. I’m still working on mine, but you go ahead and have another one. We’re on holiday.”

“Well yes, dear, I think I will!” Ruby says. “I’ll have another vodka gimlet. Thank you.” Watching the waitress retreat, Ruby continues, “I think in light of the story, a few drinks are called for. Prohibition is over, you know. Ha!”

“So, how did you go from singing in the night clubs to community theatre and then to the movies?” Lisa asks, enjoying the conversation and hoping to coax her grandmother into revealing more about her long and interesting life.

“Well, I left Toronto. It was expensive, and at the time I was supporting the kids on my own. The work I had with the singing wasn’t what you would call reliable and I needed something I could count on. I can’t remember how I decided on Peterborough, but I did and it worked out well. I found a steady job and a great place to live. But provincial Ontario can be pretty insipid after the excitement and flavour of a big city, as you can imagine.” Ruby looks directly into Lisa’s eyes, her seriousness bringing a smile to her granddaughter’s face. “Thankfully, I met Robert Davies. He was the editor of the Peterborough Examiner and a drama enthusiast, not to mention a writer—one of Canada’s greatest! He and his wife, Patricia, befriended me, and it just grew from there. Oh, we spent so many evenings together, reading over a play Robert was working on. He’d say, ‘Ruby, you were born for the stage,’ in that deep, resonant voice of his, and I believed him.

“That was a wonderful time, and Robert and Patricial became our best friends. The stories I could tell about those years!”

“Were you married to Leland James then?” Lisa asks. She has always been curious about her grandmother’s love affair with Leland.

“Yes. Leland followed me to Peterborough, and eventually we married. Leland would come to the readings; he would even read some of the parts, and he was good. He had a keen sense of humour, and that sharp wit was always there behind the words.” Ruby says, smiling in recollection before lapsing into an introspective silence. Minutes pass, and Lisa worries if these memories may be too much for her grandmother. But then Ruby continues abruptly, speaking mostly to herself before turning back to Lisa. “But he had no desire for the stage. He encouraged me, though, and he loved watching me on stage. He was at every performance and all the closing parties afterwards, of course. They were some wild times, let me tell you! Ha! You’d never think it now, but we were so young, so full of life.” Fingering the side of her glass, her gaze turned inward again, she thinks for a moment before continuing. “Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.”

“That’s quite profound,” Lisa says, her voice flat, her mind still lost in the past with Ruby and Leland.

“It’s not me, honey. It’s George Bernard Shaw,” Ruby says, smiling. “I heard it when I was young. Now I think I understand it. When I was a young woman, I was too impatient to figure it out. You really wouldn’t have recognized me…” she says and looks over her glass and directly into Lisa’s eyes, “…and my wilder side.”

“No, Nan. I think I can,” Lisa says. Looking at Ruby, she glimpses, not for the first time, the vibrant woman her grandmother had been. “I often imagine how you would have been when you were young, when you and Leland were together. I wish I could have been there, been part of that whole story. You were forging new roads, going new places, and having great parties, by the sounds of it.”

“Yes, we were that! The evenings after performances were always wild, when everyone’s adrenaline was pumping, emotions soaring—we didn’t want it to end. Everyone would end up back at someone’s place, sometimes ours, and the kids would be woken up by the noise, the music, the singing, going all night. The birds would be calling to the morning, and Leland and I would just be going to bed, still feeling too alive to sleep.”

The scene comes to her, vibrant and real: their bedroom, washed in the ghost of morning light, the feel of Leland’s body, warm and solid against her, the sweet smell of liquor on his breath as he kisses her lips, her ear, her neck. His broad hand running the length of her body, pulling her against him, and the sheer exhilaration of wanting him, of wanting to open herself up to him, kissing his chest and inhaling the scent of him, then pulling his face to her lips as he enters her slow and hard and present.

“Are you thinking about Leland?” Lisa leans forward and touches Ruby’s hand, her grandmother’s skin smooth and dry against her own.

“What?” Startled, Ruby looks up from her glass, the condensation capturing prisms of light like crystals.

“Were you thinking about Leland James? I can always tell when you are.”

“Yes, lovey, I was.” Ruby smiles to herself. “I was thinking of Leland James.”

“Well, I think we better drink up. I’ll go pay our waitress,” Lisa says, looking at her watch and rising from the table. “We have to find the train that goes to Chicago, although we do know the track number.”

“Yes, time waits for no man!” Ruby says playfully. “You go pay, and I will get myself moving after I finish this drink. The pleasures in life are too few to waste when you get to my age. Ha!”

As she waits for the bill, Lisa watches Ruby, her white hair so distinctive, her movements so familiar as she raises the glass to her lips, savouring the last drops and nodding to the couple at the next table. Lisa can’t hear what she is saying, but the couple laugh in reply and Ruby joins them in their laughter. Then for a moment and without warning, Lisa feels a cold knot tighten in the pit of her stomach. Looking at her grandmother and watching the interplay between them, the nuances of Ruby’s movements, Ruby’s laughter alive in her ears, Lisa knows she will never again have this, this moment, this epiphanous understanding of the woman who is her grandmother. What is happening to me? Lisa wonders, reproaching herself and wiping the tears from her cheek. This is ridiculous, she thinks. Her emotions seem to push against her with physical force.

“Did you want to pay cash or debit?” the waitress asks, breaking into Lisa’s thoughts and releasing her from the moment.

“Cash, thank you,” Lisa says, forcing a smile as she regains control of her emotions. The transaction gives her a focus, freeing her mind from her fears and allowing her thoughts to race ahead to the train and the journey, to her aunt Phoebe and the excitement of Chicago.