Finding My Own Way Read online

  Finding

  My Own Way

  Peggy Dymond Leavey

  Finding

  My Own Way

  Peggy Dymond Leavey

  Text ©2001 by Peggy Dymond Leavey

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Cover art: Patty Gallinger

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

  Napoleon Publishing

  an imprint of TransMedia Enterprises Inc.

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Leavey, Peggy Dymond, date-

  Finding my own way

  ISBN 0-929141-83-0

  I. Title

  PS8573.E2358F55 2001

  jC813’.54

  C2001-901972-6

  PZ7.L4639Fi 2001

  Dedicated

  to my parents,

  in loving memory.

  A room without books

  is as a body without a soul.

  —Cicero

  One

  One evening, late in May, I told my Aunt Irene that I was going home. Less than two hours away from where we were, my family home stood empty, waiting for me. I saw no reason not to go. I was seventeen, and it was almost summer.

  Irene hesitated a moment, just long enough to make me think she might be considering it. “Home where?” she asked. She was threading elastic, on a safety pin, into the waistband of some old practice tights. Irene was a dancer.

  “To Pinkney Corners, of course.” It’s where I’d lived all my life. Or at least until eight months ago, when my mother had died of cancer, and I’d come to Toronto to live with Irene.

  I moved closer to her, drawing the footstool up to her knees and perching on it. “Look, you didn’t bargain for this. Your life was already full. And then, barn, you acquire a teenager to look after.”

  “You’ve forgotten the promise I made your mother,” Irene said. “Do you think I take that lightly?”

  “Of course not. You gave me a home like you promised. All I’m asking is for you to let me try it on my own for the summer. Can’t you do that?”

  “Spend two months back there in that house, all by yourself?” Irene’s look was incredulous. “You must be out of your mind! There isn’t even telephone at that place!”

  “I can’t afford a telephone. But I’ll get my dog back. Ernie’s a good watchdog, you know.”

  “And just what would you live on?” my aunt persisted. “It costs money to keep a roof over one’s head.”

  “There’s my inheritance.”

  Irene sniffed. “You’d go through that in a hurry. Besides, it was meant for your future education.”

  “Well, it would feed and clothe me till I found a job. The house is mine already.”

  “Some house,” she muttered. “And what if you get sick?”

  “Come on!” I straightened my spine. “How often am I sick? And if I do come down with something, I’ll go see Dr. Russell, same as always. It doesn’t cost much to live in Pinkney Corners, Irene. Not like here. Please? Just for the summer? If it doesn’t work out I’ll come back, I promise. I’ll even go to business school, if that’s what you want me to do.”

  Irene fastened the other end of the elastic onto the safety pin. “Don’t badger me, Libby,” she said. “Let me think about it.” She rolled up the tights and got to her feet. “You’ve got homework to do, haven’t you? And I have a class at eight.”

  Buoyed by that small seed of hope, I decided to say nothing more about it. When the door to the apartment shut behind her, I dutifully unzipped my binder on the kitchen table and drew out the geometry homework.

  For over an hour, the clock on the wall of the black and white kitchen made little scraping noises to accompany the sound of the pencil and the protractor, drawing angles on the page. Someone in the flat across the hall pulled a plug and water gushed through the pipes in the wall beside me.

  1946

  I must have been about five the first time I visited Irene’s apartment. My mother had come to Toronto to meet with her publisher, and since my grandmother, whose house we shared at Pinkney Corners, had died the previous June, Alex had no choice but to bring me along.

  It had been snowing the morning we left Pinkney Corners for Toronto. One of the neighbours gave us a lift, Alex never having owned a car. I knelt on the back seat and scraped at the ice on the rear window, peering out through the small hole at the snow swirling up behind the tires and settling back onto the road, as if we’d never passed that way. The fields of frozen corn stubble, the cedar-filled valleys and the glimpses of Lake Ontario, deep and cold in the distance, filled me with wonder.

  Eventually, Alex and I were dropped off on a wind-blasted street corner, where traffic like I’d never seen before streamed past. We were going to the shop where my Aunt Irene sold sewing machines. Alex held my hand tightly as we hurried on, heads down against the bitter wind and snow that funnelled between the buildings.

  We almost passed the shop before recognizing it—a doorway recessed between two grimy plate glass windows. “Here it is,” Alex gasped. A metal sign creaked overhead. We tumbled through the door, out of breath and half-perished with cold. My church coat and leggings were not suited to sunless, city Decembers.

  I remember Aunt Irene rising from her stool behind the counter, a look of amazement on her clear, round face at seeing her only two living relatives so far from home on such a wintery day.

  The two sisters were as different as day and night. Irene, with dark hair and olive skin, was rather short, her body rounded and curvaceous. Alex, on the other hand, was tall and willowy, looking as if she should be the dancer. Her skin was fair and covered in golden freckles. She was the older by almost three years.

  “Alex! Libby!” Irene cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on my way to see my publisher,” Alex explained. “And I hoped you could keep an eye on Libby for a few hours.”

  “Of course, of course. I told you, any time at all.” Aunt Irene unwound the scarf from my face. “I’m just so surprised to see you. Mother would never leave home in winter for fear of her precious pipes freezing.”

  “If ever they had, Irene,” said Alex, shaking snow from her hat, “then you would have appreciated her concern.” She bent to pull off my mittens.

  “Poor little thing,” Irene purred. “You’re blue with cold. Come back here, Libby, by the heater.”

  Curtained off from the shop, the small room behind the counter where she led us was warm and cozy. Thick layers of newspaper and half a dozen rag rugs insulated the floor. There was a sagging couch, a chrome table stacked with magazines and tins of food, and a wooden clotheshorse in front of the electric heater where we draped our mittens and scarves to dry. A collection of heavy coats hung over the door to the alley. They belonged to no one in particular, Irene told me when I asked. They served to keep out draughts.

  Before Alex left for her meeting, Irene made us tea, lacing mine well with milk from a can into which she poked two holes with a leather punch, before wiping it on her smock and returning it to the store shelves.

  I spent the rest of the day in the shop with Irene, watching her measure out fabric against a brass yardstick embedded in the counter. Irene kept up an easy banter with all her customers, even those who came in only to buy a packet of needles or one spool of thread. She didn’t sell a single sewing machine all afternoon.

  Later in the day when Alex returned
, it was decided that after Irene closed the shop, they would take me to see the Christmas windows in the big department stores downtown.

  It took two streetcars to get to our destination, and I was terrified that they would leave before I could get all my limbs on board. We swayed along the tracks on the yellow straw seats, the car filled with the gritty shuffle of feet, the squeal of the wheels and the crackle of electricity overhead, the smell of damp wool and cold night air. I looked out at the blank expressions on the faces of people sitting in the lighted windows of streetcars passing us in the other direction, close enough to touch.

  In the centre of the city, Eaton’s and Simpson’s each had a full block of decorated Christmas windows. We took in the busy scenes of Santa Claus’ workshop that filled the windows of one of the stores. Then, Irene on one side and Alex on the other, they hurried me across the street, swinging me, laughing, over the tracks to see the windows on the other side. Here was a woodland Christmas, and I moved eagerly from one end of the plate glass to the other.

  Greedy for more, I rounded the corner of the block and discovered, to my disappointment, that this side was given over to windows of unsmiling mannequins, modelling what ladies would be wearing at parties held to ring in the New Year, 1947. Neither Irene nor Alex could afford such finery and pretended not to be interested. What to me was most amazing was that all this had been happening every Christmas, just two hours away from Pinkney Corners.

  As a final treat, we had supper at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s. Sitting on a stool, I had canned spaghetti on toast while the sisters ate bacon and tomato sandwiches. Then it was back on the streetcars to Irene’s flat over the music store.

  Irene’s rooms were at the top of a steep flight of stairs that rose from a door directly off the sidewalk. Inside 2376B a long, ill-lit hallway of dark wood led to a kitchen floored with dizzying little squares of black and white tiles.

  On that first visit I slept on the floor beside my mother, who refused to put Irene out of her narrow cot. I would have slept on top of the icebox, I was so happy to be there.

  The next morning, we were up early, as I remember it. I could hear Aunt Irene in the kitchen when I awoke and found her filling the kettle, dressed in a belted bathrobe that looked as if it should belong to a man.

  I snapped the rings on my binder shut and looked around that same kitchen. Twelve and a half years had passed, and everything had changed. Alex was dead, and I was living in this place with Aunt Irene. But maybe, I thought with a surge of anticipation, not for much longer.

  The geometry finished, I decided to read my Shakespeare assignment in bed. I got into my pyjamas in Irene’s room and unfolded the studio couch in the living room where I slept. My pillow and blanket were stored in the airless space underneath the seat.

  I lay in the light of the lamp, The Merchant of Venice unopened on my stomach, listening to the traffic down on Kingston Road, and I thought about going home. I imagined how it would be, how I would throw open the front door, let fresh air and June sunshine fill the little house again. My house. It was right there, waiting for me. I rolled over with a contented smile and folded my hands together beneath my ear. We’d be fine there, Ernie and I. I was sure of that.

  Irene would be late getting home that night, as usual. If ever there was any possible way she could sneak into the back of the class after hers, she would. My Aunt Irene was a ballerina. She had fallen in love with the ballet after seeing a performance by a visiting troupe at the Consolidated High School’s auditorium in Pinkney Corners when she was only ten. That, according to Alex, was when her obsession had begun. Out of desperation, my grandmother had asked her friend the Countess, who had studied ballet in her native Russia, to teach the youngster enough to satisfy her.

  Thus, Irene had begun private lessons in one of the rooms of the boarding house the Countess ran in Pinkney Corners. Strange, I thought now, how the Countess kept surfacing in our lives. She was like a thread woven into the fabric of our family. It was only later that I learned just how true that was.

  The first time I met the Countess myself was in 1949, when my mother Alex went to interview her. Alex was was gathering information for a story she was writing for the local paper. I remember standing on the crumbling sidewalk before the Countess’ house, waiting for the door to be opened and picking at the chicken pox scabs on my skinny arms. Chicken pox was the reason I was not at school that day.

  We had walked to town that May morning, leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink so as not to be late for Alex’s appointment. At eight o’clock, it was already warm and, full of chatter and questions, I skipped along the dusty roadside, trying to keep up with my mother’s long strides. I wondered where in Pinkney Corners there could be a house grand enough for a Countess. “Will she be wearing a crown, do you think?” I asked.

  “She’s just an ordinary person now,” Alex smiled.

  “But she was royalty,” I insisted. “You even said so.”

  “No,” said Alex, with great patience. “I said I think she was related to Russian royalty. To the tragic Romanov family.”

  “Tell me again, Mommy. Why were they tragic?”

  Alex paused long enough to shake a small stone out of one of her white pumps. “They were victims of the Civil War,” she explained. “Murdered by the Bolsheviks.”

  I hurried back to slip my hand into my mother’s. This was the part of the story I wanted to hear. Alex told wonderful stories.

  “There were rumours that one of the daughters, the youngest girl, might have escaped when the rest of the family was killed,” Alex continued. “Her name was Anastasia.”

  I knew all about Anastasia. I especially liked Alex’s stories about the little, blue-eyed girl who was the mischief-maker in the Russian royal family, who liked to play practical jokes on her sisters and her teacher. She had the most beautiful name I’d ever heard, and I tried it out a few times on my tongue.

  “They all had beautiful names,” Alex agreed. “Olga, Maria, Tatiana and Anastasia, of course. Beautiful children. Their little brother Alexei would have been the next Tsar of Russia.” Her voice became sad. “But the Revolution brought an end to the monarchy. There are people today who think Anastasia might still be living somewhere in secret.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” I cried with a little shiver of excitement. “Could we ask the Countess if she knows about Anastasia?”

  Alex stopped suddenly, reining me in with a jerk. “Absolutely not! Now, Libby, I want you to mind your manners. No speaking unless you’re spoken to. Remember now! Or I’ll leave you to sit right here till I’m through.” She indicated a low cement wall around someone’s property.

  “I’m really thirsty, Mommy,” I pouted.

  I didn’t call my mother Alex in those days. That habit started a few years later, after I had read a book where the main character called both her parents by their first names. I thought it was very chic. My best friend said her mother did not approve of such informality; she said it was a sign of disrespect. But both Alex and I knew that it was not.

  “If you behave and are as quiet as a little mouse, we’ll go to the drugstore before we go back,” Alex promised. “Now, here’s where the Countess lives.” We’d reached a big three-storey house of weathered clapboard. “This used to be a boarding house,” Alex informed me.

  She tucked her notebook under her arm, patted at my flyaway hair and retied the sash at the back of my dress. Her own hair, copper-coloured and wiry like mine, she’d tried to contain under a hat. “You’re getting so tall, Libby,” she sighed. I knew she didn’t mean it to sound like a complaint. She was tall herself, and you knew by the way she walked that she was proud of it. “This dress hardly fits you any longer.”

  Alex scraped the rusty doorbell around a second time. “The Countess is a little hard of hearing,” she said.

  The door opened just wide enough to reveal the short figure of a woman, dressed entirely in black and wearing a man’s fedora. Her face was as wrinkled as a gn
ome’s, with a great beak of a nose, sharp, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows. She held a thin brown cigarette in fingers that were crooked and stained.

  “Countess?” Alex stretched out her hand confidently. “I’m Alex Eaton. Nancy’s daughter? I hope you don’t mind that I’ve brought my little girl. Libby’s just getting over the chicken pox. No, don’t worry, it’s no longer contagious, but I couldn’t leave her home alone.”

  “Come, come.” The door opened wider, and we stepped into a front hall steeped in odours of cooked cabbage, musty furniture and windows too long closed against the fresh air. Sunlight struggled in behind us, illuminating the dust motes and layers of smoke in the air before the door was quickly shut.

  We followed the Countess into a large room so filled with furniture that there was only a narrow path through to the empty fireplace grate. Heavy draperies covered the windows.

  “We talk in here,” said the Countess, switching on two small wall lamps, which did little to disperse the gloom. The chair where I perched was knobby, with unwound springs. Its tattered upholstery scratched my legs, but nonetheless I placed my hands on the arms of the chair and studied the toes of my sturdy shoes, determined not to miss a word of my mother’s interview.

  To my great disappointment, Alex didn’t ask any questions about Anastasia or the rest of the Romanovs. It seemed her story had to do with the Countess’ attempts to entice travelling performers to put on concerts in the high school auditorium. I began to lose interest.

  “Some refreshments,” the Countess declared, about forty minutes into the interview. She left the room with a sweep of rusty skirts. I remained silent and hopeful, until she returned with two glasses of black tea. Alex gave me a warning look. I was sure now that the payment for my silence would be a cold drink at the drugstore lunch counter.

  “Is beautiful daughter,” the Countess said later as she ushered us to the door. With her rich accent it sounded like “bootiful doter.” Although we were practically the same height, she lifted my chin with a yellowed finger. “Sons, they are fine, of course,” she pronounced. “But for woman to have daughter, is real blessing.”