Finding My Own Way Read online

  “And you, Countess?” Alex asked. “We didn’t talk about your family.”

  “Someday,” the woman promised, “I tell you.”

  “Then I may come and see you again? I’m sure there is much more you could tell me.”

  “Perhaps,” said the Countess, and she closed the door.

  Afterwards, spinning on my stool in Pacey’s Drugstore where Alex and I were sharing a lemonade, I needed convincing. “Couldn’t anyone wear a hat in the house and call themselves a Countess?” I pestered. “How do you know for sure that she is who she says she is?”

  Alex bent over her straw. “I know,” she said, lowering her long, pale eyelashes and taking a sip, “because she was a friend of your Nan’s.”

  That was when Alex told me about the ballet lessons, how Nan had persuaded the Countess to take Irene on as a student, how everyone had been sure Irene would quickly lose interest. But everyone had been wrong.

  After graduating from high school, Irene had boarded a bus for Toronto, where she got a job in the store selling sewing machines. Then she had come home and announced she was moving to the city to continue her ballet studies.

  Irene had spunk, Alex used to say. She had determination and a will of iron. And in that summer of 1959, I was no less determined to return to Pinkney Corners and live, on my own, in the house where I had been raised.

  Two

  I grew up knowing what it was like to live with a writer. By the time I was six, I knew what a manuscript must look like before it went out in the mail in the customary brown envelope, stiffened by a piece of cardboard cut from the back of a cereal box. I knew that when Alex was bent over her typewriter, I must be quiet and not distract her. This was not the time to begin building forts with the dining room chairs. Instead, I’d get my crayons out, and Alex would make a place for me at her table under the window in the front room. I’d busy myself drawing stick people whose arms and legs came out of the sides of their enormous heads. “This is Mommy, and this is Irene. This one is Nan, and this is me. And this one’s Renny.”

  Renny looked the same as the rest of my family, only bigger. Renny was my father. I was free to draw him any way I wanted, because I had never met him. Neither had anyone else in the family, except Alex. Next to stories about Anastasia, I liked to hear Alex tell about Renard Newton.

  He had worked for another newspaper, and they had met while they were both away covering the same story. The night before their return to Pinkney Corners to announce their engagement to Alex’s family, Renny had left the hotel room to fetch some ice cream. It was summertime and they had something to celebrate.

  Alex had heard the wail of the siren from the ambulance down on the street, but she hadn’t known until hours later that Renny had been struck by a car and killed. I asked her once if he had had the ice cream with him when he died. She didn’t know that either.

  My mother’s flair for writing had become apparent while she was still in high school. After graduation she landed a job writing advertising copy and filler pieces for the local newspaper, gradually moving up through the ranks until she was writing feature articles. In her spare time she wrote short fiction. A story that was published in Liberty Magazine caught the eye of a publisher who ran a novel-making syndicate. Alex signed a contract with him and began churning out a new adventure story for girls every six to eight weeks.

  My mother’s writing table afforded us a view of the front walk, the road beyond the gate and the hedge of lilac bushes that enclosed our front yard. Few people came out as far as our place when I was growing up in the forties. So isolated were we that we kept the door to the outhouse open in good weather. There we would sit and watch the seasons change in our back garden and let the sun warm our bare knees.

  Once in a while our quiet life was interrupted by a visit from Aunt Irene. I used to love it when she came. I never remember having to get the house ready because Irene was coming, the way we did when Alex’s publisher was expected. I would just come downstairs one morning and discover her asleep on the couch in the front room, wrapped in her enormous black overcoat.

  Typically, these visits lasted about two weeks and were usually precipitated by another ruined romance. It was a different household when Aunt Irene was with us. There would be late nights for everyone and shrieks of laughter, occasionally punctuated by wails from Alex that she really should be writing. The bank of unwashed dishes in the sink kept growing until there was not a clean plate left in the cupboard.

  Sometimes, if Alex had a deadline to meet, she would let Irene take me into town, two miles away. We would have fountain Cokes at the Blue Bonnet Restaurant and, before we walked home again, we would buy a bag of bridge mix at the five-and-ten. Here, Irene informed me, was where she had worked while she was in high school, saving every cent she earned so that she could one day move to the city.

  I nibbled and listened and knew from experience that if I wanted to have any candy left to share with Alex, I would have to stop dipping into the bag by the time we reached the place where the sidewalk petered out and the cinder path began.

  Irene smoked cigarettes and painted her fingernails, and although Alex said Irene was too frivolous to be thrifty, Irene protested that she was, after all, an artiste. I watched her do pliés after breakfast, and I marvelled at how she could clean her teeth at the kitchen sink, while resting one outstretched foot on the edge of the counter.

  It was only later, when I lived with her in Toronto that I discovered that Irene’s love of the dance far outweighed her talent. Her dream of becoming a member of the corps de ballet had never been realized. The job at the sewing machine shop paid her bills, and it also paid the rent on an empty room in a house downtown, where she gave weekly ballet lessons to a group of children.

  Sure that exposure to the ballet was a major thing that had been missing from my life at Pinkney Corners, Irene kept asking me to accompany her to a class, which these days she took only when she could afford it. Finally, one Tuesday evening, for lack of anything else to do, I agreed.

  I learned when we arrived that I’d have to stay in the ladies’ change room while the class was in session. “But just to see the members of the company, absorb the atmosphere, will be a thrill for you,” Irene assured me.

  I sat hunched under the coat hooks, glad I’d brought my book along. I kept having to move as people came and went. Eventually, I joined a pimply-faced girl seated on an end bench under the window, darning the toes of her pointe shoes, waiting for the next class. She had holes in the sweater that was knotted beneath her small breasts and holes in the heavy wool socks that stopped short of the top of her legs. From the next room came the creak of the rosin, the gentle thump of the landings, the shrill voice of the ballet mistress, and the faltering piano.

  Irene rejoined me an hour later, beaming happily, her round face red and perspiring. “Isn’t it wonderful, Libby? Are you enjoying yourself? Oh, I’m exhausted!” She pulled a towel out of her small suitcase and slung it around her neck. “I’ll be right back,” she promised and scampered off.

  She returned in her underwear and got into her street clothes, pausing every now and then to do a little dance step, muttering, “Glissade, balancé. Isn’t that music wonderful? They’re doing Coppelia next season, you know. We’ll have to save our pennies to see it, Libby. It’s delightful.”

  I didn’t go to the studio again after that, but I did accompany Irene downtown whenever I could. That was where I made one of my most pleasant discoveries since moving to Toronto—a public library within walking distance of the bus stop.

  I spent many blissful hours there, lost in the world of books. I knew this was a good library as soon as I found my mother’s books, everyone one of them, listed in the card catalogue. “Quincy-Newton, Alexandra.”

  I started borrowing the books, although I’d read them all before. Here were the characters that had peopled my life when I was growing up. It was like finding old friends after a long time apart.

  There
was Laura Hill, the adventurous girl who lived with her widowed father, a retired private investigator who was always willing to give her advice on her latest “case”. There was the father’s maiden aunt Caroline who lived with them and looked after domestic duties; Laura’s best friends the twins, Ruth and Reilly, who helped solve each mystery; and loveable but clumsy Spud, whose role it was in every story to muddy the waters. And there was everyone’s nemesis, Byron DeLisle III, the arrogant rich boy who made things difficult for the other four. Nothing had changed; they all still lived between the covers of my mother’s books.

  Irene came to stay in Pinkney Corners during Alex’s final illness and stayed on for a week after the funeral. When the service was over, I went down to the river’s edge to escape the people who filled the little house and trampled the grass and nibbled the sandwiches Irene and my best friend’s mother had prepared. That was where Mr. Thomas, the man who owned the paper in Pinkney Corners and who had given Alex her first job, found me.

  “Are you going to be okay, Elizabeth?” he asked, hitching up the knees of his trousers and squatting on the grassy bank beside me.

  I tossed the stick I’d been breaking into little pieces into the water. “I’m going to live with Irene in Toronto,” I said. It didn’t really answer his question.

  “If you need anything, a little extra cash, someone to come and check on the house for you, Marge and I would really like to help.”

  I nodded. Our neighbours, the McIntyres, were going to check on the house. We remained in silence for a few moments, watching the river. William Thomas was a nice man, but he couldn’t help me now. No one could. Grief, like a sickness, consumed me. It was there, waiting, the minute I opened my eyes each morning, and I fell asleep choking on it every night.

  “Oh, there you are, William.” Marjory Thomas came down the slope towards us. Her husband stood up awkwardly.

  “Libby, dear,” Marjory gasped, her kind face damp from the unusual mid-September heat. “People are leaving. Do you want to come up, or shall I tell them you’d rather be alone?”

  “I’m coming,” I said, brushing off my skirt and tucking in my blouse.

  “Do you like to write, Elizabeth?” William Thomas inquired as the three of us made our way back up to the house.

  “Write?” I asked, surprised, as if he’d asked me if I liked to eat worms. “I suppose. My teachers all figure I should get better marks in composition because of, you know.” I couldn’t say her name; it hurt too much.

  “What I was going to suggest was that you try writing about what you’re feeling.”

  I watched my shoes moving relentlessly forward. Left, right; left, right. Write about this pain that’s like a knife in my heart, I thought? The hurt I can’t get away from?

  “Maybe it’s a bit too soon, William,” Marjory cautioned, tottering in her high heels over the bumpy back yard.

  “Perhaps,” the man admitted, softly. “But when you can, Elizabeth. Write about what you are experiencing.” He meant well. Everyone did, I suppose.

  The day came when it was time for Irene and me to leave. Arrangements had been made to take my dog up the road to the McIntyres’ farm, where he would start a new life. We locked up the little house, and I got into the back seat of the car Irene had borrowed from a boyfriend, where I could sit with my arm around Ernie. His hairy sides heaving, Ernie put his head out the window and let his lips flap in the wind, spraying saliva back over me. I didn’t even care. I wished I could be a big, stupid dog and not know what this was all about.

  Leaving Ernie was the second worst thing that had ever happened to me, and although the dog couldn’t understand, I told him I’d be back for him someday, and that we’d go home again. I looked back only once and saw him sitting in the road between the farm couple, watching me drive away without him.

  As it happened, I did take William Thomas’ advice about writing, and as the weeks dropped away in my new home, I filled the back of half a dozen old school scribblers with my agony. Eight months later, I was still writing. Once the anger had died down and the pain had become less acute, the writing reflected the way I felt about being an outsider at the high school I went to in Toronto.

  Twelve hundred students, half the population of Pinkney Corners, attended the school the year I was there. I felt crushed by the mass of people moving from class to class every forty minutes. I had to take a crowded bus to get to school and to return to Irene’s late in the afternoon. A city bus, not a friendly, yellow school bus.

  The cement schoolyard had a way of spilling over to the plaza on the other side of the street, so you never knew whether the smokers who lounged against the bars on the storefront windows were students or not.

  I had come from Pinkney Corners late in September, when the school year had already begun. Stepping down off the bus the first morning, I tried to catch up with a girl who had been sitting in the seat ahead of me. “Hi,” I said, galloping to keep up with her. “We came on the same bus. Do you live on Kingston Road too?”

  She carried her books like armour against her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “No,” she said.

  “Oh. I just figured you did, seeing as you and I were on the same bus.”

  The girl looked at me from under pencilled eyebrows, as if I was a Martian. All I wanted was for her to walk across the pavement and into the school with me.

  “Could you show me where the office is?” I pleaded. She didn’t even have to talk to me if she didn’t want to, as long as it looked as if we were together. I hated being this needy.

  Every day that week it was the same: walking quickly to catch up with her. Every day hoping Marlene (that was her name, I discovered) would wait for me when she got off the bus.

  Finally, on Friday, when I boarded the bus on the corner of Irene’s block, the seat beside Marlene was empty. But she was gazing fixedly out the window. She had to have seen me waiting on the curb. Losing my nerve, I dropped onto the seat behind her. “Hi, Marlene,” I said.

  “Oh, hi!” Pretending to be surprised.

  At school, I let myself be swept along as the wave of students moved down the hall to the next class, wishing I’d known saddle shoes were out of style here and something called white bucks were in, and knowing it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

  Somehow I got through those first few weeks at school, keeping to myself, concentrating on my studies, and filling page after page of my journal. Gradually, I took on what I considered to be the persona of a writer, aloof and mysterious. It made me feel protected, as if I’d chosen my isolation. I took to wearing my curly, red hair stuffed into a black beret, and I wrapped myself in one of my aunt’s voluminous capes. I knew that some people already thought I was rather strange.

  After I joined the literary club (they were anxiously recruiting new members and seemed to have few takers) I made some friends among those students who shared my interest in reading and writing. When the head of the English department learned that my mother had been a writer, he persuaded me to sign up for the yearbook committee. I spent hour after hour editing submissions, arranging for photos, collecting advertisements, cutting and pasting and preparing the final layout. I had found my niche. I imagined Alex performing many of these same tasks when she first started at the newspaper.

  The day our yearbook committee of six turned everything over to the printer downtown, we cut afternoon classes and went to see a Sal Mineo movie, as if we were part of the popular crowd. It was the most fun I’d had since leaving Pinkney Corners.

  The sound of a key scraping in the lock at the door of Irene’s apartment woke me. In the living room where I lay on my studio couch-bed, I pulled the sheet up over my head and waited. Someone bumped gently against the door. There was muffled laughter and loud whispering.

  “No,” Irene was saying, choking on a laugh. “You can’t come in. Go away, now! Oh, wait a sec. Help me with this key.” More rattling and bumping.

  I got up, pulling the sheet from the bed around me
and trailing it to the door. I unlocked it from my side, and Irene and her companion almost fell into the room.

  “Oh, Libby, dear, I’m sorry to wake you.” Irene drew her accomplice forward by the sleeve of his coat. “This is Barney,” she said, introducing a short man with a sweet face, who held his hat in his hands. “He’s not staying, I promise. This is Libby, my niece, the daughter of my only sister. My dear, big sister, Alex. She died of cancer, you know.” Tears filled her brown eyes and spilled easily down her cheeks. “I promised Alex I’d take care of Libby. It was the least I could do.”

  Irene leaned against Barney, causing him to stagger. Patting her and looking uncomfortable, he cleared his throat. “Okay now, Irene. You get some sleep. Else you’ll be no good in the morning.” He bobbed his head at me. “Nice to meet you, Libby.”

  I felt sudden sympathy for this little man with the apologetic smile. I could have told him just exactly how long he could expect to be around. But I was tired, and anyway I needed Irene on my side while she was weighing the pros and cons of letting me go home once school was out.

  Three

  I think it was the news that I’d been exempted from my final exams that convinced Irene to let me go. She wanted to reward me and knew what I wanted most.

  “This going-home thing will be on a trial basis only,” Irene insisted. “One day at a time.”

  “Oh, thank you, Irene! Thank you, thank you!”

  There were conditions. “I’m writing to the McIntyres, letting them know that you’re coming. They can easily check on you every day. Maybe I should let your mother’s friend at the newspaper, what’s his name, Thomas, know too. And absolutely no male company past the front yard.”