The Stubborn Season. Lauren B. Davis
to nag. Why had she mistaken weakness for gentleness? Margaret’s father had been a big, brusque man, all whisky and rough hands and a voice that could shake the windows. She loved him, but he was hard to handle, and her mother had always looked drawn and tired. In fact, she had never really seemed relaxed until after her husband died. It was a terrible thing to say, but it was true, wasn’t it? Her mother had changed then, with a deep contentment in her widow’s face that had never been there when she was a wife. With no disrespect to her father, Margaret had been glad to find a well-mannered man like Douglas, with his freshly pressed shirts and shiny shoes.
He had seen her at the Methodist picnic on Toronto Island and asked her brother, Rory, with whom he’d played a game of horseshoes, to introduce them. It was three months after John Carlisle had left for New York. Douglas seemed so refined, so unruffled, standing there in his straw hat, looking down at her. She now believed his calm masked an unmasculine timidity. He’d been thirty years old then, a whole decade older than she, and she found this reassuring. Surely a man, full-grown and responsible, with his own business, would never just up and leave. He had not been to war (an honour he said he was swindled out of by virtue of his age), and so did not wrestle with John’s demons. She became engaged to Douglas six months later, although she had to admit that she hadn’t taken the engagement altogether seriously.
“Don’t mess with his feelings,” Rory had said. “He’s a nice guy.”
“Of course he’s nice. How can you think such a thing of me?” she’d protested. But in truth, she thought she’d stay with Douglas just until John returned. She planned to make John suffer a little, as he’d made her suffer. Then she would forgive him, and with deep regret, but with good reason (for hadn’t John pledged his undying love for her first?), she would end her engagement to Douglas and things would go back to their proper place. But John Carlisle never did return.
Back in the spring of 1918, with the war raging in Europe, the world had seemed to offer so little promise or hope. So she walked down the aisle, wearing her cream silk gown, and beamed at Douglas. The war would end one day. They’d have a good life. He was kind and tall, with all that wavy brown hair and a soft moustache. She couldn’t wait to see what he’d do once the relatives were gone and the lights were low and there was no longer any reason for him to be so careful of her. She thought he would shrug off the polite displays of gentlemanly behaviour and press her body to his the way that John had done, with a demanding knee between her thighs and his hand on her throat.
After the blur of the reception they arrived at the Queen Anne Hotel and went immediately to their room. The walls were pale blue and the carpet was ivory. Small cunning bunches of violets were woven through the bed’s white canopy, and a gilt mirror hung from one wall. Margaret thought it the most elegant room she’d ever seen. Douglas uncorked a bottle of sparkling wine.
“Perhaps you’d like to get ready for bed now,” he said at last, and his eyes were very bright. Margaret blushed, as was expected, and excused herself. In the bathroom she filled the tub and added fragrant oil. She lowered herself into the water, thinking of his hands on her hips. When she was done she smoothed scented cream into her skin and dabbed perfume behind her ears and between her breasts. She brushed her hair and slipped on the thin-strapped rose-coloured gown she had bought especially for tonight. Her breathing was shallow and her mouth was dry, but it was an exciting sort of fear.
She opened the door and stepped into the brightly lit room. She paused a moment so he could see her. How disappointed she had been to find him lying there, in his blue-striped pyjamas, with the covers pulled up to his chest. He had been reading a book.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “Come here.” He patted the side of the bed. She walked, feeling awkward. Douglas put out the light. She slipped beneath the cool, pressed sheets. He moved on top of her and pulled up her gown.
Afterwards, he’d asked, “Are you all right?” and patted her hair.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“I hope it didn’t shock you. Did your mother talk to you?”
“I wasn’t shocked, Douglas.”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” he said. “I love you, Margaret.” He put his arm around her and pulled her to his chest. She lay there, trying not to cry, while he fell into a loud and leaden sleep. When her arm became numb beneath her, she got up, went into the bathroom and washed her ruined nightgown in cold water, rinsing away the blood.
She spent the night in the armchair by the window, looking at the face of the man to whom she’d given her body and her future. In the morning she developed a headache and couldn’t eat breakfast, preferring to lie quietly in the dark room while Douglas went down to the coffee shop alone. Over the eleven years of their marriage she’d come to rely upon the refuge of a silent, still room the way others relied on whisky, perhaps, or opium.
And so Margaret lay beneath her comforter now, a rattling bundle of irritable loneliness. The words from the newspaper accounts kept going through her head. The market was completely demoralized . . . Stocks were sacrificed ruthlessly . . . Extreme declines . . . Clients carrying cheques and cash in their hands to stave off ruin. It shouldn’t really matter to her—after all, they had no stocks, no bonds, no investments whatsoever. Douglas had been prudent. He was a deeply prudent man. But there was still a sense of ruin. She clenched her hands until the red moons of her fingernails left crescents on her palms.
The problem was that big things were happening in the world, and she was not a part of them. She felt that some great chance had been missed, for fortune or for failure, it hardly mattered. She’d felt it for weeks now, this itch of discontent. A shiver of something angry twitched at her body from her toes to her teeth.
3
April 1930
Homewood was a quiet, well-tended street. Although it was mostly a street of modest homes, boasting gardens of zinnias and marigolds and climbing-rose vines, there were several modern apartment buildings. Margaret did not approve of the apartments, nor their residents, single men and women, newlyweds, the elderly, and families too poor to afford a house.
Children played double dutch and telephone, using two tin cans and a length of string, while their mothers chatted with the fruit man who came by twice a week with his horse and cart, or the knife sharpener with his grinding wheel that sent out sparks. The women swapped recipes for angel food cake and jellied salads the way the children swapped the miniature playing cards that came in Turret cigarette boxes.
The residents bragged that Dr. Banting, the discoverer of insulin, had lived on the street as a boy. Dr. Banting, of course, had moved to a more fashionable district long ago, but still, they prided themselves on this badge of gentility, particularly now, when hope of moving off to Forest Hill or Rosedale seemed very slim indeed. Some of the families, such as the Gardners at number 19, the Lambies at number 25 and the Cantwells at number 36, had taken in boarders. The family who used to live in number 9 had moved out and the house was now carved up into four apartments, two of which were occupied by single men.
Still, the MacNeils’ old neighbours were largely unchanged, although they were all feeling the pinch. The Steedmans, with two small boys; Mrs. Annie Dixon, a retired schoolteacher who’d lived on the street alone as long as anyone could remember. There were the Whartons, who had immigrated from England, the MacKays, the Boyers and the MacIntyres. All good Anglo-Saxon stock, most with a trace of Scottish in their backgrounds, a love of the King and a good cup of tea with toast. And there was Mr. Rhodes, who owned the butcher’s across from Douglas’s pharmacy, his over blown wife who had a hunger for gossip, and four noisy teenagers, three girls and a boy.
Inside the MacNeil house, at number 51, Margaret pored over news stories of unemployment and unrest from both near and far. In India, the nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi opened a civil disobedience campaign by leading the Salt March, to protest the levying of a salt tax on poor people. In Columbus, Ohio, a fire killed 318 inmates at the state penitentiary, which was nearly two hundred percent over capacity. Margaret sat with her ear next to the radio as the voices spoke