Finding My Own Way (2 page)

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 gnome'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.”

“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.

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.