More in Anger (5 page)

Little Pearl's hair was straight and black and her dark brown eyes were like Opal's brother Farley's and her sister Pearly K's, while baby May had her mother's larger bones and plump softness. May's wavy hair was light brown, and she would have fair and freckled Scottish skin and blue eyes, and though her smile would become self-conscious, it was both warm and tolerant, even when her big sister, whom she adored, treated her unkindly.

Both daughters were born at home, Pearl in 1917, May in 1921. The first time Pearl saw May, Pearl had shyly, even softly, approached the bassinet where her new baby sister lay. Pearl
peeked in and took one look at May, and a wail rose from inside her and grew in volume as she stamped out of the room, up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door. Not only did her new sister have the only blue eyes in the family, she sobbed to Opal when she coaxed and coaxed her to divulge what was wrong, but now Pearl would have to
share
. Everything. Everything that mattered, everything that had been all hers until this interloper had arrived. When a smile played on Opal's lips, little Pearl had looked at her with adult fury and ordered her mother out of her room. Opal had gone.

Pearl was a strange child, and Opal was intimidated by her. When Opal knelt and embraced her, Pearl stood stiff as a stick, offering little or nothing in return. Pearl's rare smiles always seemed forced, and laced with unhappiness. What appeared to Opal to be an inherent sadness that she had seen early on in her little girl's face had almost broken her heart. But as Pearl grew older, the sadness gradually became a fixed expression that more closely resembled displeasure as Pearl became, apparently, chronically dissatisfied and cranky. Nothing and no one could please her, and that's how she stayed. In some ways, Pearl was a lot, Opal thought, like Mac. Like him, her gaze was shrewd and somewhat unnerving; even when she was very young she had looked suspicious, as if someone somewhere was getting something that she was not, or that something was going on that she ought to be privy to and wasn't. Something wasn't fair. How to convince her beloved daughter that the world had other things on its mind than thwarting her every desire? If Pearl liked
them
better, people would like
her
better, she told her. People were offended when other people did not trust them. But Pearl did not care.
She could stay mad for days, refusing to speak or even acknowledge anyone's existence. Yet Opal had heard desperate sobs emanating from Pearl's room, had heard her daughter's weeping and wailing that no one loved her, so she knew Pearl was not without feelings. But she would not open her door to her mother, and to her father only when he angrily demanded that she do so or he'd thrash her.

Pearl could stay mad at her sister for days, refusing to speak to her or even acknowledge her existence. If little May looked sad or hurt, Pearl ignored her. She treated her sister like a curse that had been sent to interfere with the way the world should run—which was, of course, around Pearl. Little May would traipse after her looking so unhappy it would melt anyone's heart but Pearl's. Pearl slammed the door in her face. “That girl had better learn that's not the way things work!” said Mac, as he locked Pearl in her room for insolence. “She may speak to you rudely, but I won't put up with it. Let her stew. She'll sort herself out soon enough.”

Mac had strict rules about many things, and required Opal to enforce them when he was not present. Discipline was a mother's job, he said, implying when they misbehaved that Opal wasn't fulfilling her responsibilities. Mac might administer verbal chastising, but he would not administer corporal punishment, though he considered it necessary. Let them hate their mother, not him, thought Opal. The children were not allowed in the parlour unless they wanted to practise on the piano or there was company. They were to keep their hands off the furniture because Mac didn't like fingerprints on everything and the maid had better things to do than to run around cleaning up
after them. They were to keep their feet off the clawed feet of the dining room table because it scuffed the wood and made an annoying sound. They were, as was the accepted wisdom, to be seen and not heard. Period.

Opal didn't like to hit her daughters. Her own parents had never hit their children, had admonished them with quiet, stern words when it was necessary, which hadn't been often. Her father had only once raised his hand to the boys, and the occasion was so unusual that Melville had been just as surprised as their father. But Opal did what Mac told her to do with Pearl, hitting her either with her hands or with a stick Mac acquired and gave her expressly for the purpose, and then Opal cried for hours afterwards, torn by the pull between being an obedient wife and a loving mother. Without her husband's permission, she lightened the touch with May.

Summer holidays usually involved a week or two in a cabin in Banff, and two weeks for the girls riding horses at the King Ranch in Millarville. But in the summer of 1926, the Macaulays took a sea voyage to Britain. It was the first time Mac had been back home, which he regretted deeply, as his father had died in January without ever seeing his grandchildren. Pearl was nine, May five when they embarked. The twenties were turning out to be the best decade of their lives together. Mac had prospered, and he didn't mind showing his mother that was the case, with the clothes he dressed his family in, and the manner in which they travelled and lodged. First they went to London, where they
visited the Tower and Buckingham Palace, and then they hired a car and driver and went north to Scotland. The week they spent there with his mother was tense and unpleasant, and the absence of his father and the presence of his mother created a turmoil in Mac that resulted, Opal could see, in his hardening himself like shellac. Which made it difficult for everyone, his mother included. He could barely speak a civil word.

As they travelled south into England again, Mac decided that he wanted to have his sister Joan meet his children and his wife. How many years had it been? Almost twenty, surely. His sister had married badly, he reminded Opal, and this time he gave her the details. She had married an Indian doctor named Walla who was from Bombay, of all places, in spite of her family's forbidding it. Now, he said, he had changed his mind about it all. Surely there were worse things than marrying a coloured man, and if they visited during the daytime he would not have to set eyes on him. He wanted his sister to see that he was doing well; he wanted her to be pleased for him the way she had tried on occasion to be when he was a child, removing him sometimes from their mother's path, from her grasp. So when they arrived back in London, he took Opal, Pearl and May to his sister's door, and brusquely knocked with short, hard raps. Joan opened the door. When she saw who it was, an indescribable look swept across her face. Then she closed the door in her brother's face. Not only that, but she had caught her skirt in the door, and had to open and shut it
again
.

Mac looked dumbstruck, crushed, and then his face went hard. As hard and as black, Opal thought, as that day he came out of Mr. Tupper's office. He ordered his family away, and walked
apart from them back to the hotel. He remained ill-tempered even when they had crossed the Channel to France, and in Paris, where Opal bought her mother and each of her sisters a dress, Mac, still smarting from his sister's rebuff, was vocal in his disapproval of the expenditure, and there in their hotel room they fought.

“You make too much of that family of yours,” he said.

“I do not,” she said.

“You are completely foolish when it comes to them. You'd think you hadn't a brain in your head.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee. I am not. And I do so.” Then she recklessly added, “Well, at least I talk to my family.”

She and Mac didn't speak to each other for days after that, and they said to their two daughters,
Tell your mother this. Tell your father that
, though May was the only one to co-operate. Pearl sat staring at the wall or the floor, sullen and silent, ignoring them all. “I refuse to partake in such idiocy,” she said finally, in a very grown-up voice.

On the day the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the Alberta Five, saying that women were not persons, Opal had gritted her teeth and barely held her tongue while Mac, jubilant, crowed at the dinner table as he sat with his wife and daughters and the maid waited on the table. He said to them that anyone with a brain knew already that women should not serve in the Senate. He said these females had wasted the court's time, anyone could see that. This was the culmination of many months of one-sided
“discussions” on the topic: Mac had spoken often and long about it. Women were too stupid to see that they were out of their league wanting such rights. He needed to look no further than his own wife with her willy-nilly spending habits if he wanted to see a woman in action. There were female pursuits and male pursuits. Women excelled at their chosen activities, and men at theirs. What was so hard to understand about that? Opal sat across from her husband and watched her daughters absorb his words.

But that wasn't the end of it. They were subjected to more of Mac's rants on the topic a year and a half later when, on October 18, 1929, England's Privy Council overturned the Supreme Court's ruling. Now Mac was disgusted, criticized his supper, and announced (Finally! thought Opal) that the topic was permanently closed.

Like her own mother, Opal prided herself on being well informed. She had followed the course of justice with interest, and had read all the newspaper articles on the subject, secretly cheering the women on. She was determined that when they grew up her own daughters would be considered persons, and that they both would go to university; she was determined to have more success than her own mother had had trying to educate her daughters—it was a whole generation later. It was sinful not to train the mind God gave you, she told Mac, as Pearl drew closer to her high school graduation, and continuing with what Mac called Opal's “relentless harangue” on the subject. What good had educating her sister Lillie done? he said, presenting yet again his favourite piece of evidence. Hadn't Opal spent all that time and money working at the law firm as a secretary so that her sister could go to university? And while Lillie had finished—just
barely—she never actually did a thing with her teaching degree. Lillie had promptly married a wealthy man, hadn't she, and didn't have to lift a finger in the way of work unless she wanted to. It was in being a homemaker and socialite that Lillie excelled, not intellectual pursuits. Lillie herself had known that, and Opal should have too, instead of wasting her money. If Lillie had married well in the first place, what would have been wrong with that? He, for one, had no money to waste. The thirties were not like the twenties: the whole country was in a Depression, she should remember.

Opal knew all too well. Mac and the papers provided them daily with statistics. Over a million Canadians were unemployed. The cost of living had sunk dramatically: in Calgary, eggs were three cents a dozen, a leg of lamb was $1.50. Milk was ten cents a quart. On Ninth Avenue, Mac said, you could purchase a breakfast of coffee, two slices of toast and butter, bacon and one egg for fifteen cents. In 1933, wheat had sold on the Liverpool market at thirty-three cents per bushel, the lowest price in three hundred years. And in the past two years Mac had taken two tenpercent cuts to his salary.

But then, within a matter of months, things had turned around, for the Macaulays at least. In November 1934, Mac was promoted to Chief Solicitor for Alberta. He bought May a bicycle for Christmas, Opal a new fur coat, himself a new car; and he promised Pearl a trip to Hawaii on a CPR steamer as her grade twelve graduation gift. Opal pressed harder for her daughters' education. Mac relented. But, he said, it would have to be McGill, the best Scottish Canadian university, or nothing.