Sunny Dreams (3 page)

Our family’s primary claim to fame before that summer was that my dad’s dad, Grandpa Palmer, had gone down with the
Titanic
. I knew it, but didn’t feel it, so it was easy to talk about. Even my dad didn’t mind when I brought it up on occasion. But Sunny’s kidnapping and my mother’s death never took on enough distance for us to be able to talk about them comfortably even among ourselves.

Every year on the anniversary of Sunny’s disappearance my dad put an ad in all the major papers across Canada. Each time he worded it a little differently, according to how old she got to be and how much he imagined her to have grown. He never got a serious answer. There are an awful lot of cranks out there in the world.

Eleven Years Later

My family had been out of quarantine for a fortnight when I finally persuaded Fraser to go with me to see the boys.

At first, Johnny Lee was reluctant to talk to us.

“I thought it was just a pile of thistles,” he said at last.

So the part about the Russian thistles was true.

We sat around the dining room table at a big house in Riverview: Johnny Lee, Fraser Foote, and I. We had been lucky enough to catch Johnny when his mother wasn’t home.

The boy started to cry. I was sorry for putting him through this, but not sorry enough to stop.

“It must have been hard for you,” I said.

“Leave my brother alone.”

We hadn’t noticed a little girl standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Go play in the backyard,” Johnny said roughly.

“No.”

“Go play in the backyard, Muriel, or I’ll tell Mum you snuck cookies.”

“I didn’t sneak,” Muriel said quietly as she backed away from us through the kitchen. “You snuck.” The screen door closed behind her.

“That’s my sister,” Johnny said. “She’s five.”

A familiar sad worm wiggled inside my chest. Seven years ago our Sunny would have been five and I’d missed it.

“Does Muriel know about what you found?” I asked Johnny.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. She knows something bad happened.”

In late August of 1936 two eleven-year-old boys from Riverview became famous because of something that they found by the railway tracks. Johnny Lee was one of those boys and the other one was Artie Eccles. Their names weren’t in the paper but news like that travels fast and their identities were bandied about soon enough. Fraser pestered his dad into confirming the names for us. His dad was a cop.

The phone book told us where we could find the boys. Riverview is on the other side of the Red River from the Norwood Flats where Fraser and I lived. It was a part of town that we mostly saw from across a muddy expanse of water. People just like us lived there, I’m sure, but they had always seemed exotic to me simply because they were as tiny as toy soldiers and they lived west of the Red. It was more like south-southwest at that bend in the river but there were too many curves to label them all with particularity. West held an allure for me probably because everything I knew best was east of the waterway. We had the motorboat launch and the Rowing Club and even a golf course on our side, but somehow Riverview’s westness beat out all three, in my mind.

On a larger scale, reports of drought and wind and misery from the western provinces seemed to me more fascinating than the tales of grief from back east. And west coast salmon was far more enticing than the cod that bullied its way in from the east. No one liked that salty cod.

It was a Saturday afternoon in September when Fraser and I trudged through St. Vital, across the Elm Park Bridge to Jubilee Avenue. I knew there was a shorter way, but Fraser insisted on being the navigator and I was so grateful to him for coming with me that I didn’t argue.

The sun slanted down on us from a deep blue sky fancied up with puffy white clouds. The days as we moved into autumn had become oddly clear of dust and no wind disturbed the stillness of the day. It was hot for that time of year, but hot was nothing new; we were old hands at hot. The leaves were turning and they hung motionless from the trees that were too young to provide much shade — just a dappling here and there.

By the time we got to Artie Eccles’ house on Balfour Avenue, I had a blister on one heel and a blouse soaked with sweat. And I had managed to kick my right anklebone with my left penny loafer so many times that I was bleeding through my thin white sock. I often did that.

Mrs. Eccles wouldn’t let us speak to her son. She kept pushing him behind her as though to protect him from a couple of wild boars. He wanted to talk — I could tell — but she wouldn’t hear of it. If she’d had a stick she would have beaten us off with it.

Johnny Lee lived on Morley Avenue, just one street away from the St. Mary’s Cemetery. There were no adults at home there. His mother was at work, he’d said. No mention of a dad. The snag was he didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’d rather not,” he said, peering at us from behind the big front door.

“The man was my friend,” I said.

His shoulders hunched up closer to his ears and he stared at the space between us.

I was sick with thirst. We stood there for another moment and then I asked for a glass of water.

He let us in then and led us to the dining room. He brought water in a pitcher and three glass tumblers. Fraser and I drank greedily.

Johnny was blubbing into his sleeve now and Fraser looked uncomfortable; he wasn’t as sure as I was that this whole thing was a good idea.

“We sometimes put metal slugs on the tracks when a train’s coming to see how flat they get,” Johnny said. “We always play down by the tracks, building fires and roasting stuff.”

The tears kept falling, but Johnny’s voice was steady and I no longer felt like I was forcing him into anything. He wanted to talk. Maybe he hadn’t talked enough. Maybe his mum didn’t want to hear it.

“Nothing horrible ever happened to us before,” he said. “It was always fun down there, till now.”

“It’ll be fun again one day,” I said, not sure if it was a lie.

He looked at me as though I had no reasoning powers. I worried my bloody ankle with my left foot and regretted my words. I chose not to worsen the situation by speaking further. Finally, he went on.

“We each had a wiener,” he said. “And a bun. We were gonna roast them. We were walking on the wooden slats between the rails. No trains were coming.”

His shoulders hunched again when he said this and he looked like he expected someone to yell at him for playing on the tracks. It was the kind of thing boys got yelled at for.

Fraser reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Johnny,” he said.

The tears had stopped. They left their salty tracks on his smooth tanned face.

“I threw my wiener away,” the boy continued. “I couldn’t eat it after what we saw.”

Again, that guilty look. It was unheard of for a thinking being to throw away any morsel of food in those hard years. And again, Fraser said, “That’s okay.”

“What did you see, Johnny?” My voice came out barely above a whisper.

“At first I thought it was just a pile of thistles by the tracks. But Artie thought it looked weird with all those flies. I did too. There were so many flies.”

It was hot in the dining room. We had finished the water. When Johnny paused again Fraser picked up the pitcher and went to the kitchen to fill it from the tap.

Johnny looked at the tabletop and waited for Fraser to return. What he told us next hadn’t been in the newspaper. We knew about it by now, but not from the paper, which hadn’t told us much at all.

“There was no head,” he said, his eyes on mine now, his lips trembling slightly.

“Most of the flies were at the head end.”

Head end. It was an odd phrase, unlike any that we were used to hearing.

“The end where the head had been,” said Johnny.

“Yes,” Fraser and I said together.

“His head had been on the rail when a train went by. That’s what the firemen said.” Johnny’s tears started up again.

“It was flattened to nothing. We knew it had been there because of the flies. They made a great buzzing pile by the neck hole.”

Neck hole.

“The hole where…”

“Yes.”

“Other insects too, ants, and ones I didn’t even know what they were — new ones.”

Fraser handed Johnny his damp handkerchief.

The trains that we heard from across the river in Norwood were the ones that travelled those rails where the boys played. They headed to and from the
CNR
Station on Main Street. They were in the background of our lives most days and nights, and usually I didn’t notice them. But sometimes if I lay awake in the dark hours I imagined that I was a woman on a train, travelling alone with an expensive leather bag and a modern hairdo. I saw myself in fashionable trousers, tossing out witticisms to anyone who spoke to me, mostly porters and conductors, but sometimes a rich businessman who wanted me for his mistress. They all admired me no end.

I allowed myself now to picture a well-loved head being crushed to nothing.

Death by passing trains certainly wasn’t unheard of in those days, but mostly it was accidental — too much hooch — or in some cases a messy suicide.

But not this time. This was murder. His naked body had been covered with tar and then plastered with Russian thistles: tarred and thistled. That part had been printed in the paper.

Three Months Earlier

In the spring of 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whether rightly or wrongly, was cooked in an electric chair for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Although it happened a long way away in another country, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. and the trial of his abductor was an event that resonated endlessly within the walls of our well-kept home. We had followed the news with heavy hearts.

Aunt Helen was still with us after all these years. Mostly she looked after us, but occasionally she took a private nursing job if someone asked for her in particular.

“Thank goodness that’s over,” she had said when we heard about Hauptmann on the radio news.

I wasn’t so sure. Now whose job was it to kill the executioner? What about the ten commandments? What about, Thou shalt not kill? I was very back and forth about religion in those days, but certain parts of the bible were pretty hard to argue with.

My dad said nothing.

Our Sunny had never come home and, unlike the Lindberghs, we never received a ransom note or any communication at all from her kidnappers.

Over the years I came to believe that criminals were raising her, that her underwear was filthy and her hair full of knots all through her childhood. Her teeth would be rotting and crumbling in her mouth. I pictured her in New York City, a place so big that she would go unnoticed as someone who didn’t belong.

I had stopped a long time ago trying to discuss these sorts of things with my dad or Aunt Helen. Neither of them wanted to speculate about Sunny. I became convinced that they thought she was dead or at least that they found it easiest to believe that was so.

That June I graduated from grade eleven at Norwood Collegiate. I scored a fifty r in mathematics. The r stood for reread, which I requested after receiving a failure, at forty-eight per cent. My teacher, Mr. Abernethy, was an easygoing man. There couldn’t have been an extra two marks in there anywhere; maths isn’t that kind of subject. I applied for the reread in the hopes that he would take pity on me, and he did.

In those days you could enter college straight out of grade eleven and that was my plan. I imagined that once I was out of high school I would start performing better, but I still didn’t have any idea what I wanted to be — for sure nothing that involved maths or chemistry — those were my worst subjects. Any ambitions remained unclear to me, hidden under a woolly fog of confusion.

My dad was no help. His vision of my future was marriage to an up-and-coming prince of a man and many strong-limbed children for him to bounce on his knee. And he wouldn’t leave it alone.

Finally, one day, I raised my voice to him and said, “I don’t want to get married and have kids and lose one of them and become so sad that I drive myself into a stone wall. I don’t want to depend on a husband and children to keep me alive and kicking.”

He grew quiet and I apologized and he never mentioned it again and I sometimes wished he would.

Instead he decided to try and encourage me in different ways but I don’t think his heart was in it. He would call out ideas from time to time.

“How about a nurse, like your Aunt Helen?”

“I don’t think so, Dad,” I said, “but thanks for the suggestion.”

There was no way, even in the farthest reaches of my imagination, that I could picture myself mopping up the errant bodily fluids of the sick and jabbing needles into their withered rear ends. I knew there was more to it than that. It was rewarding work, the way Aunt Helen described it, but definitely not for me.

That summer I worked for Eaton’s mail order. In the winter, I had worked there on Saturday mornings, but when my final exams were over, I began a three-day-a-week schedule: Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. People said I was lucky to get the job. Others, like Mrs. Walker, Gwen’s mum, said I shouldn’t have taken it away from someone who really needed it. Gwen was my best friend and she suggested that I ignore her mother, which I tried to do. But she could really get to me.

I lied to get the job, pretended that I would be staying on in the fall. They didn’t want to train me just to have me up and quit. I felt a small amount of guilt about lying and about leaving them in the lurch come fall, but not too much.

We were well-to-do, even during the Depression when so many people were struggling. Besides my dad having a well-paying job there was wealth from my mother’s side, from her father, who had been an architect and builder. My mum had been an only child and both my maternal grandparents had died soon after I was born — Grandpa from a massive stroke, Grandma from something that no one wanted to talk to me about. I knew she had bled to death but I didn’t know from where.

“Was it in childbirth?” I had asked more than once, figuring that would be a good way of identifying the orifice without uttering any unpleasant words.

“No,” was all I got from either Helen or my dad. I guess they were done talking about death.

My dad didn’t care if I had a summer job — he would have been fine with my staying around home — but I wanted to buy clothes and shoes and makeup and magazines without asking him for money all the time. He was fairly generous, but he did question some of my purchases, especially if I bought two of something, like two lipsticks in different shades.

“Why do you need two?” he asked.

“Because on different days I feel like wearing different colours,” I said.

“I don’t think your mother ever had more than one lipstick on the go at the same time.” He measured everything womanly by the way my mum had done it.

And look where she ended up, I thought. But what I said was, “So?”

“Yes, well,” he said.

And there it would end.

I could barely remember my mother by now. She was something inside me that caused my jaw to clench and that curled my hands into fists. And she was a face in old photographs that Dad insisted on keeping around. They lost all meaning for me. They became less familiar than the cartoons in the funny papers. Blondie at least had bubbles filled with words coming out of her mouth and a friend named Tootsie Woodley. I didn’t know if my mother had had any friends; I couldn’t remember any, but that meant nothing. And it wasn’t something I felt I could ask my dad.

Sometimes I would catch him crying when he didn’t know I was around. Once I found him crying in my mum’s closet where her clothes still hung and that made me mad. I pretended that it scared me and told Aunt Helen about it: fear seemed more acceptable than anger. She made my dad pack up the clothes and give them away to the church.

My position at Eaton’s mail order was in the complaint department. I answered letters and tried to fix people’s problems, like Ruth Block’s, which landed in my tray on a June morning:

Hamiota, Manitoba

June 10, 1936

Dear Eaton’s,

I received the size 14 blouse that I ordered but it doesn’t fit me. It’s snug under the arms and that won’t do. Although I’ve never taken a size 16 before I would like to order one at this time. Please send it soon.

Yours truly,

Ruth Block

P.S. I’ll hang on to the size 14 until I receive the substitute. Thanks.

RB

I sighed as I fed two new pieces of paper separated by a carbon sheet into my typewriter. It was one of a long run of mornings when my clothes stuck to me like paste and the Eaton’s hosiery regulation seemed downright cruel. I explained to Ruth Block that she had to return the snug blouse before we could send her a new one. And that if she’d had the sense to do that in the first place she would have her size 16 a darned sight sooner. I didn’t type in this last part, just thought it and mentioned it out loud to Mary Cartwright, the girl who sat at the desk beside me, doing the same job I did.

Mary had the same name as my little sister but I didn’t often think of that because I still thought of my sister as Sunny. I often wondered what the criminals called her. For sure they would have changed her name.

When I told Mary about Ruth Block, she laughed.

Some people didn’t trust Eaton’s to clear things up for them, so they held on to their items as hostages. This puzzled me, because the store had such a fine reputation. Mary understood the hostage taking as she was a suspicious type herself. She thought I was naïve. So she was kinder to the customers than I was, and more patient, although she still liked to make fun of them.

“I guess old Ruthie’s sausage arms have slipped their casings a tad since last time she ordered a blouse,” Mary said. “Let’s get out of here,” she added, glancing up at the clock on the wall. “It’s time for lunch.”

“It took Ruthie’s letter nine days to get to me,” I said. “By the time the whole mess is straightened out, summer will be over and she’ll have to wait till next spring to wear her new blouse.”

“Not your problem, sweetie,” said Mary.

“Or maybe we won’t even have a size 16.”

“Or maybe Ruth’s husband will light her on fire and she’ll die and blouses won’t matter to her anymore,” said Mary. “Come on. Let’s eat.”

We stood up and pushed in our chairs. It was 12:30 on a Friday. We treated ourselves on Fridays to a meal at Moores across the street.

“Enjoy lunch, Rich Girl,” a woman named Henny called out from her desk across the room near the windows.

There were some in the office who, like Gwen’s mum, resented me for having a job when my family didn’t need the money. I didn’t know how to argue with them.

“Ignore her,” said Mary. “She’s a horse’s ass,” she added loudly.

Henny stood up and someone put a hand on her arm.

The heels of our shoes made lovely clopping sounds on the wooden floor as we hurried down the hall toward the stairs. I concentrated on those sounds and tried not to let Henny’s words get to me. Maybe she and Gwen’s mum were right: I should give my job up to someone who really needed it.

Mary and I stopped on the shipping floor to see if Lester Sykes wanted to join us; often he did. Today he had his hands full with a tiller part.

“It looks to have been damaged after delivery,” he said. Someone was trying to get away with something. Poor Lester. He sat at his desk staring at the part; he shook his head and sighed. There were little chunks of dry Manitoba gumbo on his desk.

“Thanks, girls,” Lester said. “But I brought my lunch today.” He pointed to his battered lunch box. “Maybe next Friday, eh.”

Lester was far from a frivolous spender. Mary had told me that he sent as much money as he could possibly manage home to his folks on their farm near Clearwater.

We went for lunch and left Lester to his stewing over his tiller. I had a bacon and tomato sandwich and Mary had sliced turkey. I loved going for lunch at Moores; it made me feel grown-up, like the well-turned-out woman on my imagined train ride with her stream of witticisms. We both dressed with a little more care on Fridays, although neither of us would ever admit it.

It was easier to act sophisticated when Lester wasn’t with us leaving a trail of sawdust and dirt behind him. We drank in the appreciative glances of the businessmen, pretending that we didn’t notice them and also making believe that we weren’t soaked with perspiration beneath our clothes. We both pinned dress shields inside our blouses so the world wouldn’t know about our sweat.

Mary was a few years older than me and sometimes wore an engagement ring on her left hand — just sometimes because it turned her finger green. Her boyfriend’s name was Perry Toole and I was sure he bought the ring at Woolworth’s or worse. She called him her fiancé, which I found embarrassing on her behalf. He didn’t look like a fiancé the few times I had seen him. He looked like a hayseed and I was sure Mary could do better.

Perry worked as a hired hand on a farm near their hometown of Carman. Sometimes he drove eggs in to the grading department in the mail-order building. On those days Mary ate lunch with him at the coffee bar in the farmers’ waiting room and made sure to wear her ring. She talked about him as though he were king of the world.

“Perry’s coming to pick me up at 5:00,” she said now. “He’s taking me out for supper before we leave the city.”

She went home to Carman every weekend.

“What’s he driving?” I asked. That was mean, but at least I didn’t ask who was paying for supper.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “Something, I’m sure.” She dabbed her lips matter-of-factly with her cloth napkin.

Last time he came to get her he’d hitched a ride in and Mary’d had to pay for both of them to go home on the train. I wouldn’t put up with it if I were her, but she thought she was in love and wouldn’t hear a word against him. So I bit my tongue.

He didn’t treat her very well as far as I ever saw. He ordered her around and criticized her appearance. Once I heard him tell her that she needed a chocolate milkshake like she needed another hole in her head. Mary had set the milkshake aside. How could she enjoy it after that?

When I asked her what it was about him that she loved so much she said, “He’s good to me.”

I guess that meant he didn’t slam her into walls or light her on fire.

My hope was that Mary would one day break free from Perry. They still hadn’t set a date, which I found encouraging.

Even Lester would be a better deal for her. Or maybe one of our lunchtime businessmen would sweep her off her feet. We should stop so studiously ignoring them. I suggested to Mary that she smile at a man with brown wavy hair who made no secret of the fact that he admired her. She did so as we walked out past his table and he smiled back. We laughed all the way back to Eaton’s.

The next letter on my pile was from a woman in Roblin, Manitoba. She complained that the colour of her cardigan, or cardy, as she called it, wasn’t as described in the catalogue. A vague complaint like that was difficult for me. She had been expecting the light blue of a prairie sky, she wrote, not the light blue of her dead mother’s eyes. That letter was beyond me on the first reading. I put it at the bottom of the pile. Maybe later in the day I could come up with an answer for her.