She shivered as her husband, William Douglas Armstrong, drove against the blast of the November wind. She’d been shivering in her coat the last forty miles, for the heater in the eight-year-old Plymouth had stopped working the week before. Everyone cut back in wartime anyway, and heat cost gas. Uncle Tim, never without, had mailed him some extra gas ration cards.
Between the chill on her legs and her tension being away from the baby for the first time, they hadn’t been fifty miles from home when Leslie wanted to stop. “Oh, Will,” she whined, “can we find a pay phone at the next town and see if everything is OK? Toronto is almost six hours away.” A washroom would be handy.
“He’s fine,” Will protested, “Leslie, you’ve asked four times!” He softened. “Look, Les, with a babysitter all day and two doting grandparents, we can leave him. He’ll be spoiled rotten when we get home.” He chuckled.
“Oh, Will, this is the first time…” Caught in the unrelenting cold, Will’s stubbornness, the aunts’ looming inspection and missing her fifteen-month-old, Leslie slid into a sulk tugging at the pilling on her wool coat. All four were reasons to stay home.
“Look,” Will’s father had said at her baby’s first birthday party in July, “Brucie is a year now. No reason you can’t go away for a few days.” Her resistance was silenced. Damn, I always give in. The trip had been decided by everybody else.
Harriet, Willy’s long-faced mother, just clamped her false teeth together as Will’s dad, Douglas Everett Armstrong, sang praises of his society sisters. Her mother-in-law cooed, “They have a lovely home, dear, and their cook makes wonderful deserts,” she interrupted. “You’ll have a lovely time.” She showed her ceramic teeth in a tight smile. “And Bruce is here with us, dearie.” “Dearie,” ended the conversation.
Gosh, she almost said, “Don’t hurry back.” Then, she mused again of their very own little apartment, but that’s all it was–musings.
“He didn’t even cry when we left,” Will added. Leslie stewed about that as Will negotiated a narrow S curve. “This has more pep than my old Ford. Look, fifty-five miles per hour and we don’t even feel it,” he said as the road straightened out.
For the next half hour, they drove in silence with the November afternoon sun warming the car. After two months of their prodding, she had no excuses left for Will and his father. Bruce was sixteen months.
Yet again, it was the fancy aunts as she called them. Two summers before at the family cottage, she had met Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Bernice for the first time, just six months before the yet-unplanned wedding. Feeling inspected in her sister’s hand-me-down bathing suit, she busied herself in the kitchen mashing potatoes. Who wears diamonds to the beach?
On January 16, 1943, the wedding had been small, very small in the church presbytery. Mercifully, winter storm had kept the aunts from the wedding—a relief.
However, wedding pictures had been sent registered mail to Toronto within a week. “The war,” Leslie had insisted a week later, “meant the dress couldn’t be white with the need for parachutes. Pale lavender had to do.” It had worked for a while with men, but women weren’t stupid. However, now with Bruce, the busy offspring, the timing had become irrelevant, for most.
She refocused on the road as Will whistled “In the Mood.”
“Mr. Whachacallit, whacha doin’ t’night?” she sang into the fur trimmed collar on her wool coat.
Their duet ended. “Just one quick call?” she begged as they were coming into the outskirts of a town.
“Already? Oh, sweetheart, do you know how expensive long-distance phone calls are from a pay phone?”
“I don’t care. I saw your father slip you some money before we left. How much?”
“I’m not telling. You’ll want to go shopping at Eaton’s.”
“Wow! That much? If I don’t, give me the dollar for the phone call, OK?”
Ten minutes later, she shrieked, “Look, a grocery store! And a telephone booth.” He obliged.
She ran to the booth, got the operator, gave the number, stuffed the coins into the slots, and waited and waited some more. Will saw the receiver slam onto the cradle from the car. “No answer,” she cried, as she slammed the car door behind her.
Will drove on. Leslie slumped lazily in her seat.
“I need gas,” he announced as he pulled into a Texaco station with a diner.
“Oh, good, I’m hungry,” said Leslie.
She waited as the attendant filled the tank; then, they bustled into a roadside eatery. It was dusty place promising humble fare judging by the corrugated tin roof and the chipped asbestos shingles on the outside.
She found the pay phone, called and listened to the long-distance sounds of the the baby babbling and gurgling, and her mother-in-law’s reassurances. “We’re planning lovely a Sunday outing, dearie, with my sister, Auntie Ethel. It’s warm and sunny; we’ll do lots of things, dearie.” With the operator asking for another quarter, the mention of that sister and twice “dearie,” Leslie hung up.
Relieved, they ordered. Two turkey sandwiches came with their Cokes. Will added an iceberg lettuce salad they shared. The waitress plonked the chipped Fiesta ware down in front of him with a clatter. “There,” she barked. The Cokes arrived with the same sound effect.
They thanked her in unison and watched the full-figured-fifty-something waddle away. “Humph,” she said, “We’re closing soon.”
“Jeez,” Will said. “Grumpy won’t get a tip.”
She rested her hand on his arm. “Don’t let it get to you.”
“That’s $1.55.” Grumpy folded her arms and glared over the cash register.
“No tip,” Will muttered to Leslie as he handed her one dollar with three quarters. He stood waiting for the change. Grumpy glared again. He pulled his eyebrows together until they met.
“Change, please. I believe it’s twenty cents.”
She slapped her hand down on the counter. The dimes were underneath.
“What are you doing here?” The figure sneered.
His muscles tightened between his shoulders. “My wife and I are driving to Toronto to see family. Why?”
“I have two sons. Last June, they survived Juno Beach at Normandy. I see you did, too.”
Will’s jaw dropped. “My brother’s in Holland,” Leslie chirped as she tugged on Will’s sleeve.
“Change, please.” His words were sharp.
“Will is working in the government research on explosives and munitions, but he’s been assigned to the Air Force and could go anytime.” She tugged again. “Will, leave the tip.”
“Change, please.” The women raised her plump hand. Will took the coins and stormed out of the restaurant past the pay phone.
“Will,” she said, “wait!” He didn’t. They dropped themselves into the Plymouth. As she shut her door, he slammed his.
“Furthermore, my dear wife, why did you make nice with that nasty woman?” He turned the key in the ignition and stepped on the starter. The engine chugged in the cold.
“Will, she’s scared. She’s got two sons over there. My mother prays with the rosary for an hour every night for Leo. You can’t go. She doesn’t know that.”
He turned sharply to Leslie. “If someone is being horrible to me, don’t take her side. I feel bad enough about watching my best friends join up. I can’t help it if I have a bum leg, and her kids didn’t get polio. It’s none of her business. And she was goddamn rude.”
“Don’t swear!”
Throwing the Plymouth into first gear, he edged forward and pulled slowly onto the road. “I’ve got a little research going on that would take care of that crumby restaurant,” he barked.
She turned to him slowly. “We could have stayed home.” He shifted roughly into second and then third. This trip is such a mess, we should turn around and forget it. She glanced at his scowl; she thought better of repeating.
Neither said more for seemingly endless miles until Will broke the silence. “Look at that sign, Toronto 60 miles; we’re making good time, but I need a washroom.”
Leslie pulled herself out of a slumber. “Will, what am I supposed to talk to them about? The summer before the wedding, I was the maid, cooking and cleaning while your mother fawned over them.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“Well, she did. Even her voice got sweet.”
“Talk about anything.” He reached over to pat her arm. “Talk about the baby, and our plans and moving out from Mom and Dad and looking for an apartment. They’re easy.”
“Really? All I remember is a hot stove and your Uncle Fred throwing drunken insults at his sister. I had to duck when Dorothy threw her ice cubes at him. Investments or something. The two of them were sloshed.” It was not so different from growing up with her father—just better vocabulary.
“They won’t be that way with us.”
She wasn’t convinced. “I’m sick of booze and I’m sick of drunks. Really.”
The car slowed down to forty at the beginnings of a farming community.
Her father, before the war, had been a humiliation. His unemployment had driven him to alcohol; so, her mother had sold corsets in Armstrong’s department store, an enterprise of Will’s great uncle, an irony there somewhere. Mass and communion everyday gave her mother solace.
Will pulled in to the rest stop, stopped the car and then lifted the hood. He was always tinkering.
“I’ll find the washroom.”
“I’ll use the one in the gas station.”
She entered the country tavern beside the station to find the washroom, and maybe, again, a telephone. The facilities were at the far end of a long bar at which sat two afternoon patrons. The men were motionless staring into their half-filled glasses of amber beer, until she passed the one in a stained fedora.
A hand reached out and grabbed at her waist. “Come and have a drink wi’ me,” a slurred voice said. As he tried to pull her more closely, she wrenched herself free of the stink of cigarettes and beer. Leslie picked up her pace, found ladies’ and locked the door to the washroom.
She knew drunks only too well; so, she gave the boor a wide berth as she came out. Will was standing at the end of the bar waving her forward to hurry up. “We want to drive in daylight, Leslie. Let’s go.”
If the drunk grabbed her again, Will’s temper would be ugly. Will beckoned again. The drunk turned to her and winked and then winked again.
She moved quickly away from the bar and took a passage through tables. As she picked up her pace, Will held out his hand to her; the man turned on his seat tipping his fedora. “Ah, Baby, we could get t’know each…”
“God, you’re a creep,” she barked.
Will boomed, “You’re talking to my wife, bud!” As he stepped further into the dank room, Leslie took Will’s offered hand and pulled him out to the cold.
“Just another drunken louse, Will. I’m cold, let’s move.” He was led; the phone call was neglected. “That jerk! Booze! I saw too much of it at home.”
She hated alcohol; memories of home crowded in from before the war. Leslie’s father in a rage, well fuelled with whiskey, had threatened to “beat the shit” out of Will if he ever “got her into trouble,” and tried to back out. “He scared the shit out of me,” Will had so often admitted. Leslie often reminded him, “That’s not why I married you.” He always gave her a peck on that line.
Will’s now-father-in-law had ranted about supporting his daughter for eighteen years, his youngest, just to be ruined by some punk from knob hill so he could take off and do it again to someone else. “He threatened me with your mother’s rolling pin, ‘I’m not feeding yur little bastard with no dad, eh, m’boy?’ He sounded like you were his investment I was going to mess up.”
“My father had investments?” She’d laugh. “That’s your family, Will.” She turned to him. “We were hired by you bunch. You know that.” She witnessed Reona who came every Friday to do Harriet’s ironing, while her own mother sold corsets in Will’s uncle’s store.
“Your dad’s doing better,” Will softened.
“After his bender when Hitler invaded Poland, he was hospitalised. The drunker he got, the more he cursed Chamberlain until he couldn’t pronounce the name. He was so sick, poisoned.”
She had made him promise never to tell the stories of Dad, Billy O’Boyle, to the Armstrongs. But those aunts and before dinner cocktails, and after and flying ice cubes. Just a little apartment, in a faraway town. She sighed quietly to herself.
However, Will had made good. His job in munitions development paid two thousand a year at the National Research Council. Cora, Leslie’s mom, always on his side, felt blessed and grateful that Leslie had a sober husband, and one at home, not on some battlefield in Europe.
After some minutes silence, Leslie had complained, “This trip is jinxed. First Grumpy and now a drunk. What else is it gonna be?” She whispered, “Can’t we just go home?”
“At this point? No.” When she heard that tone, she always retreated.
Will pulled the engine down into second gear with the floor shift as the Plymouth bumped through fresh construction. “This is so backward. You should see the highways they’re building in the States.”
“This trip is so long,” she whined, and then settled. “I should drive for a while.”
“That’s OK.” He glanced at her with a pasted look of fear.
She slapped his arm. “I’m a good driver.”
“Yes, dear.” He nodded. His manhood would maintain his place.
Will braked behind a hay wagon. “Damn things slow us down to five miles an hour.” He peeked out to the oncoming lane and pulled back as a black two-year-old Packard sifted by, the last of the ‘42s. “Hey, Uncle Tim just bought one of those in burgundy. Wow, what a beauty!”
“Visiting your aunts or a new car? It’s a long way for that.” God, how he loves those cars!
Concentrating, Will shifted down to second, roared past the wagon, passed, returned it to third gear, and then drove in silence as Leslie settled into a lulled sleep mesmerised by the tires on the asphalt and the wind against the car.
It had been almost six hours as they cruised down Kingston Road, with Will’s swearing he knew a short cut. It didn’t work out that way for, the streets were narrow and clogged with vehicles. Forest Hill was a long way off.
“Pull over in that gas station. I’m phoning again.”
“Can’t you wait until we get there. They won’t mind. It’s getting late.”
“And leave a dollar on their table? No, Will, that’s so rude. Pull over,” she said in a tone that surprised her.
She directed the operator at the phone while he directed the attendant to the gas pump. The chat with Bruce was short, for it was getting close to his bath time. Harriet was bubbling over with their wonderful day spent with Bruce and her sister Ethel.
“We took him to playground; he loves the swings.” They had been out for hours, the grandmother bragged. Right, no answer earlier.
“Hours on the swings. It’s so cold. Where else?” The silence spoke something unexplained. “And what else did you do, Mrs. Armstrong?” She waited.
At last Harriet answered. “Well, dearie, you know how religious my sister is.”
She didn’t, but she said, “Yes.”
“She thought it was time we visited an old friend of hers.”
“With Bruce?”
“Well, yes, dear.”
“Where to? Who is the friend?
“Oh, dear, an old friend, so Auntie Ethel just wanted to show the baby off. He’s so adorable, you know, and Ethel is so devoted to him. We all are-“
Leslie questioned abruptly, “Who? Where? Why?”
“Now, dearie, we, or Auntie Ethel, thought it was time.”
Leslie’s teeth were starting to grit.
“Who, please, Mrs. Armstrong? I’d like to know.”
Pause.
“To her friend, Reverend Geoffrey Cottrell.”
She gasped. “What? For what?”
“We had him baptised at Wesley United. We thought it was time.”
Ten long seconds passed. Leslie supressed a scream, primal and vicious into the phone.
With measured syllables, she articulated, “You did what? What?”
“Now, don’t be angry, dearie, it was long overdue and Geoffrey was more than happy-“
“Mrs. Armstrong, I’ll have you know that Bruce was baptised some months ago by Father McElligott at the Church of the Assumption.”
The mother-in-law gasped. “And you didn’t tell me or Will’s father or Will?”
“Will was there. We told your husband. Mrs. Armstrong, you don’t speak to me when I come home from mass on Sunday. No, we didn’t feel the need.”
“Oh, I see.”
“And another thing you don’t know, Mrs. Armstrong, is that Will and I are earnestly looking for an apartment for us, Bruce and the new baby that is now on it’s way.” She hung up.
She looked out the window to her husband handing the payment to the attendant. Will, the man she married in a whirl, the man with the stricken leg and the temper, but the balance in her life whom she loved, the man to whom she was still practising to be a wife. Tomorrow, one year past adulthood, she would tell him about the new baby, but not yet. It would be her present to him on November 6 on her twenty-second. It was the only thought that eased the rage out of her breast. She would also tell him they would be moving into anything they could find of their own, even if she had to take in ironing.
As she strode to the car, she felt she had taken a very long step.
They drove on.
His darling aunt and gracious uncle, Dorothy and Tim Borden, had a circular driveway in downtown Toronto, Forest Hill, with limestone columns supporting iron gates at the entrance. “The front yard’s bigger than the playground at Assumption Elementary,” Leslie said as she drove through them. Her voice shook just a little. “You said it was circular,” she added; “it’s not, it’s almost straight.” She’d make that point; for she was determined to be their equal; she was a grown woman now—twenty-two tomorrow.
The dying fall sun was throwing long shadows through the Borden’s grounds, as she imagined after dinner horrors with booze and barking. “At least your dad doesn’t drink. God, I’ve had enough with booze,” she said, “and with chatting on this cold porch.” She chattered, “Will, ring that silly door bell. I’m cold.”
He turned to her. “Sure, but you know we have a couple of party girls here. If my aunts get going, just excuse yourself to bed.” There was a long silence when only the wind spoke through the tall triangles of blue spruce that flanked the portico. “That’s allowed after six hours in a cold car.”
“I was there two summers ago,” she recalled. “Well, family-in-law, love me or not, I’m here.”
“I love you, so they will.” After he pulled her toward him, their kiss lingered. “And that should be enough. Furthermore, Les, Aunt Dorothy always adored me; she has to love you. She’s so sweet, she used to take me riding up north for about-“
“They had horses?” Her shoulders dropped. “Really?” she whined. “Oh, God!”
“C’mon, Tough Stuff, wow them.” He snickered. “Your dad didn’t take you riding?”
“My dad? William Christopher ‘Billy’ O’Boyle? No horses. Maybe a donkey-ride at the exhibition for a nickel before the Crash. After, five cents bought a loaf of day-old bread.”
He stayed quiet.
Two carriage lights blazed symmetrically framing the couple in the arched doorway. For a moment, Leslie marvelled at the dark-stained elegance. Yellow light burst through the diamond, leaded-glass panes in the centre of each of the doors.
Taking a deep breath, Leslie mulled silently about the society aunts, but stopped herself. Let them judge me. Will was rocking from foot to foot.
The little mother was ready. Photos for them were ready in her purse, her ice-breaker. In one of them, the little tyke was swamped in an army cap for the uncles, both World War veterans.
The doors opened.
“Dahlings, dahlings, dahlings, dahlings.” The voices were strong and full, each with accented syllables stressed melodically. Then, “Oh, my nevuew,” a single voice screamed with joy. Will had always joked about their being so mid-Atlantic, without ever having crossed the pond.
A second voice rang from behind, “Oh, Willy baby, bring your handsome self over here. March on the double to your old aunt.” The forty-five-year-old gave a full-throated chortle. “She hasn’t seen you in, oh dahling, it must be over two years at the cottage.” A fast hug. “And then you got that job, oops, started your careerfor that awful Liberal government.” They squeezed again. The “dahlings” poured forth. In the background, Leslie giggled thinking they’d been torpedoed somewhere in the English Channel.
Will cooed, “Oh, big hugs! I’ve missed you both for too long. But this time you get more than just me.”
Will puffed up his chest and in a booming voice announced, “You missed the wedding; so, I now present my wonderful wife, and I say it with zest, she’s better than best. Ta da! Leslie O’Boyle Armstrong.”
The aunts squealed. Dorothy began, “Will, you’ve rehearsed. You’re a star (the r was missing).”
Aunt Bernice opened her arms to Leslie and chirped, “Oh, an O’Boyle. Well, dear, not anymore, you belong to us now.” She squeezed Leslie’s two hands with hers. “We are all Armstrongs, you know.” She placed her diamond-loaded hands onto Leslie’s shoulders and gave each cheek an air kiss.
Not to be upstaged, Dorothy thrust out her hand and shook Leslie’s vigorously. “So, very pleased to see you again, a grown-up married woman.” She took one step closer and spoke softly in her right ear, breathing fresh gin. “Dahling, you’re such a lovely gerrl. But it’s too bad you’re Catholic.”
Leslie pulled up as high as her platforms would allow.
Retreat, stand or advance into her twenty-second year? It was wartime. Without a pause, Leslie gave a beaming smile and announced, “Catholic like my baby, Bruce, and his soon-to-be brother or sister. I am Catholic, dear Aunt Dorothy, as are, and will be, the children.” She leaned forward and gave two sweet air kisses, one on each cheek.
There was a loud whoop from behind. “Oh, my God!”