MY FINAL ARTICLES FOR THE CANADIAN REGISTER included a long nostalgic review of my years at St. Joseph's College School at Bay and Wellesley Streets in Toronto. When I left there in 1954 as a member of the 100th graduating class, I was the last girl ever to attend "St. Joe's" through all elementary and high school grades. I had a lot of memories to share, managed to get a site plan, and Bill assigned me a full page.
Because St. Joe's had been my second home, I wrote to either the Mother Superior or the Principal at the time of its closing, asking for some memento of it. She sent back a small oval shadow box containing a carved alabaster copy of Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola. That left me speechless, because Babcia had brought as a wedding gift a family treasure, an oil painting on copper of the same subject, the same size, in a thick, ancient wooden frame with traces of gilt and lots of tiny worm holes. Those two pieces began the only serious collection I've ever assembled. Thirty-two Madonnas in materials ranging from petit point to carved ivory are displayed in my apartment.
Another of my final articles was about The Little Brothers of the Poor.* One of Fr. Hanley's countless contacts had passed the word that this order of laymen, founded in Paris in 1946, was setting up shop in Montreal and had caught the attention of Mme Georges Vanier, wife of Canada's Governor-General. Bill's headline explains their work -- A CHAMPAGNE APOSTOLATE: Luxury and love for the poor.
Mme Vanier was popular across the country, a loving mother to all Canadians. After we published that item about one of her favourite causes, I sent her a clipping of it and of my last piece about one of mine: The Catholic children at Sunnyside. In it I detailed all the rejections** of the girl who went to Confession with me on an unforgettable Saturday. Bill headed it "The Lonely Wayfarer". Mme Vanier sent me a (typed) thank-you note, adding that the Sunnyside story was "an eye-opener to me and I will not forget, when the opportunity arises, to mention the problems you write about."
In those days, when housing was discussed in my age group it was common knowledge that one should "buy in Toronto, rent in Montreal". The latter copied the European model of well-built and affordable rentals or co-operatives big enough for people to live out their lives with children. And there were green spaces everywhere. Most Montreal landlords were private individuals and not greedy. As in Europe, owning residential buildings was a business like any other, with rents covering the costs and providing modest, steady incomes.
Charlie and I were advised to look for an apartment first on Montreal's Ridgewood Ave., a long, dead-end street snaking up the east side of Westmount Summit. After Hans Black, a pre-WWII immigrant from Germany, showed us a few units in each of three buildings he owned halfway up, we chose a one-bedroom for $125 a month. We signed the lease in his office in the smallest bedroom of his own apartment in a building across the street from "ours".
In May we'd had $500 in savings. In August there was just enough left to buy food until Charlie's first pay cheque. But someone forgot to put him on the payroll.
He phoned from the newsroom to say, as casually as he could, that he felt like walking home on such a lovely day. I'm a slow thinker but after he'd said a bit more I finally grasped that he had no money. Journalists live on gossip and he could not let the ones he'd be working with know we were flat broke. We would never live that down!
Condiments were all I had in the kitchen at that moment, so while Charlie walked I invented Plan B. I called a friend who lived near us, asked her to lend us $30 for two weeks' groceries, and walked to her house to fetch it. Two weeks later we were able to carry out Plan A: We opened a bank account with the (double) pay cheque, withdrew enough cash to function, and celebrated his new job with lunch in the Queen Elizabeth.
Then we delivered an envelope containing $30 to Sonja with some French cheese from Dionne's, everyone's favourite specialty food shop on St. Catherine St. I thought it was very classy of her not to look into the envelope, merely to lay it on a hall table and invite us out to the garden for coffee and to talk about Montreal. The day ended with grocery shopping.
After unpacking our few possessions -- a graceful carved oak double bed from a used furniture store in Kingston, a bookcase and chesterfield he had taken from his family's house when it was sold, the steamer trunk I used in Switzerland (now a plant table in my living room) -- we listed basic items we still needed. Within a couple of weeks, we had them all.
In those days, most newly-weds' had wooden orange crates, free from supermarkets, to use as tables, book cases, organizers for stuff in kitchens and baths. Because leases forbade drilling into walls or ceilings, paper lanterns from Chinatown were stuck to ceilings wherever a light was needed, with 15- or 40-watt light bulbs inside, connected to electric wall outlets. Shelves of any width or height were made of bricks bought by the piece and 1-inch X 6-inch boards cut to different lengths at Pascal's Hardware.
Neither of us liked a trend for lamps, vases, even footstools, made of tin cans of various sizes glued together and either left shiny or covered with fabric.
With the tough and versatile Singer Spartan sewing machine I bought in Kingston to make summer dresses, I sewed drapes for the bedroom and living room with fabrics and notions from a five-and-dime store. In those days one didn't decorate with money but with personal tastes, especially in colours, and lots of creativity.
Our bedtime was 8 p.m. because Charlie had to be at work downtown before 5 a.m. We were two brilliant journalists, but neither of us had thought to check if public transit ran that early. It did not.
Even Montreal slept seven nights a week in 1962. At least most of it did. A club district along St. Antoine St., far downhill from the core, apparently never slept but we didn't go near it. That's a pity because a musical revolution led by jazz genius Oscar Peterson was in full swing there.
Canada had no overnight broadcasting then. However, CFCF Radio ("Canada's First, Canada's Finest", licensed in 1920), did have one overnight staffer looking after its teletype machines, and ready to answer the phone if it rang. Because it never did, Marcel offered to drive from the station to pick up Charlie at 4:30, and have both of them at CFCF by 4:45. (He doubled the speed limit but police knew him and his Fiat, and there was no other traffic on Cote des Neiges Rd. at that hour.)
Marcel was a very charming, very funny, very large French-Canadian who was delighted to educate a newcomer from Ontario about Montreal and French Canada in general. The overnight shift suited him perfectly. He wanted it forever. With a girlfriend who was a waitress on the South Shore he owned an acre of dense woodland there, with a small house they had designed and had almost finished building themselves.
When they had us to dinner, he and Charlie expanded on their conversations in the Fiat while Jocelyne and I pottered about but listened. Both men were self-taught high school dropouts but avid readers, especially of history. They were delighted to be able to compare Canada's story as it was taught in the two official languages, in the two provinces, with different "facts" and emphases.
Our apartment was on the fourth, the top floor, so that no one would make noise overhead after our 8 p.m. bedtime. On the other hand, we owed it to neighbours below us to be quiet after we got up. Since the sounds of typing or vacuuming are carried by structures, I settled for doing stretching exercises or reading, but as the weather grew colder I began baking, not just bread but pastries which got fancier as time passed.
After that penniless day when Charlie had to walk home, he kept on doing it because he enjoyed it: Straight up Peel St. and into Mount Royal Park, westward along the riding trail, up stairs in front of the Chalet, past it to the toboggan hill and Beaver Lake, over to Camillien-Houde Blvd., down to Cote des Neiges Rd., north along it and finally up Ridgewood. He burned all the calories I baked, and then some. He had never been healthier in his life.
I had plenty to do in those mornings. Mother St. Mary Assumpta of the Congregation of Notre Dame, president of Marianopolis College, whom I'd met in Kingston, called me soon after we arrived. As a result I, um, volunteered to write a 25th anniversary booklet for St. Kevin's Church, actually the parish we had moved into.***
Next, she gave my name to Father Leonard Crowley, recently appointed by Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger to serve the English-speaking community. He invited me to help launch a monthly tabloid to be produced by volunteers during its first two years. He already had enlisted Leo MacGillivray, an editor at The Gazette, who would find a managing editor. Would I be "the writer" of that paper? Of course I would. It took us almost a year to spool up The Challenge but then it turned out to be one of the great adventures of my life.
We enjoyed every day and they kept getting better.
*Now called Little Brothers of the Poor -- Friends of the Elderly, this NGO is active in nine countries in Europe and North America. It boosts the morale of underprivileged people by providing modest but loving gifts such as roses on birthdays and cakes on special occasions.
**Foster parents returned her to Catholic Children's Aid Society because "they were going on vacation", or "she cried", or "she wanted too much attention".
***This was a major learning experience about how a Roman Catholic parish comes into being. Canon Law spells it out: Lay people who want a local parish have to lobby and persuade the area's bishop and then raise all the money to buy land and build. (You will always find rich people in the early history of a parish.) A church may open for social events as soon as construction is completed, but no religious rite can be performed in it until there is no debt whatsoever and it has been "canonically erected". Then the pastor and parishioners begin adding non-essentials such as a steeple, stained glass windows, statues, musical instruments, etc. Cathedrals take a few hundred years to be trimmed and even a small rural church may require decades. Female and male communities of Religious are bound by similar rules, and all have to do something profitable to support themselves. One or more units of the institution may go bankrupt or be sued, but never the whole Roman Catholic Church. The Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada have both suffered in recent years because their legal forms are nation-wide. The RCs were wise enough to appreciate the wisdom of Judaism, which is a couple of thousand years older: every synagogue is a separate legal entity.
CHAPTER 26 of GLIMPSES -- 30