The Age of Cities (9 page)

Alberta had already seen this outpouring of provincial pride, or was not interested. Abandoning her traffic cop routine as they passed through, she was thinking aloud, casting herself as a career girl in a fantasy of city dwelling. “I wonder if I could get a job here, become an elevator lady. You think they'd hire me, or am I already too much of a relic?” she asked.

Winston surged with affection and took his mother by the arm. “Too old? You? I'm sure they'd take you on. You're a natural. You could offer perfume samples too. Tell the women they are incomplete unless they purchase the secret weapon now in your possession and available to them for mere pennies. You'd be a manager in no time.” His tone was jocular even though he was sincere.

“You think? It'd be an adventure, at least a part-time one.” She was swinging her purse as they came to the end of the corridor.

“Here we are,” Alberta said at the heavy cedar doors, carved, Winston saw, with scenes borrowed from the glass ceiling. He thought to ask whether the department store had entered and won a competition during centennial. Alberta strode toward the hostess, a pale unsmiling matron with tight swirls of black braided hair. The woman turned to indicate a table by the window that was being set for them by a pair of girls wearing lacy white aprons over top stiff aqua pinafores.

“Stern Mrs. Danvers over there says we'll have our panoramic view in two minutes,” she reported with an elated grin.

She took a few steps past the hostess's post, absorbed by the watery expanse just beyond the window. Winston studied the room, his attention first drawn to the lit tapers in trident candelabras sitting at opposite ends of the skirted banquet table. Barely visible, their light served no purpose in such a bright room except decoration, he decided. Between them lay the platters of elaborate food—rolled, wrapped, knotted, stuffed, or else spiked with toothpicks—that formed the room's centrepiece. Outside that inner circle sat jellied salads, coleslaw, smoked salmon, devilled eggs, celery stalks, rolls and biscuits, olives, pickles, condiments. At the far end: a deep metal tray heated with a kerosene flame that he guessed held scalloped potatoes and a layered chicken casserole. A smaller circular table promised them puddings, pies, and cakes garlanded with pastel icing.

Except for the chef carving bite-sized slivers of ham, turkey, and roast beef, Winston was the only man present. He saw that all the women had dressed up, some not removing their gloves until their orders had been taken. The bare arms and exposed backs, though, was a Marine Room fashion he could predict would not be catching on in the Bend. Farmers and loggers might admire that sort of thing in burlesque dancers they'd sneak out to gawk at across the river in Clear Brook, but never on their wives—who were expected to churn out the children while remaining as prim as nuns.

The hostess walked to the table and placed menus at each of their settings. There would be a waitress to serve them presently, she explained.

“She's seen this all hundreds of times before,” Alberta said once the woman had returned to her station.

Winston smiled, sure that if the window could open, his mother's head would be stuck out of it, catching the rush of sea air.

“It's strange to think one could get tired of something so spectacular.”

“Well, Mother, even you change teas from season to season.” Winston was staring outside, focused on nothing in particular, wondering if sailors ever suffered from a marine sort of snow blindness.

“That's different,” she replied.

They pored over the menu for a moment before deciding on the buffet.

In the spirit of fun, Alberta ordered a Jolly Fishwife. Winston read that it contained rum, grenadine, and pineapple juice, but imagined that an actual fishwife—an improbable mythical creature like a farmer's daughter, he thought, the butt of jokes men tell in beer parlours after they've had a few—was likely to drink straight from the bottle. Who could blame her? He told the waitress—younger and fairer than the hostess yet no less frosty—that he would be satisfied with water alone. She pointed to the plates available next to the chef.

“Heavenly days,” Alberta exclaimed at the banquet table. “What a selection.” She chose samples of everything, and even questioned the chef about turkey stuffing that was nowhere to be seen. She spoke her mind: “You can't have one without the other. I'd like a smidgen if you can dig some up.” Winston's choices were fastidious: no olives, nothing with mayonnaise in it, no salmon.

Throughout the meal, their conversation was the usual merging of flows and eddies. They imagined the view as it was now and as it might have been in Alberta's Age of the Dinosaurs. With a smirk, Alberta added “doctor” to her list of career possibilities after Winston told her about the specialist's timid brand of diagnosis. Winston presented his mother with a short list of possible activities for the remainder of the day, but she waved aside the list and said she would like to walk through a park planted head to toe with flowers. The so-called park in the Bend was a memorial for the Great War circled by overgrown and unkempt greenery.

Over the years, Alberta had sent numerous letters to the city council about it—polite ones filled with practical and thrifty suggestions at first, then a wheedling pair, and finally a terse note whose lines veered toward vitriol. Aged and infirm veterans sat there gathering wool and speaking of
fighting the good fight
amongst themselves and to passersby, while younger layabouts and their rough-mannered girls smoked cigarettes and treated them with a palpable contempt tempered with false civility. A patch of dusty, butt-strewn petunias looking parched and dissipated in summer was as florid as it ever got.

They decided on a huge blossomy rectangle of a park in the city's southern reaches, agreeing it would likely be nearly overrun with flowering Dutch bulbs. Winston guessed that its splendor might reawaken his mother's reformist spirit and produce a fresh batch of splenetic letters.

Winston looked at his mother and felt happy that she was taking such pleasure with the day. Alberta's routine was so entwined with his and she'd been Mother for so long that he overlooked that she might have ambitions other than household cleanliness, gardening, and making them meals three times a day. A career, unlikely as that was, could be one of them. Why not move to the city and become an elevator woman at the Hudson's Bay Company? She might even marry. Who could say? His inviting her along had turned out to be a benefit for them both.

They finished with coffee—served in bone china, no less—and samplings from the dessert table. Winston told his mother that the Marine Room custard was nowhere close to hers. Looking forward to taking him through the highlights of the department store and getting across the city to view flowering trees and beds of blossoms, Alberta recommended they pick up the pace. Winston waved to their waitress.

As they stood and readied themselves for the afternoon, Alberta said, “Alright then, sir, let me show you around.” She resumed her policing act, white gloves beckoning him now toward the elevator. He smiled, thinking how infectious her enthusiasm had become.

 

 

On the main floor at long last, Alberta and Winston planned their route to Queen Elizabeth Park from downtown. Winston agreed to their taking a bus, and refrained from suggesting an easy and quick taxicab.

“Before we move another muscle, though, I'm off to the Ladies' Room.” Alberta handed her two shopping bags to her son.

“I'll wait right here,” he said.

He was testing his eyesight—one eye squeezed shut, the other discerning shapes on the distant banks of shoes—when a voice interrupted him: “Excuse me, sir, we're running a special offer in the Men's Department. Today only!”

The voice was unmistakable. Winston turned and said, “Well, hello, Dickie. What a surprise. You're walking around the store advertising your department?” In a grey suit and somber striped tie, hair combed and parted neatly on the right, Dickie was the picture of an up and coming store clerk.

“No, you dizzy thing, that was for your ears only. I'm running an errand for Management, in fact.” He raised his brow and tilted his head to indicate some documents in his hand. As always, his tone implied that there was trouble lurking below the calm surface: classified information, for instance, that could fall into the wrong hands.

Department store secrets, Winston thought, imagining spies from Woodward's infiltrating unlit rooms in the dead of night, flashlights in hand, sussing out enemy plans secured within filing cabinets. It seemed ludicrous, but who knew? Even he had been transfixed by the Rosenberg case—not least because the pair looked so innocuous. Their double-dealings remained a mainstay of conversation at work and at home for months. A lament had been uttered by practically everyone: If you couldn't trust your neighbours, then what was left to believe in?

The War and the tensions that had risen since then had made folks suspicious, Alberta complained now and then. “It's hardly necessary. I mean, why in God's name would any enemy power be interested in a sleepy valley in Canada?” she'd asked him one afternoon. Having gotten caught in a tangle of conversation—the proposed setting up of sentinels at the bridge and western exit of the city to alert citizens about the arrival of Soviets was a topic that had town lips flapping—at the Post Office, she was exasperated and in need of a kindred spirit. “Unless there's a strategic importance to strawberries and lumber the government hasn't told us about. Maybe they can make rocket fuel out of them.” The idea was so risible they'd both laughed and coughed up their tea. While they had poked fun at the possibility of local clandestine lives and cloak-and-dagger goings-on, they could not help holding a few newborn reservations, or think of truths disguised by appearances: who could say?

Dickie took a step closer to Winston and glanced around before explaining, “You see, I'm hoping to move up the ladder. Before long I'm going to have a secretary who will take dictation. Just a matter of patience and timing, that's what Johnny says. Then I'll be heading out for three-martini lunches at the Empire Club. Just you wait and see.”

As before, Winston felt himself at a loss for words. He drew back from Dickie and remained silent.

Dickie continued: “And you? You just happened to take a vacation from Mudville and happened to be shopping at the Hudson's Bay, I suppose. It tickles me that you wanted to stop by here. What a friendly gesture.”

Winston had not forgotten about Dickie's love affair with himself. “It's a surprise running into you, but in fact we are shopping here. Mother and I. We ate lunch in the Marine Room and have been touring the floors. That's why I'm here.”

“The salt of the earth mother? Here? I'm seeing something primordial.” Dickie surveyed the vicinity like an African safari hunter who is anticipating some ghastly creature slithering toward unsuspecting innocents. Dickie's feverish imagining was funny, but Winston realized he drew blanks when he tried to guess what such a thing would look like.

After no more than a beat, Dickie exclaimed: “I simply must run, though, gotta grab the brass ring. ‘Those who hesitate are lost' and all that gung-ho management bunkum. Say, we are grabbing a bite tonight in Chinatown at the Bamboo Terrace. It's our haunt
du jour
. The chicken chow mein's divine and the mezzanine's better yet. We'll probably head over to the ol' Port-Land for a glass or three afterward. Say about seven give or take fifteen minutes. Care to partake?” He adjusted his tie's perfect knot.

“Thank you, Dickie. I'll keep that in mind.”

“Ta-ta,” Dickie said before moving onward to Management at a motivated pace. Dickie looked back. Winston waved in reply to the smile of his acquaintance.

Alberta returned just as Winston resumed his eye self-examination. “Who was that clerk talking to you?” she asked. “I figured he was selling something so I watched his pitch from over there.” She thumbed over her right shoulder.

“No, I don't think he was selling me anything, Mother. Remember when I told you about the odd fellow I met last time I was in the city? The one who took me to a seedy beer parlour? That was him. Dickie.”

“I see. I was thinking I'd not likely buy something from him. A bit of a flaky pastry, looked like to me. Shifty.” Alberta's mistrust of salesmen was boundless.

“The jury's still out about him as far as I'm concerned,” Winston said, and quickly added: “But we really ought to get a move on, Mother. We don't want to be viewing flowers in the twilight.” He'd prefer to guard Dickie from Alberta's feline curiosity.

“Southward ho, then. You mind carrying the bags still?” She strode toward the exit.

On the bustling streets outside the department store block, they walked toward the bus stop. A pretty girl at the perfume counter had sketched them a map after Alberta purchased a delicate ampoule of Empress Jean from her. Winston thought they'd need to refer to it often, so his mother kept it clutched in her hand. Before passing the city's first jail and courthouse—the imposing planes of grey stone evidently fertile ground for moss patches and streaks of slime—they paused at a rectangular cinder block pile set atop plywood on an adjacent lawn. Jade green letters on unpainted wood explained the crude shed:

Junior Chamber of Commerce

Cement Fallout Shelter

The sign on its roof inspired Winston's vision of cheerful high school Honour Roll students banding together to build protection from atomic bomb fallout with the same pep they might muster for decorating a themed holiday social or graduation dance.

Alberta frowned and said, “Doesn't look like it would withstand a strong gust of wind,” then strode toward the door-less entrance.

“I suppose it would be underground, Mother, not just sitting there on somebody's front lawn,” Winston replied.