Jack of Diamonds Read online

  My mom referred to Dolly as ‘a nasty piece of work’, not only because of how she treated us, but also because of what happened when Mac was occasionally in his cups. A harmless drunk, he was nothing like my dad, and yet Dolly McClymont would always beat him up. We’d hear him begging her, his voice gone shrill with fright, ‘Dolly, Dolly, stop! I’ll be good. I promise, I’ll never touch a drop!’ But Dolly lacked a forgiving nature and would abuse him, cursing him as a ‘useless little shit’ and far worse. My mother said she had a mouth like a dock worker. Sometimes we’d hear the twins sobbing when Mac was being beaten up. The following day his face would be a mess – both eyes almost closed and a split lip were pretty normal. That woman was capable of doing as much damage to a face as my dad, but I never got to see her knuckles afterwards.

  Mac McClymont was an upholsterer by trade but I guess not too many people, even among the city’s upper and middle classes, were too fussed about their tatty couches in those hard times, so he only occasionally got work at his trade. No more than five feet tall, he was seldom chosen from the dawn labourer’s line he diligently joined most mornings. But I have to say this for Mac McClymont, he was the only one of the family upstairs who would always smile and say, ‘Hello, young Jack’, if he was on his own. He once gave me a marble he’d found somewhere, a good aggie any boy would be fortunate to own. No one else had one anything like as good as it, and I never put it in danger when we played marbles at school. It became a precious possession.

  Mac would have made a much better husband for my tiny mom, and a much better dad for me. Once, in the winter, when Dolly and the twins went to stay with her sister and Mac was on his own, he must have noticed my mom’s broken and battered snow boots. ‘Mrs Spayd, forgive me for being personal like, but . . . ah, er, me trade is, er . . . I’m an up-upholsterer,’ he stammered.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ my mother said with a smile, not knowing where Mac’s announcement about his trade was leading. Seeing she was friendly and wasn’t going to bite his head off, he immediately lost his stammer. ‘What I meant to say is, will you let me fix yer snow boots? No cost, of course. I’m not a shoemaker but I can darn well repair them boots.’ He took them upstairs, returned two hours later and they were as good as gold. He had a cup of tea with us in the kitchen and we talked. It was nice.

  See what I mean? He was the same size as my mom and they’d have been good together and I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, I’d have been happy to swap my dad for him. But then I suppose Dolly and the twins wouldn’t have agreed to take my drunken father at any price. Even by Cabbagetown’s standards, Harry Spayd stood out among the drunken bums and bastards. But here’s the weird thing: he never came in for much criticism and the men liked him, so their wives left him out of their bitchy gossip, even though he was lucky enough to have a job. It was my mom who had to take it on the chin and silently accept all their abuse, and she’d never harmed a fly.

  I’d like to be able to say that I looked up to my dad despite everything, and that we’d shared some kind of father-and-son relationship, even a half-assed one. But that would be a lie. The only role he played was, like I said, to keep my mom and me in a state of constant terror.

  I remember four things in particular about my father.

  First, of course, was his drinking. In the summer we’d wake to an atmosphere that smelled like a brewery, even long after he had gone to work; in winter, the freezing interior would somewhat deaden the beer fumes.

  Second was his size. He was six-foot-four and weighed 290 pounds. He’d brag about one day reaching the 300 pound mark.

  Third was his quick temper, usually as a result of drink, but not always. It could flare up out of nowhere; the smallest detail could send him into a fit of rage, often as not resulting in a backhander for my mother and sometimes, if I was foolish enough to try to protect her, for me. His hand was the size of a small dinner plate and his knuckles would make a mess of a face with one blow, like I said.

  Finally, there were his loud rasping snores, which came through the wall into our bedroom from the tiny room where he slept alone, and presumably clearly carried through the ceiling to the McClymonts upstairs. Fortunately, in the snoring stakes, the two families pretty well cancelled each other out. Dolly McClymont had a fairly severe snoring problem herself and must have looked like a beached whale in bed. The nights were never silent and I reckon as a kid I could have slept through an earthquake.

  My dad beat up my mom so often that my memory blurs just thinking about it, but there were two events of sheer bastardry that stand out from the many violent outbursts that resulted from his drinking. The first occurred on a winter’s night during a particularly severe January snowstorm. The streetcar was delayed forty-five minutes and then my mom, as usual, walked the last stop to save on the fare, struggling through the snow. She arrived home over an hour late, so that my pail of salty, pissy, peppery chilblain water was pretty much cold. I had to begin my routine all over, but I managed a small piss while she turned her back.

  She was barely seated with her steaming King George mug of tea warming her hands when my father arrived home, drunk and snorting from the cold outside. Kicking snow from his boots, he tossed his heavy council work coat, gloves, cap and scarf on the kitchen floor and demanded a mug of tea. I poured him one from the pot, black and heavily sugared.

  ‘What’s this, boy?’ he demanded, swaying slightly as he took the cup and raised it to eye level.

  ‘Your tea, Dad.’

  ‘Tea? I don’t mean the fucking tea!’ He stabbed a finger at the mug. ‘The queen? Where’s the king? A man drinks out of the king’s cup.’

  ‘Mom’s got the King George,’ I replied.

  ‘“Mom’s got the King George”,’ he mimicked, then added, ‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘She always has it,’ I blurted out stupidly.

  ‘That so, is it? Well, now . . .’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry!’ my mother interjected. ‘Here, I’ve barely touched it.’ Still sitting with her feet in the pail, she reached up and proffered the King George mug to my father, who accepted it but kept hold of the Queen Mary mug.

  ‘Barely touched it, have you? Shouldn’t have touched it at all!’ His voice rose as he indicated the mug I’d given him. ‘This is your mug, woman!’ he shouted. ‘That is mine!’ He nodded at the King George. Then he upturned it over my mother’s head and stood swaying as he attempted to pour the tea in the Queen Mary into the empty King George.

  My mom leapt up screaming, the almost scalding tea running down her face and neck. Some of the water from the pail spilled onto the kitchen floor as she stepped out of the pail, her dark eyes blazing and her voice a furious snarl I’d never heard before. ‘You bastard! You drunken bastard!’ she yelled. Then she picked up the pail and hurled the hot, salty, pepper-and-piss-infused water at his face and chest. He let out a howl and dropped both mugs, clutching at his eyes as he sank to his knees. My mother banged the upturned pail over his head and hands. ‘Bastard!’ she screamed again.

  My dad, sobbing and moaning that he was blinded, managed to shake the pail off his head, but he remained on his knees with his hands covering his eyes while we cleaned up around him. Surprisingly, only the Queen Mary mug had smashed. As I picked up the pieces of broken mug, I thought, I wonder whether the King George mug didn’t break because it had ‘God Save the King’ on it. The Queen Mary had no such request for God’s protection inscribed around her bottom.

  My mother’s thick flowing hair had carried most of the hot tea away from her face, and apart from a pink scald on her left cheek she didn’t seem to be too injured. Finally, Mom was sufficiently calm to attend to my dad, who was weeping uncontrollably. I found out years later that cayenne in the eye causes severe pain, conjunctivitis and something called blepharospasm – contraction of the eyelids – as well as floods of tears. Of course, neither my mom nor I knew that at the time, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if we had; she w
as mad as hell and would still have thrown the pail into his face.

  Anyhow, my old man was howling like a baby, still kneeling on the kitchen floor with his hands pressed over his eyelids. My mom told me to fetch a rag and a bowl of cold water, and tried to mop his eyes, but he screamed each time she attempted to touch them. We wrestled him out of his wet clothing, and when he was stripped down to his underpants, we took an elbow each and escorted him into the bathroom, his great hairy beer belly wobbling from his agonised sobbing. My mom got him into the bath and poured fresh water over his head, easing his hands away so she could wash his reddened eyes thoroughly.

  At last we helped him into his red flannel nightshirt and led him into his bedroom. I slept okay but my mom said she could hear him howling through the wall and didn’t get a wink of sleep all night.

  He lay in his bed for three days moaning and groaning, while my mother bathed his eyes in boracic acid eyewash, fed him and took him to the toilet.

  I couldn’t help wondering what Dolly McClymont and the twins made of my dad’s three-day bout of screaming, sobbing and moaning. They couldn’t possibly have entertained the notion that my tiny mother had turned the tables on him and had become a fire-breathing dragon.

  I’d watch my mom caring for him, gently swabbing his half-closed eyes, which looked like fiery red marbles stuck in flaming eye sockets, and silently hope that my personal contribution – the piss – added to his pain. I’d also ponder why she didn’t take the best chance she’d ever had to do some real damage. He was as helpless as Cyclops, who I’d read about in one of my library books. Children don’t think much about consequences and I reasoned that if he couldn’t see her, he couldn’t harm us. Unfortunately, by the fourth day he managed to regain some sight, sufficient to return to his work at the council and, of course, to the tavern. But his eyes were real bad for a long time afterwards and though I don’t know if he got blepharospasm, he now had a permanent pop-eyed look that made him even uglier. ‘Lucky you don’t need good eyes to collect garbage pails,’ my mom said with a small smile, ‘or good looks.’

  Drunken bashings inevitably followed, although it was three months before he backhanded my mom again. We never found another Queen Mary mug, and the pail incident was simply never mentioned again. When he gave me his angry, eye-popping glare and I didn’t know what was coming next, I’d remind myself that I’d once virtually pissed in his eye, and take some comfort and courage from that.

  Winters always seemed endless, but eventually summer would arrive, with the long summer vacation stretching through July and August. During term, half the class would play truant, girls staying home to mind younger children, boys on the streets learning a different set of lessons from classroom stuff, which was rarely valued. In winter it was the opposite: the classrooms were warmed by hissing hydronic radiators, which were almost too hot to touch. School was packed to the rafters, the girls bringing their preschool brothers and sisters with them to get them away from the bitterly cold cottages. The school principal, Mr Stott, always sent letters home saying babies and little kids were not to be brought to school, but none of the families took any notice. You can’t let a toddler freeze, and so the teachers had to give in. Of all the vicissitudes we endured as children, the one we shared with the rest of Toronto was the bitter winter weather. I can’t ever recall being totally warm except in a classroom.

  The only advantage of winter was that there were fewer fights. Fighting meant partially stripping, and staying warm in the freezing playground was everyone’s first priority. My mom would bring newspapers back from the offices she cleaned and mould a thick layer against my skin under my shirt, jersey and overlarge overcoat from Mrs Sopworth at the Presbyterian Clothing Depot. All the kids did the same in winter and some of us looked like the Michelin man. As soon as warmer weather arrived we reverted to looking as scrawny and malnourished as we really were. With babies and small kids squalling and screaming and generally carrying on in class, there was very little effective learning in the winter months.

  The children in our part of town were divided into various categories, mean-spirited and tough at the top, weak or compliant at the bottom, with most somewhere in between. If the attitudes and expectations adopted in childhood carry over into adulthood, then, generally speaking, the kids from Cabbagetown were unlikely to live lives filled with much success or happiness.

  That I should fall through the cracks of my childhood world was a matter of sheer luck. I was by nature a loner, but at school I mostly managed to conceal my true feelings with the appearance of an easygoing attitude. I was quick with a quip and I used my wit to make the other kids laugh. Strangely enough, I have my father to thank for a piece of good advice that helped me in the playground: ‘Son, don’t back down from the big guy; fight him and even if yer lose yer’ll gain respect. He won’t pick on you again and neither will anyone else.’

  Fights were how the pecking order was established in the schoolyard, and, in schoolboy terms, they were what decided the future. The toughest guy in my age group was Jack Reading, and he was an inch or two bigger than me. He was virtually obliged to challenge me to a fight, and when he did, I accepted, and though I took a beating, I inflicted a fair bit of damage of my own. He was the one who eventually walked away. ‘That’s enough,’ he growled, unaware that I had just about fought to a standstill. I stood there bleeding from the nose, my lip split and my left eye closing fast, feeling as if Jack Reading had near beaten me to death, but as I looked around at the guys who’d gathered in a circle to watch the fight, I mustered a grin and called out, ‘Hey, Jack, come back! You forgot to close the other eye!’ This got a big laugh and did a whole lot for my reputation, and I realised then that using humour is generally more effective than using your fists. Although Jack Reading had clearly won, the fight was declared ‘evens’, an honourable draw. So, I gained the respect I needed to help conceal the fact that I was different and a loner. I knew that isolation or solitude was the single most dangerous situation in which a slum kid could find himself.

  Nobody could get away with showing that they really liked learning. Anyone stupid enough to hold up his hand in class in response to a teacher’s question would earn the scorn of his peers. It would certainly have blown my disguise to smithereens had I let on how much I loved learning, and I wasn’t that foolish. Answering questions in class was left to one or two of the bolder, brighter girls. But I had a secret life in books. Remember, my mom left for work at four o’clock in the afternoon and so I had the whole late afternoon and evening alone at home in which to read.

  I’d borrow books from the Boys and Girls House, which I’d joined at age six with the help of a teacher, Miss Mony. Her name was Shanine, and she was very beautiful and always nice to me. One afternoon after school, she took me on the streetcar to where they had a library that, like its name said, was just for boys and girls. We were permitted to take out two books twice a week.

  For the next two years, Miss Mony would take me to the library twice a week on her way home, we’d discuss the books I’d read and she’d give me verbal tests that helped me a lot. I’d get off at the Boys and Girls House streetcar stop, and she’d give me my return fare to the east side and continue on to where she lived. I’d get my two books, jump on a returning streetcar and be home by five, an hour after my mom had left for her work. She would leave my dinner for me: sandwiches in the summer and, when she’d managed to get a bone from the butcher, soup in the winter, which she’d keep warm in our old thermos flask.

  On days when Miss Mony and I didn’t go to the library, she’d give me my hot evening meal soon after I got back from school. So on weekdays I’d only see my mom for half an hour over breakfast and then for half an hour over dinner on non-library days; my only real chance for us to have a proper chat was when she came home at ten o’clock each night.

  In the summer in which I would turn eight, Miss Mony left our school to get married and moved to Vancouver. Because the weather was fine, I could walk to
the library, but it took a long time and I’d get there in the last half hour before it shut. By the time I got home, my mom was long gone. Nobody knew I’d become an avid reader except the departed Miss Mony and my mom, who could barely read herself and loved it when I read to her. We would share books at night just before we both fell asleep and at weekends, when we had more time. It didn’t seem to matter that they were kids’ books, although just before Miss Mony left, I was reading books for children aged up to twelve. My mom had never had anyone read to her, not even, she said, at school. It was like she was doing her life backwards. Sometimes she’d clasp one of my library books to her chest, close her eyes and say, ‘I wish, I wish.’

  But with Miss Mony now gone, I didn’t know what I was going to do when winter came and it snowed. I didn’t think I’d be able to make it to the library before it shut. Winter loomed even bleaker than usual, and I puzzled over how I could avert this impending disaster. How do you spend the evenings alone at home if you can’t read? Especially after you’ve been accustomed to reading four books a week. I couldn’t listen to the radio, like people did later. Radio was just becoming popular, but only very rich people had one in their homes and no kid I knew had ever seen a radio. I doubt there was a single radio in all of Cabbagetown during the whole of the 1930s.

  ‘Them upstairs’ had an old wind-up gramophone and the records were all old songs that sounded as if the singer sang them from the bottom of a deep well. Sometimes the needle would get stuck in the worn groove and keep repeating a single line until somebody came and lifted it. But I didn’t mind; it was the only nice thing coming through the ceiling. I memorised all the songs, even the places where the voice got stuck. But they didn’t play the gramophone a whole lot, so books were usually my only companions at night. While there was a fair bit of summer left, I couldn’t help worrying about the winter to come. At night when I said my prayers, I asked God not to let it snow on library days.