The Gift of Women (10 page)

“But why does he leave it here?” I ask.

“Who's he?”

“The gardener.”

“Have you been watching one of the labourers… Have you some arrangement attached to this spade?”

The wood on the grip has a leathery glaze from the hands that use it.

“Sister Felicitas, would I ask
you
why the gardener leaves it here, if
I
had anything to do with him?”

I pose the point, logically, like the nuns teach us to. I get no answer.

“Should it not be away in the tool shed – out of the weather?” I wallow in saying weather, the Irish way, meaning rain.

“I caught sight of him,” I say, choosing my words. “He wears leggings made out of old sacks, tied round his shins.” Like a poor man's puttees, I think, but don't say.

“You are…if I remember rightly…a Waterston?”

All St. Ursa's girls are addressed by surnames, but I'm stumped at once by her “a,” which puts me in my place through the Waterston collective.

“You know fine well I am, Sister Felicitas.”

“And sent back.”

I think Sister Felicitas refers to placement, my being put back a year into Fifth Form when I came from Mississauga to St. Ursa's in Ireland.

“What's your meaning, Sister?”

“Sent back to your old home,” Sister Felicitas frowns. “The Waterstons are not supposed to touch anything to do with the property. Keep in touch, and your family has, but the property is to be left alone. Everything in the garden has its place, and it's not for you to choose where they go any more. How did you happen to see this…gardener?”

I point up to the window that looks down from our attic dorm.

“From our room.”

“Then, you must be moved. We can't have our girls watching young men going about their work. Especially, a Waterston.”

Once again, my curse of being a Waterston in the town of Waterston, in what was Waterston Hall. As bad as being the head teacher's daughter. Extra severity seeps into the Sisters' voices when they mention any deficit in my studies or appearance. Like some form of fat, I feel debilitated by Waterston money. My father did tell me to dig into my schoolwork, not our history. But said as if Dad insinuated I should.

In bed I often do a rewind mind-run on the toboggan down the slope from the back of our Mississauga house to the Credit River. In Mississauga, Ontario, I fill the slope with school friends to crowd out whatever my father, grandmother and great-grandmother stare at there, on the slope from our house down to the Credit River.

I have had this luxury of Waterston women to advise and the family business to prepare me. Rosheen Waterston, my great-grandmother, filed the first records and searched for guests at the Toronto hub. The Waterstons have always run Lineage Hotels, which operate not unlike the Mormon Center in Salt Lake City with its worldwide family information and database. This feature keeps Waterston Hotels running as continuous conference and research centres. But my father still speaks to my grandmothers and my mother about me as if I'm not there – even before I'm not there.

“Can she bear to be on her own with only memories of us to keep her company?”

“Memories are a man's distraction, but woman's daily bread. In any case, it's our trade,” my grandmother harrumphs at him, and my mother won't even look up at my father from the chair where she sits, reading
Chatelaine
.

I quote her. “She abhors his absurd mix of sentimentality and trepidation at his decision to return his daughter to the fold, but then she only married into the Waterstons.”

They gather in the kitchen, like it's their debating chamber. Kessie, the cook, uses a wooden spoon, a pot or a pan like a gavel when discussion gets in the way of their eating or her cooking.

They settle my switching schools over a seafood sauce and pasta-draining session. “The Grey Nuns will take care of her.”

“The Grey Nuns?” I ask.

“Charity begins at home, in our case, our old home,” I am informed.

I learn Waterston Hall was a gift to the Grey Nuns in Ireland, and Waterston Hall is now St. Ursa's School, where the nuns shall pass the benefit of their wisdom and instruction on to me. Amen.

“Okay, I agree to a good Catholic education, and to live without a friend in the world.” Neither relieved nor pleased, they peer at me like I am one of Kessie's pots and colanders she has struck with her wooden spoon.

In Mississauga I would be going into Grade 12 after the summer break; at St. Ursa's I'm in Fifth Form. Put back and prickly as a pincushion about it, I badger to Sister Felicitas in chemistry over my top mark for my lab book. “Shows I should be in the Sixth Form,” I tell her.

“Don't feel that you are behind, Jean. The Irish are always ahead of themselves in their educational standards because of their reputation for being backward, but then, the Irish always see their way forward by looking back.”

“Sounds like everything slips into reverse, here! Even common sense,” I say before I can stop myself.

“You are only going back a year, one of the hundreds.”

From Waterston, a view of the Boyne lies in the distance. The lawned slope from the school leads into squared fields, clusters of trees and towns, a misty grid and something else of mystery and muddle haunts my heritage: this spade.

“Well, it's back for him when he comes to get it, later.”

I startle Sister Felicitas with this reply.

“How much later?” she snaps.

If the young man props the spade opposite the girl's dorm, he does so for attention, but I don't disclose that I wait at the dorm window till he picks up his spade and takes it into the dark with him. Like a gaffer I keep a time sheet in an exercise book for him: his hours of departure and return. After a night's labour, shaking with exertion and steaming with sweat or dew, he leans on his spade, wraps his fist around the handle, which digs in under his breastbone, like it's giving him a paralyzing punch to the pelvis.

When I gently open the window, I hear the same thing every night: “'Taint no way enuf. Nine hours solid, and bad as ever, when I've done. Not'in' where it shud be.”

This last night, before the Sisters move me, I'm down beside him, exercise book and pen in hand, to ask a question.

“Where should everything be?”

“Where it was.”

I flinch at this and wonder if he has seen me touch the spade.

“Trenches were easier, Miss.” He wipes his hands on his hips. “You're not angry at me, are you?” he asks.

“Should I be?”

“Perhaps not – leastways, y'r' talkin' to me. Nobody else is. Disgusted, are they?”

“I think it best I don't speak for the rest.”

“Well, I put in the hours, Miss. Thousands and I'm beat.”

“But you haven't given me your name for my records!”

I never knew I could sound so bossy and bold.

“Bowse Cartey. Do you not remember – the only one who volunteered?”

Now, he stalks off on me, giving me the view of his back.

“Volunteered for what?” I call after him.

A letter to my dad gets one from my grandmother back: “
Bowse Cartey joined Sean Redmond's Southern Volunteers in
the Great War. He planted perennials, torch lilies, to come back
to, and never saw them. Over there in Belgium, mortally
wounded, a Grey Nun nursed him on his deathbed, and in a
delirium, he proposed to the nun. People on the estate said he
might have confused the nun with Cissy Waterston, who would
be your great-great-aunt, were she alive. Bowse followed Cissy
with his spade held across his shoulder, like a rifle, as if he were
honour guard for her special projects to brighten the gardens. The photo of Cissy will let you understand the added confusions
for Bowse with you.

I can see.

Cissy's me with a lovely ruffle collar, running around her neck and all the way down to her waist,
small as a
wasp's
, like my grandmother says.
Not Cissy's choice for the
photograph, but done to please
her
grandmother. As for the
nun, at eighty years of age she finally came over with her
order to our gift of Waterston Hall and with this wish from
Cartey: for her to visit him where things would look their
best.

They all shook hands at the handing over to become St. Ursa's. My father always said the nun wore a smile when she looked past them all at the garden, and she talked to it,
“Tu sembles bien, mais pas heureux – fatigué, comme tous les homme qui travail pour rendre la nature de plus en plus belle dans son lit. Tu est fiel plus longtemps que la mort.”

That was the last look she took at anything in this world. Funny old nun, she had been one of the negotiators, responsible for relocating the order after the War.

Which war?

This much leaves me feeling like the Belgian nun: a little light in one hemisphere.
We know whatever is up with
him, you will put him straight. You're a Waterston and you're a
woman –
end of Granny's letter.

When did I have my family graduation to woman?

Several days after I'm moved, Sister Felicitas says my eyes look unhealthy. They have shadows under them like I boot-polished them to pull on a helmet and play some ridiculous sport. Or go on a night raid.

Will I or won't I tell her?

To my mind the sister is SF. Her initials, and being into science and gymnastics makes Sister Felicitas as fantastic to me as science fiction. If she's not in the lab, she's in the gym or on a court coaching. Maybe Cartey comes to moon over her. Half of the girls do, some in the demurest and some in the dirtiest way, choosing to work out on the exercise benches or the courts till their nipples stick through the blots of sweat on their sports halters and their armpit hair is treated like
the
badge of bravery.

“Has he said anything to you?” Sister Felicitas asks me.

I don't know what to answer, so I quote him: “‘I can't get it right. The place is as bad as ever.' I think that's it, but he mumbles.”

“Is that all?”

“No, he said I'm a Waterston. Miss Waterston, actually, and it's all right for me if I keep track of him.”

“For you to what?”

“Keep track. Until you moved me, I kept a time sheet of all the times he came and went with his spade in an exercise book.”

“Is that so? And he talks like someone who isn't trying to get off with you?”

“Sister Felicitas. He talks like he's an employee and I'm his supervisor.”

“Mistress would be a better word. Well, you'll have to give him his marching orders, eventually.”

“I will?”

“You're a Waterston, as he said.”

I'm flabbergasted as Sister Felicitas kisses my cheek.

“Time to get these fixed,” she says to the bags under my eyes.

Since so many of the pupils at St. Ursa's have parents in business, Small Business Essentials is on the curriculum for the upper-level girls. We don't ever ask, “What about big business?” One girl who did was told, “For big, do the same, only more.”

Taking on and laying off, humanely, is introduced, since many of us – the privileged – will be called upon to do it, and therefore are fit subjects for the topic. Once upon a time, we are told, dismissal training would have been for suitors, a specialty of the finishing schools, but the sisters are here to prevent us from cutting people dead and conducting an inhumane and spiritless business.

“For most,” Sister Bénédicité tells us, “the hardest lesson is learning when to quit. In an ideal world we would recognize our own incompetence or redundancy. We should see it in our own faces, but that isn't the way it works.”

I have the creepy feeling I am the sole object of these weird remarks or someone sitting directly behind me is.

During history, Sister Beatrix reprises the insult to Redmond and the Southern Volunteers. No officers, unable to issue their own orders. They stood in wait for commands to be given by Englishmen, which suited some.

Is that what Cartey waits for?

I see him at the end of the nine-hour night, leaning his head against the chemistry lab wall. He twists his fist on the handle of his spade, like a throttle. He mutters at me or someone, doubles over till the top of his head buries itself in the ivy on the wall. He reaches down and plucks at the sacking around his trouser bottoms, like he's trying to read the few letters that are left there from the brand of sugar it held.

“Well?” he says, and turns to look at my exercise book and pen, then my wristwatch. I tap my pen on my exercise book.

“Just say the word.”

“You're sacked,” I say, experimentally. Then, without a second thought, “Pick up your things and go.”

His relief frightens me. It's like lightning.

As for Bowse Cartey's work and enslavement to loyalty, I'd love to find a torch lily he planted, especially when I discover it's a nice name for a red-hot poker, and take it in to Sister Cecilia, who teaches botany and music. But I come across no such thing. The gardens are all low-maintenance. Perhaps it's better so, otherwise Bowse might come back and spend eternity seeing to the torch lilies' welfare.

Lily's début engagement was at the Candia Taverna on 10th Avenue. Initially, the Candia suggested vouchers and Herbie said okay. The Taverna did a good pizza, great chicken and Greek salad. Herbie liked the wooden booths – maybe stalls described them better – for four or for two people. One served a party of twelve by the window; the cops used it, which added an aspect of public safety to the cuisine.

This double-sided row of dining stalls ran from the front door down to the bar at the back. To Lily, her Candia Taverna performance – swinging her hips, raising her arms, clicking her fingers and looking down at the diners, who looked up at her from their fodder in the stalls – was like belly dancing in a stable. Too much wagging in the aisle and Lily's lace skirt would be soaked in sauce, but the cash was easily stuffed into Lily's belt as she passed. Even the city police came back and poked in the odd five spot for her seven o'clock show.