The Imperial Room

The season is turning on its hinges, the earth swings further from the light; under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen of snow. The air is drying out, preparing us for the coming Sahara of centrally heated winter. Already the ends of my thumbs are fissuring, my face withering further. If I could see my skin in the mirror-if I could only get close enough, or far enough away-it would be crisscrossed by tiny lines, in between the main wrinkles, like scrimshaw.

Last night I dreamt that my legs were covered with hair. Not a little hair but a great deal of it-dark hair sprouting in tufts and tendrils as I watched, spreading up over my thighs like the pelt of an animal. The winter was coming, I dreamed, and so I would hibernate. First I would grow fur, then crawl into a cave, then go to sleep. It all seemed normal, as if I'd done it before. Then I remembered, even in the dream, that I'd never been a hairy woman in that way and was now bald as a newt, or at least my legs were; so although they appeared to be attached to my body, these hairy legs couldn't possibly be mine. Also they had no feeling in them. They were the legs of something else, or someone. All I had to do was follow the legs, run my hand along them, to find out who or what it was.

The alarm of this woke me, or so I believed. I dreamt that Richard was back. I could hear him breathing in the bed beside me. Yet there was nobody there.

I woke up then in reality. My legs were asleep: I'd been lying twisted. I fumbled for the bedside lamp, decoded my watch: it was two in the morning. My heart was hammering painfully, as if I'd been running. It's true, what they used to say, I thought. A nightmare can kill you.

I hasten on, making my way crabwise across the paper. It's a slow race now, between me and my heart, but I intend to get there first. Where is there? The end, or The End. One or the other. Both are destinations, of a sort.

The January and February of 1935. High winter. Snow fell, breath hardened; furnaces burned, smoke arose, radiators clanked. Cars ran off roads into ditches; their drivers, despairing of help, kept their engines running and were asphyxiated. Dead tramps were found on park benches and in abandoned warehouses, rigid as mannequins, as if posing for a store-window advertisement of poverty. Corpses that could not be buried because their graves could not be dug in the steel-hard ground waited their turn in the outbuildings of nervous undertakers. Rats did well. Mothers with children, unable to find work or pay their rent, were bundled out into the snow, bag and baggage. Children skated on the frozen millpond of the Louveteau River, and two went through the ice, and one drowned. Pipes froze and burst.

Laura and I were less and less together. Indeed she was scarcely to be seen: she was helping with the United Church relief drive, or so she said. Reenie said that come next month she'd only be working for us three days a week; she said her feet were bothering her, which was her way of covering up the fact that we could no longer afford her full-time. I knew it anyway, it was plain as the nose on your face. As the nose on Father's face, which looked like the morning after a train wreck. He'd been spending a lot of time up in his turret lately.

The button factory was empty, its interior charred and shattered. There was not the money to repair it: the insurance company was baulking, citing the mysterious circumstances surrounding the arson. It was whispered about that all was not as it appeared: some even hinted that Father had set the fire himself, a slanderous allegation. The two other factories were still closed; Father was racking his brains for some way to reopen them. He was going to Toronto more and more often, on business. Sometimes he'd take me with him, and we would stay at the Royal York Hotel, considered to be the top hotel then. It was where all the company presidents and doctors and lawyers who were so inclined kept their mistresses and conducted their week-long binges, but I didn't know that at the time.

Who paid for these jaunts of ours? I have a suspicion it was Richard, who was present on these occasions. He was the one Father was doing the business with: the last one left, of a narrowed field. The business concerned the sale of the factories, and was complicated. Father had tried to sell before, but in these times nobody was buying, not with the conditions he set. He wanted to sell only a minority interest. He wanted to keep control. He wanted a capital injection. He wanted the factories opened again, so that his men would have jobs. He called them "his men," as if they were still in the army and he was still their captain. He did not want to cut his losses and desert them, for as everyone knows, or once knew, a captain should go down with the ship. They wouldn't bother, now. Now they'd cash in and bail out, and move to Florida.

Father said he needed me along "to take notes," but I never took any. I believed I was there just so he could have someone with him-for moral support. He certainly needed it. He was thin as a stick, and his hands shook constantly. It cost him an effort to write his own name.

Laura did not come on these excursions. Her presence was not required. She stayed behind, doling out the three-day-old bread, the watery soup. She'd taken to skimping on meals herself, as if she didn't feel entitled to eat.

"Jesus ate," said Reenie. "He ate all kinds of things. He didn't stint."

"Yes," said Laura, "but I'm not Jesus."

"Well, thank the Lord she's got the sense to know that much at least," Reenie grumbled to me. She scraped the remaining two-thirds of Laura's dinner into the stock pot, because it would be a sin and a shame to have it go to waste. It was a point of pride with Reenie during those years that she never threw anything out.

Father no longer kept a chauffeur, and no longer trusted himself to drive. He and I would go in to Toronto by train, arriving at Union Station, crossing the street to the hotel. I was supposed to amuse myself somehow in the afternoons, while the business was being done. Mostly however I sat in my room, because I was afraid of the city and ashamed of my dowdy clothes, which make me look years younger than I was. I would read magazines: Ladies' Home Journal, Collier's, Mayfair. Mostly I read the short stories, which had to do with romance. I had no interest in casseroles or crochet patterns, although the beauty tips held my attention. Also I read the advertisements. A Latex foundation garment with two-way stretch would help me play better bridge. Although I might smoke like a chimney, who cared, because my mouth would taste clean as a whistle if I stuck to Spuds. Something called Larvex would end my moth worries. At the Bigwin Inn, on the beautiful Lake of Bays where every moment was exhilarating, I could do musical slenderizing exercises on the beach.

After the day's business was done, all three of us-Father, Richard, and myself-would have dinner at a restaurant. On these occasions I would say nothing, because what was there for me to say? The subjects were economics and politics, the Depression, the situation in Europe, the worrisome advances being made by World Communism. Richard was of the opinion that Hitler had certainly pulled Germany together from a financial point of view. He was less approving of Mussolini, who was a dabbler and a dilettante. Richard had been approached to make an investment in a new fabric the Italians were developing-very hush-hush-made out of heated milk protein. But if this stuff got wet, said Richard, it smelled horribly of cheese, and the ladies in North America would therefore never accept it. He'd stick with rayon, though it wrinkled when damp, and he'd keep his ear to the tracks and pick up anything promising. There was bound to be something coming along, some artificial fabric that would put silk right out of business, and cotton to a large extent as well. What the ladies wanted was a product that wouldn't need to be ironed-that could be hung on the line, that would dry wrinkle-free. They also wanted stockings that were durable as well as sheer, so they could show off their legs. Wasn't that right? he asked me, with a smile. He had a habit of appealing to me on matters concerning the ladies.

I nodded. I always nodded. I never listened very closely, not only because these conversations bored me but also because they pained me. It hurt me to see my father agreeing with sentiments I felt he didn't share.

Richard said he would have had us to dinner at his own home, but since he was a bachelor it would have been a slapdash affair. He lived in a cheerless flat, he said; he said he was practically a monk. "What is life without a wife?" he said, smiling. It sounded like a quotation. I think it was one.

Richard proposed to me in the Imperial Room of the Royal York Hotel. He'd invited me to lunch, along with Father; but then at the last minute, as we were walking through the hotel corridors on our way to the lift, Father said he couldn't attend. I'd have to go by myself, he said.

Of course it was a put-up job between the two of them.

"Richard will be asking you something," said Father to me. His tone was apologetic.

"Oh?" I said. Probably something about ironing, but I didn't much care. As far as I was concerned Richard was a grown-up man. He was thirty-five, I was eighteen. He was well on the other side of being interesting.

"I think he may be asking you to marry him," he said.

We were in the lobby by then. I sat down. "Oh," I said. I could suddenly see what should have been obvious for some time. I wanted to laugh, as if at a trick. Also I felt as if my stomach had vanished. Yet my voice remained calm. "What should I do?"

"I've already given my consent," said Father. "So it's up to you." Then he added: "A certain amount depends on it."

"A certain amount?"

"I have to consider your futures. In case anything should happen to me, that is. Laura's future, in particular. " What he was saying was that unless I married Richard, we wouldn't have any money. What he was also saying was that the two of us-me, and especially Laura-would never be able to fend for ourselves. "I have to consider the factories as well," he said. "I have to consider the business. It might still be saved, but the bankers are after me. They're hot on the trail. They won't wait much longer. " He was leaning on his cane, gazing down at the carpet, and I saw how ashamed he was. How beaten down. "I don't want it all to have been for nothing. Your grandfather, and then… Fifty, sixty years of hard work, down the drain."

"Oh. I see." I was cornered. It wasn't as if I had any alternatives to propose.

"They'd take Avilion, as well. They'd sell it."

"They would?"

"It's mortgaged up to the hilt."

"Oh."

"A certain amount of resolve might be required. A certain amount of courage. Biting the bullet and so forth."

I said nothing.

"But naturally," he said, "whatever decision you make will be your own concern."

I said nothing.

"I wouldn't want you doing anything you were dead set against," he said, looking past me with his good eye, frowning a little, as if an object of great significance had just come into view. There was nothing behind me but a wall.

I said nothing.

"Good. That's that, then." He seemed relieved. "He has a lot of common sense, Griffen. I believe he's sound, underneath it all."

"I guess so," I said. "I'm sure he's very sound."

"You'd be in good hands. And Laura too, of course."

"Of course," I said faintly. "Laura too."

"Chin up, then."

Do I blame him? No. Not any more. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but he was only doing what would have been considered-was considered, then-the responsible thing. He was doing the best he knew how.

Richard joined us as if on cue, and the two men shook hands. My own hand was taken, squeezed briefly. Then my elbow. That was how men steered women around in those days-by the elbow-and so I was steered by the elbow into the Imperial Room. Richard said he'd wanted the Venetian Caf ©, which was lighter and more festive in atmosphere, but unfortunately it had been fully booked.

It's odd to remember this now, but the Royal York Hotel was the tallest building in Toronto then, and the Imperial Room was the biggest dining room. Richard was fond of big. The room itself had rows of large square pillars, a tessellated ceiling, a line of chandeliers, each with a tassel at the bottom end: a congealed opulence. It felt leathery, ponderous, paunchy-veined somehow. Porphyry is the word that comes to mind, though there may not have been any.

It was noon, one of those unsettling winter days that are brighter than they ought to be. The white sunlight was falling in shafts through the gaps in the heavy drapes, which must have been maroon, I think, and were certainly velvet. Underneath the usual hotel dining-room smells of steam-table vegetables and lukewarm fish there was an odour of hot metal and smouldering cloth. The table Richard had reserved was in a dim corner, away from the abrasive daylight. There was a red rosebud in a bud vase; I stared over it at Richard, curious as to how he would go about things. Would he take my hand, press it, hesitate, stutter? I didn't think so.

I didn't dislike him unduly. I didn't like him. I had few opinions about him because I'd never thought much about him, although I had-from time to time-noticed the suavity of his clothes. He was pompous at times, but at least he wasn't what you'd call ugly, not at all. I supposed he was very eligible. I felt a little dizzy. I still didn't know what I would do.

The waiter came. Richard ordered. Then he looked at his watch. Then he talked. I heard little of what he said. He smiled. He produced a small black velvet-covered box, opened it. Inside was a glittering shard of light.

I spent that night lying huddled and shivering in the vast bed of the hotel. My feet were icy, my knees drawn up, my head sideways on the pillow; in front of me the arctic waste of starched white bedsheet stretched out to infinity. I knew I could never traverse it, regain the track, get back to where it was warm; I knew I was directionless; I knew I was lost. I would be discovered here years later by some intrepid team-fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.

What I was experiencing was dread, but it was not dread of Richard as such. It was as if the illuminated dome of the Royal York Hotel had been wrenched off and I was being stared at by a malign presence located somewhere above the black spangled empty surface of the sky. It was God, looking down with his blank, ironic searchlight of an eye. He was observing me; he was observing my predicament; he was observing my failure to believe in him. There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless-endlessly down.

Such dismal feelings however do not often persist in the clear light of morning, when you are young.