Details from a Larger Canvas

By Helen McLean

The biggest surprise - and disappointment - that life holds is that it is over so fast. The golden tomorrow, to which most people (usually women) put off their hopes rarely appears. This is the lesson learned by Helen McLean in her memoir.

Details from a Larger Canvas is about a woman with the expectations of her time and class heavy upon her shoulders; in short, she is supposed to be much the same woman as her Rosedale matron mother-in-law whose life was bound up in sets of rules and whose life had little expression except in the form of materialistic acquisition and censure. Instead, Helen creates her own life - and, while painting a portrait of Margaret Laurence, finds a woman with whom she has common ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Apr 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781459714571

Helen McLean

Writer and artist Helen McLean was born in Toronto where she now lives. She has exhibited her paintings across Canada, and has been a teacher and a journalist. She is the author of Sketching from Memory (Oberon Press), Of All the Summers (Women's Press), and the acclaimed memoir Details From a Larger Canvas (Dundurn Press).

Book preview

LONGA

HEAT

Seely and I have been friends almost all our lives. Her husband’s work with a large international company has taken her to many distant places over the more than half century since we were girls together: first to Alberta after their marriage, then to the Caribbean, back to western Canada, and then to Florida for several years before they settled permanently in California — with a three year hiatus in Australia just before he retired. I haven’t been exactly sitting still myself. Since my own marriage my husband Ross and I, and our daughter and two sons, have lived in Toronto, in London, England, in Calgary, and then on a farm in the Ontario countryside near Peterborough. Finally, after our children had grown up and gone, we returned to Toronto. My paths and Seely’s have never intersected, but she and I have remained close in spite of long periods when we were living in different parts of the world. Whenever we get together, as we do more frequently now, we’ve always managed to pick up where we left off.

A few years ago I was sitting on a stool in Seely’s kitchen, in the northern California community where they have lived since her husband’s retirement. I was watching while she filled pie shells, laying translucent pastry over a mounded filling of cherries, pressing it down against the edges of the piepans, pinching it all around with thumb and forefinger to make a perfect crimped rim. She lifted first one pie-plate and then the other on raised fingertips, turning it to trim the ragged edge with a sharp paring knife, so the rind of dough dropped in a continuous spiral onto the floured board. Seely always did have beautiful hands and quick shapely fingers. These days they were turning their genius to needlework, exquisite smocking and quilting and embroidery, and as I watched I remembered envying that dexterity of hers when we spent a summer picking fruit together years ago. I wasn’t ham-handed myself, but I was slower than she was, and if we were on piece-work she often generously helped me load up my last basket so we’d come out even at the end of the day.

She checked the oven temperature and slipped the pies in to bake. We carried our mugs of coffee out to the deck where our husbands were already sitting in the sun, sharing the morning paper and keeping an eye on the two children who were splashing in the pool on rubber mattresses. The kids love cherry pie, she said, after we’d settled ourselves in lounge chairs. I’d make them oftener but I hate pitting the damned things. The kids were her two granddaughters, visiting for the weekend.

Who do cherries make you think of?

She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. Do you by chance refer to our dear darling Mr. Bellamy?

We both began to splutter helplessly.

You two. What a pair. All right, let’s have it. Her husband spoke with affected boredom. Come on. You might as well tell us.

That poor little wife of his didn’t like us, you know, Seely said. She was onto us right from the start.

She should have thanked us, I said. He was probably hell on wheels in bed all that summer.

Now it was my husband’s turn. I haven’t heard this one before. Who’s Mr. Bellamy?

Oh, just an old guy we were in love with for a while, I said. Long before your time.

Old?

Seely and I burst out laughing again.

Oh, really old, she drawled. He must have been — what would you say, Helen? — forty?

Easily that, I said. Ancient.

Then what was the attraction? This from one of the husbands.

Seely and I spoke almost in unison. "There weren’t any boys around."

We’d both just turned seventeen. If there’d been males of our own age anywhere to be found that summer we probably wouldn’t have given Mr. Bellamy a second glance, but it was wartime, the summer of 1944, and any young man who might have attracted us would already have joined the armed forces, or would be living in as a hired hand on some farm for the summer, or working in the city. We were housed in a school in the town of Grimsby on the Niagara peninsula, one of the so-called farmerette camps the government set up in small towns all over Ontario for girls who wanted to spend the summer picking fruit and doing light farm-work. We slept in double-decker metal army bunks in the high school gym, ate our breakfasts and dinners at long trestle tables in an adjacent area that was the school lunchroom and cafeteria. In the basement of that building there were washtubs and scrub-boards, clotheslines, ironing boards and irons, and to its mildewy-smelling depths we usually repaired on Saturday mornings when we didn’t have a single clean garment left to put on and were desperate enough to tackle our laundry.

After the dinner tables were cleared off in the evenings, wrapped loaves of sliced white bread were brought out from the kitchen, along with pounds of butter, towering stacks of bologna, tubs of peanut butter, cheese slices, bowls of iceberg lettuce and institution-sized jars of mayonnaise and mustard, from all of which we were to make our lunches for the next day. Oranges and apples and cookies were available, but when we were picking strawberries or cherries or peaches we didn’t need to bother with the seedy little Florida oranges and tough-skinned apples. We were eating fruit all day long, sometimes to the point of gastric distress, but we wrapped a couple of hastily slapped-together sandwiches in wax paper and shoved them into the brown paper bags provided, scrawled our names on the bags and left them on the table where we would pick them up in the morning. We weren’t supposed to have food in the gym where we slept, although there wasn’t a single orange crate making do as a dresser that didn’t have a stash of chocolate bars and cookies tucked away in it for emergencies. Our mayo and bologna sandwiches must have sat unrefrigerated through those sweltering July and August nights, and then under a tree on a farm somewhere for half the next day, blithely unrefrigerated. Either we were lucky or the microbes weren’t as virulent in those days as they are now. I don’t remember anyone getting food poisoning.

The camp was run by a tall formidable middle-aged woman with high cheekbones and dark curly hair that she wore pulled tightly back in a bun. She stood very straight and looked as if she wore a good strong girdle even in the summertime. No nonsense, her mien stated firmly, even if attractive curly wisps kept escaping from her bun and twirling around over her ears and forehead in the humid summer air. We were told she was a school principal in real life; here she was assisted by two younger women who were also schoolteachers. Who it was that did the pot-walloping behind the scenes in the kitchen we neither knew nor cared. There was never a man to be seen around the place, not even a janitor, the fear being, I suppose, that he might have spied on us from the broom closet while three or four of us at a time washed the farm dust out of our hair in the doorless shower stalls after work. Those school teachers took their responsibility of being in loco parentis very seriously, as well they might have, with forty or so nubile girls in their care, every one of them humming with hormones.

Miss Whatsername of the escaping curls gave a little lecture to the assembled farmerettes — sixteen was the lowest allowed age limit, and anybody past eighteen would probably have been able to find something better to do, so we were much of an age. The lecture, which she must have delivered to every new batch of arrivals, consisted of explicit directions about behaving like ladies and being respectful toward our employers. She tried to impress upon us that we were there to work and help the war effort, not to fool around and have a good time. There were dark blue baggy Carhart overalls available for us to buy, if we wanted them. Seely and I didn’t. A ten o’clock curfew was in effect nightly, except on Fridays and Saturdays, when shut-down and lights-out was extended to eleven-thirty to give us time to get back from Grimsby’s one and only movie theatre. We were told we were under no circumstances to hitchhike to the neighbouring towns of Beamsville or Jordan or even farther, although of course on the weekends we often did, usually in groups of three or four, packing ourselves into the back seat of a dusty black car driven by some ruddy-faced farmer, who would toss pleasantries to us over his shoulder while his wife in her flowered cotton go-to-town dress would keep her eyes sharply forward on the road, as though to intimate that somebody had better.

The growers — why the word farmer wasn’t good enough I don’t know — came every morning in open-backed trucks to collect their quota of girls for the day and off we’d go standing up in the back, clinging to the board sides, bouncing and jolting along washboardy gravel roads to the various farms. We worked eight hours a day, five days a week. If we were hoeing weeds or picking vegetables we were paid at an hourly rate of twenty-five cents. Piece work came into play when we picked fruit, the rate per box or basket depending on the type of fruit — three cents for a quart of strawberries, three cents for a pint of raspberries, fifteen cents for a four-quart basket of sweet cherries that had to be picked with the stem still attached to the cherry. We took our full trays of berry boxes up to the end of the field to be tallied, receiving a tag that we slipped onto a safety pin attached to our shirts, picked up a new tray of boxes, and went down the row again and back to work. The farmers paid us in cash at the end of each day. When a particular fruit crop was almost finished and the berries became few and far between, the piece rate might go up a cent or two per box, but a crop of large and abundant berries in the middle of their season might bring us as much as three or four dollars for the day’s work. Out of our earnings we paid four-fifty a week to the camp for our room and board. We had been required to bring our own two pairs of flannelette sheets and a pair of grey army blankets and whatever pillows we needed. For one dollar a week our sheets were taken away and laundered, unless, of course, we chose to wash them ourselves in those tubs, which was unthinkable as far as Seely and I were concerned.

On our trips into town Seely and I idled around the general store and the pharmacy and the dry-goods and ladieswear shop, buying chocolate bars, Chen-yu lipsticks and nail polish to match — a dried-blood colour called Chilli Bean was popular that summer — cheap sunglasses, white cotton halter tops with sailboats on them, Mexican huaraches. We laid out our slender earnings on fashion magazines and tickets to the movies, postage stamps, writing paper, cold cream for our faces. At some point Seely and I purchased corn-cob pipes and tobacco and smoked them while strolling through the leafy residential streets of the town, hoping to scandalize the townies sitting in the cool of their verandas, I suppose, with a bit of early camp — city girls affecting a stereotypically hick-town habit to demonstrate how madly sophisticated we were, although now I’m sure no-one in Grimsby under the age of ninety smoked a corn-cob pipe. Anyway, our money wasn’t long in our pockets, and if we could manage to go home with twenty-five dollars at the end of the summer, it would be a triumph.

Seely and I were part of Mr. Bellamy’s crew from the first day. Sometimes he needed as many as eight girls or as few as four, but the two of us were always among them. The farmers were allowed to ask for certain girls they liked, or they could refuse to have other girls back if they fooled around too much or didn’t do the work properly. The Bellamy place was a picture-book farm: white clapboard house surrounded by green lawns and neat flower beds, well cared-for outbuildings behind that — a drive shed and a small stable where the two Bellamy daughters, aged about eleven and thirteen, kept their ponies in the winter, and a chicken house with a fenced run. The property stretched from the lakeshore back to the escarpment, where vineyards climbed the south-facing slope and basked in the long hours of sunlight. A few acres near the house were planted in berries and vegetables and then the orchards began: sour Montmorency pie cherries, big black Bing cherries, different varieties of peaches that ripened in sequence, pears and plums, and then the apples with their white-painted lower trunks, row upon row of big trees marching back as far as the eye could see. In among the trees were several open-fronted sheds where ladders were stored and where the fruit was packed into baskets and boxes and flats. Wherever we were working Mr. Bellamy brought cold well-water in shiny milk pails, with clean white sugar sacks laid over them, and a tin dipper and mugs. Sometimes in the afternoons Mrs. Bellamy drove back through the trees with gallon vinegar jugs full of Kool-Aid, and occasionally even a pan of homemade cookies.

We thinned peaches the first week, picking and discarding half the hard green knobs so the ones remaining would grow large. The fuzz on immature peaches is fiendish stuff, and we quickly learned not to rub our faces or eyes when our hands were covered with those invisible little hairs. We worked on ladders like none I’d ever seen, tripods, the two legs with the rungs converging and meeting at the top, while on the opposite side a single hinged leg could be swung in any direction, sideways or up and down, lifted and slung over low branches to put the picker right in the middle of the tree. Some years later I came on a reproduction of a painting by Berthe Morisot, in which young girls in a French orchard are picking fruit from ladders exactly like them. Mr. Bellamy’s ladders were seven feet tall and made of solid wood, almost too heavy for one of us to shift alone, so Mr. Bellamy would walk about, moving them for us when we’d finished part of a tree. We never felt terribly secure on the narrow top rungs and learned to brace ourselves by planting one sneakered foot on a strong limb or to wrap an arm around a branch while we picked.

After the peaches were thinned, we started picking the translucent Montmorency pie cherries. I began to love working on those tall ladders in the middle of the rustling trees. Sometimes I could leave the ladder behind and wedge myself into a high fork with my basket hanging from a hook on a branch beside me, look around across the tops of the trees toward the house and stable, with the turquoise lake in the background, dotted with whitecaps under a blazing blue sky. To the north, the vineyards stretching up the distant escarpment shimmered gold and violet in the heat. The sun shot ruby light through bunches of ripe cherries hanging before my eyes, and I could smell their juice on my fingers and taste their astringent flavour on my tongue. The heavy sweet scent of buckwheat and the drone of bees rose up from below. The very air I breathed was drenched in sun and perfume. It all made me feel burstingly alive, as full with my own blood as those cherries were with their juice. It was a happiness almost too powerful to bear, a sensation of being filled, overwhelmed, by something that might disappear if thought about, or given a name.

Seely and I looked down on Mr. Bellamy as he strolled among the trees, handing up baskets, moving ladders. His legs were long and straight, his shoulders broad. Brilliant blue eyes were set in deep sockets in a square brown face. He usually went hatless and his blond hair was bleached almost white. He wore his shirt open to the first button at the neck with the sleeves rolled tightly above the biceps of his brown arms. Mrs. Bellamy was blond and blue eyed too, but her skin was pale and her eyes a washed-out colour, a faded blue, and set in little puffs. She wore long-sleeved dresses and hats even when she was working in one of the sheds or in the vegetable garden. I was helping her pack baskets of green beans in the shed one afternoon when she reached over and touched one of my suntanned knees with a fingertip.

Look how brown you are, she said. You’re lucky to be able to wear shorts. I have to keep covered up. I’ve got this psoriasis.

Oh really? That must be awful.

It’s a nuisance.

I didn’t know what psoriasis was, but I felt sorry for her that she had something wrong with her skin, that she was so pale, so old. That she wasn’t me.

She was a quiet woman, well spoken. She told me she and Mr. Bellamy had met at college. Neither of their families had been farmers or fruit growers. With her white skin and soft voice and pretty dresses she didn’t seem like a farmer’s wife, at least not like any of the farmers’ wives we’d run into in the shops or at the soda fountain next the movie theatre in town, hearty boisterous women with big arms who laughed out loud when they joshed with the storekeepers. Those women shouted at their children on the street and in the grocery store and ordered their husbands around. Then go and get the twine and get back for us here in half an hour! Freddy, put that damn kitten down before ya strangle it. Hang onto your sister’s hand like I told ya or you’re not gettin’ an eskimo pie!

The Bellamys couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than my own parents, but I couldn’t imagine my father driving a truck or a tractor, working in the blazing heat, swinging those heavy ladders into place with such ease. My father was a lawyer who worked all day in an office at the corner of Bay and Temperance Streets in downtown Toronto. Whenever we went to a beach in the summer the skin on his shoulders and arms burned to a bright rose colour, and a few days later when we were back in the city he would take off his shirt, laughing, to show us how it was peeling off his body in awful translucent sheets as big as his hand. Mrs. Bellamy looked like the mothers I knew, she would have fitted into any of the households on Duncannon Drive where we lived in Toronto, but her husband wasn’t like any man I’d ever met. It crossed my mind that she might not have particularly wanted to be a farmer’s wife, that she was living in the country because she loved Mr. Bellamy and not because she loved being there. It would have been an easy choice for me. The summers spent with my family on a farm in Prince Edward County had been ecstasy for me when I was a young child, and I’d yearned to live in the country ever since. What I’d felt at seven I still felt at seventeen. I was quite sure that if I were offered a man like Mr. Bellamy in a few years time, and the chance live on a farm like this one, I’d marry him like a shot. As it was, I was envious of the two daughters, only a few years younger than I was myself, with their ponies and their collie dog and their freedom — and their wonderful father. Seely and I would be going back to the city in a few weeks, and those girls would still be here in this heavenly place, through all the seasons, year after year.

By the end of the first week Mr. Bellamy had become the main topic of conversation between Seely and me. We were well on the way to being completely obsessed with him. We’d decide ahead of time whose turn it was to sit next him in the cab of the truck, inhaling the clean-laundry smell of his blue shirt, admiring the golden pelt on his forearms and his strong brown hands on the steering wheel. It was thrilling to be pressed against his warm side, looking up into his bright long-lashed blue eyes when he’d tip his head down toward us to speak. When we were up in those high trees and heard his voice or glimpsed his blond head below, Seely and I would catch each other’s attention through the leaves and exchange sappy smiles and roll our eyes heavenward.

I can’t remember anything at all about the other girls who worked with us, although there were several who, like us, came to the Bellamy farm every day. We certainly didn’t worry whether it was anyone else’s turn to sit next to Mr. Bellamy in the truck. He was ours. Seely and I had an ideal friendship. We never quarrelled, we thought alike about almost everything, found the same things funny and shared a wry view of most of the adult world. We were friends enough for each other and didn’t look for companionship with the other girls. We worked hard because we had no wish to disappoint Mr. Bellamy, or heaven forbid, have him not want us back. He often told us we were fast pickers, good workers. One morning I overheard the woman who assigned the girls to the farmers tell Mr. Bellamy one of the girls had complained that Seely and I were being favoured, that we’d been moved to picking Bing cherries while the others had to hoe weeds. He instantly defended us. He said we’d worked like men the week before demolishing a brokendown shed and that moving us to the Bings had been a reward.

Of course we were being favoured, and we knew it. Our demolition job was a lark, as I’m sure he intended it to be, a hundred times more fun than hoeing weeds. We were between crops, the Bings weren’t quite ready and the Montmorencys were finished. He singled out the two of us, hauled an old flatbed wagon down into the orchard, equipped us with crowbars and a sledgehammer and workgloves and set us to prying apart the walls and floorboards of the shed, which was already half caved in. What was left of the roof was within easy reach. He told us to pile the old wood on the wagon and when we’d finished he’d come back and drag it away to be burned. We were at least three days on that job, whacking out the uprights with the sledge-hammer, prying up the boards, pulling out the nails and dropping them into an old coffee can, flinging the rotten wood on the wagon. In the course of the job we found all sorts of interesting things under the floor-boards — a man’s pipe, a pair of old-fashioned spectacles, a bent silver spoon, a couple of coins from the Twenties — all of which we later turned over to the Bellamy girls to add to what they called their museum, a collection of things they’d found around the farm — old coins and buttons, a perfume bottle with a silver top, a pretty etched glass chimney for a coal-oil lamp.

When we finished our wrecking job, Mr. Bellamy brought two ladders and a pile of baskets and moved us onto the first of the Bings. Only a few of the trees had ripened up enough to begin picking, and there was no-one within earshot in that section of the orchard, or so we thought, so we sang while we worked. It was the time of big bands, of the newly famous boyish long-necked Frank Sinatra, who made us feel woozy with adoration when he sang The Music Stopped on the radio. I’d had a job selling popular records at Simpson’s during the previous Christmas and Easter holidays, and I knew every tune, all the words. Alone there in the orchard, Seely and I ran through our repertoire of sentimental wartime songs of separation — I’ll Never Smile Again — and those overtures to celestial bodies or birds that seemed to us so deep and soulful — Blue Moon, Skylark. There was a stirring song addressed to a tree called Poinciana which we belted out at full volume. Sometimes we picked up the tempo and sang campfire, riding-in-the-back-of-a-bus songs, one of which Seely particularly liked because her father was a clergyman. It went to the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean …

My father’s a big missionary,

He saves little girlies from sin.

He’ll save you a blond for five dollars,

My God how the money rolls in.

You girls have pretty singing voices, Mr. Bellamy said when we were heading home in the truck a few days later. We blushed and fell silent. Had he been hanging around concealed among the trees — overhearing our conversations, which might possibly have been about him? We’d sung that dirty song about the missionary. What else had we sung, or said? Oh my God, was he watching when we took our shorts down to pee? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Nevertheless we continued to do everything we could to make ourselves appealing to Mr. Bellamy and catch his attention. We washed and curled our hair obsessively, ironed our blouses and shorts, painted our nails and lips in matching brilliant colours. For our birthdays we’d given each other identical bottles of toilet water, and we now dabbed it lavishly on our necks before we went out to work in the morning, steaming up the cab with the flowery scent of Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass.

We were caught in times that were restrictive for young girls, times that would become even less liberal when the war was over and the reactionary Fifties had set in. It was the era of pinups and beauty pageants. The legs of movie stars like Betty Grable were being insured for millions of dollars by their studios. A beautiful woman was supposed to have a wasp waist and a voluptuous bosom — while paradoxically the basic indicator of a woman’s sexual maturity was taboo, shameful, never to be spoken of or even hinted at. A girl’s very father must never be aware that she was menstruating, or so our mothers told us, and when the fifty percent of the population that used sanitary pads slipped a package of them surreptitiously off the drugstore shelves, it had already been wrapped up by the druggist in plain brown paper as though it were a dirty magazine, with a small K or M pencilled on the corner of the package to indicate which of the two available brands lay within.

In such times catching a suitable man was seen to be every girl’s primary goal, beside which her own interests and ambitions were secondary — if indeed to be considered at all. We sincerely believed that old maids like the schoolteachers who ran the camp were pathetic creatures, as did everyone we knew, our parents and our friends, men and women alike, no matter how self-assured and happily independent they might appear to be. Old maids were the butt of jokes. If you should end up in your thirties still unmarried and without children, you would have to consider yourself a total failure as a woman. The rules for our behaviour, as I observe them now, were bizarre to the point of inducing schizophrenia, a compilation of pretence and subterfuge and outright lies. On the one hand, since men were our destiny, we were directed at every turn to make ourselves as attractive to them as possible. It was common knowledge among us that girls should do their best to conceal the intelligence God gave them, because boys didn’t like girls who were as smart as they were — or, heaven forbid, even smarter.

A post-war Irving Berlin song called The Girl That I Marry described the kind of female a man, every man, wanted to marry. She was to be tender and sweet, and dressed in lace and ribbons. The song concluded with a warning that this ideal woman should be as easy to lift into manly arms as a doll — a sharp reminder that you should not only remain emotionally infantile, but not grow too big, either. At one point in that song, if memory serves, the girl was to produce an adorable feline purr,