Jack of Diamonds Read Free

smell the blood on my knuckles, his blood, and see him on his knees, whimpering, both hands covering his broken nose, the way I’d so often seen my mom cowering on the kitchen floor.
    A battered wife would very seldom leave her brutal husband, even before the Depression. Women’s wages were only two-thirds of men’s, there was no social security for a woman alone with children, and even should she find work, she couldn’t possibly care for her family. In the Depression she had no chance.
    The fact that both my mom and dad had jobs was greatly resented by many of the Cabbagetown women, who would snub my mother in public or make snide remarks as she passed by. If we kids understood the pecking order in the playground, this was also true of the wives, who caused most of the problems that weren’t the result of liquor. While we were all in the same boat, there were deeply felt differences. A small family such as ours, with two adult wages coming in and only three mouths to feed, caused great resentment, even bitterness, among the women in our neighbourhood.
    Most families had a clutch of four or five children, so when neither parent was able to find regular work, feeding and clothing that many kids was a terrible burden. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters due to ‘complications’. My mom gave birth to me at home, where, like most slum kids, I was delivered by Mrs Spencer, the local midwife. But, shortly after I was born, Mom had to be taken to the general hospital emergency department in Elizabeth Street. ‘It was to do with my plumbing,’ was how she later explained it to me. The doctor at the hospital said she couldn’t have any more children, and that if she did, then she’d most likely die. That’s why I was an only child.
    While the perception of our financial circumstances was quite wrong, I suppose the envy and anger some wives directed at us was understandable. Had my dad not poured his entire wages down his throat each day, so that we were forced to rely on my mom’s tiny income, we would have been decidedly better off than most. In truth, my mom shared all the same fears about the landlord and bailiff as everyone else.
    Nonetheless, many of the Cabbagetown wives snubbed Gertrude Spayd completely, never addressing her directly or even acknowledging her presence. Some even spat to the side of their feet as she passed. My mom referred to them as the ‘bitch pack’ and pretended she didn’t give a damn. I was too young to fully understand what was going on, but it must have hurt like hell and she must have been terribly lonely. The only women she could talk to were those she met briefly at work.
    The leader of the bitch pack was Dolly McClymont, a very large, big-bosomed woman who lived upstairs with her diminutive, skinny husband, Mac, and twin teenage daughters, Clarissa and Melissa. The entire family had blazing red hair, and none of them was supposed to speak to us, under strict orders from the dreaded Dolly, who would sweep by my mother with a disparaging sniff and her nose in the air in her down-at-the-heel white summer shoes. We got to know ‘them upstairs’ from what we heard through our ceiling. They, of course, would have learned about us by what passed up through their floorboards.
    In 1930, the McClymont twins were thirteen, nearly twice my age, but when they’d pass me in the front passage one of them would bump me aside with her hip or shoulder. ‘Oh, didn’t see you,’ she’d say with mock surprise. Then I’d hear them giggling as they went off down the front steps and into the street. When it was very cold, their pale Anglo-Saxon skin seemed to take on a bluish tinge. My mom would sometimes refer to Melissa and Clarissa as ‘them red-and-blue twins’. In summer they would turn red as a ripe tomato, burn, peel and blister.
    My mom’s colouring was just the opposite of the twins’; she was, in Cabbagetown terms, tainted by a ‘touch of the tarbrush’. It was probably her black