said, “I noticed.” Then Lil: “I promise I won’t do it again, but if you tell Ma and Pop, I’ll tell them you’ve already been to second base.” There was a silence, then Bessie hissed, “I trusted you!” After that, all I heard was angry mumbling.
Bessie didn’t tell. At first, I thought she sympathized with Lil’s generosity, but then I thought no, she just didn’t want to explain to Ma why she’d gone three months without telling her she’d screwed up the count. It had to be that, because why would our parents care if she played baseball?
The next month, everything checked out perfectly.
As I BEGAN TO EXPLAIN, telling my family that I remembered Nurse Grace’s stories about the Orange Sunset had one consequence worth noting: it convinced my parents it might not be a complete waste of time to bring me on the planned outing that evening. Emma Goldman was in Toronto on tour, and everyone was going to hear her. Emma Goldman, the most dangerous woman in the world! By then, people already called her that, and I was curious to see what could be so scary. I didn’t know or even care that she never preached violence, that people who called her dangerous didn’t know a damn thing about her.
Normally, Emma lectured on controversial progressive subjects such as free love, by which she didn’t mean promiscuity—though she wasn’t opposed to that—but rather the freedom to love whomever you wished. In those days, when marriages were arranged contracts trapping either loveless couples or people for whom love had blossomed but then wilted, it was a radical notion to choose and change partners at will, just to follow the heart. In the early 1900s, she was also speaking out in favour of birth control, sexual and personal emancipation for women, and even, Ari has recently told me, homosexual rights.
In Toronto’s Jewish community, to go to hear her speak you didn’t need to be an anarchist sympathizer. She was a Jew and an infamous international celebrity. Besides, that night, her lecture topic was to be the playwright Henrik Ibsen and the modern drama, and what harm could there be in that? My parents packed us into the streetcar on that cold night in 1926 and took us to Hygeia Hall. We took seats near the back of the auditorium, near the police who were lined up and scribbling things in their notebooks.
Although I heard the lecture first-hand, it was a story Lil would tell and retell, always as if the talk had been the night before. It was hard, even for someone like me, to sift out what was authentically my memory from what was hers. Once, years later when Ari was only nine, we were over at Bessie and Abe’s, eating hors d’oeuvres in their living room, and Lil was telling the story. She took the opportunity, as she often did, to tease our older sister.
“Your grandma Bessie sat through the whole lecture with her arms crossed,” she said. “Everyone around her, including our father, was on the edge of his seat, but your grandma just sat there with a sour puss. Even your uncle Toshy appeared to be interested and he was only your age, Ari.”
Bessie dismissed Lil with a wave of the hand. “It was winter. It was cold in that hall, and the woman was preaching nonsense, as she always did.”
Lil shrugged. “That’s your opinion,” she said, and then Bessie said, “Yes it is,” and they both shrank into their corner of the sofa. There was a chilly silence until Susan changed the subject.
It was true that Emma was a magnificent speaker. Her voice was stern and commanding that night, and her eyes, through those spectacles, appeared to bore through you as they passed in your direction. Lil said her words came at her in waves: huge, powerful breakers soaked with significance. Emma spoke that night about Nora’s enlightenment in The Doll’s House. Nora left her husband, she explained, not because she was tired of wifely duty or because she was making a stand for women’s rights. She left because she’d lived for eight years with a stranger, borne him children, even, and what could be more humiliating than realizing that the person with whom you live in close proximity hasn’t the slightest interest in you?
The hall was packed and noisy, the air smoky, the crowd boisterous, and they challenged Emma’s ideas during the question period. Men and women pointed fingers and gesticulated wildly, standing on chairs to be heard. Emma’s responses were witty, quick, and playful, and she ultimately had us all entranced, even Bessie, though she would never admit it. Even me, though I was disappointed she hadn’t talked about blowing up buildings.
This tiny force of nature with round glasses and thick jowls was telling women they could be anything they wanted, that they had a right to be thought of as individuals, and this, Lil had never before considered.
“By her very example,” Lil would say, when she told the story, “by her hand slapping the lectern to emphasize the importance of her message, she was showing us that the key to liberation was to first free one’s mind.” Her eyes were still wide with wonder, all those years later.
I can only imagine what it must’ve been like for her after that night, to watch the women in our family, our mother and sister, and see only captives, chained to a predictable future and uninspired dreams. As Lil grew up and began to excel in school, it was inevitable that a chasm would open between them. Our parents were proud of her scholastic accomplishments, but they worried about her ambition. They were concerned by her impatience with injustice. Bessie tried to be an older sister the only way she knew how, to protect her and give advice, but Lil wasn’t receptive to Bessie’s conservatism and wasn’t good at hiding her feelings. Those feelings, a mixture of pity and superiority, were the perfect recipe for condescension.
When I arrived at Kingston Pen in July of 1935, I was stripped of my belongings and clothes, given a uniform, and taken into a small room that was painted green and had a long table against the far wall, a simple wooden chair in the centre, and four hanging lamps evenly spaced. Six people sat behind the table shuffling paper, barely acknowledging me as I was seated in front of them. The guard had told me before going in that this was the Classification Board, where they would be assessing my educational and occupational record and testing me for my mental stability and my physique. Also, they would try to determine if I was a recidivist.
I didn’t know the word recidivist then but the guard explained it meant you would return to your life of crime and sinfulness. How they’d be able to tell that from meeting someone for the first time and asking him a few questions, I didn’t know. I pictured a person cracking under the pressure, finally shouting, “Yes! Yes, I’d do it again. Again! Over and over again, I tell you!” and then throwing his head back with a maniacal laugh.
I sat down on my hands, hugging my arms close to my sides. The cotton uniform they’d given me was stiff and itchy and the room smelled of damp sweat and mould. The men behind the table introduced themselves one by one. The first was the warden for both Kingston and Collins Bay penitentiaries, Lieutenant Colonel Craig. He was a thin man of about fifty who scrunched a monocle in one eye. He had a friendly smile and didn’t look at all like a lieutenant colonel. Next to him was Mr. Fowler, a Brit with a bushy grey moustache who was the deputy warden. He was stockier than his boss, and he mostly stared at his notepad, even when it was his turn to ask me questions.
Next in line was the chief keeper of Collins Bay, a few miles down the road. Collins Bay was, in those days, a new prison, still under construction, though they had started to move inmates in already. The chief keeper’s name was Frank Flaherty, and his eyes set on me like hooks trying to rip out secrets. Flaherty had a scar running from his bulbous, ruddy nose, down over his left cheekbone, ending near a sharp chin. Beside him were the prison medical officer, Dr. Platt; the industrial overseer, Mr. Jagninski; and at the end of the table, Father MacDonald, the chaplain. These last three men were remarkably alike in their features—dull and symmetrical—and their hairstyles—short hair, middle parts, slicked back over the ears. They were all in their forties, I guessed. They wore different uniforms, though—the doctor, a white lab coat; the overseer, a dark blue shirt buttoned to the neck; and the chaplain, a black shirt and stiff clerical collar. The doctor wore round glasses and fiddled with the rims.
It occurred to me that if I were ever transferred to Collins