Almost a Great Escape Read online

  The truck came into our nothingness a few days later, and you and I stand in the yard while a crippled cowboy in a hat worn through the crease unloads a brown mare.

  You write the cheque and he hands me the lead rope. What’s her name? No name.

  The rope and halter always go with the horse he says before driving out of our nowhere.

  Tyler’s First Saddle. Alice surprised Tyler on his seventh birthday at Old Canmore, telling his friends to distract him before leading his horse out with a new saddle.

  Photo courtesy of the author.

  I look and you say yes. You have bought me a horse of my own. So I could ride anytime. So I could ride anywhere. Anytime. You gave me this. You gave me the mountains and trees and grass and the rising sun and the setting sun. You gave it all to me. A life of my own. I could go anywhere do anything. There is no forgetting the most wonderful yes you ever said. We named her Dolly and she always brought me home.

  Don’t tell me you are forever locked in the memorial bronze of yesterday. Let my stories be my horse for you. I’ll ride Dolly and we’ll go everywhere. Anytime.

  You showed me how to say yes when that crippled cowboy unloads eternity. That’s how much you loved me.

  AN UNCLE JOHN STORY

  A FAMILY OF SHOW-OFFS

  Your birthday again and I’m at Eden Brook for another suitcase visit, this one to tell you I went last week to Montreal to talk to your brother, my Uncle John.

  My trip to Montreal will take awhile to explain. When you chose morphine in the Rockyview Hospital, I brought you my first novel, The Story of Blue Eye. You smiled with wandering eyes. I signed a copy for you. To Alice, who taught me how to read, write and ride. Love Tyler. Where did that copy go? Randy sat by your bed and read excerpts. After the funeral I reread your notes on my first manuscript. Your review. What fun. A mother reviewing her son’s book. No wonder you smiled. Your funeral was the day after the book launch. Later that year, Blue Eye was nominated for a prize and the finalists were flown to Ottawa. Dad, hoping for gold stars, phoned Uncle John in Montreal. Nobody from the family here is going. Will you? Yes, I will drive to Ottawa. That’s where I met John Tyler.

  I wonder why you never told me about the Tylers. Another family of strangers. Names mentioned in passing. Big Marjorie. Father Bert. Their children: Little Marjorie born 1921, Alice 1924, Joan 1925, John 1926. All dead now but John. I remember a few years ago you telling me they found Little Marjorie in a hotel apartment. Dead. Who was she? A half-sister you said. I should have asked more questions. Your blue eyes stopped me.

  I could have passed Uncle John age 79 on the street and not recognized him.

  You named me after him, John Tyler, and called me Tyler. Odd to think I know so little about my namesake.

  I brought copies of Your Jens letters to Ottawa. I wanted you there. Uncle John and I chat like airport acquaintances. A nephew and his uncle? He has your familiarity with the crowded gate into AA hell. And the lonely path to redemption. A life traveller in recovery.

  He only remembers I liked to ski fast. Long ago. He knows nothing else about me. A writer? That’s a surprise to him. A book about the Blackfoot? he asks. Yes. We sit on a couch outside the awards ceremony. He says the crowd inside looks very bookish. Not his type. I like him. I’m not bookish either. He sees through people just like you do. Same challenge in his voice. Don’t try to get away with anything. He’s bored when the ceremony begins. He’s bored while the MC reads the list of finalists and bored while authors read passages from their books. Not real life.

  After the awards and handshaking (Blue Eye didn’t win) he says he has something important to tell me. A family secret about my great-grandmother, Eva Flanagan, Big Marjorie’s mother.

  A strange time for this, I think.

  Eva lived with the Mohawk on the Kahnawake Reserve, he tells me. Maybe that’s why you wrote that book about Indians. Did Alice tell you where Eva lived? he asks, and I remember her saying something about her but I wasn’t paying attention. It was at the Kellys I remember now in my dishabille suitcase of memories.

  It was a slap in the face to our mother, he says. She kept it a secret. I was the only one who visited Eva. Nobody could stop me.

  What secrets the Tyler family have. You loved secrets.

  I ask about Jens. A Norwegian, he recalls vaguely. A good skier. (Uncle John’s kind of real life accomplishment.) Did you know Alice and Jens were engaged? Impossible, he says. Never would have happened. But like you he catches on quickly. He knows there’s more to this story. Not bookish stuff. He’s in­terested.

  Tell me about my mother.

  Suddenly he wants to drive back to Montreal. It is getting late. There will be traffic. No time to tell you about Alice.

  We’ll talk another time, he promises as he leaves. I sign a book for him. A book about Indians. I wonder if he will read it. He knows more but isn’t telling. Yet.

  I phone from Calgary. He doesn’t say much but he doesn’t say he won’t help me. I know he doesn’t trust me. But not the why of that. By September I have saved enough for a ticket to Montreal and I’m going to see him. He’s going to show me Westmount where you lived. Westmount High School. The Alpine Inn. The Tyler family graves. It’s a start.

  I arrive in a blizzard. He drives with your disregard for the expectation of stop signs and red lights. Hang on. We’re going!

  Dinner. Then I show him photocopies of the Jens and Alice letters and photo­graphs. They were in love, I tell him.

  While he reads, I browse a Tyler family photo album. Not much to see, he warns. Hazel our stepmother took everything when Bert our father died. Hazel the stepmother? It is going to take awhile to sort out these names so I just flip the pages of the album. John Tyler the athlete. Ski team. Hockey team. Could have any girl I guess. Thick dark hair. Portraits of Beautiful Joan. Beautiful Alice. John and Big Marjorie. Little Marjorie. Uncle Ivan. Father Albert. An Albert Edward. An Albert John. No Flanagans. No Eva.

  I guess it’s true, Uncle John says after he’s read Jens’s letters. But marriage? No. It never would have happened. Alice never would have married him.

  He’s so sure.

  Maybe I missed something. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

  For three days Uncle John drives me around Montreal and the Laurentians. I photograph schools, city homes, summer homes, graves, golf courses, hotels, rivers, and all the while Uncle John slips me pieces of the story. Nobody knows where Eva’s buried. Nobody cares.

  At first I wonder why he just doesn’t start at the beginning and tell it all. Then I realize he too is coming to an understanding. To seeing how extraordinary the Tyler lives were. I make notes twisting arrows across pages to connect names and places. Asterisks. A puzzle of broken threads. I am interpreting chaos.

  When Alice was 14 she was already going on 18, Uncle John says. She was way ahead of everybody. He laughs and his eyes are yours, even bluer perhaps. She always had older boyfriends. The O’Brien brothers — Bill and Stuart — Gerry Dakin, Les McClarren, Charles Ronalds, Peter Holt. Some serious. Some to play tennis. She was good at tennis.

  “My father’s textile business was a bonanza. He started Standard Cottons after he graduated from McGill. His partner was a chartered accountant.They did very well!”

  “Very well” is one of Uncle John’s favourite expressions. When he uses it, he raises his hands palms out and presses them down slowly in time with his very well. It means that somebody is doing so well that there is no point in even asking how well. Just accept it. Don’t ask. I recognize that look.

  Uncle John tells me: Big Marjorie — Alice’s mother — came to Montreal from Malone in New York State. She was divorced and already had one daughter, Little Marjorie. Three years old. Bert — Alice’s father — didn’t have it easy, his family and friends snubbed Big Marjorie because she was divorced and had a child. She never forgave them or any of the other society families who looked down on her.

  Big Marjorie and Bert are married in
1924. There is always something wrong with Little Marjorie. Unstable, they say. Nervy. The three beautiful children follow quickly.

  Bert and Big Marjorie buy a home at 588 Lansdowne Avenue in West­mount — the white only no French no Jews wealthy enclave of Montreal. Maybe Catholic but better to be Anglican. This home is just the start for Big Marjorie. The top of the hill is her aspiration. The mansion at 3803 Westmount Boulevard. The most prominent location.

  Big Marjorie is obsessive. Uncle John says she has only one ambition — to stand on the top of Westmount Boulevard and piss down on the people who insulted her when she arrived in Montreal. Not a Canadian Literature image Uncle John.

  Her plan begins with raising Alice and Joan as society debutantes. Marry them into the right families and the Tylers will move into high society. Alice and Joan are sent to Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s finishing school. There are balls, dinners, coming out parties. High school is all the education a debutante needs to get a husband.

  And where was the best place for Big Marjorie’s daughters to meet the right men? The Alpine Inn. Owned by the fast moving big money Tyler family. Right in the centre of the Laurentians where the sons and daughters of Westmount’s wealthiest families ski play tennis golf and ride horses in preparation for idle lives devoted to spending the interest compounding in grandfather’s trust account.

  The Tylers build a private lake, summer and winter homes for themselves and their children, guest cottages and stables. Uncle John points them out to me.

  I ask about Pierre Trudeau. He was older than Alice, he answers. But they knew each other. She had the brains in our family and was good-looking. She skied. Of course he would know her.

  The Show-Off Life. Big Marjorie and Bert Tyler presided at the Alpine Inn’s “Wings Over Canada” wartime horse show with the Governor General, the Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice (in uniforms).

  Photo courtesy of the author; public domain.

  “We lived a very big life. Our parents were show-offs,” he says, getting back to the family’s grand life.

  I don’t mention the irony of Alice’s show-off Country Club exit. What genealogical tragedy families emulate.

  “The Tylers didn’t just go to horse shows,” he says. “The Tylers had their own horse shows.”

  He says all this palms down, so I don’t argue with him. A Very Big Life. I admit I didn’t really believe him until I find the Alpine Inn Horse Show programs and newspaper photos of the Governor General of Canada, the Earl of Athlone, presiding over the prize giving. Can you guess who is with him? His wife, Princess Alice! Did you introduce yourself? I also find a newspaper clipping with photos of Joan and her horse doing very well on the show circuit.

  The Alpine Inn had everything: rustic log walls varnished and polished, stone fireplace, 50 rooms, a mezzanine dining room, bar, games rooms, ski shop, beauty salon, tennis courts, stables, guest houses, swimming pool, and a bathhouse.

  And the Tyler children were the Inn’s royal family. The best of everything. Horses, skis, tennis racquets, cars. Everything.

  Uncle John hands me a summary of Alice’s Westmount life that he has written. He wants to help and I thank him. Meaning it.

  Alice was a poet and writer. She would have loved to be able to be an author. She wrote some poems and many short stories.

  Alice was a clever girl and did extremely well in school. She got the acting bug in high school — not unlike Hollywood hopefuls. She was always a very dramatic person. In actual fact this was true to the end of her life. In many ways she was a perfect fit for acting. Very beautiful, great figure, and extra smart way beyond her years. She did some summer theatre with her good friend Betty Goodfellow. They were really never good but it was a lot of fun. And a great way to meet men.

  Alice loved men and men loved her. Certainly she was a flirt in many ways. She was never promiscuous.

  Alice was beautiful, but alas her sister Joan was more beautiful. Hard for a girl like Alice to swallow but Joan was known as the most beautiful girl in Montreal. Not only that, Joan was a much better athlete. Joan went on to ski for the Canadian National Ski Team. Besides that, Joan was a talented horseback rider and a member of the Quebec Swim team.

  Although Joan was younger than Alice she was also no slouch when it came to men.

  The Social Scene: Here’s a clipping you kept, and now I am keeping for us in Alice’s Suitcase. It’s a reminder to me that John’s story may have sounded like an exaggeration, but it wasn’t. It also tells me that despite your rivalry with Joan you could still be proud of her. The article, with photo, describes her as the beautiful Penguin Club racing star and one of the leading contenders for a place on the Eastern Canada Women’s Team that will compete at Lake Placid. To me, the clipping says more about what you chose to keep than it does about Joan’s skiing.

  Two of the Beautiful Tylers. Alice’s brother and sister, Joan and John, had everything: formidable athletic ability, good looks, money, and friends.

  Photo courtesy of the author.

  Uncle John’s summary continues:

  Alice had several girlfriends mostly from high school but none of them close. Betty Goodfellow was one. But the truth was Alice was not a girly-girl. She preferred men. She wasn’t close to her mother or her sisters. She dearly loved her father . . . and her brother John.

  She loved to dress well and she truly loved coming from a well-to-do family. Maybe she got that from her mother. Once her mother had money, expense was no object. Her mother didn’t hesitate to spend money on her girls. She ran up huge charge accounts at Morgan’s Department Store.

  Maybe the Tyler children were spoiled, but they all had a good life and enjoyed it to the last.

  I fold Uncle John’s pages, noting how Big Marjorie encouraged the rivalry between her daughters. The winner would be the girl who made the best marriage. Money. Social Position. Approved by Big Marjorie. Her plan.

  Uncle John phones Betty Goodfellow. We drive there in the morning for coffee. She’s a watercolourist. An artist. A friend to Alice the planning to be writer. As we’re talking 1940s Montreal society, Betty politely reminds me that she and John are my godparents.

  Now I remember. Betty was the friend who sent you those exquisitely painted Christmas cards each year. One of her cards is in your Eden Brook suitcase. Bundles of her letters. Betty kept most of your letters. You were a wonderful writer, she says. She kept everything. Even your Christmas cards. Beautifully written.

  I cannot help smiling when Betty mentions your Christmas cards. Signed in stories that carried onto the back page. I’d watch you at your glass front desk thinking of the addressee then begin to write. Those card wrapped paragraphs still float inside faraway dresser drawers hidden in wonder. Betty remembers them so vividly. Often people tell me they kept your notes and cards.

  At first Betty is positive the Jens and Alice engagement isn’t true. Alice never mentioned Jens to her. She would have: We were close friends. We talked about . . . everything! Not a word in her letters. All her life she wrote me about . . . everything.

  I show Betty the letters from Jens. And the photos. She doesn’t recognize him. She is a careful and practical thinker. She thinks before saying Alice would never have married somebody like Jens. Besides, it wasn’t like Alice to keep a secret of that kind. I was her best friend in Montreal. She would have told me.

  Nobody in the family knew, John adds.

  I tell them she had once told me she was in love with a pilot. She was drinking. I didn’t pay attention. I should have.

  Betty frowns then hesitates. She did confide there had been somebody else. It could have been Jens. She didn’t tell me who it was. Your mother was a difficult person. Betty says that nicely and I don’t need more explanation. I knew Alice’s alcoholic flashpoint.

  Nobody speaks for a long moment. Then Betty glances at John and back to me. “I remember when your mother got engaged to Ted. She thought her life was going to be wonderful. I told her Ted won’t be goo
d for her. She wouldn’t listen.”

  She shakes her head, no, when I ask why she thought Ted would be no good for Alice. “I don’t want to say any more about that.”

  More secrets, I say to myself. Betty is observant. She must have seen or heard something and now she wishes she had told Alice.

  Why are you so sure that Alice would not have married Jens? I ask.

  Betty lists the reasons on her fingers. In Westmount you chose a man who was:

  1) Anglican, or at least a Protestant denomination (Catholic a desperate choice. A status-based system rather than theological),

  2) Of British background (American second choice),

  3) Educated (university),

  4) Had good prospects (family money or a good job), and

  5) Not likely to be killed in the war.

  Those were the rules in 1940s Westmount Society.

  A mother didn’t choose a Jens Müller for her daughter to marry.

  And if anybody asked the Tyler family about Grandmother Eva, they said she was still living in Malone, New York. None of them knew that old woman living with the Indians on the Kahnawake Reserve. No relation.

  It is not until I am landing in Calgary that I wonder, Where did all the Tyler money go?

  AN ALICE AND JENS STORY

  THE ALPINE INN

  At Eden Brook, I am drowsy in the sun. Beside you on the grass my arm over my eyes. I begin to see the too late story of your marlin.

  It is December 26, 1940. Jens’s first Christmas away from his family. The pilots drove all last night from Little Norway to St. Marguerite’s, determined to be skiing as soon as the hill opens. They are staying at the Alpine Inn. He meets Alice in the ski shop. He is buying ski wax when she says, “The red will be the fastest. In an hour the sun will warm the snow and the red will be just right. That is, if you like to go fast.”

  He nods. “Yes. I like that.” Her blue eyes dare him. She tells him where to find the steepest runs. She offers to show him around. They agree to meet for lunch and ski together in the afternoon.