Nelson Street

Illuatration by Liz Priddy

More than eighty years ago, the Howard family lived on Nelson Street in the centre of Ottawa, close to the university, in an area known as Sandy Hill. There were ten children in the family, not an uncommonly large number for the time. The firstborn, a girl, died of scarlet fever when she was six years old, and her mother, although she seldom spoke of the death, never forgot the day her first child died. At times throughout the years as she raised her other children, she would see her young daughter, perpetually six, sitting on the front porch looking out to the road, or standing at the top of the staircase as she herself mounted the steps after another tiring day. It was no surprise, then, that near the end of the mother’s life, when she was in her early seventies, delusional and ill, she saw this child dressed in the blue-and-white sundress she had been buried in, watching her from the end of the bed.

The last year that all nine Howard children, five boys and four girls, aged four to twenty-two, lived in the same house was 1920. The mother loved all her children, even the dwarfish second-eldest son, who had a mean spirit, fought with his brothers and sisters and was always dismissive of his parents. The road in front of their house was hardened mud and gravel, and during the summer, when the large windows were wide open, the sound of horses pulling carts and wagons could be heard through the high-ceilinged rooms. The pale light of early evening settled into these rooms and the upstairs hallways, stretching through the space in dusty bands. It was this large house with many windows, either open to the air or closed and reflecting the light, that the children remembered best years later, when they’d gone away—windows and the early-morning smell of the pale pink honeysuckle that lined the side yard.

On the first floor was a kitchen, where the mother spent many hours making meals or sitting by the fireplace mending. In the hottest weeks of July and August, the stove would be moved to the summer kitchen at the back of the house. The dining room was big enough to seat twenty, which it often did on Sundays, when the children brought friends home; across the hall was the living room, where the father read his paper in the evenings, and a den where he’d retire every working day after lunch for his noon nap. Because they were coaxed by their mother to be quiet during these nap periods, the children, who had a desire to please their mother—a kind woman who made each child feel special—came to regard their father as a nuisance.

This last year they all lived together, the girls, aged six to fifteen, sitting side by side at the dinner table, were distinguished by their size and the colour of hair that had been combed smooth down their backs—Margaret’s hair dark auburn, Rita’s blond, Dorothy’s red and June’s almost black, the same colour as her father’s. She was the youngest girl, the ninth child, born in the summer of 1914.

Each of the children at one time or another heard the story of how their mother and father had met. Usually it was from their mother as she was sewing or mending; she’d recount the day of their meeting without looking up, as if it were a song or poem long remembered and greatly valued. The mother’s family had been wealthy and lived in Westmount, in Montreal, where they owned a number of hotels. The father had been appointed manager of one of these hotels, and at Christmas he was invited to a dinner party at the home of his employer. The mother was twenty, but the father said he had only to see her once, to see the way she crossed the room, the sway...