Blue Moon by James King Page B

my father would lament my mother’s pretensions. He especially did not like her invention of the mysterious Lady MacLean, his aunt, who had married a peer of the realm. Since my mother did not have a fantasy world into which she could tap when inebriated, she imagined herself as having married into a family that had risen in the world. Many were the stories I was told as a child about my great aunt. At various times, her long dead husband was an inventor, a physician rewarded with a baronetage because of his exemplary service to the Royals when they were in residence at Balmoral.
    Our neighbours in Hamilton—working-class Poles, Italians, and Irish—understood instinctively that my mother was mendacious, knowing full well that her anecdotes were a way of establishing some sort of dominion over them. As a result, my mother became an object of curiosity and of loathing. In effect, she segregated herself from everyone around her. In the process, she made me an outsider as well.
    In my mother’s view of the world, those born in any part of the United Kingdom and into any station of life there were inherently superior to those born in Canada. Soon after moving to Hamilton, she found her world-view in open conflict with the “natives.” She joined a circle of women who purchased Limoges blanks from France and then decorated and fired the various vases and plates in their own kilns. Those women, she soon discovered, were uppity. She dropped out of the group. Then Mother attempted to infiltrate The Wynn Rutty Radio Writers who wrote and performed plays on CHML. Quite soon—when her ideas about scripts were not readily received—she denounced Mrs. Rutty, Mrs. Pettit and Mrs. Fuller as prissy village tyrants, colonials unappreciative of the finer points of theatricals.
    Later, my mother would maintain I was queer, shunned by other children. But she was the cranky person who made me such. In fact, my mother had her own special way of reserving me exclusively for herself. If I became friendly, as I did, with Anita, three doors down, who was of German ancestry, my mother immediately became fixated on her racial origins. Like all Krauts and Huns, my friend was overly aggressive andwarlike. Helen, a year younger than I, was a Kike, who came from a race famous for money-lending and various kinds of opportunistic cheating. Little, adorable, red-haired Bernadette, whose family had emigrated from the Emerald Isle, came from a group of rabid opportunists who had invaded England and Scotland, bred like rabbits, believed in witchcraft and made the United Kingdom uninhabitable for respectable Scots. The worse offenders—probably because they were more numerous—were the “EYE-tal-ians,” slummy dark-featured people whose men were only interested in sex, whose women—after marriage—dressed in black for the simple purpose of annoying her.
    Together, my mother and father—themselves usually clad in blacks and greys—resembled those tiresome comedians, Laurel and Hardy. Like Oliver Hardy, my mother looked overstuffed, her natural expression was a smirk, and her good-humour could quickly convert itself into what it did a bad job concealing: the rage that consumed every fibre of her being. My short, delicate-looking father was the perfect foil to her, a full partner in the
folie à deux
that was their marriage. In a manner similar to Stan Laurel when he provoked his partner, my father was an expert in passive-aggressive behaviour: he would play dumb at the very moment he said or did something he knew would incite my mother’s anger. This would cause her to strike him, making her the perpetrator of spousal abuse.
    So imbued was my mother with the silver screen that she even once (my father had corrected her pronunciation of an obscure word) re-enacted the celebrated breakfast table sequence wherein James Cagney pressed a grapefruit into the face of his moll. In his turn, my father