Horse meat stores were the craze for a brief time and Hal got caught up in the low prices.I dutifully cooked him steaks, chops and even liver, always using tongs to avoid contact. I wasn’t girl-horse crazy but they had such nice eyes so I stuck to scrambled eggs.
I also mastered meat loaf and pot roast and when we had enough chairs, we began inviting people for dinner on Sunday evenings, using the silver meat platter and covered silver vegetable dishes. It was tacitly agreed that horse meat would not be on the menu.
One flaw in our perfect little apartment was the regular- as- clockwork Sunday activities of the eight children upstairs. Those children lived exemplary lives from Monday to Saturday; in fact, we used to wonder if we had dreamed their existence. But not on Sundays. We knew where they were on Sundays.
This was the day that we could sleep in until dark if we wanted to, or that’s what we thought. Instead, at the first faint ray of dawn we were snapped awake to the beating of seven million wooden spoons on the door located squarely over our bed. Nothing kept those children from their favorite Sunday pastime and our only comfort was the knowledge that they would be dragged off to mass for one glorious hour.
Someday, we solemnly promised one another, we would have children who spoke only in whispers and knitted for recreation.
It occurred to me years later that their devout and bossy grandmother who lived next door might have considered it unseemly for us to remain indoors when the church bells were ringing. She probably egged on those children.
Three months after our September wedding I was pregnant and blissful with joy while Hal managed to hide his panic, wondering how we would cope on one small salary and no health insurance. Each morning I optimistically poached a breakfast egg, quickly lost it and trudged off to catch the streetcar for the one-hour ride to work, my hormones protecting me from serious worry.
Fleet Street slowly disappeared into the background as we coped with small exigencies of our new life. A more pressing notion was that life would be less expensive if we saved for a refrigerator and scrapped the second- hand wooden icebox we kept in an unlit storage area. The problem wasn’t just hauling the fifty pound block of ice from the ice house many blocks away without a car. Once we got it home one of us had to shine the flashlight into the icebox while the other, the one who wasn’t pregnant, eased it into place around the margarine and milk. This was usually the time that the stench invading our nostrils reminded us we’d forgotten about the fresh crab we bought two weeks before.
In late November we tried out the heat registers for the first time and found they were all card- carrying virgins. The spiteful coal furnace flatly refused to send warmth our way, and instead spewed its bounty to the sweltering closely packed family upstairs, forcing them to open doors and windows to keep breathing while we huddled below in layers of sweaters.
This was a mixed blessing of sorts because it gave us the incentive to move. Our options were slim; we could build a bomb shelter, which was gaining some attention in those days, but we settled for a move closer to the city centre, even though the rents were higher. Admittedly this was not particularly logical, now that we would soon be reduced to one salary. We would look for a place near a park to wheel the English pram I was borrowing from my sister-in law who was between babies at the time. And there had to be windows. We would seriously consider outdoor plumbing before we would do without windows ever again and that took care of any bomb shelter thoughts.
For seventy-five dollars a month rent we found a lovely little one- bedroom apartment in a converted mansion in the South Granville area, complete with fridge and stove.
On moving day we were dismayed to find that the odds and ends we had collected to furnish Stalactite Heaven were not going to fit.
The enchantment of hand painted tiles surrounding the working fireplace in the new living room distracted us from studying the actual size of the room. I’ve seen larger sentry huts. We advertised the extra oak table we had planned to cut down into a coffee table and a few other odds and ends that wouldn’t fit and netted enough to buy a tiny wardrobe-dresser, which squeezed into one of the two hall cubicles, and a bathinette that just fitted beside the bedroom closet door. Hal’s brother made the crib and it fitted in beside our bed with a couple of inches to spare.
I quit my job in my eighth month and we were managing despite the higher rent. Maternity benefits were available by this time but we reckoned that the baby was our responsibility and not that of the government, so I didn’t apply.
I felt like a duck, a fat duck and distracted myself by perching on a sturdy crate and painting baby-like fairies and animals on the crib and baby dresser.
My doctor had been around long enough to deliver me twenty-odd years ago and judging by reports through the family grapevine, his methods hadn’t changed in the intervening years. Luckily, just before my due date he retired and left me in the hands of much younger Obstetrician.
