Storm Orphan

Chapter One

“77 Plymbridge” is my password for all those internet accounts you have to create to purchase tickets, books, or register for bill payments. It’s an address embedded in my memory, like the words to a catchy commercial jingle from the past. Now you know my password and can perhaps find a way to access all my personal information. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to reveal all about myself anyway, so there will be little left to hack after this story is told.

77 Plymbridge is the address of the family home where I was born, raised, and given my name, Marsha Ellen Barrett. I lived there for almost two decades (minus a few tumultuous teenage years). A two-storey Cape Cod-style white house with real wood siding, black shutters, and a white picket fence, it was, on the outside, the image of a perfect middle-class suburban home. On the inside, life was not so perfect. The interior held rooms and hallways full of secrets, suicide, illness, and death.

Joy and laughter did exist but, as my father said once while we ate at The Steak Pit for our monthly barbecued rib dinner: “The happy times in life are like bursts of sunshine on mostly cloudy days.”

As I dipped my succulent rib in the barbecue sauce (we always ordered sauce on the side), I recall disagreeing with my father.

 “I think it’s the opposite, Daddy. Life is full of sunshine with some cloudy days in between.”

He sucked his teeth, removing the last bits of pork that remained lodged there, sighed, and wiped his thin mouth with the moist towelettes that came at the end of every meal. “You’re only twelve. Wait until you’re older and you’ll see life differently.”

 I didn’t respond at the time. The only sound I made was the sucking and gnawing of the last of my back ribs. It was a pleasurable goal of mine – still is – to remove every morsel of meat, gristle, or fat whenever I eat anything with a bone. Actually, it’s a family trait; my father and two older sisters, Connie and Wendy, clean bones this way as well. This became an excellent way of assessing any potential partners that my sisters were dating. We served chicken and then judged how well Connie or Wendy’s date cleaned their bones at dinner. Suitors who left chicken bones with enough fleshy meat to serve a family of four were quickly rejected.

Bone-cleaning similarities aside, when my father shared his pessimistic view of life, I didn’t agree with his philosophy. As a sixty-three year old adult, now eight years older than my father lived to be, I still don’t agree.

Our family home was built in the 1950s by my father and was located in what was known as Hoggs Hollow or “the Valley” in a suburb by York Mills and Yonge Street in Toronto. My friends Leigh, Valerie, Susan and I were valley girls long before it was coined as a name for wealthy teenagers in California. Nestled in a neighbourhood with mature trees and the meandering Don River in our backyard, the valley was a lush green setting far from the main streets, creating a rural oasis in the midst of North Toronto.

 My father, Gilbert (his friends called him Gil) didn’t physically build the house himself, but he purchased the land and had it professionally designed and constructed, so it was one of a kind. All the houses in the valley were created this way. There was no mass suburban plan for the valley so each unique home was constructed over time. Our house was built in the early days of the developing neighbourhood, and there was controversy over whether we could actually live there. No Jews allowed. My father had to fight the anti-Semitism that existed everywhere at that time. I suppose the Valley Neighbourhood Association had a vision of creating a WASP community but my father, an olive-skinned Jewish man, challenged that idea. Daddy was short, but his power and chutzpah belied his five-foot-six frame. He fought the Valley Neighbourhood Association and bulldozed his way into the wealthy white Christian enclave.

My life at 77 Plymbridge had many cloudy days and some stormy ones too. I understood my father’s perception that life was challenging.

I was six when my mother died of cervical cancer. It was a devastating loss that coloured every part of my world like black crayon scratch art. My mother, Elizabeth, called Betty by her friends, was diagnosed with cancer after I was born in 1957. It was her second bout with the disease. She had been in remission for five years until my birth. As a result, my birth and her death are etched in my mind as cause and effect. While rationally I know that I didn’t cause her death, the circumstances and timing of my birth were a contributing factor in how both Connie and Wendy saw their lives before I was born when “Mommy was healthy” and after I was born and she became sick.

“Everything was perfect in our family before you were born,” said Connie wistfully, one day when we were reminiscing as adults about our early family life.

Even though I was in my fifties by then, this comment she made so casually hurt me to my core. I know Connie’s intent wasn’t to hurt and she was likely thinking of her own pain at losing a mother when she was only fifteen years old.

My birth also came three years after Hurricane Hazel, the most famous storm in Canadian history, struck Southern Ontario. Although I was too young to have memories of Hazel myself, I do remember hearing adults reminisce about the hurricane and the devastation that impacted so many lives and communities. One story about little Nancy Thorpe struck a chord with me.

Nancy was a four-month-old baby who was the only survivor of a family from Island Road in Long Branch and was dubbed the “storm orphan.” As the hurricane wreaked havoc everywhere, a fire chief managed to get to the Thorpes’ home and retrieve Nancy from her mother’s arms. He carried the infant across the road to safety and then went back to assist the rest of the family. But when he returned, he discovered that the house had floated away.

I view myself as a storm orphan who has lived through a hurricane of family loss and pain. My house at 77 Plymbridge didn’t float away, but my family did.