Archive of Our Own

Summer, 1937

The last thing Liam said as they stood at the dock pending the parental departure of Rilla and Ken Ford was, 'Enjoy Europe!'

Anthony said, 'You needn't bring us anything back,' and grinned the grin of a cherub.

Sissy, childish still, said, 'Write lots! We want postcards!'

'And stamps!' said Anthony.

'And pictures,' said Jims, getting his arm around Sissy. 'But mostly, don't worry. We'll be absolutely fine.'

Mum began, once again to rattle off instructions; remember that Anthony had choir practice on Thursdays, Liam had ball practice on Mondays, Wednesday was Madrun's night off, his grandparents – the Ford ones, mind – lest Jims should somehow have forgotten this detail, were only over on Castle Frank…

'And the Aunts are at St George. And if we want anything, anything at all, we only have to get in touch. Madrun has Sundays off, too. You've said it all before.' Jims grinned at her, teeth flashing white in the June sunshine. He let go of Sissy and pulled Mum into a hug. She smelled, as she always did, of azalea. He kissed her cheek. Cap shook his hand, returned Anthony's cherubic grin with a roguish one and said, 'Lieutenant Jims won't lead them astray. Our resident cherubs are in expert hands, Rilla-my-Rilla.'

Mum gave a derisory snort, code for you and your sister are incorrigible, you really are, and they laughed. It was an old joke, the cherubs joke, but a good one. And then Mum hastened to say that she knew they would be all right, she really did, but even so…and ended by flourishing a handkerchief. It looked delicate, lacey and flyaway, there on the docks.

'Everything,' said Jims, 'will be absolutely fine.'

Oh, famous, idiotic last words.

In fairness, he'd said them before Toronto was consumed by polio. Before every walk to the park became a spontaneous funeral procession as they perforce took in the black wreaths and sombre parades of churchgoers. It was before the weird hush of the fever fell over the city, parks deserted and eerily quiet.

'I don't like it,' said Jims to Aunt Persis over flaky spinach pie and plump stuffed peppers at St. George street.

Aunt Persis was shortly to go abroad, all things going to plan, and they were farewelling her. They had flung the terrace windows open and below them people drifted somnolently by. There were fewer black wreaths at St George on account of it being so near the university, but even it wasn't immune; Jims had distinctly spotted one on the Polten door as they ascended the stair this evening. When he thought about it too hard it made the spinach pie, flaky pastry and all, solidify in his stomach in case somehow the black wreath was contagious, which was silly, but there it was.

'You could always get out of the city,' said Aunt Persis.

In the background Aunt Cass swapped out Lucy Isabelle Marsh's soprano – I Know that my Redeemer Liveth – for Thais. Massenet. Lovely. Jims felt himself relaxing in spite of himself directly the overture started. In his stomach, the pie unknotted. Going away was not a bad idea.

'With you, you mean?' he said. Aunt Persis laughed her wonderful, silvery laughter, matrilineal inheritance from her own mother.

'You could,' she said, 'but I think your mum might have a thing or twelve to say about abducting the lot of you to Africa, don't you think?'

It was unclear if this last was aimed at Jims, Aunt Cass or the other children more broadly. 

Cass took it as aimed at her, ad did not quite turn Persis-ward. 'You'd never here the end of that,' she said, and because there were Cherubs there, gracefully elided whatever endearment should have capped the sentence. He heard it anyway, felt it somewhere against the prickling of his neck, and remembered why he had come. Yes, they were farewelling Aunt Persis before Africa stole her for the summer. But here also, with the aunts, was safe. They were safe, and Jims was safe, and the cherubs were doubly safe.

'It strikes me, though,' said Aunt Persis, 'that you've got a whole lot of clannish Blythes, who would jump at the chance to pay fealty to you lot.'

'Oh,' said Jims. 'Right. Yes, I suppose we have.'

She was right, of course. Ingleside was mile upon glorious mile from the crisis ravaging Toronto. It did nothing to lessen the pang that came with the prospect of leaving the aunts. They'd been his anchor through so many crises. Safe. Come with us, he wanted to say, holding his hands out to Cass, who would not be in Africa, because if she came too then everybody would be, as he had said that day at the docks, absolutely fine. Perfectly safe. But that was childish, and Mum and Cap hadn't left him in charge on account of his innate childishness. That was the whole point. So Jims smiled at Aunt Persis there on the terrace, Hera tightrope-walking her way along the rail, and said it was an excellent idea, he should have thought of it, and Madrun would probably be glad of the holiday.

'Madrun?' said Cass, incredulous. 'Holiday? Aren't those two words antonymic or something?'

'Anthony and Madrun,' said Sissy from where she sat attempting to bate Hera the cat with a fern frond, 'are two entirely different people.'

'Of course they are, darling,' said Aunt Persis, and she, Cass and Jims traded little, secretive smiles in the rising twilight. Proof, Jims thought, that he now numbered among the ranks of the adults, because he understood words like antonymic and appreciated the incongruity of Madrun ever taking time off that wasn't her regulation Wednesday evening and Sunday entire. Reflexively he set his shoulders and reminded himself that with Mum and Cap away, he was the de facto adult in charge of their Maple St family, not the aunts. Safety was on him.

'You know what I mean,' he said. 'Madrun can visit her niece, or something. Look after someone not us.'

'That,' Cass said, 'sounds altogether more likely. She went to fetch lemonade, and muster the rest of the Ford army. Liam verily barrelled out onto the balcony, spooking and irritating Hera in all her tortoiseshell majesty, but Anthony dawdled, talking music with Cass, helping to make the lemonade. They came out singing together, Marching to Pretoria, him on the melody, her on the descant. Cass though, for all her good points, was that rare bird that should really sing contralto, even unmusical Jims could tell that much, and even the relatively low harmony of Pretoria eluded her.

'Swap you,' said Anthony with his cherub's grin.

'Gladly,' said Cass, so that they were laughing as she poured out the lemonade. Sing with me, I'll sing with you…Laughing and singing, Anthony's fine treble much better suited to the canonical harmonic line. Jims listened to them and had misgivings all over again about going away. Who would Anthony talk to? Who would play Thais as a tonic?

He placed the telephone call anyway, when they got back. Mostly he did it because he could swear more wreaths in their distinctive black had gone up between the trip out to St George St and their return. It made Jims nervous. He hummed the Thais meditation waiting for the call to go through. It wasn't as good as the real thing, the crackling of the recording in all the familiar places, but it was close enough.

'You're flat, Jims,' said Anthony, impish as ever, eyes laughing, but then the call connected and there was only time to swat him playfully on the shoulder. Little cherub. Anthony grinned. Down the line a groggy Grandfather Gil was saying 'Ingleside, Doctor's residence, how can I help?'

'It's about the polio,' said Jims, waving Anthony away. Mouthing, Go, get ready for bed, as he waited for his grandfather to process the information.

'There's ever so much of it going around,' lapsing, in spite of himself, into childishness now he had someone capable, an expert, to talk with.

'People keep getting and getting it – wreathes everywhere – and I don't know what I'd do if – '

'Of course you must come and stay,' said Grandfather, his voice warm and reassuring as any tonic. Except perhaps Thais. Massenet. Lovely. 'We'd love to have you. Will you be all right, travelling with your army of rascals?'

'Cherubs,' said Jims reflexively. 'Entirely different thing. And thanks, Grandad.'

'I'll take that as an affirmative then,' he said, and Jims could picture the way he said it, the Blythe smile that would follow this playful inquiry.

'Yeah,' said Jims. 'You can.' And because he'd learned nothing, 'We'll be absolutely fine.'

And they were. Well, they were on the train journey. Jims got them organised, bought the tickets and planned the connections. He'd have done the packing, but Madrun beat him to it, bustling about and muttering about how left to their own devices they'd show up with a shirt between the two wee boys and nary a sock between any of them, wild, unruly scallywags that they were. Cherubs indeed. No, Madrun would see to it that they had everything they needed. Anthony translated all this from the original Welsh with aplomb, all the while looking like the little Cherub Madrun disavowed him of being. He said it to them as they sat out on the terrace with the Aunts in the run up to their departure, and Jims laughed, because if the little Fords were unlikely cherubs, then Madrun, as it turned out, was the still less likely head of Guardian Angels everywhere. He should have known.

It was Lotte Lehman's Marschallin that night, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks – all of them, not Thais. It was still lovely, full of lyrical melodies, sweeping waltzes and soaring harmonies for female voice, but it wasn't the Meditation. It didn't matter because the aunts had done their bit of bolstering and reassuring for the summer. They played a lazy game of Lexiko, which Hera won in the usual way by trampling the pieces underfoot. They laughed and hugged one another goodnight in the gathering gloom.

'Keep in touch,' said the aunts. 'Let us know you've arrived safe.'

'Will do,' chorused Jims and the others. To Persis he said, 'And you too.'

'Of course,' she said. 'I'll send you lots of postcards with stamps. Cass will forward hers to you, too.' Anthony beamed. Sissy giggled. Jims thought how much he'd miss them.

They did arrive safe. The train journey, and the subsequent crossing by boat, was long but uneventful. They played endless and awkward games of dominos, the pieces sliding across and off the compartment table with each jolt of the train. Sissy and Jims, who mutually appreciated the puzzle aspect of it, threw up their hands early on and left the others to it. Anthony kept at it, stubborn, convinced he could outmanoeuver the train, as if it were a particularly tricky bit of sight-reading. Jims applauded his effort.

Then they were at the Glen St Mary train station, and the family was there to meet them; Grandfather Gil with the car, Grandmother Anne with her torrent of news and 'So happy to see yous.' Little Miss Abbey was there, leaping like a salmon, 'We thought you'd never ever come,' improbably doing Anthony one better in the italics department, which took some serious doing. It was lovely. Anthony descended upon the piano first thing and became very hard to separate from it. It wasn't the classical stuff he played for Aunt Cass, either, but popular music; Bring me Little Water, Sylvie, and Rock Island Line. Miss Abby joined in with the words, and suddenly sing-songs had become a staple of their evenings. Liam, meanwhile, had got hold of the great, outsized Bible that lived up on the Ingleside mantelpiece, between Gog and Magog – Jims shuddered to think just what acrobatics had been involved and how imperilled the beloved dogs had been – and dived head-first into a kinship study that the aunts would have heartily applauded. Jims didn't pretend to understand it. He clapped Liam on the shoulder and said, as Aunt Cass had said all those long-ago years, 'Rather you than me.' Liam beamed at him.

There was a puzzle stranded on the Ingleside coffee table that Jims strongly suspected the Inglesidean adults of stranding there on purpose, but that he and Sissy succumbed to anyway. The box depicted a flock of tropical parrots deep in some green, ferny wilderness, but this eye-popping image had been reduced to a veritable rainbow of fragmented pieces. They raced each other, hands flying, first to sort the colours, then to place them, crowing in triumph as pieces clicked into place. Ingleside rang with the improbable cries of 'I've found the cockatoo's head!'

And 'No, see, that's got to be a wing, not a fern, look here!'

'No, because if you fit it here, you get the tail, it's all wrong as the parrot's feet!'

Hector watched them placidly, and shook his head. Puzzles were not his forte. They weren't that of Dulce, resident dog of Ingleside, either, but she lay at their feet, dreaming blissful canine dreams of munching on puzzle pieces, but never actually going through with it.

Uncle Shirley and family came back from Scotland, and perforce dragged them all out of the house. The puzzle was completed by then, anyway, Hector and Abbey dutifully having coated it in a layer of glossy adhesive the better to hang it in perpetuity in the spare room that Jims and the little boys shared. Liam climbed the tree lovers, and Anthony swapped piano for banjo, but never actually stopped singing. It was the most time they'd ever spent with the Fox Corner Blythes by Jims's reckoning, and it wasn't terrible.

You were right, he wrote to Aunt Persis. It was just what we needed. If Sissy complained of a headache or three, well, that was what came of puzzle-solving without her glasses. Jims ribbed her about it, and she retaliated by swatting at him with them. He thought of the aunts on far-off summer afternoons and tickled her. And when she wasn't hungry, that one evening, well, who was, between picnics in Rainbow Valley, and snacks at all hours? Aunt Di teased her about spoiling her appetite and Jims joined in.

'What?' he said, scoffing, 'this cherub?' and the other Fords cackled with laughter. Ingleside didn't catch the joke, but that was okay, that wasn't their fault. They had never been to Toronto, land of Aunts, Asparagus Casting, and the Cherubicness or otherwise of the Anderson-Ford collective. Jims tempted Sissy with pudding, and she capitulated, nibbling delicately at Aunt Di's Orange Shape. The very picture of cherubic innocence.

Even when Sissy's arms ached, when she said they were shot through with pins and needles, Jims chalked it up to long days holding a fishing pole, or tree climbing, or any number of other things. And then he came into the library and caught the tail end of an urgent – no other word for it – call from Grandad to Dr Bruce Meredith, and that all changed.

'Is God dead?' he said, and tried to smile, because he was the de facto Ford adult and must not let on that the breath had been unceremoniously punched out of him by the urgency of that telephone call, the set even now of Granddad's mouth. Jims watched him trying and failing to answer, and couldn't joke any more.

'It's your poliomyelitis, isn't it?' he said, feeling suddenly, horribly, young. Then, because the silence was deafening, awful, 'Is it very bad?'

He wanted Mum desperately. And the Aunts. Anything to not be in charge of this terrible, horrible thing that had happened. He wasn't old enough, he thought, to bargain with God, explain that Sissy wasn't actually supposed to become a cherub. Didn't He grasp that? That it was all in good, irreverent fun? But it was all right. Other people got over the polio. Sissy would get over the polio. She had to; Grandfather Gil was looking after her and Aunt Persis had sworn to him once that Grandad would never willingly let Jims's family die. Jims didn't know how to say this, standing there in Grandad's study, the telephone a monstrous and evil thing between them. It had betrayed the severity of this thing that had got hold of Sissy and that wasn't allowed. If only it was God that was dead after all, and not Sissy, there in her little holiday room with poliomyelitis.

Jims couldn't stand there in the library. Not with Grandad looking drawn and tired like that. He wanted to be able to go to pieces, and he couldn't as long as Grandad was looking at him like that, because he was the de facto Ford adult in this situation. Very deliberately, without running or racing, he went down to Rainbow Valley into a shady, ferny place Mum had pointed out once as her favourite corner of the valley. I used to go there during the war, she had said. I felt I could let myself go there. It was cool for a July evening, and the little corner smelled of baked earth and musky ferns. Jims lay down in its seclusion and sobbed, because the Aunts were away and he needed them, because Sissy was unwell and he couldn't do anything, and because for all Aunt Persis's best efforts, she had never quite succeeded at mustering in Jims an unwavering faith in Grandad.

We'll be absolutely fine, he had said to Mum in a fit of naivety. Why had he said it, tempted fate so horribly? He tried to compose a telegram to her mentally, Sissy ill Stop Come at once Stop, and cried harder, because it meant he had failed her, and spoiled her holiday, and let them all down into the bargain. Then he stood up, grasped his nettles and marched back to Ingleside.

Grandad, Bruce Meredith and Alice Caldicot, district nurse were conferring at the kitchen table. They stopped dead as Jims came into the room. This would never do.

'Well?' he said, 'how bad is it?' And to the ever-expanding elastic of silence, 'Look, I've got to write and tell Mum something. So how bad is it? Do I say come at once your baby is dying, or do I tell her it's all in hand, not to worry, will keep her updated, etc, etc.?' He felt a bit bad about it, afterwards, as if he had taken a sledgehammer to a situation that called only for a carefully manipulated bobby pin. On the other hand, his nerves were shot and maybe Sissy was dying and they had the gall to try and baby him about it; him, the de facto adult for the house of Ford. Nurse Caldicot seemed to get it.

'I think it's closer to that last one,' she said. Jims could have kissed her. Instead he rattled off a telegram to Mum and Cap, who he estimated to be even now in France surveying the Vimy Ridge memorial. Sissy Ill Stop In good hands Stop All Under Control Stop Will Let You Know Soonest If Any Change Stop.

It got into Sissy's lungs. It wasn't supposed to get into Sissy's lungs. It hurt to hear her breathe. She rasped and wheezed as Jims sat up with her, and he began to panic that she couldn't breathe. He thought about asking Anthony, who knew all about breathing because of the choir practices on Thursdays and his singing lessons, but that wasn't right. Anthony was…well, he wasn't exactly a baby, but he wasn't a grown up, either. Jims thought about the aunts, about the care they'd had of him, and even of Madrun in her determination that he should not, absolutely not learn to cook, not as he'd supposed, because he was a boy, but because he was only fourteen and shouldn't have had to worry about Mum dying of a baby or who would do the cooking if she did. It was touching, in hindsight, and Anthony deserved the same care. So he couldn't ask Anthony. He dared to leave Sissy where she gasped and rasped in her little spare room, and went to summon Grandad. Infallible or not, he was the best Jims had.

He sent Sissy to the hospital. So Jims went also to the hospital and wired that to Mum, wondering how he would ever look her in the eye again. He couldn't bear to go into details. He did not write Sissy In Iron Lung Stop Makes Horrible Noise Stop She Looks Smaller Than Ever Lying In It Stop Stop STOP. It would have been an expensive telegram, but that wasn't really the issue. It was true, and that somehow made it worse. He listened to the terrible, awful machine whirring and clicking away, and bottled his tears until he was back from Kingsport and cocooned in the wonderful, ferny seclusion of his own particular corner in Rainbow Valley and that had once been beloved of his mother.

Then he went back to the hospital and resumed vigil. They drew up a sort of unofficial rota, Jims and the grandparents, of who would sit with her versus who fetched the tea. Periodically they broke out of it to remind one another they should eat.

'It's my fault,' said Jims, meaning it. 'I should have taken better care of them.'

Grandmother Anne had gone for tea, or he probably wouldn't have said it. It would have hurt her to hear it, and Jims didn't want to hurt her. He thought he'd probably done enough of hurting people, what with telegramming Mums about Sissy in the first place.

'I should have told you to take them somewhere that didn't have polio,' said Grandad.

And even though this was unreasonable, even though Jims was pretty sure everywhere had polio, he felt it to be true, anyway. His grandfather should have known, anticipated that this would happen. It wasn't fair, but then, nothing about this was fair. Sissy wasn't even ten, for God's sake. She was supposed to go gaily through life, outdoing Jims at puzzles and teaming up with him to demand someone install a gas ring in the Ingleside kitchen. Instead of which she was lying in a metal monstrosity, unable even to breathe for herself, and it was Jims's fault for failing her and Grandad's for not predicting the future, because he was old enough that he should really be able to do that sort of thing.

Jims got up stiffly. He said, 'I'll go help Grandmother with the tea.'

Grandad let him go, forbearing to comment on the weakness of hospital tea and how ineffectual it was as a panacea.

But Jims couldn't face Grandmother either, somehow. He chalked it up to the watery look she always had in the hospital, as if always half-afraid Sissy would really die. And Jims loved her, he did but he hated her for daring to imagine that terrible, unbearable outcome. Hated her for even thinking it. Sissy was going to stay in the world come hell or high water, even if Jims had to murder God to guarantee it. So he left Grandmother to wrestle with the weak tea and her watery look and placed a telephone call to St George St.

Persis answered. Jims said, caught off-guard, 'Aren't you supposed to be abroad?'

'The trip was postponed. Something about difficulty getting the papers. And hello to you to.'

'Sorry,' said Jims. Then, because if he kept on bottling feelings he would choke on them, 'Sissy's in hospital with that polio that's been going around.'

'Why,' said Persis, 'in the name of God, didn't you lead with that?' It was so utterly, completely Aunt Persis that Jims broke down and began to cry there in the telephone nook of the Charlottetown Hospital. No doubt he got some odd looks for it, but it was a hospital, and honestly, what did people expect? Aunt Persis only made comiseratory noises over the phone.

'It's going to be all right,' she said, and if Jims lacked faith in his grandfather, he had it in spades for the Aunts. 'You stay right where you are,' she said. 'We'll come to you.'

He began to cry all over again, because the aunts were coming, and they would look after him, and Sissy and he wouldn't have to be brave and adult any more. Aunt Cass took over the phone, and now she made the gentle, comiseratory noises until the operator threatened to, and then finally did cut them off. But it was all all right, because the aunts were coming.

Jims tried to stay up and wait for them. He sat by Sissy's bed and read to her, first Captain Salt in Oz, but it wasn't long enough, so he eschewed children's books and started on Gone with the Wind. It wasn't to either of their literary tastes, but it was a brick, and needs must. Only even that wasn't long enough, so he switched in desperation to Ballet Shoes, but was so offended on Sissy's behalf that he couldn't bring himself to finish it and swapped over to Sweet William 25 pages in.

Then the aunts were there. The first Jims heard of them he was sitting, scuffing his shoes against a vacant chair in the waiting room, watching through the glass as Grandmother smoothed Sissy's hair and read aloud from some book of poetry or other. He wanted to tell her Sissy hated poetry the same as he did. He was going to tell her and damn manners, consequences and all the rest, when an arm wrapped around him and pulled him close. It angled Jims' head against its broad shoulder and Jims felt the vibrations of a hum. He was overtired, underfed and sick to death of weak hospital tea, but he'd have known it anywhere.

'Thais,' he said, and tried to muster a smile. 'Massenet. Lovely.'

'Isn't it just,' said Aunt Persis and sat down on his other side.

She made the grandparents go home, first off. Or Cass did. One of them, anyway. They wanted Jims to go to, but he was terrified of leaving Sissy. Terrified she'd die in that awful metal thing that rattled, clicked and clanked, and that Sissy would never see him again, not knowing how terribly sorry he was that he had failed her so monumentally. Anyway, no one argued. Even Aunt Cass capitulated when he set his shoulders and gritted his teeth, and refused.

'All right,' she said, and resumed humming Thais. Massenet. Lovely.

They joined in the tea rota, and the griping over that terrible, ubiquitous ditto that was such an inexplicable hospital staple. Jims made the mistake of observing on it days into their arrival, and Cass resumed their original argument.

'Go back to the house,' she said. 'Eat something else. You need it. Sleep.'

'I can't leave Sissy,' said Jims.

'You will be absolutely no good to her,' said Aunt Persis, 'if you die on our watch, all malnourished and sleep deprived. What would we tell her? Or your mother come to that?'

Jims shrugged. Thought about saying it might be worth it if it got Sissy through this mess. He resolved that if God let her live, he would read nothing but Ballet Shoes ever again, in gratitude to God and the imperfect hospital library. 

''You see?' said Aunt Persis, 'definitely sleep deprived,' which was how Jims knew he'd made this divine bargain aloud.

'We'll ring you if anything changes,' said Aunt Persis.

'And if it doesn't, you can come right back in a couple of days.'

Jims felt himself acquiescing. He was tired, his eyes ached and he'd forgotten the taste of real-world food. 'Tell her I'll be back soon, yeah?'

The aunts promised that they would.

There was a telegram at Ingleside with an arrival date for Mum and Cap. Jims supposed he should have expected this, but it made it all more real, somehow. If they were coming back then it was every bit as real as he thought and not the everlasting nightmare he'd only hoped it was. He braced himself for their arrival. They were going direct to Charlottetown, as per the telegram, so he went directly back himself and negotiated a hotel room for them somewhere nice and near the hospital. And if Cass wanted him to sleep, well, he'd just take up residence on the floor of the room she and Aunt Persis had nearby, that was all, lie on the rug between the prim twin beds. It wasn't as if he expected to sleep, anyway.

Then Mum was there, and Cap too, armed with trunks and tokens and all the things one brought back from a journey abroad. It was September by then and autumn cool. Little eddies of leaves whipped around their feet as they stood on the docks. Jims didn't like to be there; it reminded him how much time had actually passed in the world outside Charlottetown Hospital. If they stayed much longer – and they must stay, they couldn't leave Sissy – someone would have to sign the cherubs up for the local school. But the joke didn't make Jims smile any more. He paid off the porter and gave the hotel address to a waiting cab while Cap took charge of their cases. A previous Jims, the Jims of June would have felt terribly grown-up over all this. Present Jims was holding himself together with a shoestring and his fingertips.

Cap had brought gifts, as per Anthony's non-request. You don't have to bring us anything back– how long ago had Anthony said that? It felt like years. There were the usual things; special issue stamps from Royal Mail, a puzzle depicting Café Terrace at Night that for all its European sophistication put Jims in mind of those summer evenings on the St George St terrace and thus propelled him forward to tears. He set the puzzle aside for the afterwards in which Sissy was well. There was a thimble for Madrun's collection in some posh china pattern, prints for the aunts – well, Persis, Jims supposed, but it came to the same thing – and the crowning glory, a little, unasuming book in green by an unknown writer. It had the most gorgeous cover of blue and black mountains, and was just the right size to fit comfortably in one's jacket pocket.

'I thought,' said Cap, with an alarming catch in his voice, 'we could read it after dinner, you know, before bed. Like in the old days.'

He wound up reading it at the Charlottetown Hospital to an accompaniment of the clicking, clanking lung. Jims watched Mum watching him there with the book and little Sissy, her dark head just visible over the collar of the machine, and wanted to cry.

'I'm so sorry,' he said to her when the grandparents had returned to Ingleside and the aunts were fetching tea. 'It's all my fault.'

Mum's hand was cool against his cheek. She smoothed it in that way peculiar to mothers everywhere and said, 'Darling boy, it's never your fault.'

'But it is!' said Jims. 'You went away and trusted me with them and – and look!' He couldn't bring himself to be more articulate. He began to cry. Hot tears bubbled up in his eyes, but unaccountably never got further, because Mum blotted at them, first with her thumb and then with that impossibly fly-away handkerchief of hers, the one with the lacey edge. It smelled of azaleas, of Mum.

'Darling boy,' she said, 'that's not your fault. Did no one ever tell you about that terrible snowstorm we had in 1917, how Dad – your grandad – was stranded and Susan and I nearly killed you not knowing how to cure Diphtheria Croup?'

'No,' said Jims, tears startled into suppression. He blinked incredulously at Mum. Mum who knew everything about babies, had written the book on them, practically. And she hadn't known how to cure him? Of Diphtheria Croup? The thing was incredible; he recalled distinctly that she had saved the youngest McLellan baby over at Rosedale Presbyterian of exactly this. Had left the sewing circle by all accounts, directly when Joyce McLellan had mentioned it, and worked what the Rosedale women had been convinced was nothing short of a miracle. It had kept them in Coffee Hour conversation for weeks. And obviously Jims hadn't died, because he was even now stood in front of Mum wringing his hands while Sissy lay like a pearl in an oyster under the weight of that monumental machine, letting it breath for her. Click. Rattle. Clank. Rattle. Clank. Click.

'Come along,' said Mum. 'Let's find something to eat that isn't Ditto and I'll tell you all about how Mary Vance burst into Ingleside and saved your life when I couldn't. Frankly,' as she snugged her arm against his – as if they were going to a grand opera and not some nearby café – 'I can't believe she hasn't told you before now. Mary never gets tired of her turn as Unsolicited Saviour of War Babies.'

Jims smiled in spite of himself. Breathed in the heady azalea smell of Mum's perfume. Whatever God had invented mothers for, he knew what he was about when he invented them.