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...On the morning of Oct. 26, 1944, Frank Beazley
went to empty Gertrude Henn’s chamber pot, one of
his chores before leaving for school. The boy opened his
foster mother’s door. Gertrude lay motionless on her
bed. Frank thought she was sleeping until he noticed that
she was not breathing.
...He called to Ronnie, the
older of Gertrude’s adopted sons.
...Your mother’s not
moving, said Frank, who was 15.
...What are you talking about?
...Your mother — she
won’t wake up.
...Ronnie telephoned a doctor,
who pronounced the woman dead when he arrived at the house.
A heart attack, perhaps precipitated by her heavy drinking,
had killed her.
...Gertrude was 48. Her husband,
William, had lost his second wife.
...Frank did not grieve for
his foster mother: the woman had been nicer to her dog and
her parrot than she had been to him. But he didn’t
rejoice, either. Vengeance wasn’t in his nature.
...Gertrude was buried alongside
William’s first wife and baby daughter, victims of
The Explosion of 1917.
...A
short while later, Nellie Beazley stepped off the bus at
the foster home. Almost two years had elapsed since she’d
last seen Frank at her husband’s funeral. Nellie told
Frank that the family had moved into their new home and
Frank could now live with them.
...Frank bid farewell to the
Henns and left his foster home for good. More than a half-century
would pass before he next saw Marion. He would never see
William or Ronnie again.
...The new Beazley residence
was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood that was home
to a lawyer, a public school principal, and the Police Department’s
chief of detectives — a different class of people
than Creighton Street’s stevedores and sailors. Nellie
had finally moved up.
...No. 14 Bluebell Lane had
a porch, a yard, and eight rooms. Nellie lived on the second
floor, the recently widowed Edna May Moffatt on the first
with her fatherless young daughter. Sixteen years old now,
Frank shared an upstairs bedroom with Nellie’s brother,
a former laborer who had been forced to retire when he developed
emphysema. He was a boorish man of about 60.
...I know who you are! he would
tease the boy. I know but I’m not at liberty to tell
you!
...But the facial similarities
between Frank and Edna were so striking that even a stranger
might make assumptions, and so Nellie fabricated a story.
She claimed that Frank was Edna’s brother —
not Edna’s illegitimate child. Nellie said nothing
of the boy’s mysterious circumstances and she tolerated
no questions; it was no one’s business where this
person had been or why he’d suddenly appeared. Nellie’s
heart remained as cold as January.
...The Beazleys attended Mass
every Sunday, and as Frank accompanied his grandmother and
mother he sometimes thought: How can you go to church
and face God but not tell me that I’m your son? Why
such a big lie? Why?
... A
WIDOW NOW, like her daughter Edna, Nellie ruled
the household. She had a brother, daughter and granddaughter
under her wing — and now a teenaged boy who was for
all intents nothing but a boarder. Nellie demanded that
Frank keep his room clean and assist with chores, and she
put him to work building a garage. He had to earn his keep.
...Edna was 33 years old, a
secretary at Imperial Oil, a thriving company that supplied
fuel to Allied ships during the Second World War. Industrious
and frugal, she hoped someday to use her growing savings
and the proceeds of her late husband’s insurance to
free her from the workaday world. Edna was a funny and personable
woman, with her share of friends; she went on dates, and
invited acquaintances back to Bluebell Lane for an evening
of cards. Nellie did her best to keep them away from the
mysterious newcomer who lived upstairs.
...Frank became fond of Edna’s
young daughter, Helen, nicknamed Snookie. Frank sat next
to Snookie at Sunday Mass. He took her bowling. He walked
her to school and helped her with her arithmetic. He saw
in the little girl the same vulnerability that made him
cherish Marion Henn, his foster sister.
...Frank had dropped out of
ninth grade while living at the Henns’ and he had
no desire to return to school. He’d quit his job as
a water boy on the reservoir project — but when Nellie’s
garage was finished and she demanded rent, he found employment
at a Halifax bakery. He was planning for the day when he
would be on his own.
...Everybody has
to eat, he thought. Baker would be a good steady
job.
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A
street in downtown Halifax in the 1940s, when Frank
experienced real freedom for the first time in his
life.
Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management
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...FOR
THE FIRST time in his life, Frank experienced significant
freedom.
...Several teenage boys lived
in the Bluebell area, and Frankie became their friend. The
boys hung out at Windsor Sweets, an establishment that featured
a soda fountain, pinball machines, a jukebox that played
swing, the popular music of the time — and one of
the wonders of the era, a Panoram machine, precursor to
the music video that projected short movies of entertainers
onto a screen. But the biggest attraction was Winnie, a
pretty clerk with black hair and a beautiful smile. Frank
and his friends fantasized about Winnie, but she was older.
She did not lack for suitors her own age.
...Weekends found the boys
at the movies. In 1940s Halifax, American Westerns were
big. The Saturday-afternoon double feature cost 12 cents.
That left enough for a supper of fish and chips.
...Frankie was no movie sophisticate:
until Bluebell Lane, he’d considered Snow White the
height of filmmaking. Westerns thrilled him. He already
knew Roy Rogers’ music — now he could see the
fabled singer, riding across the screen in such movies as
King of the Cowboys and Yellow Rose of Texas.
...Theater etiquette, however,
escaped him.
...A movie would take a dramatic
turn and Frank would jump excitedly onto his seat. He screamed
at the actors, as if they could respond:
...Watch out! You’re
going to get shot! There’s an Indian behind that rock!
...Boys being boys, the Bluebell
gang egged him on:
...You tell ’em, Frankie!
Give ’em heck!
...The boys liked this slender
newcomer with the easy laugh and sweet spirit. Frankie was
funny — ‘‘a joker’’ —
and he was always up for anything. But he was extraordinarily
naive.
...Almost old enough to serve
his country at war, Frank had never shopped at a department
store, dined at a restaurant, or been on a ship or train.
He had never owned a book, read a newspaper, or set foot
in a library or a museum. He was a child in a teenager’s
body.
...Frank realized his shortcomings:
since birth, he had existed in a sort of suspended animation,
his only insights into modern civilization what he gleaned
from the radio and a collection of country-and-western records
played by a drunk. Coming to Halifax was like landing on
another planet.
...The Bluebell boys attended
public schools that stood three stories tall. They played
organized sports. They had mothers and brothers and sisters
with whom they’d always lived. They had fathers —
one an army colonel, another the Halifax police chief. They
could tell stories of merry Christmases and daytrips to
the Nova Scotia shore. They had photographs of themselves
and their families. They belonged somewhere.
...What did Frank have? Memories
of nuns sewing pockets shut and draping boys in their sheets
after they’d wet the bed. Memories of a woman who
craved liquor at midnight. Memories of beatings. His new
friends sympathized when Frankie told his stories —
and they wondered what the real situation was with Edna,
who so closely resembled Frank except for being almost 20
years older.
...They say she’s my
sister, Frank said. But I think she’s my mother.
...More than half a century
would pass before he had definitive proof.
TOMORROW | A FLIGHT OF STAIRS
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