More in Anger by J. Jill Robinson

decided that Pearl and Tom should marry early in 1941. In January, in fact. What, Pearl wondered, was the big rush? Why not wait for spring or summer, for sunshine and warmth? Well, that was easy enough to figure out after a very little bit of thought. Right after his October birthday, Eleanor Mayfield’s good boy Tom had broken one of the rules at McGill, and his parents had been officially informed. Tom had taken one of the maids who worked in his residence out for coffee, and someone had seen and reported them. Ye gods! You would have thought they’d been discovered in sexual flagrante delicto given the uproar that ensued.
    There were maids all over the place at McGill in those days, and they weren’t all of them good girls, certainly. It was common knowledge that some of the maids who worked in the residences, attending to the men’s housekeeping and laundry needs, went out on the sly with the men. It was rare for anyone to be caught, however, and rarer still to receive a reprimand, formal or otherwise. But Tom, who swore up and down that he had beenon an innocent mission related to laundry, had been both caught and reprimanded.
    Of course Pearl herself had known all about it well ahead of time, as his fiancée , and hadn’t been concerned for a minute: the girl was homely and not bright, and whatever his interest in her, it most definitely wasn’t of a sexual nature. And anyway, Pearl had that part of him cornered. Pearl figured that Eleanor Mayfield, for whom social propriety and reputation were paramount, had been thrown into a perfect tizzy by the reprimand. Eleanor had become so worried that her precious elder son was going to end up compelled to marry one of the maids instead of someone of his own station, i.e., Pearl, that she had yet again taken matters into her own hands. Without bringing the matter up as she should have with Tom’s affianced , Eleanor decided to solve the matter by pushing the wedding plans ahead, under some invented guise of a wedding present—a honeymoon ski trip in the Laurentians. Wouldn’t that be fun? Ha, thought Pearl. For whom? She did not ski.
    Then Eleanor Mayfield topped it all by writing Pearl another of her sweet little notes, this time about the importance of making oneself available to one’s husband, “every night.” Eleanor needn’t have bothered writing that . That was unlikely to be a problem. Pearl had never felt anything like the charged physical pull she and Tom felt towards each other. It would be enough to sustain them when they did not see eye to eye in other regards. Eleanor might as well have minded her own business. Yet again.
    In the end, Tom’s parents hadn’t been able to attend the wedding anyway, though her parents and sister were there, andTom’s brother, and one sister. The Mayfields couldn’t come, they wired, because of the war; the fear was that the Banff Springs Hotel would be needed for some war-related purpose, and the doctor had better be around. And so Tom and Pearl were married, in January of 1941, in Montreal, and after the wedding they travelled to the Laurentians for their honeymoon ski trip.

    Four years later, Pearl sat at her dressing table assessing herself, and her state, in the mirror. “You are trapped,” she said. “How do you like that?” Gloomily, she picked up the silver-backed brush from her set. (Twelve pieces. Engraved. Sterling silver from Birks. A wedding present from her parents.) Immediately, her hands began warming the metal.
    It was barely a month since she and Ruby had moved in with her parents, and things couldn’t be going worse. On New Year’s Day 1945, the day before Tom flew off to England with the RCAF, she and Ruby, two years old and devoid of sense, had taken the train from Regina to Calgary. Ruby had behaved badly the entire time and Pearl, who had so been looking forward to the trip,