Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [114]
They marvelled at the Victoria Bridge built across the St Lawrence river, which people called the Eighth Wonder of the World, and admired the New York Life building where an elevator whizzed you up eight floors.
There was the Golden Mile with huge and beautiful mansions where the rich lived. The Windsor Hotel was the grandest hotel Beth, Sam and Jack had ever seen, and the shops in St Catherine’s Street were every bit as smart as New York’s finest.
As September came to an end and the leaves on the trees turned fiery red, russet, gold and brown, everywhere became still more beautiful. But however lovely a city Montreal was, they could sense they were never going to find success here. There were plenty of saloons, there were variety shows and dance halls, but Montreal wasn’t a liberal-minded city: the character of the majority of its residents was staid, sober and hard-working.
Sam and Jack both found jobs as barmen within a few days of their arrival, but although they tried to persuade their respective employers to give Beth a chance to charm their customers, they refused. Without anyone actually coming out and saying what they thought, it was clear they believed any young woman prepared to step inside a saloon was a whore.
Beth tramped round all the stores, hoping to be taken on in one of them. But it seemed they only employed men as sales clerks. If she saw a woman working in a shop, restaurant or coffee shop, she was invariably related to the owner.
Theo found it almost impossible to get anyone even to admit there was any gambling in the city, let alone get himself invited to a game. For the first time in his life, his English gentleman persona seemed to be working against him. In Montreal it appeared the French liked to be seen as the aristocrats, and he found them looking down on him. Yet the ordinary working-class men, mainly first- and second-generation English and Scots, were suspicious of him too.
He still had most of the winnings from his last poker game, but he wasn’t prepared to use it just on living expenses. He said he had to keep it for a stake when he eventually found a way into a big poker game. Jack and Sam had gone along with this at first, for they both wanted to work in gambling circles and they needed Theo to get them in. But as the weeks ticked by, while they worked long hours for low wages, they had become resentful that Theo spent his days sitting around drinking in smart places like the cocktail bar in the Windsor Hotel while they were keeping him and Beth.
They moved from the hotel to a guest house, then on to a three-room flat, but even that was too expensive, bringing back to Beth memories of the difficulties she and Sam had when they first got to New York. Just as they had no choice then but to settle for one room in a tenement on the Lower East Side, now they had no alternative but to lower their sights and get a place to live in Point St Charles.
Griffintown, or the Swamp as Point St Charles was often called, was a slum area to the west of the city, between the St Lawrence river and the Canadian Pacific railway tracks. It had none of the beauty of the rest of the city which was up on a hill, its skyline dotted with church spires. Down in the Swamp, it was factories and heavy industry, tall chimneys belching black smoke day and night.
There weren’t the five-storey tenements that they’d grown so used to seeing in New York, only small terraces of two or three storeys, but it was a grim place and home to the very poorest in Montreal. They found a tiny two-up, two-down clapboard house in Canning Street, one of the roughest parts, with high unemployment and large families. Even those who did work probably brought home less than ten dollars a week.
After living in comfort at Pearl’s with indoor sanitation it was miserable having to go back to an outside privy, especially as it was so cold. They managed to buy a few pieces of furniture from one of the hundreds