Visitors

When I try to think of 5 pages of reminiscences about the house on de Maisonneuve, I think of animals, houseguests, parties - which should I do? What will other people do?
For me, the amusing times came after the divorce. Prior to that, our lives ran along well-trodden paths. There were rules. Afterwards, it seemed to get a bit disorganized - not exactly chaotic, but somehow freer. Well - maybe chaotic. How about houseguests? Why not?

I am recalling these inhabitants in not very reliable order. My own children moved in and out, as they could afford to, or felt like it. I always had a houseful - toward the end, I noticed that there weren't any of my kids living in, much. I noticed, too, that the house was starting to cost too much, and I began to want to get rid of the taxes, furnace, roof and pipes - things that seem to go wrong every so often.
The basement dwellers came in December – our much loved Soomphongs. They dwelt with us, paying formal little after-dinner calls with the children every evening. Gosh those kids were cute! Poon was about 4, and Tookta was 18 months.
We took Poon out on Hallowe’en, and it didn’t take him long to figure out something for nothing. We had dressed him, as he requested, as Batman, and he strenuously objected to black tights. Batman wears grey, he kept insisting, and at every single house he apologized for our inadequacies as providers of the authentic costume.
They, refugees from Laos, lived in the basement for about a year, and returned for another 6 months while their St Henri flat was being wonderfully re-organized for them. Mrs S looked bedraggled and afraid when she arrived, but she brightened up after a while, cut her hair and turned into a glamorous little lady.
One thing I remember very vividly is all the bad advice I gave Soomphongh. As in – help with Income Tax; do not enter into the cooperative that is offered in your new digs. What did I know about all those things? Nothing – and he quietly did what he thought best.
When they finally left, we became a sort of haven for all kinds of other people. Isolde’s beau, Phil, seemed to live with us, sort of, because he didn’t like his flat. He was an art student at Concordia, and spent the term making a very elaborate leg for a chair. He also spent the ensuing summer scraping the paint off of the house next door, with a 2” scraper. We put him on a sofa. Or was that while Isolde was at Westmount High? I guess so.
Rebecca’s beau, Marc, lived on the sofa, too, off and on for about a year. For the life of me, I can’t remember why. Maybe because he lived on the South Shore.
In my sorties along the 401, much later, I used to bring hitchhikers home, now and then. Like a mother fox returning to the den with prey for the cubs. One nice young Englishman wanted to go to Ottawa, but I persuaded him to come to Montreal, it being more fun.
We adopted a Vietnamese boat boy, Thanh, who attended Westmount High with my children. He introduced us to a friend, who was about to lose his Canadian home for undisclosed reasons. (His Terre des Hommes sponsors wrote me a letter, containing the reasons, but I destroyed it without reading it.) Unable to find a home for Thongh, we took him in too. They didn’t last long – they stopped going to class, and I delivered an ultimatum, so they decided to move out, rather than comply. Thanh sort of disappeared – but Thongh fell in love with a pretty and determined Vietnamese girl who sent him back to finish school, and now they are prosperous, happily married and very strict with their own children, which makes me laugh!
Gordie Pederson lived with us for a winter. He was a friend of Susie. Gordie was an agreeable chap, and a useful one. He built me a new staircase out in front, and he tiled the basement when I was about to sell and move. I didn’t know he was a drug addict. Well – I can’t know everything.
His brother John came and rented a basement room, as my kids were starting to move out. I had another little clutch of renters in the basement – some better than others.
Oh Gee. I almost forgot eccentric genius Andrew Schwartz – he stayed one summer in the basement, and his dreary girlfriend stayed there with him, till I laid down the law about live-ins.
I rented out the basement to 2 sets of chicks – all were unmemorable, and unregretted when they left. One pair of students wanted to be family – but we didn’t like them, and wouldn’t have them as anything but rather remote acquaintances.
Another fellow rented the basement for a few weeks and skipped out leaving behind a hideous suit. He was very good looking, but unreliable.
Jason provided me with a Hungarian he met up with on his world travels. “Stay with Mum” he cried cheerily to a young man who turned out to be a complete waste of space. Zoltan phoned me from London, en route to Montreal, and said his money had been stolen there. I thought for a minute, and said –“ Well, come along anyway, and we’ll see what can be done. There’s a lot in Montreal that’s free – and you can rescue something out of this.” He told me that he was accompanied by a cousin. That was a surprise, but I arranged for bus fare from Mirabel, and sure enough, Zoltan and his cousin came to my house. He brought me presents – a hideous embroidered table cover, wine and paprika. I borrowed a couple of bikes for them, and Zoltan considered them to be inadequate. “Not 10 speed?” he said dismissively. The first night they were at my house, a big car came and picked them up and took them out on the town. They brought in take-out, and ate it in front of my kids. They also drank all the wine. After a few days (Zoltan slept in all the time) I noticed that he had taken the sheets off the bed, and slept on the bare mattress. By then I had really started to hate him and I realized more or less right away that he had lied about the money, and was in general a shifty, ungrateful, miserable pig. I ordered them to replace the sheets, and when I checked they had not done this pretty basic sort of thing. So I kicked them out. They could go and live with their friends. Zoltan took the embroidered cloth with him.
I guess my various refugees fit into the category of live-ins. The first was a Somalian, who never emerged from the basement at all, till we got him legalized. Isolde discovered him praying to the corner, when she burst in upon him, all unknowing. He was a Muslim. Another woman, a Sri Lankan about 3 feet tall, Seguntala, kissed Rebecca’s feet when she moved out. Rebecca was alarmed.
Lilti lived with me for a year: She was a stunning Ethiopian refugee about 16 years old. She attended High School, and Boy did she work hard! She graduated that year, and had a little party one afternoon. 7 or 8 students (mostly boys) arrived about 4, and Lilti gravely offered them chips and cokes and they danced decorously around the living room for a couple of hours and then she said the party was over, and they went, uncomplaining, home.
She attended the grad dance alone, attired in a truly amazing and sophisticated sapphire blue dress – and came home at midnight in a taxi. I don’t know where she got all those rules.
Lilti was out on the front steps with my kids, one summer afternoon. She took her books, and just sat there studying, while passing male motorists drove through stop lights, into trees and over passing pedestrians. When they trooped in to supper, a young man accompanied them. We thought somebody knew him – but he just wanted a closer look at Lilti. So we gave him supper, and he looked wistfully at Lilti.
Susie’s grade school friend Wanda K stayed with us for two years. She was studying at Concordia – and I remember her sitting at the kitchen table making props for her theatre school - perfect replicas of silly things, like condensed soup tins. I can’t really remember why she moved in or how. I guess she couldn’t afford an apartment.
Sheila Emmanuel, a friend of Rebecca, moved in with us for a while. She was a foster child from up the street who tired of her very square parents and sort of ran away from home. I remember the night the police brought the two girls home about 11 – Ray answered the door, and was just livid! They hadn’t been doing any harm, but the Security boys didn’t like the young man who had been with them in the park.
She and Rebecca decided to completely run away from home after that, and (tipped off by a neighbour who saw them) Isolde and I combed the Alexis Nihon Plaza and brought Rebecca home. The others (there was a little clutch of kids) left town in a stolen VW, and were caught near Kingston and returned to (I think) Weredale House

Gerry Free was hitchhiking from Dorval, when I picked him up and brought him home. He said he had applied for a summer job as ‘a maid’ – and his employers lived a block north of us on Metcalfe. Gerry was really a character! He must have been a great surprise to his new employers who expected a girl. He used to drift by every so often, and tell us how he was doing as a domestic servant. He said he was asked to prepare lunch for his mistress – a bridge party, I think – and he had amazed the guests with a portrait bust of the lady of the house carved in cheddar cheese.
Gerry gave me a number of poems that he had written. I have lost them all, to my great regret, but one, The Hitchhiker” started
Out on the highway,
Thumb up…
When he got the sack – that was pretty soon – he came over and made a huge sandwich sign, which he planned to wear outside the boss’s downtown office tower. He believed he had been fired without cause.
Jason and Jonnie saw something of him after that. He used to bring me rather wilted baskets of flowers, which the boys told me later, he ordered (along with negotiable valuables) from credit card numbers taken out of the garbage behind downtown restaurants. The story he gave me was somewhat different – unbelievable, but different.
The boys got him a job in the kitchen at Ruby Foo’s, and Suzanne Mills said later that he couldn’t do anything! He told me that he had learned to carve vegetables in cunning shapes.
I heard from Gerry a few years later. He rang at 2 in the morning to tell me that his wife (a registered nurse – and black) had been killed in an automobile accident in Snowden. A month later, he came to visit with another wife (white and French Canadian). I gave them dinner, and we all politely avoided awkward questions.
Gerry rang me at odd intervals. He assured me that he looked upon me as a second mother! Once he said he needed money because he was in jail in Alabama, or somewhere. I asked for the name of the police station and the sheriff, so that I could check this out. It never came clear…
He also asked Jason to pose as a psychiatrist (on the phone) to support one of his fanciful alibis – we never really figured out what that was all about.
A recent Google check turned up a Gerry Free, a southerner, who was tried and convicted of fraud a few years ago. It sure sounds like Gerry, but 66 seems a bit too old. Another possibility is a man who ran a talent e-mail scam in the South a few years ago. Whatever our colourful friend is or was up to, I’m sure it was illegal.
I was sort of lucky, I think. The wonder is that we weren’t all murdered in our beds.