House of Marie

It was built in 1850, by a family said to be as prominent (at least) as the Massey’s and Rogers’ but very secretive. They almost never left the house while they were there, and sometime in the early 1900’s the wife died giving birth. The husband, his heart torn apart, moved back to Europe, leaving the mansion completely abandoned.

It’s story could have ended there. Just another tragic story of early Canada, mothers and babies dying all the time. The neighbours (especially the young and single women) whispering that he should have just gotten over it. Women die in childbirth. It’s sad, but it happens. Better just get back on the horse. Find a new wife, with all his money?

There were much worse tragedies in the world. These, they knew everything about. Free land grants and new industry had given them short-lived hope, but factories have only so much need for workers... and so you must sell to the workers.

Bars and department stores popped up alongside smoke shops and finally, as a last exclamation point on all of it, whore houses. The churches, who were not affected at all, protested that they were the work of Satan and swore to do away with them. Their commitment to spreading guilt put people in the pews Sunday morning who had spent Saturday night committing enough sins to keep the confessional booths and church pews full for at least a century.

The housewives, who were very much affected, swore to do away with them and came much closer to succeeding. Probably because they actually wanted them closed down.

Ironically, as the city expanded and grew, it was prostitution that saved the house from tragedy. In 1922, as it was about to be demolished, a woman by the name of Marie LeChance pronounced it “absolutely darling and a perfect home for me and my girls.”

It was an interesting sale of real estate, to a long-legged and beautiful chain smoking French woman who claimed to be the mother of twenty-two similarly lovely young women. Women of all colours, ages, shapes and sizes...some of them born when she must have been three or four years old.

The estate’s agent may or may not have believed that one woman could give birth to twenty-two children, all daughters, beginning at the age of three, but the economy was in a downturn and she paid in cash.

This, said the church, is how neighbourhoods fail. But they bought houses and filled them with homeless urchins, the insane, and ex-prostitutes just the same.

In between one house and the other, the House of God and the House of Marie, were thousands of much smaller houses where men and women: workers, miners, and business owners lived with their families. Most leaned one way or the other, until the housewives leaned into the government.

The House was revived. Bright red curtains with golden swags hung artfully over stuffed velvet chairs, their arms glittering. Glasses clinked and people laughed. Music played on a series of vitrolas, day and night. Even the nights were full of evening dresses and dancing, beautiful women who were friends with everyone from miners just off their shift to groups of lawyers in for an evening’s rest.

The woodwork was warm, and the carpets well used. In rare moments of silence (like the day they settled up accounts, Marie with her big book asking who had paid and who owed) something happened. The House, remembering its years of loneliness, turned grey and sad. The air seemed stagnant then, and the dust sat hard against the floor. The girls couldn’t wait to get back to work. They heard things in the hallways at night. Babies crying. Women screaming.

Life must be louder than death. It is in silence that we hear ghosts.

Silence came in the form of Constable Bryan Douglass, who started simply enough by tacking a note to the door. The House couldn’t read, but it could hear the urgency in the residents’ voices, and hear the anxiety as it seeped into the walls. Their whispers filled the air and the spaces between the floors and joists. The walls whispered to the bricks and through the windows, and they told the vines outside.

The gardens fell into neglect and flowers bowed their heads. When the Constable came calling, it was mostly weeds that greeted him. The porch groaned like a man who has thrown out his back when the public servant’s shoes slapped the stairs. His face was carefully arranged: stern, but not angry. He knocked hard on the door. It made a pathetic sound, despite the knocker’s weight, falling against the door like a corseted woman losing consciousness. He rang the bell.

It was Marie who answered. Her makeup, once perfect, ran into her cheeks. Her red lipstick was wiped half-off. For the first time in her glittering life full of beads and sequins, diamonds and champagne, she looked tired. Tired and old.

He was all business.

“Madam,” he found this funny but couldn’t say. He kept his face neutral and did not laugh. “I hereby charge you with running a bawdy house. An establishment of ill repute within which occur acts of prostitution or lewd sex. Do you understand the charge?”

She rearranged herself, wiping her eyes and lips. It helped a good deal. She straightened her spine.

“I deny it. These are my girls. I raised them from children.”

“They’re all your offspring? That’s the story you maintain? Madam, you’ve been accused. It’s a serious crime.”

“No, not all my children.” She spoke in a French accent that might once have brought men to their knees. But there had been notices on the door, and homeless in the yard. And those damned weeds wouldn’t stop growing. And she’d lost girls. To other houses. To the church. Rooms sat dusty, alone, and cold. With nothing to do but brood.

She spoke with the House together.

“Rooms shouldn’t remain empty. They need life in them.”

The Constable maintained his composure, though he could swear he’d heard two voices, speaking together. One of them too close. Far too close.

“I took my girls in from the streets. Saved them from drugs and prostitution. I tell you, we are not prostitutes.”

“Then what would you call yourselves?”

“Companions. Friends. The world is dark, Constable. Don’t you think? People need a light. Men do. They need pretty things to make them smile. Don’t you think?”

She ran a finger over his uniform, making promises with her eyes. He felt nothing but rage. With a strong grip, he removed her hand from his body.

“I’ll show you what I think, MADAM. CLARISSA!”

He called the girl’s name many times. Ran in and out of rooms, up and down stairs. He found women and men in various states of undress. Money changing hands. Evidence. More than he needed to condemn this foul place.

And then he found her, still abed at 1:30 pm, wrapped in a crumpled sheet and the limbs of a common street sweeper. He pulled her to sitting and shook her to wakefulness. At least, he tried.

Her head rolled sideways onto her shoulder, and then forward onto her chest.

Marie trailed behind him into the room. So he knew someone here. There would be no stopping him, then. She’s have to go back to France, and hope things had gotten better there. It had gone fifteen years. She’d made her money. Had her fun. There were less than ten girls now. Only two or three who still had ties in Europe. It would be an easy break.

The Constable could no longer keep his composure.

“What did you give her?”

Marie rolled her eyes. “What? You think I bring girls here to give them drugs? It’s the other way. No smoking. No getting too drunk. No smelling like opium. But still they bring it in. They come here to make money. She already loved drugs.”

The Constable dropped the girl back to the mattress...whoever she was to him...and stared Marie in the face. He looked tomato-red with burning rage. Well, she’d seen the type before. He might hit her. She was used to that. They had good doctors. Bones had been repaired before. She hoped he wouldn’t hit her face.

Maybe the lips. She made more money when they were swollen up.

“That’s your story? She already loved drugs! She came here to make money to buy them?”

“What can I tell you? It’s the truth.”

“That Woman was my wife!”

“Then I’m sorry for you both, and for your child.”

“What do you know about my kid?”

“I know a body that has given birth. Clarissa has. More than once. More than once since coming here, too. It’s her daughter, working down the hall.”

“Do you have any morals at all?”

“Heh, morals. Like the church? They like pretty girls too. Parading the cutest of their urchins around the streets. Swinging incense. They sell pretty things, Constable, just like me. That’s how money works.”

She spat in his face, and under her breath, uttered a curse.

He reached out with strong and silent hands, seized the woman by her beautiful and disarrayed face, and firmly snapped her neck. The sound echoed through the walls as if the very house had been broken.

Marie’s body fell limply to the floor, brittle and wet, making a hard sound that ended everything. She wouldn’t go to France, and the house would once again be silent and alone.

Clarissa, on her opium, barely made a sound as the Constable carried her out of the house.

The body was discovered, and the police did nothing. Why should they? It was just another dead prostitute.

The body was found nude, prone on the floor with its neck snapped (the cause of death). A second body, identified as the remains of Mr. Marcus Reilly, a street sweeper and Catholic father of five, was found nude on the bed.

They say he died with a grin on his face, and the cause of death was...

...was, according to the coroner, unknown.

If you had been a fly on the wall in the coroners office, watching him carve up a human being like he was dressing a turkey for thanksgiving, weighing the parts, you might have heard him shake his head and say, to his assistant, that the man had almost certainly been fucked to death.

“What a way to go!” The assistant concluded, as they stuffed the man into a box for transport.