26. The Wedding Dress
The first time Edward met Maria was at a house party in Eindhoven, Holland. In the aftermath of the war, like almost everyone else at the gathering and millions of others, they were displaced people—DPs—refugees struggling to piece together their shattered lives.
Maria hadn't attended many social events in her life, but Basia, her new outgoing Polish friend and co-worker from the assembly line at Phillips Electric had convinced her to come along. As they entered, Maria's eyes were immediately drawn to a blond-haired man across the room. He was surrounded by friends, all laughing and gesturing animatedly.
Every inch of the smoke-filled room, a cramped studio apartment on the second floor of a nondescript apartment building, was occupied by the party crowd. The sparse furnishings were pushed against the walls, and soft evening light filtered in through two windows overlooking a city scarred by heavy bombing yet steadfastly rebuilding. Animated conversations, the clinking of glasses, and a palpable sense of the boundless possibilities for the evening and each person's life filled the room.
"Chodź. Przedstawię cię," said Basia, who knew almost everyone there, as she grabbed Maria’s arm and pulled her through the room towards the blonde-haired man. The three exchanged pleasantries, and then Basia disappeared into the crowd.
Maria and Edward talked about their jobs at the Phillips Electric Company. As they chatted, they discovered more commonalities. Maria had been in a DP camp in Bavaria, only a few kilometres from where Edward had worked with the Polish Guard Company supporting the US Army. Maria was impressed with the confident and handsome man. He'd only been in Holland for a few short months and was already the president of the local Polish service club, helping fellow DPs with housing and social services. He found the attractive raven-haired woman with dark eyes to be shy and unassuming, perhaps someone he could help.
Maria worked the afternoon shift on the assembly line at Phillips, making light bulbs. Edward was employed in a test lab at the same large factory in Eindhoven. Both got jobs within a month of each other when Holland opened its border in late 1947 to refugees displaced by the war. Edward's friends didn't think Maria was his social or intellectual equal, and a year later, when the couple surprisingly announced their engagement, all of them told Edward not to marry Maria.
“You’ve nothing in common,” they said one after the other.
Pre-war Poland had been a class-conscious society with distinct social classes—nobility, gentry, intelligentsia, urban middle class, working class, and peasants. Although the upheaval of the war and post-war period had accelerated class mixing, remnants of old societal expectations persisted. In Polish, there was even a word, mezalians, to describe marriages between individuals from different social or economic backgrounds. Edward's friends doubted he could find happiness with a woman of peasant stock who worked on the assembly line.
He ignored their advice.
"I proved them wrong," he said during one of our late-life conversations.
My ears perked up as we sat in my father’s small long-term care room, facing the window, looking out at a garden below with a large statue of a guardian angel. He had been living in the long-term care residence for a couple of years by this time, and I had been visiting him every two or three weeks. Was he going to tell me more?
I was curious, but I realize today I was reluctant to ask more specific questions. My parents did, indeed, have very different personalities and backgrounds, and I was resigned—before I knew much about her story—to accepting my mother as the enigma that she was. Marriages are often mysteries to an outside viewer. It’s hard to know what makes some successful. I let my father’s statement rest.
Maria wasn't raised in a city; she was born in a tiny hamlet in a one-room thatch-roof house without running water, far from libraries, good schools, theatres, universities, and other amenities of sophisticated urban life. She wasn't well-educated or worldly. She had crawled out of hell in the aftermath of the war without adequate support or money or family and found a way to keep going. Determined to move forward with her life and achieve something meaningful, the "something" would not be bound by the hardships of her childhood or the demeaning experience as a forced labourer toiling for Hitler's war machine for over five years.
Maria refused to return to Poland after the war, despite the entreaties of the United Nations workers running the three DP camps where she stayed in Germany. While the majority of Polish women in the DP camps chose to go back, Maria remained steadfast in her decision. It was this strength and one-pointed determination that captivated Edward. In turn, Maria fell in love with his confidence and optimism that everything would work out. And so they made plans for their future together.
In early August 1951, Maria sailed to Canada aboard the SS Maria Salen, a worn-out old bucket of a cargo ship refurbished to ferry refugees and immigrants to Canada, the United States, and Australia. She was among the last groups of DPs to benefit from a Canadian government immigration program covering the travel expenses of refugees in exchange for one-year contracts in low-paying jobs where there was a shortage of workers: mining, logging, agriculture, the needle trade, and domestic service. Between 1947 and 1951, Canada finally opened its doors and admitted 157,000 DPs as part of this immigration plan.
Bound by a labour contract, Maria felt fortunate to secure work as a housekeeper for a prominent Montreal lawyer and his wife in their comfortable home, in Westmount, an upscale enclave in Montreal. The plan was for Edward to join her a few months later; he had saved enough money to pay for his passage.
Maria, the quieter one, was as heroic and determined as Edward. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean, boarded the train in Halifax after immigration processing at Pier 21, travelled overnight to Montreal, and began the job she had contracted to do under the immigration program for DPs. She had accomplished this alone. Several months later, on a warm early May morning, she boarded the train bound for Sarnia. It was where Edward, the Polish man she had met in Holland and decided to marry, had found work.
She carried the same small suitcase she had brought with her to Canada from Holland. An embossed pewter plate, a farewell gift from her girlfriends on the assembly line in Holland, was carefully wrapped in soft tissue paper and secured between her folded clothes. A silver baby spoon with a Dutch windmill with little spinning sails was tucked into a side pocket. It reminded Maria of her dream when she came to this country of having children. Her wedding dress was draped over her arm, carefully wrapped in a heavy cream-coloured cotton bag.
The weather on their wedding day, three days after her arrival, was sunny and mild. The ceremony took place at the only Catholic Church in the town, followed by a wedding lunch Maria prepared herself. The handful of guests, other newly arrived Polish immigrants that Edward had come to know in the new town, dined on a wooden picnic table in the backyard. The boisterous celebration and laughter lasted well into the evening, ending only because some guests had to leave to work the overnight shift at the chemical plant.
I picked up the silver-framed photograph of my parents on their wedding day, which was sitting on my father’s dresser, and brought it over to him in his wheelchair.
“Look how young and happy you look,” I said.
In her wedding photo, taken at a studio near the church, Maria is radiant and smiling. She wears a simple but elegant satin gown with a tight row of covered buttons down the front and on the sleeves and a veil with embroidery along the edge. The veil, along with a pearl necklace and earrings, are borrowed.
"The wedding dress was a gift from your mother's employers. Your mother and I didn't keep in touch with them. We regretted not letting them know we had done well or properly thanked them for the dress," my father said.
The gift of the dress was news to me. Until that day when my father was in his late nineties, I had never wondered how Maria had managed to afford a wedding dress. Most of all, I was moved by the kindness of her first Canadian employers, whoever they were.
The couple in whose backyard my parents celebrated their nuptials remained friends for the rest of their lives. To Maria, they extended the welcome they’d offered Edward the day he arrived and knocked on their door after walking from the train station—a place to stay. They continued to offer it until the newly-wed couple could afford a place of their own: a rental on Water Street. It was a humble beginning, to be sure, a tiny, two-storey, clapboard house on the wrong side of the tracks, next to a foundry that spewed dark smoke all day. Men with blackened faces and grimy overalls emerged from its doors as whistles blew, signalling the end of the shifts. This is the house they were living in when I was born.
Long after they’d moved on, my parents would drive our family by the house on Water Street and point it out as the home where they first lived. For them, it was a trip down memory lane. For me, as a child, it was inexplicable. I wondered how anyone could live in such a small, dilapidated place. I imagined a kitchen and living room on the first floor and perhaps two small bedrooms on the second floor. Had my baby crib been in the second bedroom?
“We didn’t have the whole house,” my father explained. “We lived in two rooms on the first floor and cooked on a hotplate with two small coils. The landlord lived upstairs, and we shared the bathroom. You slept in a small dresser drawer.”
Shortly after my father's death, my sister sent me a postcard found among his papers with a message written in his beautiful penmanship. It was addressed to my mother at the house where she had worked on Western Avenue (now de Maisonneuve Boulevard) in Westmount. He had mailed it from Paris the day before he set sail for Canada, writing, "My ship is sailing from LeHavre tomorrow morning. I will contact you the moment I arrive." I smiled as I noticed that he had carefully removed the stamp because he was a stamp collector, and that's what stamp collectors do.
A property search for the Westmount address on the card revealed the name of the man who owned the house. Sixty-eight years earlier, it had belonged to a prominent lawyer and his wife, the daughter of a senator. The irony is it was two blocks from my own home. Maria had walked down the same street and past the same stately Victorian homes and maples I walk by on most days. Of course, she never said a word when she visited me. She would never have wanted me to know about her humble beginnings in Canada as a refugee, just as she didn't talk about what happened to her during the war or the complicated guilt and shame she felt as a forced labourer.
I searched for the owner's obituary, tracked down their children, and sent an email to thank them all these years later for the wedding dress. My father's regret that he hadn't appropriately thanked this family was laid to rest. Soon a gracious acknowledgement arrived in my inbox from a woman who had not yet been born when my mother had worked for her parents.
At that time, I did not realize my mother was employed by the family for only seven months, not the full year stipulated in her contract. As I now focus on the dates, I see that the couple who sponsored her was happy to let her get on with her life before the end of her contract. They provided a wedding dress for her as a parting gift.
My sister still has the dress, its satin yellowing now with age. It's beautifully sewn with hand stitching, clearly the work of a talented seamstress. Each covered button is handmade. A wave of tenderness washes over me as I imagine Maria excitedly going for fittings; how happy she must have been wearing such an exquisite wedding gown—the first beautiful item of clothing she had ever owned. So many acts of kindness helped my parents create a new life and home.