The Stars Shine Down
Thompson smiled. ‘And he can see your buildings wherever he is.’
Lara laughed. ‘You flatter me.’
‘It’s pretty true, isn’t it? You’ve put up buildings all over this fair country of ours. You own apartment buildings, office buildings, a hotel chain … How do you do it?’
She smiled. ‘With mirrors.’
‘You’re a puzzle.’
‘Am I? Why?’
‘At this moment, you’re arguably the most successful builder in New York. Your name is plastered on half the real estate in this town. You’re putting up the world’s tallest skyscraper. Your competitors call you the Iron Butterfly. You’ve made it big in a business traditionally dominated by men.’
‘Does that bother you, Mr Thompson?’
‘No. What bothers me, Miss Cameron, is that I can’t figure out who you are. When I ask two people about you, I get three opinions. Everyone grants that you’re a brilliant businesswoman. I mean … you didn’t fall off a hay wagon and become a success. I know a lot about construction crews – they’re a rough, tough bunch of men. How does a woman like you keep them in line?’
She smiled. ‘There are no women like me. Seriously, I simply hire the best people for the job, and I pay them well.’
Too simplistic, Thompson thought. Much too simplistic. The real story is what she’s not telling me. He decided to change the direction of the interview.
‘Every magazine on the stands has written about how successful you are. I’d like to do a more personal story. There’s been very little printed about your background.’
‘I’m very proud of my background.’
‘Good. Let’s talk about that. How did you get started in the real estate business?’
Lara smiled and he could see that her smile was genuine. She suddenly looked like a little girl.
‘Genes.’
‘Your genes?’
‘My father’s.’ She pointed to a portrait on a wall behind her. It showed a handsome-looking man with a leonine head of silver hair. ‘That’s my father – James Hugh Cameron.’ Her voice was soft. ‘He’s responsible for my success. I’m an only child. My mother died when I was very young, and my father brought me up. My family left Scotland a long time ago, Mr Thompson, and emigrated to Nova Scotia – New Scotland, Glace Bay.’
‘Glace Bay?’
‘It’s a fishing village in the north-east part of Cape Breton, on the Atlantic shore. It was named by early French explorers. It means ice bay. More coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘My grandfather owned a great deal of land in Scotland and my father acquired more. He was a very wealthy man. We still have our castle there near Loch Morlich. When I was eight years old, I had my own horse, my dresses were bought in London, we lived in an enormous house with a lot of servants. It was a fairytale life for a little girl.’ Her voice was alive with echoes of long-ago memories.
‘We would go ice skating in the winter, and watch hockey games, and go swimming at Big Glace Bay Lake in the summer. And there were dances at the Forum and the Venetian Gardens.’
The reporter was busily making notes.
‘My father put up buildings in Edmonton, and Calgary, and Ontario. Real estate was like a game to him, and he loved it. When I was very young, he taught me the game, and I learned to love it, too.’
Her voice was filled with passion. ‘You must understand something, Mr Thompson. What I do has nothing to do with the money or the bricks and steel that make a building. It’s the people who matter. I’m able to give them a comfortable place to work or to live, a place where they can raise families and have decent lives. That’s what was important to my father, and it became important to me.’
Hugh Thompson looked up. ‘Do you remember your first real estate venture?’
Lara leaned forward. ‘Of course. On my eighteenth birthday, my father asked me what I would like as a gift. A lot of newcomers were arriving in Glace Bay and it was getting crowded. I felt the town needed more places for them to live. I told my father I wanted to build a small apartment house. He gave me the money as a present, but two years later, I was able to pay him back. Then I borrowed money from a bank to put up a second building. By the time I was twenty-one, I owned three buildings, and they were all successful.’
‘Your father must have been very proud of you.’
There was that warm smile again. ‘He was. He named me Lara. It’s an old Scottish name that comes from the Latin. It means “well known” or “famous”. From the time I was a little girl, my father always told me I would be famous one day.’ Her smile faded. ‘He died of a heart attack, much too young.’ She paused. ‘I go to Scotland to visit his grave every year. I … I found it very difficult to stay on in the house without him. I decided to move to Chicago. I had an idea for small boutique hotels, and I persuaded a banker there to finance me. The hotels were a success.’ She shrugged. ‘And the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. I suppose that a psychiatrist would say that I haven’t created this empire just for myself. In a way, it’s a tribute to my father. James Cameron was the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.’
‘You must have loved him a lot.’
‘I did. And he loved me a lot.’ A smile touched her lips. ‘I’ve heard that on the day I was born, my father bought every man in Glace Bay a drink.’
‘So, really,’ Thompson said, ‘everything started in Glace Bay.’
‘That’s right,’ Lara said softly, ‘everything started in Glace Bay. That’s where it all began, almost forty years ago …’
Chapter Three
Glace Bay, Nova Scotia September 10, 1952
James Cameron was in a whorehouse, drunk, the night his daughter and son were born. He was in bed, sandwiched between the Scandinavian twins, when Kirstie, the madam of the brothel, pounded on the door.
‘James!’ she called out. She pushed open the door and walked in.
‘Och, ye auld hen!’ James yelled out indignantly. ‘Can’t a mon have any privacy even here?’
‘Sorry to interrupt your pleasure, James. It’s about your wife.’
‘Fuck my wife,’ Cameron roared.
‘You did,’ Kirstie retorted, ‘and she’s having your baby.’
‘So? Let her have it. That’s what you women are guid for, nae?’
‘The doctor just called. He’s been trying desperately to find you. Your wife is bad off. You’d better hurry.’
James Cameron sat up and slid to the edge of the bed, bleary-eyed, trying to clear his head. ‘Damned woman. She niver leaves me in peace.’ He looked up at the madam. ‘All right, I’ll go.’ He glanced at the naked girls in the bed. ‘But I’ll nae pay for these two.’
‘Never mind that now. You’d just better get back to the boarding house.’ She turned to the girls. ‘You two come along with me.’
James Cameron was a once-handsome man whose face reflected fulfilled sins. He appeared to be in his early fifties. He was thirty years old and the manager of one of the boarding houses owned by Sean MacAllister, the town banker. For the past five years, James Cameron and his wife Peggy had divided the chores: Peggy did the cleaning and cooking for the two dozen boarders, and James did the drinking. Every Friday it was his responsibility to collect the rents from the four other boarding houses in Glace Bay owned by MacAllister. It was another reason, if he needed one, to go out and get drunk.
James Cameron was a bitter man, who revelled in his bitterness. He was a failure, and he was convinced that everyone else was to blame. Over the years he had come to enjoy his failure. It made him feel like a martyr. When James was a year old, his family had emigrated to Glace Bay from Scotland with nothing but the few possessions they could carry, and they had struggled to survive. His father had put James to work in the coal mines when the boy was fourteen. James had suffered a slight back injury in a mining accident when he was sixteen, and had promptly quit the mine. One year later his parents were killed in a train disaster. So it was that James Cameron had decided that he was not responsible for his adversity – it was the Fates that were against him. But he had two great assets: He was extraordinarily handsome and, when he wished to, he could be charming. One weekend in Sydney, a town near Glace Bay, he met an impressionable young American girl named Peggy Maxwell, who was there on vacation with her family. She was not attractive, but the Maxwells were very wealthy, and James Cameron was very poor. He swept Peggy Maxwell off her feet, and against the advice of her father, she married him.
‘I’m giving Peggy a dowry of five thousand dollars,’ her father told James. ‘The money will give you a chance to make something of yourself. You can invest it in real estate, and in five years it will double. I’ll help you.’
But James was not interested in waiting five years. Without consulting anyone, he invested the money in a wildcat oil venture with a friend, and sixty days later, he was broke. His father-in-law, furious, refused to help him any further. ‘You’re a fool, James, and I will not throw good money after bad.’
The marriage that was going to be James Cameron’s salvation turned out to be a disaster, for he now had a wife to support, and no job.
It was Sean MacAllister who had come to his rescue. The town banker was a man in his mid fifties, a stumpy, pompous man, a pound short of being obese, given to wearing vests adorned with a heavy gold watch chain. He had come to Glace Bay twenty years earlier, and had immediately seen the possibilities there. Miners and lumbermen were pouring into the town, and were unable to find adequate housing. MacAllister could have financed homes for them, but he had a better plan. He decided it would be cheaper to herd the men together in boarding houses. Within two years, he had built a hotel and five boarding houses, and they were always full.
Finding managers was a difficult task because the work was exhausting. The manager’s job was to keep all the rooms rented, supervise the cooking, handle the meals, and see that the premises were kept reasonably clean. As far as salaries were concerned, Sean MacAllister was not a man to throw away his money.
The manager of one of his boarding houses had just quit, and MacAllister decided that James Cameron was a likely candidate. Cameron had borrowed small amounts of money from the bank from time to time, and payment on a loan was overdue. MacAllister sent for the young man.
‘I have a job for you,’ MacAllister said.
‘You have?’
‘You’re in luck. I have a splendid position that’s just opened up.’
‘Working at the bank, is it?’ James Cameron asked. The idea of working in a bank appealed to him. Where there was a lot of money, there was always a possibility of having some stick to one’s fingers.
‘Not at the bank,’ MacAllister told him. ‘You’re a very personable young man, James, and I think you would be very good at dealing with people. I’d like you to run my boarding house on Cablehead Avenue.’
‘A boarding house, you say?’ There was contempt in the young man’s voice.
‘You need a roof over your head,’ MacAllister pointed out. ‘You and your wife will have free room and board, and a small salary.’
‘How sma’?’
‘I’ll be generous with you. James. Twenty-five dollars a week.’
‘Twenty-fi …?’
‘Take it or leave it. I have others waiting.’
In the end, James Cameron had no choice. ‘I’ll tak’ it.’
‘Good. By the way, every Friday I’ll also expect you to collect the rents from my other boarding houses, and deliver the money to me on Saturday.’
When James Cameron broke the news to Peggy, she was dismayed. ‘We don’t know anything about running a boarding house, James.’
‘We’ll learn. We’ll share the work.’
And she had believed him. ‘All right. We’ll manage,’ she said.
And, in their own fashion, they had managed.
Over the years, several opportunities had come along for James Cameron to get better jobs, employment that would give him dignity and more money, but he was enjoying his failure too much to leave it.
‘Why bother?’ he would grumble. ‘When Fate’s agin you, naething guid can happen.’
And on this September night, he thought to himself, they won’t even let me enjoy my whores in peace. Goddamn my wife.
When he stepped out of Madame Kirstie’s establishment, a chilly September wind was blowing.
I’d best fortify myself for the troubles aheid, James Cameron decided. He stopped in at the Ancient Mariner.
One hour later, he wandered toward the boarding house in New Aberdeen, the poorest section of Glace Bay.
When he finally arrived, half a dozen boarders were anxiously waiting for him.
‘The doctor is in wi’ Peggy,’ one of the men said. ‘You’d better hurry, mon.’
James staggered into the tiny, dreary back bedroom he and his wife shared. From another room, he could hear the whimpering of a newborn baby. Peggy lay on the bed, motionless. Dr Patrick Duncan was leaning over her. He turned as he heard James enter.
‘Wa’s goin’ on here?’ James asked.
The doctor straightened up and looked at James with distaste. ‘You should have had your wife come to see me,’ he said.
‘And throw guid money away? She’s only havin’ a baby. Wa’s the big …?’
‘Peggy’s dead. I did everything I could. She had twins. I couldn’t save the boy.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ James Cameron whimpered. ‘It’s the Fates agin.’
‘What?’
‘The Fates. They’ve always been agin me. Now they’ve taine my bairn frae me. I dinna …’
A nurse walked in, carrying a tiny baby wrapped in a blanket. ‘This is your daughter, Mr Cameron.’
‘A daughter? Wha’ the hell will I dae wi’ a daughter?’ His speech was becoming more slurred.
‘You disgust me, mon,’ Dr Duncan said.
The nurse turned to James. ‘I’ll stay until tomorrow, and show you how to take care of her.’
James Cameron looked at the tiny wrinkled bundle in the blanket and thought, hopefully: Maybe she’ll die, too.
For the first three weeks, no one was sure whether the baby would live or not. A wetnurse came in to tend to her. And finally, the day came when the doctor was able to say, ‘Your daughter is going to live.’
And he looked at James Cameron and said under his breath, ‘God have mercy on the poor child.’
The wetnurse said, ‘Mr Cameron, you must give the child a name.’
‘I dinna care wha’ the hell ye call it. Ye gie her a name.’
‘Why don’t we name her Lara? That’s such a pretty …’
‘Suit your bloody self.’
And so she was christened Lara.
There was no one in Lara’s life to care for her or nurture her. The boarding house was filled with men too busy with their own lives to pay attention to the baby. The only woman around was Bertha, the huge Swede who was hired to do the cooking and handle the chores.
James Cameron was determined to have nothing to do with his daughter. The damned Fates had betrayed him once again by letting her live. At night he would sit in the living room with his bottle of whiskey and complain. ‘The bairn murdered my wife and my son.’
‘You shouldn’t say that, James.’
‘Weel, it’s sae. My son would hae grown up to be a big strapping mon. He would hae been smart and rich, and taine good care of his father in his auld age.’
And the boarders let him ramble on.
James Cameron tried several times to get in touch with Maxwell, his father-in-law, hoping he would take the child off his hands, but the old man had disappeared. It would be just my luck the auld fool’s daid, he thought.
Glace Bay was a town of transients who moved in and out of the boarding houses. They came from France and China and the Ukraine. They were Italian and Irish and Greek, carpenters and tailors and plumbers and shoemakers. They swarmed into lower Main Street, Bell Street, North Street and Water Street, near the waterfront area. They came to work the mines and cut timber and fish the seas. Glace Bay was a frontier town, primitive and rugged. The weather was an abomination. The winters were harsh with heavy snowfalls that lasted until April, and because of the heavy ice in the harbour, even April and May were cold and windy, and from July to October it rained.
There were eighteen boarding houses in town, some of them accommodating as many as seventy-two guests. At the boarding house managed by James Cameron, there were twenty-four boarders, most of them Scotsmen.
Lara was hungry for affection, without knowing what the hunger was. She had no toys or dolls to cherish nor any playmates. She had no one except her father. She made childish little gifts for him, desperate to please him, but he either ignored or ridiculed them.
When Lara was five years old, she overheard her father say to one of the boarders, ‘The wrong child died, ye ken. My son is the one who should hae lived.’
That night Lara cried herself to sleep. She loved her father so much. And she hated him so much.
When Lara was six, she resembled a Keane painting, enormous eyes in a pale, thin face. That year, a new boarder moved in. His name was Mungo McSween, and he was a huge bear of a man. He felt an instant affection for the little girl.
‘What’s your name, wee lassie?’
‘Lara.’
‘Ah. ’Tis a braw name for a braw bairn. Dae ye gan to school, then?’
‘School? No.’
‘And why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Weel, we maun find out.’
And he went to find James Cameron. ‘I’m tauld your bairn does nae gae to school.’
‘And why should she? She’s only a girl. She dinna need nae school.’
‘You’re wrong, mon. She maun have an education. She maun be gien a chance in life.’
‘Forget it,’ James said. ‘It wad be a waste.’
But McSween was insistent, and finally, to shut him up, James Cameron agreed. It would keep the brat out of his sight for a few hours.
Lara was terrified by the idea of going to school. She had lived in a world of adults all her short life, and had had almost no contact with other children.
The following Monday, Big Bertha dropped her off at St Anne’s Grammar School, and Lara was taken to the principal’s office.
‘This is Lara Cameron.’
The principal, Mrs Cummings, was a middle-aged grey-haired widow with three children of her own. She studied the shabbily dressed little girl standing before her. ‘Lara. What a pretty name,’ she said smiling. ‘How old are you, dear?’
‘Six.’ She was fighting back tears.
The child is terrified, Mrs Cummings thought. ‘Well, we’re very glad to have you here, Lara. You’ll have a good time, and you’re going to learn a lot.’
‘I can’t stay,’ Lara blurted out.
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘My papa misses me too much.’ She was fiercely determined not to cry.
‘Well, we’ll only keep you here for a few hours a day.’
Lara allowed herself to be taken into a classroom filled with children, and she was shown to a seat near the back of the room.
Miss Terkel, the teacher, was busily writing letters on a blackboard.
‘A is for apple,’ she said. ‘B is for boy. Does anyone know what C is for?’
A tiny hand was raised. ‘Candy.’
‘Very good! And D?’
‘Dog.’
‘And E?’
‘Eat.’
‘Excellent. Can anyone think of a word beginning with F?’
Lara spoke up. ‘Fuck.’
Lara was the youngest one in her class, but it seemed to Miss Terkel that in many ways she was the oldest. There was a disquieting maturity about her.
‘She’s a small adult, waiting to grow taller,’ her teacher told Mrs Cummings.
The first day at lunch, the other children took out their colourful little lunch pails and pulled out apples and cookies, and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.
No one had thought to pack a lunch for Lara.
‘Where is your lunch, Lara?’ Miss Terkel asked.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Lara said stubbornly. ‘I had a big breakfast.’
Most of the girls at school were nicely dressed in clean skirts and blouses. Lara had outgrown her few faded plaid dresses and threadbare blouses. She had gone to her father.
‘I need some clothes for school,’ Lara said.
‘Dae ye now? Weel, I’m nae made of money. Get yourself something frae the Salvation Army Citadel.’
‘That’s charity, Papa.’
And her father had slapped her hard across the face.
The children at school were familiar with games Lara had never even heard of. The girls had dolls and toys, and some of them were willing to share them with Lara, but she was painfully aware that nothing belonged to her. And there was something more. Over the next few years, Lara got a glimpse of a different world, a world where children had mothers and fathers who gave them presents and birthday parties and loved them and held them and kissed them. And for the first time, Lara began to realize how much was missing in her life. It only made her feel lonelier.
The boarding house was a different kind of school. It was an international microcosm. Lara learned to tell where the boarders came from by their names. Mac was from Scotland … Hodder and Pyke were from Newfoundland … Chiasson and Aucoin were from France … Dudash and Kosick from Poland. The boarders were lumbermen, fishermen, miners and tradesmen. They would gather in the large dining room in the morning for breakfast and in the evening for supper, and their talk was fascinating to Lara. Each group seemed to have its own mysterious language.
There were thousands of lumbermen in Nova Scotia, scattered around the peninsula. The lumbermen at the boarding house smelled of sawdust and burnt bark, and they spoke of arcane things like chippers and edging and trim.
‘We should get out almost two hundred million board feet this year,’ one of them announced at supper.
‘How can feet be bored?’ Lara asked.
There was a roar of laughter. ‘Child, board foot is a piece of lumber a foot square by an inch thick. When you grow up and get married, if you want to build a five-room, all wood house, it will take twelve thousand board feet.’
‘I’m not going to get married,’ Lara swore.
The fishermen were another breed. They returned to the boarding house stinking of the sea, and they talked about the new experiment of growing oysters on the Bras d’Or lake, and bragged to one another of their catches of cod and herring and mackerel and haddock.
But the boarders who fascinated Lara the most were the miners. There were 3,500 miners in Cape Breton, working the collieries at Lingan and Prince and Phalen. Lara loved the names of the mines. There was the Jubilee and the Last Chance and the Black Diamond and the Lucky Lady.
She was fascinated by their discussion of the day’s work.
‘What’s this I hear about Mike?’
‘It’s true. The poor bastard was travelling inbye in a man-rake, and a box jumped the track and crushed his leg. The sonofabitch of a foreman said it was Mike’s fault for not gettin’ out of the way fast enough, and he’s having his lamp stopped.’
Lara was baffled. ‘What does that mean?’
One of the miners explained. ‘It means Mike was on his way to work – going inbye – in a man-rake – that’s a car that takes you down to your working level. A box – that’s a coal train – jumped the track and hit him.’
‘And stopped his lamp?’ Lara asked.
The miner laughed. ‘When you’ve had your lamp stopped, it means you’ve been suspended.’
When Lara was fifteen, she entered St Michael’s High School. She was gangly and awkward, with long legs, stringy black hair, and intelligent grey eyes still too large for her pale, thin face. No one quite knew how she was going to turn out. She was on the verge of womanhood, and her looks were in a stage of metamorphosis. She could have become ugly or beautiful.
To James Cameron, his daughter was ugly. ‘Ye hae best marry the first mon fool enough to ask ye,’ he told her. ‘Ye’ll nae hae the looks to make a guid bargain.’