Lives of the Family (16 page)

OUTCOMES

IN THE WINTER OF
his last year of high school, Joe Lor wasn’t sure what he’d do after he graduated, whether in the fall he’d go on to university and, if so, what he’d study. His three elder siblings had already gone out into the world. Alice had studied nursing at McGill, had married and was working in Toronto. Ruth had earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, was about to return to study social work, and had been a freelance writer and photographer, filing stories for the
Globe and Mail
from such far-flung places as Frobisher Bay in Canada’s north and Brazil. Valerie was also in Toronto, in her second year at teachers’ college. Only Joe and Gloria were still at home. At twelve, Gloria had a few years yet.

Like all the Lor children, Joe was born in Brockville. His first, and only, home was the apartment where his parents, Leip and Agnes, had begun their married life, above the New York Café. Their marriage and the family’s restaurant were each going on thirty years.

Joe’s older sisters had known that sooner rather than later they’d leave their hometown, if only because they weren’t going to find husbands there. So he knew that life as he’d known it had to change. But comfortingly, during holidays and summers,
when his sisters returned from university, their lives settled back into the rhythm of the family business. Just as the siblings did in their early childhood when they needed a parent to come upstairs to the apartment, one of them would take the broom, upend it, and bang on the floor to get the attention of a family member in the restaurant below. The five children still gravitated to the booth at the back, where they once did their homework, competing for space with their mother’s paperwork and leaving their father to his office in the basement.

Perhaps when you’re far down the sibling order, change comes harder. But that was thinking further ahead than Joe needed to. It was only February. He had a few more months to make any decision.

DESPITE LIVING IN A
small town like Brockville, Joe had no sense that he was cut off from the world. In fact, the opposite was true. Come spring, once the ice broke up, the modern era of water transport, international commerce and tourism would sail into view. In a few weeks—as early as April—the recently completed St. Lawrence Seaway would open, linking the river with the five Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. The official opening later this summer, on June 26, 1959, was going to be an international event, presided over by no less than Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, President Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth.

The five years of construction to widen and deepen the channel between Montreal and Lake Ontario had been a mammoth spectacle in itself: the river had to be diverted to accommodate the building of locks and canals and, in advance of the controlled flooding, houses picked up and moved. But
now that the seaway was finished, of all the river towns where one might watch the parade of ocean-going freighters, cruise ships and pleasure craft, Brockville arguably offered the best prospect; the river here was at its narrowest, less than a mile separating Ontario and New York State.

All of which boded well for business at the Lors’ New York Café. Even before the seaway, one only had to see the volume of summertime traffic through town to recognize that Brockville attracted its share of tourists and big-city spenders. Its waterfront was a departure point for tours and cruises of the Thousand Islands, tree-covered granite hilltops of the southernmost reaches of the Canadian Shield that broke the water’s surface. Thirty miles upriver, centred around Alexandria Bay, New York, these islands and the banks of the St. Lawrence were home to “Millionaires’ Row,” named for the summer mansions of industrialists and socialites from New York, Boston and Chicago who left city life behind and came for “the season.”

Leip and Agnes Lor’s New York Café was on King Street, a five-minute walk up from the tour boat pier at the end of Broad Street. Within a sixty-five-mile stretch of the King’s Highway on the Canadian side, no fewer than five cafés, located in Brockville, Prescott, Morrisburg, Ganonoque and Iroquois, carried the same name, and were owned by Leip Lor or men related to him. He owned a share in three; he and his younger brother were sole proprietors of their own respective cafés.

Leip advertised his café as “The Largest Modern Restaurant on the St. Lawrence.” He could stand by the claim: his 121–seat establishment was staffed, at its busiest, by six cooks, two dishwashers, seven waiters and two cashiers. The menu was beyond compare. Within its pages, one could find the standard fare of
“Americanized” Chinese food, from chicken balls (but made with delicate coatings that drew raves) to chow mein (including the perennial favourite, the chow mein bun). But as well, it offered cuisine that one would expect to find in the dining rooms of storied resorts and grand hotels, including Malpeque Oysters Rockefeller and seared Nova Scotia sea scallops, and smoked Winnipeg Goldeye. Leip put his signature on his restaurant with the menu’s daily specials, deciding them the night before, according to what he’d bought and had shipped in or what was in season. If venison or bear steak, he had paid a hunter for them. If lamb chops, a local sheep farmer had raised the lamb and butchered it. If sturgeon, an angler had taken it from the St. Lawrence River; if whitefish, from Lake Ontario. Even the frog’s legs were from frogs trapped in the nearby countryside.

Sophisticated diners would recognize Leip’s restaurant as belonging to the tradition first made famous by Ruby Foo’s in Boston. Tired of virulent anti-Chinese sentiment on North America’s west coast, Ruby decamped from San Francisco and in 1923 opened Ruby Foo’s Den in Boston’s Chinatown. Her clientele were well-heeled Jewish families, many of whom managed or owned garment factories. Where timing is everything, Ruby hit the jackpot. First- and second-generation Jews, whose families had emigrated from European cities, saw dining out as a way to indulge their refined palates. Chinese cooking, which never combined dairy with meat, relied on clear broths, and allowed forbidden pork to disappear into say, an egg roll, sat comfortably with Jewish dietary customs. And, “eating Chinese” was at once a compelling bargain and a cosmopolitan experience. Ruby went on to open four more Ruby Foo’s restaurants, including, most recently, one in Montreal in 1945.

A similar attraction drew crowds to Leip Lor’s New York Café. Even the “mileage card”—the souvenir calling card handed out to patrons—suggested one had
arrived
. On the flip side of a photograph of the posh dining room, with its checkered floor, glass pendant lamps and ceiling fan, a detailed chart set out “DISTANCES FROM BROCKVILLE,” listing mileage from fifty-one cities, towns and villages. Some were as far away as Quebec City and Chicago. Some were only fifteen minutes down the highway: Prescott on the Canadian side, or directly opposite, reachable by a year-round ferry, Ogdensburg on the American side.

THE LORS
’
RESTAURANT
, open everyday of the year except Christmas Day, opened at half past eight in the mornings, and closed at half past eleven in the evenings Monday to Saturday and at ten on Sundays. The only respite in the long workday came mid-afternoon, when the restaurant closed in the interval between lunch and dinner. In summer, Leip would pile some of the family into his beat-up Dodge and they’d escape to their cottage four miles down the road for a swim or to fish off the dock. By late afternoon, one of them had to be back at the restaurant. The Lors had one standing rule: during opening hours one family member—the children counted, once they were old enough—had to be on the premises. The rule held even when Agnes’s beloved brother Charlie died. One of the daughters was designated to stay behind while the rest of the family went overnight to North Bay for the funeral.

On this cold February day, during the afternoon break, Joe wandered into the living room and came upon his father stretched out on the sofa. Maybe he was tired; how could he not be.

“Joe, would you play the piano for me?”

Joe felt honoured by his father’s request. His mother had been the one to insist that each of the children take piano lessons, which for five had been no small expense. The practising over the years had taken its toll on the piano; each end of the keyboard was missing two keys. Joe pulled back the stool, sat himself comfortably, and considered what to play from his repertoire of the Grade 9 syllabus of the Royal Conservatory of Music. He chose a Bach piece, as the composer’s music seemed both calming and meditative. If played well, Bach’s music would show off his dedication and hours of practice, virtues that his father would appreciate.

When Joe’s performance ended, Leip expressed his gratitude. Joe rose, pushed the stool back in place, and told his father he was going out to get some air. His father responded by saying, “If anything happens, promise me you’ll make sure you take care of your mother.” Odd thing for Dad to say, Joe thought. He grabbed his winter coat, planning to walk over to Delaney’s Bowling Alley to see if anybody he knew might be hanging out at the pool tables there.

LEIP LOR
’
S SUCCESS IN
Brockville followed on that of his father, who’d brought him to Canada and later returned to China in the same year that Leip married Agnes. In 1909, father and son had been toiling, unhappily, in Havana, Cuba, when a compatriot from a neighbouring village in China, who had a laundry in Brockville, got word to him that the city had room for a second laundry. Settled by United Empire Loyalists who escaped the American Revolution by coming north, Brockville, the first city to be incorporated in Ontario—in
1832—boasted an array of factories on its waterfront, from tinsmiths to shipbuilding.

The elder Lor paid the Canadian head tax for himself and his twelve-year-old son, and opened Kwong Sing Laundry at the cheaper-rent end of King Street. His sign promised “First Class Service,” and to win his customers’ confidence, he attired his bachelor workers in immaculate white shirts and crisply pressed trousers. He allowed Leip two years of schooling, then put him to work in the laundry. When the elder Lor sold out twenty years later, he passed his investments of a piggery and some land near Brockville to his son.

By then, Leip had shifted his own obligations from China to Canada. He’d followed the familiar pattern of marriage in China, leaving behind a pregnant wife on his return to Canada. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, his wife died, leaving relatives to raise their child. A decade later, Leip decided he wanted to remarry in Canada. He asked a friend in the missionary society to help find him a Chinese wife, and a contact at the Presbyterian Church in North Bay turned up Agnes Young, a tall, striking girl with the posture of a dancer. She was twenty, twelve years Leip’s junior. After corresponding for a few months, the two married. Leip was impressed by her evident cleverness; Agnes was persuaded that “since he’s a Christian, he must be okay.”

From the start, Leip and Agnes divided the responsibilities in their new restaurant. Leip, the face of the business, ran the kitchen. He dealt with the cooks and did all the buying, travelling every few weeks to Montreal, sometimes including a side trip to Ottawa. In Montreal, he picked up general delivery mail destined for various relations and bachelors. On his way back, he’d stop to deliver it at their cafés and laundries.

Agnes focused on the customers. She scheduled the waiters and cashiers, did the payroll, and at close of day balanced the day’s cash receipts and transactions, staying up half the night if necessary to get it right. And, once Leip decided the next day’s specials, she typed the daily menu insert, which she then left for one of the children to copy on the Gestetner machine in the morning, the only time they ventured into their father’s basement office.

The personalities of this husband and wife team appeared to be complementary: Leip was outgoing, with a loud and resonant voice—he was capable of raising it to astounding volumes—to match his sociable, cigar-smoking ways. Agnes was charming, soft-spoken, both self-assured and shy. Yet when it came to the business, they were highly competitive. Leip had great confidence in his business acumen, as she did in her own. Like his family’s success, hers had been proven over two generations. Her family’s road from China to Canada had travelled through Philadelphia and Boston, where her father had been a merchant, and then to Montreal and finally North Bay, where he’d opened a laundry and a café. When Agnes was five, her mother, newly widowed, took her young family back to China, thinking she could stretch the family’s savings further there, only to decide two years later that a better future for her children lay back in the restaurant and laundry in North Bay. With her encouragement, Agnes would graduate from a business college in North Bay, and work as a secretary at a local insurance company.

Leip, mostly self-educated, had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, well short of what Agnes had achieved. But when it came to business, he relied on intuition and gut
feeling. Agnes prided herself on constantly thinking of ways to “improve” the family’s business. She relished checking out the competition. Whenever she took shopping trips to Montreal, she dined at Chinese-owned restaurants. If Ruth was along, she would pen “reviews” for her mother.

As stubborn as Leip was about giving ground on any matter, Agnes never held back on her opinions. The two clashed often, their arguments sometimes erupting into loud and prolonged rows. The Lor children accepted this tension between their parents, as if their reliably opposed opinions created the vitality and energy that kept the café thriving.

“
EVERYONE KNOWS OUR FAMILY
,” Agnes reminded her children. “Your father is respected in this town.” As a newlywed, Agnes had been impressed that people tipped their hat to her husband. And not just ordinary folk, but police, lawyers and judges. After hours, the police would invite Leip to ride along with them on their patrols. He’s famous, trusted and well liked, Agnes noted. And he was a leader. Leip was elected head of the local business association and was often quoted in the
Brockville Recorder and Times
. Agnes, always stylishly attired in an outfit that showed off her trim waist, with her hair swept up in a chignon, forbade her daughters from wearing shorts or baring their arms in public. Each time an adult they didn’t recognize passed them on the sidewalk with a “Hello, Miss Lor,” the daughters had to concede the wisdom of their mother’s lessons in modesty. In case Agnes missed something in teaching her children social graces she instructed them: “When you go to white people’s homes, watch what they do.” In North Bay, she had benefited from the tutoring of a proper English family.