Threads of Life

Chapter 2-1

The name Triller used to be Trillberg. My great-grandfather was five years old when he emigrated with his parents by boat from Russia to Canada. The family then travelled by train to Winnipeg, which is where the only other Trillbergs outside of Russia lived, cousins who had intended to live in the United States but who had accidentally disembarked in Halifax, the ship’s next-to-last stop, and weren’t permitted back on board even after they realized their horrible mistake—a mistake that was then further compounded when they were told that the quota of Jews allowed to relocate to Toronto and Montreal had been reached and that they would have to reside in Winnipeg.

And even though my grandfather and his parents had come from a place where winters were severe, nothing had prepared them for winters in Winnipeg, which seemed to last two months longer than anywhere else in the world, and where the wind was either knocking them over or blinding them, and where the snow that covered everything was like broken eggshells crunching incessantly under their boots and giving each one of them a headache. So, rather than settling down in the prairies, they stayed just long enough to learn a bit of English and a bit about running a small tailor shop, before crossing the country again, this time settling in Toronto, which was no tropical panacea but where the winters were a bit less hopeless—and where the roads and sidewalks were ploughed after a snowstorm.

Trillberg was too ethnic sounding for my great grandparents, who were probably correct in assuming that many Canadians, like the rest of the world, harboured some unexplainable but inherited ill will toward Jews. So, after working for two years in a tailor shop on Bathurst Street, where the owner mistreated and underpaid them, and where anyone who couldn’t speak English was charged more, they opened their own shop called Triller’s across the street and took all the first and second generation Italians, Portuguese, and Jews—in other words, every customer—along with them.

It wasn’t long before their mail started arriving with Mr. and Mrs. Triller written on it and, of course, all the customers were calling them by those names. And though they didn’t legally change their names, when their son, my grandfather, got married, the name on his wedding licence was Triller. And then, when he and his wife had a Canadian-born son, the birth certificate said he was Sidney Triller, and the other name was lost for good.

TrillerThe Trillers owned the tailor shop on the other side of Bathurst Street for another forty years, with my grandfather taking over the store from his parents when they were too old to work. It was a good location and had a long glass storefront, where the made-to-measure suits and coats were always on display, and my grandfather was blessed with a steady stream of immigrant assistants, mostly from Italy, who worked for him until they gained enough experience and enough English to work at one of the department stores, like Sears or Eaton’s, for better pay. After their only child, and my future father, was born, my grandmother stayed home to raise him, and my grandfather worked in the shop until he was sixty-five years old and had put his son through law school at the University of Toronto.

In nineteen fifty-nine, a young man named Harry Brandes walked into Triller’s and offered my grandfather an absurd amount of money for the store. The long storefront and proximity to Little Italy were exactly what Harry, who already owned two stores on Dufferin Street, was looking for.

At the very moment Harry walked through the door, my grandfather had been daydreaming about retiring to Florida and spending everyday poolside on a lounge chair under the hot sun with his wife lying next to him. My grandfather left Harry alone in the store and ran home to tell my grandmother and to get her blessing. Thirty minutes later, he returned out of breath and accepted the offer. He had one condition: that his son, a new lawyer who had just started working for one of the biggest law firms in the city, was to be hired by Harry to draw up the paperwork and complete the deal.

To someone living in downtown Toronto at the time, I’m sure it looked like Harry Brandes was trying to open clothing stores on every corner of every street (and that, fifteen years later, he was trying to get rid of them just as quickly). Each store had a round black-and-white sign with a man holding a walking stick and wearing a tall hat and the words Bond Men’s Shop on it—a name he’d borrowed from an upscale haberdashery in London, England, which he had never visited in person but which he had seen in a movie starring David Niven.

Bond Men’s ShopBut that’s not the real reason Harry is an important figure in my life. The real reason is because of his two younger sisters, twins named Abbey and Marlene, one of whom would become my future mother.

* * *

All the Brandeses were tall and thin, except for Abbey, who was on the short side of five foot three. No matter how much she ate, she looked emaciated and breastless and stooped over like a malnourished child. Abbey would never get married or hold a job and for most of her adult life, was financially supported by Harry, who sometimes brought her to his store on Dufferin Street, where he would ask her to choose fabrics for the suits he was having made, even though he had already chosen them himself. Her sister, on the other hand, was tall and beautiful with large breasts and big black eyes and long black hair and a smile that made other people smile back. Marlene was a schoolteacher at the time and her male colleagues were hitting on her every day. Figuring that a young lawyer would be a better match for his sister than a schoolteacher, or at least a better earner, Harry brought my future mother along to my father’s office on the day he signed the documents for the purchase of the store and, a year later, they were married.

* * *

Harry’s father was from a family of eight children and every one of them, with families of their own, lived in the same part of the city, so when Harry’s parents died in a pharmacy on Church Street, the roof having collapsed on top of them under the weight of five feet of snow, Harry and his sisters, who were only twelve and eight years old at the time, were raised by umpteen aunts and uncles who were like a board of directors in guiding their lives. When it came to planning my parents’ wedding, the Trillers were no competition for the corporation Brandes, and though my grandparents had passed down to my father an indifference bordering on contempt for every religion, including their own, the two dozen Brandeses insisted on a traditional Jewish ceremony and since they were paying for most of it, my parents were married by a Rabbi at Beth Shalom Synagogue. The Brandeses looked very pleased that day that they had brought a promising young lawyer into the corporation.

* * *

Harry was never book-smart, but he was business-smart. During his high-school years, he worked at a clothing store called Zimmerman’s on St. Clair, and because Mr. Zimmerman was balancing the demands of a wife, two mistresses, and a gambling habit and was happy to never set foot in the store he’d inherited from his father, except to clean out the till, and because Harry was eager to work every weeknight and weekend, he soon became Mr. Zimmerman’s de facto manager at minimum wage.

Zimmerman’s was a type of high-end men’s store, with nice finished dark-wood shelves and elegant lighting and made-to-measure suits and coats and hats and dress shirts, all beautifully displayed, which served as a prototype for the Bond Men’s Shops Harry would soon open.

Harry did all the bookkeeping, the buying, the window and floor displays, and supervised salesmen two and three times older than him. That he was paid virtually nothing to run the store while Mr. Zimmerman depleted all the profits on w****s and gambling, didn’t bother Harry a bit; he was learning his future livelihood.

At the age of twenty-three, using all the money he had earned while he worked at Zimmerman’s, as well as the money he hadn’t earned and had skimmed from the till, unnoticed by Mr. Zimmerman, who always blamed himself for his weekly shortfall, and with the blessing and financial assistance of many Brandeses, Harry opened the first Bond Men’s Shop on Dufferin Street, just south of Bloor Street. It was a high-end men’s clothing store with the finest camel-hair coats in the city, the finest Italian wool suits, and cotton shirts and cashmere cardigans, and scarves and finely constructed hats imported from England. The store also sold European leather goods and umbrellas with wooden handles.

From the moment the doors opened, the store was a success. Located in Little Italy, Italian immigrants bought their first suits and coats at Bond. Harry hired Italian tailors and rather than situate them in the backroom, which was the custom, he put them right in the window, under a sign that read, Real Italian Tailors, where passersby and potential customers could watch the deft construction of the made-to-measure suits.

Real Italian TailorsAnd rather than bank his profits, Harry opened a second store, also in Little Italy, north of the first store, also on Dufferin, at St. Clair, and again the Italian tailors were part of the window display.

In five years, Harry had opened fifteen stores, all downtown and in the same general area. No store was east of University Avenue or west of Keele Street or north of Eglinton Avenue or south of Queen Street. He hired a manager for each location and allowed the manager to hire two salesmen and two tailors.

Like I said before, Harry was an astute businessman. He had an innate understanding of how to motivate employees without reading a single book on the subject. He hired the smartest, most honest, most experienced managers he could find, often luring them away from other retailers with a very generous wage, including a Christmas bonus that was a percentage of the store’s net profits. And he didn’t pay them well out of kindness. He paid them well because he wanted them to love and to care for the stores just as much as he did. And because he travelled from store to store and could never police each store the way he would have preferred, he needed his managers to be as diligent in keeping everyone in line as he was—and they were, because every penny each store made increased their bonuses at the end of the year.

If Harry had a weakness, it was in thinking that his customers would never compromise on the quality of the suits and coats they wore. When the retail world began shifting toward mass-produced garments made with cheaper fabrics and materials, he stubbornly stuck to selling only the highest quality wools and cottons in the most muted colours—greys, blacks, and blues—and somehow this astute, forward-thinking businessman had, through his inflexibility, turned his stores into specialty shops for people with lots of money facing big events, like weddings and first communions, rather than a place for regular men to buy work clothes.

The truth was, Harry could have evolved with the times and made his stores younger and trendier and he would have been successful all over again, but by the time he had reached his late thirties, having worked every day of his married life except his wedding day, my parents’ wedding day and the day his youngest son was born, he had accumulated enough wealth for two lifetimes, and his interest in selling clothing was in rapid decline. And although he was still a young man, he had already lived longer than his own parents, and he found himself growing more and more restless.