Little Audrey

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In this slim book, Audrey Henders tells the story of the first half of
her life. She was born in 1914 in Montreal, went to school, got a job,
got married, had a child. Early dates with boyfriends were mostly at
church functions, girlfriends were office workers or nurses, she met her
husband in an office and married him shortly before World War II. When
he enlisted in the Air Force, she joined a Red Cross group and went to
movies with friends; after the war, she and her husband moved to the
suburbs.

So runs the report of her life. Yet here and there are hints of the
woman she must have been. She married her man in spite of his mother’s
dislike of her. After a complete mastectomy, which was not for cancer,
she found the sponge falsies needed a lot of drying when laundered; to
cheer up her sympathetic neighbors, she hung them outside on the line so
all could see. In a brief reference to her “projects,” she mentions
a scrapbook she kept on a bus trip to California.

The story ends at the start of the 1960s. We may wonder how Henders
responded to women’s lib and how she went through the next 40 years,
but we must be content with what she has given us—the record of a
woman’s life in the first half of the 20th century, something the
history books seldom touch.