Emancipation Day (17 page)

“It’s so nice to meet you finally, Mrs. Lewis.”

There was an awkward silence while they watched Benny come in with the luggage. “You two aren’t sleeping here,” he said, “but I thought I’d better bring these in from the truck before somebody stole them.”

“Where are they staying, then?” Jack’s mother asked in surprise.

“At my place,” Benny said, winking at Jack. “There’s more privacy there. I’ll sleep here on the chesterfield.”

“Oh, well,” Jack’s mother said vaguely. “I’ll just go and set another place at the table. Oh, it’s no trouble. We have plenty of plates.”

Vivian very nearly sagged against the wall. The situation was so utterly beyond her comprehension she couldn’t even form a thought about it. Jack
must
have told them she was coming. They had forgotten, that was all. Forgotten that their
son
was bringing his
wife
home to meet them. Almost worse than everything else was the ease with which they accepted his bringing a strange woman home and expecting to share a room with her. It was humiliating in the extreme. What did they think she was? She wanted to run from the house, out into the menacing street, but she couldn’t. She wanted to take Jack aside and ask him what he had told them, but she couldn’t do that either. Benny was behind her, so she couldn’t even shoot Jack a meaningful glance. She followed him down the hall to the kitchen. She would have to wait until later. Maybe everything would be clearer by then.

In the kitchen, Jack’s mother looked at her and exclaimed again: “So, you’re Vivian.”

“Yes, Mrs. Lewis,” she said, as though speaking to a child. “I’m Vivian Lewis, Jack’s wife.”

A baffled look came over Jack’s mother’s face, but she recovered and said, “Oh, you must be exhausted after your long trip. Would you like some tea?”

“I would love some, thank you.”

Jack cut in. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s upstairs lying down.” She turned to Vivian. “He’s feeling under the weather today. He said he might come down for a bite of supper later on. He’ll be so happy to meet you.”

Jack’s mother opened a cupboard door and began removing dishes, the offer of tea evidently forgotten. Perhaps Jack had written to her after all, and it had simply gone out of her head, like the tea. She tried to catch Jack’s eye again, but he was talking to Benny and Jack’s mother suggested Vivian help her reset the table in the small dining room.

“The war has spared my son,” Jack’s mother said happily, handing Vivian a water glass with yellow polka dots painted on it, “and given him a bride!”

“We were so sorry you couldn’t come to the wedding,” Vivian said.

“Oh, was there a wedding?”

Vivian nearly dropped the glass. “Yes, of course there was,” she said. “In May.”

“May is such a lovely month.”

The table was heavy and dark, too big for the room. Everything was. A large, glass-fronted cabinet in one corner held glassware and serving dishes, and next to it was a big matching sideboard. An upright piano on the opposite wall was festooned with at least a dozen silver-framed, pre-war photographs, and she wondered why Jack had never shown her a photograph of anyone in his family. Jack’s mother laid the table for six. Who was the sixth guest? She knew only of an Uncle Harley, and she thought Jack had said he lived in a hotel.

“There,” Jack’s mother said when they were finished. She herded Vivian through an arched doorway into the living room and bade her put her feet up while she put on the kettle. She hadn’t forgotten the tea after all. “We’ll let the boys talk,” she said. “Dinner won’t be too long.”

She left Vivian alone in the room, which, like the dining room, contained more furniture than it could comfortably hold. They had evidently moved from a larger house, perhaps the one Jack had described to her on the train. Had business been bad during the war? Yes, that was almost certainly it. The war had shrunk everything. Except, apparently, the furniture. On the wall was a faded print of Jesus in pastel robes, kneeling at a rock with his hands folded in prayer, eyes lifted imploringly towards Heaven. No one she knew would have had such a thing in their house, not even the Catholics. She sat in a red plush armchair that reminded her of the seats on the train, and put her head back, trying to clear it of worry and suspicion. Jack would never lie to her about something this important, how could he hope to get away with it?

A short while later, Jack’s mother called the three of them, Vivian, Jack and Benny, to sit at the table while she served from the kitchen, scurrying back and forth carrying food in pots and mixing bowls but never actually sitting down herself. Jack’s father did not come down for his bite of dinner, nor did another guest arrive. No one mentioned the two empty chairs. There was a pot roast, cooked to within an inch of its life, and mashed potatoes, boiled cabbage, a cooked green that looked like spinach but somehow was not. The only condiment was salt. There never
was any tea, and Vivian did not have the heart to ask for it. By the end of the meal, Jack’s mother still had not sat down to her own empty plate.

“Shouldn’t we save something for Dad?” Jack asked when there did not appear to be anything left to save.

“Let’s let him sleep,” said his mother brightly, perching on one of the unoccupied chairs. “I don’t like to wake him,” she said to Vivian. “But you can go up and take a look at him if you like.”

“Oh,” said Vivian, taken aback. “Won’t we be seeing him tomorrow?”

“Of course you will,” Jack’s mother said.

“Jack,” she said when they had left the house to walk the short distance to Benny’s apartment—Benny would bring their luggage around later in the truck—“what is going on? There is something very odd about … about your family.” There, she’d said it. What would Jack say in response? But he surprised her.

“I know,” he said. “I tried to warn you.”

“You did? When?”

“Lots of times.” Then he looked at her. “You’ll get used to it.”

She walked beside him, sensing a kind of relief in his voice. Something she’d said had made him feel better. But when had he tried to warn her about his family? He’d barely mentioned them.

Jack had given the Navy Benny’s apartment as a contact address to which to send his demob notice, so she knew it was on a street called Tuscarora. “An Indian tribe,” Jack had joked. “Don’t
worry, long gone.” The street was better lit, and there was a bit of grass in the yard. Jack had a key for the main door and another for the apartment. She felt almost regal entering it, it was so much bigger than their little flat in St. John’s, which had seemed as big as the world to her. Benny had said he lived alone, but there was a small hand mirror and tubes of lipstick in the bathroom, a percale housedress hanging from a hook behind the bedroom door.

In bed that night, their first real bed in days, she decided to risk being more direct in her questioning.

“Did you or did you not tell your parents about our wedding?” she asked him, although now that she’d said it, it sounded more absurd than ever.

“I told you, I wrote to them,” Jack said.

But he had told her so many things that weren’t quite true; that his parents lived in a big house, that his father owned a construction company.

“What exactly did you tell them?”

“I told them I was getting married,” he said, “to an angel from Fairy Land. A wonderful girl named Lily White.”

“Jack, your mother had no idea who I was.”

“I can’t help what she knows and what she doesn’t know,” Jack said. “She says whatever comes into her head.”

“Did you tell her I was coming to Windsor?”

“Yes, I told them you were coming to Windsor.”

“Benny didn’t seem to know, either,” she persisted.

“Benny!” he said. “He knew, all right, he was just pulling your leg.”

Why did so little of what Jack said make sense to her? He was staring up at the ceiling, gone from her again.

“Jack,” she said slowly, “why does your mother use so much face powder?”

“What?” he said, turning on her. “What are you talking about? She doesn’t.”

“She does, Jack.”

“Well, how would I know? Maybe she likes face powder.” He reached across her, and for a moment she thought he was going to embrace her, to reassure her, to tell her something she could believe and trust, but he was just turning out the little lamp on the bedside table. “If you don’t have any more dumb questions,” he said into the darkness, “I’d like to go to sleep.”

In the morning, as she unpacked and was deciding what to wear, she said to Jack, “Am I to meet your father today?”

“No, not today. He and Benny have a rush job in Leamington. They won’t get back until after midnight.”

How did he know that? “We could wait up,” she offered. The thought of Jack’s father being kept from her by his family had kept her awake most of the night.

“That’s if nothing goes wrong,” Jack said.

The next day there was a different excuse. His father had to go to Detroit for supplies, then take them out to Ann Arbor where Uncle Harley was working on a nursing home. But wasn’t Uncle Harley a barber? He was, but he helped out with
the plastering when they were busy. And he was an American citizen, so he could work in Ann Arbor without a work permit. How was Uncle Harley an American citizen? Didn’t he own a barbershop in Windsor? He did. It was all so confusing and so inconceivable that she would not meet her father-in-law that she stopped questioning anything at all. She let herself believe it was simply a matter of waiting. She did have the unkind thought that if they were so busy with work then why were they still living in such a dingy little house, but she put that away from her, too, not wanting to invite another angry response. She had no idea how much a house in Windsor cost, or how much plasterers were paid. She contented herself with the mornings in Benny’s apartment, sleeping late, reading for a bit while Jack slept, then getting up to make coffee and toast and fried eggs and bringing them back to bed for Jack, who jumped like a disturbed cat when she gently shook him awake.

After dressing—Jack had brought some civilian clothes from his mother’s house—they would walk to Ouellette Avenue, Windsor’s elm-lined main street, and turn up towards the river, looking into shop windows and wandering through dime stores, killing time before going to Jack’s mother’s for lunch. She forced herself to move lingeringly. They were on holiday, a kind of honeymoon, and she wanted to enjoy it. She would pick up some small item in a shop, a scarf or a comb, and he would stand beside her jiggling coins in his pocket.

“Do you want to buy it?” he’d ask her. “Go ahead.”

“No, thank you, darling,” she would say, putting it down,
trying to keep her voice light and her spirits up. “Maybe we should send Iris a scarf?”

“Why, is it her birthday?”

“No. Never mind.”

Close to the river the shops became smaller and cheaper and the streets more congested. It reminded her of the St. John’s waterfront, only here the sidewalks were filled with coloured people instead of dockworkers, people with varying degrees of the Windsor tan, as Jack had once called it. She had seen Negroes in St. John’s, of course, merchant mariners from cargo ships. They came ashore for a day or two and then left. Coloured people in Windsor behaved more like they belonged to the place. And here the waterfront was a river. Rivers were unfriendly, she thought. She was used to water coming towards her like a greeting; here it swept past as though it hadn’t noticed her at all, dismissing her the way Jack did.

There was a dirt lane at the bottom of Ouellette, leading down to the ferry dock, and a path running east with the flow of the river, with a wooden railing to keep people from falling over. When they reached it, she leaned against the top rail and closed her eyes, breathing in the wind and the rusty cries of gulls and the warm autumn sun pressing against her bare skin. When she opened her eyes again, she was surprised to see a city shimmering like a mirage on the other side: Detroit, it must be, the Arsenal of America.

Jack took her hand and they walked back up Ouellette on the east side. In one of the shops she bought him a fedora, and
he wore it pushed back on his head, looking more like Frank Sinatra than ever: people turned to look at him, and as the afternoon passed his mood improved.

Eventually they came to a large park, with a low, black-painted chain fence dividing it from the sidewalk. Paths ran among shade trees, bordered by neatly tended flower beds and wooden benches. It looked cool and safe.

“What park is this?” she asked.

“Jackson Park.”

“Can we sit for a minute?”

“Sure,” he said, “if you want to be mugged.”

A shadow had crept into Jack’s voice. Why? Why did something as innocent as walking in a park cause him to scowl? He was the touchiest person alive. Maybe if she jollied him enough, said the right things, avoided saying the wrong things—like mentioning his father, or his mother’s use of face powder—the old Jack would return and they would get on with their real lives. But she never knew when the next crash would come, and the strain on her nerves was wearing her down.

Soon he’d be out of the Navy, though. This visit would end, Jack would be demobilized, and she’d be on her way back home to her family in St. John’s.

“But we won’t be mugged if you’re with me, darling,” she said. “You’ll protect me, won’t you?” And she drew him into the park.

JACK

T
he grass was trampled at the Ouellette end, nobody stayed on the paths, probably because they were muddy and traced with bicycle tire marks. And why did dogs always shit on paths? Vivian didn’t seem to notice, even though she was the one wearing white shoes. He guessed she also didn’t see the squares of waxed paper caught in the shrubbery, or the coloured couples entwined on the benches in broad daylight. She walked with her arm through his, looking up at the trees as though they were on a country lane.

“Isn’t it amazing,” she said, “how one tree can be perfectly still and the tree right beside it is trembling in the wind?”

“Just like you and me,” he said.

They sat beside the fountain, downwind of the spray so the freshened air blew over them, and then they walked again. They could hear traffic from Tecumseh Boulevard. When they reached the sunken garden without being mugged, she led him down the steps. Flower beds lined the paved walkways and she stopped at each one, stooping to sniff or to cradle a bloom in her cupped fingers. Masses of rose petals fell off into her hands, and she lifted them to him. “Just smell their bouquet,” she said, but they reminded him of his mother’s face powder and he turned his head away. Through the trees they could see Kennedy Collegiate, which backed onto the park from McDougall Street.