Emancipation Day (11 page)

She studied Jack’s face over the top of her book, almost warily, wondering what was going through his mind. She tried to see him as Maugham’s Larry Darrell, a loafer whom Isabel’s parents had tried to talk her out of marrying. But Isabel would not be dissuaded, and married Larry anyway. Had Iris given her the book on purpose? She’d felt protective of Jack, he seemed so vulnerable all the time, laughing one minute and the next looking
like he’d just seen a ghost. She realized how little she knew him.

“He’s a performer,” Iris had said. “He’s meant to be looked at, not understood.”

Was that true? Had he been performing for her all along, pretending to be something he wasn’t?

“He’s all surface,” Iris said.

Iris had told her another thing that worried her. According to Iris, Freddie had offered to set Jack up in business in St. John’s, some kind of construction project, and Jack had turned him down flat. Rather rudely, Iris had said, but of course she would say that. What bothered Vivian was that Jack hadn’t mentioned it to her.

“Does it hurt?” he said to her.

She looked up at him, startled. “Does what hurt?”

“Having your nose stuck in a book like that.”

She closed the book and put it on the seat beside her. “Sorry, darling.”

She was trying to get used to calling him “darling,” which was what Iris called Freddie, but it didn’t seem to suit him. The only syllable that fit was
Jack
. She kept her eyes on him, smiling encouragingly, she thought, but he didn’t say anything more. After a while he returned his gaze to the window, seemingly content that now he had gained her undivided attention he could pretend she wasn’t there.

She looked at her watch, counted a hundred telephone poles and looked at her watch again. A minute and a half, golly. She hummed “In the Mood” to the rhythm of the train’s wheels. She looked down at the book. They were passing through what
seemed to be perpetual bush, farther from the sea than she had ever been in her life, nothing around her but trees and more trees rushing by like an endless school of startled fish. She took a sheet of New Belmont Hotel stationery from her purse and began writing a letter.

“Now what are you doing?” he asked her.

“Writing to my parents,” she said.

“Let me see it when you’re done, okay?”

“Why?”

“I might want to add something.”

“Why not write your own letter?” she said.

He reached across and snatched the page from her lap.

“Jack!” she cried. “That’s private.”

“Oh-ho,” he said, reading. “ ‘Jack was really seasick on the ferry—some sailor! I guess he wasn’t kidding about his time on the Derry Run.’ Who said I was kidding about that?”

“No one. It was just something to say.”

“Did someone think I was faking it, to get off active duty?”

“No, Jack. No one thought that.”

“Iris?”

“No.”

“I guess I should be flattered that Iris thinks I’m such a good actor I could fool a doctor.”

“Jack, please. It was just something to say.”

He tossed the letter back to her and laughed. She took it up and smoothed it. “Aren’t you going to add something?” she asked.

“Naw, you go ahead.” He resumed gazing out the window,
giving her the cameo shot, but now his eyes were hard and unseeing.

When the train stopped in Moncton they got off to walk on the platform and she dropped her letter into a postbox inside the station. She watched the envelope disappear through the slot and thought about crawling in after it, but that was silly. Wasn’t this what she’d wanted, to be away? When they returned to their seats and the train was moving again she looked for her book, but it was gone. Jack called the steward and asked if he had seen it but the man shook his head. “No,
suh
.”

“You sure about that?” Jack asked him.

“Very sure, suh,” the steward said evenly.

Jack told him to bring him a Coke and some ice.

“Anything for the lady?”

She shook her head. She was devastated by the loss of her book, the last thing she had received, might ever receive, from her sister. It was as though she had lost Newfoundland and any possibility of going back to it. She remembered seeing Jack standing by a dustbin on the platform while she was in the station. It was a terrible suspicion for her to have, but there it was. When the steward came with his drink, Jack picked up the magazine and became deeply absorbed in it, studying each page with exaggerated attention. Teaching her a lesson.

“Tell me about your parents, Jack,” she said. “What kind of people are they?”

He shrugged. “They’re nothing special.”

“They’re special to me, they’re my parents-in-law.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but after this trip you won’t be seeing much of them.”

“Why not?”

He looked up. “Because they’ll be in Windsor and we’ll be somewhere else.”

He had a way of making the most outlandish things sound logical, and then getting all riled up when she didn’t go along with him. It frightened her.

“I’d still like to hear about them.”

He turned another page of the magazine and spent some time looking at an advertisement for laundry soap.

“Are they nice people? Not so nice people?” she persisted. “What kind of house do they live in? What’s your mother like?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said.

“But I want you to tell me.”

“All right,” he said, sighing and closing the magazine. “They’re like your folks. They live in a big house in a nice part of town, bigger than Iris and Freddie’s. Brick, with a big front porch with a swing on it. There’s a living room on the ground floor, but they only use it when they have guests, like that room in your parents’ house. Their parlour’s on the second floor, at the top of the stairs.”

He paused. How odd, she thought, to have a parlour on the second floor. “Do you mean like a sitting room?”

“Not a room, really, more like a big space with some chairs
and a coffee table, but that’s where they spend most of their time. Mom knits and listens to the radio. She’s small but she’s a real fighter, wears herself out doing charity work all day, belongs to lots of clubs. She likes listening to
Amos ’n’ Andy
in the evenings, you don’t get that in St. John’s, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. I sit up there with her sometimes after dinner. Through the windows you can look down over the tops of the chestnut trees and see the Detroit River, and Detroit on the other side of it. Now that the war’s over the barrage balloons will be gone and at night the skyline will be lit up like a Christmas tree. You never seen such tall buildings. I told you me and my sister Alvina used to go there to hear the big bands and watch movies in the Fox Theatre.”

“What’s your sister like?”

“Alvina?” he said, leaning back in his seat. “She’s big, and blonde, like Dad and Benny. She’s twelve years older than me. I take more after my mother.”

“And Benny?”

This was what she wanted, this was the intimacy she craved. She didn’t know why she’d practically had to force it, but once he started it was like music pouring out of him.

“He and my father don’t get along, maybe because they’re too much alike. Benny’s taller than me, blond hair, blue eyes with brown flecks in them, never seen that in anyone else except my father. Women go crazy over him. He’s got his own place now, just around the corner from my folks’ house. They’ll probably give us his old room at the back of the house on the ground
floor. The sun pours into it in the morning and you can walk out of it into the backyard.”

“What about your father?” she prompted.

“What about my father?”

He paused again, longer this time. “He wears expensive suits with a white handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket that he never uses, just for show, see? He always smells like talcum powder and aftershave. His father was a barber, but he’s dead now, has been for years. Granddad used to take me to the Detroit Zoo and Tiger Stadium, and Belle Isle, where people go when it gets too hot in town. Windsor’s the hottest place in Canada, did you know that? It’s always summer, never snows, they got trees that never lose their leaves, and flowers growing in the middle of January.”

“You were talking about your father,” she said gently.

“Dad was already in the construction business when I came along. He started out with one truck, with ‘W. H. Lewis and Son’ painted on it. When I was born he added the ‘s’ to make it ‘Sons.’ ”

He looked out the window, and for a second she was afraid he was finished. Then he shrugged, as though a second conversation was going on in his head, one she couldn’t be part of.

“When my father and Benny have a big job they have to be careful who they hire. Windsor’s a working-class town and there’s a huge coloured population. Coloureds’ll steal the shirt off your back. They take things from my father, paint and plaster and stuff to fix up their own shacks with, and they steal from the house owners. Stupid things, like shampoo, or kids’
toys, or that book of yours. There are some parts of the city you can’t go into because of them.”

“What do they do?”

“Are you kidding? They’d slit your throat as soon as look at you. Those people carry knives.”

He retreated into silence after that, but she felt close to him. He had constructed a bridge between them. She reached across and took his hand and squeezed it, blinking back tears. He smiled at her tightly, but his eyes were soft.

When the train pulled into Toronto, it was nearly midnight and she couldn’t see anything of the city. The connection to Windsor didn’t leave until six in the morning. Jack didn’t want to leave Union Station. She suggested they put their bags in a locker and go for a walk, get something to eat, see the city, have an adventure, but Jack insisted it was too late, that everything would be closed and the streets would be too dangerous so late at night. Station employees had copies of all the locker keys, he said, and they went through people’s luggage looking for valuables.

“This is the real world, kid, not some Fairy Land.”

“We don’t have any valuables,” she said, but they sat on a wooden bench, curled up under their coats, for the whole six hours. This isn’t the real world, she thought. In front of them was a kiosk that sold books and magazines, but it was closed and wouldn’t open until nine. She leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder and gazed through the wire grille at the titles—there was
The Razor’s Edge
, its pitch-black spine with white lettering perched just out of reach behind the iron screen.

On the train in the morning he barely spoke to her. Something terrible seemed to be going on in his head, but what it was she couldn’t fathom. They were in a coach, the tight, red plush seats like those in a theatre rubbing the backs of her legs. Twice they were shunted onto sidings while cargo trains roared by importantly in the opposite direction. Jack barely seemed to notice them.

“Jack, you
will
show me the tunnel when we get there?” she said, trying to cheer him up. “The one that goes under the river to the United States?”

“Sure, doll,” he said without enthusiasm. “All the old haunts.”

Just before noon the conductor hurried down the aisle calling “Windsor!” as though the city’s name were a warning. Five minutes later the train began passing scrap-metal yards, the backs of unpainted houses with their weathered stoops and sooty windowpanes, grey laundry sagging in the yards. Windsor was so much duller than the other cities they had seen, duller even than Sydney, not at all the balmy metropolis Jack had described to her. A physical pall hung over everything, the station, the streets, the river, even the people, all of whom seemed to have come down to the station to meet someone they didn’t like.

She looked at Jack. He was staring out at the faces in the crowd, looking terrified.

My poor, poor darling, she thought. What have I done to you?

PART II

WILLIAM HENRY

A
fter driving into town from Walkerville, Benny parked the truck near the corner of Sandwich East and Ouellette, not exactly in front of the British-American Hotel but close enough by. The sidewalks were unusually busy for a Monday, especially down by the ferry dock, where people were pushing and shoving like something was being handed out for free. Coloureds and whites. William Henry always felt uneasy when he saw a crowd acting agitated. Benny noticed it, too.

“What’s goin’ on down there?”

“Nothin’ good,” William Henry said.

They entered the hotel through the side door off Ouellette, which would take them past the barbershop. Harlan was cutting
a customer’s hair and William Henry waved at him through the glass,
come and have a drink
, and Harlan raised his scissors and comb,
soon as I’m done here
. William Henry and Benny continued across the lobby towards the open tavern door.

“Morning, Betsy,” William Henry said to the coloured clerk at the front desk.

“Afternoon, Mr. Lewis,” she said. “Benny.”

Fast Eddy must have seen them coming, because he had four glasses of draught on their table before they even sat down. Benny went to the bar and bought a pack of Buckinghams. There were three or four other men in the place, all sitting at different tables, but none of them looked up as William Henry took his work hat off and hung it on a hook on the wall. He was never one to drink with his hat on, it seemed too impermanent.

William Henry loved this room, settled into it like a tired foot into an old shoe. In his dream house, the entire ground floor would be this tavern, with the same terrazzo floor and a dozen round tables, each with four captain’s chairs around it, a bar running along one wall and Fast Eddy in constant attendance. In this dream tavern, the beer was always cold, the salt flowed freely from the shaker, and nothing ever changed. Friends dropped in for drinks and sat silently at their tables, each absorbed in his own thoughts or not, as the case might be. There were no windows, or maybe windows made of hollow glass bricks. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. Most of the light in the room came from behind the bar, reflected off a long mirror like the one Harlan had in his barbershop. The sawdust
on the floor was from sawn white pine or cedar. No distinctions were made between night and day, winter and summer, these dark days of the war and the glory days of the Depression. The war was not a constant topic of discussion, and being out of work was not a disgrace.