Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  But tonight was going to be different. She had run into Valerie Hynes downtown—Valerie Gillard, she was now—a few weeks ago. They hadn’t really kept in touch, except for a few letters right after Audrey had moved down South and Christmas cards every year since then. They had squealed, and hugged, and done all the things you did when you saw an old friend after years apart. They traded news, or rather Audrey heard all Valerie’s news—two babies and another on the way, a new job for her husband working for CN, as the railway company was called now. “And I heard you moved back home…I’ve been meaning to drop by the shop and see you, but you know how busy it always is when you have youngsters,” Val said. “And you’ve got just the one? A little boy?”

  They had ended the visit in the shoe aisle at Bowring’s with the promise that they would get together soon. Valerie gave Audrey her phone number and said she would have Audrey over to the house sometime. But she wasn’t in the neighbourhood anymore—they had bought one of the new houses in around Churchill Park, so it wasn’t as if she and Audrey were going to run into each other on the street or drop over after supper for a cup of tea. If Valerie didn’t call, Audrey supposed, that would be the end of it.

  But Valerie did call, and tonight she had invited Audrey over to her house for supper. She had also asked Lorraine Penney and her husband Ted. Audrey had seen Lorraine in and out of the shop since she’d been home; these days she was nearly always with Ted’s sister Selena, who had married Freddy Ivany. Lorraine had never suggested that she and Audrey might get together, but now she sailed into the front porch of Val’s little bungalow, kissed Audrey on the cheek, and shrieked, “We got the old gang back together!”

  Not all their old crowd was available to get together, of course. Most of the conversation over dinner was taken up with tracking old friends and classmates, bringing Audrey up to date on who had married whom, who had moved away, how many children everyone had. Eileen Howse was down in the States; Maxine Parsons and her husband were up in Toronto. Donna Crocker was still living over on Summer Street and had two sets of twins.

  “And Cathy Kelly—did you hear? Well, you knew that wasn’t going to end well, herself and Ricky Ryan—sure he was fifteen years older than her if he was a day,” Lorraine said, digging into Valerie’s orange Jell-O mold with gusto. “And it’s not like Ricky was the kind you’d ever say was steady or reliable. Well, the fights they used to have! They were only next door to my mother, you know, the bottom floor of that house next to her that’s all cut up in apartments? She said—well, she said, but I saw it with my own eyes a few times when I was over there—they used to be screaming, yelling, out in the street, throwin’ things at each other—making a holy show of theirselves.”

  “It was shocking,” Val said. “We lived over by them too, when we were first married, but I was some glad to get out of there. They weren’t the only ones getting on like that.”

  “No, but they were the worst. Anyway, she took up with Kevin Downey, from the South Side—do you remember any of the Downeys, Audrey? There was a sister used to go round with one of the Crockers for a while, I can’t remember her name. Anyway, Cathy Kelly and this one Downey, they took off together for the mainland last summer, not a word said to old Ricky Ryan— she just up and left him.”

  In the little silence that followed Lorraine’s story, Audrey watched both her old friends remember that she, too, had up and left her husband without a word. Lorraine looked down at her plate, and after a moment Valerie said brightly, “Well, now, if anyone’s ready for dessert, I tried something new—I hope it turned out all right—it’s a no-bake cherry cheesecake. I got the recipe out of Good Housekeeping….”

  Valerie was trying so hard, like she’d read something—probably also in Good Housekeeping, right next to the recipe—about being the perfect hostess, making all these fancy new dishes like the molded salad and the no-bake cherry cheesecake. She got up and went into the kitchen.

  “I mean…she probably did the right thing,” Lorraine added. “Cathy, I mean, leaving Ricky. He wasn’t very good to her. Only it was a big shock to everyone.”

  “It always is,” Audrey said.

  After supper, Valerie’s husband—a nice fellow, Bryce Gillard from Grand Falls—suggested a game of bridge, which everyone thought was a good idea till they realized there were five of them. Then Bryce said he would sit out and let the other four play, and Ted chimed in and said no he would. The two men got into a competition over who wouldn’t have to play. Lorraine suggested another game, 120s or 45s or something. It turned out the only games anyone could think of with five players were kids’ games like Go Fish or Crazy Eights, and Audrey thought this might be the reason adults normally went around in couples.

  It was a little bit fun, and a little bit awkward, and a little bit sad, all in equal parts. Lorraine and Ted offered her a ride home but Audrey said she’d rather walk. It was a nice fall evening, a few folks still out on the street, mostly young couples twined around each other with no eyes for the lone woman walking up the road.

  “Audrey! Is that you, Audrey Holloway?” A voice from the step of one of the houses near the bottom of Cairo Street rang out in the still air, and Audrey turned to see Doris Parsons coming down the steps.

  She had seen Doris a few times in the shop since coming home, but there had never really been a chance to talk or catch up—and if Audrey had had any doubt that catching up with old friends was a bad idea, surely tonight had proven that it was. Anyway, she and Doris had never been friends, not like she had been with Val and Lorraine. They hadn’t gone to school together, or gone to dances and flirted with the same boys, or hung around at each other’s houses. Doris had already been a married woman when she arrived in the neighbourhood, marked as an outsider by her Scottish accent. The accent was blunted a bit now by seven years in St. John’s, but was still distinctive enough to draw stares when she spoke.

  “It’s me—just back from dinner with Valerie and Bryce. You remember Valerie, don’t you?”

  “Yes—her parents live up on Suez Street, don’t they? I remember you and she were great friends,” Doris said. She came down from the step and met Audrey at the front gate; both women stood, one on either side of the gate, each with a hand on the gatepost.

  “I suppose you must have had girlfriends like that, back home in Scotland, before you married and moved over here?” Audrey asked, suddenly curious.

  “Oh, I did! Myself and Winnie Gates, we were great pals from the time we were in grammar school, all the way up. We were both going around with soldiers when the war started, but I married mine, and she split up with hers.”

  “Did she marry someone else? You keep in touch, do you?”

  “Oh aye, we write each other, pretty regular. She’s seeing a fellow now, but I don’t know how serious it is.”

  “Do you miss it a lot—home?” How strange that she was asking Doris the kind of personal questions she could no longer imagine asking Val or Lorraine.

  “Oh aye, every day I miss it. Miss me mam and da, and the neighbours in the street, and Winnie and the rest of my pals… it wouldn’t be so bad if I could ever go back for a wee visit, but they’re all away on the other side of the ocean.” Doris sighed, then tried to laugh. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I try not to talk about home. Les doesn’t like for me to be sad.”

  “I don’t think Harry ever knew or cared whether I was sad or not,” Audrey said.

  “Then you’re better off back here, aren’t you? It’s hard enough to be so far from your own people—if Les wasn’t good to me, I’d be on the first plane home even if I had to sell my clothes to buy the ticket and go home in my birthday suit.”

  Both women laughed, and then Audrey pressed her hand against her mouth to stop the laughter turning to a sob.

  “Les works nights now,” Doris said. “Some nights, anyway. Once you’ve got your little fellow put to bed and my girls are a
sleep, you drop down here some night for a game of cards and a cup of tea. All right? I’d be glad for the company.”

  “I’ll do that,” Audrey promised. “I will.”

  musical interlude

  HENRY HOLLOWAY

  Lean into the mic, finger that first chord on the neck of the guitar. Clear my throat before I talk.

  —Now you might not say it to hear me talk, but I was born in Louisiana. Waayy down south.

  Tried a southern accent there, but didn’t really pull it off. What do I sound like? A St. John’s corner boy, voice roughed up a bit by years in Toronto, trying to fake a Southern accent. But there’s songs where it sounds so natural, my voice just slides that way. Singing’s not like talking. On with the story.

  — I left the South when I was just a little fella, my mom was one of those Newfoundland girls married to Americans, and I guess it didn’t work out so well. So she brought me back to the Rock before I was old enough to know much of Louisiana. She didn’t ever have much good to say about the place, or any of the people down there, including my old man, from what I remember, but she sure did love the music. She saw Hank Williams, Senior, live at the Louisiana Hayride, and a few years after that she did one thing I’ll always be grateful for—she took me to that great man’s funeral. ‘Course, I don’t remember much about it, being only three years old, but we stood in that street while his hearse went by. Old Hank was my mom’s favourite, and she loaded me on a train and travelled all through the night from Louisiana to see him laid to rest in Montgomery. And then she took another train north, and kept going, and never went back to my daddy again.

  Play the first chord, drag out it. Let ’em guess the song with its lonely whippoorwill. This crowd knows all the standards.

  Little burst of applause. I wouldn’t say the crowd goes wild exactly. Not really enough of a crowd here in this little bar to go wild, anyway. But them that are here, like this song. Who doesn’t?

  Not many like it like Audrey does, though. Tell the truth it’s almost creepy, the way that woman loves Hank Williams. Whenever I tell that story to intro this song, I never mention the other part. How that show she saw at the Hayride was nine months before I was born, nearly to the day, and I always thought she had the two things tangled up in her mind somehow. She used to call me Hank when I was little, know that? I never liked it, dug in my heels and wouldn’t answer to it. When I got older, of course, knew who Hank Williams was, I thought it woulda been cool to be called after him. Too late to change back, then.

  I don’t remember a damn thing really about Hank Williams’s funeral, not like you’d expect me to at that age. Don’t even remember much about South Ridge, Louisiana—not from then. A couple of memories from the other two times I was down there later. The first one all full of dry summer dust and boredom, broken up by some good jazz music I learned on the guitar. The second trip—well, no need to talk about that. Or think about it, even.

  All I got are these few images of the place, and I stitch them into Audrey’s stories about when I was little, and try to pretend it’s a memory. But it’s not, not really.

  And I got this chorus coming, inevitable once you start it, and all you can do is lean in like you own it.

  three

  LIKE A ROLLING STONE

  1964–1966

  AUDREY

  Nine o’clock; time to close the shop. Audrey counted out the money in the cash register and zipped it into her bag to take up to the safe. She was more than ready to go upstairs and rest her feet.

  They had a good system worked out now, herself and her mother: Ellen opened the shop and did the morning shift; Audrey worked afternoons and evenings. They had Doris Parsons’s young one, Laura, in now and then to work a shift, but most days Audrey put in a solid eight hours.

  This had never been her plan. Well. Leaving her husband and moving back to St. John’s hadn’t always been her plan either. But even after she did that, more than ten years ago now— had it really been that long?—Audrey hadn’t imagined that when she was thirty-six she’d still be living with her parents and working in the shop. What had she pictured? Probably that she’d find an office job like she used to have before she was married, and get a little apartment of her own for herself and Henry.

  There were times, she wouldn’t deny it, when the idea of a quiet little apartment to herself seemed nice. But it would also be lonely, and surely it was better for Henry to grow up in the middle of a family—his grandparents, his Aunt June and Uncle Frank when they were still living at home, Alf and Treese’s crowd only a few streets away. Raising a youngster all on her own wouldn’t have been easy; it wasn’t easy now, with Henry fifteen and up to all kinds of foolishness. But at least she had Mom and Dad to help.

  And then there was the shop. It had seemed natural to take her place behind the counter, helping her mother. She had taken a bookkeeping course so she could oversee the financial affairs of the business, which Ellen had said were getting to be too much for her, and then Alf wanted her to do the same for his contracting business, so she did that on the side. The shop, like rising bread dough, had a way of expanding to take up whatever bit of time you had, and once she and Ellen worked out a system to pay Audrey her fair share of whatever the shop earned, she didn’t see the point of going out and getting a job in some office. She’d be some boss’s secretary, and in the shop she was her own boss.

  Henry clattered down the stairs. “I’m goin’ out, Mom.”

  “Where and with who might I ask?”

  “Oh, nowhere. Just out around with the b’ys.”

  “Well don’t be gone till all hours.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  Now there was some impossible advice to follow. Don’t worry. And it wasn’t as if Audrey was a world-class worrier like her mother. She’d always thought of herself more as the take-it-easy type. When Henry was a youngster she had never spent much time worrying he’d break a leg or cut his foot open on a rusty nail or run into any other kind of trouble while he was out roaming the neighbourhood for hours at a time with the other youngsters.

  But now that he was nearly grown, a year away from finishing school, tall as his grandfather and blessed or cursed with his father’s dark-haired good looks, she worried. He hung around with all the young fellows from the street and most of them were decent fellows, but there were a few hard tickets among them. And it was more than time enough to start worrying about girls; there always seemed to be a cloud of those around, pretty little things with the skirts right up to their yin-yang. Girls who just yesterday had been playing hopscotch in the street and now were showing off long legs and teasing their hair up into big shiny bouffants, trying to look like women in the magazines.

  She stepped outside into the cool gray May evening. Henry hadn’t gone far: he and a crowd of youngsters were hanging out in front of the shop window. There were a couple of Nolans there, and the Hiscock boys, Butch Cadwell’s young fellow Eddie, as well as a few girls. Henry was talking to a pretty little blonde thing, skinny as a rail and with long bangs hanging down into her eyes. Audrey was almost sure she was a Nolan, but was she Tony’s girl, or Mick’s? Whoever her father was he couldn’t have been paying much attention, letting her out of the house wearing a skirt that barely covered her bum.

  “Oh, come on, please, you got to. Everybody wants to hear it,” the little one Nolan was saying, and Henry said, “Hi Mom—I’m just going back up to get my guitar.”

  The guitar had been a present from Frank when he was home last Christmas. Henry loved listening to the radio and his mother’s record collection. He had her love for music, but unlike Audrey he could actually carry a tune—Audrey always thought she’d been given a terrible curse, to love music so much and not be able to sing or play a note of it.

  Henry didn’t have much time for going to church—not that Audrey expected him to, she didn’t go herself—but he loved the old hymns. And
unlike his mother, who had no patience with what she called “Newfie music,” Henry soaked up his grandfather’s old songs on the accordion about shipwrecks and weeping maidens and great catches of fish, though he had never set foot on the deck of a boat.

  Wes had tried to teach him the accordion, and Henry, like his Uncle Alf before him, had learned a bit but never got really good at it. Audrey thought that was just a flaw in Henry’s character; he didn’t have any stick-to-it-iveness. His grades at school were only so-so and he would have dropped out after this year if she wasn’t making him go back for his Grade Eleven. He took a turn in the shop now and then, but he wasn’t like some of the young fellows, working every job he could find and saving up money for a new bike or motorcycle. Audrey was afraid her son was going to drift through life never settling down to anything.

  But the guitar was different. When Frank gave it to him Henry’s face lit up like a neon sign. He spent hours teaching himself to play, and then he went off looking for someone to give him lessons so he could learn a bit more. He even paid for the lessons himself out of the pocket money he earned Saturdays in the shop. Audrey was glad to see him giving his attention to something finally, although it would be nice if it was something a bit more useful.

  She looked at the girl, who slouched against the wall waiting for Henry to come down. Audrey was never sure what to say to youngsters when she saw them without the store counter between them. “You’re one of the Nolans from the garage, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Holloway. My dad’s Tony, him and my uncle Mick got the garage.”