Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “That’s a good business. You got brothers to go into it?”

  “Oh yes, there’s five boys in our family and Uncle Mick got six. Pete and Tim and Phonse all loves working on cars—the other ones don’t care about it so much.” Her face tilted and her smile brightened as Henry came out the door.

  “You be careful with that guitar now, that cost your uncle Frank a nice bit of money so don’t go bangin’ it around anywhere,” Audrey warned.

  Henry grinned, the guitar strap slung across his shoulder and his free arm draped around the girl. “Now, Mom, you knows I’m going to treat that like it’s my baby. Won’t I, Stella?”

  Don’t you go talking about babies, Audrey almost said, but bit back the words—the youngsters would only laugh, and it might go putting ideas in their heads. Stella, then. Stella Nolan. There were always girls around, but she had thought Henry was too young to have any kind of a steady girlfriend. She’d have to keep her eye on this one.

  Upstairs, Audrey put the kettle on for her cup of tea and put a record on the stereo. Poor little Patsy Cline, another lovely singer gone too soon. Audrey had convinced her parents to buy the oil heater and the gas range, but her one big purchase just for herself was a floor-model record player with the radio built into it. Some women spent a lot of money on clothes and shoes, some on fancy vacations. Audrey was happy to have a good stereo and a steady supply of records. She had always loved the Top 40 but these last few years she found she wasn’t liking the stuff on the radio as much. She couldn’t see the point of The Beatles at all, though her sister, June, was gone off the head over them. Most of the records Audrey bought now were country music—the kind of music they’d played on the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride. And of course she had all Hank Williams’s albums.

  Her mother and father would want the TV on later—they always wanted to watch the evening news—but they didn’t mind Audrey putting on Patsy Cline in the living room while she sat down with her tea. She was just settled when the phone rang and Ellen, answering it, said, “Just a moment, please— Audrey?” As Audrey got up she saw her mother mouth the words “Long Distance.”

  If it had been Marilyn or June, Ellen would have been chatting on the phone herself; both the girls called every month or so and talked to both their mother and Audrey. She couldn’t think who else might be calling long distance. “A man,” Ellen’s lips shaped as Audrey picked up the phone.

  “Audrey? That you, Audrey?”

  Such a long time since she’d last heard her ex-husband’s voice. There had been a couple of phone calls right after she moved back home, including the one where he’d threatened to get a lawyer onto her to get custody of Henry. She had gambled on the fact that he had always been suspicious of lawyers, also on the fact that she didn’t think he really wanted Henry back with him. The final business of the divorce had all been carried out by mail.

  “It’s me. What…how are you?” What do you want would have sounded too harsh.

  “I’m…I’m good, everything’s good down here. Carol had her baby, uh…back in March. Little boy. Two months old now.”

  I suppose he would be, if he was born in March. Harry had never appreciated her smart mouth. “Congratulations.”

  “Have you given it any thought, Audrey? What I wrote to you?”

  They exchanged cards at Christmas. She had to be civil to him even after the divorce was final. He was Henry’s father, after all, and she had promised that someday she would bring Henry down for a visit. She sent Henry’s school picture every year, and Harry asked on each year’s Christmas card— Sure would like to see him, when can you bring him down here? but Audrey never answered back till the following Christmas when she told him what grade Henry was in and how his schoolwork was. She never mentioned the visit.

  Three years ago, Harry wrote that he had married again. Then this last Christmas, the news that Carol was pregnant, with a long note saying that at fifteen, Henry was old enough to fly down to Louisiana by himself. I really want to see my son before he’s all grown up.

  “I’ve thought about it,” she said now. “He still seems young, to go all that way on his own.”

  “I’ll send him his ticket, and he’ll only have to change planes twice. I’m sure he’s old enough to handle that. I’m within my rights, Audrey—I haven’t seen the boy in more than ten years.”

  “That’s why I’m not sure it’s a good idea. He don’t even know you.”

  “And whose fault is that? I want to know him. I want him to get to know his stepmother and his half-brother, to see his grandparents again before they pass on, to see the place he was born. Half his roots are here, and I bet he can’t even remember the place.”

  Later that night she talked to Henry about it. “I suppose you don’t remember anything about Louisiana at all, do you?”

  “Not really—I think I remember a dog. Did we have a dog?”

  “No, that was your Uncle Fred and Aunt Ruth’s dog. You used to play over there with your cousins.” He had cousins here in St. John’s too, of course, Alf and Treese’s kids, but it struck her that by taking him away she had robbed him of knowing half his family. If they had stayed in Louisiana, the Newfoundland relatives would have been strangers to him.

  Henry shook his head. “No, I don’t remember any of it. How come we never went back, like even for a visit or anything?”

  Audrey drew a deep breath. “It wasn’t easy for me. Things between me and your dad were—well, I left him, so you know it wasn’t too good. But he’s not a bad man. He probably would have been a good father—I don’t know.”

  “I wish I knew him.”

  “That’s—he wishes that too. You know how he always says in his Christmas cards that you should come down for a visit.”

  “So, why didn’t we ever? Just because you don’t get along with him…that’s not fair, is it?”

  Nothing got Audrey’s back up more than Henry telling her things weren’t fair. “Don’t give me none of your lip, now. The truth is I just got off the phone with your father and he wants to send you a plane ticket to come down and see him when your exams are over.”

  “Really?” Henry looked a bit shocked, as if he’d been asking for something just to be difficult and then found out he was going to get it after all. “What would I—do down there?”

  “Not much, I imagine—if it’s like it was when I lived there, there’s not all that much to do. And you’d be away from your friends all summer.” This was the part that had made her think it wasn’t a bad idea after all, now that she’d seen him with the Nolan girl. “But you’d get to know your father and your other grandparents. You know he’s married again, and they have a baby. So you got a half-brother you never seen. It might be a good idea.”

  “I don’t know. Would I have to go on the plane all by myself?”

  “Yes, but your father would meet you at the airport. He got it all arranged, where you’d have to change planes and all that.”

  Henry’s lower lip jutted out a bit. “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  “It’s not up to you to know or not. Your father and I talked it over and it’s time for you to go down there, see the place you were born and get to know your family.” She had hung up from the conversation with Harry not fully convinced she would let Henry go, but if that young frigger was going to start digging in his heels and whining about it just because he didn’t want to leave his little girlfriend for the summer—well, that was another story. The more Henry stuck his lip out, the more sure Audrey became. It was the right thing to do. And it might keep him out of all kinds of trouble.

  AUDREY

  “We should have waited till next summer, they say the whole road will be finished then, all the way from here to Port-aux-Basques. Going to be paved and everything.” Treese ground out her cigarette in the big ashtray on the counter and Audrey passed her another one. Treese and Alf and th
e kids had taken the train to Nova Scotia for a week’s holiday earlier in the summer. “Maybe we’ll do it again in a couple of years, when we can drive all the way. You should do it too, take a couple of weeks and go up and visit Marilyn and June.”

  “If I got any urge to go to the mainland I’d most likely fly,” Audrey said. “It’s all right, I s’pose, for people out in them places like Botwood and Grand Falls who’d be hard pressed to get anywhere otherwise, but I don’t say I’m going to be spending much time driving on that new road.”

  “What about you, Mom? When you were young it was all getting around by boat, wasn’t it?” Treese turned her gaze and her foghorn voice on Ellen, who was not supposed to be down here now—her shift ended when Audrey’s began—but who was looking through the cooler for anything that might have gone off.

  “By boat or by train, that was it,” Ellen said. “I minds the first time I came into town on the steamer, I was only fourteen and I never seen so many people in one place all at the one time. I thought St. John’s was a real big city then, like New York or London.”

  “Funny how different things look, depending on where you came from,” said Doris Parsons. “When the steamer came into St. John’s harbour in 1946 and I looked out at it, well, the last place I’d seen was Liverpool, and I thought St. John’s looked like a little fishing town compared to what I knew back in England. But if I’d gone, like my mate Lil did, off to Harbour Breton or someplace like that, likely I’d’ve died of the shock.”

  Audrey laughed. “Oh, I’d go cracked. I was half-cracked anyway down in the States, sure Harry’s place was out in the back of beyond, no neighbours closer than a mile away.”

  “What did young Henry think of it when he was down there over the summer?” Doris wanted to know. Henry had been back since Labour Day, out with that one Stella Nolan every minute he wasn’t in school.

  “He never had much to say about it, tell you the truth.”

  “Must have been strange for him, though, staying with his father after so many years,” said Doris.

  “I imagine it would be, but he never said. You know what boys are like.” She nodded at her mother and Treese, who both knew what boys were like. Doris had four girls.

  Henry had phoned her twice while he was down in Louisiana. She’d talked to Harry for a few minutes each time too. It was strange, carrying on a conversation with Harry after all these years. Harry had said Henry was doing all right, although he seemed a bit bored with small-town life and missed his friends. “Harry said he spent a lot of his time playing the guitar,” she told her mother, Treese and Doris. “There was an old coloured man down there—some fellow who works for Harry—loaned him a guitar and was teaching him some new stuff. Not like formal music lessons or anything, but just sitting down playing the blues with him, and Henry seemed to like that.”

  What Harry had actually said was, “Carol doesn’t think it’s right, him spendin’ so much time with a coloured man. But it’s not like it’s a bunch of boys his own age—Jeb’s an old guy, and he’s respectful, and I don’t think it’ll do Henry any harm. I just didn’t want you to worry, if he came home talking about it.”

  “Why would I worry?”

  “Well, no reason I guess, only cause of how it looks. I wouldn’t want you to think we were exposin’ him to anything bad.”

  “It sounds like all he’s being exposed to is a musician who knows a lot of music and can teach him a thing or two—I imagine Henry’s over the moon about that, he loves all that jazz and blues and rock ‘n’ roll stuff. What odds do it make if the man is coloured?”

  “You know the way things are down here, Audrey. You know we like people to keep with their own kind.”

  “And you know it’s not like that up here. Henry wasn’t raised to worry about the colour of a man’s skin.” All Henry had said when he came back was that he’d been lucky enough to meet up with an old fellow who once played with Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues, when he was young, and the old fellow had taught him a bunch of blues riffs and “really cool stuff.” Cool was a word he had picked up down in the States and now he threw it into every conversation.

  “Who’s that young one I sees him around with all the time?” Treese wanted to know.

  “She’s a Nolan—Stella, her name is.”

  “Nolan?” Treese wrinkled her brow. Audrey knew what she was thinking: Nolan was as much of a Catholic name as Treese’s own maiden name, Ryan. Of course, “keep with your own kind”—the Newfoundland version of it—didn’t matter much to the young ones today, if it ever had. If it had mattered to Alf and Treese twenty years ago, then Treese wouldn’t be married into the family and wouldn’t be here right now taking up space on the counter. Audrey remembered all the fuss back when they got married—Treese’s mother refusing to go to the wedding if it wasn’t in a Catholic church, and then Dad refusing to go if it was, everybody crying and carrying on. As if it made that much difference what building you got married in! In the end it was at St. Teresa’s and everybody went, Dad included, and Treese was as much a part of the family now as the cash register was part of the store counter. She and Alf had moved out to a new house Alf built way out on Cornwall Avenue a year ago, but she still dropped into the shop two or three times a week, planted her elbows on the counter and stayed for a good hour.

  “Now would they be the Nolans from down on Empire Avenue? Old Mr. Nolan would have been from Cappahayden,” Treese suggested.

  “No, they’re the ones with the garage on Freshwater Road—her grandfather is Mike Nolan.”

  “Oh, right, them Nolans. Well that explains the old- fashioned name they got on the young one—she’ll have been named for her Aunt Stella, she’s a Presentation Sister. Me and Stella went to Presentation together, she’s the last girl I ever would have guessed would become a nun. There was four in our class what went into the convent and she was the least likely—wild as the loo, she was, when she was twelve or thirteen.”

  “I suppose the convent settled her down a bit, did it?” Doris asked.

  “It must have, though I haven’t laid eyes on her since I left school—well you don’t, do you, once somebody becomes a nun.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Ellen, who was now stacking tins of peas on the shelf. There was just enough disapproval in her voice to remind them all that while Treese’s Catholic background was acknowledged, it shouldn’t be flaunted. Talking about nuns was taking it one step too far.

  “Well, I never heard Stella say nothing about an aunt in the convent but it do make some sense of the name,” Audrey said.

  “Would her father be young Micky, or Brian?”

  “I think she’s Tony’s girl.”

  “Oh, Tony was a lot older—she must be the youngest of a big crowd, is she?”

  They were rapidly reaching the bottom of everything Audrey knew about Stella. She couldn’t have picked the girl out of a crowd of youngsters before she saw her with Henry that day back in the spring, the day she decided to send him to his father. But she was in and out of the shop all the time in July and August when he was gone, picking up one thing and another, chatting to Audrey. Stella had told Audrey that her and Henry were real good friends, and she asked for the address down in the States so she could send him a letter. She talked in this soft little voice, and between that and the blonde hair and blue eyes you’d think she was a little angel, but brazen as brass to go asking a fellow’s mother for his address like that.

  Ellen brought it up that night, when the store was closed—the business of Henry and Stella and her being Catholic. “Do it really matter all that much, really?” Audrey asked.

  Henry wasn’t home yet; she had told him to be back by ten but here it was nearly eleven and there was no sign of him. Audrey and Ellen were in the kitchen having their cup of tea and toast, Ellen with her feet up and Audrey with hers in a pan of water. Her corns were killing her after
standing at the counter all afternoon. She liked to soak her feet while she had her tea in the evening. Wes sat in his chair by the TV, watching the news, occasionally passing a comment but leaving most of the conversation to his wife and daughter.

  “That she’s R.C., I mean,” Audrey added. “I know you and Dad wasn’t too pleased at first when Alf married Treese but they’re happy enough together.”

  “Yes, happy enough, but all the youngsters are baptized Catholic,” Ellen said.

  “What difference do that make? None of them goes to church except Christmas and Easter anyway. Neither do me or Henry, for that matter.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Ellen said. “I always feel like if I hadn’t been so busy with the store and all, I could have done a better job of bringing all ye crowd up in the church.”

  “Marilyn goes,” Audrey said. She hoped to God that Marilyn never gave up going to the United Church up there in Toronto, because it was the one thing that reassured Ellen she hadn’t failed as a parent. “But if I don’t go, and Henry doesn’t either, what odds do it make if his girlfriend is Catholic or Protestant?”

  “It’s just better in a family, if you’re both of the same faith,” Ellen said.

  “But if you’re of no faith at all, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Nobody’s of no faith at all, Audrey, don’t be so foolish. Everybody got a religion, even if they don’t practice it. Just because I go to church every week, I’m not foolish enough to think everyone does or everyone got to. But you got to have something to fall back on. When everything else fails you and you turn to God, you got to know where to go. That’s all.”

  “Will your anchor hold, in the storms of life,” Audrey quoted.

  “Right. That’s what I mean.”

  We have an anchor, that keeps the soul, steadfast and sure while the billows roll. It was a hymn Dad liked to play on the accordion and sing on a Sunday evening. That, Audrey thought, was the bedrock of Ellen’s faith—that for her and Wes and all their wandering, disappointing children, there was still an anchor to hold them in place. Good old Protestant Jesus, watching over his flock.