It wasn’t something Audrey had ever felt, or felt the need for. The billows rolled, all right—she had had her hard times. None harder than when she was down there in Louisiana, far from home, married to a man she didn’t love anymore, if she ever had. Her anchor then was the thought of home, this house and this store and this street, here waiting for her at the end of her train ticket. Steadfast and sure, all right. Fastened to the Rock which cannot move. Jesus was supposed to be the Rock, but when Audrey heard that hymn she was reminded of how the American servicemen used to call Newfoundland “the Rock.” Her Rock, the one that was here when she needed it.
“You got bigger worries with Henry and that young girl than what church she goes to. If you’re going to worry, worry about him being out with her all hours of the night like this,” said Wes, standing up and folding the newspaper that had been open on his lap for the last hour. “If he’s out late at night he’s up to no good—you can count on it.”
Before Audrey could reply they all heard the sound of someone at the shop door down below. It must be Henry, coming home, but there was always the fear of a break-in so both Ellen and Audrey sat up a little straighter. No, there was the key in the lock and the sound of the bolt being drawn again. Next came Henry’s footsteps up the stairs, and then he was in the kitchen with them. He must have grown three inches while he was away; he looked so much more like a young man now than when he’d left home at the start of the summer. Tall, his hair a little too long, guitar case in his hand.
“What time do you call this?” Audrey said, her voice sharper than it might otherwise have been with her father’s rebuke still hanging in the air.
Henry glanced at the clock over the stove. “Sorry, Ma. I lost track of the time.”
“Yes, now, I s’pose you did. Were you out with Stella?”
“There was a crowd of us. Stella was there.”
“You watch yourself, now mind. Don’t do nothing foolish.” Henry shifted from one foot to the other, his eyes still on the clock over the stove, not meeting his mother’s or his grandparents’ gaze.
“You wants to be careful, now,” Wes echoed Audrey’s warning, then said goodnight and went back to the bedroom.
“I’m going to bed too,” Henry said.
“You don’t want a cup of tea or a few cookies?” Ellen offered.
“No thanks, Nan. Me and Stella got a plate of chips at Marty’s.”
“You’re a growing boy, you always got room for a couple of ginger snaps.”
Now he did look at Ellen, and smile with the real warmth he sometimes still had for his grandparents, though rarely for Audrey, these days. Henry and Audrey were always rubbing each other the wrong way lately; everything one of them said seemed to irritate the other. That’s what it was to have a sixteen year old, Audrey thought. In a few years it might be better. When Audrey was sixteen she and Ellen could hardly be in the same room without sniping at each other, and look at them now, sat off together having their tea like the best of friends.
“Your father’s right, you got to be stricter with him,” were the first words out of Ellen’s mouth when they heard the door of Henry’s room close behind him. “You mark my words, if you’re not careful he’s going to get that little one in the family way and what do you think we’re going to do then?”
Audrey sighed. “What do you want me to do, Mom? Chain him up in his bedroom?” It just went to show, she thought, no matter how easy you thought things were with your mother, there was always a piece of advice or criticism she could pull out of her hat. No matter how old you got. Maybe things would never be easy.
ELLEN
“What do you want me to do, Mom? Chain him up in his bedroom?”
That was Audrey all over, saucy as the crackie. How many times had she said that when Ellen had suggested she needed to be stricter with Henry? There were times with all her own youngsters when Ellen had wished she could have done that. Keep Alf chained up till he got over Treese and met a nice Protestant girl. Keep Audrey locked in her room till the war was over and all the American soldiers were gone. Keep Marilyn, June, and Frank chained to the counter at the store so they couldn’t take off to the mainland. If she could have kept them all safe at home, wouldn’t she have done it?
And yet. There were Alf and Treese, four lovely children of their own now, happy as larks as far as Ellen could see. There was Marilyn happily married up in Toronto with two youngsters, and June and Frank both with good jobs up there, making decent money and sending a bit home. Audrey was the one failure if you looked at how things were supposed to work out—divorced, raising young Henry on her own—and yet what would Ellen do now, running the shop and all, if Audrey hadn’t left Harry Pickens? Ellen couldn’t wish her back down there with him, and if she wished Audrey never gone and married him in the first place, that would be like wishing young Henry had never been born.
Henry had finished school and managed to pass his Grade Eleven, “Magna Cum the Skin of his Teeth,” as Audrey put it, shaking her head over his exam marks. Alf had offered him a job but Henry was in no hurry to take him up on it. Neither Alf nor Wes thought Henry had much aptitude for, or interest in, the carpentry business. Frank had been the same way of course, never really took to the work, but then Frank had the initiative to go off and take the plumbing and heating course, and now he had a good trade of his own. Henry didn’t take much interest in anything except for the guitar, his noisy rock ’n’ roll music, and his girlfriend, Stella.
Ellen worried more about Stella than she did about the music or Henry’s lack of interest in work. The girl was a year younger than Henry, still doing her Grade Eleven at Holy Heart of Mary, and stuck to Henry’s side every second she wasn’t in school. He was out till all hours of the night and saucy to his mother when she questioned him about what he was up to. Ellen had thought she had her hands full with Frank when he was that age, but Frank had nothing on Henry.
So the night Henry came in with Stella in tow, about nine in the evening when the shop was closed and Wes was out working late, Ellen knew even before the two of them sat down. She knew just looking at them, Stella’s little head, which she always held up so proud, bent down so her long blonde hair brushed the tabletop, like a curtain she could hide behind. Henry, to give him credit, looked straight at his mother and grandmother when he told them.
“So, I know you guys are going to be mad about this, but, um, I better just say it…. Stella’s going to have a baby,” he said. “I mean we are, we’re going to have a baby. And it’s all right, you don’t need to worry about nothing, we’re going to get married. I got my Grade Eleven now and I’ll get a job—I’ll probably go work for Uncle Alf. Only we might need to stay here until we got enough to get a place of our own.”
He had timed this pretty neatly, cute enough to know this news would go down better with his grandfather if it came filtered through the women of the family. Wes would blame Ellen, as Ellen blamed Audrey, for being too soft on Henry. Just like the Garden of Eden, Ellen thought now: Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the serpent. At least Henry didn’t blame Stella, didn’t try to hint that she’d led him astray. You had to give him some credit for that.
Ellen broke the news to Wes when they were both in bed that night. Wes’s anger, the rare times he got mad, was as quiet as his happier moods were. He groused out his anger and disapproval, but ended up saying the youngsters could move into Henry’s room once they were married. By the time he fell asleep, with Ellen still lying wide awake on the pillow beside him, Wes seemed to have accepted that this was the way things were. Henry was going to be married at seventeen, working for Alf and tied down with a wife and child. It wasn’t what any of them wanted for him, but what could they do?
About a week after Henry and Stella’s announcement, Ellen was working in the store after supper while Audrey was gone off somewhere with her friend Doris. It had been quiet in there ever since supper hour but abou
t half-past eight, just as Ellen was thinking she’d close up soon, Mrs. Hynes and Mrs. Hiscock both came in at the one time, and both of them got to talking while they picked up their groceries. They were there at the counter having a grand chat when the door pinged again and Stella sidled in. On her own, no sign of Henry around. She wasn’t her usual brazen self, either—she took a step towards the counter, then backed away, crooking her finger for Ellen to come over to her.
“Are you lookin’ for Henry? He’s not there, I thought he was out with you.”
“No, I know he’s not out, he’s gone off somewhere with Nick Lahey but I don’t know where they’re to. Um, can I talk to you, Mrs. Holloway?”
Ellen glanced at her two neighbours with their bags of groceries, already bagged up and paid for, settled on the counter. The two of them were all ears, naturally, not wanting to miss a bit of this.
Ellen sighed and slipped out from behind the counter, leading Stella over to the door that went upstairs. “What is it, my love?”
The girl looked like she was close to bursting into tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry to bother you like this but I got nowhere else to go, Dad’s after throwing me out of the house.”
“What? Go on upstairs, you poor thing. Get Audrey to give you a cup of tea or a mug of cocoa or something, I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
Of course Mrs. Hiscock and Mrs. Hynes were quick to comment: “That’s Tony Nolan’s little one isn’t it? She goes around with your Henry? I don’t know what the young ones are like, at all, at all.” It was a few minutes before Ellen, giving nothing away, could shoo them out and put the CLOSED sign up in the window.
“We told them yesterday, together, just like we told you,” Stella was telling Audrey when Ellen got upstairs. “I knew they weren’t pleased but they never said much one way or the other until tonight when they had me to theirselves. Then Dad went off the head, yelling at me. He called me a little w-h-o-r-e, can you believe it?”
“And you can’t go to your sister’s house, or anything like that? Not that you’re not welcome here, it’s only I don’t know what time Henry’s likely to be home,” said Audrey, pouring up cocoa. She opened a package of Purity biscuits and laid them on a plate in front of Stella, who was really crying now. “Dad told them they couldn’t have me in the house either! I was going to go over to my friend Lois’s place, but her mother is some strict, once it came out what it was all about, that I was you-know-what, she wouldn’t have let me stay there either. But I can stay here with ye crowd, can’t I?”
Wes, in the living room, made a grumbling kind of noise from behind the Evening Telegram. “We’ll talk it over when Henry gets home,” Ellen said quickly, thinking that knowing Henry, he might not be in till all hours.
But for a miracle, he was home early tonight, darting up the stairs about half an hour after Stella. She poured out the whole tale again for Henry, with a good few more details besides.
“He called you what?” Henry stood up from the table when Stella again spelled out what her father had called her. “I’m going over there right now and give him a piece of my mind—I’ll beat the living shit out of him!”
“Sit down and shut up,” Audrey said. “You’re not going nowhere this hour of the night. And keep your voice down; we don’t need the neighbours knowing our business.”
Stella’s parents were not happy with their daughter’s plan to marry her boyfriend and become a mother at sixteen. Their plan was for Stella to go out around the bay to stay with her Aunt Kath, have the baby, and have the parish priest down in Witless Bay put it up for adoption. There was a strong suggestion that after the baby was adopted, she might be better off to follow her Aunt Stella’s example and dedicate her life to God. If not, she could go down to Boston with another aunt and take a secretarial course. And, of course, she was never to see or speak to Henry Holloway again.
“But I don’t want any of that!” Stella wailed. “I don’t want to go out around the bay, I don’t want to give up my baby, and I certainly don’t want to be no frigging nun! And I don’t want to go to Boston either! I want to stay here with you,” she said to Henry, “and have our baby, and get a little apartment, just like we planned. But Dad said if I don’t go along with their plan I can’t darken their door never again, and he called Mary Louise and Elaine and told them if either of them ever wants to come in the house again, they can’t let me stay at their place either. So I got nowhere to go but here.”
Stella slept on the couch that night—Wes wouldn’t hear of her being up in Henry’s room if they weren’t married, and Ellen went along with him, though if that wasn’t a case of locking the barn door after the horse was stolen she didn’t know what was. The next morning when Ellen was behind the counter of the store, the door banged open, its usual welcoming ping lost in the roar of Tony Nolan’s voice as he demanded, “Is my daughter here?”
Ellen looked the man up and down. She had never spoken to him, but she recognized him as one of the men she’d seen in coveralls down by Nolan’s Garage. “I suppose you must be Stella’s father?”
“You knows damn well who I am, missus, and if my daughter is in this house you better bring her down to me or I’ll have a policeman in here so fast it’ll make your head spin. And I’ll have that young fellow of yours hauled up on charges too, for corrupting an innocent girl!”
Ellen was not a tall woman; she was dwarfed by this angry, large, red-faced man. Everyone was out of the house—Wes at work, Audrey at the wholesaler’s putting in their orders. Henry and Stella had gone out after breakfast; Ellen had no idea where to, and it was better that way. She hoped they wouldn’t come home while Mr. Nolan was here. She pulled herself up to as tall as she could make five foot three look and spoke in her most careful voice, the one she would use for the minister—or for a policeman, if there really was one here. She would not let this man drag her down to his level.
“Mr. Nolan, my understanding is that you turned your daughter out of the house and told her married sisters they were not to take her in either. It’s only natural she should come here. I’m sure you’re no more happy about this news than we are, but we are not the kind of people to put our own child out into the streets to starve. Of course the children made a foolish mistake—” she was not going to let him put all the blame on Henry; it took two, after all, “but they plan to get married.”
“Get married? Sure they’re nothing more than children theirselves and they haven’t got a pot to piss in! I might have known this would happen when she got tangled up with the likes of ye crowd, you’ve only got to look at his mother to know what kind of stock that young fellow comes from!”
“He’s offered to marry her. As far as I’m concerned he has taken responsibility. We’ll do all we can to help them, and we’d expect you to do the same.”
“That’s what we won’t, then! Help them? At their age? Help them shack up and try to support a child? My Stella is throwin’ her life away on your useless young fella and ye crowd are helpin’ ’em all right, ye’re helpin’ them go to wrack and ruin! And Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’ll see you in hell before I stand by and watch that happen to my daughter!”
He brought his huge clenched fist down on the counter with the whole weight of his mechanic’s arm and a father’s rage behind it, and looked almost as surprised as Ellen at the cracking sound. They both looked down to see the spider-web shatter and the long cracks reaching out from it, and for a moment Ellen felt the violation of her store counter almost as strongly as Tony Nolan felt the violation of his Stella.
“I won’t have you stand in my shop and insult my family like this, Mr. Nolan. If you don’t leave now, I’m the one who’s going to be calling the police.”
“Police, is it? You’ll have plenty to do with the police when I’m finished here. Where’s your husband? I know that young frigger of yours got no father but he’s got a grandfather who can answer for him. If that man of you
rs is upstairs hiding out like a coward go haul him down and tell him Tony Nolan got a few words for him!”
If Wes was here this would turn into a fistfight, Ellen thought, though she hadn’t seen Wes fight anyone since he was sixteen and got into it with David Vincent down on the wharf in Candle Cove. She could see how frustrated Nolan was at the lack of a man to punch, and she was afraid he might start heaving tins through her front window next.
“Is she upstairs? My Stella, is she upstairs?” He moved toward the swinging door that barred the shop off from the area behind the counter, behind which was the door leading upstairs. Ellen moved quickly to block it, and Nolan reached for her but then let his hand fall.
“She is not upstairs. She’s not in the house at all. And if you go through that door, that’s trespassing, and I’ll have you arrested for that.”
“My God, you got some nerve, missus. You with your nose up in the air like you think you’re better than the likes of us, and your dirty little bastard got my little girl in trouble!”
It was the ping of the door, again, that saved her—not Wes or a policeman or, thank God, Henry and Stella. It was only two women from up the street, shopping bags over their arms, who came through the door talking to each other and then stopped short at the sight of the angry man towering over the little shopkeeper.
Tony Nolan turned to look at them and deflated like a popped balloon, taking three steps back, away from Ellen and towards the door. “You haven’t heard the last of this, missus,” he threatened as he left the shop, his voice easily half as loud as it was earlier.
“Is everything all right, Mrs. Holloway?” Mrs. Vokey asked.
“Yes, yes, everything is fine, just a…disagreement,” Ellen said. “Now, what can I get for you ladies?” She laid her hands flat on the counter to hide how much they were trembling, and when the women looked down at the counter they could see the cracked and splintered glass.
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