by Wayne Grady
“I belong to the Navy,” he said, exhaling smoke.
“You can’t belong to a thing, you belong to a place. Where you came from.”
She didn’t know why she was being so insistent about it. She actually agreed with him, at least in theory. He seemed to bring out the contrariness in her. And anyway, she didn’t like to think of him belonging to the Navy. It was like belonging to the war. What would he belong to when the war ended?
“Don’t you want to go back to Windsor?”
“Why should I?”
“Your family’s there. It’s where you belong.”
“No, it ain’t,” he said. “You get born, you grow up and you leave. That’s the way it is, see?” He threw his cigarette into a snowbank in the garden, as though he had lost interest in it, and put his hands in his coat pockets. “Why can’t I belong to where I’m going?”
She thought about that. The war had torn up so many people, sent them to places they hadn’t known about before, and not all of them would go back home. “I don’t want to stay in Newfoundland forever,” she said. “I want to travel, learn about new things.”
“And never come back,” he said.
“Oh, I’d come back, of course I would.”
He half turned as if to go, and she remained leaning against the door, as if to let him. She felt irritated, as though they’d been arguing and he was refusing to make up. She didn’t want him to leave. She knew he’d been expecting her to ask him in, it was cold out here on the porch, but she could never, not with her nieces upstairs and Iris maybe waiting up. Had she been too standoffish, was that it, too cool? Had he given up on her because she wasn’t a V-girl? “The V doesn’t stand for virgin, honey,” Iris always said. But then he seemed to change his mind about leaving, and suddenly leaned into her, resting himself against her, smelling of cigarettes and bay rum. She’d had to thrust her pelvis out to keep from collapsing against the door, and he must have taken that for encouragement. His lips tasted metallic, probably from the trombone. He pressed into her, his chest against hers, his hands under her coat cupping the small of her back, the kiss itself almost incidental. His hands travelled up and down her back. Was she returning his kiss? Was she? She didn’t know. It didn’t feel like music, not slow and smooth. She put her hands on his shoulders, but one of them moved involuntarily to the back of his neck, felt his muscles tighten, and yes, she did thrust back. She was back inside his greatcoat, and the warmth of his body felt good. She didn’t thrust too much, she told Iris, nothing lewd, more as though she were bracing herself. What else could a girl do?
“Stay away from him, that’s what,” Iris said.
“Why?”
“Viv, darling, he’s a sailor.”
“No, he’s not, he’s a musician.” Iris wouldn’t appreciate the difference. But seeing, no, feeling what Jack could do with music told her that he was different, special, that a person didn’t get that good at something unless it was already part of him. And part of her. Surely only someone who already had beauty inside them could make such beautiful music. “He’s only a sailor because of the war,” she said. “You should hear him play. The sound goes right through you.”
“So does cod liver oil.”
“Oh Iris, don’t be vulgar. Please.”
“Father rang this evening while you were out.”
Vivian groaned. “What did he say?”
“He gave me hell for letting you traipse about town on your own.”
“I wasn’t traipsing. And I wasn’t alone. We were in a restaurant, having lunch.”
“Five thousand Yanks in the colony, he said, and I’ve got to keep you away from all of them.”
“Well, you needn’t worry. Jack isn’t a Yank and he won’t call again, I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, he’ll call, all right. If he doesn’t, he’s worse than a Yank. He’s an idiot.”
But he didn’t call that week or the next, and when she turned on the marconi on Saturday night it wasn’t the King’s Men doing the Voice of Newfoundland broadcast but another band, the Starlighters, and she thought, Well, then, that’s cut it. She stayed away from the K of C, resigned herself to spinsterhood. She darned socks, then read the twins two Beatrix Potter stories like a good aunt. When, on the third Sunday, she still hadn’t heard from him, she drove down to Ferryland with Iris and Freddie and the twins, eager to show her parents how stalwart she was being, hiding how broken her heart was. She never once mentioned Jack and neither did they. Daddy was either in his office mulling over his accounts or down at the wharf talking to the fishermen. Her mother looked anxious, but she wasn’t well. Vivian felt like an exile, home on a sneak visit, noticing changes and not approving of them, a new tablecloth, an electric heater, but knowing also that her opinions were neither sought nor welcome. It made her feel furtive and disdainful. Her younger brother, Walter, who had just turned sixteen, was considering going into politics when the war ended. He intended to help bring Responsible Government to the colony. “Don’t you think you should try voting first,” she said to him, “to see if you like it?”
“Well, look who’s all la-di-da now she’s living in the big city,” Walter said.
“It may seem big to you, Wat, but it’s not. It’s quite small, really.” She thought of Windsor as a big city.
She supposed she was meant not to notice when Iris took their mother into the waking room to tell her about Jack and how they needn’t worry because he had apparently dumped her.
Plenty of fish in the sea, her mother would say.
Plenty of bigger fish to fry, Iris would add.
On Monday, Vivian worked at Baird’s in the morning and went home at noon, saying she had a toothache. She ate next to nothing, tea and toast, changed into her nightgown and slippers and stretched out on the sofa with the cushions around her and the blackout curtains drawn against the harsh sunlight. She loved Iris’s living room. It was exactly the right size, big enough for really comfortable furniture but small enough to feel cozy. It was the kind of room she would want if she were married. A living room should be lived in, she told herself, thinking of her mother’s waking room, which was opened only for funerals and when the Anglican minister came to tea. That made her think of Jack. She tried to read Thomas Raddall’s new book, Roger Sudden, but it didn’t hold her attention. Bigger fish, she kept thinking. But there weren’t, and anyway, Jack was a perfectly good-sized fish. Big enough to take her away from Newfoundland and show her how other people lived. She wasn’t like Iris, who had been off the island only once in her life and hadn’t liked it. For their honeymoon, she and Freddie had gone to Brazil on a company ship with a load of salt cod. They’d stayed in Rio de Janeiro while the ship called at ports farther south. They had taken a cable car up Sugarloaf Mountain, in the middle of the bay, and ridden a bus up to the base of the Finger of God. The place was, Iris said, merely squalid. She had not felt comfortable at all. She described the favelas, where the poor blacks lived in shacks terraced down the mountainside like so much accumulated debris. Dogs and babies, that’s all you saw and heard. Little pickaninnies with their hair all matted and something wrong with their eyes. Freddie told her about the half-naked Negro men loading sacks of coffee, the smell of fruit in the market stalls in the early morning before the mist had burned off the hillsides.
Finally, after almost a month had gone by and Vivian had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, Jack rang. It was a Friday night, a week before Christmas. He’d been to sea, he said. “Escort duty, almost to Ireland and back. Even bandsmen have to go to sea sometimes,” he said.
“You could have told a person.”
“No, I couldn’t. I didn’t know myself until the last minute, none of us did. Loose lips sink ships.”
As soon as he said it she realized she ought to have trusted him. All the while she’d been mooning around St. John’s he’d been on a ship at sea, fighting the enemy. He might have been killed. Just that morning she’d been reading the Newfoundland Bulletin, which g
ave all kinds of unsettling news about soldiers and airmen and sailors wounded and lost. She’d looked for names she recognized. “Signaller Edward Flanagan of the 166th (Newfoundland) Field Regiment and Corporal Duncan J. Mercer who was serving with the Canadian Army have been killed in action. Pilot Officer Kevin J. Evans and Sergeant Walter Sweetapple, both serving with the R.A.F., have been killed in air accidents. Gunner Frederick Robertson died on September 15th at a Military Hospital at Shrewsbury.” Jack’s name might easily have been among them. What would she have done?
Chastened, she agreed to see him again. Longed to see him again. She would go to the K of C on Saturday and watch him play, and they could talk during breaks, she would like that, she said.
“And I could walk you home again.”
And she said, “Yes.”
“And what about during the week?”
“I work during the week.”
“Can’t you get a day off?”
No, she couldn’t, not unless she called in sick again. And if she did that, she would have to stay home and let Iris look after her. With the war economy, the store had never been so busy, and Mr. Baird was a friend of her father’s. But everyone was taking time off work to do their Christmas shopping. “I might be able to get an extra hour for lunch one day,” she said. Not much of a war effort, was it? “Tuesday,” she said. “Don’t come to the store. I’ll meet you someplace.”
“Where?”
She couldn’t think. Her father had spies everywhere. “The train station,” she said, “at the lower end of Water Street. It has a lunch counter.”
The train station was full of people, mostly men in uniform but many in fedoras and civilian clothes, government men, she guessed, although more interesting than that. Movie actors, perhaps, a scene from Heaven Can Wait. They didn’t look local, anyway. Those in uniform were either American GIs going back to their base at Stephenville or airmen from Fort Pepperrell, the U.S. Air Force base on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake that she’d heard had been laid out in the shape of a cowboy hat. She didn’t know where the civilians were going. Off the island, presumably, off the map. They sat at the tables or on the benches reading newspapers, or paced back and forth in the waiting area, smoking. There were a few other women, WRENs and local girls kissing their Yankee boyfriends goodbye. She would kiss Jack like that when he got there. He would swoop her up in his arms and say, “The war can wait.”
She thought he wasn’t there yet, and then she saw him. He had a table, and had placed his greatcoat and cap on the chair beside him, saving a place for her. And on the table was a glass of Coke for him and a pot of tea for her. That was all it took. He was the only one in the station in a Navy uniform. He looked so young, a little boy in a sailor’s suit. He saw her and waved and she waved back. Eyes turned in her direction.
He put his greatcoat on the table, then took it off the table and placed it on the floor under his chair, then put his cap on the table, then took it off the table and placed it on top of his greatcoat, where it fell to the floor. She picked it up and put it on her lap when she sat down. They decided on fish and chips. Jack took a flask from inside his tunic and topped up his glass of Coke. He offered to pour some into her teacup, but she said, “Thanks but no thanks.” She didn’t know anyone who drank in the middle of the day, not even her father.
“This place gives me the creeps,” he said, looking around the crowded room.
“Why? It’s just a train station.”
Something had changed in him. He was uncomfortable. She wished she’d thought of somewhere more private for their first date, even Baird’s would have been better than this.
“Any one of these bums could be a spy,” he said, indicating the men in civilian dress. “On the Derry Run we sank this U-boat, see, then we had to stop and pick up the survivors. There weren’t many. We had to go out in boats and hook them out of the water. The brass wanted to know what ship they’d been attached to, for intelligence.” He paused and took a drink.
“How awful,” she said.
That mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Three long weeks at sea had taken the confidence out of him, and although she hadn’t liked his cockiness, she liked this nervousness even less.
She wondered if the German government sent out something like the Bulletin, if there were German women sitting in their kitchens at this very moment reading of the deaths of husbands or brothers or fiancés. Men who’d died fighting for something the women didn’t believe in. Of course there were. She wanted to take his hand, to draw him closer to her, closer than the war, and stop him from speaking these horrors. But she didn’t, and he went on.
“Some of the bodies were wearing ordinary clothes, suits, socks, ties—just like these guys. You’d think they were us, except they were German spies, going to be put ashore in Halifax or St. John’s to pose as Canadians, mingle with the sailors and GIs in the bars, get them talking, find out what their orders are. They had theatre tickets in their pockets for movies playing that week, and ration booklets, matches from St. John’s and Halifax nightclubs. They had passports with Canadian names, home addresses in Ontario and Manitoba, letters from sweethearts, photos of wives and children.”
“Where did they get all those things?”
“From our guys who were shot in Europe, that’s where,” he said.
She gasped.
“Yeah,” he said. “Remember what I said about loose lips?” He nodded towards a group of civilians standing by the Departures sign. “They could all be spies. You can’t tell anything about a person just by the way he looks.” He looked at her for so long she thought she had missed something.
“Not you, Jack,” she said. “You’re exactly what you look like.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right. You’re safe with me.”
She put her hand lightly on his arm.
“We could buy two tickets and be a thousand miles away by this time tomorrow,” he said. “The sky’s the limit. What do you say?”
Was that a proposal? The war had brought the world to Newfoundland, to her door. Hadn’t she wanted the world? Yes, but she wanted to leave the island to see it, not have it hauled aboard like some thrashing sea creature. And now he, too, wanted to be on the move, get off the island, see something. Where was a thousand miles away? She read down the column of figures on the Departures sign. There was a train leaving for Port-aux-Basques at one o’clock, in time to catch the late ferry to North Sydney. It didn’t seem very adventuresome, but it would be a start.
“You just got back,” she said.
“Three weeks at sea.” He shuddered. “I’m no good at it. I should have joined the Army, like them.” He looked at the American GIs with their girlfriends.
“Is Windsor a port, then?”
“Not like St. John’s. It’s on a river.”
“How do you cross the river?”
“There’s a ferry, a bridge, and a tunnel big enough to drive cars through.”
“I’d like to see that,” she said. Was she being too bold? She didn’t care. She wanted to know more about him. “What do you do in Windsor?”
“Work for my father,” he said, his voice gloomier than ever. Then he seemed to perk up. He finished his Coke, caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another. She thought she had better get back to work, but she wanted to hear about his father. “He owns a construction company in Windsor,” Jack said. He made a square with his hands, like a sign: “ ‘W. H. Lewis and Sons Limited.’ There’s me and my brother, Benny, and Dad’s brother, Uncle Harley, when we need him. If we get too many houses to do we hire more people. It’s a classy outfit. Not as big as your father’s, of course, but big enough. We did the Fox Theatre in Detroit. You ever hear of it?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Huge job. Took six months.”
“Do you like construction work?” she asked.
“Naw, I hate it. That’s why I took up music. Joined up as soon as I could. To get away, see?”
“G
et away from Windsor?”
“The work, the family, all that …” He stopped to light a cigarette. All that what? The waitress came with his drink. This time he drank half of it before taking his arm from her hand and refilling the glass with rum.
“Why do you want to get away from your family?” she asked.
He looked at her as though she had asked an odd question. “A fella’s got to strike out on his own.” He reached over and took her hand. “Don’t you think so?”
“This is an island, Jack. I’ve never been off it. People are born here, live here all their lives, and die without ever knowing a thing about the rest of the world. Maybe you don’t realize it, but people here look down their noses at people like you.”
He pulled his hand away as though she’d burned it.
“I don’t mean you, silly,” she said, taking his hand back. “I mean anyone from away, soldiers and sailors. They complain about you all the time, as if you’re the ones who’ve invaded us, not the Germans.” Jack took a drink with his free hand. “They don’t complain about you risking your lives to keep U-boats and spies out of our harbour, but would you mind keeping your dirty paws off our daughters, thank you?”
He looked at her blankly. She hadn’t realized how strongly she felt until she’d said it. Now indignation filled her on his behalf, the injustice of it. People like Jack should be thanked. Newfoundlanders should get down on their knees and thank God for these men.
“You’re not like them, though, are you?” he said.
“No, Jack, I’m not.”
“You don’t mind me putting my dirty paws on you?” He held one of her fingers, it was her ring finger, and rubbed his thumb gently along its side, then brushed it lightly over the little V where the finger joined the body of her hand. It made her throat throb. Maybe she was a V-girl after all.
“The war,” he said, not letting go of her hand, pressing his finger into the V. “It won’t last much longer.”
If she had wanted to, if she still had control of her limbs, she would have withdrawn her hand from his at that instant. She would have changed the subject, told him that at Baird’s they were having a special on razor blades, he should tell his buddies, or that in May the harbour at Ferryland filled with migrating birds—baccalieus, turnstones, sandpipers—and that her father was fanatical about them. But she didn’t say that. Or anything. She didn’t want him to think that his hand was dirty, or that she looked down her nose at him, and she knew by saying nothing, by letting this moment pass unremarked upon, she was saying yes to something, and that later to pretend that nothing had transpired between them would be to go back on a promise.