by Wayne Grady
“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Peter will be worried.”
The gas station opened at eight. Della gave him five dollars and he bought gas, then drove the truck around to the motel office. She came out, climbed into the truck and sat facing straight ahead. He didn’t know what he had done wrong.
He drove down Fort towards the bridge and the Windsor skyline. She sat stiffly, rubbing her bare arms. What were they going to do after they got home? He could take her for a picnic out near Amherstburg. He wanted to feel the sun burning his back as they made love, and see again that look of amazed ecstasy on her face, the flush spread up from her breasts to her throat. Just before the bridge they stopped at an intersection to let a line of Army tanks file by, heading downtown. The mayor must have called in the troops. When the tanks were gone Della looked at him sadly, as though she thought the Army had been searching for them and eventually they would be found out. Jack put the truck in gear and drove across the bridge.
When he pulled up outside her house, Peter was sitting on the porch steps. Jack turned off the engine, rolled down the window and waved. Peter waved back, not warmly.
“Better stay here,” she said.
“Why?”
“Let’s give it some time.”
“How much time? When?”
“I don’t know, Jack.” She looked past him and waved at Peter. Then she put her hand on his arm, a gesture he suddenly hated. “There’ll be police reports, insurance people to call about the car.”
“Is it because of Peter?” He looked up at the house. Peter was coming towards them. He would want answers. He would be writing to his father. Would he tell him about this?
Della got out of the truck. Jack watched her embrace her son, wondering what she would say to him. The thought of her lying about him hit Jack like a blow to the chest. There would be no picnic in Amherstburg, no more nights after band practice. No more band practice. In a rage, he started the truck and drove off, slapping the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand until it bled again.
He followed the river, turned up Walker Road, drove along Tecumseh to Ouellette and back down to the river, though not as far as the dock, then made the loop again until he was certain he could trust himself. He calmed down as the city came to life. Smoke or mist still drifted across the river from Detroit. He hoped the city had burned to the ground. He drove home. There was no one there. He changed his clothes and put a fresh bandage on his hand, then went back downtown, parked in front of the Recruiting Office and turned off the ignition. Then he went inside and joined the Navy.
Only then did he remember Benny and his father.
PART III
VIVIAN
Vivian stepped down from the train onto the conductor’s stool and searched the throng for Jack’s brother, Benny, who was supposed to be picking them up at the station. She was sure she would recognize him from Jack’s description: tall and blond, brown eyes with blue flecks in them. Looking into them, she imagined, would be like gazing up at the sky through a canopy of trees. When Jack joined her he looked grim, as though he’d had a fight with the conductor. He took her arm and pulled her through the crowd, almost to the exit. She should have worn lower heels. Near the door, a tall man in splattered work clothes was grinning widely at Jack. So this was Benny. His hair was blond and wavy, just as Jack had described it, but his complexion was like tanned deer hide, like that of someone who’d been working outside all summer. There were large brown freckles on the backs of his hands. Vivian hadn’t seen anyone before who looked quite like Benny, but she couldn’t put her finger on what was different about him. Jack introduced her, and Benny gave her a brief, appraising look, but instead of reaching out to shake her hand he clapped Jack on the back and said, “Well done, little brother.” What was that supposed to mean?
“Where’s the others?” Jack asked.
“Mom’s at home,” said Benny.
He took their two suitcases and led them through the station to the street. He still hadn’t said a word to her. She thought they would get into a taxi or a car, but they turned left and walked along a sidewalk, down a dreary street that smelled of dust and sewer, with shuffling pedestrians going into and out of cheap hotels, diners and pawnshops. Jack and Benny walked ahead, talking. She strode doggedly on, glad, now that she thought about it, to be moving after the long, tense train ride with Jack. This was her first real walk in Canada, a surprising thought given that she was almost two thousand miles into it. She let the distance between her and the men increase. With the wind coming from the south, it was warmer than it would have been back home, but people were walking with their hands in their pockets and their heads down, as though trudging through driving sleet. In St. John’s so warm a day would have had them taking their coats off and smiling up at the sky.
She studied the men ahead of her, her husband and his brother—her brother-in-law, although that title still seemed to belong to Freddie. Benny walked in a loose-jointed lope, so unlike Jack, whose gait was more swagger than stride. Jack’s uniform was out of place here, his widened cuffs even slightly ridiculous. Windsor wasn’t the natural home of sailors. She felt sorry for him, though she knew it was disloyal for a woman to feel sorry for her husband. Benny and Jack hadn’t seen each other for more than two years, yet they’d greeted each other like grudging acquaintances, without touching except for that disconcerting clap on the back. Well done, little brother. As if Jack had won her at a fair.
At last they turned down a side street, and when she reached the corner, Benny was lifting the suitcases onto the bed of an old, dented pickup truck.
“We can all squeeze in the front,” he drawled. “If I’d known you was bringing a lady friend, I’d’ve brought the Merc.”
She looked at Jack in alarm. Had he not told his family she was coming? It seemed impossible to believe, and yet what else could those words have meant? Surely he’d written to his mother; in fact, he’d told her he had.
If Jack noticed her dismay, he said nothing. He motioned her into the truck’s cab. She sat between them, her heart pounding. The floor was littered with oily rags and papers and small cardboard boxes. She didn’t know where to put her feet.
“Are they still living on Dougall Avenue?” Jack asked. After much gear shifting, Benny finally had the truck in motion.
“Dougall? They never lived on Dougall.”
Keeping his voice low, Jack said, “How’s Dad?”
Benny grunted. “Back to normal.” Jack turned his head and looked out the window, as though he were still on the train.
McDougall Street was only a few blocks from the train station. It was a narrow, treeless street of small clapboard houses built shoulder to shoulder and close to the sidewalk. The majority were rough and neglected, their shiplap siding weathered, porches aslant, windowpanes cracked, lawns bare or overgrown. She had seen ramshackle houses before, some of the shanties on Springdale and Carter’s Hill in St. John’s made you wonder what kept them standing, but these were worse. Surely his parents didn’t live here? Benny parked in front of the most dilapidated of them all.
“Christ!” Jack exclaimed. “They didn’t move up, they moved down.”
“Uh-huh.”
The house looked as though it had never known paint. Its patched roof sagged in the middle. The open porch was cluttered with sawhorses and pails, metal troughs, long-handled hoes and shovels, everything spattered and smeared with what Vivian took at first to be birdlime—making her think of the rocks off Ferryland—but which, when she was at the door, turned out to be caked plaster. Where was the big house with the guest room overlooking the river, the one Jack had described on the train?
Despite her own mounting alarm, she thought it best to keep him calm. He looked at her with such panic in his eyes that she put her hand on his arm. “It’ll only be for a few days,” she said, patting him. But when he turned away from her, she realized she had pushed him back into his shell.
Before she could say anything
else, Benny opened the front door. Jack squeezed past him into the house and she followed. There came a shriek from the far end of a narrow hall, and a small, delicate woman wearing an apron bustled towards them. She was tiny but spritely, as tiny creatures often are. Her wavy, dark hair, so much like Jack’s, was brushed over one eye, and her face was pale. When she reached them at the front of the hall, Vivian detected the soft perfume of rose-scented facial powder.
“Jackson, my baby!”
Jackson? It hadn’t occurred to her that his name was short for anything. She sensed Jack recoiling slightly, but he allowed his mother to embrace him, and when she was finished she turned to Vivian. “And who’s this?” she cried in delight. “Who have you brought us?”
“Ma, this is Vivian.”
“Oh, my,” she said. “How do you do, Vivian?”
“It’s so nice to meet you finally, Mrs. Lewis.”
There was an awkward silence while they watched Benny come in with the luggage. “You two aren’t sleeping here,” he said, “but I thought I’d better bring these in from the truck before somebody stole them.”
“Where are they staying, then?” Jack’s mother asked in surprise.
“At my place,” Benny said, winking at Jack. “There’s more privacy there. I’ll sleep here on the chesterfield.”
“Oh, well,” Jack’s mother said vaguely. “I’ll just go and set another place at the table. Oh, it’s no trouble. We have plenty of plates.”
Vivian very nearly sagged against the wall. The situation was so utterly beyond her comprehension she couldn’t even form a thought about it. Jack must have told them she was coming. They had forgotten, that was all. Forgotten that their son was bringing his wife home to meet them. Almost worse than everything else was the ease with which they accepted his bringing a strange woman home and expecting to share a room with her. It was humiliating in the extreme. What did they think she was? She wanted to run from the house, out into the menacing street, but she couldn’t. She wanted to take Jack aside and ask him what he had told them, but she couldn’t do that either. Benny was behind her, so she couldn’t even shoot Jack a meaningful glance. She followed him down the hall to the kitchen. She would have to wait until later. Maybe everything would be clearer by then.
In the kitchen, Jack’s mother looked at her and exclaimed again: “So, you’re Vivian.”
“Yes, Mrs. Lewis,” she said, as though speaking to a child. “I’m Vivian Lewis, Jack’s wife.”
A baffled look came over Jack’s mother’s face, but she recovered and said, “Oh, you must be exhausted after your long trip. Would you like some tea?”
“I would love some, thank you.”
Jack cut in. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s upstairs lying down.” She turned to Vivian. “He’s feeling under the weather today. He said he might come down for a bite of supper later on. He’ll be so happy to meet you.”
Jack’s mother opened a cupboard door and began removing dishes, the offer of tea evidently forgotten. Perhaps Jack had written to her after all, and it had simply gone out of her head, like the tea. She tried to catch Jack’s eye again, but he was talking to Benny and Jack’s mother suggested Vivian help her reset the table in the small dining room.
“The war has spared my son,” Jack’s mother said happily, handing Vivian a water glass with yellow polka dots painted on it, “and given him a bride!”
“We were so sorry you couldn’t come to the wedding,” Vivian said.
“Oh, was there a wedding?”
Vivian nearly dropped the glass. “Yes, of course there was,” she said. “In May.”
“May is such a lovely month.”
The table was heavy and dark, too big for the room. Everything was. A large, glass-fronted cabinet in one corner held glassware and serving dishes, and next to it was a big matching sideboard. An upright piano on the opposite wall was festooned with at least a dozen silver-framed, pre-war photographs, and she wondered why Jack had never shown her a photograph of anyone in his family. Jack’s mother laid the table for six. Who was the sixth guest? She knew only of an Uncle Harley, and she thought Jack had said he lived in a hotel.
“There,” Jack’s mother said when they were finished. She herded Vivian through an arched doorway into the living room and bade her put her feet up while she put on the kettle. She hadn’t forgotten the tea after all. “We’ll let the boys talk,” she said. “Dinner won’t be too long.”
She left Vivian alone in the room, which, like the dining room, contained more furniture than it could comfortably hold. They had evidently moved from a larger house, perhaps the one Jack had described to her on the train. Had business been bad during the war? Yes, that was almost certainly it. The war had shrunk everything. Except, apparently, the furniture. On the wall was a faded print of Jesus in pastel robes, kneeling at a rock with his hands folded in prayer, eyes lifted imploringly towards Heaven. No one she knew would have had such a thing in their house, not even the Catholics. She sat in a red plush armchair that reminded her of the seats on the train, and put her head back, trying to clear it of worry and suspicion. Jack would never lie to her about something this important, how could he hope to get away with it?
A short while later, Jack’s mother called the three of them, Vivian, Jack and Benny, to sit at the table while she served from the kitchen, scurrying back and forth carrying food in pots and mixing bowls but never actually sitting down herself. Jack’s father did not come down for his bite of dinner, nor did another guest arrive. No one mentioned the two empty chairs. There was a pot roast, cooked to within an inch of its life, and mashed potatoes, boiled cabbage, a cooked green that looked like spinach but somehow was not. The only condiment was salt. There never was any tea, and Vivian did not have the heart to ask for it. By the end of the meal, Jack’s mother still had not sat down to her own empty plate.
“Shouldn’t we save something for Dad?” Jack asked when there did not appear to be anything left to save.
“Let’s let him sleep,” said his mother brightly, perching on one of the unoccupied chairs. “I don’t like to wake him,” she said to Vivian. “But you can go up and take a look at him if you like.”
“Oh,” said Vivian, taken aback. “Won’t we be seeing him tomorrow?”
“Of course you will,” Jack’s mother said.
“Jack,” she said when they had left the house to walk the short distance to Benny’s apartment—Benny would bring their luggage around later in the truck—“what is going on? There is something very odd about … about your family.” There, she’d said it. What would Jack say in response? But he surprised her.
“I know,” he said. “I tried to warn you.”
“You did? When?”
“Lots of times.” Then he looked at her. “You’ll get used to it.”
She walked beside him, sensing a kind of relief in his voice. Something she’d said had made him feel better. But when had he tried to warn her about his family? He’d barely mentioned them.
Jack had given the Navy Benny’s apartment as a contact address to which to send his demob notice, so she knew it was on a street called Tuscarora. “An Indian tribe,” Jack had joked. “Don’t worry, long gone.” The street was better lit, and there was a bit of grass in the yard. Jack had a key for the main door and another for the apartment. She felt almost regal entering it, it was so much bigger than their little flat in St. John’s, which had seemed as big as the world to her. Benny had said he lived alone, but there was a small hand mirror and tubes of lipstick in the bathroom, a percale housedress hanging from a hook behind the bedroom door.
In bed that night, their first real bed in days, she decided to risk being more direct in her questioning.
“Did you or did you not tell your parents about our wedding?” she asked him, although now that she’d said it, it sounded more absurd than ever.
“I told you, I wrote to them,” Jack said.
But he had told her so many things that weren’t q
uite true; that his parents lived in a big house, that his father owned a construction company.
“What exactly did you tell them?”
“I told them I was getting married,” he said, “to an angel from Fairy Land. A wonderful girl named Lily White.”
“Jack, your mother had no idea who I was.”
“I can’t help what she knows and what she doesn’t know,” Jack said. “She says whatever comes into her head.”
“Did you tell her I was coming to Windsor?”
“Yes, I told them you were coming to Windsor.”
“Benny didn’t seem to know, either,” she persisted.
“Benny!” he said. “He knew, all right, he was just pulling your leg.”
Why did so little of what Jack said make sense to her? He was staring up at the ceiling, gone from her again.
“Jack,” she said slowly, “why does your mother use so much face powder?”
“What?” he said, turning on her. “What are you talking about? She doesn’t.”
“She does, Jack.”
“Well, how would I know? Maybe she likes face powder.” He reached across her, and for a moment she thought he was going to embrace her, to reassure her, to tell her something she could believe and trust, but he was just turning out the little lamp on the bedside table. “If you don’t have any more dumb questions,” he said into the darkness, “I’d like to go to sleep.”
In the morning, as she unpacked and was deciding what to wear, she said to Jack, “Am I to meet your father today?”
“No, not today. He and Benny have a rush job in Leamington. They won’t get back until after midnight.”
How did he know that? “We could wait up,” she offered. The thought of Jack’s father being kept from her by his family had kept her awake most of the night.
“That’s if nothing goes wrong,” Jack said.
The next day there was a different excuse. His father had to go to Detroit for supplies, then take them out to Ann Arbor where Uncle Harley was working on a nursing home. But wasn’t Uncle Harley a barber? He was, but he helped out with the plastering when they were busy. And he was an American citizen, so he could work in Ann Arbor without a work permit. How was Uncle Harley an American citizen? Didn’t he own a barbershop in Windsor? He did. It was all so confusing and so inconceivable that she would not meet her father-in-law that she stopped questioning anything at all. She let herself believe it was simply a matter of waiting. She did have the unkind thought that if they were so busy with work then why were they still living in such a dingy little house, but she put that away from her, too, not wanting to invite another angry response. She had no idea how much a house in Windsor cost, or how much plasterers were paid. She contented herself with the mornings in Benny’s apartment, sleeping late, reading for a bit while Jack slept, then getting up to make coffee and toast and fried eggs and bringing them back to bed for Jack, who jumped like a disturbed cat when she gently shook him awake.