Emancipation Day

by Wayne Grady

  “So? Lots of people drink. Do you think I haven’t seen drinking in St. John’s?”

  “Not like Dad’s.” Jack sighed. “He goes on these binges, see. Real tears. Everything’s fine for a while, sometimes for a whole year, he goes to work, builds up the business, they move to a nice neighbourhood, and then he starts drinking again and that’s all he does. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t pay the bills, he hardly ever comes home, we don’t see him for weeks at a time, we don’t know where he is. He’s been like that since the day I was born. You have no idea how many times me and Benny have gone into every saloon in Windsor looking for him. That’s where I went last night. Sometimes we find him, sometimes we don’t.”

  Surely he wouldn’t lie about a thing like this. Was it naive of her to believe him?

  “Your poor mother,” she said, taking his arm.

  “He was all right when I joined up.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  A weight lifted from her mind; it was like looking up from a gloomy book and seeing a cloudless sky. Tomorrow they’d be in Toronto, and soon after that they’d be in St. John’s, and Jack would go back to being light and breezy, Frank Sinatra in a sailor suit, the man she’d fallen in love with. And when she got him back to St. John’s she would talk to her father about finding him a job in the company. Everything would be fine.

  PART IV

  JACK

  Jack had loved Toronto when he was there for his Navy training, two and a half years earlier. No family, no Della, no past. He’d spent all his time with his fellow recruits at the Armouries or with his closer mates who shared his boarding house a few blocks up on King Street. They had all been united in a single purpose: to bury the past and use the war to carve themselves out a new future. This time, however, with the war over, the streets crawled with ex-servicemen glaring at anyone who might have been a lower rank or seen less active duty, and Jack felt targeted on both fronts. Everywhere he looked he saw men who kept their hair short and wore hats and looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and women who’d been happy enough getting their monthly cheques in the mail during the war but looked less than thrilled at having home the men who’d sent them. But they all seemed to respect anyone who’d survived. No one had seen what they’d seen, been through what they’d been through, deserved what they deserved. After a week or two, Jack was beginning to feel that he belonged in Toronto.

  Frank Sterling was there. They had met up again during their demobilization. Frank had a job in his father-in-law’s construction company. When they ran into each other, Jack and Vivian were staying in a boarding house not far from Jack’s old place on King. It was small but clean, and the rent included breakfast. Frank and Jeannie had an apartment in the city’s west end, on Euclid Avenue—Easy Street, Frank called it—and Frank invited Jack and Vivian over for a drink the next night. When he and Vivian got there, they found that the so-called apartment was a second-storey walk-up that didn’t even have its own door. They had to go into some wop family’s house and walk up the stairs. Sure, when they got up there it was nice. Jeannie kept it clean, and they had a few sticks of good furniture. “Always buy the best,” Frank said, “even if you can’t afford it.” Which made Jack feel good about living in Toronto. No one had ever let him buy something he couldn’t afford.

  And Jeannie and Vivian hit it off right away, nattering like a couple of magpies who’d known each other since Adam. It made sense, he guessed, they were both born with silver spoons in their mouths. But Jeannie was all right, a full-figured party with a nice face.

  “You’re staying in a boarding house in Parkdale?” Jeannie asked, making it sound like they were sharing a boxcar with a bunch of hobos. “We’ve got an extra bedroom here, why don’t you move in with us for a while? That would be all right, wouldn’t it, Frank?”

  “Sure thing, old buddy,” Frank said to Jack. “We’ll string you up a couple of hammocks.”

  Jack looked at Vivian. She seemed pleased, and so he said okay. But he wasn’t all that happy about the arrangement. Frank was still the easygoing, slap-happy guy he’d been in St. John’s, ready to slip into any part of the good life that came his way. But he’d become a bit of a show-off, if you wanted to know the truth. What did he have to blow hard about? He was working for his wife’s father, laying cement blocks. Big deal. A monkey with a piece of string could lay cement blocks. Things would be different for Jack. If he’d learned anything, it was that they couldn’t go back to doing things the way they did them before the war. The way things were then was what had caused the war.

  And sharing an apartment with Frank and Jeannie was awkward, no question about it. The walls were thin as paper. He and Vivian could hear everything that went on in the other couple’s bedroom, which was plenty. Every frigging night, thump thump thump, Oh Frankie! as clear as if they were doing it on the radio. Jeannie was a squealer, you could tell that by looking at her. Compared to her, even compared to Della, Vivian was a mouse, afraid to let go. Most of the times when he wanted it she would turn away, or be reading a book, or say it was the wrong time of the month. And they only did it when Frank was at work and Jeannie was out shopping, like they were doing something dirty. Not dirty, Jack, private. Frank and Jeannie didn’t seem to worry about private.

  Still, the place was free. And he was glad to have Vivian out of Windsor. She’d stopped asking him all those questions about his family, and he was finally able to relax and think about what he was going to do. They had some money from his demob pay, and he’d cashed in their train tickets back to St. John’s. They wouldn’t be needing them, that much was for sure.

  “So,” Frank said at breakfast one morning. “What are your plans?”

  “You mean for today?” Jack asked.

  “Today, tomorrow, next month. Are you going to stay in Toronto?”

  Ah, he wanted them out of his apartment. Jeannie was at the stove with her back to them, making coffee, still in her housecoat and slippers. Vivian was in the bedroom getting dressed. “I’ll go where there’s work, I guess,” he said. “We’ll get a place of our own.”

  “Lots of work here in Toronto.”

  “So I hear.”

  “What kind are you looking for?” Frank asked.

  “Something in music,” Vivian answered for him, coming into the kitchen. She was wearing a floral print dress with a wide, white-leather belt and white shoes. She always looked good in the morning.

  “A band?” Frank asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “You mean a dance band?” Frank asked, and Jack said, “Yeah, a combo.”

  “That would be nights, though, right?”

  “Nights, weekends. You interested?”

  “Me? Nah, the war’s over, buddy. Besides, Jeannie keeps me pretty busy at night, don’t you, Sugar?”

  “Frank!” she said, slapping his arm.

  No one spoke for a while, then Vivian, who never drank anything but tea in the mornings, said, “This coffee is delicious.”

  A week later they had their own place. Vivian found it. It was in the east end, south of Danforth, on a street off Gerrard called Hollywood Crescent. It had been advertised as an apartment, but it was really a small bedsit on the second floor of a private house, no kitchen or bath, but at least it wasn’t a walk-up. It had its own door at the bottom of the stairs, its own mailbox on the front porch, and its own meter on the side of the house. They had to share the downstairs bathroom with the owners—a surly-looking truck driver and his thin, flimsy wife who looked afraid of her own shadow—and upstairs there was just a hotplate and a small icebox. But it would do until they could afford something better. Fifteen dollars a month.

  Jack started going out to clubs at night, looking for musicians for his band, coming home late and a little drunk. He didn’t want just anyone. Even putting a small band together wasn’t something you did overnight. You didn’t just call up the Musicians’ Union and say, send me a piano player, a ten
or sax, a drummer and a bass.

  “Why not?” Vivian asked. “At least you’d get a list of names, hold auditions.”

  Auditions? Jesus, who did she think he was, Duke Ellington?

  “Why don’t you ask Peter to come up? He’s a good trumpet player.” She was full of bright ideas.

  “You saw that club he was in,” Jack said. “It was penny-ante stuff. I bet the musicians were playing for beer.”

  Besides, he thought to himself, there was no way he was going to play in some coloured dump.

  He bought fifteen-cent sheet music and spent hours each day arranging songs for trombone and tenor sax. “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It).” “I’ll Remember You (Always).” He’d hum them over and over until Vivian begged him to work on a new tune. He jazzed them up a bit, not much, just to give them some swing, something people could tap their feet to. After a few weeks he had enough songs ready that, when he had a band, they could play a whole evening of his own arrangements. The Jack Lewis Combo. That’s what managers wanted, he told Vivian. Something distinctive. If people wanted to hear the Jack Lewis Combo, they’d have to go to such-and-such a club. That way the club could charge more to get in, have higher drink prices, pay the band more, maybe give them a cut of the take. That was how it worked, doll.

  And before too long, he’d be playing the Royal York.

  He had to have a signature tune, though, a song that the band would play every night that announced who they were, and then they’d play it again after each break. He chose “Blue Moon,” and worked on it for days. He changed the tempo, added a few riffs, and worked especially hard on the trombone solo. He went over the song in his head, modulating his voice so that it was somewhere between a croon and a bark, a bit of Crosby, a bit of Sinatra. He even designed the plywood music stands that each band member would have, a huge quarter note in the form of a moon, painted blue, with “The Jack Lewis Combo” traced on top.

  Meanwhile, they had to eat. He looked for jobs that would leave him enough time to work on his music. Something in sales, commission work, a white-collar position. He wasted a lot of time filling out forms and sitting outside the offices of people who never came out of them. He sat with his elbows on his knees, ruining the creases in his trousers, twirling his fedora in his hands, smiling at secretaries who kept shooting him looks. He read the posters on the walls a hundred times. “A clean workplace is a safe workplace.” “Cooperative Economic Action—The Balance Wheel of a Free Economy.”

  “We need a car,” he told Vivian after another day of fruitless trudging. It was humiliating, walking everywhere looking for work. He felt like a beggar.

  “Cars cost money,” she said.

  “Look, two fellas apply for a job, one of them shows up all sweaty and wrinkled from riding on streetcars all day, the other guy pulls up in his car looking fresh, his suit nicely pressed, no dust on his shoes, who do you think gets the job?”

  “I guess that depends,” she said. “Are you talking about plastering or bricklaying?”

  “I’m talking about a salesman’s job. I didn’t fight a war so I could come back home and do the same dirty work I was doing before. I’d be good in sales.”

  “That’s true,” she said, backing down. “You’re a performer.”

  “Exactly. And ninety-nine percent of sales is pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.”

  “You don’t think an honest person can be a good salesman?”

  “I didn’t say that.” There she went, twisting his words around. “I mean you have to convince the buyer that your product is better than anyone else’s. And to do that, you have to honestly believe it, deep inside, even if it isn’t true.”

  He bought a car the next day, a ten-year-old Hupmobile that he found at a sandlot dealership for thirty dollars. It was green and had a rumble seat in the back instead of a trunk, but it would do. “You can’t beat these old Hups,” he told Vivian when he drove it home and called her outside to look at it. She was less impressed than he’d hoped. Why couldn’t she just pretend to like something he liked? She was worried about the price, two months’ rent. Christ, the car would pay for itself in a week when he got a job. “How are you going to get ladders and hoes in a rumble seat?” she asked him, as though she already knew he’d be a failure as a salesman.

  She was wrong, as usual. He got a salesman’s job a week later, selling encyclopedias door to door, something called The Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia Year Book for 1945. Answered an ad in the paper, and he wouldn’t have got it without the car. What did he tell her? Maybe now she’d have a little faith in him. “No home should be without a good encyclopedia,” they told him at the training session in a big office building on Bloor Street. That was the pitch. “The accumulated wisdom of the ages.”

  “Don’t worry, the books will sell themselves,” the recruiter told him.

  “So why do you need us?” he quipped. No one laughed.

  The company divided the city into sectors, like on a war map, and he was given a territory in a new subdivision called Scarborough, in the east end north of the Danforth. He was to make his rounds on weekdays, when the husbands weren’t home, because only women bought books. He got a dollar for every book he sold.

  Scarborough turned out to be a mecca for returning veterans and their growing broods. A hundred and fifty bungalows, all built from the same plan on twenty-five-foot lots, no basements, no front yards to speak of, all of them looking across four streets surrounding the Pine Hills Cemetery.

  He sold one year book the first week, to a woman whose husband was a schoolteacher, and two the second week, which was progress. At that rate, he calculated, by the end of three months he’d be selling two thousand books a week. When he managed to sell only ten books in his first month, he wasn’t discouraged. The big numbers wouldn’t start kicking in until month three.

  When December came and went and he was still lucky if he sold a couple of books a week, he saw another ad in the paper, this time for people to sell Regal Greeting Cards door to door. He thought that having two reasons to let him in would double his chances of making a sale. People had to buy Christmas cards, didn’t they? Vivian thought he was jeopardizing his job with Funk & Wagnalls, but how would they find out?

  He was now making ten dollars a week, which covered the rent easy, and when he got his band going, he would double that. More important, for him, he was doing it on his own. No help from Vivian’s family, no hindrance from his own. Nobody knew who he was, and nobody cared, which was Jack’s idea of paradise.

  He was still selling encyclopedias and cards when their first wedding anniversary came around. He’d wanted to have a quiet evening at home, turn on the radio, pull out the sofa bed, but Vivian had other ideas. Frank and Jeannie were taking them out for dinner. Well, that was okay by him, if it made Vivian happy. They exchanged their presents after breakfast. He gave her a bracelet with a heart engraved around the words Jack and Vivian.

  “I love it,” she said, slipping it over her wrist.

  “It’s not real gold,” he said, “but you can’t tell from a distance.”

  She gave him a book about music. As if he didn’t handle enough books already. But he told her he loved it, too, and would read it as soon as he found time. What was it with her and books?

  “You’re supposed to get paper on your first anniversary,” Jeannie said when they met them at the restaurant, a small place on Bloor West not far from Euclid. Tablecloths, real flowers, fancy waiters, a five-piece combo playing in a corner.

  “I didn’t know that,” he said.

  “Darling, I love the bracelet.” She pulled back the sleeve of her sweater and showed it around the table. Jeannie murmured appreciatively.

  Frank ordered a bottle of champagne. Vivian asked him if he could afford it.

  “Always buy the best,” said Jeannie. “Of course we can afford it, as long as we don’t plan on eating until July.” They all laughed.

  “To long and happy marr
iages,” Frank said when the champagne came. They clinked their glasses over the table. The champagne tasted like thin beer that had gone skunky, but he didn’t say anything.

  Then Jeannie gave Vivian a present, a tube wrapped in silver paper. When Vivian unwrapped it, it was a roll of wallpaper. “Aha!” said Vivian, unrolling it a ways to look at the pattern. “It’s perfect!” But Jack didn’t get it.

  “Wallpaper?” he said.

  “It’s for your new house,” Jeannie explained.

  “What new house?” Jack said.

  “Well,” Frank said, “since it looks like you’re staying in Toronto, we figured you’re going to be looking around for a house.”

  “Who says we’re staying in Toronto?” Jack turned to Vivian. He hadn’t told her about cashing in the tickets. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “We could live here.” A person could be anyone he wanted to be in Toronto.

  “Actually, we’re thinking of moving out,” Jeannie said. “To Barrie or some other place up north.”

  “Maybe Barrie,” Frank said. “Or Newmarket. Or Markham. Turn one of those one-horse towns into a big city.” Frank said they had started their own construction company, F. Sterling & Sons. “The sons will come later,” he said, winking at Jeannie. “Strictly new houses. There’s no money in fixing up someone else’s mistakes. You said so yourself, Jack.”

  Jack nodded. He’d had enough of that in Windsor.

  “So, what do you say, Jack?” Frank asked him.

  “What’s that?” Jack said, startled. “Say to what?”

  “To coming in with us,” said Jeannie. “We’re a construction company, you’re a plasterer. How about it?”

  “I’m not a plasterer anymore,” he said. “But I’ll think about it.”

  “It’s a good offer, Jack,” Vivian said.

  “I said I’d think it over.”

  “Sure, you think about it,” said Frank, leaning back in his chair. “You two lovebirds talk it over. Jeannie and I have made up our minds, though. Newmarket is the future, and we’re going to be part of it. You could be, too.”