Emancipation Day

by Wayne Grady

  Then the penny dropped. Talk it over with Vivian’s family was what Frank meant. They were the ones with the money. Jack had never taken a cent from them, and he never would. This from Frank was a huge disappointment. The old Frank would have known better. He’d sooner sell books than ask for handouts, thank you very much. He’d sooner starve.

  VIVIAN

  Vivian didn’t want Jack to be selling encyclopedias door to door. It was undignified work. Salesmen used to come to the store in Ferryland. They were a dusty, feckless lot, always on the go, on the make, lacking any kind of sincerity or industry, usually with a bottle stuck in their jacket pocket. Her father would look their wares over, order what he thought the village needed, then show the men out and come up to the house for a cup of tea. She didn’t like the thought of Jack being treated like that.

  But he seemed happy to do it, so she didn’t say anything. Since coming to Toronto he was relaxed, more his old self, and she didn’t want to do anything to cause him to feel that he wasn’t a success. He had big plans, he said, he wouldn’t be selling encyclopedias forever. She would keep her worries about Jack to herself, at least for now.

  As the days shortened, she established a routine. She’d always thought that doing the same thing over and over would make time pass slowly, but in fact she found that knowing exactly what she had to do each morning freed her mind up for other things, so that each day held new meaning, even new adventures. First, after checking the newspaper to see what was on at the cinemas, she would turn to the grocery-store ads. Since she had only a tiny icebox she had to shop for perishables nearly every day. She didn’t mind, it was fun, in a way, like the math problems she used to do in school. Grapefruit at Power’s were six for twenty-nine cents; at Loblaws the big ones were three for twenty-five and those that were just “a good size” were five for twenty-nine. Where could she get the most grapefruit for fifteen cents? Carrots at both Power’s and Dominion were two bunches for seventeen cents; Dominion had bigger bunches, but at Power’s the rib roast was forty-five cents a pound and at Dominion it was forty-nine. She wrote down everything she had to buy and put the three totals at the bottom of the list. The sums were very close and always too high, but she calculated that if she walked to Power’s, got a blade roast instead of a rib and made do without butter, then went to Dominion for vegetables, she could just about manage. The papers said the government was considering lifting the ban on margarine and she hoped it would do so soon. With margarine a third the cost of butter and sugar rationing almost over, she might be able to afford to make a cake for Thanksgiving dinner.

  She kept up with her reading. There was a public library a few blocks east of Hollywood Crescent that was sort of on her way to the grocer’s. It was small, but had most of the current popular books, and if she asked for a title they didn’t have they would order it from the main branch. Jack grumbled about her books cluttering up the apartment, but she thought they added a certain interest to the place, proof that there was life beyond these four garishly papered walls. They were like letters from faraway places, and Lord knew she didn’t get many of those. Iris was not a letter-writer. Her mother sent her brief notes in her eccentric handwriting and peacock-blue ink: crocuses up, peas picked, storm windows on, Wat gave a talk at the Junior Conservatives’ Fall Convention. Her father wrote occasional long, sad, marginless letters laboriously typed on the office Underwood, probably after his secretary had gone home at the end of the day. She pictured him sitting at her rolltop desk in the little room behind the store, typing with two fingers as the evening light faded, reading everything over half a dozen times. He rarely mentioned himself. He wrote about her mother’s health, the declining size of the catch, birds as they came and went in the harbour, the latest idiocies of Joseph Smallwood’s confederate faction. “They think joining Canada will bring down the price of rum!” A roseate tern was spotted up the coast near Renews and he had considered going to see it, but the weather had turned mauzy and in the end he had stayed home and worked on his stamp collection. He had given up the idea of moving to St. Lucia. Wat was taking a car engine apart and putting it back together, and meanwhile the oily bits were scattered about the kitchen. Her father bet that Jack would like to help him with it, because being a Windsor man he would know about motors. Her breath caught at that, because it was the first time he had mentioned Jack. She wrote back saying yes, Jack would love to do that, he was so good with cars. She told her father about the Hupmobile, “our adorable old Hup,” and the cute little rumble seat that Wat could ride in when they came to visit.

  She saved Canadian stamps to send him. The eight-cent stamp showed a peaceful farm scene that she knew he would like. She told him about the two silken jays and the cardinal she’d seen in the ravine by their house. She wrote about her first ride in a streetcar and the unimaginable variety of goods in the shops along Danforth, as if she could afford them. She was beginning to like Toronto, she wrote. It was odd to think of herself living in a city that her father would find too big, too noisy, too dangerous, but she told him that where they lived was like a village, with the Towne Theatre at one end and Power’s at the other. And it wasn’t noisy at all. At night she could hear the crickets chirruping in the ravine, and the sound of heels on the pavement as far away as Gerrard. Being comfortable in Toronto made her feel older than her parents, and the distance she had felt from them since her marriage increased, despite her attempts to shrink it. She kept her letters gay so as not to cause her parents any anxiety, just as she was doing with her conversations with Jack. She never mentioned Windsor, not even to say they hadn’t been back. She was beginning to fear the very idea of Windsor; her mind refused to let her thoughts go there, the way fishermen avoided certain corners of the sea without really knowing why.

  Jack didn’t like her walking in the ravine by herself, but she went anyway. It was a lovely forested parkland with birds and wildflowers and a meandering stream that was, she had to admit, a bit muddy, but seemed cheerful enough, and there were minnows and, recently, larger fish in it. Atlantic salmon! she wrote. During the hot summer afternoons she would stroll along the paths, and the rustle of leaves and the sound of birds and water trickling over stones reminded her of the woods she had played in as a girl. She told Jack about her walks when he came home, to show him that nothing bad had happened and he was not to worry. North of their house the ravine left Hollywood Crescent and went under some railway tracks, but she hadn’t followed it that far. They should walk it together sometime, she said, pick it up at the tracks and see where it went. He said yes, they might do that someday, but everyone knew the ravines were full of DPs and tramps, people who would knife her for her purse, or even her shoes, or worse.

  “I’ve never seen any tramps or DPs,” she said.

  “You don’t think they stand out in the open, waiting for you to come up to them and ask to be mugged, do you?”

  His arguments were always both ridiculous and irrefutable. She remembered what he’d said about Negroes and knives in Windsor, which also turned out not to be true. She was touched that he worried about her, but she didn’t want to start thinking like he did.

  Sometimes after supper they would walk down to Gerrard, visit the shops and the soda fountains in the drugstores. Jack would buy cigarettes or get a haircut, and she would sit in the barbershop and watch the barber, an elderly man with glasses and a thin moustache who never smiled, never exhibited any emotion whatsoever except a smouldering hatred for cutting hair. Barbers were supposed to talk your ear off, Jack said, but here it was Jack who did all the talking. After he’d been getting his hair cut there for several months, Jack told him that his grandfather had been a barber in Windsor, had owned his own shop in the basement of City Hall before it burned down, and his uncle still had a barbershop in one of the biggest hotels in the city. This was only a slightly different version of the story she had heard before.

  “That so?” the barber said.

  Then Jack told him that his father, a succe
ssful businessman in Windsor, went to a barber every day for his morning shave, every single morning, never shaved himself. What did he think of that? The barber wasn’t impressed. Jack frowned and asked the barber what he would say if he, Jack, came down every day for his morning shave. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t open until eleven,” the barber said.

  She was amazed to see Jack getting angry about something so petty. She picked up a Liberty magazine and looked at the cover. It showed a smiling Navy rating holding an engagement ring and talking into a pay phone, proposing long-distance to his girl. She felt a catch in her throat, imagining the happy woman at the other end of the line, her mother and sister smiling in the background.

  The summer passed. The bedsit no longer seemed impossibly tiny. Jack’s trombone was behind the sofa bed, the case gathering dust. Their savings account held steady at thirty-four dollars, not enough for two train tickets to anywhere but enough to make them feel they could afford a movie or a dinner out now and then. She began looking at the Sears catalogues: the fall dresses had cinched waists and flared at the hips, she might be able to afford one. The newspapers had ads for wringer washers and cookstoves and she found herself looking around the bedsit, wondering where on earth she would put such things.

  One afternoon towards the end of October, as she was reading the Toronto Star, her eye caught on a headline: “New Novel Flays Anti-Negro Prejudice.” The book under review was Kingsblood Royal, by Sinclair Lewis, a writer she had read and enjoyed. This new one was about a man named Neil Kingsblood, who lived in a small Minnesota city called Grand Republic. Kingsblood started checking into his family history because, according to family legend, he was distantly related to one of the kings of England. “People have been warned before now about examining family trees too closely,” the reviewer wrote, “owing to the number which have miscreants hanging from them. In this case it is not a miscreant that Neil finds, but a Negro.”

  She coughed and put her cigarette down in the ashtray. She looked around the apartment, making sure Jack wasn’t there even though she knew he was at work. When her breathing settled, she got up from the table, found her scissors in her sewing basket, and cut the review out of the paper. Then she set it in the ashtray and burned it, stubbing out the ash with the remains of her cigarette.

  Thank God they were out of Windsor.

  By the second week of November she began to feel her body changing, though not in ways Jack was likely to notice. She found it more comfortable sleeping on her back; her breasts hurt when she lay on her stomach, or when Jack felt for her in the mornings. She noticed a metallic taste in her mouth when she drank tea. She tried it with less milk, but it was worse. She cut down on smoking; no effect, except that she felt irritable. There was a mild tightening in her lower abdomen, she wouldn’t call it cramps, exactly. She didn’t connect any of these sensations for a week or more, and then one night she sat bolt upright in bed, her eyes wide in the darkness. She was pregnant.

  Her first thought was that she wouldn’t tell Jack until she was sure, until she had seen a doctor. She didn’t know any doctors in Toronto. She didn’t know any doctors anywhere except back home. Should she write to Iris and her mother? No, not yet. She might tell Jeannie. You lucky devil, Jeannie would say. You must be so happy. Was she? She and Jack had been married for two and a half years, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. They hadn’t been trying, but they hadn’t been trying not to, either. She realized with a tinge of guilt that every time her period had come she’d felt relieved.

  She should be overjoyed, so why wasn’t she? Their bedsit was much too small; they’d have to move. That wasn’t so bad; she liked this place but she didn’t love it, as she had loved their tiny apartment in St. John’s. So that wasn’t what was worrying her.

  It was Jack. As she’d seen with the barber, it didn’t take much to make his blood boil. He liked his job, he said, but he’d come home complaining about his territory and his customers, the hills and the snow, and he usually fell asleep on the couch after supper before they could even pull out the bed. She would sit up and read while he slept, smoking and drinking cold tea left over from supper. Was this to be their life from now on, both of them filled with secrets they couldn’t share with each other? It wasn’t just her body that was changing: the world was spinning around them, too. New styles. New countries. New gadgets. Televisions, vacuum cleaners, automatic washing machines. Jack kept talking about buying all of them on credit.

  “Where would we put them?”

  “You don’t think we’re going to live in one room all our lives, do you?”

  Well, that was true, not with a baby on the way. She counted on her fingers: they wouldn’t need to move until July or August. But they wouldn’t be able to think of buying a house, not on Jack’s commissions. Veterans Affairs might give them a mortgage, but where would they find the down payment?

  “I should make supervisor in another couple of months,” Jack said one night at dinner, when she’d broached the idea of moving. “All they do is drive around all day making sure joes like me are doing their jobs. Piece of cake. A year or two as a super and I’ll be up for promotion to manager.”

  He made a year or two sound like no time at all. She couldn’t think that far ahead. She made a mental list of things she couldn’t think about. The baby after it was born. Jack’s quick temper. The fact that she still hadn’t met his father, or his sister. Jack’s mother wrote from time to time, but they hadn’t been back to Windsor since coming to Toronto, and she could hardly expect Jack’s family to come all this way just for a visit. But then again, why not? If her own family lived only a few hours away, they’d be here every month, and she and Jack would go there at least on holidays. Wat would have put his motor back together and driven to Toronto every Sunday for dinner. Jack’s family never even phoned. Making the list had only made her think about the things that were on it.

  “What’s wrong, Viv?” Jack asked that evening after dinner. “You’re very quiet tonight.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I was thinking that we haven’t heard from your family for a while.”

  “That’s because they don’t need anything yet. Let’s talk about something else.”

  But they didn’t talk about anything else. They went back to not talking at all except about unimportant things. Would they listen to the radio or go out to a movie? Did she think he needed a haircut? How long could she put off telling him she was expecting? A month? Two months? She would tell him when she’d seen a doctor, when she started showing, when she had a due date. When it was safe.

  By Christmas she still hadn’t been to a doctor. She thought about telling Jack as a Christmas present, giving him something a father might need. A box of cigars, maybe: Surprise, darling, we’re going to have a baby! She practised different ways of saying it. “Jack, I’m pregnant.” No, too abrupt. “Jack, darling, we’re in the family way.” “There’s a little bundle of joy in our future.” None of them sounded right. In the end, she gave him a tie clip in the shape of a trombone, and he gave her some perfume in a really nice bottle.

  On Christmas Day they brushed the snow off the Hup and drove all the way to Newmarket to see the Sterlings. The Danforth was bright with Christmas lights hanging from the hydro poles and in the shop windows. The snow was so deep that Jack drove behind a streetcar until they reached the edge of the city, the windshield wipers on and the wheels riding on the metal trolley tracks. She was afraid he would not be able to stop if the trolley suddenly stopped, but she knew better than to say anything about his driving.

  Frank and Jeannie lived in a new house that Frank had built in the fall, a split-level bungalow with a gently sloping roof and grey brick siding below a bay window that looked out onto a tall blue spruce with Christmas lights strung on it and a wooden cut-out reindeer grazing in the snow next to the front porch. They had come up in the world, and Vivian was happy for them. She couldn’t help thinking that if Jack had accepted
Frank’s offer, they might be living in such a house now, too.

  “Looks cheap, doesn’t it?” Jack said as they parked in the drive behind a new truck that had F. Sterling and Sons, Contractors painted on the side.

  Inside, the house smelled of roasted turkey and floor wax. Frank kissed Vivian’s cheek and Jeannie took their coats. She’d brought a jar of bakeapple jam, one of three that her mother had sent from Ferryland, all of which had survived the journey, and she had spent part of the morning baking oatmeal cookies. Jack handed Frank what was left of a bottle of Canadian Club. Frank took it and poured the drinks and Jeannie put the bakeapple jam and cookies under a tree in a corner of the living room. The tree was almost as tall as the one outside.

  They spent a few minutes admiring the house. Jack knocked on one of the walls with his knuckles. “Drywall?”

  “Five-eighths-inch,” Frank said. “Nothing but the best.”

  “My parents had a house like this in Windsor,” Jack said. “Had a fireplace in every bedroom. They lost it during the Depression.”

  “How’s the encyclopedia business?” Frank asked.

  “Can’t complain. I’m in line for a manager’s job.”

  “That’s great, Jack,” Frank said. “How long have you been there? Two years now?”

  “About that. You going to sell this house when you build another one?”

  “That’s the idea. Why? You want this one?” Frank laughed.

  “Naw,” Jack said, “there’s just the two of us. We’d be lost in a place this big, eh, Viv?”

  “Come and help me in the kitchen, Viv,” Jeannie said.

  Jeannie’s kitchen was done entirely in white and fire-engine red. White walls, white ceiling, red countertop, white cupboard doors with little red Scottie dogs on them, a new white icebox and a matching stove, and a white sink with two sections, one for washing and the other for rinsing. Even the tea towels were red-and-white striped.