Emancipation Day

by Wayne Grady

  “Are you all right, Viv?” Jeannie asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Why?”

  “You look kind of pale.”

  “I do?”

  “You’re not …?”

  Vivian nodded. Jeannie gave a whoop and Vivian shushed her. “I haven’t told Jack yet!”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ve only missed twice.”

  “Oh, Viv, I wondered how long you two were going to take. It’s been over two years.”

  “What about you? Are you trying?”

  “Yeah, we’re trying all right, but so far nothing doing.”

  “Sorry,” Vivian said quietly.

  “Yeah, well. Still, it’s fun trying.”

  They laughed, but Vivian felt uneasy about having confided in Jeannie before she’d told Jack.

  “When are you going to tell him?”

  “When I’ve seen a doctor.”

  “I’ll give you the name of mine. He’s an old sourpuss, but he’s good. And he’ll be happy to have a patient with ovaries that do what they’re supposed to.”

  Vivian put off calling. Having a Toronto doctor would commit her to having the baby in Toronto, and she still had thoughts of going back to Newfoundland, to having her mother and Iris with her. There was plenty of time to make plans. Jack was still talking about starting a band, and on New Year’s Eve he surprised her by taking a job with a small combo that was playing at the Rex Hotel on Queen Street. He spent most of the afternoon polishing his trombone, coating the slide with Pond’s cold cream and humming “Blue Moon” to himself. When he finished, he tested his lip by playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” There were a few sour notes, but he got through it, and she clapped appreciatively from the sofa.

  Instead of going to hear him play, however, she spent the night in the bedsit, reading. At midnight she listened to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians on the radio, and after the countdown she sang “Auld Lang Syne” under her breath, staring out the window at the ravine and fighting back tears. Old acquaintances back home would be doing the rounds of the houses dressed up as jannies, frightening the children and getting a drink of rum. The villagers called her father the Lord of the Hill because he owned the store, a title both of respect and resentment. During the war, the men from Ferryland who had joined the Newfoundland Regiment had sent their pay packets home to Vivian’s father, rather than to their wives. Her father would put a little money on the families’ accounts, enough to keep the store running, and give the rest to the families. When the men came back they’d been mean about the little he had held back, but why else had they sent him their pay? And how else could he have kept the store going and the village fed? But all was forgotten on New Year’s Eve. There would be laughter and hijinks and rum, and any rifts there had been in the outport would be set aside. Whatever you did on New Year’s Day set the tone for the rest of the year.

  Later that night, actually early on January 1, 1948, after Jack had come home and they were lying in bed, she thought: I’ll tell him now. But what if he got angry? She wouldn’t tell him now. Maybe tomorrow.

  JACK

  One night after supper, Jack told Vivian he was going out to see a band. He whistled “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” as he buttoned his yellow sports jacket and put his trombone tie clip on his blue-and-yellow tie.

  He drove down to the Royal York Hotel to hear Moxie Whitney’s band in the Imperial Ballroom. He didn’t pay the cover charge, just stood at the door pretending he was looking for someone. The bandsmen were all wearing tuxedos. They looked like Bay Street bankers, but he knew that up close, their suits would be shiny and smell of sweat and cigarette smoke, and he felt a silent bond with them, the fellowship of spit on brass. They weren’t Guy Lombardo, maybe, but they weren’t bad. They already had people up and dancing and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. He watched the trombone players when they stood up to take their turn. He could see himself as one of them, maybe not lead trombone, that guy looked as old as Whitney himself, but second or third, maybe alto. He wondered how much Whitney paid them. They were playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” one of the songs he’d arranged back when he was planning his own band. He scanned the couples on the dance floor; they probably were bankers, in good tuxedos and ball gowns, and not a coloured face among them. The head waiter was standing behind a little lectern with a light on it, pretending not to notice Jack.

  “I guess my party isn’t here yet,” Jack said to him on his way out.

  “Perhaps she’s in another part of the hotel, sir,” the waiter said.

  Bastard, Jack thought. But he had seen what he’d come to see, and went out through the lobby to where he’d parked the Hup. It had started to snow. Coloured bellhops were loading suitcases into the car behind his, and a coloured redcap was pushing a heavy wagonload of luggage across Front Street from Union Station, having trouble with the trolley tracks.

  Jack drove slowly up University Avenue, fat snowflakes eddying in his headlights. What would it be like to have a room at the Royal York? To leave the Imperial Ballroom and take an elevator up to the tenth floor, no one giving him the evil eye, wondering what he was doing there. The room would have good furniture, a thick carpet that felt like you were in your stocking feet even when you had shoes on, and a well-stocked bar, anything you wanted, gin, whiskey, bourbon. He’d just have a beer, thanks. Trombone was thirsty work. He turned right at Bloor and headed for the viaduct, the coal-black Don River flowing somewhere far below. Who would be in the room with him after the rest of them had gone home? Would it be like their honeymoon room in Flynn’s, or would it be like the Ambassador?

  When he got home, Vivian was sitting on the sofa. She wasn’t smoking much these days, and she’d asked him to stop smoking in the apartment, said it made her feel queasy. When she looked up at him he could tell she had more bad news. She wasn’t exactly crying, but she wasn’t far from it.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She took a ragged breath. “Your mother rang while you were out.”

  Alarm bells sounded in his head. “What did she want?”

  “Your father’s in hospital,” she said, coming even closer to tears. “I couldn’t quite make out what happened, she wasn’t very coherent. I think he might have fallen down some stairs.”

  Jack had a vision of his father on the ground, on his hands and knees, fire edging towards him. He almost cried out, but instead he put his hands over his eyes to erase the image. It didn’t work.

  “Jesus,” he said. “What stairs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jack lowered his hands and took a deep breath. “He was probably drunk. What am I supposed to do, go down there and hold his hand?”

  “Yes, Jack, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. He’s your father.”

  “Jesus, Viv, Benny’ll be with him.” Benny.

  “But what if he’s seriously hurt?”

  “That’s what hospitals are for.”

  “Jack!” This time she did start crying. “Don’t you care about your family? Don’t you love them? How can you love me if you don’t love your own family?” She stopped talking and looked at him wildly. “How can you not love the people who brought you into this world?”

  “All they want is someone to pay the goddamn hospital bills.” But even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true.

  “Can’t we at least ring them back, find out how badly your father’s hurt? Make sure Benny is looking after your mother? Jack, that’s the least we can do.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Sure, go ahead.”

  Vivian got up and went to the phone, which was on the wall beside the door. His mother must have given her the number.

  “Hello?” she said into the phone. “Is Mrs. Lewis there, please? Who’s this? Alvina?” She looked at Jack. He shook his head. He didn’t want to talk to her. “Hello, Alvina. We haven’t met. I’m Vivian, Jack’s wife. Yes, the one from Newfoundland. We just heard about your father. Can yo
u tell us more about what happened …?” She was still looking at Jack, and now she mouthed the words: Your mother’s at the hospital. “Jack and I were wondering how he’s doing. Is he badly hurt?”

  There was a long pause while she listened to what was evidently a tale of unending woe. He felt constriction in his chest. What did she need to read books for? If she wanted a real tear-jerker, all she had to do was talk to his family. Her eyes widened, and at one point her hand went to her mouth. “Oh!” Then she said, “Oh dear,” and repeated it two more times. Then she said: “Well, thank you, Alvina. I’ll tell all this to Jack and we’ll call back. Will someone be home tonight? Of course we want to help. Yes. Goodbye, Alvina. Give our love to everyone.”

  “Well?” he said when she’d hung up. “What’d he do, fall down at the British-American Hotel?” He hoped that was all it was.

  “Jack, it’s serious. He’s in a coma. They don’t know if he’s going to come out of it.”

  “A coma. What the hell happened?”

  “He came home in the middle of the night and had to go down into the basement for something …”

  “That’s where he keeps his whiskey bottle.”

  “And there weren’t any stairs there.”

  “There what?”

  “Benny had taken the old stairs out, and he hadn’t put new ones in. And I guess it was dark, and—”

  “Benny!” Jack said, pacing back and forth between the sofa and the counter with the kettle and the hotplate. “That idiot!”

  “Your father landed on his back. They think his neck may be broken.”

  “Oh, that’s just great, that is,” Jack said. He was trying to think the matter through, and his mind was racing. He’d planned on going to talk to Moxie Whitney in the morning, see if he needed a trombone player, and now here was his family messing things up for him again.

  Vivian stood up like she meant business.

  “Where are you going?” Jack asked.

  “To pack,” she said. “It looks like I’m finally going to meet your father.”

  PART V

  VIVIAN

  “Your sister didn’t say which hospital your father is in,” Vivian said to Jack when they reached the outskirts of Windsor.

  “It’ll be Hôtel-Dieu,” Jack said.

  “How do you know?”

  He hesitated. “It always is.”

  New houses were going up in clusters between the highway and the lake, small, single-storey bungalows like the one Frank and Jeannie had built for themselves. She pictured the young couples who would live in them, imagining herself and Jack with a pram on the porch, the Hup parked in the driveway. But everything, she and Jack with a baby, Frank and Jeannie in Newmarket, Iris and Freddie back home, seemed so unreachably distant. These houses all looked empty and cold. She shivered. She was freezing. They’d been in the car for seven hours, since six o’clock that morning, stopping only for gas and more coffee when their Thermos was empty. The Hup had made it, somehow, but it had jettisoned a few parts along the way, a tail light, the windshield wiper on her side. Jack hadn’t even stopped to retrieve them, saying something about not needing them anymore. The heater had quit just after London.

  Hôtel-Dieu turned out to be a solid, red-brick hospital with rounded turrets at each corner, a bigger, square one above the main entrance, as though it had been modelled on a castle in France, a bastion against disease and suffering. Nuns worked at a wooden desk that stretched along one end of the foyer. As she waited for Jack to park the car she warmed her hands above a radiator and read a plaque on the wall. The hospital had been started sixty years before by the Hospitallers of St. Joseph. There was a photograph and a caption explaining that the hospital had at one time also run an orphanage for sick infants whose parents, too poor to look after them properly, had brought them here for treatment and then hadn’t come back to pick them up. Vivian touched her belly through her coat. Many of the children, she read, were from coloured families.

  Jack came through the heavy revolving doors, rubbing his hands together and looking around anxiously for her. Together they went up to the admissions desk. The nursing sister looked at them kindly, but she was firm. “Mr. Lewis can be visited only by family.”

  “We are family,” said Vivian. She turned to Jack. “This is Jack Lewis, his son. And I’m Jack’s wife.”

  The nursing sister looked at Jack for a long second. “Very well,” she said. “Mr. Lewis is in Long-Term Care, third floor. The duty nurse, Sister Emmanuelle, will tell you which room.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jack didn’t say a word as they rode up the elevator. He pushed the button marked 3 and watched the lights move glacially from floor to floor, fiddling with his hat, turning it around and around in his hands as though feeling for something hidden inside it.

  When they got out, Sister Emmanuelle at the nursing station pointed down a long, wide corridor. “Third room on the right.”

  “Come, darling,” Vivian said, taking his arm when he held back.

  Most of the doors were closed, but the third room was open. Jack stopped at the door and Vivian stood beside him, looking around the room. The first thing she saw was Jack’s mother sitting on the edge of a narrow bed, dressed in her Sunday clothes and looking calm and serene, as though nothing in the world could be wrong, and Vivian sighed with relief. Jack’s father must still be alive. Benny was straddling a chair at the foot of the bed, staring at the floor, the very picture of dejection and guilt. A young woman wearing a black pillbox hat with a dark veil stood behind him, her back to the door, her gloved hand absently massaging his shoulder. A taller woman, who must have been Alvina, was pacing back and forth, looking angry, as though she’d lost something and wanted to know who took it. No one spoke. Then Jack’s mother noticed them at the threshold. She smiled, and everyone turned and looked at Vivian.

  Perhaps it was their being all together like this, poised in a shaft of light coming through the window as though for a group photograph, that made Vivian see them objectively, even Jack’s mother and Benny, as though for the first time. A thought struck her, a thought she had never quite formulated before but ought to have, she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t: Jack’s family was coloured. The realization made her forget about Jack’s father and the reason they had come. As strange as it sounded, she knew in her heart that it wasn’t because Jack’s father was hurt that they had returned to Windsor. It was so she could see this.

  She turned to Jack but he wouldn’t look at her. She wanted to place his hand on her belly and tell him there was nothing to worry about, nothing that mattered, but of course it did matter. He was looking vague again, the lost little boy in a sailor’s suit, and her heart went out to him. He had let her bring him to Windsor two years ago so she could see this, and she hadn’t. Everything had been too new to her then, she hadn’t been able to connect one oddity to another. But now, with everyone gathered in one room, she could finally see them for the first time.

  Then she looked at the bed.

  “Will,” Jack’s mother said to the figure lying under a blue sheet. “Will, Jack and his wife are here to see you, ain’t that somethin’? They come all this way.” The figure beneath the sheet did not stir. Jack’s mother looked up at Vivian. “They say he can’t hear us,” she said, “but I don’t believe them.” She reached out her hand and Vivian stepped forward and took it, leaving Jack at the door. Vivian stared at the form under the sheet, avoiding the face on the pillow. She didn’t know what to do. Was she supposed to say something?

  “Hello, Mr. Lewis,” Vivian said, leaning over Jack’s father, still holding his mother’s hand. He was lying on his back, legs and arms straight at his sides, looking like a long mound of fresh earth under a blanket of blue snow. She brought her eyes to his face. His eyelids were closed and the corners of his mouth turned down as though he’d been given a bitter pill, exactly like Jack when he was sleeping. A tube connected his right arm to a bottle of yellowish liquid suspended upside down on
the wall beside his bed. The arm was puckered and wrinkled, covered in scar tissue as though from a severe burn. He wasn’t dark dark, she saw, but he was dark enough, especially against the pillow. Jack’s mother had said that Jack took after her, but Vivian could see Jack in his father; the father was like a photographic negative of his son. What surprised her most was that she wasn’t surprised. She thought she would be, but when she looked at Jack’s father she said to herself, yes, this makes as much sense as anything else Jack’s told me. She placed her free hand on the man’s shoulder, above the burn marks. He was cold to her touch. She wanted to say it was nice to meet him, but instead she started to cry. Jack’s mother squeezed her hand, and Vivian let go and backed away to stand beside Jack in the doorway.

  “The doctor says there been some damage done to his brain,” Jack’s mother said. “He says he’ll probably never come out of this, or if he does he won’t never talk again or probably know any of us. But we don’t believe that, do we, dear?” she said, looking fondly at her husband. “I know he’s here with us.”

  “That’s from a gospel song, ain’t it, Mama?” Benny’s girlfriend said.

  “I don’t believe you met Dee-Dee before,” Jack’s mother said, and Vivian looked at Benny’s girlfriend. The veil didn’t obscure her face, but it was hard to tell where the veil ended and the bare throat began.

  “Jackson,” said Jack’s mother, “you met Dee-Dee, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Not that I know of.”

  To the tall, pacing woman Jack’s mother said, “Alvina, dear, this here’s Jack’s wife, Vivian.”

  Alvina gave Vivian the once-over, curious and dismissive at the same time. “We talked on the telephone.” Her hair was coarse and straw-coloured, and she’d had it permed into long waves that held firm when she walked. Like Benny’s, it had a hint of red in it. But it was her skin that caught and held Vivian’s attention. Where Benny’s was pitted and unevenly tanned, Alvina’s was a smooth, glowing, buttery brown.