Emancipation Day

by Wayne Grady

  Vivian moved Jack from the door into the room and they stood together by the window. It looked down on Ouellette Avenue. Vivian turned to Jack’s father.

  She had the feeling that everyone, especially Alvina, was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to remark on what to them was unremarkable. She supposed they thought she would walk out of the room, out of the hospital, and not come back, but of course she wouldn’t do that. For one thing, her knees were too weak, and she felt a tightness in her chest as from something long suppressed. But it wasn’t anger or fear or even disappointment that was causing it, rather a kind of curiosity and a sense that now, at long last, things that she hadn’t understood were finally out in the open. Benny’s Windsor tan, Jack’s mother’s facial powder, the extraordinary efforts to keep her from meeting Jack’s father, Jack’s insistence that Alvina had married beneath her, all of it now fell into a pattern that she could piece together and understand.

  She wasn’t crazy, after all. Jack must have thought that if she couldn’t see the truth for herself after he had laid it out for her like a hand of cards on a table, then there wasn’t much to be gained by saying more. But now that she had seen it, suddenly, as though she’d been looking out to sea and seeing nothing and then suddenly discerned a flight of birds skimming inches above the surface, she could relax. Maybe now they could both get on with their lives. So she would not walk out of the room. The only unresolved question now was, if Jack’s family was coloured, how was it that Jack was not? And that was important because, as she now realized so sharply that she had to lean back against the windowsill to remain upright, there was this baby inside her. Jack’s baby.

  When morning visiting hours were over, Jack and Vivian drove Alvina and Jack’s mother back to the house, where they discussed Jack’s father’s condition. Jack’s mother insisted quietly that her husband would wake up at any moment, look about him, and ask grumpily what the hell everyone was doing in his room. Alvina protested less quietly that people didn’t just wake up from comas like they did from naps. If the fall had damaged his brain, as the doctor said it had, he might never wake up at all. Vivian kept out of it. She took small bites of her egg-salad sandwich and asked if anyone would like her to make tea. Jack wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  As she waited for the kettle to boil, she studied each of them in turn, trying to see how Jack fit into the picture she’d carried from the hospital room. Between Jack’s father at one end of the scale and Jack at the other, there was a bewildering array of combinations. Alvina had Jack’s sharp tongue, his quick temper, his darkly suspicious nature. Jack’s mother was very light, almost as light as Jack, and her hair had always intrigued Vivian; she’d wondered if she’d had it straightened, but then she realized that Jack’s mother’s hair and Jack’s were similar if you took away the Brylcreem—soft and wavy, and they even parted it on the same side. Benny could be taken for white, especially beside Dee-Dee. Next to Jack, he looked like one of the Caribbean sailors who sometimes jumped ship in St. John’s.

  When lunch was finished and Alvina and Jack’s mother went back to the hospital in Alvina’s car, Vivian said she and Jack would stay behind to clean up and would join the others later. Vivian did the dishes, barely breathing, and then joined Jack in the living room. He was smoking a cigarette and sitting beneath the picture of Christ, in the same chair she had sat in the first time she’d been in this house.

  “We have to talk, Jack,” she said, and he looked up at her as though she had spoken a language he didn’t understand, as perhaps she had.

  “About what?”

  “About your father.”

  “Aw, he’ll be okay.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me he’s a Negro?”

  “What do you mean, a Negro?” Jack said, as surprised and indignant as if she had told him his parents were codfish. “He’s not. My father and Benny both have blond hair, Alvina has blonde hair. Have you ever seen a Negro with blue eyes and blond hair? Look at me. Do I look like a Negro to you? Does my mother? Stop talking nonsense.”

  She recoiled as though she’d been slapped in the face.

  His response had evidently been prepared. And she had seen blond Negroes. In Windsor there was every conceivable combination of skin tone and hair.

  “Jack, I have eyes, I can see.”

  “Your second time in Windsor and you’re an expert?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference, you know,” she said to placate him.

  “It makes a big difference to me,” he said, pounding his fist against his chest.

  “How?” She was genuinely curious. Then she thought about that novel she’d read about in Toronto, Kingsblood Royal. Not all books were letters from faraway places.

  “I wouldn’t have anything to do with them, that’s how,” Jack said. “Whites and coloureds don’t mix.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” he said. He stood up and began pacing back and forth in the room. Then he turned to her. “If people in Toronto ever thought I came from a coloured family, I’d lose my job. We’d be kicked out of our apartment. Is that what you want?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then stop talking foolishness.”

  “It’s just that we have to be honest with each other,” she said.

  “I am being honest. I look in the mirror every morning and I see a white man. That’s the only truth that matters. Anything else is just you seeing things that aren’t there.”

  She realized she wasn’t being entirely honest with him, although she longed to be. The time had come to tell him about the baby. “Jack,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”

  He stared at her. He looked bewildered and terrified. She was relieved that she had delivered herself of her secret, she had rehearsed it often enough. But Jack’s response wasn’t what she had imagined it would be. He seemed not to have grasped what she’d said. Instead of his face lighting up with joy, he almost scowled at her. Had he even heard her?

  “I’m pregnant,” she said again, “with your child.”

  “So?” he said. “You’re white, I’m white, so the baby will be white.”

  “But what if—?”

  “What if what?” he said. He turned suddenly and went towards the front door. Then he stopped and spun around, and she almost covered her ears because she knew what he was going to say. “If that baby comes out coloured, I’ll know it isn’t mine!”

  The door slammed behind him and she was alone.

  JACK

  He hadn’t meant to slam the goddamned door, but he was having a hard time controlling himself. He got in the truck, slammed that door, too. If he took the Hup he’d have to go to the hospital with Vivian, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with Vivian or his father. He was in no mood to sit around a hospital room wringing his hands with the doom-and-gloom patrol, the old man lying there like a corpse and everyone around him acting as though he was just resting his eyes.

  He’d driven all the way from Toronto, and now here he was driving again. He sped down Ouellette towards the river, his mind seething, iron bands tightening around his chest. If Vivian thinks I’m coloured, he told himself, she’ll leave me. She’ll take her kid and go back to Newfoundland and tell her family they were right all along, the marriage didn’t work out. He could just imagine what Iris would say. That was if the kid turned out white. Which of course it would. Assuming it was his.

  He considered taking the tunnel across the river to Detroit, to clear his head, but he turned left on Sandwich instead and then left again on Pelissier, into Windsor’s white district. He turned right onto Giles Boulevard and down Victoria, realizing where he’d been heading all along. He parked the truck in front of Della’s house, thinking he might catch a glimpse of her, maybe at a window, or coming out to go shopping. He hadn’t seen her in more than two years, but he had thought about her constantly, not only at night when Vivian was busy making herself unavailable to him but during the day, too, whenever he saw a gasoline gauge showing empty, and so
metimes when he was knocking on doors, imagining her coming to open one in a loosely tied housecoat. “Like to buy a Year Book, ma’am?” “Oh, it’s you,” she’d say, and step aside to let him in. Damn it, he would speak to her. It’s a free goddamned country, isn’t it? Isn’t that what they fought the war for?

  As he sat, his breathing shallow, his heart thumping in his chest, the truck’s engine running and the heater turned on high, the whole night at the motel came rushing back to him. It began with him walking into the Horse Shoe and seeing Della surrounded by refugees from the riot, their anxious faces looking up at him as he led her from that palace of darkness to the promised land, the Ambassador Motel. Della taking off her torn dress in that cold room. In his waking dream, this was where he usually shook himself awake, turned to Vivian or got a customer’s order ready, but now he let his mind run its course. He laid Della back on the bed and slowly revealed, revelled in, her pale, beautiful body. He lay down on top of her and let her skin give way to his.

  And it seemed to him that in the five years since that night he’d never wholly accepted the idea that she had rejected him the next morning. He couldn’t believe that their night together had not constituted a beginning, because he had thought of himself as being in love with Della for much longer than that single night. Their love included all those nights after band practice, when he and she had sat side by side in her parlour, and he had watched her knitting and drinking tea and had had to dodge her questions about his family. And all the times he had thought about her since, lying in his narrow cot in the barracks in St. John’s. The Ambassador, as it now shaped itself in his mind, had merely been an inevitable first step, not a consummation or completion. All the pain that came after that, her rejection, his joining the Navy, his not seeing or hearing from her, his marriage to Vivian, had been new episodes in his life, yes, but not breaks from his old life—the way a verse is not a new song but a continuation of the old song between repeated refrains. Della had always been the chorus.

  And so he got out of the truck and, without any clear idea of what he would do once he got inside, knocked on Della’s front door.

  He’d been composing something to say to her husband, or to Peter, or maybe a receptionist, and then the door opened and she was standing there with a winter boot in her hand.

  “I was just going out,” she said when she saw him.

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t trust himself to speak. She looked older. The new styles didn’t suit a woman of her age and so she wasn’t wearing them: a loose woollen coat with padded shoulders, her hair tied back with a babushka knotted at the throat, knitted scarf and gloves; she might have been an immigrant, a woman fleeing her homeland. She stood slightly bent over, one stockinged toe touching the floor and her boot in her hand. She looked into his eyes, then slowly straightened.

  “I guess I’m not going anywhere. I guess you’d better come in.”

  If only she’d said that five years ago, that morning after the Ambassador. How different things would be now. He might not have joined the Navy, he might have stayed in Windsor, built up his father’s business, be living in a big house now, with Della. Maybe even in this house. Six simple words.

  While Della took off her other boot, he looked around the downstairs, took in the smell of disinfectant, the polio poster showing a child with a withered leg, the closed pocket doors leading to Dr. Barnes’s practice, and he felt a kind of possessive pride in the grandness of it. As long as those doors remained closed, the rest was his. Della must have sensed the same thing because she glanced at them and then took Jack’s arm and led him up the stairs to the parlour, which was just as he remembered it, the two soft chairs with the tall floor lamp between them, the radio against the wall in the bay window. Even the heavy curtains on the windows were the same, although pulled aside now to let the afternoon sunlight in. He had never been here during the day. After band practice it had always been night. “After band practice” sounded so juvenile now; this wasn’t after band practice, this was after the riot, this was after the war.

  He sat in one of the chairs and she sat in the other, facing him. She placed her purse and gloves on the little table between them and removed her babushka, letting her hair fall back over her shoulders, but she kept her coat on.

  “What is it, Jack?” she asked, and still he could not find his voice.

  He wanted to tell her to relax, see, there was nothing wrong with his being here, maybe she should take out her knitting and they could talk about music. More than anything he wanted this to feel normal, permanent.

  “It’s nice here,” he said, looking past her at the leafless chestnut trees. The portrait of her husband in his Navy uniform was gone, in its place a photograph of Peter holding his trumpet to his lips. “You’ve kept it nice.”

  “Jack, what’s this all about?”

  “I wanted to see you again, that’s all.”

  She sat back in her chair and looked at him. “How’s Vivian?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you enjoying married life?”

  “Are you enjoying yours?” he said.

  She flinched, and he wished he hadn’t said it. This wasn’t how he wanted the conversation to go. His marriage was a closed door now, and he didn’t want advice on how to open it. He wanted another door.

  She leaned forward and opened her purse, took out a slim, silver cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and handed it to Jack like a peace offering, then took another for herself. One end of the case was a lighter. He found himself admiring the case, losing himself in its polished surface. He lit her cigarette and his. They would start over.

  “Look, Jack,” she said, “I don’t know why you’ve come here now, after all this time, but really, darling, let’s not pretend we can pick up where we left off.”

  “No, of course not,” he said, and it was only a partial lie. Never tell them what you want. “I just wanted to sit in this room again. I like it here. I feel at home here. You know,” he said, turning the cigarette around in his fingers, “I don’t belong in my own family. It’s like I was switched at the hospital or something. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Jack, you’re talking to a doctor’s wife. That kind of thing doesn’t happen. You are who you are.”

  “I’m not, that’s just it. No one is.”

  He stood and went to the window and looked down the street towards the river.

  “How can I help you, Jack?” It wasn’t an offer.

  He choked back a sob, as though one of the bands around his chest had snapped, and turned to her. “When I came here with Peter after band practice, it always felt like I was coming home, like this was my real home.”

  “Do you mean you thought of me as your real mother?” she asked, all but laughing at him.

  But he was trying to be serious. “In a way. At first.”

  “I hope you don’t look at your mother the way you looked at me.”

  “How did I look at you?”

  “The way a man looks at something he wants. That’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? Because I didn’t give you what you wanted.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Vivian—” he began, as if Della had reminded him of an appointment he had missed.

  Della set her cigarette in an ashtray on the table.

  “How’s your father, Jack?”

  “My father?”

  “I heard he was in the hospital.”

  Every time he thought he had his feet on solid ground, Della said something that pushed him back into the sea.

  “He’s all right. The doctors say he’ll be fine.”

  Della looked at him sadly. “Jack,” she said, “he won’t be fine. He’s in a coma he probably won’t come out of. He’s a very nice man, and you should be proud of being his son. I’ve known your father for a long time. He did the work on my husband’s office downstairs.”

  Jack’s breathing stopped, as though there was a ti
ny noise somewhere that he wanted to hear. She knew his father? “But I thought …” he started to say, but could not go on. “But …” He looked at Della helplessly, the shoreline receding. Then he said: “Vivian’s pregnant.”

  “Oh.” Della nodded slowly. “And she’s worried that her baby will be coloured.”

  “No!” It had come out louder than he’d intended. “Of course she isn’t!” Then his voice rose even more. “You don’t know anything about me!”

  “Jack,” she said. “I’ve always known. You’re the only one who didn’t. It was one of the things I liked about you.”

  “But it’s not true!”

  “Keep your voice down,” she said. “Sit here.” She pointed to the second chair.

  “Stop treating me like a kid!” he said. But he sat.

  “I want to tell you something. A story. When I was your age, when I was eighteen, barely out of high school, Howard and I were engaged, sort of. There was an understanding. My father thought the fucking sun rose and fell on Howard Barnes, and I thought he was the biggest goofball anyone could possibly imagine. It was 1925. Everyone was wearing cloche hats and those skimpy dresses with long beads and elbow-length gloves, and the men slicked their hair back and went to the racetrack and drank Dom Pérignon with breakfast, and here was Howie with his tennis whites and his savings account. I panicked. I could see exactly what my life was going to be like. He’d have his medical practice and his roses and I’d have children and tea parties and a horse in the country, and we’d vacation in Florida where he’d play golf and I’d wear sundresses and drink too much gin.”

  She looked over at him. He tried to figure out where all this was going.

  “It must have been the same for Vivian,” she said.

  He wasn’t interested in Vivian’s problems at the moment. He would have given his eye teeth for a rose garden and tea parties and a horse in the country. He’d have shovelled shit for the things Della had wanted to escape from.