by Wayne Grady
“Ain’t it wonderful how they make them so lifelike?” said the bird woman.
Vivian felt the blood draining from her face and was sure she was going to faint. “I … I can’t eat this,” she said. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” She stood up and placed the confection on the tea tray, where it rattled and lay still.
“Ephie, dear …” Jack’s mother said, but a roaring sound filled Vivian’s ears.
The bird woman’s high voice cut through the roar like the cry of a gull through a windstorm. “White people been tellin’ us for years that if we got one drop of coloured blood in us, then we coloured. What’s wrong with us sayin’ the same thing back to them? You and I both know, Josephine, that if that baby got one drop of coloured blood, then it a coloured baby. It belong to us.”
“I’ve got to go,” said Vivian, standing. “Jack will be home wanting his …”
Jack’s mother followed her to the door, wringing her hands. She took Vivian’s coat from its hook and helped her on with it. “You’ll see a doctor soon, won’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Vivian said. “As soon as I can.”
Before leaving, she looked back into the room. Alvina and Dee-Dee were studying their tea, and the bird woman’s head was pivoting around, she was quite pleased with herself. The feathers in her hat fluttered, as though she were preening, and her horrid chocolate egg lay exposed on the tray.
WILLIAM HENRY
Now William Henry wishes he could see Jackson’s wife. She has a nice voice and she sounds smart, but you can’t tell much from voices. Radio announcers have nice voices but are probably ordinary people when you meet them face to face. Lying here is like listening to a radio program, in a way. Amos ’n’ Andy, maybe, or Boston Blackie. It sure as hell ain’t The Happy Gang.
How did he get here, anyway? He thinks if he wasn’t hit by a bus he might have had a heart attack. He’s never had heart trouble before, but when he gets better he’ll slow down, stop working so much. He’s had enough of slinging plaster. Lifting a hod of wet plaster up a ladder is too damned hard on an old man, and he’s old. Time for Benny to take over.
Jackson could make it easier for them if he wanted to. He could put on a good suit, drive out to River Canard and get them a contract in ten seconds flat. But would he do it? Not in this life. Plasterin’s coloured work, he’d say. He’d rather sell books to white people too lazy to walk to the store to buy it for themselves. Is that how he thinks he’ll earn their respect, by fetching things for them?
He’d like to ask this new wife of his what she sees in him. Is he a good husband to her? This isn’t exactly how he pictured their meeting. He thought that maybe once she got used to the idea of Jackson not being who he says he is, the two of them could commiserate about what a blind fool his son turned out to be. They both suffer for it, they have that in common. But neither one of them suffers for it as much as Jackson himself.
“Will,” he hears Josie say to him, “you remember Vivian, Jack’s wife. She and Jackson are living in their own apartment now. Aren’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” her sweet voice says, “but only for a short while, until we go back to Newfoundland.”
“You hear that, Will? A short while! The faster you get better, the faster these people can get on with life.”
Now she comes over to his bedside and says hello in that nice, young voice of hers, not like his, roughened by cigarettes and alcohol and a lifetime of grunt work. Fifty-seven ain’t that old, but he needs to slow down. His arm hasn’t been the same since the riot, feels like the skin on it shrunk, like it crackles every time he bends it. A lot of things ain’t been the same since the riot.
“We got to put all that behind us,” he says.
“All what?” Harlan answers, startling him. He thought it was just Josie and Vivian in the room. Harlan doesn’t normally come down to the hospital, says he has enough visitors. Besides, he doesn’t want his brother coming here, seeing him like this, flat on his back, his hair uncombed and probably needing a shave. He can only imagine what he looks like. He misses his daily shave.
He sees himself in Harlan’s barbershop mirror, a bib around his neck and half his face covered with shaving cream. He believes he went home late one night and something happened, he forgets what, maybe his heart, and he didn’t get up early the next morning and leave before anyone else was up, and walk down to the British-American for his morning shave, like he usually did, or if he did that was when he was hit by the bus, or whatever it was. He likes that walk, with the sun eating away at the snow and the day still unruined. The lobby always busy with people checking out in time to make the nine o’clock ferry. Harlan leaning against the door of his shop, watching people’s hair as they walk past, imagining how he’d cut it, how he’d change the way they look. There’s another coloured profession on the way out: barbering. After the riot, whites were wary of coming downtown to get their hair cut, maybe they thought twice about letting a coloured man come at them with a straight razor in his hand. There’s white barbers opening shops farther out, up on Wyandotte and Tecumseh, mostly Italians. Harlan was complaining about it just the other day. All them places where they don’t have sidewalks and nobody walks anywhere. Won’t be long before the coloureds have the whole downtown to themselves; already happening across the river.
“We got to put it behind us,” he says again.
“Get on with it,” Harlan agrees.
“Slavery ended a hundred and fifteen years ago, at least in this country.”
“You goin’ to the picnic this year, Will?”
“I ain’t missed one yet.”
“They say this one’s going to be different.”
“Who says?”
“Alvina, Josie. They say we’re done steppin’ aside to let whitey pass.”
“We come up here to get away from all that.”
“Not an easy thing to get over, though.”
“Jackson was never an easy child to get along with.”
“Can’t say he was.”
As soon as he wakes up, William Henry is going to tell Josie that he long forgave her for having a white baby, although he’s never really forgiven Jackson for being white. Not that he’s a hundred percent white, never mind what he thinks and the way he carries on. If he wants to live white that’s his choice, but he can’t expect William Henry to turn himself inside out to be white, too. He ain’t one of them new electric signs can be one colour one minute and another colour the next. William Henry shakes his head, causing Harlan to step back for a second with the razor so as not to nick him. When Jackson was a baby, William Henry was ashamed to be seen with him, and now that he’s grown up Jackson’s ashamed to be seen with William Henry. You reap what you sow.
“She’s a bit thick around the waist,” Harlan says.
William Henry heard Alvina saying something like that the other day. Thick with child.
“I ain’t seen her.”
“Me neither.”
“About time, though. How long they been married?”
“Three years.”
“Be your first grandchild.”
“Be another white bugger in the family.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Yeah, that’s right, you never know, do you.”
“No, you sure don’t. Look at Jackson.”
William Henry laughs at Harlan in the mirror. “If that child comes out coloured,” he says, “I just might start believin’ in God again.”
VIVIAN
The trouble was, she didn’t know any doctors in Windsor. She supposed she could just look in the telephone directory under Physicians, but that didn’t seem a reliable way of choosing a doctor. She wanted someone she knew, or who came recommended by someone she knew. Then she remembered that Peter’s father was a doctor. She found the directory in the kitchen and looked up Barnes. Yes, there he was, Howard J. Barnes, MD, residence and office 512 Victoria Avenue. She rang that afternoon, when Jack was out and his mother was at the hospital. She t
hought of calling Della first, but decided it was best to go through the proper channels. She spoke to a receptionist, explained that she was nearly four months pregnant and needed to see the doctor. She was given an appointment for the next day.
She walked there from Janette. The sky was grey and there was a cold wind, but it was warmer than it would have been in Toronto, she had to admit, there was something spring-like in the air. Gosh, she’d be as big as a house by spring.
At the doctor’s office, the receptionist told her to sit in the waiting room. Through the thick windows, their velvet curtains held back by silk ropes, she could see the quiet street lined with leafless trees, the cars parked along the sidewalk, wet but without snow. She remembered the night they had come here before going to Detroit, before she met Jack’s father, before she became pregnant. It seemed several lifetimes ago.
Dr. Barnes was tall, with greying hair and smiling eyes behind silver wire-rimmed glasses that glinted in the light from his desk lamp. He looked older than Della, the very portrait of the family physician, a town doctor rather than one from the outports. He wore a three-piece suit, navy-blue pinstripe, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. He reminded her so much of her father that she felt she knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it. She even knew what he did. At the end of the day, exactly like her father, he would sit stolidly in his chair by the coal fireplace, take a small folding knife from his vest pocket, shave a palmful of tobacco from a plug he kept in a wooden box on the mantelpiece, and light his pipe with a match that he struck on the fireplace fender. Then he would hold a newspaper up to his face and growl at it while Della made supper.
“Well, you’re pregnant, all right,” he told her. “As if you didn’t know that.” He had her father’s gruff humour, which she understood perfectly. Longed for. “But there’s a lot of albumin in your urine. Bet you didn’t know that, eh? Probably nothing. Been getting much exercise lately?”
“I walked here, does that count? And I do the shopping every day. Is albumin bad?”
“No, it’s a protein and the baby needs protein. But a high count could indicate a problem with the kidneys, or a touch of anemia. Probably not in your case, but since you’re in the family way we mustn’t take chances. We’ll do another blood test for iron. You haven’t had German measles or chicken pox lately?”
“No.”
“No vaccinations?”
“No.”
“Do you smoke?”
“No, I quit.”
“Good. Do you drink milk?”
“No, I hate milk.”
“Too bad. Drink milk. Lots of it. Four glasses a day. Eat calves’ liver, too. And green vegetables, spinach. And cod liver oil.”
“My father makes cod liver oil in Newfoundland,” she said.
“Hmm. Good, you should get some from him. Wouldn’t want to have a rickety baby, would we? Come back and see me in a month. Baby’s not due until late July or early August, so no reason to panic yet.”
But there was every reason to panic. Could a doctor tell her anything about the baby’s colour? Could he take X-rays and see from the shape of its head, or the size of its bones? The way it lay in her womb, like a curl of dark chocolate?
“Meanwhile,” the doctor said, “do what I’ve told you and you’ll be right as rain. You and the baby.” He looked up at her. “Any questions?”
“I want to have the baby in Hôtel-Dieu, if that’s all right?”
All the coloured babies were born in Hôtel-Dieu. It was as close as she could come to asking him directly.
“Hôtel-Dieu? I’m afraid I don’t have privileges in Hôtel-Dieu,” the doctor said, looking at her intently. Or was she imagining that? “I’m with Grace Hospital. If you want to have the baby in Hôtel-Dieu, I could arrange for you to have a—a different doctor. But I think you’d both be much more comfortable in Grace.”
She pulled at the buttons on her sweater, remembered the buttons on Jack’s Navy tunic that first time on the beach in Ferryland, and stopped.
“I … I think you knew my husband during the war,” she said. “He was stationed in St. John’s.”
“Oh?” the doctor said.
“Jack Lewis? He’s a friend of your son’s.”
“Oh, yes, he was here just the other day.”
“Jack was here?”
“Yes,” Dr. Barnes said, putting away his stethoscope. “He was upstairs, seeing Della. Apparently looking for Peter.”
All the objects in the room had been still until that moment, like perching birds, but suddenly they were in violent motion, as though a hawk had flown in through an open window.
“My husband is worried,” she said. “About the baby, I mean.”
“Well, then,” said the doctor, “you’ve got some good news for him. Everything’s fine.” But he didn’t make it sound like good news.
“Will the baby be … normal?” she asked.
“Nothing’s normal,” the doctor said. “Drink plenty of liquids, preferably milk, and get lots of rest.”
The moment passed. The objects around her roosted again.
He took her elbow and led her back to the waiting room, where the receptionist, whose name tag said June, a nice name, gave her a follow-up appointment for early April, a little over a month away. April was a nice name, too.
“Mrs. Barnes saw your name on our appointment book,” June said. “She hopes you have time to go upstairs for tea. She’s expecting you.”
For a second, Vivian thought she had said, “She’s expecting, too.” She trembled as she left the office.
When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw Della sitting in an old-fashioned wing chair by the fire. The hallways on either side led, Vivian guessed, to bedrooms, and the kitchen and dining areas. There was a bay window fitted with heavy curtains, and a floor-model radio with a framed photograph of Peter on top of it. Soft morning sunlight filtered through the sheers. The layout, the furniture, everything about the place seemed familiar to her. Then she realized this was the house Jack had described to her on the train. He had described Peter’s house as though it were his own.
An empty chair faced Della’s, and between them a silver tea service had been set on a small table. There were scones and Devonshire cream. It had been a long time since Vivian had had a real English tea. Della was dressed entirely in wool, right down to her stockings; she might have knitted everything herself. There was a knitting basket behind her chair with two long, thin needles sticking out of it, like an insect’s antennas.
“Do sit down, Viv,” she said. “You look exhausted.”
Her worries about the baby and the curious behaviour of the objects in the examining room had left her shaken. “I am a bit flustered,” she said, taking the second chair. Sitting, she felt immediately better. Was it the woollen skirt, the English tea, the smell of the fire? How much Dr. Barnes had reminded her of her father? She felt so powerfully at home here that she decided to confide in Della.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
A look passed across Della’s face that suggested to Vivian that her news either wasn’t news or was not entirely welcome. How much did a doctor share with his wife? Or had Della guessed the truth when she saw Vivian’s name in the appointment book?
“How wonderful for you,” Della said. “How is Jack taking it?”
Della had leaped to the delicate heart of the matter.
“Not well, I’m afraid,” Vivian said. “It’s a difficult time for him, what with the baby coming and his father’s accident.”
“How is Jack’s father? Any change?”
“No,” she said. “No change. He just lies there.”
Della poured the tea, a good Earl Grey. She poured expertly, holding the spout above the cup so as not to drip on the white tablecloth.
“Poor man,” Della said. “Hôtel-Dieu is a fine hospital, but if he were in Grace I could ask Howie to look in on him.”
“Oh,” said Vivian.
“An
d how is the family taking it?”
“They … We’re all being brave,” Vivian said.
“Jack’s a brave boy,” said Della. “Did he ever tell you about saving me from the riot?”
“What riot?”
“In Detroit, during the war. A mob tipped my car on its side and set fire to it.”
“He’s never told me anything about it. Were you hurt?”
“No, thank goodness.”
“But that must have been dreadful.”
There was a lull that Della did not break. Perhaps she found the memory too painful.
“How is Peter?” Vivian asked.
“Oh,” said Della, sitting back with her tea. “Peter’s Peter. He doesn’t seem to be interested in doing much, outside of music.” Her gaze went past Vivian. “I tried to talk him into going to college somewhere to study music, and he said that if I could find him a college that taught bebop, he’d go.”
“Jack hates bebop.”
Vivian saw Della’s gaze turn reptilian for a fleeting moment, and she realized she had spoken disparagingly of something that Della’s son loved. But it was too late to take it back.
“Many whites say that,” Della said. “Bebop is to jazz as Henry Miller is to Proust, they say. Peter disagrees, of course. He says that Miller’s is the purer art. Purer than Proust, can you imagine it? Bebop is a refinement of jazz, not a debasement of it, he says, a sort of jazz elevated to the level of mathematics.”
“Perhaps that’s what Jack meant,” Vivian ventured.
“What?”
“Just that it’s hard to dance to mathematics.” Vivian hoped the subject would change, but Della returned to it with a coldness she no longer pretended to be borrowing from Peter.
“You know, I find it odd,” she said. “I was in New York in the twenties, when the first jazz wave hit. I loved it straight off, couldn’t get enough of it, but all the whites denounced it as Negro music. Then a few white musicians started playing it and suddenly jazz was this brilliant new art form. Now along comes bebop, and again the whites are calling it jungle music. Well, a few aren’t, like my son. But you see what I mean?”