“Look, Mom, Anne came with us again today. You remember…Claire’s girl, Anne?” Diane’s voice is a little hesitant at the end, prompting.
Aunt Ethel leans forward, peers at Anne through old-fashioned cat’s-eyes glasses. “I know who Anne is, Diane, I’m not senile yet. How are your mother and father, dear?”
“They’re fine. I saw them when I was home Christmas.”
“Oh, I’d like to get home again,” Aunt Ethel says. “I often have a mind to write to Annie, say to her, Annie girl, can you fix up a little room for me? Off in a corner anywhere, it doesn’t have to be anything special, but I’d like to die in my own place among my own people. Is that too much to ask?” Anne wonders if Aunt Ethel remembers the four months she spent in Newfoundland, four years ago. Aunt Annie certainly remembers.
Joyce pats Ethel’s hand. “You are among your own people, Mother. Look, we’re all here.”
Ethel shakes her head; Anne has noticed that no matter what Joyce says Ethel is never sharp with her, whereas Diane can’t make even the most innocent comment without earning a reprimand. Ethel’s voice now is sad rather than angry: “You’ll never understand, Joyce girl. Newfoundlanders, you know what they say, you can take the girl out of Newfoundland but you can’t take Newfoundland out of the girl. Poor Jim understood that. To his dying day he wanted to go back home. He would have been so happy, just to sit on the back step of Annie’s house again, just to see all his old friends. No, Joyce, you don’t know what it is to be uprooted from the place you were born, and live out your life among strangers.”
A small silence follows this melancholy speech. Dennis breaks it, saying, “I’m buying a motorcycle, Nan.” This change of subject does nothing to lighten the mood.
“He was a wonderful man, was Jim,” Aunt Ethel says, fumbling for the box of Kleenex on the nightstand. Joyce hands them to her. “A perfect gentleman, right to the end, that’s what I always said.”
“Do you want to go for a little walk, Ma?” Jimmy says. “Down the hall, as far as the lounge?”
Ethel looks up through misty eyes. “My, yes, Jimmy, I think that’d be nice. Get me up out of this chair. Take my mind off things. Just bring me over my walker now, that’s a good boy, Dennis. What a shame about your hair, can you have anything done for it? I don’t suppose it’ll be long growing out, will it?”
“Everyone in my family is obsessed with home,” Anne tells Brian a few weeks later, walking in Central Park in a drizzling rain. “My Aunt Ethel wants to die at home. I have this cousin, Dennis, who’s never been in Newfoundland in his life, and he says he’d like to go home sometime. Home is a place he’s never been. Isn’t that weird?”
“It is weird,” Brian says. “I can’t imagine that. It’s like they’re immigrants or something.”
“Well, they were, I guess. Maybe I’m an immigrant too.”
“And are you obsessed with going home?”
“Um…I don’t know. Not right now. But on the other hand, I knew all these people in high school, and in university at home, who were like, I can’t wait till I can get off this godforsaken Rock. I never felt that way. But here I am.”
“Do you think you’ll go back there sometime?”
“I…yeah, maybe. I want to travel, do the whole see-the-world thing, work overseas. But yeah, I guess I do have that sense of roots. Like I know where I belong.”
Brian frowns, but says, “That’s nice. In a way.”
“What about you? Do you have any feeling of roots? I mean, is New York home for you, in that way?”
He shrugs. “Not really. I was born here, but my dad is from Chicago, and my mom comes from Virginia. Neither of them has that kind of feeling about home like your people do. I think the only Americans I’ve ever met that feel that way were some Southerners…not my mom’s family but, you know, people who can’t wait to get back to the grits and gravy. I grew up thinking grits was plural. When I finally went to visit my grandma in Virginia and she asked if I wanted grits, I said maybe just the one grit.”
Brian laughs, then looks quickly at Anne who is smiling, but uncertainly. “You thought it was plural too, didn’t you?” he says.
“Grits.” She pictures three long fried things on a plate. “Well, you could see how I might. If I offered you fish and brewis, how many would you have?”
He takes her hand. “Just one. A fish and brew. You take me home sometime and I’ll try that.”
ETHEL
LONG ISLAND, JULY 1989
ONE NIGHT, IN HER bed in Shady Acres, Ethel has a dream.
She dreams about heaven – not surprising, perhaps, given that it’s Sunday night and the church crowd have been holding services in the chapel. Ethel always goes, even when she’s not feeling well. She likes when they sing the old hymns, not the young crowd with the guitars and jangly new music, but the crowd that sings “When All My Labours and Trials Are O’er” and “We Are Nearing Home” and all the old favourites. Ethel likes to think about heaven. She imagines it in the usual way: mansions, streets of gold, angel choirs. Promoted to Glory.
In her dream, when she finds herself in heaven, it’s nothing like that. Heaven, it turns out, is Annie’s backyard in Freshwater Valley in St. John’s. Except a little bigger than Ethel remembers it. But she knows right away it’s heaven. She’s sitting on the back step, wearing a blue dress with white sprigs that comes just below the knee, a dress she owned in 1928 and particularly liked. She has a white cardigan over it, because there’s just a bit of a breeze, but not too much. Heaven is a July day in St. John’s, warm but not sultry. Annie has a line of wash out: the wind fills the white shirts and they dance on the line like angels.
Bert sits on the step beside her, looking just like he did the last time she saw him, twenty-two years old, one arm laid on her shoulder. On her other side, sitting just as close, is Harold, about the same age, smiling like he’s just told a joke. Annie is somewhere inside the house making supper. In the yard below, Ethel can hear the children playing: Jimmy and Diane, five or six years old, their voices ringing with laughter.
She looks at Bert, and then back at Harold, thinking she should feel uneasy though she doesn’t. “It’s all right, girl,” Harold says.
“Is it?” Ethel asks.
“Yes, it’s really all right.”
“Everything,” Bert echoes. “Everything’s all right.” And hearing them both say it, she knows it’s true.
Some people are not in the yard but she knows they are somewhere around; their absence does not feel like a loss. Frances must be in the house with Annie, and Ethel’s own family, her parents and her sister, are probably in there too. The younger ones, the grandchildren – she can hear them laughing from somewhere in the distance, even though their parents are only children themselves. All children, playing together, and everything is all right.
And Jesus. She almost asks Harold where he is, because Harold would know if anyone would. As it’s heaven, she expects to see him. But then she doesn’t need to ask, because she’s sure he’s around. She can feel him. Probably sitting down in the kitchen with Annie, having a cup of tea. Ethel thinks she should go in and find him. She owes him an apology for something, some misunderstanding years ago. But he’ll probably come out and sit in the yard in a few minutes, it’s so nice out, and whatever misunderstandings there were between them she’s sure he won’t hold it against her. He’s bound to be in a good mood. Sitting at Annie’s table having a cup of tea and a slice of homemade bread with molasses is enough to put anyone in a good mood.
Then she remembers she hasn’t seen Jim. A flutter catches her heart, her first moment of discomfort since waking here; she feels as if she’s misplaced something important. Harold lays a hand on her arm. “Everything’s all right,” he reminds her.
That’s when she sees them, over by the lilac tree. Jim is standing there, young and strong, spinning around in the grass. In his arms, high above his head, he holds Ralphie, who is about eight years old. Ralphie is silhouetted against th
e blue sky high above Jim’s head, arms outstretched, spinning in the air making airplane noises. Both their faces are alive with laughter, echoing each other’s smiles, no eyes for anyone but each other. Ethel watches them till the picture is seared into her eyelids, then closes her eyes.
The morning nurse finds Ethel when she makes her rounds. As she says later to Joyce, in thirty years of nursing she has cause to know that not many deathbeds are like in the movies or in books. People don’t usually die with a smile on their face; it tends to be messier than that. “But your mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, was one of the few. One of the few I can honestly say died with a smile on her face.”
EPILOGUE: ANNE
BROOKLYN, MAY 2004
THE BARNES AND NOBLE bookstore in Park Slope is like every Barnes and Noble everywhere: tastefully cream and dark green, two levels of books with comfy chairs which Anne has never seen unoccupied, a cafe serving Starbucks coffee, scones and cheesecake.
It’s just a few blocks from the house Anne and Brian bought three years ago when their daughter Hannah was born. Before that, their home base was an apartment in Manhattan, where Brian worked and Anne came home between overseas assignments. Anne used to joke to friends that her parents were shocked that her brother Stephen and his girlfriend were living together and not married, and equally shocked that Anne and Brian were married and not living together.
The year she turned thirty-five, the turn of the millennium, the year Aunt Annie died, Anne decided it was time to stay in one place, live with her husband, make a baby. She’s always wanted to live in Brooklyn, and Park Slope is now a very trendy neighbourhood. Pricey, too, but they rent out the downstairs apartments of their solid old brownstone on Carroll Street. Anne took a year off after Hannah was born and now has a job with the network in New York. No more travelling for a while.
They do travel to Newfoundland almost every summer; last year she and Brian bought a house in Elliston, as a summer place. Since the collapse of the cod fishery the little Newfoundland outports are gutted, and well-to-do Americans can buy beautiful old saltbox houses for twenty thousand cheap Canadian dollars. Anne’s still not used to thinking of herself as a well-to-do American.
This is Claire’s first visit to the brownstone in Brooklyn; she and Doug have been to visit Anne and Brian in Manhattan, but for this trip Claire has come by herself. Claire still finds it hard to believe her daughter has chosen to live in Brooklyn. Yesterday Anne and Claire drove through boarded-up, burned-out streets in Bedford-Stuyvesant, walls painted with lurid gangland graffiti, garbage on the streets. Claire said nothing at the time, staring out the window like she was touring the streets of Baghdad. She kept quiet last night and this morning, in front of Brian, but now, sitting in the Barnes and Noble cafe waiting for Diane and Valerie to arrive, she says, “I don’t see how you can raise a child in this city, Anne.”
Anne sighs, looks at her mother over her mocha frappucino. “I don’t live in Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights, Mom. I live in Park Slope.” She waves a hand at the street outside the bookstore’s window: the stone Baptist church, the small trendy shops. The beautiful, well-dressed, multicoloured people all talking on cellphones. The line of SUVs, minivans, BMWs parked at the curb. The mothers walking past with children in strollers, Snuglis, slings. Then she sees a woman entering the store. “Oh good,” she says. “Here comes Aunt Valerie.”
Valerie drifts into the store like a feather blown on the breeze. Bangles at her wrist jingle as she holds out both arms towards Claire and Anne in a theatrical gesture. “Darlings!” she says.
She is barely settled, catching them up on the story of her reading today in Manhattan, when Aunt Diane finds them. “Well hel-LO!” she bellows, and there are hugs all around. Diane gets coffee for herself and Valerie.
Sitting around the table as they talk, Anne studies the three older women. Her mother, slim and elegant with the high proud tilt of her head on her long neck. Valerie, more comfortable in her own skin than anyone Anne has ever seen, long white hair flowing down her back. She looks like a Victorian virgin gone to seed. And Diane, the only one who still dyes her hair, looking glossy and lacquered, her bright red lipstick standing out oddly on her creased face, her laugh as loud and unrestrained as ever.
Seventy, Anne thinks, sounded so old until just a few years ago, when her parents reached that milestone. She herself is dealing with Nearly Forty, and is happy with her choices: a child, a home, a career change. But she still feels half-hatched, feeling fourteen some days, twenty-two others. Once in awhile, after a hard day at work and a sleepless night with Hannah, she feels fifty-six. She still doesn’t feel she’s arrived. What can happen in the next thirty years to give her the confidence she sees in her mother and her mother’s cousins, these women barrelling so brazenly into old age?
“It must be a long time since the three of you have all been together like this, is it?” Anne says.
The other three women look at each other, then at her, then back at each other and burst out laughing.
“You know what, honey?” Diane says. “We have never all been together. Not once in our lives, till tonight.”
“You’re kidding me. How is that possible?”
“Well,” Diane says, “we never all lived in the same place at the same time. We’ve kept in touch, visited each other on trips, but honestly, this is the first time all three of us have been together.” She sips her coffee and smiles. “The Evans girls, together at last.”
“I did not think about that at all,” Valerie said. “It really is an historic moment.”
Valerie’s reading is downstairs in a corner of the bookstore cleared for the occasion, tucked between self-help and sexuality. As they follow her downstairs, Valerie gushes to the nervous young store employee about how wonderful it all is, how special it is to come to Brooklyn, where she was born but has never lived as an adult. Anne suggested the reading here and made the arrangements. Valerie’s publisher, in planning to promote the book in New York, had only thought of her reading in Manhattan, despite the fact that a significant chunk of the book takes place on Flatbush Avenue.
“Yes, it’s quite lovely here,” Valerie tells the bookstore girl in her mid-Atlantic voice. “I feel quite at home, even if it has been nearly seventy years since I left here.” A polite murmur from Bookstore Girl. “Oh, don’t be surprised, my dear. I have no problem admitting I’m over seventy. I don’t know why women feel so embarrassed about their ages. I revel in old lady-hood. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’ve told myself, Valerie dear, it’s time to cease being conventional, kick over the traces, let yourself be flamboyant.” She gestures broadly, her fingertips knocking over a copy of The Bad Girl’s Guide to Good Sex. “I’m planning to be a truly eccentric old lady.”
Claire leans close to Anne’s ear. “The mind boggles,” she whispers. Anne chokes back her giggle.
After being a late bloomer, publishing her first book at fifty-five and then being published for fifteen years by small presses with minuscule print runs, Valerie surprised everyone three years ago with a book that made the Canadian bestseller list and was nominated for the Giller Prize. Her latest book, just released, was another surprise in that it was just as good. The new buzz on Valerie is that she’s going to be the oldest woman ever to win the Governor General’s award.
Only fifteen people show up for Valerie’s reading: a big success in Canada does not necessarily mean you’ve been heard of in Brooklyn. But the small group settles under the spell of her voice, her words, as she opens the book and begins to read.
Despite all the mockery of Aunt Val that she and her mother have shared over the years, Anne has always been drawn by Valerie’s writing. Now she sits in the straight-back chair and the green and cream room full of books falls away as Valerie reads, leaving Anne alone on a Brooklyn street eighty years ago.
“They came like other immigrants,” Valerie finishes, “but they were not like other immigrants: they spoke English; they were not believed to carry disease. T
hey crossed not the entire ocean but one corner of it, and because of that, they believed they were going to a place much like home. And they were just like other immigrants, because they barred their doors and shut out the world that was so different, and made for themselves a world like home. They ate with and slept with and married one another, and in the evening they took the subway to the Loew’s Kings to laugh and cry at the lives of people they believed were quite unlike themselves. But before they went in they paused outside to hang their harps on the willows, for they were immigrants, could not sing their own songs in this strange land.”
Valerie’s voice ends; the strangeness drops away; the room comes into focus again. The small audience applauds as she finishes. Valerie doesn’t care about the size of the crowd. “It’s just such a pleasure to be here,” she gushes during the signing afterwards. She sells three books and signs four: one hard-core Valerie Evans fan shows up with a well-thumbed copy of her last book and gets it autographed.
A young African-American man, well-dressed, wearing small wire-rimmed glasses, waits among the small group of fans. When he reaches Valerie he says, “I enjoyed your reading.” He has a new copy of the book for her to sign. “I hadn’t read your work before today, but I’m looking forward to getting home and reading this.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Valerie says. “And your name is?” Her pen hand hovers over the title page.
“Bennett. Gareth Bennett,” the young man says. As Valerie signs, he says, “Actually, it’s an interesting story, how I came to be here tonight. I teach English at Brooklyn College. A lot of ads for readings come across my desk. I was about to pin yours on the bulletin board and forget about it when I noticed you were originally from Newfoundland and the book is partly set there.”
“Oh, have you been to Newfoundland?”
Gareth Bennett shakes his head. “No, never been farther north than Boston,” he confesses. “But it was the Newfoundland connection, combined with the fact that your name is Evans. You see, I came across that name recently. Do you know, would you by any chance be related to, a Claire Evans from St. John’s, Newfoundland?”
By the Rivers of Brooklyn Page 33