He wore his uniform but his head was bare. The evening was unusually warm and beads of sweat stood out on his face. He played “If Stars Could Talk” and “Breezing Along with the Breeze,” the crowd raising their hands in the air to applaud between numbers, and he bowed twice without taking the instrument from his lips, already moving into the next song. The concave arch of his spine like a strung bow when he reached for the upper register. He turned slowly as he played, so the music travelled to all points of the compass. He caught sight of Mercedes finally and broke off to drag her into the open space, kissing her full on the mouth as people cheered him on. She could smell alcohol on his breath, which surprised her, she had never known Johnny to take a drink. She backed off quickly, shouting at him to keep playing.
The impromptu concert continued another twenty minutes until two policemen pushed into the centre, waving the crowd on their way to clear the street for traffic. Johnny packed up his trumpet and stood looking at Mercedes. He shrugged awkwardly, embarrassed to have made a spectacle of himself or to be caught drinking or to have kissed her so brazenly.
“I felt like playing,” he said.
“Take me up to Signal Hill, would you?”
It was nearly dusk and as they walked east they had to work against a swelling crowd heading to the railway station to meet members of the 5th Regiment arriving on the night train. People shook Johnny’s hand as they passed, stopped to offer the soldier a snort from a bottle or flask. Mercedes could tell from the reckless way he threw his head back, the way his Adam’s apple pistoned the alcohol down his throat, that Johnny was drunk. But he was her guarantee she’d get access to the Hill.
They found rowdy groups of American soldiers at the foot of Cabot Tower, singing together, laughing. Total strangers embraced them as they arrived, pressing drinks on them. The men slapped Johnny’s back so hard he almost pitched forward onto his face, recovering his feet in time to brace for the next blow. Mercedes stepped out past them all into the dry grass and picked her way down the hill to the Battery standing on a promontory directly above the Narrows.
This had been a favourite walk of hers in the summers, after she’d discovered that Johnny Boustani’s company was enough to satisfy the patrols of military police who might question her presence on the Hill. She’d stayed up here for hours sometimes while Johnny sat in the grass and sang softly to himself, the subterranean thrum of the city drifting up to them from the dark below. Distant traffic, voices shouting in the streets, laughter. Weak stains of light leaking through the hooded headlamps of cars.
She heard footsteps coming through the grass toward her but didn’t turn away from the view.
“Thought I’d find you here,” Johnny said.
“I was sure they’d have the lights back on. Why are they keeping it dark?”
He put an arm over her shoulder to point out the lights near the west end of the harbour. “They’ve got the railway station lit up for the 5th Regiment.”
She’d come up here hoping to see the city shimmering, incandescent, like a creature restored to health after a long, devastating illness. The war in Europe was over. There should have been deck lights blazing on the ships at anchor and lights terraced up the bowl of hills surrounding the harbour, like berries clustered on a bush of darkness. “This must be the only place in the Commonwealth still blacked out,” she said. The disappointment made her chest ache.
“This place is nothing,” Johnny said. “You should see Boston at night. New York.”
“I bet they’re beautiful,” she said softly.
“They are.” He paused. “Though not so much next to you.”
Mercedes eased a step away from him. “How much have you had to drink, Johnny Boustani?”
“Can’t a man have a little fun, Mercedes? The war’s over, for Pete’s sake.”
“It’s not over for everybody,” she said. “Not yet.”
She had been living above Hiram’s shop since the early fall of 1942, in the same rooms Wish had occupied before lighting out for Halifax and then England. She moved in around the same time he was steaming toward the tropics aboard the Wakefield. There was something in not knowing where he was headed that made her feel she was losing him, and she took the rooms at Hiram’s to offset that sense. For the comfort of sleeping in the same bed he’d slept in, of sitting in the same chair at the same window while she read his letters, of looking out on a view he knew by heart.
She worked days in the shop to pay her rent, keeping accounts at first and other small matters of paperwork, eventually learning to run a projector, making five dollars in an afternoon showing movies at children’s birthday parties in the merchant homes on Circular Road. She assisted Hiram in taking portrait photographs when he was working in town, although he would never allow her into the darkroom where he developed the prints. It was a converted sewing room, the window blacked out and the doorframe sealed against light from the hall.
“It’s unseemly,” he said, “for a man of my position to be in such close and closed quarters with a girl of your station.”
“What does my station have to do with your quarters?”
“You know how people talk.”
It was the same argument he’d made when she’d proposed renting the rooms. “You aren’t afraid of living alone here?” he’d said. “With me?”
“You’re harmless enough.”
Hiram’s face went dark. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me, little miss,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
She knew from Wish that Hiram lost his “nature” to alcohol long ago. His sense of propriety was all show, but she’d hurt his pride. She said, “My father taught me how to look after myself around your kind.”
Hiram’s residence was passed on to him by his parents and was large enough to house a dozen or more in a pinch. Thousands of people had moved to the city since the start of the war for the jobs on the army bases and the docks, and accommodations were nearly impossible to come by. There were those who suggested Hiram’s living alone in the circumstances was somehow unpatriotic, and Mercedes guessed he let her move in partly to blunt that criticism. But he held firm on keeping her out of the darkroom and she was happy to let him have this smaller, symbolic victory.
As he predicted, people talked. She was Hiram’s illegitimate child from some ancient outport affair, come to track down her father. She and Hiram were secretly married. She was pregnant with Hiram’s child. “There’s no imagination to gossip,” Hiram said when he reported the rumours to her. “It’s the same old thing, over and over again.”
She was surprised to discover she enjoyed Hiram’s company, not least because he had an endless supply of anecdotes about the Southern Shore and many of those involved Wish in some way. When he was sober Hiram had little to say about him, as if he was afraid he might contradict some story Wish had already told about himself. But he was rarely sober and never for long.
Hiram’s favourite story about Renews: The first night he showed a movie at Kane’s store he set up the projector and went off to Tom Keating’s after a drink. When he wandered back two hours later, the room was packed with people sitting on the chairs and lobster pots and boxes they’d carted with them for seats. And every last person in the audience sat facing the projector at the back of the room. “Wish too,” Hiram said. “It made sense in a way, I guess, that’s where the machine was. That’s where you’d expect it all to happen.”
There was a note of condescension in Hiram’s opinions of everyone and everything from the outports, even when it was admiration he felt. As if he was praising a slightly retarded child.
His one real pleasure besides drink was gambling. He wagered bets on anything he could find a taker for. When the spring ice would block the harbour and how long it would stay. The date of the first snowfall of the year. In March, horse races were run on the ice at Quidi Vidi Lake, the animals who hauled groceries and coal and milk through the city pitted against one another and occasional challengers from the out
ports. Hiram was rumoured to have won hundreds of dollars on the outcomes. Easy money, he called it. “The Protestants won’t be seen to bet against a Protestant horse, not to save their lives. And the micks are the same. But I got no qualms either way,” he said. After taking a bet from an easy mark he rubbed his palms together and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.”
Mercedes didn’t understand this addiction of his and told him so.
He cocked his head at her. “You’re a gambler,” he said. “Same as myself.”
She could feel her ears go red. “I am not,” she said. According to her grandmother, gambling was worse than drinking or dancing.
“You picked your horse,” Hiram told her. “And you put everything you have on him.”
And she recognized what he said as the truth.
He said, “One time out of a hundred, a bet will call you. Rest of the time it’s just guessing, but that one time. It’s like the hand of God settling on you, pointing you this way or that. Any normal person would Jonah and run, for fear of looking a fool if it turns against them. Not me,” he said. “And not you.”
“What happens if you end up looking like a fool?”
“Faith is all we gamblers have going for us.”
She asked Wish to take his shirt off one morning. Just to have a look at him.
This was the day after young Willard Slade’s funeral. Two mornings after Wish had come to find her at the riddle fence, when he’d buried his head under her skirt and held it there like a man trying to drown himself in a bucket of water. She thought he must be drunk to act that way and tried to haul him off her, pulling harder at his hair as she felt something unfamiliar building in the distance, bearing down on her like some tidal wave of the senses, picking up speed and heft as it approached. It felt like a violent thing and she was terrified at first, her right calf seized up in a cramp halfway through the first orgasm of her life and she fell onto him, writhing like some evangelical in a trance.
It was only in the aftermath that she was able to sort it all into manageable categories, parsing the surge of pleasure from the fear, from the knot of pain in her calf that was still aching. She’d lain awake all night then, tormented by the memory of his mouth down there. She couldn’t imagine a soul in the Cove having any truck with the like, and decided it must be a Catholic thing. Her face burning at the thought of anyone in the house knowing she’d allowed it to happen.
“Lie still,” Agnes pleaded.
Wish knelt up, shrugging his shoulders free of the suspenders, unbuttoning the shirt. Not a hair on his chest. The hollows behind the collarbone deep enough to hold a tablespoon of water. Pale, puckered nipples like an infant’s. She put her arms around his bare torso and held him, running a hand up and down the pronounced keyboard of his spine. She started at the nape of his neck, at the birthmark, and counted all the way to the tailbone, her fingers slipping under the band of his trousers. Sixteen vertebrae. She repeated the number in her head, to remember it.
It was as if she knew she had to take him in as quickly as possible, set enough of him to memory to carry her through.
“What else would you like to have a look at?” he asked.
She glanced up at his face. There was nothing lewd in the question. Or the lewdness was twined so delicately with something else, with a shy seriousness, that she never thought to be insulted. She said, “Everything.”
“Now Mercedes,” he said. “Don’t be greedy.”
“Everything,” she said again.
He smiled at her and stood up out of the grass, reaching for the clasp of his trousers. And paused with his hand there.
“Have you ever seen a man naked before?”
“No.”
He took several steps back toward the water.
“Where are you going?”
“You stay settled where you’re to,” he told her. He slipped his pants down his legs and stepped out of them, standing before her in only his socks. The skin so pale she could see a tracery of blue veins at the pelvis. Pubic hair a bush of tight curls, as if it was carefully tied up in rags at night. His thing. She had nothing else in her head to call it. It was hard and stood rigidly at attention. The dark mushroom cap of a head, the length of it quivering as the blood pulsed through. It was a ridiculous article to look at and for a moment she thought the urge to laugh might undo her.
She sat up on her knees, touching her mouth with the fingers of one hand. Things came over you, she thought. That’s what it meant to be in love. Unimaginable things came over you and you were a different person and wanted different things than the world suggested you could be or want. She had no idea how to tell Wish what was in her mind. It was a Catholic thing and there were no words for it in the world that was hers before she found him. He was standing too far away to touch and she extended one hand toward him. She said, “Wish.” He was already reaching to put his clothes back on and she wanted to stop him. She said, “I want to do for you.”
He looked up at her quickly. Knowing exactly what she meant, she could see that. But he turned away to pull his pants up around his waist. The angry red mark at his neck. He hauled on his shirt, buttoned it with his back turned.
It was the wrong thing somehow. Suggesting it out loud was wrong, maybe even thinking of it was wrong and he was rushing away from her. “You must think—” she said.
“No. No, I don’t.” He knelt beside her and kissed her face, kissed her mouth and eyes. “Of course I don’t,” he said. “It’s only …”
“Only what?”
“There’s lots of time, is all. To do it right. When we’re married.”
“And what was that the other night, then? When you?” He said, “That was just a taste”—he smiled at this little unintended joke and Mercedes smiled with him—“of things to come.” It made her more sure of him at the time, the unexpected restraint, his insistence on putting off the consummation, as he called it. But she regretted that now, agreeing to wait as if there was all the time in the world. She wandered through his rooms, touching this piece of furniture or that fixture he would have touched, and all the time choosing or discarding children’s names or planning the cut of a wedding dress or the colours in a quilt sewn for an imaginary bed.
She was struck by Hiram’s description of her as a gambler and had to admit there was something of a gambler’s fancy in it all—that having wagered so much there was no other way for her to feel, no other outcome to hope for. It was intangible and shadowy and as real as anything she’d ever felt. She was like a person born blind, with no experience of sight except that every remaining sense insinuates the lack of it.
Hardy came to see her at Hiram’s shop shortly after she moved in.
Mercedes was behind the counter and stood looking up at him when he came in, his hair bleached almost white by a summer on the water. She glanced down at Hardy’s hands on the counter, saw his wedding band. “Are you and Ruthie married now?”
“Day after Christmas, when the minister was over to do a service at the church.”
He told her that Clive Reid had taken a fever just before Christmas and nearly died but was on the water as soon as the weather was civil enough to fish. That the church hall had caught fire and burned to the ground, though they’d managed to save the church.
It struck Mercedes how she’d thought of the Cove and the people in it as frozen in time somehow, that their world had been suspended when she left and would remain unchanged, as they were in her mind. She felt those lives set in motion now, as if she was revising a film, the celluloid pacing through her thumb and forefinger, days and seasons, loves and illnesses and deaths. The sensation of it made her light-headed and she put both hands to the counter to steady herself.
“Sadie,” he said.
“She’s gone, isn’t she.”
“Before Christmas,” he said. “She went peaceful.”
Mercedes thought of her grandmother’s certainty, her doggedness. The only book the old woman had ever read was
the Bible. Five verses every evening and she’d crawled through both Testaments half a dozen times in her life. Peaceful didn’t suit the woman.
“What have you got done to your hair?” Hardy asked her. “You looks some grand.”
Mercedes only shrugged. “How’s Ruthie?”
“You could offer me a cup of tea, Sade.”
She took him to one of her two rooms on the second floor and put the kettle on an electric hot plate.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“It was the only place I knew to look.” He picked up the tin of evaporated milk she’d set beside the cups. He said, “I thought this stuff was rationed for children.”
“Hiram knows some people,” she said and she motioned Hardy to a seat. She could hardly believe he was next to her, within an arm’s length. They hadn’t touched one another since he’d come in the door and she felt the absence of it suddenly, the way hunger sometimes ambushed her after sneaking up unnoticed for hours.
Hardy had never seen a contraption like the hot plate and he asked her a string of questions that Mercedes had no answers for. And then just as casually he said, “How’s things with your man? You two are still fixed for each other?”
“Is that Mother you’re asking for?”
He didn’t answer right away and she could tell he was trying to choose his words carefully. “Mother isn’t—” he said. “She doesn’t talk about it. About you.” He nodded at her hands with his chin. “You’re not married.”
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