A Sudden Sun

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Speaking to such a group was both exhilarating and frightening. Grace’s speech was a brief coda at the end of Miss Kennedy’s presentation, and she felt disloyal to Lily as the words came out of her mouth. The very thing Lily had worked hard to conceal from her, the past that she was so ashamed of, Grace was telling this large group of strangers. Speaking as if suffrage was a cause she had learned about at her mother’s knee.

  When she finished with a plea for the ladies to petition the Newfoundland government for women’s franchise, a burst of applause met her speech—something Grace’s previous experience speaking in Sunday School and to church women’s groups had not prepared her for.

  It was not making speeches, though, but listening to them that was the most exciting part of the week—hearing the great Carrie Chapman Catt speak as she laid aside the mantle of leadership she had borne for nearly twenty years and the new president, Mrs. Ashby of England, was elected. Later, Grace was introduced to Mrs. Catt and shook her hand. Then there was the fact that, incredible as it seemed, she was in Rome. Grace spent as many hours as she could spare walking the streets, looking at the ruins. There was the Coliseum, and there the Roman Forum, just as they had been when Caesar was murdered on the Senate floor, when St. Paul and St. Peter preached here.

  On Sunday, their last day in Rome, Miss Kennedy asked if the Italian lady who was acting as their tour guide, Signora Rignotti, could take her to St. Peter’s. “I would so love to catch a glimpse of the Holy Father, and perhaps get some holy medals to bring home to dear Mother—it would mean so much to her,” she said. Grace sometimes forgot that Miss Kennedy was a devout Roman Catholic; she was the only papist Grace had known well since the days when she worked under Nurse Fitzpatrick at the old Empire Hospital. Both women had done a great deal to erode Grace’s wariness of Catholics, but her staunch Methodist soul shrivelled at the idea of going to St. Peter’s Square to see the Pope and get holy medals blessed. “I believe I’ll stay at the hotel,” she said.

  “I will bring you to a group of ladies who are making a—a pilgrimage, you would say?—to St. Peter’s,” Signora Rignotti said to May Kennedy. “Then I take Grace to the Coliseum. I am not so very good a Catholic; the Pope can say mass without me there.” She laughed and hooked her arm through Grace’s.

  Italy was a country rebuilding itself after the ravages of the war that had ended five years earlier. Everywhere in Rome new roads were being built and new monuments erected. Grace exclaimed as she stepped over a metal drainage cover emblazoned with the eagle of the ancient Roman legions and the “SPQR” legend that she knew represented the Senate and People of the Roman Republic. “Goodness! Surely the drainage covers haven’t been around since the time of the Caesars, have they?”

  Signora Rignotti laughed. “No, no, not at all. Italy is an old country and a very new one, too. Much of our past was buried and forgotten. All this, bringing back the eagle and the old Roman symbols—that is all Mussolini and the Fascists. They want us to think the Roman Empire is great again. A bit foolish perhaps, but they are also putting in the new drains, so who am I to complain?”

  The name and image of the new leader, Mussolini, was everywhere. He had sat on the dais and greeted the suffrage delegates on the first night of the conference, a blunt, plain-looking man who spoke what sounded to Grace like blunt and plain Italian. Nothing was poetic or eloquent about him, but when he spoke, people listened. Since coming here she had heard Italian ladies speak almost with reverence of their new leader—they called him Il Duce, “The Boss”—while others rolled their eyes and shook their heads when the great man’s name was mentioned. One way or another, this man was the centre of everything in this city.

  In a strange way Rome reminded Grace of Port Union—on a far grander scale of course, but the ancient city had the same endless string of new building projects that the little outport did, the same air of energy and optimism, and the same sense that behind it all was one man’s vision, one towering personality. Over dinner that evening with Signora Rignotti, May Kennedy, and some ladies from the Canadian delegation, Grace tried to explain to Signora Rignotti. The Italian woman nodded, then shook her head. “Yes and no,” she said. “I see what you mean about these great men—they build cities as their monuments—but if your Mister Coaker is a union man I do not think he and Mussolini would get along well, for Il Duce is set against the unions. His Blackshirts break up the strikes and promise they will save us from the socialists. Me, I’m not so sure we need the saving, but he says he will give our women the vote.”

  “I suppose time will tell,” Miss Kennedy said, and when Signora Rignotti shot her a questioning glance, she added, “Your Mussolini—whether he is a good leader or not. And whether you, and we, get our rights.”

  “Ah yes, time. Time does not heal all wounds, as you English say, but it makes many things clear.”

  Signora Rignotti walked them back to their hotel that evening. At the door she turned to Grace. “It move me very much, what you say about your mother. I pray you in the New Found Land soon have the vote, and we here in Italy too. I am sure your mother will be proud of you.” She put her arms around Grace, who was still struggling to adjust to the frequent kisses and embraces of southern Europe.

  Then the Roman interlude was over, and Grace and Miss Kennedy were on a steamer headed back across the Atlantic. Their ship was bound for New York, from where they would catch the Nerissa to St. John’s a few days later. Grace had arranged to spend those days staying with Mrs. Parker, who was eager to hear about everything: Grace’s family, her work in St. John’s, Jack, the conference in Rome. Abigail Parker was a most gratifying audience: she was never bored.

  “What a wonderful opportunity, not just to attend a conference like that, but to speak. I tell you, Grace, I’m ashamed sometimes to think I come from Newfoundland when I see how backward our country is, but now I really think we might be seeing change in the air. And you’re going to be a part of making it happen! Your mother would be proud, really she would.”

  Abigail Parker—who had known Lily so well, so long ago—unconsciously echoed the Italian woman who had never met her: I am sure your mother will be proud of you. And they were both wrong.

  Grace took a long breath. “Do you really think she would, Mrs. Parker? She’s told me over and over that she doesn’t want me involved in the suffrage movement. Why would she think that, if she fought for women’s votes herself once?”

  For the first time since Grace had met her, Abigail didn’t start talking immediately, treading on the heels of Grace’s question. She took the time for a long sip of tea and laid cup and saucer down with great care. She picked up a scone, looked at it, laid it down again.

  “Your mother was very badly hurt once, Grace. Perhaps she made some—poor choices. And perhaps she blames the suffrage women for some of that. She thinks that—well, that one thing led to another.”

  “She was in love with someone else before she married my father, wasn’t she?”

  Another sigh, like a soft puff of wind in summer. “Yes. Yes, she was. Madly in love, I’d have said.”

  “I can’t picture that.”

  “No, and that’s the tragedy—not that she fell in love, but that it turned her into a woman you can’t imagine ever being in love. It’s as I told you. She was very badly hurt.”

  “Who was he?”

  “No one. I mean, no one you’d know of. No one any of us knew of, really. He didn’t move in our circles. He was a nobody—a journalist, very ambitious, very radical ideas.”

  “This was in St. John’s?”

  “Yes, hard to believe there was anyone radical in St. John’s in those days, isn’t it? He left eventually, of course. Came here, to New York.”

  “He left my mother?”

  “He, ah—yes, he went away.”

  “And that was the end of things between them?”

  “I can’t tell you the whole story, Grace. Your mother begged me never to tell you….”

  “But th
ere is a whole story. And you know it.”

  “I helped your mother—I mean, I thought at the time I was helping. I helped her see this man, spend time with him. I thought it was all fun, a great lark—you know, secret admirers and all that. I didn’t know how badly she would be hurt when—oh dear. I’ve said too much already.”

  “I’d pieced together a lot of it anyway. Things my mother and father said, and some old postcards I found in her room at Grandfather’s house.” The two postcards that had mystified her for years, the one signed A and the one signed D, were in Grace’s purse, worn soft on the edges from carrying around. She had brought them knowing she would see Mrs. Parker in New York, though it wasn’t until Signora Rignotti said I think your mother will be proud that Grace had decided to show them to Abigail.

  Now she passed her the one signed A, the one that said, “It’s a pickle and no mistake.” “You wrote this, didn’t you?”

  Mrs. Parker looked at the card, her lips forming the words as she read. “Yes,” she said, almost a whisper.

  “And this other one. He wrote it—the man my mother loved.”

  Mrs. Parker nodded, reading the card. “I suppose so. Yes, of course he did. I saw his hand writing often enough. I used to pass notes for them, sometimes. I should have known better.”

  “Can you tell me his name?”

  “I can’t. I shouldn’t.”

  Grace wasn’t sure why she persisted. For so many years she’d known there were secrets in her mother’s past but had been willing to let them lie. It wasn’t as if she had any right to them, if Lily didn’t choose to tell her. But she had gone to Rome, and told women from around the world that her mother had once been a suffragist—her mother, who burned the suffrage petition. Last fall, when Grace had written to tell her parents that the Franchise League had raised money to send her to Rome, the Reverend had written back to give her his blessing. He had made it clear that he was going against Lily’s wishes, something he rarely did where Grace was concerned. He also wrote, “We would like to see you at home again,” but Grace had not been back since Lily burned the petition. She pleaded the need to stay in town and work, to save money for the Rome congress. The last letter she had from Lily before leaving Newfoundland was full of news about what everyone in Catalina had contributed to the Ladies’ Aid sale of work, but had made no mention of Grace’s trip to Rome.

  Abigail Parker, who hated keeping secrets, needed little persuasion to tell Grace about a man called David Reid, a Newfoundlander who, like herself, had lived in New York all these years. They didn’t see each other socially, of course—not the same circles at all—but David Reid looked her up from time to time. Asked about people from home. Asked about Lily. He was a journalist. He lived in Brooklyn. And he had never married.

  “You have an address for him, then. Or at least you know where to find him,” Grace said.

  “Oh Grace, that wouldn’t be a good idea. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all.”

  Two days later, the day before her ship sailed for St. John’s, Grace walked down the Brooklyn street where David Reid lived. The streets grew narrower and more crowded as she moved further into the heart of Flatbush. May in New York was as hot as May in Rome had been; she missed the cool of a St. John’s fog. This Brooklyn street was a different world from Mrs. Parker’s neighbourhood in Manhattan. She heard a babble of voices in different languages, saw dark faces, saw old Jewish men in black hats with long fringes of hair by their ears, woman in long dark dresses with veiled heads.

  Mrs. Parker had given her the address after some protest. It really hadn’t been a fair fight, Grace thought, pitting her own will against Abigail Parker’s. Abigail still had that romantic, foolish side. The same part of her nature that had once helped Lily arrange meetings with a secret beau also wanted to know what would happen if Grace were to meet her mother’s old lover. Grace had considered coming here and knocking on the man’s door, or walking into his newspaper office, but she had sent a note instead explaining who she was and asking if they could meet. She had hesitated before adding the postscript. My mother does not know I am contacting you.

  He had replied by return post, suggesting a restaurant in his neighbourhood at four o’clock this afternoon. She stood looking at the house a moment longer—it was four now, so if he were punctual at all he had left—and then went down the street, checking the address on the now crumpled piece of paper in her hand.

  The restaurant was small and almost empty, since it was neither lunchtime nor dinnertime. A few people passing on the street gave her sidelong glances as she opened its door: presumably a well-dressed young lady going alone into a restaurant in the late afternoon was enough to attract attention.

  The small, olive-skinned man who bustled towards the door when she opened it apparently thought the same. He gave her a nod deep enough it might have been called a bow and said, in heavily accented English, “Good day, Miss. Are you—you are not alone, are you awaiting someone?”

  “She is awaiting me, Hassan,” said a man’s voice from the back of the room. Still blinking from the contrast between the brilliant sunshine outside and the darkness of the restaurant Grace could not at first see the man attached to the voice, but she followed Hassan to a table by the wall.

  The man—tall, thin, grey-haired—stood up, thanked the waiter, and offered his hand to Grace while Hassan pulled out her chair. “David Reid,” he said. “I’m very glad to meet you, Miss Collins.”

  “I’m—I’m not sure glad is the word in my case,” Grace said, taking her seat. “I didn’t even know of your existence—not by name, anyway—’til quite recently.”

  “And now you know that I am—what? An old friend of your mother’s? I don’t know what Abby told you.”

  “An old—what’s the phrase? An old flame, I suppose. Someone my mother kept company with before she married my father.”

  He raised his glass and turned to the waiter. “Another of the same for me, Hassan, and the lady will have—what? A cup of tea? You won’t like the coffee here, even if you like coffee.”

  “I’ve just come back from Rome. I drank Italian coffee there.”

  “Really! So you were at the women’s suffrage conference? Did you hear Mrs. Catt speak? Still, Turkish coffee is another thing altogether.” He glanced back at the waiter, and Grace said, “I will have a cup of Turkish coffee, thank you very much.”

  David Reid burst out laughing. “Oh, you are so like Lily! You ordered that coffee exactly as she would have—full of spite and determined to have her own way even if she choked on it.” His laughter died as quickly as it had come. “Or perhaps I’m not really remembering her. Perhaps I’m imagining her as she would have been if she’d lived in a time and place that had let her sit in a restaurant with a man and order her own coffee.”

  “I’m not even sure it’s proper for me to be here,” Grace admitted. “But having just come back from the conference in Rome I feel less inclined to worry about what’s proper.” She was impressed that he knew about the suffrage congress.

  He looked old, older than her father, she thought, the way thin men often looked older than fatter ones because the wrinkles of age stood out more. Her father was fifty-five and her mother not yet fifty. David Reid could easily have been sixty. His face was lined, his hair iron-grey. He wore a light summer suit and fidgeted with his necktie, loosening it around a long, thin neck as he spoke.

  “So, how did you convince Abby Hayward to tell you about my existence? Or did she just blurt it out? She’s quite the blurter.”

  “She is, but she’s a loyal friend too. My mother had asked her not to tell me anything about the past. Mrs. Parker told me a few things, but only after I guessed a good deal myself. I gather your…friendship with my mother didn’t end very happily.”

  “Not very happily, no. I’m not surprised Lily never told you about me.”

  “It turns out there are a lot of things about my mother I didn’t know. I only found out by accident that she was a suf
fragist when she was young. She never spoke of it.”

  “Quite the opposite, I’d guess—she disapproves of modern young women being independent and having careers, all that?”

  “Yes.” He seemed to know Lily’s way of thinking quite well for someone who hadn’t seen her in thirty years.

  Hassan returned with a miniscule cup of coffee, which he laid before Grace, and another glass of whatever Mr. Reid was drinking—something alcoholic, Grace supposed, though she was hardly an expert in that area. Half a small glass tumbler full of amber liquid.

  “So she’s become quite conventional. It doesn’t surprise me. People react in many different ways to—well, to things that upset them. Has she told you that pursuing women’s rights will lead to free love and the end of morality?”

  “Something like that, yes.” Grace sipped the coffee, which was at least as strong as three cups of what she had drunk in Italy, distilled into a single tiny vessel. She wondered what Mr. Reid would say if she told him about the petition Lily had burned.

  David Reid nodded. He cradled his glass in two long, bony hands. Then he looked up. “Tell me about Italy,” he said. “Was it your first time abroad?”

  So instead of talking about Lily, they talked about Italy. Mr. Reid had been there before and during the war but not since. He wanted to know about the conference but also what she had thought of Rome. “This Mussolini will be bad news, you mark my words,” David Reid said to her, when she said how clean and well-run the ancient city had seemed to her. “People are looking around for saviours just now, in Europe, after all the chaos of the war, but here in America too. Perhaps even in Newfoundland.”

  “I don’t think there’s any hope of a saviour arising in the east—only Sir Richard Squires, in office again, forever and ever amen.”

  He laughed again. He had a wonderful laugh that filled the whole room and lighted his thin tired face. “Ah, dear old Newfoundland. I’ve travelled so much but I’ve never gone back home. I went to Russia, you know, in ’19—just after the revolution. I wanted to see if the Bolsheviks had really got it right after all.”