A Sudden Sun

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “And had they?”

  “Well, they’re trying. It’s a noble dream, you know, the best in the world. Better than Christianity even. I’m sorry, you’re a minister’s daughter—am I shocking you? But whether it’s Christianity or communism, the problem is always the same—human nature. The serpent in Eden. Russia is a communist Eden, but it has its share of snakes.”

  They talked about politics in Newfoundland, in America and abroad, about Bolsheviks in Russia and Blackshirts in Italy and a world trying to remake itself after a war that had seemed like the end of the world. About the franchise for women and about Prohibition, which was in force in the U.S. as in Newfoundland but widely ignored in both places. “It’s what women like your mother fought for,” Mr. Reid said, “At first they only wanted the vote so they could outlaw the liquor trade. But do you really think it’s done any good?”

  Grace shook her head. “Not at home, because it’s not properly enforced.” Many of those who had once supported Prohibition in Newfoundland, even Mr. Coaker and the FPU, had turned against it in practice, seeing it as just one more way for the rich to oppress the poor. Those who had money could still get liquor if they wanted it; those who hadn’t brewed their own.

  “It’s the same story here.” David Reid lifted his glass. “I couldn’t walk into any restaurant in New York and order a glass of whisky, but Hassan, who is a devout Mohammedan and doesn’t touch a drop of the stuff himself, has a quiet understanding with his regular customers. People who want it can still get it, and those who abuse it always will.”

  Grace nodded. “If a man is a worthless drunkard who beats his wife and children, making liquor illegal doesn’t change him—only forces him to buy it or make it illegally. If he had no way of getting liquor at all he might still beat his wife and children. The problem is deeper than the tavern or the wine-shop.”

  “Exactly. And the corollary is that if a man isn’t that sort—if he’s a decent kind of fellow who treats his wife like a queen and just wants a stiff drink to relax at the end of a hard day’s work—then it’s not fair to deny him that small pleasure, on the grounds of keeping it out of the other fellow’s hands. You see? That’s a thing your mother and I could never agree on, and I can see your forehead wrinkling up too—oh, you do look like her. You’re not convinced.”

  “Not entirely, no.”

  “You know, if I could have given up that one drink at the end of the day, if I would have signed the temperance pledge and gone to church, Lily might have married me. Imagine. I suppose we’re both thinking that then I could have been your father.”

  Grace nodded and forced herself to take another sip of the coffee. “Only, not really. Because I wouldn’t have been me. I’m Papa’s daughter too as well as Mother’s.”

  “Yes, and with my blood in the mix instead of the good Reverend’s who knows how you might have turned out. I don’t know him, you know—your father. Never met the man, only heard your mother talk about him. He was courting her at the same time I was. But he was the one her father approved of.”

  “You couldn’t have been so much in love, if you wouldn’t take the pledge for her.”

  “Either that or I was a slave to the bottle, eh?” He laughed, a quieter laugh this time, one that didn’t fill the room but barely left the table. “I wasn’t, you know. There’ve been a few times in the years since when I drank too much—after Lily left me that last time, and once during the war when—anyway, sure. But it’s never been my vice. Drink didn’t ruin me, you know, the way she thought it would. I’m not sure I even am ruined, except by old age. That gets us all in the end, whether we take the pledge or not.”

  He was silent a minute, staring down into his glass. They had talked for two hours about the whole world and it had finally circled back to Lily. “She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t, and I guess I wanted the same from her. I mean, I pictured us running away here to New York, living some kind of bohemian life together, but she wouldn’t have been happy. And so in the end, I wouldn’t either. That’s the problem with love. It’s a damned shame, Grace, but loving someone doesn’t matter that much in the end if you don’t want the same things. She didn’t love your father, but I always thought she was much better cut out for his kind of life than mine. Tell me, did she manage to find a bit of happiness out of it all?”

  It was almost the same question Abigail Parker had asked four years ago. Both of these people, her mother’s old lover and her mother’s old friend, had been tangled up in a sad situation that had left them both desperate to learn whether Lily had been happy after all.

  “Not really. I don’t think so. She’s kept busy; I think she liked church and parish work, being the minister’s wife and all that, at least until my brother died during the war. But even before that—I can’t say I ever thought of her as particularly happy.” Even as she said the words, Grace wondered if they were true. How often did she, did anyone, take a step back and look at a parent as a fellow human being, happy or unhappy? She had always seen Lily only in relation to herself: as kind or stern, over-protective or distant, depending on the mood between them at any given moment. But happy? Grace thought not, but how could she ever know for certain?

  “Ah. That’s too bad,” David Reid said. “Too bad for her, and too bad because it makes a mess out of my theory. I’ve been—well, I haven’t been unhappy. It’s been a decent life and I’ve done most of the things I wanted to do. I hoped she could say the same. I’ve come to think living the kind of life you want is more important than being with the person you love. But maybe Lily hasn’t even had the life she wanted.”

  Grace took the second postcard out of her purse. “You wrote this, didn’t you?” She passed it across the table and watched his face as he read it.

  He laid it on the table in front of him when he’d read through it, at least twice she thought, from the time it took. “I was in a boarding house in South Brooklyn,” he said, “sitting up on the bed with a book on my lap, because I didn’t even have a desk, writing this and trying to imagine bringing her here, into this life. I couldn’t do it, but I couldn’t abandon her either. The easy thing would have been to go home and pretend to be the man she wanted. Maybe that’s what I should have done after all.” He looked up at Grace. “I’d been down here for months when she wrote me. She wouldn’t come with me, you see, when I left St. John’s, so I thought it was all over between us. I was down here, working all hours and still broke, going to political meetings and, yes, that was probably one of the times I was drinking a bit too much. And then Lily wrote to tell me.”

  “That she was coming to New York?”

  “What? No. Lord, no. She wrote to tell me she was going to have a baby.”

  Part Six

  LILY

  1894–1895

  Lily

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SHE PROMISED HERSELF she would wait a week before she started to worry. Her monthly visitor was due late in July, a week after David sailed for New York. Three weeks since she had said goodbye to him. Three long, lonely weeks. Most days had been grey, chilly, rain-soaked. Lily tried to read or write, but paced the floor of her room more often than not. There was no Abby to call and visit with, no hope of notes passed through the fence from David, nothing outside the house to distract her since she had been banned from everything but church.

  She had come home at half-past seven in the evening the night she rejected Reverend Collins’s proposal. When she walked into the house that night only her mother was there: her father and Reverend Collins were still out looking for her. The fact that she could, or would, give no account of herself for three missing hours made Papa’s rage even greater.

  “I was confused. I needed to think. I went for a walk by myself.”

  “For three hours? In the middle of the city?”

  “I walked downtown, by the harbour.”

  Lectures, shouts, threats. It went on ’til nearly midnight. Reverend Collins politely excused himself. The fact that she had to
ld him she wouldn’t marry him somehow got rolled into the whole business of her disappearance, more evidence that her behaviour was entirely inappropriate for a Christian young woman.

  “And the worst part of it,” her father said, about ten o’clock in the evening as he warmed to his theme, “is that this fine young man of God, who made you an excellent offer of marriage, has now seen what kind of girl you are, and when you’ve had time to think better of it and realize what a good offer it is, he will be unlikely to make it again.”

  Lily felt as if her entire body were filled with shattered glass. She could make no sense of the fact that Obadiah Collins had offered to marry her, that David Reid was going away and had asked her to come away with him, that she had once again succumbed to temptation and lain with him, and worst of all, that it would be the last time ever.

  The Reverend dropped by the following day to see if she was well after her “misadventure.” Lily refused to see him. He went back, presumably, to Greenspond, and Lily went back to pacing the floor. She did not leave the house again until it was time for church on Sunday.

  Over the next week she read Bleak House, the only Dickens novel she hadn’t yet read, and went no further than the back garden. Only once did she see Johnny with a note from David, which turned out to say “Leaving on Friday the 14th. Will you reconsider?”

  She burned the note.

  Friday the 14th dawned with a hard rain. Lily had not sent a return note to David. He was leaving. Unless he had changed his mind, decided to stay. He could stay in St. John’s, keep on working away at the Evening Herald, start going to church. He could come to the front door, meet her father, ask for her hand in marriage. Papa would say no, but Lily would defy him, head held high, and marry David anyway. And in a little while, three months or six months or a year, her parents would see what a fine young man David was. There would be a grandchild someday, and Lily would be forgiven for being a headstrong girl who got married without her parents’ permission. It would all be so easy: why wouldn’t David do it?

  By the beginning of August it looked like there might well be a grandchild, after all, without the benefit of even a secret wedding. Lily wished she could read that medical book again, the one she had seen in Abby’s parents’ library, but she had no way of getting to that or any other book, and there were no useful volumes on her parents’ shelves. Perhaps she had misunderstood it. Perhaps if you missed your monthly visitor only once, it didn’t mean anything. Surely it had said a woman couldn’t be certain until she had missed twice? She would have to wait all of August to be sure.

  The calm thoughts, the thoughts assuring her that she must be mistaken—those thoughts came during the day. She rehearsed them, repeated them soothingly to herself during the times when Bleak House slipped from her hands and she couldn’t focus on the words. In the daytime, she could convince herself of anything. That she wasn’t going to have a baby. That David would go to New York, realize he couldn’t live there without her, and come home to marry her. That God could forgive her sins.

  But at night all those careful defenses fell away. She drifted into a troubled sleep and woke in the dark, knowing she was going to have a baby whose father was far away, that she was going to be shamed and cast out. She would have to go to a home for unwed girls, or no, worse, they would send her to Harbour Grace, to her grandparents, and she would have the baby in seclusion and then it would be taken from her, given up for adoption. She would never even see David again and he would never know about his child, and she would be farmed out to some relative around the bay and become the spinster cousin, never to marry or return to the city of her shame.

  When those thoughts crowded into her head she felt snakes of terror twist in her gut. And then she would convince herself that those were cramping pains and that her period was coming after all, and she would lie there believing she had been given a reprieve.

  August grew hot and muggy, despite the general rule that summer was over after Regatta Day. In mid-August a letter arrived from New York.

  Dearest Lily,

  I got my landlady, who has rather pretty girlish handwriting, to address the envelope in hopes that if your parents question the sender, you can claim this is from Abby. When I think that such tricks are necessary to write to you it makes me angry, but I see no other way. The thought of never hearing from you again shatters me. It’s a great city here, my love. So different from old St. John’s—and not just because it’s bigger. There’s a kind of life pulsing through the streets here. Even knowing I’ve left you behind and that you may never follow me—missing you every hour—still I’m glad to be here. I probably shouldn’t confess that but I can’t lie to you. I only wish there was a place we could both feel this way together.

  Lily locked herself in her room, read the letter, cried for an hour, reread the letter and burned it. It would have been better if he hadn’t written. Better for him to have just sailed silently out of her life. She could pretend the whole affair had never happened. Only she couldn’t. Not if she were pregnant.

  August ended. By mid-September there could be no further denying it. Two months had passed without her monthly visitor. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered how soon women started to grow large. She looked no different, but her breasts felt sore and she was often sick to her stomach, which she knew were signs she was carrying a child.

  The night she finally admitted the truth to herself, she prayed for the first time since July. She confessed her sins fully and with an open heart. She knew now that no love, no pleasure, no moments of delight in each other’s arms could ever be worth the agony, the torment she was now suffering. A man could walk away from a love affair, could go on to a new life in a new city and write about how happy he was there. He could cherish her like a sad and lovely memory that would grow smaller and sweeter with the years. But Lily had no such luxury.

  She prayed for the baby too, knowing the only half-way respectable solution was to go away and bear the child in private and then give him away. Him, or her. A son or a daughter. David’s and hers. Lily tried to place it all in God’s hands but she could not imagine leaving the child with someone else. For the rest of her life that child would stamp her with the stigma of her sin, but also with the only tangible memory of love. How could she give up such a child?

  She wrote two letters, finally. She was still virtually a prisoner in the house and garden. During the times when her father was at work and her mother was lying down in her room, Sally was nearby, doing her work with watchful eyes. Only in her bedroom or in the garden did Lily have any privacy. She gave the two letters to Johnny Murphy with some money for postage and prayed that the boy was trustworthy enough to take them to the post office rather than spending the money on candy or tobacco and tossing the letters in the gutter.

  People at church began to ask how she was, why she didn’t come to the Sunday School outing or that wonderful concert last week. Mrs. Ohman dropped by three times to try to visit, but was turned away, once by Mother and twice by the efficient Sally. The third time Lily was actually on the stairs to hear her say, “No, sorry Ma’am, Miss Lily isn’t seeing nobody.”

  “Are those her orders or Mr. Hunt’s orders?” Mrs. Ohman’s rich voice rang out.

  Lily thought of running down the stairs, racing into Mrs. Ohman’s arms, begging for rescue.

  “Don’t make no difference, Ma’am, she won’t see you either way.”

  “Can I leave a note?”

  “Probably best not to, Ma’am. Miss Lily haven’t been very well and I’ve been told over and over she’s not to be disturbed.”

  Lily turned and went upstairs. Mrs. Ohman was still bickering with Sally, their voices mingling into a single high-pitched chitter as Lily continued up to the third floor.

  For a fortnight it seemed there would be no reply to either of her letters and she fell further into despair. She really was all alone, then, in the world. Nobody would help her, no one would rescue her. Then Abby’s reply, a postcar
d enclosed in an envelope for privacy, arrived.

  It’s a pickle and no mistake. She could hear Abby saying the words, her pretty mouth curving downward with shock even as she couldn’t resist thinking what a delightful melodrama she’d been caught up in. But her offer of help was immediate, even though Abby was still a guest in her aunt’s house and was not really at liberty to offer house-room to Lily. She had said they could “puzzle out what to do” but there was no solution to this puzzle. Even God could not change what had happened. Unless…

  Lily knew that not every woman who conceived a baby went on to give birth. She had heard of miscarriages though she was vague about what was actually involved. Would it be a sin to pray for a miscarriage? Was there something one could do to make one happen? That in itself would surely be a sin—although any stain of guilt might be worth it if she could go back and erase the past, erase the child she now knew was growing in her womb.

  She did not burn Abby’s letter but stuck it in a drawer with some old issues of the Water Lily and WCTU handbills. How strange, that all that had once seemed so important to her, that she had slaved over little essays and poems in hopes they would be published. That she had handed out leaflets to invite women to meetings. She thought of that Lily, the Lily of just a few months ago, as an alien creature, strutting the streets like a peacock spreading its tail, drawing attention, opening herself out to the larger world. Now she was a snail curling into its shell, drawing more and more of herself inside.

  While she thought about Abby’s letter and whether she could really go to New York, the first week of October came and went. Another week in which she should have had her monthly visitor but didn’t. Three months. She studied herself in the mirror again and thought she could detect a slight thickening of the waist, though everywhere else—arms, face, legs—she looked thinner, because the combination of nausea and distress was making it hard to eat much.