A Sudden Sun (13 page)

“You’re an unusual man, Jack Perry.”

“Am I, I wonder?” He looked out the window, at the dark street punctuated by the yellow glow of streetlamps. “I don’t think I always was. I think I was pretty ordinary, before I went overseas. Something of what I saw there, what we did there, gave my ideas of ordinary life a kick in the teeth. I don’t know yet if that’s good or bad. But I can’t be the only one, so there must be a change coming, Grace.”

“So—you’ll go to Montreal, and I’ll go to New York?”

“I have two years more of medical school, and then an internship. At best it would be a long engagement.”

“I’m not opposed to long engagements,” she said, and he laughed.

“To tell the truth I hadn’t planned on this tonight—I have no ring—and I haven’t spoken to your parents.”

“Let’s not be in any hurry to do that,” Grace said. “It doesn’t need to be official yet. I don’t have to wear your ring to know that we…that we have…”

“An understanding?” Jack raised his glass.

“An understanding,” she agreed.

Y
OU ARE NOT going to New York. It’s simply impossible.”

Lily stood at the parlour window, her back to Grace. She could “ not even bear to look at the girl as she talked about going so far away, starting a new life tucked under Abigail Hayward’s wing. Abigail was the sort of mother Grace wanted, urging her forward. Lily wondered would Abigail be so eager to encourage adventure if she had a daughter of her own.

“Last time I came home you thought Jack was going to ask to marry me, and you told me I’d regret rushing into a hasty marriage. Now I come home to say I’m not getting married, I want to go back to school, and you’re forbidding that. Mother, if you don’t want me to marry, you don’t want me to go to college, and you don’t want me to work, what do you want me to do? What kind of life can you possibly imagine for me?”

A life here, with me
, Lily thought, but that was impossible. When Grace was born, Lily already knew about sons, about loving and losing them. She knew that no boy, whether he lived a few hours or twenty years or seventy years, would stay by his mother’s side. On
the morning the midwife laid Grace in her arms, Lily had thought,
This is my daughter, my reward. This is the child who will love me, the child I can hold
.

But Grace had only seemed to be that girl for those few quiet minutes while she nursed at Lily’s breast. Then she had wriggled, and squirmed, and opened her mouth in an ungodly howl, and ever since that moment she had been fighting to get away.
Why can’t you be content here?
Lily wanted to say. Not that Lily herself had ever been content in Catalina or in Elliston or any of these other barren outports the church had stranded her in. But if she had a daughter by her side, if she and Grace could be together all the time, she would feel that all those hard and lonely years had been worth it. She would finally have her reward.

Now Grace wanted to go off to New York, of all places.
Can any good thing come out of New York?
Lily thought. No city on earth—not London or Paris or even Berlin—could have laid a colder chill on Lily’s heart. She would no more give her girl up to that city of wickedness than she would sell her into slavery.

Aloud she said, “New York is a hard place. It makes people harder.”

God knew the last thing Grace needed was to be made harder. The girl had had a shell on her since she could walk and talk, like a beautiful piece of furniture lacquered over and over ’til you couldn’t put a chip or a spall into it. Grace at three, struggling out of her mother’s arms to go play. Grace at six, her knee skinned and bloody: Lily had dabbed at it with Mercurochrome and told her to be more careful, but Grace had bit down on her lip to keep from crying out at the sting and said, “It doesn’t hurt.” Grace at seventeen, running off to St. John’s as soon as she could after Charley’s death, talking about joining the VAD and going overseas, as if she thought Lily could bear another loss.

“Is that what you think? That going to New York will turn me
into some kind of hard, modern woman? Do you think I’ll come back with a Castle bob and short skirts, smoking a cigarette? I want to go to a school of philanthropy, for goodness sakes!”

“Watch your tongue!” Lily said. “A girl who’ll talk back to her own mother like that, who knows what you’d be like after a year in New York. What is social work, anyway, when it’s at home? Do you even know, or is Abby Hayward filling your head with fool ideas you don’t know a thing about?”

Grace started pacing the room—at least, she walked to the door, then hesitated and walked halfway back, and then turned again, so the effect was much the same as pacing, like a cat in a cage. “Nothing I do will ever please you, will it? I can’t be a nurse, I can’t go to college, I can’t get married. You had dreams of your own once. Can’t you remember? Or is that the reason? You won’t let me have any work or life of my own, just because you never did!”

Abby Hayward. Foolish old Abby with her unguarded tongue, dragging up old stories to tempt and amuse poor Grace, who was hungry for romance and excitement. Who knew what other things Abby might have told Grace? That was the worst of Abigail Hayward: the past would never be dead while she was alive.

“Don’t talk about things you know nothing about.”

“Then you don’t deny it?”

“Deny what? That I did foolish things when I was a girl? Did you ever stop to think that’s the reason I don’t want you making foolish mistakes—because I know where it gets you?” Lily had a memory, vivid as a stab wound, of herself lying across the bed in her parents’ house, crying so hard her throat ached.

If she could spare her daughter even one night of crying like that, it would be worth all Grace’s resentment. Lily would lash Grace to the front porch if it would guarantee she would never have to cry like that. “All young girls want today is to go away from home, have careers, excitement, adventure. Do you know what happened
to Eve when she wandered from Adam’s side?”

“You are impossible! I’m going to talk to the Reverend!”

“Don’t you go bothering your father now! He’s working on his sermon—”

But Grace had already gotten up, walked out of the house without even saying goodbye. The sound of the door closing was so firm and so familiar—Lily thought she could probably remember, if she tried, the very first time Grace had run away after a quarrel, run out of the house and slammed the door. She was punished for the door-slamming, of course, but though her touch had gotten gentler with the years, her method of escape hadn’t changed. It was just the same when she went off to Port Union and got herself a job, or when she went to St. John’s to live with her grandfather against Lily’s express wishes. Out the door, always. What fate might befall a girl who chose the outside world as her refuge?

Grace would go to her father. The Reverend had not been a supporter of emancipation for women back when Lily secretly marched with the suffragists. But his views had changed in his middle years. He thought now that it was appropriate for a young woman to get some education and work in a suitable profession until her marriage, or instead of marriage if God had ordained her for a spinster. Social work, working among the poor—yes, he would approve that. He would have been in favour of Grace training for a nurse if it had not been for the possibility of her going overseas.

There was only one way Lily might sway him. She never brought up the past—neither of them did. But if she were to allude to it, to tell him that Abigail had not only been privy to her own darkest secret but had aided and abetted her at the time, well, the Reverend might agree that Abby was no fit woman to be in charge of the morals of a young girl. It would be worth dredging up that painful subject, if the Reverend would agree that Grace should not be allowed to go to New York. Lily might still prevail.

P
EOPLE FLOWED DOWN Fifth Avenue like a living river. Grace thought that if she were to lift her feet she would still be borne, wedged between the shoulders of the people on either side, down the broad Manhattan street towards Macy’s. She had been in New York for a week now and was amazed at how there were more people on any given street than in all of St. John’s. Until she had come downtown to go shopping alone she had not really realized how vast and swift-moving the crowd was, how small a droplet she was in this mighty torrent of humanity.

Mrs. Parker had wanted to go shopping with Grace, driven in their car by Mr. Parker’s driver. “He brings Mr. Parker to work every morning as it is; he can tuck us in alongside, drop us at Macy’s and come back after we’ve shopped a bit and had our lunch. Don’t look shocked, Gracie dear; that’s how we do things here. Buying you a few new frocks is the least I can do, for your poor mother’s sake.”

Your poor mother
. Mrs. Parker liked that phrase, which rang oddly in Grace’s ear. It was usually used of the dead, and Lily was very much alive and still heartily disapproving of Grace being in
New York. “Your poor mother wrote me a letter—” Mrs. Parker had said the day she arrived. Then she shook her head. “She worries about you. I wrote her and promised I would take care of you as if you were my own, Gracie.”

The week of what Mrs. Parker called “settling in” to her fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side was full of unfamiliar experiences, of which being called “Gracie” was only the most obvious. Mrs. Parker kept trying to buy things for her. The Reverend was paying Grace’s college tuition but there was no extra money for living expenses; Grace had suggested she find work tutoring young girls so she could give Mrs. Parker something towards her room and board.

“I won’t hear of it, I won’t!” Mrs. Parker had insisted. “Not that there’s anything disreputable about teaching—it’s not as if you were working a shop. But I want you to be like a daughter to me, and no daughter of mine would work her way through school. You should be able to devote yourself entirely to your studies, not scurrying around to jobs at all hours. No, if you go looking for pupils I shall be completely heartbroken.” Tears formed at the edges of her eyes and Grace, unused to this particular form of manipulation, was forced to concede.

It was hard to believe that Abigail Hayward had ever been Lily Hunt’s best friend. Certainly their methods of dealing with an unwanted situation could not have been more different. Mother had harangued, harassed, and peppered Grace with arguments about why she should not go to New York. Grace appealed to her father, who at first had been wholly in favour.

“I know of this school. It has a good reputation. We had a little money set aside for poor Charley to finish college. I’m sure he would have approved of it going to your education instead.”

Then Mother got her hooks into the Reverend. At least that was what Grace assumed, for a day or so later her father had expressed
doubts about whether Mrs. Parker was a fit guardian for a young girl far from home. That made Grace wonder: if Mrs. Parker knew secrets about Mother’s past, did Mother also know secrets about Mrs. Parker, things that would make Reverend Collins suddenly doubt her generous offer?

Grace confronted her father in his study at the church, far from her mother’s field of influence. She had thought it all out carefully first, trying to decide what ammunition she had that might hold some weight with him, enough to outbalance her mother’s refusal. As calmly as she could she told him that she wanted to go to New York more than she had ever wanted anything. “I’ll go anyway,” she said, “no matter what you say.”

“Grace, I’ve never thought of you as a rebellious girl. I know your mother wasn’t happy with you moving back into St. John’s, but then at least you were still living with the family. You understand that she worries about you—it’s not like you to be so defiant.”

“No, it’s not, but this matters to me, Father. I have my passport and enough money for steamer fare at Grandfather’s house in town; I can go on my own, without your permission. I’ll throw myself on Mrs. Parker’s mercy, and you know she’ll take me in and pay my tuition. Then I’ll be even more beholden to her. Is that what you want?”

Her father had relented, over Lily’s objections, and here Grace was. Catalina train station, where she had said goodbye to her parents and Jack a few weeks earlier, seemed as far away as the moon. Today she had taken the subway and then a streetcar: nothing less like the streetcars in St. John’s could have been imagined. She stood shoulder to shoulder with people of every imaginable size, shape, and even colour, for there were Negroes on the streetcar too, and old men speaking a language she couldn’t even guess at, and one impossibly fat woman whose parcels almost equalled her own bulk—how could she be carrying so many
packages downtown just at the time the stores were opening? How much more would she have once she had actually done her shopping? But perhaps she was not going shopping.
Perhaps she was
—and here Grace’s imagination failed her, for riding the subway and streetcar, and walking down Fifth Avenue, reminded her of how little she knew about people in New York.

If she walked on the street in St. John’s she knew everyone. Not literally, of course; she knew only a few people by face and name, but the rest she knew by type. She could identify at once the office worker, the factory girl, the housemaid coming from her mistress’s home, the schoolmaster off to teach his classes. People at home were as clear and simple as illustrations in a child’s primer, while here in New York some half-mad artist seemed to be at work, illustrating the grimy streets with every variety of human, clothing and decorating them in ways that gave her no clue who they were and what they were about.

The positive side to that, Grace realized as she stood before a long mirror in Macy’s, holding skirts up before her, was that she might be as opaque to New Yorkers as they were to her. Nobody knew or cared where she came from, who her father or mother was, what business brought her to the city.

She picked out sensible clothes: three wool skirts that would seem heavy now but nice and warm in winter. One black, one brown, one grey; they could be mixed and matched with the four cotton blouses she bought, two white, one pale blue and one a very soft rose. Everything was good quality and would stand up to plenty of washing and wearing. Grace was pleased with her purchases.

She was ready to leave that floor and go look for good walking shoes when she saw the red dress hanging on a mannequin. It was perhaps only her imagination that made Grace think the mannequin looked a little like herself: the same shade of dark brown hair, though the mannequin’s hair was bobbed and Grace’s braided
and pinned in a neat coil. Something about the tilt of her chin, maybe, made Grace imagine herself in the dress. But where? It wasn’t a dress she could wear to church, or to school, or walking on the street. She had no idea why she searched for it on the rack in her size, why she slipped it off the hanger, why she took it into the fitting room.

When she slipped it over her head and looked at herself in the mirror she caught her breath. The coiled braid of hair looked out of place now: she needed bobbed hair to match this dress, and silk stockings instead of heavy lisle ones. The dress made her silhouette boyish-straight, no nipped-in waist but a clean downwards line, only a beaded belt around the hips giving a token nod to the idea of a waist. The red satin was edged with black piping, and the skirt ended half-way between knee and ankle, showing more leg than Grace had ever displayed even in a bathing costume. She looked up to meet her own eyes in the mirror and saw that her cheeks were red.

She stepped outside the change room to catch a glimpse of herself in the three-way mirror. As she turned to look at the back of the dress over her shoulder she saw a man pause and shoot her a bold look and a smile. Quickly, she ducked back into the dressing room and peeled off the gown. It was silly—and so impractical. And even at a sale price, far outside her modest budget. She could buy another two good skirts and a hat for what that dress cost, and where would she ever wear it?

Back at the Parkers’ apartment, Ida, the maid, answered the door and took Grace’s packages. “Just put them up in my room, Ida, that’ll be fine.”

“Yes, Miss. Got yourself some lovely new things, have you? So much nicer here than the shops in St. John’s, ain’t it? More choice, like,” said Ida. Ida came from Fortune and was some kind of poor cousin of Mrs. Parker’s family. “I always hire girls from
home,” Mrs. Parker told Grace. “I like to help them out, and they make far better servants than anyone else in the city. We Newfoundland girls know how to work, don’t we?”

Grace very much doubted that Mrs. Parker had ever “worked” on anything like the scale of Ida or her cohort Liza Jane: they scrubbed and dusted and polished and cooked and served at the table, and lived together in a tiny room off the kitchen. But they had not mastered the art of appearing silent and invisible like servants in the better New York homes. They were Newfoundlanders not easily put down or kept silent, and the fact that their mistress was a fellow-countrywoman and a shirttail relation gave them leave, in their eyes, to be familiar.

“A letter from your beau,” Mrs. Parker said, sailing into Grace’s room to inspect her purchases and hand over the mail. Grace imagined Mrs. Parker’s reaction if she had brought home the red dress. She would approve, probably offer to pay for another in yellow. “Nothing from your parents?” Mrs. Parker added.

“I cabled them to say I’d arrived safely. I don’t expect a letter yet. And of course mail takes longer from Newfoundland than from Montreal.” Grace wondered why she felt the need to excuse her mother’s silence. She had never known her father to be a letter-writer. His pen was employed only in sermons. When Charley had been alive, away at college or overseas, it was Mother and Grace who wrote to him. When Grace herself had been at school in St. John’s, a weekly letter had come in her mother’s hand. Lily’s letters had been lengthy and full of local news, woven in and around reminders of duty, responsibility, the importance of behaving properly and doing well in her classes. Grace had often been annoyed by her mother’s constant stream of written advice. She tried to imagine now what it might be like if those letters no longer arrived.

Grace wanted to put up her aching feet and read Jack’s letter
before supper. But Mrs. Parker leaned against the doorjamb and Grace felt obliged to invite her to come in and sit down.

“I’d always imagined having your mother here, you know, in this very bedroom, after I married Mr. Parker and we moved into this apartment. But of course she was married herself then, and, well, I think she wanted to put the past behind her.”

Grace laid aside Jack’s letter and sat upright. “Mrs. Parker, you keep dropping hints about my mother’s past. Is there something you want to tell me?”

The direct approach surprised Mrs. Parker, who looked like she had been planning to continue the game of cat and mouse for several more months. “Well now, dear, I didn’t mean—well, yes, I suppose I have been a bit indiscreet. I see you, Grace, looking so very like her, like she was at that age when we were such friends, I find myself going back over it all. I keep wondering—oh, dear, Grace, all I want to know is—do you think your parents are content together? Do they have a happy marriage?”

How strange
, Grace thought,
that this is what she wants to know
. She would not have imagined Abigail Parker lying awake nights worrying about the state of Reverend and Mrs. Collins’s marriage. “There was someone else, wasn’t there? Some other man my mother was in love with?”

Mrs. Parker said nothing, which was so unusual for her that it was an answer in itself. “She asked me not to talk to you about the past,” she said finally, between pinched lips.

Grace thought of telling her about the silent parsonages she had grown up in, the master bedroom that was Lily’s alone, her father’s austere bed next to the study. “Perhaps my mother is right,” she said instead. “It’s best not to dredge up the past. After all, if my mother had never married my father, I wouldn’t be here today, would I? So from my point of view, it’s all worked out for the best.”