A Sudden Sun (15 page)

“My mother always wanted me to go into foreign missions.”

“Oh, there was a day when every good Christian thought their calling was to go to the mission field, but many of us have come to see over the years that the mission field here at home is just as great. Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Collins?”

“I think she’s a little bit in love with you,” Grace whispered to Jack later that night, after Mr. Ohman had come home and he and
Mrs. Ohman had gone upstairs. In the next room a maid clattered dishes loudly enough to assure them they were not left entirely unchaperoned.

“She’s doomed to disappointment then, as she’s not the kind of girl I admire.”

“Oh, and what kind is that? A modern young woman, I suppose, with her hair bobbed and her skirts short?”

“There’s only one girl who’s the sort I admire, and the length of her hair and skirts doesn’t matter at all.” Jack drew his face close enough to hers to kiss, almost, then pulled back. “But I’ve hardly got any time to spend with her. I’m on shift at the hospital ’til noon on Christmas Eve and then I’m back again on Boxing Day, a twelve-hour stretch. I hope you don’t have a dull time.”

“Of course not! We’ll be together when you’re not working, and when you are, I’ll visit with Mrs. Ohman and see something of Montreal.”

Jack ran both hands through his hair. “You’re a good sport, Grace, and I know you’ll make the best of whatever happens. It’s only that—oh, I shouldn’t get started talking about it. Just don’t expect me to be the best company, even when I do get away from the hospital.”

“I suppose you must be very tired, after twelve-hour shifts.”

“Tired doesn’t begin to touch it. There’s a kind of exhaustion. It goes right down to the bone. I can’t explain it unless you’ve felt it. I felt it in the trenches, but you expected it over there, everyone was going through the same thing. Now I come off a night shift and walk out into the daylight and it feels like I’m staring into a black hole, like I’ll never—” He looked around as if only now realizing he was speaking out loud. “I’m sorry. Oh, Grace, I’m so sorry—I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, it’s all right. We ought to be able to tell each other how we really feel, even more in person than we do in letters.” She had told
him in her last letter about Miss Everett’s cutting words after their visit to the settlement house, and her own doubts. Now she said, “I went off to New York all fired up with the desire to do good, but I wonder if Miss Everett is right—if it’s too hard for me.”

“I don’t think she means that at all,” Jack said. “I know I’m saying that without even seeing the woman, but I don’t see how anyone could look at you and not know how strong, how good, how dedicated you are. I think she wants to test you. But I don’t think she really doubts you. And even if you doubt yourself, I never do—not for a minute.”

“Thank you for saying that.” Again, she heard the clink of dishes in the adjoining room—that maid really was taking an incredibly long time to clear the table. “Surely it’s the same for you. Haven’t you told me before that the long hours, all the hard work in medical school, are just meant to test you, to prove that you’re strong enough to do the work? And you’ve proven that already, overseas, a hundred times over.”

Jack looked away, out a darkened square of window through which nothing was visible. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“But…you don’t believe it?”

He sighed, looked down at his fingers twined around hers: they were sitting hand in hand. “Most days I don’t. I try to put the best face on it in front of everyone, even in my letters to you, but—I’m not sure I can do it, Grace.”

“I’m sure you can. I don’t know what to say. If I could take that feeling away from you, I would.”

“I know you would. But I don’t think anyone or anything can. I pray…It feels like I spend hours on my knees, begging God to get me through the next day, to give me just a little bit of hope and strength to go on.”

“And He answers. You do go on.”

“I do. But I never feel strong.”

A door opened somewhere else in the house and Mrs. Ohman’s voice called, “Grace dear, are you ready to come up to bed? I’d like to show you where the clean towels are.”

“In other words, it’s time for me to be going,” Jack whispered, brushing his lips across Grace’s. “I’m sorry I said all that.”

“No, don’t be sorry. But look—that’s true courage, isn’t it? Going on when you don’t feel you can. I want to help, I just don’t know what to say. But I love you. If that’s any help at all.”

“It is. It’s all there is.”

A
T THE WORDS “Come in!” Grace pushed open the heavy oak door to Miss Everett’s office and stepped inside. “Here’s my paper,” she said, and watched the woman’s eyes dart to the clock on the wall, making sure it was in on time. Grace had an hour to spare before the paper was due.

Miss Everett glanced at the title before laying it with the stack of student papers on her desk. “‘Causes of Delinquency in Immigrant Boys,’” she said. “I look forward to reading your conclusions, Miss Collins.”

“Thank you, Miss Everett.” Grace turned to go.

“Miss Collins?”

“Yes, Ma’am?”

“I suppose you have selected your area of specialization for next year?”

“Yes, Miss Everett. Family work in the community.”

“Ah, of course.” Miss Everett nodded. She would already have known that Grace had not chosen Miss Everett’s own speciality, child development; she must have had her list of the second-year
students she would be supervising some weeks ago. “And I suppose you will hope to do your placement at one of the settlement houses.”

“I hope to, yes.”

Miss Everett only nodded; you couldn’t read either approval or disapproval in her nod, but something compelled Grace to add, “I still believe very strongly in the settlement model, but I have learned a great deal from you about the scientific approach. I hope it needn’t always be…exclusive. One or the other, I mean.”

“I know what you mean, Miss Collins. I hope your tendency to idealism will not overwhelm your very fine scholarly mind. Good day, Miss Collins. Enjoy your summer holiday.”

Grace walked back from college rather than taking the subway. It was a warm afternoon and she let the sun drench her back and shoulders through the cambric of her blouse. The hem of her new spring skirt was two inches above the ankle: she fit in, fashion-wise, with the younger women in her class, though by comparison with many of the ladies she passed on the street, she still looked dowdy. She liked the feeling of the spring air circulating around her stocking-clad ankles. She thought about the red dress she’d tried on in Macy’s, wondering would she ever be daring enough to wear such a costume.

Soon college would end for the year and with it, the social work program. Next week Jack would write his final exams at McGill; he was coming down to visit her in New York for a week before they both returned to Newfoundland for the summer. After that—well, who could tell?

She wondered if he might propose—here, under the trees in Central Park. Jack had another year of medical school and one of residency after that, but that was fine by Grace, who was anxious to work for a while and use her new qualifications.

I want too many different things
, she thought. She wanted to be walking through Central Park in New York and also to be back
home, to be a working woman and also to be Jack’s wife. She wanted to be independent, here in New York, connected to no-one, and yet she also wanted Jack by her side. She wanted to be free of her family and yet she yearned to go home and have Lily welcome her with open arms, approve of the life Grace was building. She wanted everything, all at once. That was her problem.

What she did not want was what she found when she got to Mrs. Parker’s apartment: Jack’s suitcase in the hallway. Her heart leapt, at first. He was here early! But by the time she got to the parlour door, even before she saw him siting with elbows on his knees, face between his palms, she knew it was wrong. This was the first day of his examinations. Jack should not be here.

He stood slowly, crossed the room to her but did not take her in his arms. After a moment he reached out and took her hands instead.

“No one was home. The maid let me in,” he said. Not the explanation she was looking for.

“What—when did you arrive?” Not the question she wanted to ask.

“This morning. I took the night train down from Montreal. It took me awhile to find the place.”

He looked as if he hadn’t slept. “I’m sure Ida’s getting the guest room ready,” Grace said. “Do you want to lie down?”

“No, no, I want—” He looked around the room as if caged by its gentility, its expensive furniture and excellent taste. Words failed him. He could not tell her what he wanted.

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

He must have walked all the way up from Grand Central Station, yet he said quickly. “Yes—please. I—we need to talk.”

She led him out of the building and back across to the park, the wide sunny paths she had walked just half an hour ago. She tried to imagine what kind of news he might be bringing that would have
him here when he should still be at McGill. He said nothing at all until they were in the park, and then he asked whether her classes had finished yet for the year, whether she had written any examinations.

“You had one to write today, didn’t you?” Grace said. “Whatever you have to say must be important, if you’ve missed an exam for it. You’d better go ahead and tell me.”

“I didn’t miss an exam to come down and tell you anything,” Jack said. He walked looking straight ahead, his stride still long and military, his arms swinging, as though he were forever marching to some battlefield in Flanders. “It’s the other way around. I came down to tell you I’m not writing my exams. I can’t do it, Grace.”

She looked at him, but he would not return her gaze, so she had to search the lines of his face and body rather than his eyes for clues. She remembered how he had talked at Christmas about fear, about feeling overwhelmed. Then he had seemed like a man struggling to swim in deep waters. Now there was a calm without peace. It was the calm of a man who has been sucked under the waves and ceased to struggle.

“What happened?” she asked finally.

“I couldn’t do it. That’s all. I did try, even though I couldn’t study and I knew going in it was no go. Sat down in the examination hall and took the pen in my hand. Couldn’t write a word—just doodled on the page until it was time to leave. Today’s exam would have been a practical. I was supposed to stand there in front of a live patient—a human being!—and tell a supervising doctor what was wrong with him. God, how could anyone even think—” He held up his hands, out in front so she could see how they trembled. “I can’t do it, Grace. I’ve failed.”

“Failed—this year, this term of your program, that’s all.” She laid a hand on his arm.

He broke stride then, stumbled to a halt. “I’m not going back, Grace. Can’t finish medical school, can’t be a doctor. What kind of doctor breaks down in tears, has to rush from the room when he sees a wound? What kind of
man
, even—?”

She led him to a nearby bench. He sat in the same posture as when she had found him in the parlour, elbows on knees and head in hands. He ran his fingers through his hair, over and over ’til it stuck out in all directions, and started several different sentences but finished none of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I thought we had a future because I thought I had one. But now I see that won’t wash.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if you’re not a doctor,” Grace said.

Then, on those words, he finally looked up at her. “It doesn’t. At all?”

“Of course not. You know I was never—I mean, being the doctor’s wife didn’t matter to me like it would to some women. I’m not like my mother, or even yours.”

“My mother. Oh, she’ll—I can’t even imagine telling her, Grace. Or Dad, even worse. They were so proud, Grace. I thought I could make them—so proud…”

His voice broke the second time he said “proud.” Grace put a hand on his shoulder and as if that touch had made him collapse like a house of cards he leaned towards her. She gathered him into her arms, against her shoulder, and she felt him shake with sobs. She sat on a park bench in open sunlight, holding a man against her breast and letting him weep. She thought of Charley. She thought of Ivan Barry with his blind eye and the gaping mouth that was supposed to preach sermons one day. She thought of every dream shattered and broken, and after a while she cried too.

E
VERY TIME LILY looked at Jack Perry, she wished he were dead.

It was, admittedly, a harsh reaction to have to a pleasant young man: handsome, devout, the son of a respectable merchant. But Lily could not clap eyes on him without picturing his body in the mud of a French battlefield, torn and broken, his lifeless eyes staring up at her.

It was wrong that Jack was alive and Charley dead. She thought it before Jack left for the Front and she thought it, too, when he came home, strapping and healthy. If Jack had been brave, he would have signed up with Charley, and been at Monchy-le-Preux, and taken Charley’s death.

But now he and Grace were keeping company, and Lily had another reason to wish him dead. It would have been fine—ideal, in fact—if he and Grace had been sweethearts before the war. He could have gone off to war, and Grace could have written him letters, and then when he died, Grace’s heart would have been broken.

In Lily’s imagined life, she and Grace sat together for hours in the parlour or on the front porch of the house on warm days, content to knit and embroider in each other’s company. In that life, a dead soldier lover would fit perfectly. She did not wish Grace to live entirely without love; a little girlhood romance added colour to life, if only it ended with the girl’s innocence intact and a bittersweet memory to cherish.

It was a pretty picture, Grace safe and contented at her mother’s side, dreaming about her brave lover who gave his life for his country. Lily could not shake her resentment of Jack for surviving to shatter that image, though she felt wicked knowing that she was wishing poor Elizabeth Perry the same anguish she herself had known. But then, Mrs. Perry had three more sons.

The Catalina station was busy this June morning. Even Mr. Coaker himself was there, to greet his daughter Camilla, he told the Reverend as they waited for the train.
Now there’s a good girl!
Lily thought. Coaker and his wife had been separated for years and the girl lived with Mrs. Coaker: she was about Grace’s age and entirely devoted to her mother, though she came for a few weeks each summer to visit her father in Port Union. It was shameful, of course, that the Coakers lived separately—a bad example to the people, and one reason Lily refused to join in her husband’s admiration of Coaker. People whispered that the great reformer was so cruel to his wife that she could not live under his roof. But the girl was a model daughter, and when Lily had seen Camilla with Mrs. Coaker in St. John’s she felt a pang of envy. Imagine having a daughter whose only ambition was to stay by her mother’s side!

Now the train was here, and there was Miss Coaker, and Abe Russell with his new wife, and a knot of other people, and then Grace and Jack. As soon as Jack stepped off the train and reached back to give his hand to Grace, Lily saw that something was wrong with him. Nothing as wrong as what was wrong with Charley. Nothing as
irreparable as death. But the boy who had carried a sort of golden sheen on him ever since returning from the war looked tarnished now.

When Jack and Grace were home last summer, there had been an ease to their laughter, a confidence. As if, despite the fact that one of them had been through a war and another had lost her brother in that war, they still walked through the world with the belief that all would be well, that oceans would part at their feet. Such confidence in Grace had frightened Lily: no girl should go out into the world with her head held so high. A girl should go out guarded, watchful for a thousand dangers or, better yet, not go out into the world at all, but stay safe at her mother’s side. And clearly Grace had caught a hint of those dangers, for both she and Jack seemed guarded, the sunny light of their faces shadowed as they came down from the train.

There was a moment, before the two families parted ways at the station, when Grace and Jack stood very close gripping each other’s hands. She said something to him in a low voice, her forehead crinkled as it had done when she was very serious ever since she was a tiny girl. Jack shook his head, and then Grace pulled away to go with Lily and the Reverend back to the manse, and Jack went off with his parents.

Lily had no words to ask Grace what had happened. Nor would she ask about Abigail Hayward, even after Grace settled her bags around her feet in the carriage and said, “Mrs. Parker sends her love, Mother, and still wishes you would come for a visit.”

“Abigail Parker knows very well New York is the last place on earth I’d want to go for a visit. If I had any interest in gadding about.”

After supper the Reverend excused himself to visit an ailing parishioner. Lily was about to go into the parlour when Grace said, “It’s a lovely evening, I’m going to sit out on the verandah.”

“Very well.”

At the door she turned back. “Come out and sit with me, Mother?” She sounded hesitant as a schoolboy asking a girl to his first dance.

“The flies will have you eaten alive,” Lily said.

“I don’t mind. I’ve missed the fresh air and the view.”

“Suit yourself.” Then, as the door closed behind Grace, Lily went into the parlour to pick up her work bag. She took the set of table napkins she was embroidering—a wedding gift for a friend’s daughter—out on the verandah and pulled up the straight-backed chair across from the rocker where Grace was lounging. The evening air was pleasant, still holding a trace of the day’s warmth.

“See? It’s lovely out,” Grace said, swatting at a fly that buzzed near her nose.

“The insects will get worse as it gets dark.”

“If they start bothering me, I’ll go inside.”

They sat silently for a while as Lily picked away at her embroidery and Grace stared out at the harbour. “Don’t you have any sewing or knitting?” Lily asked.

“Nothing unpacked yet. Can’t I have a few minutes just to sit and enjoy a lovely evening? I don’t have to be doing something all the time, do I?”

There now, Grace had her back up already, and the subject of Jack Perry had not even been broached. Truly, there was nothing Lily could say to the girl, nothing at all. It had always been like this—Grace took offense so easily. But Lily knew she must not stop trying. Considering and discarding several possibilities, she finally put together a sentence that might get near the information she wanted without angering Grace too much. She practiced it several times in her head before she spoke.

“Will Jack be coming to speak to your father while he’s in town?”

Grace said nothing for a moment, then, without meeting her
mother’s eyes, she said, “I don’t know. I wouldn’t imagine so.”

Lily had hit somewhere close to the mark. Something must have gone wrong between the lovebirds.

“Oh. I suppose since you both still have another year of school…”

She let the sentence trail off, but this suggestion of delay in their engagement seemed to trouble Grace even more. She hopped out of the rocker and went and leaned out over the railing. “Careful,” Lily said—not that there was any real danger of Grace overbalancing and tumbling into the rhododendron bush, but it was a habit as accustomed as breathing, to warn her of possible danger. In another habit just as ancient, Grace responded by leaning out further, ’til only the tips of her shoes grazed the porch.

“Exactly,” she said finally. “I’ve got another year of college; plenty of time to talk about the future when that’s done.” Grace had already secured a job at the FPU offices for the summer.

“So you’re still determined to go back in September, are you?”

“I suppose so.” Grace shrugged.

“And what will you do after that? Does it really make sense to spend two years and hundreds of dollars getting a diploma if you’re going to get married as soon as you finish?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mother! Stop badgering me, will you?”

Lily swatted her embroidery at a whining buzz in the air near her head. She gathered her work back into her bag. “I knew those flies would have me tormented,” she said. “And it’s getting chilly. Put on a sweater if you’re staying out here.” She stood up and went inside.

In church the next morning Jack sat with his parents and Grace sat next to Lily as the Reverend expounded upon the good and faithful servant who would enter into the joy of his Lord. Jack walked Grace home from church, but Lily got no hint as to the reason for the strain in the air until Monday night when the Ladies’
Aid met at Mrs. Perry’s home.

Grace said she wasn’t going. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lily said. “Everyone round the harbour knows you’re keeping company with her son. It will look bad if you don’t go.”

“I don’t care how it looks.”

“That’s all very well for you, but I’ll be plagued with questions. People will think that you and Jack have had a falling-out. Worse yet, they’ll think you’re on bad terms with his mother.”

“I don’t mind what they think! Can’t you just tell them I’ve gone to bed with a headache? I’ll go to bed, then it’ll be half true.”

“I’m not in the habit of telling lies, or half-truths,” said Lily.

“Oh, aren’t you?” Grace said. A queer smile lifted the corners of her lips and she went to get her sweater. “I suppose I’d better come, after all.”

As Lily had suspected, Grace was the centre of an eager group, not just of the girls her own age but their mothers too, all eager to know about her time in New York, even if most of them were more interested in New York fashions than in social work. Midway through the evening, Lily overheard Mrs. Snelgrove ask Mrs. Perry, “So, will young Jack be working for his father this summer, until he goes back to college?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Perry said, and laid down the cup of tea she was holding. “Truly, Clara, I don’t know what to make of that boy. He tells me now he may not—” she looked around and lowered her voice, but not so much that Lily, positioned a little behind her, could not hear “—he may not even go back to school. Imagine! He’s always been so good, so hard working, and now, well—I don’t know what to make of him. His father’s very upset, and—oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t.”

Once again, Mrs. Perry glanced around as if to make sure no one overheard, but this time she looked behind her. Lily dropped her eyes to her needlework, but not before she met Mrs. Perry’s eyes
for one unguarded second.

Later, with the younger women out talking in groups on the lawn in the twilight, Mrs. Perry glided up to Lily in the parlour. Most of the women were gone now. Mrs. Perry’s maid came and went with teacups and trays.

“You overheard me talking to Mrs. Snelgrove about poor Jack,” Mrs. Perry said. “I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong to talk outside the house—I never do it—but I can talk to you, can’t I, Lily dear? We’re almost family, aren’t we? Poor Grace must be distracted. Did she tell you the whole story?”

Lily’s tongue was stilled by the easy assumption of confidences between mother and daughter. Elizabeth Perry had three daughters in addition to her fine handsome sons: did they all confide in their mother all the secrets and sorrows of their little love affairs, their private lives? Two of the girls were married now, of course, yet they were in and out of their mother’s house all the time with an easy intimacy Lily could not help but envy.

“Grace doesn’t say too much,” she admitted finally.

“Oh, she’s very discreet, I should be more like her myself. But the truth is it’s broken my heart, and to hear Zeke losing his temper over all the money we’ve spent on his education, and poor Jack just sits there and takes it, like a dog that’s been beaten—that’s not my boy, not at all. I don’t recognize him.” She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse and dabbed her eyes. “When he came home from overseas I was so glad, I thought God had spared us, and I thought I’d never ask for anything again. But now, to see him come back all—all defeated like, as if his spirit’s broken. Even the war didn’t do that to him!”

Or perhaps it did
. For half a moment Lily allowed herself to feel sympathy.

But she could harden her heart as easily as Pharaoh. She almost felt it hardening, like putting on armour inside her rib cage. “At least
he came back,” she said. “Whatever happens to him, he is alive. You should be grateful.”

“Of course, of course,” sniffled Mrs. Perry, “and we are, but…” She broke off, her head lifting to the sound of a male tread on the stairs. Her husband and son had been banished during the women’s meeting; Lily had thought they were gone out but Jack, at least, must have been upstairs. Now he came and stood in the doorway and took in his crying mother and the woman who might be, might have been, his mother-in-law. He looked haggard. That was the only word for it.

“Mother…Mrs. Collins,” he said. “I’m sorry, I thought all the ladies were gone.”

Elizabeth crossed the room to him, took hold of his arms and laid her head against his chest. Jack looked over her head at Lily, embarrassment covering over the terrible weariness in his face. “Is Grace still here?”

“I believe she’s out in the garden.”

Jack looked through the window but made no move to go. He let his mother cry against his shirt-front as Lily excused herself and made her way out of the Perrys’ house.