A Sudden Sun (32 page)

But if the barrier between Grace and Jack seemed to have crumbled, the barrier that separated her from Lily seemed as impenetrable as ever. When she walked into the manse and said hello to her parents, Grace saw, as she’d been seeing in her mind’s eye since New York, a different Lily—a young Lily, brave and frightened and alone, carrying a child whose father was far away, marrying a man she hoped would shield her secret. But that younger, vulnerable Lily disappeared almost at once behind the thin, stern, greying woman
who had burned the suffrage petitions, who had not given her blessing for Grace to go to Rome.

They embraced, coolly, pressed their cheeks against each other and stepped back. Grace had imagined all kinds of conversations, tearful confrontations with her mother in which she confessed the visit to New York, confronted Lily with what she knew, forgave her for burning the papers. Instead there was only this wary politeness. Nothing was said about Rome, or about suffrage, or about why it had been so long since Grace had been home. Getting out of the house to be with Jack was a double pleasure, first for Jack’s sake and second as an escape from all the things unsaid between herself and Lily.

On Saturday evening Grace and Jack walked over to Port Union to watch
Nanook of the North
at Congress Hall, the latest of the town’s impressive new edifices. Moving pictures were a rare treat outside St. John’s: another of the blessings Mr. Coaker had bestowed on the Union faithful. “Do you think the film will be anything like life in Labrador?” Grace asked Jack as they walked.

“I don’t know how a film could capture it,” Jack said, “but I’ll be interested to see someone try. Even if it only shows a little of what life’s like up there, it’s a world most people never imagine, much less see.”

“You really like it there, don’t you?”

“Even I find it hard to believe sometimes, but yes, I do. People keep asking—Dr. Grenfell himself asked me, when he visited this summer—if I’ll go back to medical school,” he added as they walked across the bridge. “The way they look at it, I’m doing good and useful work, and I could do so much more if I qualified with my M.D. But I have to tell them I can’t. I don’t really understand it myself, but I know there’s a balance I have to hang onto, and going back to school would destroy that balance, somehow. I don’t suppose you can understand that anymore than the rest of them can.”

“I don’t, fully,” Grace admitted. “But I know how unhappy you were in Montreal. I wouldn’t wish that on you again.”

“It’s not just unhappiness,” Jack said. “It’s a kind of…desperation, I suppose. I believe now I can fight it as long as I’m doing work I believe in. It’s not as if everything’s wonderful all the time, it’s just that I can keep my head above water. There’s been reports on this kind of thing, you know—men who came back from the Front and broke down months, even years later, but I think the simplest thing, the thing the old folks would say, is that if I went back to school my nerves wouldn’t stand the strain.” He took her hand. “We said when I went away that there were no strings binding us. All this time, I’ve been reminding myself of that, afraid every letter I got from you would say you were engaged to marry someone else.”

“I used to imagine I’d get a letter from you telling me you’d fallen in love with an English nurse and got married, or that you were going native and moving into a tilt with an Esquimo woman.” Grace stopped to lean over the bridge rail, watching the water tumble over the rocks below, the river widening at its mouth to open into the broad harbour beyond.

Jack laughed. “No, there’s no one else for me. Sometimes I can’t imagine sharing my life with anyone else. What do I have to offer, really? I’ll never be a doctor. I might live out the rest of my life on the Labrador coast, and that’s not much of a place to raise a family. And I can’t even promise a woman that I’ll be sane or stable from one day to the next. I feel fine now, but I remind myself of Sol Sweetapple’s old fish store—something that’s been patched and propped up so many times, so many different ways, you have to worry that the next strong wind might blow it down.”

They were walking again, into Port Union now. Grace could see, on the flat roof of the Union Store, the white triangles of codfish laid out to dry: fishermen were using the store roof as a flake. Nothing was wasted in Port Union. As always, the optimism of the place infected
her, and she took a deep breath, trying to find words to match her thoughts.

But Jack spoke first, still gripping her hand in his. “I say I can’t imagine sharing this life with anyone, but the truth is, I can’t imagine a life without you in it, either. I love you as much as I ever did, Grace—maybe more, after the way you’ve written to me and kept believing in me. I don’t know if it’s fair to you, loving you when I’ve got so little to offer. But I can’t change how I feel.”

Then Grace had the words she needed. “I don’t know what’s fair and what isn’t, or if that even matters when it comes to love. I know this much—I’ll marry you, Jack Perry, if you ever get around to asking me. If you don’t ask, then I’ll do all right by myself. I’m a New Woman, or so my mother tells people, in a tone that makes it clear she doesn’t approve. I can get by on my own—but I’d rather get by with you.”

“Somewhere in that speech I think you proposed to me, Miss Collins.”

They were at the steps of Congress Hall. The good people of Port Union were crowding into the yard, drawn by the unusual promise of moving pictures. It was hardly the place to kiss or embrace, but Jack took both Grace’s hands in his and held tightly. She thought of David Reid saying that he and Lily had been better off without each other. She thought of Ivan Barry alone in his boarding house, writing essays.
We live the lives we make for ourselves
, Grace thought,
as best as we can.

“I don’t want to be sitting alone at a restaurant table in thirty years, wondering about the life we might have had together,” she said. “Even Battle Harbour would be better than that.”

L
ILY HATED WINTERS around the bay. Her girlhood memories of winters in town were pleasant—sleigh bells in the streets, walking through crisp snow, church bells ringing out through chilly night air. Had it always been so bright and cold and clean? Or had memory transformed twenty winters into a series of Christmas cards?

Before her marriage she had spent one winter outside town: that winter after the fire, when she and her mother lived in her grandparents’ house in Harbour Grace. The day of the fire she remembered feeling aflame herself, as if she were incandescent. Then came that dull indoor winter in Harbour Grace, reading books by the fire and waiting for spring. It was tedious, but did not match the crushing despair of that first Greenspond winter—the worst winter of her life, Lily thought. Then she wondered about the winter after Charley died. No, the first winter of her marriage was the worst, the winter when she lived in that cold godforsaken parsonage on a barren island with a man she could never love. The winter she lost David’s child, and lay in her lonely bed plotting escape.

In the spring that followed that endless winter she did escape. Then she cabled the Reverend from Halifax and he sent the money for her to return. He even came to Port aux Basques to meet her steamer, though whether that was to help her or to make sure she really came back, Lily never knew. He said that he knew her mind must still be unbalanced over the loss of the baby. He said, “I forgive you. Only you mustn’t try to run away again; you must learn to be content.”

She did not run away again but she did not learn to be content either. She learned other things. She learned to be the minister’s wife, to rule the manse and the Sunday School and the Ladies’ Aid with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. She learned to take pleasure in a well-run household, in a well-organized parish. She learned to admire newly hooked rugs and rows of jelly preserves on her pantry shelf.

She learned to share a bed with her husband and to banish all thoughts of David Reid. She learned how very much her husband enjoyed playing the role of Hosea, the godly man who took back the wayward wife. She learned there was a kind of power in being Gomer, too, in being the wife of a man who knew she wanted to leave. She learned that he had changed the key to his strongbox, and hidden the new key where she could not find it.

Never once, in all that time, did Lily feel content. Resigned, perhaps. Not content. Then Charley was born. Lily held him in her arms and thought,
This is my reward
. And again, three years and two miscarriages later, Grace. She had her son and her daughter, and she loved them with a love more fierce than she had ever felt for David Reid. From the moment each of them left her body, her only fear was that she would lose them.

Her children were her consolation, but she didn’t want to raise them in godforsaken fishing villages. They deserved better than that. Lily waited out those first years in Greenspond and thought that
if her husband were more ambitious they might get back to St. John’s someday. Instead they moved from one outport to another, each as barren and poverty-stricken as the last.

Since William Coaker had moved to Port Union people said it was as good as being in town, that Port Union had everything St. John’s had. Lily laughed at them—to herself, of course. Port Union was a freak, an American town built on top of a Newfoundland outport, with the skeleton showing through. It was nothing like St. John’s, the city she loved and almost never returned to. Once every year or two, with the Reverend, who did not let her travel alone now. She saw her parents, returned for her mother’s funeral but not for her father’s remarriage to the entirely inappropriate Daisy Gill, her old Sunday School teacher. She wrote Abby Hayward Parker one letter a year at Christmas. She knew every woman in every town they lived in; she drank tea in the kitchens of fisherwomen just come in from making fish on the flakes and she sat on committees with the wives of merchants who sent their children to school in England. She never made another close woman friend, not after Abby Hayward and Jessie Ohman had both led her astray. She would never again love anyone but her children, Lily promised herself.

Now the children were gone—Charley dead and Grace gone away. She had fought with all the strength she had to protect them, to spare them suffering, and to keep Grace, at least, safe by her side. You couldn’t do that to a son, but a daughter, surely, you could shelter from the world. But not Grace. She was as headstrong and eager for the world as young Lily had been years ago. Lily had lost her children after all; she had not been able to keep them safe, any more than Lily’s own parents had kept her safe.

Lily had seen it when Grace came home for a few days in the fall—her first visit home in ages, and she had barely pitched long enough to look around. She was off out the door with young Jack Perry, that useless know-nothing, as soon as she had her bags laid
down. He had been down on the Labrador for, what, a year or more? Lily thought the whole business of Jack going off to work for that Grenfell man was foolishness, but all the same at least while he was in Battle Harbour he wasn’t in St. John’s getting Grace into trouble. The few days they’d spent together here in Catalina—well, Lily was nervous about that. The two of them roamed all over Catalina and Port Union those warm summer days and evenings. Grace was all full of high ideals and as righteous as a preacher, but then Lily herself had been that way once, and her high ideals had not stopped her from getting up to what she shouldn’t. What would become of Grace if she were in the family way and young Perry was off on the Labrador coast with the Esquimos?

Now Grace was back in St. John’s and Lily was alone again with the Reverend. He was busy with parish meetings and visiting the sick, reading books and writing sermons, and jawing with William Coaker whenever the old man was in Port Union. Lily had her own kind of busy-ness, organizing the fall sale of work and making sure the new schoolteacher didn’t fool up the Christmas pageant, but what pleasure she took in such things had paled in these last few years. More and more she found herself laying aside work to sit alone with her thoughts, which seemed to grow darker along with the skies of late November.

She sat in the parlour one chilly morning, crocheting lace edging on a pillowcase for the sale, when the front door opened. Her husband never came home at midmorning; he came for his dinner at twelve o’clock sharp. He stayed in the office at church and wrote his sermons there, and made himself available for parishioners if they needed to drop by with a question or a problem, which they generally did.

But he was here, at ten-thirty in the morning. He explained he hadn’t been feeling well, was overcome with weakness and—he was going to go on, something about his stomach, but Lily didn’t want
to hear indelicate details and told him he should go lie down. He went up to his study, reappeared at lunchtime but ate only a little. Then he had to go again, because he was meeting with someone at the church—some workmen coming to do something to the church, something that needed to be done before winter. The roof? Windows? She wasn’t sure. Apparently it couldn’t be done in summer because the workmen were also fishermen; nothing could be done ’til the fishing was done. At any rate the Reverend went to his meeting and by suppertime seemed quite himself again.

Lily might have forgotten the odd incident but for what happened later. At the time it was only an interruption between trimming pillowcases and going to play piano for the Christmas concert rehearsal. But later it was from that day, the day of coming home early, that she dated the beginning of what people referred to as All the Reverend’s Trouble.

The Reverend’s Trouble was a private matter for the first little while—a collection of complaints and ailments that he kept mostly to himself. But there were further interruptions to the routine: a day’s work he could no longer complete, meals he could not eat. “Dyspepsia,” he said. “Indigestion.” It happened often enough that for the first time since she had known him the portly Reverend began to lose weight: his suits hung loose off a diminished frame. When Elizabeth Perry pulled Lily aside after church and said they were all praying for the poor Reverend, Lily adjusted her vision and looked closely at her husband. The man was ill; something would have to be done.

There was a doctor in Bonavista, but the Reverend would not go to see him, even after the Sunday when he was so ill he could not give the sermon. One of the deacons—a kind and sincere man chosen for his piety and not for his ability to speak in public—had to get up into the pulpit and read out the sermon the Reverend
had penned, stumbling over words like “justification” and “sanctification.” Lily sat through the hesitant reading and the concerned questions of the congregation afterwards. She went home to find that her husband had spent the morning vomiting into a chamber pot, and the maid was in tears.

They were locked hard into winter then. It was January, and hard to go anywhere, much less all the way to Bonavista for the doctor. The Reverend rallied and felt a little better. He preached the next Sunday and thanked everyone for their prayers. But he continued to lose weight. Lily had to take in all his trousers. As she did so she thought,
If he really is ill, seriously ill, I will have to care for him, I will have to wipe drops of sweat from his brow and likely far worse.
Even adjusting his pants seemed too intimate.

For five years, early in her married life—from the time she returned from Halifax to the day she knew she was carrying Grace—Lily had submitted to her husband in the marriage bed, endured his touch frequently enough to conceive four times. After Grace, her second surviving child, was born, she told the Reverend there would be no more. She had the two children, a boy and a girl, and henceforth she would sleep alone.

He had not been happy about this, had told her it was part of her duty as a wife. He said a man had needs and that as a man of God he was not free to satisfy them elsewhere, so she must save him from sin and allow him back into their bed. She had gambled on the fact that he wasn’t the kind of man to force her, and she was right.

Now Lily found herself having to go into his bedroom, then switching rooms to give him the more comfortable bed because he so rarely got a good night’s sleep. In February she finally wrote to the Bonavista doctor and asked him to come.

Lily thought afterwards—she should have realized it beforehand, really—that all her husband’s hesitation, his refusal to call a doctor, had been because he already knew something was far more
wrong than dyspepsia. He had wanted to put off the evil day, to avoid having the truth confirmed.

But it was confirmed, and there was to be a journey to St. John’s for an operation. Much as she hated Catalina, Lily did not enjoy travelling to town. She loved walking through St. John’s shops, fingering lovely bolts of fabric and picking up bone-thin teacups and leafing through brightly coloured magazines, but in the end it only reminded her that such luxuries were not to be had in her everyday life. She came away from a stroll down Water Street more discontented than before. Lily believed, and told others, that everyone should accept her lot in life and make the best of it, but it was harder when she was in St. John’s.

What she didn’t want was to come to town this way—as the poor relative, the outport minister’s wife, in need of help and pity. She always hoped that when she came her father would feel pleased, would think that this match he had brokered so long ago with had worked out very well. She liked to imagine that Daisy would look at her and think, “Now there’s a real lady,” and that Grace would think, “I wish I could be like my mother—so graceful and composed.” She wanted people to greet her in church and afterwards say to each other, “Ah, Lily Hunt—Lily Collins she is now—she’s done well for herself, hasn’t she?”

Lily had never admitted these thoughts to herself before but the first night that she spent in the guest-room in her father’s house they all came out and paraded themselves before her. This visit was everything she dreaded: she came to town as a woman in need. Everyone was kind and helpful; Grace and Daisy took turns going to the hospital to sit with the Reverend so that Lily could rest. On the day of the operation Grace sat with Lily all morning in the hospital waiting room.

“Will you both stay in town while Papa’s convalescing?” Grace asked. “Grandfather and Daisy would be glad to have you.”

“We’ll stay until your father is well enough to travel. After that, I’m sure he would be more comfortable in his own house.”

“Then let me come back with you. You’ll need help—more help than a housemaid can give.”

“What about this precious job of yours? I thought it was so important, you couldn’t leave it to come home for a holiday.”

“This would be…different. It’s not a holiday. I’m sure the church would understand.”

“Either your job is important or it’s not; you can’t have it both ways.”

“Let’s not quarrel, Mama, not while Papa’s in the operating theatre.”

“It’s good of you to offer, but I’ll manage just fine at home with your father. No need to change any of your…plans.”

It was a very long operation but the doctor came out afterwards to tell them that he thought it was a success, that he believed they had “got it all.” Then there were days of recovering in hospital and another fortnight at the house on Queen’s Road while the Reverend got back on his feet.

“On his feet” meant shuffling around the house leaning heavily on a cane, but at least he was getting dressed in suits again instead of wearing a bed-jacket. And his spirits were good: he told everyone that he felt much better, although he still could not eat properly—only thin porridge and custard, and not much of that.