A Sudden Sun (35 page)

Inside she found Lily writing labels to stick on trunks. “Ask Jack to come down this evening with a cart and find a boy to load these trunks up for me. I want to take them to the train station tomorrow—I’m going to ship them to Papa’s house in town.” She stood up, brushing off her hands. “There are only three. I’ve gotten rid of most everything else. I never liked most of this furniture; Joe Kenny and his new wife are going to buy it off me, and they’re welcome to it.”

“Then—you’re sure you won’t stay in Catalina?”

Lily looked surprised. “What would I stay here for? I never liked the place. I never liked being around the bay at all. I used to always hope your father would get a call to a church in St. John’s. The Lord knows ambition is more important than piety if you want to get ahead in the church.”

“I never heard you say that—that you didn’t like it around the bay,” Grace said.

“Well, it didn’t seem right to say it when he was alive. It would have seemed—ungrateful. Your father, God rest his soul, took good care of me. In his own way.”

“So—will you go back to town? To Grandfather’s house?”

“Under Daisy’s roof? Not likely. My trunks will be all right there.” She turned to look over her shoulder at Grace. “Are you worried I’ll want to live with you and Jack? I won’t, you know. I’d rather have a few rooms of my own—and I can afford it. Your father left us better provided than I thought, putting his money into that piece of land when land was cheap over in Port Union. And I’ll say this for Jack and his father: they gave me a decent price for my piece of it. You don’t have to trouble yourself about me.”

“You make it sound like you might just walk off into the sunset and I’ll never hear from you again.”

Lily gave her an odd look. “And that would bother you, would it?”

“Of course it would! You’re my mother.” Grace was so accustomed to Lily wanting to know about—and pass judgement on—Grace’s every move, every plan. Now, it seemed, she was absorbed for the first time with plans of her own.

“Well, I am going away for a little while,” Lily said. “I’m going to follow my trunks into town next week, spend a night or two at Papa’s house, and book passage on a steamer. I have it in mind to take a little trip.”

“Where?”

“To Canada or the States, or both—I’m not entirely sure yet. I have some invitations to reply to, some old friends to see.”

Grace left her mother’s house that afternoon—remembering to send Jack back later in the day with a boy and a cart—thinking how little one ever knew of another person. Or maybe it was just how
little she knew of Lily. Her image of a corridor with doors closing all around had been so wrong. Lily planned to turn a corner, walk through an entirely new door—or perhaps re-enter an old one.

“She must be going to New York,” Grace said to Jack in bed that night. “To stay with Mrs. Parker, I suppose, but I think she plans to look up Mr. Reid.”

“Do you really think she’d do that? After all these years?”

“Why else would she be so secretive about where she’s going?”

All Lily had been willing to reveal about her own plans was, “When I get to where I’m going, I’ll send you a letter so you’ll know where to reach me. Will that do?”

“I suppose it’ll have to,” Grace had said.

She imagined her mother going off on the train—she had never seen Lily travel alone—to St. John’s, then on the steamer to New York. Imagined a letter coming with a New York postmark and an American stamp. Tried—and failed—to imagine what her mother might do next, after showing up in New York and telling David Reid she was alive, well, and widowed.

Grace thought of David Reid’s words, that living the life you wanted meant more than being with the person you loved. Did he really believe that, or was it only the thing he told himself to get him through the long and lonely days? Grace thought of their piece of land in Port Union, of two rooms on a St. John’s street, of a place on the Labrador coast she’d never seen. She nestled her head into Jack’s shoulder and he moved a sleepy arm around her. She hadn’t lived long enough to be sure, but she thought David Reid was probably wrong.

S
HE STANDS ON deck as near the bow of the
Bruce
as she can, wrapped up in her tatty old fur, the harsh northeaster blowing straight off the waves into her face. Lily is the only passenger out on deck on this fierce day. She had been huddled in her cabin like all the rest but she could not resist the urge to be outdoors, to watch the ship slicing through the water, to know that Newfoundland was falling behind her and the rest of the world drawing closer.

She has crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence twice before in her life: twenty years ago with the Reverend when they went to that conference in Toronto, and ten years before that—the time she ran away.

For years Lily used to think about that journey, wonder what would have happened had she sent the cable to David Reid instead to Obadiah Collins. She can’t even really remember, now, why she made the choice she did. She only remembers sitting in the hotel room looking at the two handwritten messages and knowing she would send one of them. She had not decided until she was dressed to go to the cable station. She remembers the slips of paper in her
gloved hands. Maybe she had actually carried both pieces of paper as far as the cable office, reserving decision until the very last minute. But why one and not the other? Had she been driven by a sense of what was right, by the vows she had taken to her husband?

She dimly recalls debating in her head whether her marriage, at that time not consummated, was a real marriage at all. She could have easily convinced herself that David, the man she had slept with, was her real husband in the eyes of God. It wasn’t morality, then. It must have been that she chose what was safe, what she knew. Going with David, going to New York and into whatever unimaginable life he was living there, would have placed her forever beyond the reach of the world she had known.

She cannot trace now what might have been in the mind of that young girl thirty years ago, but maybe, in the end, she sent the cable to the one man she was certain would come for her. Not out of love: David loved her in a way Obadiah never did. Duty, in the end, is stronger than love. Perhaps that was what she gambled on. And she lived thirty years with the consequences of that gamble.

Lily was so shocked to hear Grace talk of meeting David, sitting across from him at a restaurant table. He must be an old man now, as Lily herself is old, while in her mind he is preserved like a butterfly pinned on a board, forever young and handsome.

She cannot imagine what his life has contained all these years in New York. Hers has been as predictable and safe as she knew it would be when she chose to stay with the Reverend. The only thing she could not have predicted was the war that had taken Charley from her. That was not part of the pattern. But if she had cabled David Reid that day in Halifax, instead of cabling her husband, then she would never have conceived Charley at all. She would not have had—Charley himself would not have had—those twenty good years of young life that he laid down on the soil of France. And there would have been no Grace. One cannot wish one’s children unmade.

Now it is over. The Reverend is dead. Charley is dead. Grace will go on into her own life with Jack. Lily wanted Grace by her side all those years, doing fancywork on the porch of the manse in Catalina, and instead Grace blew about like a kite on the breeze. But she came home in the end, when she was needed. “You’re here now and that’s what matters.” Lily ought to have said those words to Grace, as the Reverend said something of the sort to her: a kind of absolution.

It is too cold to stay outside; she goes below to her cabin and sleeps until the ship docks in Nova Scotia. This time she knows which train to take and where she is going: no hard decisions to make, no cables to send. She has money in her wallet and a letter of invitation in her purse.

Is it a mistake to think you can revisit the past? For thirty years Lily has set her face against the past, or at least against that year or two after the fire when she was growing into an entirely different kind of Lily. She has tried to forget not only the people she knew and loved in those years, but also the books she read, the articles she wrote, the meetings she attended—everything that made up her life in those years. There was so much more to it than lying down on a bed with David Reid. She made herself believe that if that was a mistake, then all the rest must have been a mistake too. Grace became a suffragist and Lily was terrified, frightened as much by her own past as by Grace’s future, frightened of the demons hidden in Pandora’s box.

You can’t change the past, she thinks. But you can, perhaps, make amends for what went wrong the last time you saw someone. You might try to weave the past into your present life before you go on into the future. Lily has been feeling old for a long, long time, but today, with the train wheels clicking away the miles of the Maritimes beneath her, she feels that perhaps fifty-one is not that old. She knows women who were widowed at fifty and lived to be nearly
ninety; they were widows longer than they were wives.

As dusk falls the porter comes around to pull down the sleeper berths. Lily, who sat up on the long train ride to Port-aux-Basques and slept little on the steamer, relaxes gratefully into her berth, lulled by the gentle rocking of the train. She makes a mental note that it is always worth the extra money to pay for a sleeper. She must remember that for the journey home, or wherever she goes next.

That night, and the next day as the train clicks away the miles, Lily reads
The Age of Innocence
, a novel she filched from Grace’s shelves. She reads the whole book, from beginning to end: there is plenty of time. And then she wishes there was someone to talk with about what she has just read. She hopes that her future, whatever it contains, will include conversations about books. For so many years she has read nothing but church papers and ladies’ magazines.

Now the train is rolling into the final station, the big city with its towers and streets emerging out of the countryside all around, everything becoming closer and greyer. Lily is not surprised to find her heart pounding a little. She hears the conductor’s voice call out the stop, and the other travellers get their cases down. A man hands Lily’s cases to her. She has two: a big one and a small. She will need a porter.

She steps off the train: the platform swirls with people, with faces, with voices. For a moment she feels overwhelmed and wishes she were back in the silent manse. But that is no longer her home. What a gift, to live so many years in a house that wasn’t hers, so that upon her husband’s death she is forced out into the world.

“Lily! Lily Hunt, is that really you?”

Years pass, everything changes, but she would know that voice anywhere. Lily turns, straining to see through the crowds on the Montreal platform, looking for the face that matches that voice.

But the face, of course, has been changed by time just as her own has. It is an old face now, plump and wrinkled, but the eyes still keen and sharp as ever. She opens her arms: just as in her letters, it is as if the years in between and the harshness of their last meeting never happened.

“Dear Lily,” says Jessie Ohman, “I am so glad you have come.” And Lily steps forward.

A SUDDEN SUN is a work of fiction, and my main characters—Lily, Obadiah and Grace Collins, David Reid, Jack Perry, and all their families—are entirely products of my imagination. However, the world in which they live—which consists mainly of St. John’s, Catalina and Port Union, Newfoundland, in the 1890s and 1920s—is real, as are many of the minor characters in the story.

Real people who make an appearance in these pages include Jessie Murray Ohman, Julia Salter Earle, May Kennedy, Fannie McNeil, and Sir William Coaker. In all cases, while I have incorporated as much as I can of the known biographies of these historical individuals, they are used as fictional characters, and dialogue attributed to them is my own invention.

Not nearly enough has been written about the movement for women’s suffrage in Newfoundland. I am indebted to two sources in particular: Margot I. Duley’s book
Where Once Our Mothers Stood We Stand: Women’s Suffrage in Newfoundland, 1890-1925
, and Marian Frances White’s film
The Untold Story of the Suffragists of Newfoundland
. White’s film was what first aroused my interest in the story of Newfoundland suffragists, and among the many primary and secondary sources I read in preparing for the novel, that film and Duley’s book were the guideposts to which I returned over and over.

As much as possible, I have tried to keep the adventures of my fictional characters within the boundaries of known history, but I have taken creative license in filling in some of the gaps. For example, Jessie Ohman’s career as temperance crusader, suffragist, and editor of the
Water Lily
can be traced through her writings in that paper. But some of her later activities I’ve depicted here, such as her conflicts with other WCTU leaders or her attempts to start a Woman Suffrage League, are the products of my imagination as little is known about her career outside the pages of the
Water Lily
. In 1923, May Kennedy travelled alone to the International Woman Suffrage Congress in Rome as Newfoundland’s sole delegate, but I did not think history would be too severely damaged by allowing Grace Collins, a fictional character, to travel with her.

I am thankful to the many people who answered questions or helped me in my research, including but not limited to: the wonderful staff at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the City of St. John’s Archives; the aforementioned Marian Frances White; Janet McNaughton, who was very helpful in directing me to sources on the 1892 St. John’s fire; and the staff at the various historic properties in the town of Port Union.

Thanks to everyone at Breakwater Books, a team of people who are truly committed to producing great Newfoundland literature, and to my keen-eyed editor, Marnie Parsons, who made many helpful suggestions. I always owe thanks to my friends the Strident Women for their encouragement, particularly, in the case of this book, to Tina Chaulk and Jennifer Morgan who gave the manuscript a thorough reading and made several insightful critiques.

I was privileged to have been able to spend a week at the Independent Writers’ Retreat at the Tatamagouche Centre in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, working on a draft of this manuscript in a beautiful and serene environment. I’m grateful to facilitators Gwen Davies and Chris Benjamin, and to my fellow workshop
participants, particularly Katrina Stonoff, for being part of that wonderful experience.

Thanks to readers of my blog and viewers of my vlog who have followed my “Writing Wednesday” series of YouTube videos through the writing of this novel. I continue to be grateful to the good people of Starbucks/Chapters in St. John’s for providing me with my “office space” and a steady stream of raspberry mochas.

As many readers know and others might guess from the dedication, my mother, Joan (Sue) Morgan died suddenly while I was in the middle of writing this book about mothers and daughters. This is the first book I’ve ever written that has not been copyedited by her keen eyes, and I missed her input more than words can tell. I am deeply grateful to my dad, Don Morgan, who was, with this as other books, one of my very first readers and read it not only with an editor’s eye but with the eye of someone who remembers a version of St. John’s that has long passed away, and was often able to suggest corrections or additions to the historical details in these pages. I have been blessed from the very beginning to have parents who believed that writing books was a perfectly sensible thing to do, and have always supported me in that endeavour. Likewise, my husband, Jason, and my teenagers, Chris and Emma, have provided more love and support than I can ever thank them for.

Despite all the editorial eyes that have gone over these pages, any historical errors that remain, intentional or unintentional, are entirely my own.