A Sudden Sun (6 page)

I
SPOKE TO someone today who wants to meet you,” Daisy told “ Grace. “Mrs. Parker—Abigail Hayward, she was. John Hayward’s daughter. You know,” she added, turning to her husband, “Hayward the lawyer? Abigail’s lived in New York ever since she was married, but she’s home visiting, now that her father’s so ill.”

“I remember John Hayward’s girl,” Grandfather said, ladling gravy over his roast chicken. “Flighty little thing. I never thought she was a good influence.”

“Well, perhaps not—but she’s over fifty now, I don’t imagine she’s flighty anymore.” Daisy turned back to Grace. “She and your mother were great friends when they were girls. I told her all about you and she said you sounded like the spitting image of your mother. She’d like to see your mother again too, of course. I wonder could we convince Lily to come out here for a week or so?”

“It’s hard to say,” Grace said. Lily’s visits to town were few, and Grace had the clear impression she did not enjoy staying in the house under Daisy’s cheerful regime.

“Well, anyway I’ve invited Mrs. Parker and her sister—Violet Golding, you know her from church, of course—for dinner tomorrow night, so at least she’ll meet you. And your young man as well, naturally.”

Daisy adored Jack. Shortly after Jack came home, one of Grandfather’s proofreaders had come down with pneumonia and Grandfather had hired Jack to replace him. As the proofreader was nearly as old as Grandfather himself, there was no telling how long the job might last, but of course Jack only wanted temporary work, to earn money towards his return to medical school in the fall. He boarded with his married brother, Earl, who ran the St. John’s office of the Perry family business, but he spent many evenings at the Hunt home.

“He’s not really
my
young man, Aunt Daisy,” Grace said after her grandfather had excused himself from the table and the women lingered over their tea.

“You only mean he hasn’t asked you to marry him yet—but he will. I hope your mother didn’t scare him off too badly when you brought him home.”

“My…my mother? Did she write to you?” Grace had, of course, said nothing to Daisy or anyone else about her conversation with Lily.

Daisy laughed. “Oh, Gracie, I know your mother. Sure I knew her back when her and Abby Hayward was girls, before your grandmother died. Your mother had some fine ideas of her own back then. Don’t pay too much mind to anything she says about you and Jack. She’s not a happy woman, is Lily, and you can’t blame her too much.”

“You mean…because of Charley?”

Daisy looked startled. “What, poor Charl? No, no, not that—I mean, that’s a pity, of course, it’s a tragedy. It’d be a setback for any woman. But poor Lily, no, that only knocked the last bit of life out
of her. She had the good took out of her years before that, long before you was born, even before Charl was born, if you ask me.” The more comfortably Daisy settled into a conversation, the more her Bonavista Bay accent came to the fore.

“What do you mean? When she married my father…?”

Daisy stared at her for a moment and then the expression on her face completely changed, like a child in school who has been daydreaming and has now been called to attention by the teacher. “Now, I’ve gone and said more than I should,” she said. “It’s running into Abby Hayward, that’s what it is, is got me digging up old foolishness from the past. Don’t you mind me.” She stood up with her teacup, forestalling as she often did the maid’s efforts to clear the table. Before marrying Grandfather, Daisy had lived in genteel poverty and had never gotten used to being waited on.

But she played the gracious hostess the next evening when everyone arrived for dinner. It was not difficult even before introductions were made, Grace thought, to guess which of the two visiting ladies had spent her married life in New York. Abigail Parker talked more loudly than her sister, her speech full of sharp American vowels. Grace knew little about fashions but even she could tell Mrs. Parker was more fashionably dressed than Mrs. Golding, her short beaded jacket neatly hugging her waist, her skirt reaching just to the ankle.

“My dear! Lily’s daughter!” Mrs. Parker launched herself at Grace, grabbing both her hands and pressing them to her own beaded bosom. “I would have known you anywhere, no mistaking those eyes and cheekbones. And you carry yourself just like her—a beauty completely unaware. Turn around and step back, darling, so I can get a proper look.”

Aunt Daisy introduced Jack as “Grace’s friend, Captain Jack Perry. They grew up together in Catalina before the war. He was a great friend of poor Charley.”

“Oh, poor Charley!” Mrs. Parker pressed her own hand, now, to her breast, and turned to her sister. “I told you, didn’t I, Vi, about Lily’s poor boy—lost in France—I’m so sorry for your loss, my dears,” she finished, with a glance that swept from Grace to Grandfather, taking in Jack and Daisy along the way.

Once it had been commonplace for people to offer sympathy over Charley’s loss: it happened every time Grace spoke to someone in the year after his death. Now it had been a long time and she realized with a start that she had, not exactly forgotten Charley, but had stopped feeling his loss every day. It was as if Charley had been moved to a different room, the room full of dead people, and she no longer expected to hear his voice or step among the living. That realization struck her like a second loss.

At dinner, Mrs. Parker carried all before her on a wave of conversation, and Aunt Daisy, who loved talkative guests, rose to the challenge. They talked about the flu epidemic and the difficulties of men returning home from the conflict, which drew Jack into conversation. Jack was the sort of man with whom older ladies were always charmed, Grace had noticed, and Mrs. Parker engaged him in a discussion of the differences between the American veterans and the Newfoundlanders. Then she asked Grace about her volunteer work at the hospital. Mrs. Parker herself, it appeared, volunteered in some capacity with the Red Cross in New York, “but not, of course, the sort of work you do. Mrs. Hunt has told me so much about how you are right in there working with those poor wounded men, and all the rest. You’re like your mother in spirit, too—always going about doing good, as it says in the Good Book.”

“Oh well—there’s such a great need, you know,” Grace said. “I do the little things—change sheets, and bring dinner trays, and sometimes read to the men to keep their spirits up.” An image of Ivan Barry’s ruined face appeared in her mind; she felt small, as if she were using his suffering to make herself look brave and generous.
“The doctors and nurses do all the real work, of course.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t train for a nurse yourself.”

“I thought of it, during the war, but …”

“But you’d have wanted to go overseas—so many girls did—and it would have been too hard on your parents—especially on your poor mother. Losing her boy overseas was bad enough. A mother is almost prepared to lose a son in war, but a daughter?”

Mrs. Parker steered the conversation in Grandfather’s direction next, asking what he thought of President Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations. She herself thought it was a grand plan, though she knew many people in New York who disagreed. Jack and Grace joined the discussion, leaving Daisy to talk with Mrs. Golding about mutual acquaintances, of which they fortunately had several.

In the parlour after supper Mrs. Parker positioned herself next to Grace on the small settee, and leaned in close. “You must come and see me while I’m here,” she said. “I’m in town for another month at least—well, of course how long depends on what happens with poor Father. I’ve cabled your mother and she sent back a message that it’s impossible to come this time of year. Is that true? There’s a railway line all the way out there now, isn’t there?”

“There is,” Grace said. Honesty, and perhaps a desire to tarnish Mrs. Parker’s warm memories of Lily, drove her to say, “It’s not impossible. But Mother doesn’t like to go anywhere much anymore.”

“How sad.” Mrs. Parker looked down at her own plump, pretty hands, playing with her fan. “I would go out to see her, but—dear Papa, you know. I must stay near him…. But I would so love to see your mother again. I feel she’s had a hard time. There’s no life without sorrow, is there? My own has been that I have no children alive—only two sweet angels in Heaven. Say you’ll come to see me while I’m in town, darling, even if your mother won’t.”

Grace said she would, indeed, come.

“I work with some very interesting people in New York, you know,” Mrs. Parker said. “Oh, I’m not the one to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty like you. I chair committees, sit on boards, raise funds, that sort of thing. Ladies devoted to good works—men dismiss us, but the fact is there’s very little good works that would get done without ladies. So much suffering in the war, but so much here at home, too! Newfoundland seems a simpler, finer place, but I know—I remember—there’s hardship here too. So, what do you think of Lloyd George?”

Grace felt like she was being given an oral examination in school by a very distracted and scatterbrained mistress who had forgotten to tell her what the subject of the test would be. Fortunately, Grace did have opinions on the subject of the British prime minister, and was able to gather them. The conversation broadened, then, like a stream widening out into a pond, taking in the whole group, and Grace had no more private conversation with Mrs. Parker until the guests were leaving. Her mother’s old friend turned to her again at the door and said, “Expect an invitation from me within the week, unless poor Papa takes a sudden turn for the worse. Just you alone, so we can really have a proper talk.”

Late that night, when the guests had gone and her grandfather and Daisy were in bed, Grace slipped out of her bedroom and climbed the staircase to the third floor. Grandfather and Daisy only used the first two floors of the three-storey house; they had given Grace what used to be the spare bedroom across from theirs. Annie, the maid, went upstairs once a week to dust but otherwise the top floor was unused, furniture shrouded with sheets so the rooms were like ghosts of rooms. Grace had not been up there since she was a child and had played hide-and-go-seek with Charley in the old house. Now she went slowly up the stairs, thinking of Abigail Parker telling her she was just like Lily in spirit, and of Daisy saying Lily had “fine ideas” once. What kind of ideas?

She didn’t know which of the old rooms was which. Even when her mother was young, would they have needed so many rooms? Lily had been the only surviving child, two others having died young of diphtheria. Had they had a cook or maids who slept in these upper rooms? One might have been a guest room, since the spare room on the second floor used to be Grandfather’s study. And this room—this must have been Lily’s bedroom, Grace thought, as she pushed the door open.

A broad bay window looked down on Queen’s Road and the huddled shades of two wingback chairs flanked it. A mirror over the dressing table was unshrouded and thick with dust. Annie was not being particularly diligent, then, about dusting. And why should she? Grace stood in front of the mirror, seeing a greenish, distorted picture of herself—the old mirror, the dust, moonlight filtering in through the blind windows. Was she really the living image of Lily? People said so, but Grace had never been able to see it.

This could not, after all, have been her mother’s room growing up, not this exact room, for Grace remembered her grandfather saying he had had to rebuild the whole house after the Great Fire, and Lily must then have been—Grace counted backwards—about nineteen, as old as Grace herself was now. So this room, if it was Lily’s, must have been hers after the fire, in the new house.

She pressed the light switch and a dim bulb flickered to life. Grace folded back the sheet that covered a small dressing table. A silver comb and brush set sat on top of a lace doily. One drawer was empty except for sachets of potpourri. The one below that held ribbons and gloves. At the bottom of the drawer, a tiny key. But the dressing table had no locked drawers.

On the other side of the room, similarly shrouded, was a rolltop desk with one locked drawer. Not much of a system for hiding secrets, Grace thought—a locked drawer with the key just across in the dressing table. But perhaps there were no secrets in
there, after all. Only things Lily had forgotten, things like the comb and brush that she had not deemed worth taking with her when she left home as a bride.

The key fitted the lock, the drawer slid open, and sure enough, it contained little except newspapers and clippings. Several copies of a paper called the
Water Lily
, with articles circled and words underlined. Clippings from the
Telegram
, the
Herald
, the
Gazette
—accounts of the Great Fire, accounts of attempts by the WCTU to pass a temperance law. Grace spread them all out on the bed, wondering if these were indeed her mother’s youthful papers. Handbills from meetings promoting Votes For Women? Grace read through one:
In Newfoundland today a woman who manages her own business can have no vote, no voice in elections—yet the most incapable man in her employ may do so
. And every word still sadly true in the year of our Lord 1919, she thought.

Had Lily once been a suffragist? She certainly had no sympathy for that cause now. Grace remembered her mother glancing at a newspaper article last year when women in Canada got the franchise. “They say it’s only for the wives and mothers of soldiers while the men are away at war, but of course they won’t give up power once they’ve had the taste of it,” Lily had said.