Emancipation Day (16 page)

Jack climbed out of the truck, locked both doors and followed her to the motel. While he’d been waiting, the cut on his hand had stopped throbbing, but now it started again. He tried to stay behind her but she waited for him, took his arm when he caught up to her. A room. Was she going to let him stay in the room? Or had she taken two rooms? “We’re in number six,” she said.

He had never seen a motel room before except in movies. When she opened the door and turned on the ceiling light he was amazed at the tidiness, how everything was reduced to only what you’d need if all you ever did in this room was sleep and wash, or maybe sit and smoke. A bed, neatly made, a sink with a mirror, two towels, a small bar of soap wrapped in paper to show it hadn’t been used, a dresser with nothing on it but an empty ashtray, a single chair. Through an open door he saw a toilet and the corner of a metal shower stall. Della told him to take off his shirt and ran lukewarm water into the sink. He
watched her in the mirror above it, but she didn’t look up. His pants were cut through at the knees, he hadn’t noticed that, and the blood on them had begun to dry. He took his shirt off and put it on the bed, then went over to the sink. Della took his wrist and put his hand in the basin and kept it there. Their eyes met in the mirror. Then she looked closely at his palm. “You’re a mess,” she said, as though what happened had been a bad decision on his part. She looked up at him again through the mirror: “Now you’ll have a scar on your hand as well as on your cheek.”

He said he was all right, it didn’t hurt, but it did. She cleaned the cut with a corner of a washcloth. He smelled her hair. He watched her breathing.

“Your dress is torn.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a dress.” She started to cry and he put his arms around her, but she moved away and dried her eyes with the washcloth.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “Couldn’t you see it was dangerous?”

“Someone tipped my car over.”

“Were you in it?”

“No, I was about to be. So I turned and ran to the Horse Shoe.”

“But why—?”

“Shush, now,” she said. “I was there on business.”

“What kind of business?”

“My business.”

She seemed to be staring at his bare shoulder. He thought
if he made the wrong move she would leave the room and go outside to phone Peter. She might even call the police, although she’d have a hard time explaining what she was doing in a motel room with him. No, she wouldn’t. He’s my son’s friend. He was hurt. They’d look at her torn dress. Doctor’s wife, white. They’d look at him. She leaned forward slightly and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, her body brushing against his arm. Jack saw her in the mirror above the sink, the tear in her dress revealing one strap of her slip. They wouldn’t believe me, he thought. She smelled of soap and smoke and faintly of rye, and his skin where she touched it sang out.

The bed was unforgiving. They made love with the light on, him arching above her and a red flush spreading slowly up from her breasts to her throat, her eyes shut and then suddenly wide open in a sort of amazement, as though she were seeing something incredibly beautiful taking shape somewhere behind his back. When his release came, her nerveless gaze fixed on his and held him in a state of suspension until at last he collapsed, unable to breathe. After a while he got up to turn off the light, still half erect, and she watched him with a puzzled look that disturbed him. What was she seeing? But when he got back into bed she took him into her mouth, then ran her tongue up his chest until he was in her again, even more urgently than before.

After, they remained clasped together in the dark. He had never actually slept with a woman before. The girls who had come into his room at home, Benny’s castoffs, had climbed on him, had their revenge on his brother, and then slipped back to
Benny in the dark. In the morning they’d be gone, or he would see them stumble out of Benny’s room looking for their shoes. Now he realized that it wasn’t sex but sleeping together that completed the act of love. You didn’t have to trust a woman to have sex with her, but you did to sleep with her. Della slept with her back towards him, curled away from him, breathing as naturally as if she were alone, while he lay on his back watching the morning flood around the curtains into the strangely familiar room, the shadow of the light fixture circling the ceiling like an hour hand. Keys on the nightstand, her clothes on the chair by the bathroom door. He strained to make them out until he, too, finally fell asleep.

But the day was a disappointment from the moment he opened his eyes. Della was already awake, already up and dressed. He wanted to talk about their future. He would take her away. They could take the Merc, maybe drive west to Chicago, then on to the Pacific. She was in the bathroom, putting on lipstick.

“Come on, Jack,” she said. She strode out of the bathroom, she even had her shoes on, for Christ’s sake. She opened the curtains. Bright sunlight exploded into the room.

“What’s the big hurry?” He felt awkward about getting out of bed naked when she was watching him, fully dressed. “It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Peter will be worried.”

The gas station opened at eight. Della gave him five dollars and he bought gas, then drove the truck around to the motel office. She came out, climbed into the truck and sat facing
straight ahead. He didn’t know what he had done wrong.

He drove down Fort towards the bridge and the Windsor skyline. She sat stiffly, rubbing her bare arms. What were they going to do after they got home? He could take her for a picnic out near Amherstburg. He wanted to feel the sun burning his back as they made love, and see again that look of amazed ecstasy on her face, the flush spread up from her breasts to her throat. Just before the bridge they stopped at an intersection to let a line of Army tanks file by, heading downtown. The mayor must have called in the troops. When the tanks were gone Della looked at him sadly, as though she thought the Army had been searching for them and eventually they would be found out. Jack put the truck in gear and drove across the bridge.

When he pulled up outside her house, Peter was sitting on the porch steps. Jack turned off the engine, rolled down the window and waved. Peter waved back, not warmly.

“Better stay here,” she said.

“Why?”

“Let’s give it some time.”

“How much time? When?”

“I don’t know, Jack.” She looked past him and waved at Peter. Then she put her hand on his arm, a gesture he suddenly hated. “There’ll be police reports, insurance people to call about the car.”

“Is it because of Peter?” He looked up at the house. Peter was coming towards them. He would want answers. He would be writing to his father. Would he tell him about this?

Della got out of the truck. Jack watched her embrace her son, wondering what she would say to him. The thought of her lying about him hit Jack like a blow to the chest. There would be no picnic in Amherstburg, no more nights after band practice. No more band practice. In a rage, he started the truck and drove off, slapping the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand until it bled again.

He followed the river, turned up Walker Road, drove along Tecumseh to Ouellette and back down to the river, though not as far as the dock, then made the loop again until he was certain he could trust himself. He calmed down as the city came to life. Smoke or mist still drifted across the river from Detroit. He hoped the city had burned to the ground. He drove home. There was no one there. He changed his clothes and put a fresh bandage on his hand, then went back downtown, parked in front of the Recruiting Office and turned off the ignition. Then he went inside and joined the Navy.

Only then did he remember Benny and his father.

PART III

VIVIAN

V
ivian stepped down from the train onto the conductor’s stool and searched the throng for Jack’s brother, Benny, who was supposed to be picking them up at the station. She was sure she would recognize him from Jack’s description: tall and blond, brown eyes with blue flecks in them. Looking into them, she imagined, would be like gazing up at the sky through a canopy of trees. When Jack joined her he looked grim, as though he’d had a fight with the conductor. He took her arm and pulled her through the crowd, almost to the exit. She should have worn lower heels. Near the door, a tall man in splattered work clothes was grinning widely at Jack. So this was Benny. His hair was blond and wavy, just as Jack had described it, but
his complexion was like tanned deer hide, like that of someone who’d been working outside all summer. There were large brown freckles on the backs of his hands. Vivian hadn’t seen anyone before who looked quite like Benny, but she couldn’t put her finger on what was different about him. Jack introduced her, and Benny gave her a brief, appraising look, but instead of reaching out to shake her hand he clapped Jack on the back and said, “Well done, little brother.” What was that supposed to mean?

“Where’s the others?” Jack asked.

“Mom’s at home,” said Benny.

He took their two suitcases and led them through the station to the street. He still hadn’t said a word to her. She thought they would get into a taxi or a car, but they turned left and walked along a sidewalk, down a dreary street that smelled of dust and sewer, with shuffling pedestrians going into and out of cheap hotels, diners and pawnshops. Jack and Benny walked ahead, talking. She strode doggedly on, glad, now that she thought about it, to be moving after the long, tense train ride with Jack. This was her first real walk in Canada, a surprising thought given that she was almost two thousand miles into it. She let the distance between her and the men increase. With the wind coming from the south, it was warmer than it would have been back home, but people were walking with their hands in their pockets and their heads down, as though trudging through driving sleet. In St. John’s so warm a day would have had them taking their coats off and smiling up at the sky.

She studied the men ahead of her, her husband and his brother—her brother-in-law, although that title still seemed to belong to Freddie. Benny walked in a loose-jointed lope, so unlike Jack, whose gait was more swagger than stride. Jack’s uniform was out of place here, his widened cuffs even slightly ridiculous. Windsor wasn’t the natural home of sailors. She felt sorry for him, though she knew it was disloyal for a woman to feel sorry for her husband. Benny and Jack hadn’t seen each other for more than two years, yet they’d greeted each other like grudging acquaintances, without touching except for that disconcerting clap on the back.
Well done, little brother
. As if Jack had won her at a fair.

At last they turned down a side street, and when she reached the corner, Benny was lifting the suitcases onto the bed of an old, dented pickup truck.

“We can all squeeze in the front,” he drawled. “If I’d known you was bringing a lady friend, I’d’ve brought the Merc.”

She looked at Jack in alarm. Had he not told his family she was coming? It seemed impossible to believe, and yet what else could those words have meant? Surely he’d written to his mother; in fact, he’d told her he had.

If Jack noticed her dismay, he said nothing. He motioned her into the truck’s cab. She sat between them, her heart pounding. The floor was littered with oily rags and papers and small cardboard boxes. She didn’t know where to put her feet.

“Are they still living on Dougall Avenue?” Jack asked. After much gear shifting, Benny finally had the truck in motion.

“Dougall? They never lived on Dougall.”

Keeping his voice low, Jack said, “How’s Dad?”

Benny grunted. “Back to normal.” Jack turned his head and looked out the window, as though he were still on the train.

McDougall Street was only a few blocks from the train station. It was a narrow, treeless street of small clapboard houses built shoulder to shoulder and close to the sidewalk. The majority were rough and neglected, their shiplap siding weathered, porches aslant, windowpanes cracked, lawns bare or overgrown. She had seen ramshackle houses before, some of the shanties on Springdale and Carter’s Hill in St. John’s made you wonder what kept them standing, but these were worse. Surely his parents didn’t live here? Benny parked in front of the most dilapidated of them all.

“Christ!” Jack exclaimed. “They didn’t move up, they moved down.”

“Uh-huh.”

The house looked as though it had never known paint. Its patched roof sagged in the middle. The open porch was cluttered with sawhorses and pails, metal troughs, long-handled hoes and shovels, everything spattered and smeared with what Vivian took at first to be birdlime—making her think of the rocks off Ferryland—but which, when she was at the door, turned out to be caked plaster. Where was the big house with the guest room overlooking the river, the one Jack had described on the train?

Despite her own mounting alarm, she thought it best to keep him calm. He looked at her with such panic in his eyes that she
put her hand on his arm. “It’ll only be for a few days,” she said, patting him. But when he turned away from her, she realized she had pushed him back into his shell.

Before she could say anything else, Benny opened the front door. Jack squeezed past him into the house and she followed. There came a shriek from the far end of a narrow hall, and a small, delicate woman wearing an apron bustled towards them. She was tiny but spritely, as tiny creatures often are. Her wavy, dark hair, so much like Jack’s, was brushed over one eye, and her face was pale. When she reached them at the front of the hall, Vivian detected the soft perfume of rose-scented facial powder.

“Jackson, my baby!”

Jackson? It hadn’t occurred to her that his name was short for anything. She sensed Jack recoiling slightly, but he allowed his mother to embrace him, and when she was finished she turned to Vivian. “And who’s this?” she cried in delight. “Who have you brought us?”

“Ma, this is Vivian.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “How do you do, Vivian?”