Emancipation Day (6 page)

“Here, have a drink.”

He pushed his Coke bottle across the table and she put it to her lips, aware that his had just touched it. The Coke was warm and burned her throat.

“You’ve put rum in it!” she said, coughing.

“Good old Newfie Screech. Sailor’s best friend.”

“It’s awful,” she said, pushing the bottle back to his side of the table.

“Where are you from when you’re not living with your sister?”

She told him she belonged to Ferryland, down the South Shore.

“Well, I better get back up there,” he said, nodding at the stage. “Stick around till the bitter end and I’ll walk you home.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Say you will?”

“Why should I?”

“Just because,” he said.

He was a flirt, she wouldn’t trust him for a minute, but when he stood up and passed behind her she found herself leaning her head back and letting her hair brush his arm.

When the band returned to the stage they played two fast numbers to get the mampus on the floor. She almost wished she could join them, the smiling girls tossing their hair from their glistening foreheads, the men standing between songs with their arms around the girls’ waists. That was an aspect of dancing she hadn’t considered. Then Jack went to the microphone and announced that the next song was going out to Miss Lily White from Ferryland. He put a mute in the bell of his trombone and played “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” Tommy Dorsey’s signature tune. He played it slowly, not as high as Dorsey but more sensual, the muted notes sliding into one another and flowing out into the room like liquid smoke. On the floor, couples sank into one another, barely moving their feet. She felt the sound soak into her back and arms and chest. She held his Coke bottle in her hands and watched a couple she knew, a girl who worked in a dry cleaner’s and a corporal from the Canadian air base. Seeing them together made the idea of herself and Jack seem possible. The music brought the pair closer and closer until the girl’s head was resting on her partner’s chest, as though she were listening to his heart.

The thought that Jack was playing, and that he was doing this for her, made her dizzy.

Later that night, at Iris’s front door, she let him kiss her. Then she didn’t see or hear from him again for three weeks.

“Throw him back, Viv, he’s by-catch,” Iris said when Vivian told her about the kiss the next day. “Forget him.”

But she went over it a thousand times in her mind. They had been talking on the porch, saying good night. In the summer the porch was shaded with ivy, but now, in December, the dry leaves rattled in the wind and they stood close together to stay warm. Jack opened his greatcoat and wrapped her in it with him. There was no porch light because of the blackout, but the half moon was bright enough that she could see him clearly, especially his eyes. It was later than she usually came home but she wasn’t tired. In fact, she’d never been so wide awake. They both kept bringing up new things to talk about. He wanted to know everything about her. He made her feel interesting.

“Why did you say you
belong
to Ferryland?”

“That’s just how we talk. I belong to Ferryland. You belong to Windsor.”

“Not me, kid,” he said, looking away. “Not that place.”

“Where do you belong to, then?” She broke away from the warmth of his greatcoat and leaned back against the door.

He lit a cigarette and grinned. There was always that hesitation before he spoke, as though he wanted to be certain of
saying the right thing. Not the thing that was true, but the thing that put him in the best light.

“I belong to the Navy,” he said, exhaling smoke.

“You can’t belong to a thing, you belong to a place. Where you came from.”

She didn’t know why she was being so insistent about it. She actually agreed with him, at least in theory. He seemed to bring out the contrariness in her. And anyway, she didn’t like to think of him belonging to the Navy. It was like belonging to the war. What would he belong to when the war ended?

“Don’t you want to go back to Windsor?”

“Why should I?”

“Your family’s there. It’s where you belong.”

“No, it ain’t,” he said. “You get born, you grow up and you leave. That’s the way it is, see?” He threw his cigarette into a snowbank in the garden, as though he had lost interest in it, and put his hands in his coat pockets. “Why can’t I belong to where I’m going?”

She thought about that. The war had torn up so many people, sent them to places they hadn’t known about before, and not all of them would go back home. “I don’t want to stay in Newfoundland forever,” she said. “I want to travel, learn about new things.”

“And never come back,” he said.

“Oh, I’d come back, of course I would.”

He half turned as if to go, and she remained leaning against the door, as if to let him. She felt irritated, as though they’d
been arguing and he was refusing to make up. She didn’t want him to leave. She knew he’d been expecting her to ask him in, it was cold out here on the porch, but she could never, not with her nieces upstairs and Iris maybe waiting up. Had she been too standoffish, was that it, too cool? Had he given up on her because she wasn’t a V-girl? “The V doesn’t stand for virgin, honey,” Iris always said. But then he seemed to change his mind about leaving, and suddenly leaned into her, resting himself against her, smelling of cigarettes and bay rum. She’d had to thrust her pelvis out to keep from collapsing against the door, and he must have taken that for encouragement. His lips tasted metallic, probably from the trombone. He pressed into her, his chest against hers, his hands under her coat cupping the small of her back, the kiss itself almost incidental. His hands travelled up and down her back. Was she returning his kiss? Was she? She didn’t know. It didn’t feel like music, not slow and smooth. She put her hands on his shoulders, but one of them moved involuntarily to the back of his neck, felt his muscles tighten, and yes, she did thrust back. She was back inside his greatcoat, and the warmth of his body felt good. She didn’t thrust too much, she told Iris, nothing lewd, more as though she were bracing herself. What else could a girl do?

“Stay away from him, that’s what,” Iris said.

“Why?”

“Viv, darling, he’s a
sailor
.”

“No, he’s not, he’s a musician.” Iris wouldn’t appreciate the difference. But seeing, no,
feeling
what Jack could do with music
told her that he was different, special, that a person didn’t get that good at something unless it was already part of him. And part of her. Surely only someone who already had beauty inside them could make such beautiful music. “He’s only a sailor because of the war,” she said. “You should hear him play. The sound goes right through you.”

“So does cod liver oil.”

“Oh Iris, don’t be vulgar. Please.”

“Father rang this evening while you were out.”

Vivian groaned. “What did he say?”

“He gave me hell for letting you traipse about town on your own.”

“I wasn’t traipsing. And I wasn’t alone. We were in a restaurant, having lunch.”

“Five thousand Yanks in the colony, he said, and I’ve got to keep you away from all of them.”

“Well, you needn’t worry. Jack isn’t a Yank and he won’t call again, I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, he’ll call, all right. If he doesn’t, he’s worse than a Yank. He’s an idiot.”

But he didn’t call that week or the next, and when she turned on the marconi on Saturday night it wasn’t the King’s Men doing the Voice of Newfoundland broadcast but another band, the Starlighters, and she thought, Well, then, that’s cut it. She stayed away from the K of C, resigned herself to spinsterhood. She
darned socks, then read the twins two Beatrix Potter stories like a good aunt. When, on the third Sunday, she still hadn’t heard from him, she drove down to Ferryland with Iris and Freddie and the twins, eager to show her parents how stalwart she was being, hiding how broken her heart was. She never once mentioned Jack and neither did they. Daddy was either in his office mulling over his accounts or down at the wharf talking to the fishermen. Her mother looked anxious, but she wasn’t well. Vivian felt like an exile, home on a sneak visit, noticing changes and not approving of them, a new tablecloth, an electric heater, but knowing also that her opinions were neither sought nor welcome. It made her feel furtive and disdainful. Her younger brother, Walter, who had just turned sixteen, was considering going into politics when the war ended. He intended to help bring Responsible Government to the colony. “Don’t you think you should try voting first,” she said to him, “to see if you like it?”

“Well, look who’s all la-di-da now she’s living in the big city,” Walter said.

“It may seem big to you, Wat, but it’s not. It’s quite small, really.” She thought of Windsor as a big city.

She supposed she was meant not to notice when Iris took their mother into the waking room to tell her about Jack and how they needn’t worry because he had apparently dumped her.

Plenty of fish in the sea, her mother would say.

Plenty of bigger fish to fry, Iris would add.

On Monday, Vivian worked at Baird’s in the morning and went home at noon, saying she had a toothache. She ate next
to nothing, tea and toast, changed into her nightgown and slippers and stretched out on the sofa with the cushions around her and the blackout curtains drawn against the harsh sunlight. She loved Iris’s living room. It was exactly the right size, big enough for really comfortable furniture but small enough to feel cozy. It was the kind of room she would want if she were married. A living room should be lived in, she told herself, thinking of her mother’s waking room, which was opened only for funerals and when the Anglican minister came to tea. That made her think of Jack. She tried to read Thomas Raddall’s new book,
Roger Sudden
, but it didn’t hold her attention. Bigger fish, she kept thinking. But there weren’t, and anyway, Jack was a perfectly good-sized fish. Big enough to take her away from Newfoundland and show her how other people lived. She wasn’t like Iris, who had been off the island only once in her life and hadn’t liked it. For their honeymoon, she and Freddie had gone to Brazil on a company ship with a load of salt cod. They’d stayed in Rio de Janeiro while the ship called at ports farther south. They had taken a cable car up Sugarloaf Mountain, in the middle of the bay, and ridden a bus up to the base of the Finger of God. The place was, Iris said, merely squalid. She had not felt comfortable at all. She described the
favelas
, where the poor blacks lived in shacks terraced down the mountainside like so much accumulated debris. Dogs and babies, that’s all you saw and heard. Little pickaninnies with their hair all matted and something wrong with their eyes. Freddie told her about the half-naked Negro men loading sacks of coffee, the smell of
fruit in the market stalls in the early morning before the mist had burned off the hillsides.

Finally, after almost a month had gone by and Vivian had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, Jack rang. It was a Friday night, a week before Christmas. He’d been to sea, he said. “Escort duty, almost to Ireland and back. Even bandsmen have to go to sea sometimes,” he said.

“You could have told a person.”

“No, I couldn’t. I didn’t know myself until the last minute, none of us did. Loose lips sink ships.”

As soon as he said it she realized she ought to have trusted him. All the while she’d been mooning around St. John’s he’d been on a ship at sea, fighting the enemy. He might have been killed. Just that morning she’d been reading the Newfoundland
Bulletin
, which gave all kinds of unsettling news about soldiers and airmen and sailors wounded and lost. She’d looked for names she recognized. “
Signaller Edward Flanagan of the 166th (Newfoundland) Field Regiment and Corporal Duncan J. Mercer who was serving with the Canadian Army have been killed in action. Pilot Officer Kevin J. Evans and Sergeant Walter Sweetapple, both serving with the R.A.F., have been killed in air accidents. Gunner Frederick Robertson died on September 15th at a Military Hospital at Shrewsbury
.” Jack’s name might easily have been among them. What would she have done?

Chastened, she agreed to see him again. Longed to see him again. She would go to the K of C on Saturday and watch him play, and they could talk during breaks, she would like that, she said.

“And I could walk you home again.”

And she said, “Yes.”

“And what about during the week?”

“I work during the week.”

“Can’t you get a day off?”

No, she couldn’t, not unless she called in sick again. And if she did that, she would have to stay home and let Iris look after her. With the war economy, the store had never been so busy, and Mr. Baird was a friend of her father’s. But everyone was taking time off work to do their Christmas shopping. “I might be able to get an extra hour for lunch one day,” she said. Not much of a war effort, was it? “Tuesday,” she said. “Don’t come to the store. I’ll meet you someplace.”

“Where?”

She couldn’t think. Her father had spies everywhere. “The train station,” she said, “at the lower end of Water Street. It has a lunch counter.”

The train station was full of people, mostly men in uniform but many in fedoras and civilian clothes, government men, she guessed, although more interesting than that. Movie actors, perhaps, a scene from
Heaven Can Wait
. They didn’t look local, anyway. Those in uniform were either American GIs going back to their base at Stephenville or airmen from Fort Pepperrell, the U.S. Air Force base on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake that she’d heard had been laid out in the shape of a cowboy hat. She
didn’t know where the civilians were going. Off the island, presumably, off the map. They sat at the tables or on the benches reading newspapers, or paced back and forth in the waiting area, smoking. There were a few other women, WRENs and local girls kissing their Yankee boyfriends goodbye. She would kiss Jack like that when he got there. He would swoop her up in his arms and say, “The war can wait.”

She thought he wasn’t there yet, and then she saw him. He had a table, and had placed his greatcoat and cap on the chair beside him, saving a place for her. And on the table was a glass of Coke for him and a pot of tea for her. That was all it took. He was the only one in the station in a Navy uniform. He looked so young, a little boy in a sailor’s suit. He saw her and waved and she waved back. Eyes turned in her direction.