Homesick (10 page)

Vera could not change herself so simply. She saw that. If Mary ever remembered
her
, it would be with her long white legs poking out of a crinkled dress, giving some false, silly speech about
Wellington or Caesar. Vera didn’t want to be remembered that way. The idea was killing. How she wanted to be remembered was as a girl different and remarkable. And she made it happen, she seized her chance.

Vera Monkman became the first girl from Connaught to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. By acting decisively she was safely settled in barracks two weeks before graduation day. Her friends were left feeling a trifle breathless and disappointingly upstaged. Vera Monkman a soldier, even before the boys! So while Phyllis Knouch and Mabel Tierney completed the grand march around the Community Hall on the arms of their escorts, Vera was being drilled in a grander march, up and down a dusty parade ground. Instead of a graduation frock she wore a sober coat whose brass buttons were embossed with the profile of helmeted Pallas Athene. Vera was officially at war. If she had been asked to explain what had led her to this she likely would have said patriotism, doing her bit to defeat Hitler, all the while knowing this wasn’t true, knowing it was really her instinct for self-preservation which was responsible.

Vera had come to the end of her tether. She couldn’t have listened to another moment’s chatter about secretarial school, corsages, and gown lengths. She couldn’t have borne seeing, one more time, her father chew with deliberate, dumb satisfaction a boiled potato and be able to stop herself from crying out accusingly, “So where’s your famous grief now? Forgotten when you come face to face with a goddamn boiled potato!” She couldn’t any longer stand to watch Earl waiting each night to learn if his father was off drinking supper, or would be joining them at the table. Once, when her father was twenty minutes late, and she found Earl standing tensely by the front door, listening for the sound of his truck, Vera had said, “You know, sometimes I wish he’d run that truck of his into a telephone pole and end the suspense.” And Earl had flung himself at her, sobbing and flailing her with his palms. She hadn’t really meant anything by it. It was queer how her brother behaved.

Vera couldn’t tarry any longer. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. So she bummed a ride to Regina and enlisted. The recruiting officer gave her orders to report back in two weeks. For thirteen days she didn’t breathe a word to a soul of what she had done, fearing steps could be put in motion to prevent her leaving. On the last day, with her dresser cleared and her bag packed, she put her father’s dinner in front of him and announced she was leaving.

“Army?” he said in a bewildered voice. Then not another word as he slowly cut his meat and mashed his parsnips with a fork.

“Well?” said Vera.

He looked up from his plate. “You’d do this to him?” He meant Earl.

“I’m not doing this to anybody. I’m doing it
for
somebody. There’s a difference.”

“Who’ll look after Earl?” he asked obstinately.

“He’s not exactly a baby anymore. He’s twelve and if he needs looking after I suppose you’re the one who’ll have to do it.” Vera shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

Monkman got up from the table, walked heavily to the stove, and poured himself a cup of coffee. With his back still to her, he said, “Such a hard girl. Nothing like your mother.”

Vera could read nothing of how afraid he was to be left alone to care for Earl from the rigid set of his shoulders. “Maybe,” she said quickly to forestall tears that were threatening to break.

Her father went slowly back to the table, set down his coffee, took out his wallet. He counted four bills down on the table, side by side. A five and three ones. “There,” he said, “it’s all I have on me. This was kind of short notice.”

Vera gathered it up. Money for the trip. He had placed it on the table as he had always done for her mother when she went away for a visit. Bills in a row, counted out, no mistake as to what you got.

He tried one last time. “You know what your mother would want you to do, don’t you?”

“Don’t you know it’s my mother’s dead and not me?” Vera answered quietly.

“Get out then,” he said. “Get out. You know where the door is. You’ve been looking at it long enough.”

Tramping along, swinging her arms in unison with the other women in the drill squad and listening to the rhythmic crunch of heels on gravel, imposed a cadence to Vera’s thoughts. Over and over she repeated to herself that she would have stayed at home if there had been any hope of saving Earl from his father. But she knew there was no chance of that because Earl refused to show any fight.

“Stand up for yourself!” she had told him. “When the old man yells for you to come downstairs for one of those rides, don’t. What’s he going to do? He can hardly stagger over level ground when he’s that way, so how’s he going to manage stairs to get at you?”

But Earl always went to his father when he called. It was a mystery to Vera. As the saying went, God helps those who help themselves. Vera didn’t see how she could be expected to go one better than God. What was there left for her to do, except save herself?

In the Army, for the first time in two years Vera felt she could breathe. The skies that summer were high, cloudless, a distracting blue across which planes of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan darted and swooped. Wheeling left and wheeling right to a drill sergeant’s commands, Vera felt freer than when she had idled away her afternoons with Cokes and cigarettes and gossip. In the barracks it was interesting and exciting to talk to so many different kinds of girls, middle-class idealists full of patriotic talk and tough girls with pimples on their chins who had fled bad families for the chance to eat three square meals a day and get their teeth fixed at government expense. So many different girls with so many different reasons, an army like any other history had ever known, except that this one was female.

It was the sense of movement in the Army that Vera liked best. A short time in Regina, a month of basic at Dundurn and then she
was dispatched to Kitchener, Ontario, for trades training. Always new faces, new scenery, new things to learn. Because she had her Grade Ten, Vera’s superiors had suggested she might train as a clerk, but when she thought of Mabel and Phyllis and secretarial school she asked to be made a cook instead.

An adventure impossible to explain or express. Eastbound, leaving behind everything she had ever known, Vera wrote her first letter home, not to her father but to Earl. Ostensibly it was written to provide information as to where she was going and how she could be reached, but in reality she was seeking a confidant, a confidant who had known the old Vera and could draw comparisons with the new. That was Earl. She wrote him everything. She told of the smart dining car with linen tablecloths and silver cutlery where she had recklessly splurged, treating herself to a meal of Winnipeg goldeye as if she had done this sort of thing every day of her life. It was the uniform, she explained. In uniform you were suitably dressed for any function, a woman could go anywhere in uniform – to a fancy dining room, to a concert. A uniform was a wonderful disguise. No one had any idea whether you were rich or poor, belonged or didn’t belong. And you always looked smart. Vera proudly quoted a line to her brother from the brochure, “Women in Khaki.” “
C.W.A.C.
uniforms have been acknowledged by leading dress designers to be the smartest in the world.” There it was, from the highest authority.

Vera tried to convey, too, how she was now a traveller. She wanted to give Earl some idea of the sprawl and space and harsh grandeur of the country she was passing through. She wrote to him of what she had witnessed early one morning as her train rattled through Manitoba; wrote of a vast, distant field crawling with hundreds of minute figures. The scene would forever have remained a puzzle if the track had not curved just then, carrying her nearer and nearer. Vera had laughed aloud when the tiny figures grew larger and larger, resolving themselves into soldiers bending and straightening under the brilliant morning sun. They were stooking.
On a whim an officer had turned a day of back-breaking labour for some farmer into a few minutes of diversion on a route march for a company of men. Now the troops were larking about, ramming the butts of sheaves into the soil and tossing the heavy heads together, battle-dress drab against the sun-drenched gold of stubble. As the train rumbled by, reducing speed on the bank of the curve, the men closest to the tracks waved to the passengers who were the first witnesses to their joke, looking not at all like soldiers but like boys on an outing, and one or two threw their caps exuberantly into the air, their mouths yawning in a soundless cheer.

Vera tried very hard to get things right in her letters, to capture the strangeness of being far from home. The descriptions came so thick and fast her pen could scarcely record them. There were the prosperous farms of old rich Ontario with acres of tall corn and huge barns and sleek black and white cows with heavy udders, dreaming in the flickering shade of great trees she guessed were maples. And she described the enormous temple of Union Station in Toronto which by rights ought to have seemed empty and hollow because of its soaring roof, but which bustled and teemed with soldiers and airmen and sailors and women and children all rushing about every which way, hugging and kissing while the arrivals and departures rolled on like some awful announcement of the doom of journeys missed, chances never seized, life never lived. So hurry up! And when she came to the end of her trip, a young girl in a town in Ontario, she wanted, out of the fullness of her nineteen-year-old heart, to write a letter that said, “Tell everyone in Connaught that Vera Monkman is
alive
and
kicking
!” Both words underlined three times for emphasis. She didn’t write any such words, however. Instead, she signed it, “Your loving sister, Vera,” and enclosed a dollar of her pay for Earl, to show she was thinking of him and also to demonstrate to her father she was doing just fine, thank you very much, without him. Because, for as long as Vera corresponded with Earl, filing her reports on life in the Army, she never sat down to write without imagining two faces
reading her letters, one Earl’s, and the other, hovering just over his shoulder, her father’s.

Not that everything about the Army was wonderful. By the time she was transferred to Saint Anne de Bellevue Vera was having second thoughts about being a cook. In summer the kitchens were hotter than the hubs of hell and the noise, the incessant rattle of pans and clash of pot lids, the thin steamy stench of watery vegetable soup, the smell of raw chickens and burned food so jangled her nerves and upset her stomach that she found it next to impossible to eat. For days on end she could keep nothing down but weak tea, soda biscuits, and Jello. Yet never once did Vera present herself on sick parade. What if they found something really wrong and she was given a medical discharge? The last thing she wanted was to be forced to quit the Army just when she was proving herself so able. Because she was able. In six months Vera had been promoted to lance corporal in recognition of her general efficiency, precise and accurate record-keeping, and careful management of supplies. There were predictions she would make sergeant before long.

It was difficult to bring her success to Earl’s and her father’s attention without seeming to brag, bragging being much disparaged among the Monkmans. The solution proved simple in the end. Vera had a studio portrait taken of herself in uniform, taken in three-quarter profile so that the stripes on her arm were clearly visible. She was certain they would be noticed. Of other matters, which reflected less directly on her, it was not necessary to be so modest. She had the excuse that her descriptions to her brother of extended leaves taken in the fabulous cities of the U.S.A. were justified because of their educational value. If they also happened to cast Vera in a sophisticated, worldly light, maybe that couldn’t be avoided.

In particular, she dwelt at great length on her one visit to New York, where she and her companions had plucked up the courage to storm the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria looking for movie stars and from there, in a moment of insane bravado, pressed an assault
on the restaurant, requesting a table for luncheon. They got one, it being an unfashionable, slack hour, and they servicewomen in the uniform of an ally. It was the uniform, Vera once again explained to her brother, which earned her the right to eat in a hotel that numbered among its guests millionaires, European nobility, and the stars of stage and screen.

Later, they took in all the city’s tourist sights, saw Radio City Music Hall and the high-kicking Rockettes for whom they harboured a mild contempt as frivolous women who did not appreciate the seriousness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. They went to the top of the Empire State Building and then uptown to see Grant’s Tomb.

These were the things she wrote to Earl, to mark the changes in her. There were other things of which Vera was scarcely aware and, if she had been, could not have written of to a brother.

Old friends like Phyllis and Mabel might have thought that life in the Army had led to a deterioration in her manners and turned her just a tiny bit vulgar and unladylike. They would certainly be alarmed to see the way she drank beer, straight out of the bottle rather than a glass, and how, when she was tight, she would rise unsteadily to her feet and say loudly, in mixed company, “Make way, boys, this lady’s got to tinkle.”

Somehow, too, the promises which Vera had made to herself to improve her mind had been neglected. She only glanced at the war news in the papers and had given up attempts to read books in the barracks during the evenings. The hubbub there was too distracting, her attention snagged on bits of camp gossip and talk of men. Most evenings she spent playing cribbage with a homesick recruit from Newfoundland who cried in the shower, believing tears couldn’t be detected in the midst of all that streaming water. But as the case of that girl proved, Vera was learning it was impossible to hide anything in the Army, or hide
from
anything. Like sex. She was getting sick and tired of being importuned and bothered by soldiers. The young ones were no better than beggars, all beseeching
mouths and beseeching hands. They fumbled at you on the dance floor and in ill-lit doorways. What was worse, they struck sentimental poses and talked of dying because their bragging, lying friends told them that never failed to produce the desired result. To Vera it was exasperating and wearying, fending off this desperate stroking and fondling. They were nice enough boys but fools. Couldn’t they see that all this talk of death sounded ridiculous standing under a lamppost in Kitchener?