A Sudden Sun (12 page)

F
OR THREE MONTHS she was obedient. For three months she remained the girl her mother had raised, the girl her father hoped would marry the Reverend Obadiah Collins. She went to church, went to meetings of the WCTU, the Women’s Missionary Society, and the Ladies’ Aid. She visited girlfriends for tea, she read books, she went for walks, and she did not see David Reid at all. Or rather, she did not speak to him. She saw him on Water Street one day as she and Abigail passed Clouston’s storefront, a temporary booth the tinsmiths had set up to sell pots and pans while their shop was being rebuilt. As Lily paused to admire a china teapot, Abby poked her ribs with her parasol. “It’s that man! Isn’t that he?”

Lily shot a look at Abby that she hoped would freeze the blood to ice in her veins. She wasn’t really good at giving that kind of look but she hoped that with practice she would get better, having seen Mrs. Ohman do it at meetings. She looked at the red-headed man walking towards them only long enough to know that it
was
David Reid, but she did not meet his eyes. She lifted her skirts and veered around a stack of barrels on the sidewalk to avoid him, though that
meant she had to step down into the street and barely missed a pile of horse dung.

“He tried to speak to you!” Abby protested, looking back over her shoulder. “You were very cold to him!”

“Why shouldn’t I be cold? Father made me promise never to see him again.”

Back in May, after she had failed to show up in Bannerman Park at the appointed time, Mr. Reid had sent two further notes. She burned them both. Sometimes she woke between midnight and dawn from a dream in which she was in an alley with David Reid again, his lips against hers, his fingers pulling the pins from her hair. She woke from those dreams breathing fast and found it hard to get back to sleep.

She said nothing of this, of course, to Abigail, who would have giggled and gasped with delight at such fantasies. That door was closed, Lily reminded herself. She prayed every night that God would cleanse her of evil desires.

In all that time, she had not seen him. But that was not strange. They did not move in the same circles. The only place she was likely to see him was walking along Water Street. Now it had happened and it had not been so painful after all. There had been just a moment when their eyes met and the urge to turn her head and look back had been like the force that must have pulled the gaze of Lot’s wife toward Sodom. But Lily was made of tougher stuff: no pillar of salt for her.

The next note came the following day, slipped brazenly into her mailbox rather than hand-delivered by a messenger as the others had been. It was put in the box after the morning mail had been delivered but before Papa came home for his dinner, so its secrecy depended upon Lily checking the mail before Papa returned. Fortunately she did, and carried the small envelope up to her room, unseen by anyone. Her fingers trembled as she tore it open.

She read it over and over, and could not help smiling at the picture of the battered alley cat, still roving the streets, spoiling for another fight. In an endless battle he could not win, for the maiden with the heart of stone—Mr. Reid certainly did not mind mixing his metaphors—would never relent.

Still. She did not burn this note. She put it under her pillow and slept with it there that night. Woke in the morning from a dreamless sleep cursing herself for a sentimental fool. She was as bad as a girl in a novel, and not a sensible girl like Alida either. A silly girl like Alida’s sister, Lottie, doomed to destruction for her selfishness. Sleeping with a note under her pillow! Lily threw it on the morning fire.

“A friend of yours is coming to town soon,” Papa said that night at dinner. “He wrote and asked if he might call on you.”

“You mean Reverend Collins.”

“I hoped the news might please you.”

“It does. It does—please me, Papa.” Lily tried hard to put warmth and energy into her voice. “I know you think very highly of Reverend Collins.”

“I hope that, in time, you’ll come to think well of him too.”

She tried to think, over the next few days, good thoughts about Reverend Collins. She had met him only that once, at Reverend
Pratt’s house. Her father had said that he was a very progressive young clergyman—though not so progressive, apparently, as to approve of votes for women. She struggled to recall his face. His thinning hair was—black? Dark brown? Some nondescript colour. Not red, certainly. And whatever colour his eyes were, they were not green.

Reverend Collins came a week later: came to sit in the parlour and make polite conversation with her father while Lily sat silent beside her mother. He was in town for the Methodist Conference and was full of talk about the wonderful sessions he had attended and the great speakers he had heard. He showed his excitement by a slight rise in the pitch of his voice, and by laying his teacup down in the saucer with a little clang. Every time he did it Mother started, either because the noise troubled her nerves or because she was worried about damage to the china.

Mr. Collins had invited Lily to attend a lecture in the evening, by a returned missionary who was also attending the conference, telling about his experiences in the Congo. It was held at the Tabernacle on Parade Street, the temporary home of George Street Church, and it was well-attended. Their seats were not as good as Lily would have liked. She was stuck behind a woman with a very large hat that blocked Lily’s view of the speaker and his magic-lantern slides. The speaker’s voice was dry and scratchy. He seemed to have had amazing experiences in the Congo but lacked the ability to describe them in a way that would keep his hearers awake.

What an unfortunate thing
, Lily thought. It would be so much more convenient if the world was arranged so that interesting things only happened to people who were good public speakers or writers. Good experience was, after all, wasted on anyone who could not convey the sense of it. She thought of sharing the thought with Mr. Collins, but decided he would not appreciate the humour.

In the carriage afterwards he said, “You are very fortunate,
living here in St. John’s, to be able to hear good speakers and good music, to be in contact with the wider world. During the winter months in Greenspond, I think with longing of lectures such as the one we just heard, or some of the sermons that were given during the conference.”

“Well, conference week is unusual. There isn’t normally such a collection of great Methodist preachers in St. John’s. But of course you are right, we have more diversions here than in the outports.”

“There, a man must depend on reading to broaden his mind,” sighed Mr. Collins. “You attended some of the ladies’ sessions yourself at the conference, no doubt, Miss Hunt?”

“I did.”

“And the Temperance Rally on Sunday night?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now that was inspiring! No doubt you were moved by it, as well.”

Lily had gone with her father to the big Temperance Rally. The speeches had all been stirring, but not one of the speakers—all men, of course—had made any mention of the work of the WCTU. It was discouraging, after the heady excitement of the rally she had attended earlier in the spring when not only women’s work but women’s votes had been spoken of with such approval.

She tried to explain her disappointment to Mr. Collins. “Having been so involved with the women’s temperance work, I felt it as a rebuke, to be quite honest.” She had not intended to raise any topic that might be controversial, or even interesting, but he was the one who had brought up the rally and she was a little curious as to how he would respond if she shared even a sliver of her true opinions.

“Ah…yes, I suppose I can imagine how you might feel that way,” Mr. Collins said. He seemed a bit taken aback that she had expressed anything other than admiration for the wonderful speakers at the rally. “But you know, there are other issues going on
behind the scenes. I’m afraid many of the leaders of the movement are rather unhappy with the direction that the WCTU has been taking. Some of the ladies involved, and certainly Mrs. Ohman’s paper, have been quite strident in stating that they want the women’s vote. They talk not just about letting women vote on Prohibition, but of extending the franchise to women generally.”

“Is that it?” Lily asked. “Is the WCTU being punished because the temperance men fear it’s been taken over by suffragists?”

“Well, my dear, things are always more complicated than they seem. It’s politics, you know, and perception. How things look from the outside. It’s demeaning when women sully themselves with such things. You, my dear Miss Hunt, are a fine example of what I mean—a good and virtuous young girl, working in the temperance cause because of a sincere desire to end human suffering. But what if your name, your reputation, were to be tarnished by association with these striving and ambitious women?”

“I suppose that would be dreadful.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Collins, who appeared deaf to sarcasm. “For women to concentrate on the ballot-box is a mistake. Indeed, many temperance men think we have little chance of seeing Prohibition passed in the next year or two, that we need to concentrate more on educating the public, and less on the legislature. No real change is likely to happen while Mr. Whiteway is our premier.” He glanced over at her. “But I am boring you, of course. Nothing duller than people talking of things that are outside one’s own experience.”

The worst part was that he could say such a thing, so smug and condescending, without recognizing that he was giving her the equivalent of a slap across the face. But Lily said nothing. There was no value in arguing with Reverend Collins. She already knew she would strike no answering spark.

“I fancy you found Reverend Howlett a little dull as well, tonight,” he went on, “and I promise the next time I come to town
I will try to find something more diverting to take you to. Nothing frivolous, of course, but perhaps a nice sacred concert?”

The thought that her obligation to him—to Papa, really—was not discharged, that she would have to go along with him to another event and sit stiffly by his side through a choral cantata or organ recital, felt as dispiriting as a downpour on a summer morning. “I’m sure that would be very nice,” Lily said. It was as if she were an actress, reading someone else’s lines. She could not help remembering that Abby had gone, this evening, to the dancing assembly at the Parade Rink with Frank Ayre. Much too frivolous an entertainment for a young clergyman, but Lily couldn’t help thinking a little touch of frivolity might not hurt her. He might at least have offered to take her to watch the boat races down at Quidi Vidi.

The next day she went to the corner shop, bought a copy of the
Evening Herald
and read a scathing article about the way in which Premier Whiteway’s government was bungling everything it touched. There was no by-line, but she needed none: she heard David Reid’s sardonic voice in every line. She imagined him sitting in the gallery at the House of Assembly, his pen flying frantically across paper, copper head bent forward as he caught the currents of the debate. This was what he had been doing last night, no doubt, while she sat next to Reverend Collins watching lantern slides about the Congo. Being patronized by a man who thought she was bored by politics because she could not understand them.

The Herald. A letter sent to my place of work will always find me
. She drew notepaper towards her, filled her pen.

^“
D
ID YOUR MOTHER ever tell you about the time we sneaked out of the house to sit in the gallery of the Colonial Building, when they were debating votes for women?”

Grace shook her head. Language felt inadequate to convey the extent to which her mother had not told her about any adventure that involved “sneaking.” Young Lily Hunt had been, by her own account, flawless in her obedience to her parents. “When—when was this?” she managed to ask.

Abigail Parker leaned back in her chair and took a sip of tea. “Well, we must have been—what, nineteen, twenty? Before either of us was married. You won’t find it in the history books. None of the men thought it was important. In fact it was all a big joke to some of them. Oh, it was the year after the fire, I remember because Mama got new wallpaper with pink roses for my room. The House of Assembly wasn’t my sort of affair at all, you know. I was an empty-headed little thing back then, couldn’t have cared less about the vote or anything else. I mean, I did agree that votes for women were the thing, but I wasn’t one for meetings or petitions like
Lily was. I arranged the whole escapade, though, because she was such a good girl, she wouldn’t have known how to sneak out of the house or deceive her parents.” So that much of Lily’s self-portrait was true at least, Grace thought. “And your grandfather,” Mrs. Parker went on, “well, he’s mellowed a good deal in old age. That’s Daisy’s influence, I imagine. Back then, if we’d been caught, your mother would have been in plenty of trouble. But of course we were never caught. I was too good for that.” She smiled as she passed a plate of sweet biscuits, English ones from a tin, to Grace, who laid one on the edge of her saucer.

Grace had reconciled herself to the idea that the version of her mother that lived in Abigail Parker’s memory bore no resemblance at all to the mother Grace knew. Meetings and petitions, perhaps—Lily was a tireless organizer, not to say bossy—but suffragist rallies? Sneaking out of the house?

“She’s changed, I can tell,” Mrs. Parker said. “I know it from the tone of her letters—the few times she has written me. I wish I could see her, but I can’t leave town. If it weren’t for poor Father….”

“I’m sure Mother wishes she could come to town and see you,” Grace said, though she was almost certain that was a lie.

“Ah, we could talk about old times, I suppose. How I laughed over that whole business. You know, I thought the suffragists were a bit ridiculous, silly old bluestockings who were more concerned about the vote than about fashion or catching a man. Goes to show how much I knew, doesn’t it? I wanted the vote but I didn’t want to be one of those women out marching for it! Expected others to do all the work. And as for catching a man, well, as your mother learned, it was quite possible to march for votes and still catch a man’s eye. Though that turned out… Well, anyway, I’ve said too much.”

She unfolded her fan, a pretty concoction of painted silk, and fluttered it in front of her face. Grace could see that Mrs. Parker took
a good deal of pleasure in saying too much and then pulling back. Unlike Daisy, who had seemed genuinely shocked by her own indiscretion and anxious to cover it up, Mrs. Parker seemed to want Grace to coax more of the story out of her.

Grace thought of the postcard signed “D,” of the scrawled intimacy of those hastily written words.
Was my mother ever in love with a man whose name began with D?
She thought of asking. But no, of course she would not do that.

That evening back in March when she and her mother sat in the kitchen at home and Lily had tried to warn her about heartbreak, to tell her that she should not marry Jack. Had she been speaking out of painful experience?
If so, it would have been a fine time to tell me what happened to you, Mother
, Grace thought. But she had not. What Lily had not chosen to share, Grace would not try to coax out of her old friend, even if that old friend looked most willing to be coaxed.

Instead, she turned the talk to other channels, and Mrs. Parker seemed eager to hear about Grace’s work. “Do you still want to train as a nurse?” she asked. “I mean, if your parents were to give their blessing?”

Grace paused, thinking of the brisk, efficient Nurse Fitzpatrick at the Empire Hospital. Papist though Miss Fitzpatrick was, you couldn’t deny she was doing God’s work. “I wanted to very much, during the war,” she said. “But I wonder if that wasn’t as much about wanting to do something for the war effort as the nursing itself? I only know I want to do
something
. I taught for two years in Catalina,” she added, “and Mother and Father approved of that. They wanted me to stay on there. I think it seems a bit more respectable to them than nursing.”

“No one more respectable than your father,” agreed Mrs. Parker with a smile that, again, invited Grace to ask about the story behind it. She gazed out the window as if lost in thought, then said,
“I wish I’d been there when your mother got married. We’d always planned to be each other’s bridesmaids, but she got married in St. John’s and I in New York, and we didn’t travel about in those days the way folks do now.” Then, just as Grace thought they were about to head back down the road of reminiscence, Abigail Parker said, “There’s a school of philanthropy quite near me in Manhattan, you know, where they train social workers. A dear friend of mine teaches there. Have you ever given any thought to social work?”

“I hardly know what it is,” Grace said. “It’s rather a new field, isn’t it?”

“Very much so, but there’s such a need—you know, working among the poor, going into the homes of the destitute, caring for orphans and for poor young girls who—well, unwed mothers and fallen women, you know. You ought to look into it.”

“Are there entrance requirements? I only have my second-class certificate.”

“Oh, I believe the official requirement is for people who already have a B.A., but they say ‘equivalent experience,’ and you know, the volunteer work you’ve been doing here—well, I know people on the board, I could make a few calls on your behalf. And if you did come—well, I would be so happy to have you stay with me, and to help you in any way I could.”

Social work. College. Everyone was thinking of the future, with the war over and the returned servicemen trying to restart lives that had been interrupted. Why worry about anything that might have happened twenty-five years ago when everything seemed to be rushing Grace towards the future, towards decisions she hardly felt equipped to make?

The day after her visit with Abigail Parker, she sat in Ivan Barry’s hospital room helping him eat his dinner. He told her that the girl he used to be engaged to had gotten married to his best friend. It was still hard to pick out his speech but Grace had become
practiced at it. She leaned in close to hear him say that the girl was Myrtle—“Merr - uhh”—and that they had been engaged before he left Humbermouth in 1915.

“Best…for her,” he said, when Grace said she was sorry to hear it. “But…one more…reen…harr to go…home.”

Yes. One more reason it was hard to go home.

The government was putting money and effort into finding work for returned veterans, even retraining the men who had returned without legs or arms and would never be able to do manual labour again. The population of the hospital had thinned in the months Grace had been volunteering. Most of the men had recovered from the worst of their injuries, got used to using their prosthetic arms or legs, and gone home. Only a few remained, a few like Ivan Barry, for whom the world now seemed to hold no place.

Where could a man with only half a face go? He would never be able to work again, never go out in a fishing boat nor do the work he had hoped to do, that of serving as a minister. Yet when Grace tried, gently, to probe into the subject of his future and how he felt about it, Mr. Barry’s one good eye still seemed to shine. “I sill…blee…Goh hah a play for me.”
God has a place for me
.

Grace wished she had that much faith. She wanted passionately to serve God, and surely it should be easier for God to find a place for Grace Collins, well-educated daughter of a minister, than for poor shattered Mr. Barry. It seemed clear enough, on one level, that that place ought to be as a wife and mother, possibly even as the wife of Jack Perry. Faced with Mr. Barry, it seemed churlish to long for anything more than a normal life, marriage, and a home and family, the simple things that had been denied him.

When she left the hospital, Jack was waiting outside the door, as he often was. Instead of turning up towards her grandfather’s house, they caught the streetcar at the Holloway Street stop and got off near Wood’s Candy Store and Dining Room. Eating out at a
restaurant was a rare treat they had indulged in three or four times over the spring, just for the pleasure of dining alone. Grandfather had said no the first time Jack had asked permission to take Grace out to eat: it wasn’t proper, he said, without a chaperone. Daisy had waved that protest aside. “It’s a different world now, Mr. Hunt. Different from when I was a girl, or even when your Lily was growing up. The war’s changed everything. It’s nothing for a respectable young lady to go to a restaurant with her beau, and it’s not as if Jack is a stranger to us.”

By now it was accepted that this was something they would do from time to time. Jack’s favourite place was the Crosbie Hotel but Grace preferred Wood’s. She liked walking upstairs past the bustle of the candy store and bakery to the quiet room above where deferential waitresses came and went, where the clink of glasses and silverware and the low tones of other diners created a sense that their table for two was a private world. At Grandfather’s and Daisy’s dinner table, Grace certainly would not have told Jack about Mrs. Parker and her indiscreet comments about Lily’s past.

“I’m sure she’s just the sort of person who likes to make everything out to be more scandalous than it is,” Jack said, cutting into thin slices of pork roast. “She can’t really mean anything improper about your mother, can she?”

“Apart from her being a suffragette? I can hardly believe that, but I did find all those old broadsheets and press clippings in her old room.”

“But that’s not shocking. If anything, it’s admirable.”

“Yes, but it’s out of character.” Grace looked down at her plate, watching the flaky crust of her mutton pie—Wood’s specialty, and her favourite—crumble as she attacked it with her fork. “It makes me wonder what else I don’t know about my mother. Was she in love with someone—someone before my father, I mean? If she ever
was
in love with my father.”

“You think she wasn’t?”

“I can’t ever remember them being…affectionate. But then, I don’t suppose parents are, in front of their children, are they?”

Jack smiled. “I don’t know. My father, now, he’s the most proper man you’ll ever meet—you know what he’s like in public—but at the end of a busy day at work he’d come home and put his feet up, and my mother would sit on the humpty and unlace his shoes and rub his feet, and he’d say, ‘Oh my Bess, you’re a wonderful girl,’ and she’d say, ‘I know old man, that’s why you married me.’” His face warmed at the memory.

“Really? They would do that?”

“Oh, all the time. Now they weren’t what you’d call romantic, I don’t recall them hugging and kissing in front of us—I’m sure Mother would have died of shame—but he’d come into the kitchen in the morning when she was cooking breakfast and tell her she was a grand girl for looking after us all, things like that. And if she was dressed up for church or going out he’d always tell her she was lovely. Didn’t your parents do things like that?”

“No, never.” By comparison with those fleeting sketches of life in the Perry household, Grace felt her own childhood homes, those outport parsonages, as bleak places, empty of marital affection. She tried to remember an unguarded moment between her parents, a kiss or an embrace or a word of affection, but none came to mind. Even the mildly flirtatious teasing that Aunt Daisy directed at her much older husband, whom she always called “Mr. Hunt,” was a bit shocking to Grace; she realized now it was because she was unused to seeing a married couple show affection for each other.

“You’re lost in thought,” Jack said.

“I’m sorry—no, I’m thinking of my parents. Maybe my mother really was in love with someone else. I suppose I’ll never know. Anyway, Mrs. Parker said some more interesting things—not about the past, but about the future.”

“She wants you to go to New York, doesn’t she? What would you do there?”

“There’s a college—a school of philanthropy. I don’t know very much about it, but from the little I know I think it’s what I would like doing. I know that I want to be of some use in the world.” Grace wondered if Jack would say that he couldn’t bear for her to go so far away.

Jack looked down at his plate, pushing boiled potato and cabbage around with his fork, then took a bite before looking up at her. “I’m going away in September—back to McGill to finish my degree.”

“So you wouldn’t be here anyway.”

“Grace, I—you know I want to marry you, don’t you?”

Now it was her turn to look down at her plate. It was hard to know how to respond to such a question; it was far more complicated than “Will you marry me?” To say “yes” would sound vain and presumptuous; to say “no” might be an offense.

She settled on the answer that was closest to the truth. “I…I had hoped you felt that way.”

“I do—so much. But I want you to be free to go to New York, to learn and to work and find out what you want to do. It doesn’t seem fair that I should be the only one of us to do that.”