A Sudden Sun (14 page)

^“
I
MPOSSIBLE”? GRACE WONDERED what she would write in reply to Jack’s postcard. New York without him was not impossible, but it was lonely. She was getting to know the other students in the Social Work program, but had made no real friends yet. Women greatly outnumbered men in the program, but most of the lady students were several years older than Grace, had college degrees as well as several years’ experience working in the field. Despite Grace’s “equivalent experience”—and, more relevant, Mrs. Parker’s calls to her friends on the board—that had earned her entrance, a few of the ladies seemed to look down on Grace for not having a degree. Or perhaps it was because she came from a backward outpost of the British Empire that none of them had ever heard of. She had made a couple of friends—Miss DeWitt, a
soft-spoken girl from the South, and Miss Clark of Chicago, both girls about her own age with whom she often studied and chatted between classes. But both were doing what Grace would have been doing without Mrs. Parker’s generosity—working to earn extra money in their hours outside of class. There was little time for strolls in the park and lunches at the Automat. Grace missed home; she missed Jack.

But Montreal was not so far by train. A Christmas visit was certainly possible. Grace wondered who was this woman in Montreal who knew her mother. Another relic of Lily’s past, like Abigail Parker?

“This is our stop,” announced Miss Everett in her crisp, no-nonsense voice. Everything about Miss Everett, from her tone to her boots, proclaimed that here was a woman who had serious work to do and would brook no foolishness from man, woman nor child—especially man. She was in her forties, a church deaconess and founder of a home for unwed mothers in Utica, New York, and was a great believer in the idea that work for the poor must be conducted on modern, scientific principles.

For the first month, all their studies had been theoretical and confined to the classroom, but observation and fieldwork formed an important part of the first-year students’ programs. In the second year each student would select a specialty and a work placement in the community; the first year was intended as a general introduction to the field of social work. On this chilly December morning their destination was a settlement house on the Lower East Side where social workers lived alongside immigrant families and the poor.

It was an ideal Grace had read about and heard her professors lecture on and she found it exciting that rather than handing down charity from on high, those who wanted to help the poor would go and live among them. She had read about Toynbee Hall in Britain and Hull House in Chicago and she was excited to visit an actual
settlement house, though when the students left the subway station at Delancey Street she was shocked by what she saw. She thought she had gotten used to New York crowds, but these crowds were composed almost entirely of dirty, shabbily clad people speaking in foreign tongues. The tenement buildings all around looked as if they were falling to pieces. Many had windows broken out and all looked as if far more people swarmed in and out than even these tall buildings could hold. Miss Everett led her charges down the sidewalk and the mass of people parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Grace looked at the faces around her and wondered,
Am I still in America?

The settlement house on Eldredge Street, when the students arrived, seemed to be everything Grace had read and heard about. In the large first-floor rooms she saw a group of young women trimming hats, a roomful of men taking English lessons, and in the yard out back, a group of schoolchildren playing. The settlement worker who served as their tour guide, a young woman about Grace’s own age, described the dozens of different clubs and organizations that operated out of the house. “Just today the doctor is in for a medical clinic, seeing people from the neighbourhood who couldn’t possibly afford to pay for medical care,” she explained, gesturing at the closed door of the examination room.

The whole place seemed to hum with busy energy. Grace watched a line of men going down the stairs to the lower floor. “The public baths are down there,” their guide explained. “Most of the tenements don’t have running water, so a great many people from the neighbourhood come here to bathe, often before they go to work or when they return home in evening.”

In the yard outside they stopped to watch a slightly older woman leading the children in a vigorous series of calisthenics before she sent them inside to do their homework. “There’ll be
tutors in there who can help them with their work,” the guide explained. “Many of them come from families where there’s no English spoken at home, so schoolwork is quite challenging.”

“I imagine so,” Grace murmured to Sharon DeWitt. “I’d love to work in a place like this, though.”

“I would too,” her classmate whispered back. “I’ve heard tell how back when our college started, all the social work students had to come live here at the settlement house for a few months. I wonder why they stopped that?”

Grace shrugged as Miss Everett shot a chilly glance in their direction. Clearly she did not approve of students talking amongst themselves during a tour. But she unwittingly answered Miss DeWitt’s question herself a little later. The social work students watched as a dark-haired woman approached the group of children, wailing and sobbing. She pulled a girl of about ten or eleven away from the group, drawing her away into a corner of the yard for private conversation. “Excuse me a moment,” said the settlement worker who was leading their tour. “I must just go talk to her.” She left the group of students and hurried past the playing children to speak to the crying woman and the child.

“Come along, we’ll pay a visit to the library and the kitchens, then catch our subway train back,” Miss Everett said. “I imagine this conversation will take a while; best not to wait.” Her look of disapproval was even clearer than it had been while Grace and Miss DeWitt had been whispering.

“Do you know what is going on there?” Grace dared to ask, nodding towards the conclave in the corner of the yard.

“Not this particular situation, but I’ve witnessed enough similar ones to guess,” said the lecturer. “One of the weaknesses of the settlement house model is that workers are often sympathetic with those who require firmness. Some mothers, for example, ought not be left in charge of their own children. Mothers who drink, who cannot
be trusted to run a household, want to keep their children with them when the children would be much better off in a well-run orphanage. Many of the workers here are of the view that they can keep families together by providing support within the settlement community, but I’m afraid that all too often that is sentimentality and wishful thinking. The settlement ideal,” she continued as she led them through the halls, apparently not concerned who heard her, “sounds fine on paper—that the workers come in and treat the poor as equals—but it fails to take into account the limitations of the people with whom they are working.”

“But surely,” Grace ventured, “there’s something to be said for a mother’s love for her children.”

Miss Everett paused in her walk to fix Grace with an icy glare. “Perhaps you will be able to speak more cogently about the value of a mother’s love, Miss Collins, when you have had, as I have, the duty of removing the body of a deceased fourteen-year-old and her unborn child from the care of a mother who sold her daughter into prostitution to pay for her own gin habit. High-flown sentiments about family love and the inherent nobility of the poor sound a little hollow at such times. You look shocked, Miss Collins.” Her gaze swept from Grace to the rest of the group. “You will all need to see a little more of life in neighbourhoods such as this one before you are equipped to judge whether the settlement house model or the scientific approach works best. Perhaps then you will also be able to judge whether you are cut out for work such as this. And this is the library,” she announced, opening a pair of broad double doors to reveal a book-lined room where three or four people sat at tables reading or writing.

Her words still rang in Grace’s ears when she took the train at Grand Central Station to Montreal on the twenty-second of December, immediately after writing an examination on racial characteristics in the population. She was well aware by now of the
divisions within the social work school over the best ways to help the poor, and understood that “scientific” educators such as Miss Everett had the upper hand over those who had once knitted the school closely to the settlement houses. Grace might disagree with some of Miss Everett’s theories, but she worried the instructor’s opinion of her own capacity might be accurate.
Am I really able to do this work?
Grace wondered.
Or do I simply like the idea of helping the poor. Or even more
, she thought with a stab of sudden honesty,
do I just like the idea of working in neighbourhoods and with people that would shock my mother?

She tried to imagine Lily’s face if she had seen the squalid tenements clustered around the settlement house. Her horror was so easy to visualize that Grace felt a kind of distant fondness for her mother’s intense propriety. Lily had not, as Grace feared, cut off contact altogether when Grace went to New York. Her weekly letters still arrived, neat, closely written pages on which she documented which ladies had crocheted what for the fall sale of work and how impossible Mrs. Hapgood, the Anglican minister’s wife, was being about the plan to unite their charitable forces to benefit the families of veterans. Seeded among the parish news were the usual admonitions for Grace to study hard, behave herself, and not get carried away with any foolishness no matter what she might see or hear in the city. Lily had read an article in a church magazine about how jazz music was destroying the morals of the young. She clipped it out and enclosed it with passages underlined, and urged Grace to avoid any place where jazz might be played.

Grace had written weeks ago to tell her parents of the invitation to Montreal for Christmas. Lily had replied:

The journey home was of course far too long and expensive to make for Christmas break but for a moment Grace wished she could be there. The manse would be dull even with her there, she thought, but it would be familiar, and there were far too many unfamiliar things in Grace’s life these days.

But she forgot the thought of going home when she saw Jack waiting at the station in Montreal. He held out his arms and Grace went straight to them, as shameless as she’d been on that day they’d gotten news of Charley’s death. Here, far away from families and everyone who knew them, she allowed him to pull her into a tight embrace and lifted her face for a kiss.

“I’ve got a cab waiting to take us to Mr. and Mrs. Ohman’s house,” he said, picking up Grace’s bags and taking her by the hand to lead her through the crowded station.

“I knew I’d heard the name before. Jessie Ohman, isn’t it?” Grace said. “She used to edit a ladies’ paper back in St. John’s.” The name Ohman had tickled at the edge of memory when Jack had told her of the invitation, and on the strength of his statement that Mrs. Ohman had known her mother Grace went back through the packet of papers she had taken from her mother’s old room in St. John’s. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had taken those papers all the way to New York with her—some idea, perhaps, of showing them to Mrs. Parker, asking about them? She never did; it seemed disloyal. But when Grace went back to that packet of papers she saw Mrs. Ohman’s name all over—as editor of the
Water Lily
, as an outspoken proponent of the prohibition laws and votes for women.

“That’s the one. She’s quite a firebrand still, though she must
be well up into her seventies by now. Her husband’s the quiet one. He’s in the jewellery business, not a Newfoundlander by birth. She is, and she’s always saying how she misses home, like any Newfoundlander, I suppose.” Jack handed Grace’s case to the cab driver and helped her into the motorcar.

The Ohmans’ home was a fair-sized house. For some reason Grace had been thinking of an apartment like the Parkers’, imagining Montreal would be just like a slightly smaller New York. Inside, a grey-haired, slightly stout woman in dark green velvet trimmed with what looked like hand-crocheted lace, welcomed them into her sitting room.

“My dear Miss Collins, how very good to meet you,” she said, drawing Grace into an embrace. “Young Captain Perry—Doctor Perry as we shall be calling him soon—has told me so much about you. Oh, dear—how much like your mother you look!”

They took tea in the sitting room, Mr. Ohman nowhere in evidence, and Grace gave Mrs. Ohman a brief summary of her studies in New York.

“Such an excellent field for young women to enter. There is a great need, in every city. Not just in large places like New York and Montreal, but in St. John’s too. There is terrible poverty there. At least, there was in my day, and I don’t imagine it has gotten any better. I tell Captain Perry here that I fully expect him to dedicate his talents and his medical degree to working among the poor once he has finished his studies.”