Emancipation Day (10 page)

“What was it you wanted to tell me?”

But he, too, had changed his mind. She saw it in his eyes, a veil descending.

“Nothing,” he said. “You’ll see for yourself.”

“See what?”

Whatever it was, she had missed it.

“What if we took this boat and sailed away in it,” he said, “out of the harbour, way out to sea, anywhere you wanted to go. Wouldn’t that be fine?”

Should she remind him of his chronic seasickness? No, she should not.

“That would be wonderful,” she said, taking his hand and patting it.

Now that they were lovers—she had no word of her own for what they were, so she borrowed one from her books—she thought everything would be different. She looked for ways in
which their lives had changed. She searched his eyes, watched his hands, listened for new inflections in his voice. When they were alone together, as they contrived to be, after a dance or when Iris and the twins were somewhere, he was eager enough. She loved him then, even though they did it hastily, not very satisfactorily for her, always in some impermanent and impersonal place—the front porch when she was sure everyone inside was asleep, against a parked car on Duckworth. Risking everything. My God, if Iris ever found out. Or anyone. But it was worth it to feel him forgetting his coldness and coming back to her, to bury himself in her, if only for those fleeting moments, and be once again that lost little boy at a table for two in the crowded train station, waiting for her with a cup of tea and a story about spies.

But when they weren’t making love he was distant from her, reserved, as though their whole relationship, not just the sexual part of it, were a secret to be kept from everyone. He didn’t look at her when he talked, he didn’t put his arm around her when they walked down the street. We’re not even married yet, she thought, and already we’re acting like an old couple. What will it be like when we’re actually married?

She worried how to tell him she loved him without it sounding like a line from some movie. She practised telling him, in front of her dresser mirror, in the bathroom while brushing her teeth, but it always came out corny or flat. “I love you, Jack.” Should she say it before they made love, or after? Would she say it casually or dramatically? She couldn’t decide. She stopped practising and waited to hear herself blurt it out, maybe during an air
raid, with the city collapsing around them, after searching for each other through the ruined streets. But there never was an air raid, the war was all but over, and she couldn’t bring herself to say it. And each time they made love he seemed to retreat from her a little further, each kiss feeling like a final concession before they came to their senses and went their separate ways when the final bugle sounded. She back to Baird’s, a ruined woman, he back to Windsor after a wartime fling.

Was he holding himself back because he didn’t want to take her to his parents’ home? Whenever she talked about Windsor, he stiffened and changed the subject. Why? She began to feel distant from her own family. If she had thought that being what one of her novels called “a woman of experience” would somehow put her on an even footing with Iris and her mother, she’d been wrong about that, too. She couldn’t tell them the truth, of course, but surely they could see the difference in her? The way she crossed her legs when she sat, or nodded knowingly when they talked about needing new curtains, or frowned when Jack’s name was mentioned, or sighed when it wasn’t? Wasn’t womanhood a code that she had cracked? But there was no change, and she felt more remote than ever, cut off not only from Jack but from them as well, from her father, from Freddie, even from the twins.

One night, after she and Jack had made love in an old van parked on one of the wynds running up from Water Street, Jack leaned against the back of the driver’s seat and lit a cigarette. “We should get married,” he said, as though they didn’t really have
much choice in the matter. It was as though all the air had been let out of the van. She took the cigarette from him and agreed. That is, she agreed they didn’t have much choice, which Jack interpreted as agreeing to getting married. She didn’t correct him. She wrote to her mother the next day, announcing their engagement and listing the reasons for getting married—the war ending, his leaving, her desire to see something of the world.

“Besides,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “I love him.”

They were married in the Navy Chapel on Victoria Day—May 24, 1945—seventeen days after the victory in Europe and twelve days after Jack’s twentieth birthday. The Navy chaplain said a few words, but he didn’t know them from Adam. Frank Sterling was best man and Iris the bridesmaid. The reception was held in the YWCA. Jack’s Navy buddies had put bunting around the tables and one of the Navy photographers took some pictures, but they couldn’t have alcohol, at least not officially, and they had to be out by seven. None of Jack’s family was there. Vivian’s mother came, and Freddie of course, and her uncle Billie, who’d been wounded in Italy and sent home, and his wife, Minnie. Her father said he was too busy to come. He offered to book them a suite in the Newfoundland Hotel for their honeymoon, a whole weekend, but Jack said the captain of HMCS
Avalon
and his chiefs of staff had their headquarters in the Newfoundland Hotel and he didn’t want to run into them. So they took a room in a small motel on Merrymeeting Road, a
place called Flynn’s Tavern. Iris practically screeched when she heard: “A
tavern
? Vivian, you can’t be serious!” But it wasn’t so bad. And they spent most of the weekend in bed, even having their meals delivered from the tavern downstairs, which Vivian decided was romantic, except that Jack always insisted they get up and dress before the food arrived, which she thought defeated the purpose. He didn’t seem to know what dressing gowns were for. And he never tipped the poor waiter, a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who lived in the room across the hall.

They moved into a small flat on Harvey Road, furnished, although with not much more than a bed, a table and two chairs and a hotplate. Iris lent them some bed linen and two paintings, one a good one by Goodridge Roberts. It was their first home together and she loved it. Jack said it reminded him of a motel room. She lost her job at Baird’s because of the store’s policy of hiring only single girls, so while Jack was on parade Vivian spent most of her day in the flat, tidying up after meals, making it cozy, daydreaming and reading books from the public library, most of which seemed to be about women like herself—war brides, women married to men they barely knew. Some of the books ended happily, and she read those carefully for clues, but the ones that looked like they were going to end sadly she put down halfway through, even though they seemed more realistic to her. Sometimes the men changed, but most often it was the women. The war had already altered the men. It was as though people were capable of handling only one big event in their lives, and for the men it was the war. For women it was marriage.

Iris rang, and sometimes Vivian would go to Admiralty Road for a visit, but her sister still hadn’t accepted Jack as part of the family. She referred to him as though he were a temporary unpleasantness, like a blocked drain. There didn’t seem to be any doubt that they would soon be moving to Canada, and she was bracing herself for it. There were things she would have liked to talk about with Iris before she left, aspects of married life that mystified or troubled her, but because of Jack they kept their conversations resolutely on other topics. How the war dragged on, their mother’s health, which was failing, their father’s increasing abstractedness—he was now talking of buying a house on St. Lucia and going there in the winters to do his birdwatching—and Vivian would return to the flat to fix Jack’s supper feeling guilty and out of sorts.

When V-J Day came in August, she went to Baird’s and watched the parade from an upper window, filled with something she called anticipation but which felt more like dread. Some of the girls she’d worked with were still there, unmarried and concerned about it, wanting to know what it was like having someone
there
all the time. She told them it was wonderful. Down on the street, flags and bunting lined the parade route, and for once the weather was dry. When she saw Jack marching by, looking so serious in the first row behind the drums, she waved and shouted and he looked up and swung his trombone towards her, grinning crookedly behind the mouthpiece. Afterwards she walked around the department store in a panic, as though she should start packing everything in it up in boxes and calling the movers.

It astonished her that she and Jack had been married almost four months and she hadn’t heard from Jack’s family. She didn’t understand it at all. She didn’t even know how to talk to Jack about it. She understood them not coming to the wedding, half a continent away, but they could have sent a gift, or a card, even a telegram.
Had
he told them they were married?

“Of course I told them, what do you think?”

“Then why haven’t they written? Don’t they want to meet me? Is there something wrong with me?”

“No. You’re Lily White,” he said.

“I’m not Lily White,” she said, close to tears. “I’m your wife. I’m Vivian Lewis.
Say
it!”

“All right,” he said, laughing. “You’re Vivian Lewis.”

She realized with almost a physical blow that that was the first time she’d heard her new name spoken out loud, even by her. In four months! Vivian Lewis. She’d signed it, but that was different. Sometimes she would sign her middle names as well: Vivian Garna Clift Lewis. Only one name out of four was new, she told herself, hardly any change at all. Jack didn’t even have a middle name. He was just plain Jack Lewis. “You only need one,” he’d said when she asked him about it. Which was true, she supposed, except that everyone else in the world had more than one whether they needed it or not.

“That’s not true,” Jack said. “Lots of people have only one name.”

“Like who?” she said. She didn’t know anyone.

“Humphrey Bogart,” he said. “What’s Humphrey Bogart’s middle name, if you’re so smart?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m sure he has one. Everyone does. What about your father? Doesn’t he have a middle name?”

“Never mind my father,” Jack said. “We’re talking about me.”

“Middle names honour the people in your family,” she said. “Garna is for my mother’s father, whose name was Garnet. Clift is my father’s mother’s maiden name, Rosella Clift. Not having a middle name is like not having a past.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me, kid. No past. And you’ll always be Lily White to me.”

He pulled her up from the bed and put his hands around her waist. “You’re cherry pink and apple-blossom white,” he crooned in her ear. “You’re the white cliffs of Dover. You’re the cream in my coffee, you’re the milk in my tea.” He spun her around the room. He really was a good dancer. She had to close her eyes to keep from getting dizzy. “You’re Snow White,” he said, stopping. “And you want to meet the Seven Dwarves.”

“Jack!” she said, slapping his arm. “That’s no way to talk about your family.” But she laughed. “Yes, that’s what I want.”

“All right,” said Jack, “we’ll go to Windsor. I’ve got a couple of weeks’ leave before I have to go to Toronto to be demobbed.”

See? she could say to Iris. He does love me.

“Boy,” he said, “wait till Windsor gets an eyeful of you.”

They gave up the flat on Harvey Road and stored what little they owned with Freddie and Iris. Temporarily, Vivian assured them without really thinking about it. She assumed they’d be
coming back to Newfoundland after Jack’s demobilization. She hardly even said goodbye to her family. The Overland Limited took them across the island to Port-aux-Basques, and from there the ferry to Nova Scotia docked in North Sydney at six in the evening. She didn’t find the crossing rough, but Jack was green-faced the whole time and stayed in the passenger lounge, stretched out on blankets between two rows of benches. She went out into the fresh air to smoke and to watch Newfoundland recede from her in the wake of the ferry. Hundreds of birds escorted the ship, hagdowns and bottle-noses, sea-pigeons and annetts, making her think her father had sent them to see her safely across the no man’s land of Cabot Strait, now forever free of U-boats. Since the wedding there’d been a show of welcoming Jack into the family, but no one had actually found him a place. If Jack had noticed, he’d been too polite to say anything.

She was alone on deck when she caught her first sight of Canada, long, rolling, tree-topped hills that opened into a harbour lined with soot-blackened buildings and tall derricks. North Sydney was an industrial port. If this was Canada, she said to herself, she didn’t like it much. God, was she going to be like Iris after all? The taxi wove them through the low town, black smoke hanging over it from the coke ovens, everyone looking haggard and drawn. The women in thick, dull sweaters, talking with their fingers touching their throats. They stayed in the New Belmont Hotel. In the morning she got up to open the window and found it painted shut. She wanted to see the ocean, but there wasn’t even a view of the harbour. A huge saddleback
gull, the only sign that they were near water, stood on a hydro pole looking at her so sternly she stepped back and closed the curtains. “Come back to bed,” Jack coaxed, but it was five-thirty and the train left at six-fifteen.

“We’ve got a berth,” he said. “The Navy’s paying as far as Toronto.”

They didn’t have a berth, they had a bunk in a Pullman car. It was narrow and uncomfortable, but a curtain gave them some privacy, and the idea of making love without anyone hearing them was exciting, a private act in a public place. Later, after the coloured stewards had converted the sleeping car to a coach and put her overnight case on a rack above their heads, she sat reading while Jack, sitting across from her, drank rum and Coke and stared glumly out the window, his head nodding with the motion of the train. The steward who brought him his drink couldn’t have been nicer, but Jack spoke to him gruffly and didn’t offer him a tip. Vivian gave Jack a magazine to read, but he put it down on the seat beside his cap and resumed his sightless sweep of the passing scenery. She was reading Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge
. Iris had given it to her as a going-away present.