Emancipation Day (19 page)

At the border, the uniformed guard looked quickly at their papers and motioned them through. Peter drove to a street called East Adams, and they went into a bar called the Horse Shoe Club. It was a long, narrow, smoke-filled room with a bar down one side and a low stage at the far end, painted black, with a piano and some chairs along one side and a Wurlitzer in the corner playing “Star Dust.”

“That wasn’t here before,” Jack said as they found a table. Above the stage hung a black-and-white curtain, patterned like a zebra skin. The rest of the room was taken up by tables covered with beer glasses, cigarette packages and ashtrays, and between the tables people, most of them coloured, were all talking at once. Everyone seemed to know each other. There was an electric feeling in the room that she hadn’t noticed in Windsor. Many of the men, even the coloured men, sported pencil-thin moustaches that had been popularized by fighter pilots during the war, even though none of them could ever have flown an airplane.

The song on the Wurlitzer ended and some men at one of the tables near the back stood up and took the stage. It surprised Vivian that they played fast but almost without moving. They
played jazz versions of songs that had been popular in the thirties. They took a standard melody, the kind Jack and the King’s Men had played in the K of C, and turned it into something new and outrageous, natural and lovely, like a tree that had grown up constantly buffeted by wind. The sound obliterated all that had happened between then and now.

“Ain’t this grand?” Peter said, leaning towards her.

She nodded. She asked him what he had done in the war.

“Nothing. I was a conscientious objector. They made me join the Army, but they didn’t send me to the front. I worked in the recruiting office. Isn’t that rich? A conscientious objector sending hundreds of other men to their probable deaths? Sick bastards.”

She didn’t know what to say to this. It had never occurred to her that anyone could refuse to have anything to do with the war. What else could one refuse to do?

Peter returned his gaze to the musicians. “We saw Dizzy Gillespie here last March,” he said. “He played with some local cats, Willie Anderson and Milt Jackson. Man, was that something.” She smiled. “He wanted to take Milt and Willie A. back to New York with him, but Willie A. didn’t want to leave his mama. What d’you think about that?”

“
You’re
living with your mother, aren’t you?” Vivian said.

He laughed. “I guess we’re all mama’s boys.”

Was he including Jack? He hadn’t wanted to come back to Windsor, but he had given in easily enough.

“And your father? Was he overseas?”

“No, he was down East, in the Navy. It was my father who saved Jack’s bacon by signing those exemption papers.”

“Your father was in Newfoundland?”

“Yeah, he was Jack’s medical officer on the
Assiniboine
. Didn’t Jack tell you?”

Another thing he hadn’t told her. Had he really been chronically seasick on that trip, she wondered, or had his friend’s father done him a favour? She looked across the table at Jack. He was talking with Della, their heads close together. She hadn’t seen him so animated since they’d arrived in Windsor. Something stirred within her, and she turned back to Peter.

“When does your father come home?”

“Any day now,” Peter said. She caught him looking uncertainly over at his mother, and then she heard Jack say something about Ireland and staying in a castle, and wondered what on earth he was talking about.

Then Peter’s name was called by one of the men on the stage, and Peter stood up and made his way to the back. He gave a short bow to the house and accepted a trumpet from the man who had called him.

“He’s not going to use that man’s horn, is he?” Jack asked.

“Why not?” said Della, smiling at Vivian. But then Peter took his own mouthpiece from his jacket pocket and slid it onto the instrument.

Peter put the trumpet to his lips and blew a long, plaintive note that wavered towards the end, as though he had run out of wind, then folded it into a rippling cascade that ended in low,
sobbing tones. The piano player joined in, playing fast when Peter played slowly and slowing down when Peter picked up. The drummer stirred his brushes on the snare, making a sound like rain hitting a sail, and held the cymbal with one hand while he scraped at it with the tip of the drumstick; a howling wind, a storm at sea. They weren’t playing any particular song, rather they were relating to each other in a sort of commiseration, an impression that was bolstered by the audience, which was attentive, almost trancelike, some of the listeners calling out from time to time as though consoling Peter on some ordeal he had suffered and that the audience had suffered before him and now they were united in their recovery.

When she looked at Jack he was nodding, but his smile was frozen in place. Della was sitting on the edge of her chair, holding a cigarette halfway to her lips, transported by the music. She looked beautiful in the hazy, blue light, and Vivian wondered if she herself had looked like that when she’d first heard Jack play his trombone. She’d always thought of music as song, but this wasn’t song, it was purer than that, it was above song, beyond the rules of song. She liked it. Then the drums picked up and the bass started in, and with the new tempo they were playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” the song Jack had once played for her, but a version of it they seemed to be making up as they went along. When it was over, Peter returned the trumpet and made his way back to the table through the applause. The waiter brought them another round of drinks. “On the house,” he said. Jack didn’t say anything. Della leaned across the table
and touched Peter’s arm, then looked at Jack with an expression Vivian couldn’t quite read.

Instead of taking them home through the tunnel, Peter drove across the Ambassador Bridge so they could see the skyline up and down the river. Jack and Vivian were again in the back, but Peter had put the top up and she felt encased in the car. Della was sitting half turned towards them, her bare arm along the back of her seat.

“It must be difficult for you,” Vivian said to her, “with your husband away and all.”

“Yes,” Della said. “It has been.”

“Whenever my father goes to England, my mother misses him terribly.”

Della turned to look ahead. “The bridge is much prettier now with the lights on,” she said. “They were off all during the war.”

Peter added that the lights were yellow to discourage mayflies from landing on the bridge.

“What are mayflies?” she asked, and Peter told her they were huge winged insects that came up from the bottom of the river every spring in such vast numbers that they coated every surface in the two cities, so that the roads were slick with their crushed carcasses. That was what it was like being in this car with the top up, she thought, like being underwater in a canvas cocoon, waiting for spring.

“And they stink of fish,” Peter said. “The city smells like a sardine can for weeks.”

“It’s amazing,” Jack said, “how a harmless little insect can
cause so much damage when you put enough of them together.”

“Like an army,” Peter added.

“Like lies,” said Della.

Vivian and Jack spent the next afternoon by the river, sitting on one of Benny’s blankets close enough to the water to hear the ducks squawking as they flew in tight formation above the wavelets. Her father would have loved watching the oldsquaws bobbing close to shore, their long tail feathers pointing at the sky. Jack’s mother had packed them off with a picnic lunch of egg-salad sandwiches and iced tea. It the past five days she had come to like Jack’s mother very much. She still hadn’t met Jack’s father. It was now something of a bitter joke.

“I don’t believe you have a father.” She was picking eggshell out of her sandwich. “I think you crawled up out of the river, like one of those horrid mayflies.”

“You may be right,” he said.

She sighed. “Where is he, Jack? And don’t say, ‘Where is who?’ ”

She didn’t expect a straight answer, and she didn’t get one. In the mail that day had been a letter from the Navy. Jack was to report to Toronto for demobilization when his leave was up. After that, she supposed they would go back to St. John’s, and she would never meet his father at all.

“How long does it take to be demobbed?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not that long.”

“And we still have our train ticket home?”

“Sure, doll. They have to send me back to where I came from.”

But where he came from was Windsor.

After another attempt at supper in the apartment (meat loaf and boiled potatoes that Jack said were delicious), they walked to his parents’ house for tea and dessert. His mother was sitting alone at the kitchen table, playing a form of solitaire Vivian didn’t recognize. She looked worried. Benny was out and needed a ride home, and Jack’s father was somewhere complicated, as usual. The truck had broken down and he’d spent the day waiting in a garage for it to be fixed, then a client had complained about a plastering job and he’d gone to see about it. Jack said he would fetch Benny in the Mercury, and hurried off, leaving her alone with his mother. They sat in the kitchen drinking orange pekoe tea, which had finally materialized. Jack’s mother started talking about Jack as a little boy, always running off and getting into “situations.”

“Was he a big baby?” Vivian asked. She was investigating her theory that Jack was adopted.

“No, he wasn’t no trouble that way,” Jack’s mother said. “But he got difficult later on, oh my. His daddy was pretty hard on him. I remember the time he climbed over old Mr. Mandleson’s fence and stole some green apples. His father was none too pleased about that.”

Vivian seized on this opening, hoping it would lead to talking
about Jack’s father. But his mother veered in a different direction.

“That was in the Depression,” she went on, “when apples was money. Old Mr. Mandleson lived on Windsor Avenue, across the alley from us. He come flying over to our house, Who took my apples? Did you take my apples? And Jackson lying on the couch, innocent as a lamb, half a dozen big green apples stuffed between the cushions. No, sir, I didn’t take no apples. Musta been one of them coloured boys.”

Jack’s mother laughed. Vivian smiled but felt the warmth rise to her cheeks. She was still shocked by the way Windsorites talked about colour as often as Newfoundlanders talked about fish. According to what she’d overheard in the shops and lunch counters, soldiers coming home from the war were finding all the jobs taken by coloureds. Not only the jobs, but all the houses, the women, even the parking spaces. If there were no bananas in the grocery store, it was because the coloureds had bought them all up. They came over from Detroit. They came in from Chatham. Couldn’t go to a movie. Couldn’t sit in Jackson Park for all the coloureds taking it over.

“Jack and I were in Jackson Park the other day,” Vivian ventured. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“A lovely park. All them trees and gardens. And the bandshell.” Jack’s mother took a sip of her tea. “That’s where we have our Emancipation Day picnic every year.”

“Emancipation Day?”

“First of August. It’s a big day. People come from all over, and there’s live music in the bandshell. We used to take Jackson
to it when he was little, but he don’t go no more, now.”

Vivian felt she was getting close to something. “Why not?”

But once again, Jack’s mother became evasive. “He just stopped. Would you like some more tea, dear?”

Vivian put her cup down. “Yes, please.”

“Let me just read it first,” Jack’s mother said. She took Vivian’s teacup and placed it upside down on its saucer, gave it a half turn, then picked it up by the handle and peered into it.

“When did you move into this house?” Vivian asked.

“Oh, we only been here a year.”

“It’s a nice house,” she said.

“Maybe a bit rundown,” Jack’s mother admitted, looking around the kitchen. “Nothing that can’t be fixed. The tap drips, the roof leaks and the basement stairs need tending to. I’m almost afraid to go down there. Benny says he’s going to take care of it, but you know Benny.” Vivian nodded. She didn’t know Benny. “Benny’s a lot like his daddy. So’s Alvina.”

“Does Jack take after his father?”

“I think there’s a lot of me in Jackson.”

“Alvina is Jack’s older sister,” Vivian said, “the one who took him dancing across the river.” And someone else she hadn’t met.

“She sure did. She wanted to be a singer, like her aunt Hazel was. Tried out with every band in Windsor and Detroit and as far away as Chicago. She sung jazz and the blues.” Jack’s mother shook her head. “There’s always been music in this family. Jackson’s daddy sang in a barbershop quartet, called themselves the Garden City Quartet, did Jackson tell you that?”

“Is ‘Garden City’ Windsor?”

“No, Detroit.”

“What’s Windsor, then?”

Jack’s mother laughed. “I guess Windsor’s where you come to when you’re kicked out of the garden.”

The remark reminded Vivian of the sense of comradeship she had felt in the jazz club the previous night.

“I gather Alvina and Jack don’t get along?” she said.

“Alvina’s always had a wild streak in her. When she started singing she took up with all kinds. Always coming home in a different car. She hasn’t done any singing at all since getting married to Vernon. That’s when the trouble with Jackson started.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Alvina married dark.” Jack’s mother cast her a conspiratorial look. “Vernon is brown as a old penny. Jackson says she married beneath herself.”

“You mean her husband is a Negro?”

“Hmm, dark dark. Jackson says she disgraced the family, but that’s just Jackson. Vernon’s a very nice man, a good worker, hardly drinks anymore and he’s never laid a finger on Alvina, not like her lighter boyfriends. And he got her out of all them dives she was singing in.”

Vivian wanted to pursue this, but just then she heard Jack coming in the front door and down the hall towards the kitchen.

“Did you find Benny?” his mother asked him.