Emancipation Day (27 page)

At the doctor’s office, the receptionist told her to sit in the waiting room. Through the thick windows, their velvet curtains held back by silk ropes, she could see the quiet street lined with leafless trees, the cars parked along the sidewalk, wet but without snow. She remembered the night they had come here before going to Detroit, before she met Jack’s father, before she became pregnant. It seemed several lifetimes ago.

Dr. Barnes was tall, with greying hair and smiling eyes behind silver wire-rimmed glasses that glinted in the light from his desk lamp. He looked older than Della, the very portrait of the family physician, a town doctor rather than one from the outports. He wore a three-piece suit, navy-blue pinstripe, with a gold watch chain looped across his vest. He reminded her so much of her father that she felt she knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it. She even knew what he did. At the end of the day, exactly like her father, he would sit stolidly in his chair by the coal fireplace, take a small folding knife from his vest pocket, shave a palmful of tobacco from a plug he kept in a wooden box on the mantelpiece, and light his pipe with a match that he struck on the fireplace fender. Then he would hold a newspaper up to his face and growl at it while Della made supper.

“Well, you’re pregnant, all right,” he told her. “As if you didn’t know that.” He had her father’s gruff humour, which she understood perfectly. Longed for. “But there’s a lot of albumin in your urine. Bet you didn’t know
that
, eh? Probably nothing. Been getting much exercise lately?”

“I walked here, does that count? And I do the shopping every day. Is albumin bad?”

“No, it’s a protein and the baby needs protein. But a high count could indicate a problem with the kidneys, or a touch of anemia. Probably not in your case, but since you’re in the family way we mustn’t take chances. We’ll do another blood test for iron. You haven’t had German measles or chicken pox lately?”

“No.”

“No vaccinations?”

“No.”

“Do you smoke?”

“No, I quit.”

“Good. Do you drink milk?”

“No, I hate milk.”

“Too bad. Drink milk. Lots of it. Four glasses a day. Eat calves’ liver, too. And green vegetables, spinach. And cod liver oil.”

“My father makes cod liver oil in Newfoundland,” she said.

“Hmm. Good, you should get some from him. Wouldn’t want to have a rickety baby, would we? Come back and see me in a month. Baby’s not due until late July or early August, so no reason to panic yet.”

But there was every reason to panic. Could a doctor tell her anything about the baby’s colour? Could he take X-rays and see from the shape of its head, or the size of its bones? The way it lay in her womb, like a curl of dark chocolate?

“Meanwhile,” the doctor said, “do what I’ve told you and you’ll be right as rain. You and the baby.” He looked up at her. “Any questions?”

“I want to have the baby in Hôtel-Dieu, if that’s all right?”

All the coloured babies were born in Hôtel-Dieu. It was as close as she could come to asking him directly.

“Hôtel-Dieu? I’m afraid I don’t have privileges in Hôtel-Dieu,” the doctor said, looking at her intently. Or was she imagining that? “I’m with Grace Hospital. If you want to have the baby in Hôtel-Dieu, I could arrange for you to have a—a different doctor. But I think you’d both be much more comfortable in Grace.”

She pulled at the buttons on her sweater, remembered the buttons on Jack’s Navy tunic that first time on the beach in Ferryland, and stopped.

“I … I think you knew my husband during the war,” she said. “He was stationed in St. John’s.”

“Oh?” the doctor said.

“Jack Lewis? He’s a friend of your son’s.”

“Oh, yes, he was here just the other day.”

“Jack was here?”

“Yes,” Dr. Barnes said, putting away his stethoscope. “He was upstairs, seeing Della. Apparently looking for Peter.”

All the objects in the room had been still until that moment, like perching birds, but suddenly they were in violent motion, as though a hawk had flown in through an open window.

“My husband is worried,” she said. “About the baby, I mean.”

“Well, then,” said the doctor, “you’ve got some good news for him. Everything’s fine.” But he didn’t make it sound like good news.

“Will the baby be … normal?” she asked.

“Nothing’s normal,” the doctor said. “Drink plenty of liquids, preferably milk, and get lots of rest.”

The moment passed. The objects around her roosted again.

He took her elbow and led her back to the waiting room, where the receptionist, whose name tag said June, a nice name, gave her a follow-up appointment for early April, a little over a month away. April was a nice name, too.

“Mrs. Barnes saw your name on our appointment book,” June said. “She hopes you have time to go upstairs for tea. She’s expecting you.”

For a second, Vivian thought she had said, “She’s expecting, too.” She trembled as she left the office.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw Della sitting in an old-fashioned wing chair by the fire. The hallways on either side led, Vivian guessed, to bedrooms, and the kitchen and dining areas. There was a bay window fitted with heavy curtains, and a floor-model radio with a framed photograph of Peter on top of
it. Soft morning sunlight filtered through the sheers. The layout, the furniture, everything about the place seemed familiar to her. Then she realized this was the house Jack had described to her on the train. He had described Peter’s house as though it were his own.

An empty chair faced Della’s, and between them a silver tea service had been set on a small table. There were scones and Devonshire cream. It had been a long time since Vivian had had a real English tea. Della was dressed entirely in wool, right down to her stockings; she might have knitted everything herself. There was a knitting basket behind her chair with two long, thin needles sticking out of it, like an insect’s antennas.

“Do sit down, Viv,” she said. “You look exhausted.”

Her worries about the baby and the curious behaviour of the objects in the examining room had left her shaken. “I am a bit flustered,” she said, taking the second chair. Sitting, she felt immediately better. Was it the woollen skirt, the English tea, the smell of the fire? How much Dr. Barnes had reminded her of her father? She felt so powerfully at home here that she decided to confide in Della.

“I’m going to have a baby.”

A look passed across Della’s face that suggested to Vivian that her news either wasn’t news or was not entirely welcome. How much did a doctor share with his wife? Or had Della guessed the truth when she saw Vivian’s name in the appointment book?

“How wonderful for you,” Della said. “How is Jack taking it?”

Della had leaped to the delicate heart of the matter.

“Not well, I’m afraid,” Vivian said. “It’s a difficult time for him, what with the baby coming and his father’s accident.”

“How is Jack’s father? Any change?”

“No,” she said. “No change. He just lies there.”

Della poured the tea, a good Earl Grey. She poured expertly, holding the spout above the cup so as not to drip on the white tablecloth.

“Poor man,” Della said. “Hôtel-Dieu is a fine hospital, but if he were in Grace I could ask Howie to look in on him.”

“Oh,” said Vivian.

“And how is the family taking it?”

“They … We’re all being brave,” Vivian said.

“Jack’s a brave boy,” said Della. “Did he ever tell you about saving me from the riot?”

“What riot?”

“In Detroit, during the war. A mob tipped my car on its side and set fire to it.”

“He’s never told me anything about it. Were you hurt?”

“No, thank goodness.”

“But that must have been dreadful.”

There was a lull that Della did not break. Perhaps she found the memory too painful.

“How is Peter?” Vivian asked.

“Oh,” said Della, sitting back with her tea. “Peter’s Peter. He doesn’t seem to be interested in doing much, outside of music.” Her gaze went past Vivian. “I tried to talk him into going to college somewhere to study music, and he said that if I could
find him a college that taught bebop, he’d go.”

“Jack hates bebop.”

Vivian saw Della’s gaze turn reptilian for a fleeting moment, and she realized she had spoken disparagingly of something that Della’s son loved. But it was too late to take it back.

“Many whites say that,” Della said. “Bebop is to jazz as Henry Miller is to Proust, they say. Peter disagrees, of course. He says that Miller’s is the purer art. Purer than Proust, can you imagine it? Bebop is a refinement of jazz, not a debasement of it, he says, a sort of jazz elevated to the level of mathematics.”

“Perhaps that’s what Jack meant,” Vivian ventured.

“What?”

“Just that it’s hard to dance to mathematics.” Vivian hoped the subject would change, but Della returned to it with a coldness she no longer pretended to be borrowing from Peter.

“You know, I find it odd,” she said. “I was in New York in the twenties, when the first jazz wave hit. I loved it straight off, couldn’t get enough of it, but all the whites denounced it as Negro music. Then a few white musicians started playing it and suddenly jazz was this brilliant new art form. Now along comes bebop, and again the whites are calling it jungle music. Well, a few aren’t, like my son. But you see what I mean?”

“Maybe Peter will be the next Bix Beiderbecke,” Vivian said.

“You mean a kind of white, bebopping Pied Piper? Oh, wouldn’t he just love that.”

“It won’t be Jack, anyway.”

“No, it won’t be Jackson.”

Jackson
. She almost missed it. She’d been hearing it from his family so often, but coming from Della it was different. She recalled Dr. Barnes saying that Jack had been in the house recently. Was it the day he’d left after telling her that if the baby was coloured it wasn’t his? Had he come here to talk it over with Peter?

“Your husband tells me Jack was here the other day,” she said.

Della leaned over the tea service and put her hand on Vivian’s arm. “It’s all right, dear,” she said. “Jackson told me.”

“Told you what?”

Della withdrew her hand from Vivian’s arm and sat back with her teacup and saucer on her lap. “This is Windsor, darling, we know about Jack’s family.” The hawk was back in the room. What had Jack told her? What had he told Della that he hadn’t told her? “The colour line may be a bit smudged, but it’s here all right,” Della went on. “We have our little … adventures, but we don’t usually marry them. Jack understands that.”

“But I would have married him,” Vivian said, lifting her chin. “I’m not like you.”

Della put her cup and saucer on the table. “If Jack had told you about his family before you became pregnant,” she said, “would you have wanted to have this child?”

Vivian felt the room burst into movement, as it had in Dr. Barnes’s office. She hated Della at that moment, and she hated Della’s question. She wanted to say again that she would have married Jack no matter what, that she wouldn’t even have asked about the chances, but something wouldn’t let her say it.
The truth was, she didn’t know what she would have done. She remembered those women in St. John’s who had ended their pregnancies, the regret and relief she had seen in their faces. She put her hand on her belly as though to protect the baby from hearing her thoughts.

“You see?” said Della, sensing Vivian’s hesitation. “We Windsor women have to ask ourselves that question every day.”

Della was telling her she was a fool for believing in Jack. It was what Iris had tried to tell her. Her father, too, in his own way. But what choice did she have? She was in love with him. She is still in love with him. To have said no to him would have been like ending a pregnancy. Before she met Jack she’d lived a life very much like Della’s, with everything she knew and valued within reach, prominently on display, no surprises, and certainly no—what had Della called them?—adventures. The word echoed in her ears.

She eyed Della more closely. And then asked, “What did you mean … about ‘adventures’?”

And from Della’s expression as she sat back in her chair, a look at once startled and sad and guilty, Vivian knew. She knew everything. She knew that Della had seduced Jack, because Jack was easily seduced. Vivian knew that because she had seduced him herself. And Vivian knew not just about Della and Jack, but about Jack on his own. He stood stripped before her as in a flash of light. He hadn’t come to see Peter that day, he had come to see Della, to find comfort, to renew his faith in himself, to be somewhere where he wasn’t a coloured man who had fathered
a coloured child, somewhere he’d been accepted into the white world before and assumed he would be again. Della had taken that comfort away from him. And for this, if for no other reason, Vivian hated her.

“What I meant, Viv, darling,” said Della, recovering, “is that I know what you’re going through.”

Oh, do you? Vivian thought. Do you just?

“Jack isn’t coloured,” she said. “Jack is who he tells me he is.”

“But, Vivian, you know he isn’t. Everyone knows who he is.”

“If Jack says he isn’t coloured, then he isn’t. I believe him.”

“Despite the evidence?”

“Yes, despite the evidence.”

WILLIAM HENRY

W
illiam Henry doesn’t actually feel himself being bathed, but he knows his nurse is touching him because she tells him what she’s doing. “Time for your bath, Mr. Lewis,” she says, and he hears her swishing the water with the tips of her fingers. Is the water warm? It doesn’t matter. The first few times he resisted, as much as he could, tried to think of something else, let his mind drift off, put himself in Harlan’s barbershop or at their table in the British-American. Before his heart give out or the bus hit him, he would let himself drift off to them places and before he knew it he would be taking his morning nip from Harlan’s bottle, or raising two fingers to Fast Eddy as he walked across the floor of the B-A. But not anymore. Now
his mind stays where his body is. It feels better than trying to be two people.