By the Rivers of Brooklyn (28 page)

Claire busied herself with the carrots, straining them into the sink and turning them out into a dish. The same thought, albeit from a different angle, was on her mind. If she went to Toronto with Valerie's family, she'd never get shut of Valerie. They'd be doomed to go through their whole lives lashed together like some poor pair of losers in a three-legged race.

Bill came back in and sat down at the table. Grandmother shuffled over and Claire took her own seat as Aunt Annie brought the gravy boat over and set it down. “I hope that gravy's not too salty, Annie,” Grandmother said. “You got too heavy a hand with the salt, I can't stand salty gravy.”

“Last time you said it was too fresh,” Aunt Annie said, but she didn't sound as if she minded at all. Claire knew that she herself would go crazy in a second if she had to keep house under Grandmother's nose and keep up with all her whims.

After supper Claire sat at the table with her books spread out, studying for her geometry exam. Aunt Annie was washing dishes, Grandmother was still knitting, and Uncle Bill listened to the radio with the sound down low, which was supposed to keep from disturbing her while she studied but was in fact more annoying than if he'd had it going full-blast. Mr. Smallwood was on talking about Confederation again, and the words drifted in and out of Claire's mind, twining together with the proof of the Pythagorean theorem until neither one made any sense.

The back door opened and Valerie came in, her own geometry book under her arm. “Can I study with you?” she asked Claire, slipping into the seat beside her.

“What, you mean, can I explain it all to you while you draw pictures in the margin of your exercise book?” Claire said sharply.

“Don't be mean. You understand it and I don't, and we've got an exam in three days. I keep forgetting what the hypotenuse is.”

“It's the long side on a right-angled triangle,” Claire said for what must have been the hundredth time, and she quickly sketched the diagram on the edge of her paper. “There. That's one picture you
can
draw in your exercise book, perhaps it'll help.”

“You're the one who should be a teacher: you're mean enough,” Valerie said, copying the triangle on her own paper.

It proved almost impossible to concentrate on geometry with the radio going, all the adults in the room putting in comments in reply to Mr. Smallwood. When Uncle Harold and Aunt Frances came in, Claire began to gather her papers. She loved studying in the brightness and warmth of the kitchen, but she'd have to retreat to her bedroom, cold and dim as it was, if she wanted to really get anything done tonight.

“Well, Fred says he'll put me in touch with a fellow named Harris who runs a shop in Scarborough, that's just on the outside of Toronto. He thinks he might be able to give me a job or help me find someone who can,” Uncle Harold said to Uncle Bill. “Of course there's no problem finding jobs in Toronto, not for a man with a skilled trade like electronics. It's an up-and-coming city, Toronto.”

Uncle Bill nodded and grunted; he was still listening to the radio, his face screwed up in a frown.

“Yes, you want to listen to that, that's a smart man there: Joe Smallwood,” Uncle Harold said. “He's tomorrow's man, and fellows like Major Cashin are yesterday's men, yesterday's men.” Aunt Frances laid her hand lightly over Uncle Harold's and patted it.

“Oh, so you think bowing and scraping and going cap in hand to a bunch of mainlanders is the way of the future, is it?” Uncle Bill growled. “And looking after ourselves, managing our own country, that's a thing of the past?”

“He didn't mean it that way, Bill,” Annie said, coming in from the kitchen with her dishcloth in hand.

“Come on, let's go upstairs,” Valerie whispered to Claire, sweeping her own books and papers into a pile. Arguments made her fidgety.

But Claire shook her head slightly. “In a few minutes,” she said, watching Uncle Harold's face. He lifted his voice to cut across the sparrow-like fluttering of the women.

“I do mean it that way. I'm sorry, Annie, but Bill is right. That's exactly what I mean. Yes, I mean yes, if there was some way Newfoundland really could go it alone, be a nation, sure, that would be fine. But that's a pipe dream and you know it, Bill. That crowd at Government House wants to string us along with promises of independence, and we're at the mercy of a bunch of fat-arsed merchants and English lackeys. If you think they've got the good of Newfoundland at heart–”

“Oh, and I suppose you think Joe Smallwood has the good of Newfoundland at heart, does he?” Uncle Bill spoke Smallwood's name like his mouth was filled with vinegar. “Talk about a lackey…going to Ottawa for handouts.”

“Those handouts, as you call them, might be the difference between life and death for some poor family in an outport with thirteen children. Imagine what a difference the baby bonus will make to a family like that! Or to veterans. You'll be much better off under a Canadian government. Sure, even Mother here will get the old age pension.”

“That's what you think, is it, that Newfoundlanders can be bought with Canadian dollars? Is that all our country means to us…something to barter and trade?”

Uncle Harold made a fist and didn't exactly bang it on the table, but thumped it lightly a few times. Neither of them was the kind of man to get worked up, and they liked each other, but when it came to Confederation, Claire thought, Uncle Bill just couldn't see sense.

“Send him victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us,” said Grandmother unexpectedly from her chair, her small dark eyes opening like buttons popping through buttonholes. “God save the King.”

“God save the King, and God help Newfoundland,” Uncle Harold said, standing up. “Come on, Frances girl, we got to call those boys in and get them to bed. Valerie, don't be down here too late with Claire now.” He turned to Bill and stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings now, Bill. I s'pose we'll never see eye to eye on this, but we'll all see what's what next month when we has the referendum.”

Up in her room later, after Val and the others had gone home, Claire rolled and put away her socks and decided her sock drawer was untidy. Time to straighten it out. If she really did have to pack it all up soon, it would be best to have it well organized. She pulled the drawer out: socks, underwear, slips. She began to sort and fold.

As she laid the drawer back in, something at the back of the dresser, down inside, caught her eye. Claire pulled it out. It was a cheap birthday card, with a picture of a little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a simpery smile. She couldn't remember what birthday it had been sent for – certainly not for this one, her sixteenth. Maybe last year or the year before.

Inside, her mother's spidery handwriting:
Happy Birthday to my darling
daughter Claire. I thank God every day my dear that you have such a good Home.

Claire laid the card on top of the pile of underwear and old socks she was throwing out, but couldn't quite do it. She always managed to lose her mother's cards and letters; she had never actually put one in the waste basket. Instead she tucked it in her Bible, at Habakkuk, a book rarely read and poorly understood. She slid her tidy underwear drawer back in the dresser, cleared off the old clothes to put in the trash, and went to bed.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1949

E
THEL SAT IN HER
living room, listening to
The Guiding Light
and crocheting. She had taken up crocheting doilies because she was no longer at the age when her friends were having babies and not yet at the age when they were having grandchildren. Without babies to knit or crochet for, she was reduced to doilies.

Jim and Jimmy would be home from work soon; their dinners were in the oven. Diane had been home, had her dinner, and gone out again. Diane had just started her last year of high school, counting the days till she would graduate and go from working afternoons and Saturdays at Macy's to working there full time. After that, she and her friend Carol Dobrowski were getting their own apartment. Ethel looked around her living room, where for almost seventeen years Diane had slept on the fold-out daybed and Jimmy had slept on the couch. When Diane went, they could fold up the daybed and put it away. Right now, this was all Ethel could bring herself to feel about her only daughter leaving home.

This doily she was working on was white with pink and green trim, part of a set she was making as a gift for her friend Irene at church, who was having a dinner and dance for her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Next year would be Ethel and Jim's silver anniversary.

When she heard Jim and Jimmy at the door, she got up and tucked her crocheting into her work basket. From the hall she heard Jim's easy laughter as Jimmy finished the punch line of a story: “…and so I told her, lady, save yourself a coupla bucks next time; don't call me till you check first and see if it's plugged in!”

The men's voices mingled in laughter, and inside the laughter she caught Jim's question, “You charged her anyway, for makin' the trip?”

There was a pause and she could hear Jimmy kicking his boots off. “Naw, I was gonna charge her fifty cents but I didn't have the heart.” Jim laughed again. Ethel looked at the table, where two hours ago she and Diane had sat at either end, eating in silence. Why did fathers and sons get on so much better, easier, than mothers and daughters?

Then father and son were in the kitchen, and the laughter was stilled. Jim pulled out his chair and sat down. Jimmy came over to the sink where Ethel stood and gave her a quick sideways hug before he sat down. “Hey, Ma,” he said. “How's your day?”

“Fine, my day was fine,” she said, wondering what he would think if she recited a litany:
I got up. I made your breakfast. I cleaned the toilet. I crocheted a set of
doilies to give to a woman I don't like much. I listened on the radio to stories about
women who have real lives, lives where something happens.

“I don't know what we're gonna do about these televisions,” Jim said, directing the comment across the table at Jimmy.

“I tell you, Dad, I can fix televisions. They won't need another guy. Trust me. I been studying it.” He glanced up at his mother with a quick smile. She smiled back. He was a good boy, her Jimmy. Not brilliant. Not like Ralphie. Ralphie could have gone on to university, Ethel thought, forgetting that Ralph had never gotten his Grade Eleven. Look at all those boys who went to college on the GI Bill, and here they were now, college graduates. That's what Ralphie could have done.

She looked at Jim, saw he was giving Jimmy the same proud look she had given him herself a moment ago. Jimmy didn't notice either parent; he was buttering his bread. Over his bent head his parents' eyes met for a minute, and Ethel turned away – not just her eyes but her whole body, back to the sink, where she began scrubbing at a stain that wasn't there.

“So young Taylor called me into the office today,” Jim said.

Ethel assumed he was speaking to Jimmy, but Jimmy's chair scraped back along the floor and he stood up. “I gotta run,” he said. “Gotta meet some of the guys.” Then she understood that Jim was talking to her, directly to her, and that Jimmy did not want to be there, to stand between them and be the channel for this conversation.

She turned slowly and stood with her back to the sink, watching her husband chewing another mouthful of roast before he spoke again. The dishrag was knotted between her fingers; she was playing with it like Mrs. Romano did with her rosary beads. She stared at Jim's face, watching his eyes meet hers and then shift away again.

“So he calls me into his office,” Jim repeated, “and he tells me that since the old man died, he needs someone to live over the store. A manager, like. Till he decides whether to sell it or not. He's waiting to see about this television thing…whether it catches on or whether it's just a flash in the pan.” Jim's hands moved on the tablecloth, lifting his fork, playing with it, putting it down.

Ethel said nothing, and Jim went on. “Poor old Taylor…he put his whole life into that store. And for what? To hand it down to his son. And all young Taylor cares about is real estate. Not radio.” In a small silence, Ethel heard the clock. Tick, tick, tick. She looked down at the pointed toe of her shoe. A scuff-mark showed white against the beige. When she glanced at Jim again, he was still at the fork, poking the end of a tine through a small hole in the tablecloth.

This was the most words she'd heard Jim say to her, all at one time, in four years. Five full minutes of words, and she still didn't have a clue what he was driving at. Finally, like it was dragged out of him, he turned to her with the first direct question he'd put to her in all that time.

“Well, girl, what do you think?”