TransAtlantic (24 page)

She climbed the stairs of the newspaper office once more. Slid her copy across his desk. He looked up at her and shrugged. V. E. Driscoll, he said again. His concession. The
E
for Emily. Their secret.

Fireworks shot up over St. Louis. The twentieth century was an explosion of color. In the hotel room she eased her ankles around the back of Driscoll’s knees. He raised the bed sheet as if it were a white flag. She attached the word
spread
to his life: his forehead spread, his waistline spread, his fame, too. She waited. She was not sure for what. It sickened her. His control. His bearing. The way she allowed it. On the street the Driscoll name was called out by newsboys. Emily walked away. She felt a stirring. A sickness in the morning. She began to carry. It stunned her. She thought briefly of visiting a doctor, decided against it. There would be no father, she was a woman beyond her times, she had suffered for it but she did not care, convention didn’t enthrall her. The dampening of love had shed more light on its nature than any actual experience of it. All she wanted, she said, was her name. Her real name. There was no room for a woman writer at the paper, he said, not beyond the society page. Never had been. She touched her stomach. She mentioned a pregnancy. He blanched. The child might, she said, have real lungs for the world. He spread his palm gently on his giant wooden desk, but his knuckles were white. It was, he said, blackmail. She sat demurely. She moved her fingers in the well of her dress. A portrait of his children sat on the desk. He tapped his pencil on the edge of it. Initials only, he said. She would have to continue to write under Driscoll and then she would have a second column, E. L. Ehrlich. It had enough of a male ring to it. She could live with that. It was hers alone. The
L
for
Lily
.

She gave birth to the child in the early winter of 1902. At night, when the baby slept, she wrote again, meticulous with each sentence.
She wanted her articles to have the compression and rhythm of poems. She pushed the words towards the edge of the page. Worked and reworked. The cutting contests in the Rosebud Café, where the musicians pounded hard on the piano keys. A meeting of anarchists in the basement of a tenement in Carr Square. The bare-knuckle boxing fights down near the newsboys’ home on Thirteenth Street. She was in the habit of writing at tangents so there were times that she would stray into a treatise on the patterns of bird migration along the Missouri, or the excellence of the cheesecake that could be found in the German diner on Olive Street.

She liked her aloneness. At times, over the years, she had met men who showed interest in her. A vendor of Persian carpets. A tugboat captain. An elderly survivor of the Civil War. An English carpenter who was creating an Eskimo village for the World’s Fair. But she gravitated to aloneness. She watched the back of their jackets as they left, the creases made by their shoulder blades. She was left walking with her daughter along the riverbank. Their breathing melded. Their dresses moved harmonically. She found herself an apartment on Cherokee. She splurged on a typewriter. It clattered through the evening. She wrote Driscoll’s column. She didn’t mind. She even enjoyed inhabiting his narrow mind. For her own column she felt as if she were stretching every cartilage. A happiness came over her. She combed her daughter’s flare of hair. There were days of great release: she felt as if she was hauling herself from the depths of the well.

In 1904 Driscoll was found slumped over at his desk. A massive heart attack. His third in a row. She thought of him shuddering in his tight white waistcoat. The funeral was held in the bright St. Louis sunshine. She arrived in a wide black hat and long gloves. At the back of the mourners, she held Lottie’s hand. Later that week she was called into the newspaper offices. Her heart hammering with expectation.
She would now be given her full name, her byline, her right. She had bided her time. She was thirty-one years old. This was her chance. So many stories. The World’s Fair had made the city shimmer. The skyline was stepping upwards. So many accents on the streets. She would capture it all. She walked the stairs. The newspaper owners sat with hands folded, waiting. One of them absently probed the stem of his spectacles at his earlobe. He grimaced as she sat. She began to speak, but they cut her off. Driscoll had left a letter for them in his desk drawer. She could feel her lip tremble. The letter was read out. He had, he claimed, written her articles all along. Word for word. Every small swerve. It was his parting gift. His face slap.

She was stunned by the industry of his revenge. She would never, said the owners, be allowed to work again. She tried to summon a word. They closed the folders in front of them. One stood up to open the door for her. He looked at her as if she were nothing more than a passing horse.

She walked along the river, her face hidden underneath her wide hat. Her mother had walked along here, too, years before. Lily Duggan. Water carried on water. Emily went home to the apartment on Cherokee. She threw her hat away, packed a bag with their things, left the typewriter behind. They moved out from St. Louis to Toronto, where her brother, Tomas, a mining engineer, lived. A room for two months. His wife balked. She did not want an unwed mother around. Emily and Lottie took a train to Newfoundland: the sea did not ice.

They rented a room on the fourth floor of the Cochrane Hotel. Two days later she knocked on the door of the
Evening Telegram
. The first article she wrote was a portrait of Mary Forward, the owner of the Cochrane. Mary Forward walked around under her storm of gray hair. Her bracelets slipped down her forearms as she lifted the hair from her neck. The hotel itself was captured in quick sharp strokes.
The newlyweds—farmboys and farmgirls, their fingers thick and nervous—sitting in the breakfast room. The piano that sounded out at all hours. The banisters that curved into a question mark. Mary Forward liked the article so much that she framed the page in the doorway of the bar. Emily wrote another. About a schooner caught on the rocks. Another about a harbor master who had never been out at sea. She was allowed to use her full byline. She slid into the skin of the town. She felt comfortable there. The fishing boats. The small bells sounding over the water. The threat of storm. She caught the palette of color along the quays. Reds, ochers, yellows. The constant search for the better word. The silences, the blasphemies, the quarrels. The locals were wary of newcomers, but Emily had the texture of old weather and she dissolved amongst them. Lottie, too.

Over the years Emily published poetry with a press in Halifax. The books fell away, but that hardly mattered to her anymore; they had existed for a while, found themselves a shelf to rest upon. So, too, with the weekly columns: she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

IN THE MORNING
Emily swung her feet from the bed. Lottie was still sleeping. A piece of hair had fallen across her face. It rose and fell gently with her breath. A vague scent of gin in the room.

Emily rolled her tights up onto her ankles and struggled into her shoes. She reached for her cane, bent across Lottie, kissed the warm of her forehead. Her daughter stirred, didn’t wake.

The corridor was quiet. She walked along its whiteness. She stopped and leaned against the wall to get her breath back. She could not lay her hands on the emptiness of what she felt. The boat pitched and moaned. She thought to herself that she was, perhaps, skirmishing her way around a headache.

She was helped up the stairs by a young steward. The fresh air calmed her a moment. The gray of the water stretched endlessly. It fell into shapes like a child’s painting.

The boat hit some choppy water. A loud whistle cut the air. The umbrellas were folded and put away. The deckchairs skillfully stacked.

Somehow a maplewood guitar had been left on the upper deck. A stain of rain on its dark neck. She picked it up and shuffled back to the stairs. She wanted to return it to its owner. A sharp, warm pain moved across her forehead. She was at the point of exhaustion. Her cane dropped and skittered down the stairs. She grabbed the handhold. Slowly eased herself down. She was careful not to clang the guitar against the stairs as the boat rolled.

A reek of vomit came from the corridor. A garbled message shot over the loudspeaker. The last thing she could recall was the falling clang of the guitar as another wave hit.

EMILY WOKE WITH
the ship’s doctor leaning over her. He held a stethoscope to her chest. Took her pulse. He wore a reflecting mirror on his forehead. When he backed away to look at her, she could see the shimmy of her form in the round mirror. She struggled to sit up and speak. There was a quality of gauze to the world.

Lottie hovered in the background, chewing her nails. Her tall frame, her pale blue eyes, her short bobbed hair.

The doctor ran his hands along the length of Emily’s arm, checking for swelling at her neck. A stroke, she thought. She mumbled something. The doctor soothed her, put a hand on her shoulder. He wore a wedding ring on his left hand.

—You’ll be all right, Mrs. Ehrlich.

She felt her body tighten. She saw Lottie lean across and mention something to the doctor. He shrugged, said nothing, unhinged the
stethoscope from around his neck. He turned to the row of cupboards behind his head, reached for a bottle of pills, counted some out in a silver dish, scooped them into a small glass jar.

SHE REMAINED IN
the sick bay for three days. A severe dehydration, he said. A possible strain on her heart. She would have to go for tests when they arrived in Southampton. Lottie stayed beside her, morning to night.

A damp cloth was placed on her forehead. She wondered if a part of her had fallen ill precisely because she wanted to dwell for a while longer in the presence of her daughter. The desire not to lose her. To keep her nearby. To live inside that alternative skin.

A DAY FROM
England, she was brought up on deck. A little haze of brown in the mist. An indistinct form of dark. Lottie told her that it was the coastline of Ireland. The headlands of Cork disappeared behind them—at the rear of the boat the phosphorescence shone.

IN SOUTHAMPTON SHE
gave the porter a few shillings to carry their trunk off quickly. She would not go to the hospital. They had already made arrangements for a driver to bring them to Swansea. She couldn’t change anything now.

She saw Lottie, on the gangplank, shaking hands with the ship’s doctor. So that was it. That was all. She felt a vague sadness.

She took Lottie’s arm as they walked down the gangplank together. Her legs felt hollow beneath her. She stopped a moment to gather her breath, adjusted her hat and they walked down to a line of drivers who were waiting on the quayside. An old Ford. A Rover. An Austin.

A portly young man with a clean-shaven face stepped forward. He extended a soft hand and introduced himself. Ambrose Tuttle. He wore the blue of an RAF uniform, a pale blue shirt, trousers that accordioned at his ankles. His head came to Lottie’s shoulder. He glanced up at her as if she were walking on stilts.

He gestured towards a maroon-colored Rover with spoked wheels and a tall silver ornament on the hood.

—Sir Arthur is expecting us, he said.

—Is it a long drive?

—Afraid so, yes. We might not get there until nightfall. Make yourselves comfortable. I’m afraid the roads are rather bumpy.

When he bent to pick up the traveling trunk he exposed a wedge of skin at the small of his back. Emily took the front seat. Lottie settled in the back. The car pulled away from the docks. They drove out of the city into a sudden bright sunlight and a tunnel of chestnut trees.

THE ROAD RATTLED
through them. On occasion the shadows fretted them as they went beneath an arc of trees. The hedges were long and green and manicured. They seemed to coax the car along.

They were traveling at close to forty miles an hour. Emily glanced at her daughter in the backseat, the wind nibbling at the low of her blouse. The blue of the sky had barely changed since noon. The road was largely empty. She thought the English countryside at ease with its order. Nothing at all like Newfoundland. The fields were angular. They could see a great distance, the ancient highways narrowing towards the horizon, an empire quality to it, regimented, well-mannered. Different from what she had expected. No coal mines, no slag heaps, no gray English slouch.

It was difficult to talk over the noise of the engine. On the outskirts of Bristol they stopped at a small tea shop. Ambrose took off his cap
and revealed a head of curly fair hair. He spoke with a curious accent. Belfast, he told them, but Emily figured from the way he said it that he must have been a child of privilege. His accent was more English than Irish. A musical formality to it.

He had been with the RAF for a few years now, in the communications division, but had never graduated to the flying division. He patted his stomach as if to make an excuse.

The sky darkened. Lottie called out instructions from a giant map that gunneled in the wind. Ambrose glanced backwards at Lottie as if she herself might suddenly take flight, a parachute of intrigue.

AS THE LIGHT
failed, Ambrose geared the Rover down, banked the corners skillfully, headed into another long stretch of hedges. They neared Wales. A series of small hills, like a sleeping woman silhouetted sideways.

By early evening they were lost. They pulled up to the edge of a field and watched a falconer ply his art: the bird being trained on the end of a string, the long curl of his flight slowly learning its limits. It hovered a moment, then landed superbly on the falconer’s glove.

THEY WERE FORCED
to stop in Cardiff for the night. A dingy hotel. The air hinted of sea and storm. Emily felt feverish again, lightheaded. Lottie helped her up the stairs and slipped into bed beside her.

In the morning, they drove out along the coast road. The sun rose high behind them, burning off the fog. Children waved from the sides of ditches, boys in gray shorts, girls in blue pinafores. Some were barefoot. A few bicycles came rolling along, mud-splattered and rickety. An old woman waved a walking stick in the air and shouted something
in a language they couldn’t understand. A line of golden hayricks crossed a field.