Homesick Page 7

  Of course, he understood the business with the cigarettes was pure and simple defiance. Her way of saying if she must be mistress of the house she would be mistress of the house and do exactly as she pleased. He never said a word. The day she helped herself to his papers and tin of Black Cat tobacco and rolled a cigarette before his very eyes, he never said a word. Only watched as the cigarette came unglued and crumbled between her fingers as she puffed away.

  Monkman hadn’t said no to her for months. Demanding grocery money, she demanded too much – three dollars a week more than her mother had ever asked for. Vera said it was because of the war and inflation. He didn’t buy that but he gave her the money anyway. He had made himself a situation and he had better learn to live with the consequences. He knew well enough where the extra money went. Into the Chinaman’s pocket when she treated her former schoolmates, Mabel Tierney and Phyllis Knouch, to Cokes. They were the girls he heard so much about, the girls who were going to be secretaries in the city. Often when he drove by the Chinaman’s cafe with goods from the three-twenty train, he saw the top of Vera’s head bobbing above the back of one of the wooden booths. There was no mistaking her. There wasn’t another head of hair like Vera’s in town. She had dyed it red because of Greer Garson. He figured maybe that was the result of working in The Palladium and seeing so many picture shows. You got ideas about being different and special and decided it would be fun to be the only redhead in town. In his books she looked common, looked a tramp. Vera was taking the bit in her teeth, running away on him. There was an air of trouble about her, but what could he do? It had never been like this before; they used to be on good terms. How could she be made to listen?

  The red hair was the final trial of his patience. He had deliberated taking his belt to her when he saw that. His father had always said there was two ways of raising a child: by example or by hand. Take your pick. But he had no pick. At present he was no example of much and knew it. As to doing the job by hand, it was a little late in the day for that. If you started whaling on a girl Vera’s age you had no chance of mending her, only of bending her even more. He knew Vera wouldn’t tolerate a whipping. She had heard her mother say often enough that any man who would strike a woman was no man at all. So naturally she had a prejudice against it.

  Alec could suffer her disparaging looks and her tart tongue because what she had to say to him was mostly just and mostly the truth. What he couldn’t abide was his daughter smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, dyeing her hair red, and drinking Coke in the Chinaman’s on Monday, which was wash day, always had been. There was the question the old boy had never answered. If you can’t appeal to example, nor raise them by hand, what in Christ do you do? He sure as hell didn’t know.

  Vera hated her father. She told Phyllis and Mabel that. She was careful not to mention the smashed fence pickets, the devastated corn patch, the shattered cupboards, the night driving. Anything really peculiar in your family was better kept close to the chest because in a small town people were apt to search for the same thing in you and make sure they found what they were looking for. Besides, there were rumours. No, instead of that, Vera talked about selling tickets at the theatre with cramps from your monthlies so bad you could weep and having to stick it out because if you told him why you wanted to go home, he’d die of embarrassment. She described how he drenched his bread in gravy, ate it with a fork, and swore it was tastier than any dessert, which meant her dessert, the Nanaimo bars she had been taught to make in 4-H. And the radio. Played so loud you believed you’d lose your mind, making it impossible to escape Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and the audience laughing, so you couldn’t read a book like Gone With the Wind, a book you really had to concentrate on.

  Her friends nodded sympathetically and said, “Oh, yes,” in voices flavoured slightly by alarm at the injustice of it all. Vera knew they really didn’t see it. Because whenever Mabel and Phyllis got the chance they steered the conversation around to plans for the upcoming graduation and what everyone intended to do when they had finished high school. All the boys in the class, all six of them, had made a pact to enlist. Phyllis and Mabel were going to secretarial school in Regina. They mentioned that every second breath they drew.

  Couldn’t they see how it upset her to hear them talk of graduation glories? The only way she had to shut them up was to offer them a cigarette. That took the wind out of their sails. Neither of them dared to smoke in public yet for fear their fathers would hear of it, but they assured Vera that when they had their freedom in Regina they wouldn’t think twice about it. It was one leg up on them Vera had, being able to smoke cigarettes in the Chinaman’s. She might have had another advantage over Phyllis and Mabel if all the fellows already out of school weren’t away in the Armed Forces. Unlike her friends, whose fathers would have forbade it, Vera could have dated an older man, perhaps even one who owned a car. Her father wouldn’t have dared to try stop her. The problem was there were no older men to be had. Just shy farm boys who weren’t very clean and whose mothers cut their hair.

  For Vera nothing was the same anymore, it all felt wrong. She was neither fish nor fowl; neither entirely free of the old life nor begun a new one. Her dignity demanded she dismiss Phyllis’s and Mabel’s concerns, concerns she desperately yearned to share. When they frightened themselves with the horror of final exams set by the Department of Education in Regina, Vera smiled as if to suggest they did not know what care and worry were until they had responsibility for a house and young boy. When they debated the respective merits and demerits of Cullen’s and Creighton’s, the two city secretarial schools, Vera went pale and cold with fury. “Both’ll teach you to type, I’m sure,” she said.

  No one seemed to notice.

  “They say lawyers ask for a Cullen’s girl because Cullen’s girls get an especially good grounding in shorthand,” Mabel would say with a pensive air, bobbing her straw up and down the neck of a Coke bottle. “Shorthand is probably important taking down evidence.”

  “Imagine what you could hear!” Phyllis would squeal, imagining herself taking down evidence.

  “On the other hand, Creighton’s are supposed to be strong on bookkeeping and Dad says bookkeeping is the backbone of any business. If a girl is strong on the books he says she can rise to manage an office.”

  “I could never give orders!” Phyllis would sprightly confess. “Imagine me giving orders!”

  Vera certainly couldn’t imagine it.

  Phyllis and Mabel spent all their time scheming about graduation, seeking to get their way as they always had done for as long as Vera had known them. As winter yielded to spring Vera watched them go back and forth to school in the snow and mud, their heads tilted together in excited discussion. Plotting, intriguing, endeavouring to pull wires. Vera knew one of their goals. They wanted to ensure that Bryce McConacher was made class valedictorian. “Sure,” Mabel had said to Vera, “the teachers have always made the best student valedictorian. But Bryce could give an inspiring and humorous speech. Not some dry as dust and mopey old talk which you can bet on getting from poor old Donald Freeman. It’s time for a change. We live in a democracy, don’t we?”

  Lying on her bed with her arms folded crushingly across her breasts, Vera had to support the knowledge that loathsome Bryce McConacher was going to usurp a place that would have been hers if her father had let her continue in school. From the day she had gripped a pencil in Grade One, Vera had waged a see-saw battle with Donald Freeman for the place of honour at the head of the class, one year Donald savouring victory by the margin of a few decimal points in the calculation of their averages, the next year Vera.

  However, Vera had to agree with Mabel when she claimed that Donald was no great shakes as a public speaker. Vera had always been the speechmaker. There were four oratory medals nestled in her mother’s jewellery box to prove it, emblems of consecutive victories in Grades Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Vera had triumphed with the aid of her mother’s coaching. “If you have stage fright don’t
look at the audience. Look over the tops of their heads at the back wall. Don’t rush your speech, it’s not a foot race with the prize going to the fastest. And remember, gesture!” Her mother, who was a postmaster’s daughter, and who had had the advantage of music lessons, even beat time with a wooden spoon as her daughter orated in the kitchen.

  Stretched out on her bed, Vera found she could still mumble to herself vast tracts of those speeches she had delivered in the Community Hall to a smiling, docile audience of parents, teachers, fellow students, and various other well-wishers. Oratory Night was an event, and its prizes hotly contested. All participants understood that what was required to win was to exploit the theme of greatness, make plain the ways of success. For several months before the big night the lives of the famous were pored over in the pages of the school’s Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Vera’s first medal came when she was thirteen. Standing before a large crowd, the eyes of which she was self-consciously convinced were rivetted on her developing breasts, she was momentarily bereft of words. Then she turned her eyes to where her mother sat and caught an index finger discreetly marking tempo against a purse. That launched her. In a confident, ringing voice Vera cried: “Who was Julius Caesar? A man who always followed his star. When great Caesar crossed the Rubicon boldly in front of the legions of Gaul, he was staking everything on Rome and himself.”

  Vera tasted glory then, but what a pale, poor, cheating glory it was compared to the glory of graduation night, the anticipation of which could light your days for months. It was a night which had the power to transform, to raise Cinderellas out of ash pits. Vera had kept her eyes open, she had seen it happen in the past. All her old friends would be changed, none of them would be quite the same afterward. The boys would wear suits, some bought especially for the occasion, others borrowed from uncles, or brothers, or friends of the family. But all would look older, more serious.

  The girls would be as no one had ever seen them before. It was rumoured that even Mary Epp would defy her parents, wear lipstick for the first time in her life and dance, if anyone asked her. Phyllis reported that Mary had already bought a tube of Heart’s Scarlet and hidden it in the toe of those sensible grey stockings she wore.

  Mabel and Phyllis had purchased new gowns in the city and Mabel had been promised she could wear a family heirloom graduation night, her grandmother’s moonstone ring. How different they would all be! Vera knew how they would behave. After obtaining their diplomas Mabel and Phyllis would cry and hug and kiss one another and then graciously extend these favours to girls like Mary Epp (whom they had always despised), hoping to eradicate any unfavourable or harsh impressions that had rooted in such a person’s mind. And perhaps they would succeed and years later Mary would remember them beautiful and generous in their dresses, think warmly of them and wonder what had ever become of her old classmates.

  Vera could not change herself so simply. She saw that. If Mary ever remembered her, it would be with her long white legs poking out of a crinkled dress, giving some false, silly speech about Wellington or Caesar. Vera didn’t want to be remembered that way. The idea was killing. How she wanted to be remembered was as a girl different and remarkable. And she made it happen, she seized her chance.

  Vera Monkman became the first girl from Connaught to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. By acting decisively she was safely settled in barracks two weeks before graduation day. Her friends were left feeling a trifle breathless and disappointingly upstaged. Vera Monkman a soldier, even before the boys! So while Phyllis Knouch and Mabel Tierney completed the grand march around the Community Hall on the arms of their escorts, Vera was being drilled in a grander march, up and down a dusty parade ground. Instead of a graduation frock she wore a sober coat whose brass buttons were embossed with the profile of helmeted Pallas Athene. Vera was officially at war. If she had been asked to explain what had led her to this she likely would have said patriotism, doing her bit to defeat Hitler, all the while knowing this wasn’t true, knowing it was really her instinct for self-preservation which was responsible.

  Vera had come to the end of her tether. She couldn’t have listened to another moment’s chatter about secretarial school, corsages, and gown lengths. She couldn’t have borne seeing, one more time, her father chew with deliberate, dumb satisfaction a boiled potato and be able to stop herself from crying out accusingly, “So where’s your famous grief now? Forgotten when you come face to face with a goddamn boiled potato!” She couldn’t any longer stand to watch Earl waiting each night to learn if his father was off drinking supper, or would be joining them at the table. Once, when her father was twenty minutes late, and she found Earl standing tensely by the front door, listening for the sound of his truck, Vera had said, “You know, sometimes I wish he’d run that truck of his into a telephone pole and end the suspense.” And Earl had flung himself at her, sobbing and flailing her with his palms. She hadn’t really meant anything by it. It was queer how her brother behaved.

  Vera couldn’t tarry any longer. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. So she bummed a ride to Regina and enlisted. The recruiting officer gave her orders to report back in two weeks. For thirteen days she didn’t breathe a word to a soul of what she had done, fearing steps could be put in motion to prevent her leaving. On the last day, with her dresser cleared and her bag packed, she put her father’s dinner in front of him and announced she was leaving.

  “Army?” he said in a bewildered voice. Then not another word as he slowly cut his meat and mashed his parsnips with a fork.

  “Well?” said Vera.

  He looked up from his plate. “You’d do this to him?” He meant Earl.

  “I’m not doing this to anybody. I’m doing it for somebody. There’s a difference.”

  “Who’ll look after Earl?” he asked obstinately.

  “He’s not exactly a baby anymore. He’s twelve and if he needs looking after I suppose you’re the one who’ll have to do it.” Vera shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  Monkman got up from the table, walked heavily to the stove, and poured himself a cup of coffee. With his back still to her, he said, “Such a hard girl. Nothing like your mother.”

  Vera could read nothing of how afraid he was to be left alone to care for Earl from the rigid set of his shoulders. “Maybe,” she said quickly to forestall tears that were threatening to break.

  Her father went slowly back to the table, set down his coffee, took out his wallet. He counted four bills down on the table, side by side. A five and three ones. “There,” he said, “it’s all I have on me. This was kind of short notice.”

  Vera gathered it up. Money for the trip. He had placed it on the table as he had always done for her mother when she went away for a visit. Bills in a row, counted out, no mistake as to what you got.

  He tried one last time. “You know what your mother would want you to do, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you know it’s my mother’s dead and not me?” Vera answered quietly.

  “Get out then,” he said. “Get out. You know where the door is. You’ve been looking at it long enough.”

  Tramping along, swinging her arms in unison with the other women in the drill squad and listening to the rhythmic crunch of heels on gravel, imposed a cadence to Vera’s thoughts. Over and over she repeated to herself that she would have stayed at home if there had been any hope of saving Earl from his father. But she knew there was no chance of that because Earl refused to show any fight.

  “Stand up for yourself!” she had told him. “When the old man yells for you to come downstairs for one of those rides, don’t. What’s he going to do? He can hardly stagger over level ground when he’s that way, so how’s he going to manage stairs to get at you?”

  But Earl always went to his father when he called. It was a mystery to Vera. As the saying went, God helps those who help themselves. Vera didn’t see how she could be expected to go one better than God. What was there left for her to do, except save herself?

 
In the Army, for the first time in two years Vera felt she could breathe. The skies that summer were high, cloudless, a distracting blue across which planes of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan darted and swooped. Wheeling left and wheeling right to a drill sergeant’s commands, Vera felt freer than when she had idled away her afternoons with Cokes and cigarettes and gossip. In the barracks it was interesting and exciting to talk to so many different kinds of girls, middle-class idealists full of patriotic talk and tough girls with pimples on their chins who had fled bad families for the chance to eat three square meals a day and get their teeth fixed at government expense. So many different girls with so many different reasons, an army like any other history had ever known, except that this one was female.

  It was the sense of movement in the Army that Vera liked best. A short time in Regina, a month of basic at Dundurn and then she was dispatched to Kitchener, Ontario, for trades training. Always new faces, new scenery, new things to learn. Because she had her Grade Ten, Vera’s superiors had suggested she might train as a clerk, but when she thought of Mabel and Phyllis and secretarial school she asked to be made a cook instead.

  An adventure impossible to explain or express. Eastbound, leaving behind everything she had ever known, Vera wrote her first letter home, not to her father but to Earl. Ostensibly it was written to provide information as to where she was going and how she could be reached, but in reality she was seeking a confidant, a confidant who had known the old Vera and could draw comparisons with the new. That was Earl. She wrote him everything. She told of the smart dining car with linen tablecloths and silver cutlery where she had recklessly splurged, treating herself to a meal of Winnipeg goldeye as if she had done this sort of thing every day of her life. It was the uniform, she explained. In uniform you were suitably dressed for any function, a woman could go anywhere in uniform – to a fancy dining room, to a concert. A uniform was a wonderful disguise. No one had any idea whether you were rich or poor, belonged or didn’t belong. And you always looked smart. Vera proudly quoted a line to her brother from the brochure, “Women in Khaki.” “C.W.A.C. uniforms have been acknowledged by leading dress designers to be the smartest in the world.” There it was, from the highest authority.