In 1939, Alec Monkman’s wife died. Her death was a watershed in his life; after it he became a success. Success was late in coming to him. Until he was fifty-two Monkman was just Connaught’s drayman, a bull-necked, slope-shouldered pair of overalls who shovelled coal and wrestled heavy freight, explaining himself with a wry smile and the old saying, “Strong back, weak mind.” His business worth consisted of a dilapidated truck used for summer delivery, a sleigh and team of Clydesdales which he drove in winter when the roads were bad.
Grief was responsible for his success, grief made him daring and reckless. Monkman had always kept a stern eye on the bank book, had always been a careful, saving man. But the death of his wife robbed money of its significance. So when Rudy Kollwitz’s arthritis made it difficult for Rudy to run a projector and impossible to splice a broken film, forcing him to put his shoebox of a movie theatre up for sale, Alec withdrew all his savings, negotiated a mortgage at the bank, and bought The Palladium cheap, taking all of Connaught by surprise.
His purchase of the movie house had nothing to do with its soundness as an investment, which nevertheless was considerable with a war going on and people hungry for newsreels, and hungrier still for entertainment to push the newsreels out of mind. No, he only believed that running a picture show would help fill the interminable spaces which his evenings, deprived of Martha, had become. The movie theatre would give him something to do, he told himself. It gave him too much to do. He grew pale and drawn with the strain of doing. By day he lifted and shifted ton upon ton of dead weight; by night he sat tense in a projecting booth high above the rows of heads communing with and adoring the bright images he cast into the darkness.
It was a family affair, The Palladium. Alec ran the projector and Vera sold admissions and popcorn. Earl, who couldn’t be trusted to do much because he was flighty and couldn’t keep his mind on things, sat in the foyer, kicking his heels on the rungs of a chair, watching the people troop in. Generally he slept through the second showing of the picture curled up in a seat in the back row of the theatre. Alec had tried to persuade Earl to stop at home but he wouldn’t. Ever since his mother died he was afraid to be by himself. He said alone in the house he heard things. When he was downstairs he heard his mother walking upstairs, and when he was upstairs he could hear her moving in the kitchen, opening and shutting the cupboard doors.
Monkman did not know what to make of this talk of ghosts, except that the boy wanted mothering. Mothering would put him right. The year Vera finished her Grade Ten he took her out of school to run the house and mother little Earl. After all, she had more schooling than he had ever seen and he knew of no earthly reason for her to venture further into the realms of geometry-trigonometry, Hamlet, or Latin.
For this his daughter never forgave him. She tried to persuade him to leave her in high school, to permit her to graduate. Vera assured him she could manage it, school, the house, Earl. He would not hear of it, would not yield. “It’s too much for a girl of sixteen,” he said, “to run a household and go to school. You’d end up ruining your health. I won’t have it, Vera. That’s all there is to it.”
To Vera it felt like a death sentence. She loved school. It was the one thing which lent her life a sense of movement. Turning back over the pages of a notebook in June she could say to herself, “Here is all I know now that I didn’t know before. This is how far I’ve come.” The notion that one thing built on another, that the second theorem of geometry was predicated on the first, and the third on the second, was a comfort to her. Vera was attracted to order and valued knowledge that could be measured – so many lines of “Lycidas” committed to memory, so many French verbs conjugated. French was Vera’s favourite subject. Walking home, striding into a blustery March wind on long, ungainly legs, she would imagine herself pacing the windswept deck of an ocean liner, speaking French to a dark man. “Je ne sais quoi,” she would say softly to herself, and then laugh a sophisticated laugh, rehearsing the future. But her stupid, stubborn father snatched that away. “Earl needs you,” he argued. “He’s just a little kid. He needs a mother.”
So get him one, Vera thought. Do I look like a mother?
“He’s not happy,” her father added.
Vera had always been his blunt and fearless child. “Little wonder,” she said.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ought to quit riding him around the country at night. That’s what I mean.”
“Watch your step, miss.”
“You don’t want to know – don’t invite me to tell.”
For the moment she could see he was ashamed. Well, he ought to be. Doing as he did. Sometimes she truly believed he’d gone clean off his head. When her mother was alive Vera had never seen him drunk even once. Not at a wedding, not at Christmas, not at New Year’s. Now, once a month, regular as clockwork, he could be expected to go on a scandalous rip, using whisky to light a fire in his belly against the encroaching darkness.
Drunk he was a different man, a lunatic. Stumbling and ranting, he would kick in the pickets of the front fence, rampage through the garden, tearing up all the stalks of new corn, roaring that winter was coming, get the corn in, even though it was only June. One night he wrenched all the cupboard doors off their hinges, trampled them to splinters under his boots, and fed them into the woodstove. With the stove lids left off, Vera was sure the house would catch. Every time a gust of wind whistled down the chimney and twisted its way through the tin pipes, the fire blazed up roaring and spitting sparks. As she tried to push the stove lids back into place with a broom handle, leaning back from the flame and heat, Vera thought she heard her father whisper, “Let’s see her slam the sonofabitching cupboard doors now, Earl.”
These things were terrible but worse were the nights when Monkman stood swaying at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the banister and shouting for Earl to get himself dressed, they were going for a ride. Those nights his daughter wished him dead.
Vera did all she could to prevent him taking Earl. She offered herself in her brother’s place. “Take me, Daddy,” she would coax. “You don’t want Earl. Take me.”
He never listened. “I want my boy!” he bellowed up the stairs. “Goddamn it, Earl, get up and get yourself dressed! I want some company for a drive!”
“You’ll kill him, Daddy, driving drunk. Don’t,” Vera pleaded. “One of these nights you’ll roll that old truck and kill him.”
Her father could not tell her that he took Earl because he knew that with Earl in the cab he would not permit himself to swing the wheel off the road, hard into the ditch and the racing darkness. Instead, he said, “Earl and me are different from you, Vera. We’re alike. We’re sad and we need each other.”
“You’re not sad. You’re just sorry for yourself and drunk. That’s all.”
“Your daddy is as sober as a judge, Vera.”
Her father carried Earl off at any possible hour – midnight, one in the morning, two. In such a state he was no respecter of anyone’s sleep. All that mattered to him was the headlong rush down a country road, the old truck pressed to the limit, the speedometer needle shaking like a trembling finger. Earl sat beside him rigid and glassy-eyed as any rabbit locked in the glare of oncoming headlights. The noise was deafening. The cab of the truck rattled and groaned and squealed. Stones spurting up against the floorboards made a crazy, ragged drumming, a drumming punctuated by the steady slap slap of the glove compartment with the broken catch flapping up and down on its hinges. The sight of the dark, flat land spinning by on either side robbed Earl of the power of speech. Even when a tire caught loose gravel and the truck lurched violently from side to side, the fields suddenly swinging towards him heavy and full of menace, he couldn’t holler – only lock his knees and brace his arms against the dashboard, while in his mind’s eye he imagined the truck hurtling over and over, the gas tank slopping gasoline, the windows showering glass.
It was out of fear of darkness that Alec drove. In the beginning of his crazy drives, when he was drunkest, he lost the fear, knew only abandon, release. Ever since the death of his wife the oppression and misery of night had lain heavy on him. Night work was not cure enough. When darkness fell, he grew anxious. He fidgeted, could not keep still. Everything drew in on him, shrank. It was like being squeezed and choked in a tight black suit cut for a smaller man. Monkman feared to see the world of day recede, people and buildings shut off from view. Hated the withering away – to a street, to a house, finally to one lighted room in which he sat with a ticking clock. It started him drinking, the thought of the darkness eating up the world, gnawing it smaller and smaller.
It was this which sent him out into the country. As many times as he went, as many times he was convinced this was the way to beat it. Tearing along the narrow roads helped push back what threatened him. Mile after mile he rolled up the great carpet of darkness with his headlights and proved to himself nothing had been taken away forever, the earth was still there, as it had been. That was what he needed, wanted, when the night gathered in, to know nothing had changed. But the relief was only temporary, a drug compounded of speed and drunkenness. Lacking one or the other, it was nothing. So as he sobered, the elation drained away and the old unease filtered back. He began to see danger, to understand the durability of darkness. His hands went slick with sweat as the road tilted and swayed beyond his windshield. All went slippery and untrustworthy on him: road, tires, steering wheel.
He made himself stop the truck. When he turned off the engine and killed the lights land and sky knit solid black against him. His mind ran back over all those places on the road where a mistake might have killed them. Nothing in the world could bring him to turn his truck around and go back over those places while it was still night. In the dark, he was sure he would make that mistake.
When the truck halted, Earl knew it meant the fire. His father didn’t have to say a word. Whatever they foraged out of the ditches was piled on the hard-packed surface of the road, rotten fence posts, dried Russian thistle, beer boxes. “Bigger, bigger,” his father urged, as they stumbled through the dark in a frenzy, filling their arms with water-killed willow, a smashed turkey crate, a weathered fir plank fallen off a load of lumber. Some nights the flames roared and blustered ten feet high, submerging the stars in a fizz of sparks. His father stood as close to the bonfire as he could bear, so close that Earl wondered his shirt didn’t begin to curl and smoke.
“There’s nothing like fire,” his father said, “to take the cold and darkness away. Is there, Earl?”
The sun rose on charred sticks, ashes, and Earl asleep in the truck. Only with daybreak did Monkman trust himself to start the engine and return to Connaught. In first light and the cold of dawn he wrapped his arms around himself and scattered the remains of the fire up and down the road with his boots. Then he crept home, driving painfully slow and careful so as not to disturb the sleep of his son, who, nevertheless, from time to time, spoke out in his dreams.
Monkman knew what awaited him. Vera. Vera in her mother’s housecoat, looking sallow and hollow-eyed. It bothered him to see her so, in her mother’s housecoat. Many a time he had almost brought himself to speak to her about her wearing of it. It wasn’t respectful or right the way she had gone into her mother’s closet and helped herself. To see her sashaying and promenading around in it, trailing ash and cigarette smoke like the Queen of Sheba, particularly galled him. Smoking was not a habit Martha had indulged in, or approved of.
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.
Vera tried to convey, too, how she was now a traveller. She wanted to give Earl some idea of the sprawl and space and harsh grandeur of the country she was passing through. She wrote to him of what she had witnessed early one morning as her train rattled through Manitoba; wrote of a vast, distant field crawling with hundreds of minute figures. The scene would forever have remained a puzzle if the track had not curved just then, carrying her nearer and nearer. Vera had laughed aloud when the tiny figures grew larger and larger, resolving themselves into soldiers bending and straightening under the brilliant morning sun. They were stooking. On a whim an officer had turned a day of back-breaking labour for some farmer into a few minutes of diversion on a route march for a company of men. Now the troops were larking about, ramming the butts of sheaves into the soil and tossing the heavy heads together, battle-dress drab against the sun-drenched gold of stubble. As the train rumbled by, reducing speed on the bank of the curve, the men closest to the tracks waved to the passengers who were the first witnesses to their joke, looking not at all like soldiers but like boys on an outing, and one or two threw their caps exuberantly into the air, their mouths yawning in a soundless cheer.
Vera tried very hard to get things right in her letters, to capture the strangeness of being far from home. The descriptions came so thick and fast her pen could scarcely record them. There were the prosperous farms of old rich Ontario with acres of tall corn and huge barns and sleek black and white cows with heavy udders, dreaming in the flickering shade of great trees she guessed were maples. And she described the enormous temple of Union Station in Toronto which by rights ought to have seemed empty and hollow because of its soaring roof, but which bustled and teemed with soldiers and airmen and sailors and women and children all rushing about every which way, hugging and kissing while the arrivals and departures rolled on like some awful announcement of the doom of journeys missed, chances never seized, life never lived. So hurry up! And when she came to the end of her trip, a young girl in a town in Ontario, she wanted, out of the fullness of her nineteen-year-old heart, to write a letter that said, “Tell everyone in Connaught that Vera Monkman is alive and kicking!” Both words underlined three times for emphasis. She didn’t write any such words, however. Instead, she signed it, “Your loving sister, Vera,” and enclosed a dollar of her pay for Earl, to show she was thinking of him and also to demonstrate to her father she was doing just fine, thank you very much, without him. Because, for as long as Vera corresponded with Earl, filing her reports on life in the Army, she never sat down to write without imagining two faces reading her letters, one Earl’s, and the other, hovering just over his shoulder, her father’s.
Not that everything about the Army was wonderful. By the time she was transferred to Saint Anne de Bellevue Vera was having second thoughts about being a cook. In summer the kitchens were hotter than the hubs of hell and the noise, the incessant rattle of pans and clash of pot lids, the thin steamy stench of watery vegetable soup, the smell of raw chickens and burned food so jangled her nerves and upset her stomach that she found it next to impossible to eat. For days on end she could keep nothing down but weak tea, soda biscuits, and Jello. Yet never once did Vera present herself on sick parade. What if they found something really wrong and she was given a medical discharge? The last thing she wanted was to be forced to quit the Army just when she was proving herself so able. Because she was able. In six months Vera had been promoted to lance corporal in recognition of her general efficiency, precise and accurate record-keeping, and careful management of supplies. There were predictions she would make sergeant before long.
It was difficult to bring her success to Earl’s and her father’s attention without seeming to brag, bragging being much disparaged among the Monkmans. The solution proved simple in the end. Vera had a studio portrait taken of herself in uniform, taken in three-quarter profile so that the stripes on her arm were clearly visible. She was certain they would be noticed. Of other matters, which reflected less directly on her, it was not necessary to be so modest. She had the excuse that her descriptions to her brother of extended leaves taken in the fabulous cities of the U.S.A. were justified because of their educational value. If they also happened to cast Vera in a sophisticated, worldly light, maybe that couldn’t be avoided.
In particular, she dwelt at great length on her one visit to New York, where she and her companions had plucked up the courage to storm the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria looking for movie stars and from there, in a moment of insane bravado, pressed an assault on the restaurant, requesting a table for luncheon. They got one, it being an unfashionable, slack hour, and they servicewomen in the uniform of an ally. It was the uniform, Vera once again explained to her brother, which earned her the right to eat in a hotel that numbered among its guests millionaires, European nobility, and the stars of stage and screen.
Later, they took in all the city’s tourist sights, saw Radio City Music Hall and the high-kicking Rockettes for whom they harboured a mild contempt as frivolous women who did not appreciate the seriousness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. They went to the top of the Empire State Building and then uptown to see Grant’s Tomb.
These were the things she wrote to Earl, to mark the changes in her. There were other things of which Vera was scarcely aware and, if she had been, could not have written of to a brother.
Old friends like Phyllis and Mabel might have thought that life in the Army had led to a deterioration in her manners and turned her just a tiny bit vulgar and unladylike. They would certainly be alarmed to see the way she drank beer, straight out of the bottle rather than a glass, and how, when she was tight, she would rise unsteadily to her feet and say loudly, in mixed company, “Make way, boys, this lady’s got to tinkle.”
Somehow, too, the promises which Vera had made to herself to improve her mind had been neglected. She only glanced at the war news in the papers and had given up attempts to read books in the barracks during the evenings. The hubbub there was too distracting, her attention snagged on bits of camp gossip and talk of men. Most evenings she spent playing cribbage with a homesick recruit from Newfoundland who cried in the shower, believing tears couldn’t be detected in the midst of all that streaming water. But as the case of that girl proved, Vera was learning it was impossible to hide anything in the Army, or hide from anything. Like sex. She was getting sick and tired of being importuned and bothered by soldiers. The young ones were no better than beggars, all beseeching mouths and beseeching hands. They fumbled at you on the dance floor and in ill-lit doorways. What was worse, they struck sentimental poses and talked of dying because their bragging, lying friends told them that never failed to produce the desired result. To Vera it was exasperating and wearying, fending off this desperate stroking and fondling. They were nice enough boys but fools. Couldn’t they see that all this talk of death sounded ridiculous standing under a lamppost in Kitchener?
If you steered clear of the young heroes, that left only the tough rinds and peels, the vets of the Great War who had reenlisted, been judged unfit for active service, and assigned duties as drill and gunnery instructors. Vera preferred them to the boys. They were more patient and charmingly persistent. A number of times when she had drunk too much Vera had permitted them liberties. For none of these old men did she feel an individual passion but at certain times she was aroused to an impersonal excitement when a hand crept to a stocking top, or closed on her breast, muffled in its khaki tunic. Eyes pressed tightly closed, she would ask herself, Why not? Why not find out? Why not get it over with? But she didn’t. Vera was put off by the element of struggle in it all, by their I win, you lose attitude, by the feeling they wanted to take her, to have her. That was the one satisfaction they would never get.
Not surprisingly, none of this found its way into her letters to Earl. The picture she drew of herself was incomplete. In reality, the correspondence of Vera and her brother was the correspondence of shadows, a record of one memory speaking to another, of two people who grew dimmer and dimmer as the months became years and the memories grew more unreliable. Their father was the wall upon which the shadows met. Because Vera knew he read her letters to Earl, she could never ask the questions that plagued her. How is he treating you, Earl? Are things better now that I’m out of his hair? Earl, are you happy? She had to rely on what she could divine from the notes written on lined pages torn from a school exercise-book, the words thick and clumsy-looking because of the heavy-handed way Earl drove his fountain-pen across the paper. The childish, immature way in which he expressed himself was never remarked by Vera. In her mind, he grew no older, was as she had left him.
Got better marks from the new teacher. Mr. Mackenzie joined up on the school trustees so we have a lady teacher now. She is not so strict and owly as Mackenzie. I got specs now. Catch better with them than before, but still am no great shakes at ball. Isn’t in the cards I guess.
No, Vera supposed it wasn’t. Earl had sent along a photograph of himself in his baseball uniform. She was shocked to see him suddenly shot up tall and thin as a reed, his Adam’s apple looking like an orange in a Christmas stocking, and his new glasses throwing sun back into the camera in a brilliant blur. It was typical of Earl to have a picture of himself taken in baseball uniform, not wearing his glove but absent-mindedly clutching it by the webbing so it hung, limp dead leather, like a trophy of the hunt, a strange beast pulled from the sea, or huge bat plucked from darkness. Oh dear, Earl, Vera thought, shaking her head.
Reading between the lines, Vera could not always piece together the actual state of things in Connaught. Much of what Earl told her was communicated offhand, by the by. In January of 1944, in a letter written to thank Vera for the present she had sent for his fifteenth birthday, Earl passed on the momentous news that his father had taken over the town garage and hired himself help.
Dad has taken on a man with a glass eye. Dad says men are hard to come by with the war but since this one has a glass eye he can’t fight. His name is Mr. Stutz and he comes from somewhere down the line, Kimberley I think.
We got him because Dad says he is tired of doing bull-work his time of life. From now on Dad says Mr. Stutz canhaul freight and he will sit on his behind doing the easy stuff like showing pictures and pumping gas for a living. Dad says Mr. Stutz is a good worker but has opinions. I seen him smoking so he isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness although he’s death on drinking. That’s how he lost his eye. Somebody drunk poked it with a pencil or something.
Mr. Stutz is stronger even than Dad. Friday he carried an engine block across the shop on a dare. Was Dad ever mad when he heard. He said he could of hurt himself and been laid up and lost to him.
Mr. Stutz figured prominently in Earl’s letters from that time on. He had clearly made an impression on her brother and perhaps beyond. In one of Earl’s letters she came across a cryptic line. Dad is better since Mr. Stutz came. How exactly was this to be taken? Did he mean her father was feeling physically better now that Mr. Stutz had relieved him of heavy work, or did he mean that Mr. Stutz was exerting some kind of steadying influence on her father, discouraging his wild, erratic behaviour? She wished she knew. Vera often worried about Earl, partly out of guilt, she supposed. Her brother had always needed someone to look out for him, to take his side. Maybe Mr. Stutz was doing that. Often during lulls in the clamour of the kitchens, she thought of the man she had cast in the role of her brother’s protector. However, try as hard as she might, she could only imagine him one way – as a man moving stiff-legged in a sailor’s rolling walk, arms pulled straight by something heavy – a keg of nails, an anvil, an icebox which buffeted his thighs with every lurching step he took. That was Mr. Stutz to Vera.
But Vera had more to worry about than just Earl. By now she was a sergeant with a sergeant’s responsibilities – that is, she had to run things in a way that allowed the officers to believe they were actually in charge. She had to manage people with an easy or heavy hand, whatever the situation required. There were times when she was all at sea. What to do about the girl who was sending gifts of chocolate and perfume to another? How to uncover a barracks room thief? There were sleepless nights enough. And then there was the final worry. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer the war was drawing to a close. There were pictures in the newspapers of Russian and American troops shaking hands and posing as comrades beside the wide, slaty waters of the Elbe.
Still, no one yet dared to think of it as finished, not with Japan holding out. On the radio sonorous voices reminded them all of the terrible price in blood which must still be paid. It was difficult to think of life outside the Army as anything but far distant. Then, very soon, Vera had to imagine it. Two bombs dropped, two unearthly flashes of light, two storms of heat and dust and it was over.
This sudden peace took her unprepared. The Army began to melt away around her. It was like waking from a dream. A week never passed that Vera wasn’t down at the train station to see another of her discharged girls off home. She pressed cigarettes and bags of peppermints on them, brusquely shook their hands, and called them by their surnames before they climbed aboard. The shuddering, panting locomotives jerked forward, the carriage couplings rang, and Vera was left feeling like autumn, like those stark days when the leaves have fallen but the snow has not.
Then in 1946 it was Vera’s turn. She was out on civvy street, her winter uniform carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied up in string, and laid in the bottom of a drawer in a rooming-house in Toronto. There was only one thing clear in her mind. She was not going home.
Vera would have preferred to remain in the Army if that was a thing women did, but women didn’t.