Her misery and grief subsided, but they left a stain. When Jack came home after his outburst, he seemed to have forgotten everything, but she was wary of him. She didn’t trust his moods. He always said he didn’t mean the things he said when he was angry. Why didn’t that stop him from saying them the next time? He asked about the baby, told her he was sure there would be no trouble with it, which she took to mean he cared only that it was healthy, and when she was alone with him she almost believed that everything would be fine. But when she was with his family, at the hospital or here at the house, she felt despair settle over her. She’d known women back home who had taken steps to rid themselves of babies whose fathers were gone or unsuitable, and she had never understood before how they could bring themselves to do it, how such monstrousness could be a comforting thought.
First they decided they would stay in Windsor until Jack’s father came out of his coma. Then, when he was moved out of long-term care, or when he began to show signs of improvement, or at least until his condition became clearer. When none of those things happened, they found a furnished apartment on Janette Avenue, the second floor of a house that backed onto a railway yard. It had a living room, a small bedroom, a smaller kitchen and a tiny bathroom, and it filled with grit every time a train passed, raising dust from the cinders on the track beds. But Jack said it was on the right side of town and that they had moved up from the Settlement. The rent was eight dollars a week, and Jack took jobs playing with dance bands two or three nights a week. Alvina, who worked in a women’s clothing shop on lower Windsor Avenue, was helping their mother with groceries, and Jack was paying his father’s hospital bills. Benny wasn’t working, but he didn’t seem to need any help from them. Maybe Dee-Dee was supporting him.
They still visited the hospital most days, or Vivian did while Jack ran errands. He was keeping three households going, he said, theirs, his mother’s and his brother’s. Benny was always there, sometimes with Dee-Dee, sometimes alone, and Jack’s mother and Alvina came as often as they could. The student nurse who looked after Jack’s father was a young coloured woman named Marian Overton. She had gone to high school with Alvina, and every time she came into the room Alvina said, “Here she is, don’t she look fine?” and Marian would smile shyly and tend to Jack’s father, which, because there was never any improvement, consisted of taking his pulse and temperature, checking his saline solution, then shifting him to prevent him from getting bedsores. Marian was graduating in the spring. “She the first coloured nurse to graduate from this hospital,” Alvina said, speaking proudly but bitterly. “Sixty years this been a teaching hospital, opened especially for coloureds, and in all them sixty years not one coloured nurse, not one, until Marian here. Now, you telling me not one coloured girl in all them years been smart enough to be a nurse? I don’t believe it. I could’ve been a nurse. Dee-Dee here could’ve been a nurse. Lots of us could’ve been nurses. Mama, you could’ve been a nurse.”
Jack’s mother chuckled. “Alvina, dear, I couldn’t have been no nurse. I wasn’t good at shifting your grandmother when I was in service. I was too small. You got to be big and strong to move some of them patients around, ain’t that right, Marian?”
“They’re hard to shift sometimes,” Marian said, “but not Mr. Lewis. I think he helps me turn himself over.”
“There, you see?” Jack’s mother beamed.
“You must’ve been some good at keepin’ house, Ma,” said Alvina, “otherwise Pop wouldn’t have married you.”
Once again, Vivian felt as though a curtain had been lifted between herself and Jack’s family, but she couldn’t say for sure whether she was in the audience or on the stage.
A week or two after she and Jack had moved to Janette Avenue, when Vivian was in her fourth month, Jack’s mother invited her for tea. Jack’s mother said she was having Alvina and Dee-Dee and another friend from the Emancipation Day organizing committee over on Sunday, and Vivian was touched that Jack’s mother was making an effort to bring her into the family. The baby would likely be born in time for the picnic, and if it was coloured, she decided, she would take it to Jackson Park to show it the bandstand and the barbecue pits, let it hear the music and listen to the speeches. August would be hot and muggy. She’d need a carriage, and some cheesecloth to keep off the flies. Jack wouldn’t be there, of course, he’d have hightailed it by then and she’d be alone with her child. But she no longer found that prospect as terrifying as she once did.
It was Dee-Dee who opened the door. Vivian knew that Dee-Dee and Benny were living together, and that they weren’t married and didn’t even pretend to be. Such a thing would not have been possible in St. John’s, there would have been a dime-store ring at the very least, and the couple would conspicuously refer to each other as “my wife” and “my husband.” Vivian liked Dee-Dee. She was pert and lively and her eyes sparkled with mischief. It was the first time she’d seen her without a veil or a kerchief on her head, and Vivian noticed a lighter-coloured scar on her forehead, just below the hairline, in the shape of a horseshoe.
Jack’s mother was sitting on the red chair. She jumped to her feet when Vivian entered the room.
“You came!” she said. “I never thought you would.”
“Of course I did,” said Vivian, unsure how to take the welcome.
The other person in the room was a woman of Jack’s mother’s age, wearing a somewhat startling hat made of brightly coloured feathers and ribbons, like an inverted magpie’s nest. The woman herself was birdlike, as tall and slender as a pheasant hen, and she glared at Vivian in so predatory a manner that Vivian was rattled and promptly forgot the woman’s name.
“I call this meeting to order,” said the bird woman when they were all seated in the living room. “All present and we have a guest, Mrs. Jackson Lewis. Miss Dee-Dee is taking the minutes.”
“Dee-Dee knows shorthand,” Alvina said to Vivian. “She works as a secretary down at the salt mines. But she a singer at night,” she added. “They call her the Black Pearl on Hastings Street, don’t they, darlin’?”
“Other places, too,” Dee-Dee said shyly.
“What did they call you when you sang?” Vivian asked Alvina.
Alvina laughed. “They didn’t call me nothin’.”
“Do you know a trumpet player named Peter Barnes?” she asked Dee-Dee.
“Peter? Sure, I know him. He plays at a speakeasy his mother owns down at the bottom of Ouellette, the Flatted Fifth it’s called. I sing there with him sometimes. He’s good.”
Della owned a speakeasy? But Vivian had long ago learned not to show when she was surprised. “Jack and I heard him at the Horse Shoe when we were there two years ago,” Vivian said. “Do you ever go there?”
Dee-Dee looked down at her notepad. “Sometimes,” she said.
“You went to the Horse Shoe?” the bird woman asked Vivian.
“Yes. With Peter and his mother.”
“On East Adams?”
“Yes.”
“In the Black Bottom?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Hmm.” The woman sniffed. “That’s a black-and-tan, and you don’t look too tan to me.”
“Would anyone like some tea?” Jack’s mother said, and Vivian smiled at her gratefully.
Alvina spoke about a beauty contest they were planning for the Emancipation Day picnic, the Miss Sepia Pageant, the first of its kind in Windsor. They were trying to get Jackie Robinson, the baseball player, to come up and be a judge, but they might have to settle for Alf Hunter, a coloured boxer from Detroit.
“That’s what we got to do on Emancipation Day,” Alvina said. “We got to show people that coloureds’ve made a big contribution to this city, that we ain’t just a bunch of housekeepers and barbers. And we got to show that to everyone, coloured or white. There’s coloured businessmen, coloured lawyers, coloured nurses, coloured athletes.”
“Coloured musicians,” put in Jack’s mother, nodding at Dee-Dee. She seemed to have forgotten her offer of tea.
“That’s right,” Alvina said. “We got the Black Pearl singing for us on Emancipation Day.”
“You got a band for me yet?” Dee-Dee asked.
“We’re talking to Jock Anderson and Brad and Wauneta Moxley,” Alvina said. “We’ll get you a band somehow.” She looked at Vivian, who’d been wondering if she were a part of the meeting or just an onlooker.
“I could speak to Jack about it,” she said, although she doubted that she would be able to speak to Jack about anything to do with his family.
“I already done that,” Alvina replied. “Several times. He says, ‘Why would you ask a white man to organize your picnic for you?’ An’ I says, ‘I ain’t, I’m asking you.’ ”
Alvina’s forthrightness about Jack’s colour both shocked and encouraged Vivian. If Alvina could speak to him so directly, perhaps Vivian would be able to as well. One day.
“Josephine tells us you’re going to have his baby,” said the bird woman, staring intently at Vivian as though she were a new species of worm.
“You’ll need to see a doctor soon,” Jack’s mother said, looking at Vivian’s waist.
“You’d be wanting a coloured doctor, then?” asked the bird woman.
“Please, call me Vivian.”
“There’s good coloured doctors in Windsor.”
“We’ll be in Toronto when the baby’s born.”
“Lots of coloured doctors in Toronto.”
“But why would I go to a coloured doctor?” Vivian asked.
Dee-Dee stopped writing. There was a silence in the room. The bird woman stood up. “You stay there, Josephine,” she said to Jack’s mother. “I’ll go get the tea, and I brought us a treat to go with it.”
“You mustn’t mind Ephie,” Jack’s mother said when the bird woman had gone into the kitchen. “She gets carried away sometimes.”
“She had a hard life,” Alvina said, keeping her voice low.
“It made her a bit odd,” Jack’s mother added.
“I don’t mind,” said Vivian. “I know I should be seeing a doctor soon.”
“She sure puttin’ her heart into Emancipation Day,” said Dee-Dee. “I like to see a good concert, but Ephie, all she talks about is how from now on Emancipation Day’s going to make a new era of pride for coloureds, we going to be accepted into all the white communities, jump right over the colour bar. We’ll get jobs that’ve always been reserved for whites. We’ll be able to buy houses in parts of the city we only ever been able to enter as tradesmen or maids before, and sit anywhere we want to in movie theatres and lunch counters. She going to get the mayor to set up something called a task force. And she asked Eleanor Roosevelt to speak at the picnic. Imagine that, Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“Why Eleanor Roosevelt?” Vivian asked, just as the bird woman came back from the kitchen carrying a tea tray.
“Because Eleanor Roosevelt,” the bird woman said, setting the tray down on the coffee table, “quit the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing in Constitution Hall in Washington because she was coloured.”
Vivian was going to ask who Marian Anderson was, but the bird woman’s condescending tone made her change her mind. She kept her eyes on the tea tray: on it were a teapot and four cups and saucers, and a white cardboard pastry box. While Jack’s mother poured the tea, the bird woman opened the box and took out three squares of vanilla cake and what looked like a hard-boiled egg. When Jack’s mother saw the egg she missed Vivian’s cup and poured tea into her saucer.
“Ephie, dear,” she said, “I don’t think—”
But the bird woman set the egg on a plate and handed it to Vivian. Jack’s mother looked uncomfortable.
“What’s this?” Vivian asked.
“A special Windsor treat,” the bird woman said. “We call them Dark Secrets. They don’t have them anywhere but here, far as I know. Go ahead, open it up.”
Vivian picked up the egg. Alvina and Dee-Dee were quiet. Jack’s mother sat down and put her hands in her lap. The bird woman was cackling with anticipation. Vivian touched the egg. It felt solid, like white chocolate. A thin seam ran around it lengthwise, and when Vivian pressed her fingernail into the seam, the egg split in two and lay open in her hand. At the centre of one of the halves was a small curl of brown chocolate in the shape of a fetus. Vivian was so startled she nearly dropped it.
“Ain’t it wonderful how they make them so lifelike?” said the bird woman.
Vivian felt the blood draining from her face and was sure she was going to faint. “I … I can’t eat this,” she said. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” She stood up and placed the confection on the tea tray, where it rattled and lay still.
“Ephie, dear …” Jack’s mother said, but a roaring sound filled Vivian’s ears.
The bird woman’s high voice cut through the roar like the cry of a gull through a windstorm. “White people been tellin’ us for years that if we got one drop of coloured blood in us, then we coloured. What’s wrong with us sayin’ the same thing back to them? You and I both know, Josephine, that if that baby got one drop of coloured blood, then it a coloured baby. It belong to us.”
“I’ve got to go,” said Vivian, standing. “Jack will be home wanting his …”
Jack’s mother followed her to the door, wringing her hands. She took Vivian’s coat from its hook and helped her on with it. “You’ll see a doctor soon, won’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Vivian said. “As soon as I can.”
Before leaving, she looked back into the room. Alvina and Dee-Dee were studying their tea, and the bird woman’s head was pivoting around, she was quite pleased with herself. The feathers in her hat fluttered, as though she were preening, and her horrid chocolate egg lay exposed on the tray.