The Saturday before Christmas, a bright, snowless day, Enman took his chances and drove to town. Una opted to stay in bed. He didn’t like to leave her alone, so Hannah stayed behind making paper chains for the tree he had brought home from the barrens and put in the front room.
The downtown streets thrummed with an odd festivity, their shabbiness and the restlessness of wandering servicemen relieved somewhat by the holidays’ anticipation. Perhaps the season and its cheer offered a brief if illusory feeling of respite from the war. He headed straight for Phinney’s music store, its black tile facade only a little the worse for wear these days, a boy washing some dried splatters from it. Inside, people perused display cases, a sailor tested guitars—none as handsome as Hill’s Les Paul—and a girl and her father tried out an accordion. Sitting at a shiny apartment-size piano, a boy played “Chopsticks.”
Moving to the display of harmonicas, Enman resisted the urge to have the clerk take a violin from the wall and let him try it. He picked the best mid-priced Hohner to replace the rusty one Win had brought over. He stopped to browse the record albums, then crossed the street, hurrying the block or two down to The Book Room. It was across from the provincial legislature building, whose entrance boasted a big fir wreath and garland around the fanlight above the door—reminders that the war couldn’t fully overtake Christmas.
He was greeted by the smell of books, the busy cheer of browsers. The lady at the desk nodded and smiled at his request, An English Galaxy of Shorter Poems. He wasn’t even sure if Una liked poetry or not, she’d never said. But he had heard a carol on the radio, “There is No Rose of Such Virtue,” composed by Britten, based on something the composer had read in this very book while marooned here the year before, on his way home to England from New York.
“I’m sure your wife won’t be disappointed.” The clerk wrapped it for him, the same woman who had sold him The Hygiene of Marriage. He hoped she didn’t remember.
After that, he went down the block to Wood Brothers and bought Una a cosy, quilted robe like Hannah’s, but in an emerald green. Avoiding the lingerie—bullet bras, girdles, and playsuits—he chose a navy-blue cardigan for Hannah. The clerk remembered Una. She was the clerk who was very good at getting him to spend his money. “What size is she, again?”
“Oh, no. It’s for my sister.”
Finished shopping, he went back up to the Green Lantern, managed to find a spot at the soda fountain, and treated himself to a coffee. While he drank it he thumbed through the poetry book. It happened to have a little poem attributed to Anne Boleyn, of all people, that bemoaned the queen’s entrapment. For a moment he regretted his choice of a gift, and hoped Una wouldn’t see herself in the poem and its complaint. With any luck she would flip right past it.
On Christmas Day, Una watched Hannah open her present. Enman handed Una her gifts, which Una opened without undue interest and thanked him for. Hannah had made a drawing, which she’d put under the tree, a picture of a stickman waving a frying pan.
“Oh, Mister. It’s your fiddle!”
Una opened the poetry book, listened politely while he squeaked out the melody to Britten’s carol printed there, after pointing out its lyrics: There is no rose of such vertu/As is the rose that bare Jesu. He spoke to her silence: “It’s medieval.”
“Gibberish, too.” Una smiled a bit mischievously. Through a gap in the tree’s branches and their dangling links of paper coloured with crayon, she pointed to Ma’s figurine. “Impregnated by God. Imagine that.” Then she looked away. There was nothing under the tree from her, for him or for Hannah. He helped Hannah with the roast chicken and the cranberry sauce Isla made with berries from the bog, and the carrot pudding Win sent over. For the first time in months, Una ate like there was no tomorrow, then excused herself and went upstairs, leaving the poetry book and the robe on the sofa.
Enman taught Hannah how to blow “Silent Night,” and when she mastered that, a bar or two of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” She was still wearing the new sweater when she went to bed, and perhaps slept in it, because she had it on over her nightgown when she came down next morning.
Boxing Day was a Sunday and though he had resisted calls to come down to Isaac’s for some Christmas cheer, his old thirst came back with a vengeance, with Una resting above and Hannah on the Hohner every living second. He couldn’t wait for Monday and to go back to work. Though business had slowed to a trickle and Isaac said Enman could extend his holidays if he wanted. But no, he was saving up his days off for when the baby arrived.
By mid-afternoon he thought if he couldn’t beat Hannah’s tooting he would just have join it, and took out his violin. Then Hannah went to Isla’s to model her sweater. He was about to head down to Isaac’s when Hubley appeared at the door, his “Left Paw” over his shoulder. Hill had been imbibing, it was obvious. Had he noticed the snow blowing down off the barrens he wouldn’t have taken his guitar outside without its case. Hubley didn’t wait for an invite into the front room with its tidy coal fire behind the grate.
Enman heard the door open upstairs, heard Una skulking there.
“Got a bunch of new tunes worked up.” Hubley had grown a bit balder since the summer, his stubbled beard a chalky white. If Hill had let it grow out, Hannah might have called him Santa. Except the thinner on top he became, the more his bones shrank, as bones did with age. How was it Hill was only a few years his elder? Five foot two, eyes of blue, Enman thought of the song. Hubley always had been sawed-off, though he talked the talk of a big man, clearing his throat then piping up. “How’s your wife, anyway?” As Hubley spoke his eyes dragged the ceiling as if any second Una would swoop down. “Listen. I’ve been an ass. If you’ll be the S to my H-I-L-L, I’m willing to try some new stuff. Mozart and that. And split the door in your favour.” There was a New Year’s dance at the fire hall in O’Leery and Hubley needed a fiddler; now that Enman was here to stay, was he interested?
“Do you good to get out—do Una good too, having you outta the house.”
“Give me a day or two. I’ll let you know. “
“And have no time to rehearse?”
“Not under the gun like this, I might say yes.”
“You can’t leave her alone, even with the Twomey one here?”
“Sorry, it’s just not in the cards right now.”
Enman meant it, being sorry, watching Hubley disappear into the twilight, looking like Gene Autry the Singing Cowboy with his guitar on his back. Never mind that Enman hated songs like “Back in the Saddle Again.” Still, he kicked himself for being so wedded to his musical tastes, and other things, that he had forgone the Labour Day dance, the kitchen parties, and other shindigs he could have played if he had been more forthright, agreeing to be one half of their duo. He realized he would have enjoyed these events, in the same way Hubley had made up his mind to reach beyond his likes and dislikes.
Lurking there, Una called down, “So, are you going?”
“Not on the eve of our anniversary.”
Silence.
“The island. You never did take me there.” She meant the one he hadn’t visited since he was a teenager, even though it was right there. “The dance. Don’t let me stop you.” Then she crept back up to bed.
This exchange pushed Enman to O’Leery after work the next evening, bugger the dark, the cold, that excuse for a road—at least there wasn’t snow—and bugger Beulah. If she died, good riddance, he’d push her into the woods and be done with her. But first he asked Clint for directions, to avoid any dilly-dallying.
“Thought you were on the wagon, bud.”
“It’s for a friend. I owe Robart. He’s been breathing down my neck for it, see.”
A quarter-mile or so before the Magnet he hung a hard right. A beagle yapped from behind a picket fence before the frozen lane petered to a bald patch of granite surrounded by woods. True to Clint’s word the truck was there, his tow-headed son—Joey? Grayson? Jimmy? he never could keep track of them—lolling from the tailgate with another young fellow nursing a brown quart bottle. Their breath hung in the frosty air.
Joey-Grayson-Jimmy greeted him with a grin, eyes like Win’s, taking Beulah in. “Twomey doesn’t give a shit who buys his liquor, so what gives?” The kid sounded wary, nineteen years old if he was a day. “Lookin’ for a six or a two-four? Alls we got is brew.” His mother through and through, he uncapped a bottle, handed it over. Watched Enman take a first sip. “You don’t give the rest of us freebies,” the friend groused.
The homebrew was yeasty and had a sweet, boggy flavour. Tipping it back, Enman fought the urge to gag. But it was wet and it was alcoholic, and nobody else need know. “How much?” Peeling off a glove, Enman felt around for his little roll of cash.
“Any friend of my old man’s a friend of mine. It’s on the house. More chillin’ in the run—he’p yourself if they ain’t frozen. Then we’ll talk.”
The friend smirked. Joey, or whatever his name was, grinned, a chipped tooth visible in the dusky light. His smudge of a mustache lent him a certain charm; Enman imagined Win getting after him to shave.
“Best beer money can buy, Mr. Greene.”
The fact was it made Enman think of murky, peaty urine. “How much you charge for a six?”
“Like I said, the cooler’s thataway.” The kid pointed to an opening in the naked trees. The slow, faint burble of water drifted through the darkness and Enman followed it, swinging the bottle. It was worse than swill. All this way—he had come all this way, fighting with himself for weeks, months, then finally giving in—to drink bootlegged rot in the woods like some rabid teenager. He wondered what Clint and Win really thought about their son’s business.
As soon as he was out of sight, he emptied the bottle into the frozen moss. On a desperately hot day, it might have been drinkable. A little farther in, edged by ice, the stream snaked through a glade with boulders for chairs. The trees creaked in the wind, their thatched branches blocking out what little starlight fell. Shards of glass glinted in the black water, frozen foam scudded over rocks. The air was already sharp with January’s bite. In this outdoor barroom with only rocks for company, who knew what critters hibernated? Under the ice the stream sluiced through its peaty bed, having recovered from last summer’s dryness, making its way, he guessed, to a chain of stony lakes that emptied, eventually, into the sea. A brace of bottles leaned in a sort of bowl formed by ice-encrusted tree roots and the ruined forks of a bicycle.
He hurried back up the path, handed over his empty. “Got something at home I need to take care of, how could I have forgot?” Shaking his head, he tapped his brow. “Happens, fellas, when you get older. Brain like a sieve. I’ll say hi to your parents, Joey—sure they’ll be asking.” He got into the car as fast as he could and yes there was a God because she started first crack. The reflection in the rear-view much too dark to see what he knew would be youthful disgust.
The next morning snow covered his tracks.
That winter, the winter of 1944, two years after the sinking that had cost Enman his good friend, business at Inkpens’ ground to a halt. By then the Allies had turned things around to all but reclaim the Atlantic, so the news went, and all around the province work at the little yards was drying up. With fewer ships getting hit and needing repair, there was nothing the big yards couldn’t handle as they gobbled up business—the way Una’s condition gobbled her up, consumed the person Enman thought she had been.
“Be patient. Wait till the baby comes, she’ll snap out of it,” Snow insisted on the phone. “She’ll be so delighted she won’t even remember this phase. Neither will you. You’d be surprised how many mothers—”
Win’s visits were the one uplifting thing. Through January and February she popped over regularly, bringing casseroles and other goodies, she herself bubbling over with a determined glee. It seemed she couldn’t contain herself: “A baby in the house—just wait!” Funny, given Una’s trepidations and how these might characterize their anticipation. But maybe Win was trying, nicely, to prepare him, to prepare all of them, while unloading foodstuffs Clinton could no longer bear to look at—enough creamed corn and tinned peas to feed all of Barrein and O’Leery, gleaned from her summer’s beachcombing.
“You’re not leaving yourselves short?” he would say. With fewer sinkings, far less flotsam, useful and otherwise, beached itself these days. People turned their attention to Una’s well-being. The most standoffish Meades asked after her. “She certainly is making herself a stranger,” even Isla, who was so friendly towards Una, said. At least Una was eating, while not, as Win said, “at risk of becoming a lard-arse.” The way people talked in the store, they would have come up to the house just to have a feel of her belly. Enman wasn’t sure how he should react, grin like a cat, or step into the shadows the way some men did, letting women hold sway. He knew Una would appreciate their attention about as much as she’d have enjoyed being told she was fat.
“She’s a study in human nature,” Enman said, as was he, he thought.
He resolved to dedicate more time to practising. Consistency was everything, ten minutes every day better than thirty every now and then. Chords: two note, three note, four note. More bow, less bow. Arpeggios, major and minor. Hubley’s style of music favoured down-bow fiddlers, but the key to a sweeter sound than a Cape Breton fiddler’s edge, created by a hard back-and-forth sawing across the strings, was letting a figure-eight motion of the bow soften the tone. Steady speed. The pulse from the bow’s angle, not its pressure, setting rhythm and tone. The trick was keeping the hand relaxed, all the movement in the wrist. The muscles remembering.
But then Una would appear, massaging the mound of her belly. “Can’t you stop now? Can’t you do that someplace else?”
“Fine, then. You’re overdue for your checkup. I’ll quit if you’ll agree to see Snow.” He put the violin in its case, propped it behind the radio. Out of sight, out of mind, he thought, and not such a terrible sacrifice, he had decided. For Hill’s down-home tunes did have a sameness, a tiresome repetition of rhythms and chords.
“What will he tell me, that I’m pregnant?”
Enman booked the appointment anyway. He drove her, fingers crossed that the car would get them there. Waiting with her in the reception area he was an interloper, the only man in the place besides the doctor. They were surrounded by people only remarkable for bellies pushing out ugly flowered smocks. Those with the largest shifted awkwardly in their chairs, responding with a certain weariness to the receptionist’s perky questions. “When are you due? Have you dropped yet? My, you’re carrying low, must be a boy?” Una dodged them all, avoiding empathetic glances.
“I won’t look like a beach ball, will I?” Una had asked Snow that balmy day in September. It was odd to think of it. “It won’t be forever. Patience,” the doctor had said, and he repeated it now. “Baby will come like a thief in the night, be prepared.”
Patience, Win also said. Isaac had no choice but to cut Enman’s hours to a couple of days a week. The Lord opened a window every time he closed a door, or was it the other way around? Or did he just shut them both tight?
March, the Maritimes’ cruellest month, amounted to waiting and more waiting. Enman could hardly afford to pay a carpenter to build on a room, which scuttled his plans to move Hannah downstairs and make her bedroom a nursery. On the dreariest night, the first day of spring, forgetting his bargain with Una he rosined his bow and placed it and the violin in Hannah’s eager, clumsy hands. Better this than presiding over her efforts at sums and spelling. He tried to get her to bow something, anything, while he reached around her to form notes, pressing strings to the fingerboard. He tried getting her to bow a steady single note on an open string to train her ear. It was a largely fruitless exercise made more fruitless by Una’s sighs or her cursing.
He thought of the human brain as flypaper, the way things did or didn’t stick. He thought of Hannah’s as being especially un-sticky, the way she stumbled over things.
Oddly enough, Tippy the cat became Enman’s most reliable companion, a chummy comfort in the early evenings, curled on the back of the sofa and purring in Enman’s ear. But just before bedtime the cat would yowl to go out, then make himself scarce until morning. And then Tippy disappeared altogether, a result of his tomcatting, Enman guessed. No one could have credited the grief Tippy’s vanishing brought him and Hannah, fearing as both did that the cat had been carried off by a coyote or fox, feeling guilty at the thought. “That’s just the way it goes,” Una said. Told to stay off her back, by then she was having trouble sleeping. At least Enman’s acknowledgement of her discomfort made her a bit more talkative, enough to complain of the baby booting her in the ribs each time she turned.
“Booting or mooning her, take your pick.” Win gave a wink when he told her. “Oh, now, paying for your fun, that’s being a mom.”
As March’s snow and sleet gave way to April’s mud, he liked to think Tippy was up there somewhere with Ma, having Ma rub his chin.
“You know, I don’t see too much wrong with Hubley’s guitar-picking,” Clint said, around Eastertime. There was talk of Robart and Greely throwing a dance party in honour of Isaac’s birthday near the end of May, and Hill had volunteered to play.
Giving up on teaching Hannah much of anything, Enman had put the violin away for good. “Maybe music’s not in everyone’s genes,” he told the girl as kindly as possible. “Never mind. We can’t all luck out in that department.”
He gave her a wink, mostly for Una’s benefit. If she was watching.
Who knew what she saw or didn’t see any more.
You heard about marriages landing on the rocks, a couple’s future getting swept away in the lightest gale. But having a baby made for rock-solid ground and an anchor both, wasn’t it so? A baby was bound to save a foundering marriage, he had heard it said.
This baby would save theirs. He lived out the last, most sullen weeks of Una’s pregnancy believing it.
Such an angry, bawling thing she was when she came near the end of April, a little over a year after Ma took ill, a tiny, squalling, red-faced infant. Perfectly formed limbs, hands and feet, nose and mouth, and perfect little seashells for ears, and eyes—the world’s oldest soul was in those eyes that had no idea, yet, what colour they ought to be. Something of Ma was in them, he was sure, taking his first glimpse of her. Smears of white on her bloodied skin, white like zinc oxide, before someone bathed then wrapped her up tight as a bug in a rug, in the crooked little blanket Hannah had proudly sewn.
He had no idea who bathed her, or who if anyone besides Isla and the doctor were in the room. Something he will not forget, though—as long as he’s this side of the sod—was the doctor slipping her into his arms, not Snow but the one from O’Leery who did house calls. The sound of her cries made his lungs seize, truly.
One glimpse of her, that’s all it took, and the child grabbed hold of his heart and would not let go.
Things had happened too fast to get Una to the hospital, miles away in town. The most he’d managed was to run to Isla, thank the good Christ for Isla, who came to assist the doctor and was there to hold the newborn while he himself went outdoors to gulp fresh air.
God knows where on earth Win was.
She had arrived with the gloaming, the little girl. So he liked to think of her, descending like that. The crocuses were just up in the yard and it was still light enough to see them standing their ground after how many freezing rainstorms? Poor man’s fertilizer, rain following sleet following snow.
Catching his breath, he stood listening to the first cries of peepers waking up in the bogs.
“Holy jeez. Holy Hannah—I have a daughter!” he called back to the clamouring peepers and the sharp, salty dampness. He hadn’t guessed he would have a daughter. If he’d had a son, he might have named him Isaac: God’s little trick, a trick played on parents who probably were not up to the task of childrearing.
If Ma had had a nicer name, anything but Marge, he would have plugged for that. But “Penelope” came and lodged in his head while he stood getting used to the idea—a baby, a baby!—and lingered when, after a little while, Clinton crossed the yard and handed him a lit cigar.
“Guess I can’t give you a drink, buddy.”
Hating how the cigar pushed away the smell—traces of the mother’s body turned inside out, of blood and a more primal scent than those of bone or skin—he’d stubbed it out.
The name stuck with him. Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus. Never mind its archness, he liked its elevated, classy, classical sound. Win—who, as it turned out, had stayed holed up next door the entire time Una laboured, figuring she’d best stay out of Una’s way—thought the name was all right.
“Penny,” he proposed.
“Call her whatever you like,” Una said.
Win spoke sharply—“I don’t see a thing wrong with giving formula”— when he went over there after the third day, seeking advice. “If the kid won’t suck she won’t suck.”
In a funny way Win seemed to side more with Una and her needs than he had expected she would.
“Feed her whatever you want,” was what Una said. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
When her friend Kit came bearing a pink sweater set and booties, Una barely looked at them. She thanked Kit, though, and promised to call, before asking Hannah to take the child away and change her diaper.
Una seemed in despair. “Why must she cry so much?”
Enman wondered the same, rising repeatedly at night to help her rock the infant. “Babies cry.” He said it in the kindest way possible, given Isla’s reassurance that crying was normal. “We’re all she has to comfort her.”
Una closed her eyes. “Comfort only goes so far. And when we’re no longer around to hold her hand, what then? When she’s old, when she’s sick. But that’s neither here nor there, you think. That’s just life, isn’t it.”
“You’re just lucky she’s not colicky,” Win was quick to point out, on a mission delivering tinned milk. “My second boy? You remember Garson? Clint and me, we suffered something fierce, let me tell you. Kid wouldn’t sleep unless he was on me. Cried for a year without stopping.”
That winter, realizing that Una could not run a business, Win had taken over from Iris Finck and by the spring was firmly in charge of the store, despite Iris overseeing it—pretending to—from the room behind the store where she stayed and wasted away with dementia.
“I appreciate your help.” Enman repeated it more than once, hurrying Win out the door. They needed quiet, after all, so the baby would let her mother sleep, didn’t Win realize? May had barely arrived and Una was exhausted.
“Like mother, like daughter. Tiptoe around and she’ll never learn to settle, what with listening for every pin that falls.”
“If we need your advice, we’ll call.” He spoke as gently as he could. Then Win did a funny thing. She rolled up onto her toes, patted away his hair where sweat pasted it to his forehead, and wiped spit-up from his shirt.
“I feel for you, Enman Greene. Always have, always will. There are some things that don’t change—much. It’s not my fault you’re hard to reach. Once a pushover, always one.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re going to spoil her, holding her all the time.”
Less than a month into this and he already felt like the infant was a second skin or a shirt not to be removed. He didn’t want to put her down, couldn’t bear listening to her crying in her crib in Hannah’s room when Hannah was at Isla’s or off on her aimless jaunts. Following Una’s former habit, Hannah seemed more bent on wandering than on buckling down. Win said maybe she was looking for another home.
Una grew more despondent, lay in their bed watching the ceiling. She seemed immune to his efforts, his confusion, seemed not to register his exasperation.
“You can’t blame her for being born. I thought you longed for a baby.” He asked point-blank, “Is it something I’ve done?”
“You? Of course not.” Her face scrunched into a horrified look, even as she laughed, sort of. “Enman Greene, you are good to a fault.”
It’s not that he blamed Win—why would he?—or in any way construed Win’s stepping in and helping out in ways she didn’t have to, as any kind of harbinger of what happened. There was absolutely nothing in The Hygiene of Marriage to fill him in on whatever plagued Una.
He tried to get her to see Snow. She refused.
Finally, towards the end of May, he went to see Snow himself.
The doctor showed him into his examining room, the inner sanctum where previously Enman hadn’t set foot. The examining table had lobster-shaped oven mitts covering the stirrups, and, dangling over it, a baby’s mobile with tiny pink and blue teddy bears. A floppy cloth rabbit wore an apron like one of Ma’s, and wooden blocks sported the alphabet. They were arranged in a row to read Love is Patient.
One would have been forgiven for thinking the patients were four-year-olds.
Offering a strained laugh, nodding to him, Snow perhaps misread the weariness on his face. “It takes the ladies’ minds off la divina commedia—the decor does. You know what I mean. When I’m in there, poking and prodding.” The doctor sounded half apologetic. His light brown eyes looked tired but seemed kinder than Enman remembered them being.
“The baby blues? As I’ve said, these hormonal upheavals happen, far more often than we—”
But Enman hadn’t come here to be brushed off so easily, or to beat around any bushes.
“When will she snap out of it?” He matched Snow’s gaze with his.
Postpartum depression? Might last a week or two, or even a couple of months, he heard. “Having a child takes adjustment.” As if Enman didn’t know. Snow spoke impatiently but not without sympathy. Seeing the doctor’s instruments—shiny stainless steel objects laid out on a pristine-looking towel—brought back things Enman couldn’t imagine bearing, if The Hygiene of Marriage was in any way accurate. Una’s lengthy labour. The animal grunts and screams he had tried to block out then banish from memory, noises accompanied by Isla’s honeyed pleas to breathe, just breathe. He had tried his best to forget all this, especially Una’s cursing: Fuck the man who’d done this to her, how she’d take the kitchen knife to it should a man, any man, come near her again.
“Now, now, Una. That’s it. That’s it,” he had heard from behind closed doors, Isla working to calm her till the doctor arrived, the same one who’d come from O’Leery more or less just to sign Ma’s death certificate.
These women, he thought. His beautiful mother. Penelope’s beautiful mother. The two who mattered more to him than anyone in the world.
Dr. Snow was a taller man, a more imposing man than that other doctor. He looked bemused rather than shocked, hearing about all this.
“Oh?” he said. “A lot of them say things like that, ladies in labour. The thing about pain? Trust me, they always forget. So I wouldn’t be too worried, Greene.”