The End of Music Page 6

  She’d like to slap Gord Delaney, the way he kept after her all night, chasing her across the room during the break, slopping his drink on her. “Don’t be shouting, Joyce. You’re singing like a tavern girl.” What in God’s name did that mean? Tavern girl. Joyce didn’t argue with him, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She was near tears by the end of it, but wouldn’t give him that satisfaction either.

  Delaney with that tarnished old trumpet, standing there singing “Don’t Fence Me In” like he was showing her how. Big red face on him.

  She’d caught a ride home with Eric and that new fellow, the Frenchman with the saxophone. They hardly talked. That’s when the shivers started, in the cold car with the sweat drying on the back of her neck.

  Joyce exposed one hand to pull a cigarette from the bedside table. A second hand to strike the match. Rubbed one foot over the other, then switched. The taffeta was still crumpled on the floor, a ring of blue fabric with a hole in the middle where Joyce used to be. “I can’t carry it at all, even before this,” Gloria had said, draping the dress across her very pregnant belly. “But on you? My dear, you’ll be a proper Peggy Lee.” She was almost right. They had to let out a couple of stitches so Joyce could breathe, and that was fine for a while. But as the night went on, it was like the dress gave up on her. It went floppy at the shoulders, and when she was singing “I Got It Bad” she felt it sag around her chest and back. She must have looked like a marionette, hanging limp until the puppet master returned. Not that anyone noticed. Not that she gave a tinker’s cuss if anyone had.

  She didn’t mind the crowd in the back, playing cards and hardly looking up from their tables. But the pocket flask fellows up front, drinking and shouting. Then heading out on the dance floor, not dancing so much as just making fools of themselves. Their girls laughing like it was the funniest thing. Then somebody was throwing up. Inevitable.

  Joyce checked the clock. Could she sleep at all between now and seven? She’d be dropping by lunchtime, head aching when the mid-afternoon flights touched down. The shift schedule was relentless. Good thing they never eased up with it. Otherwise people might expect a decent night’s sleep. The days held no shape, marked only by tides of darkness and light. She was always due at work in five hours or three hours or before she was through dinner or before the laundry was dry. Which is how she had ended up going in yesterday with wet bra cups stuck to her and the blouse damp on her shoulders.

  Burnt toast somewhere. The hotel tossed and turned at all hours. Doors squeaking and slamming. Cold air rushing up the hallway. Whistling kettles, muffled squeals, the crash of a stumbling drunk, the operatic rise and fall of a card game. A shift change every eight hours, with its hurried steps, curses and sighs, barks of laughter. At any given hour there was a crowd at work, a crowd trying to sleep, and a crowd at liberty. Itching with liberty. The women were no better than the men. But the men were louder about it. Acting drunker than they were, egging each other on. They knew when they were being watched, but that just made it worse. They wanted to be watched. The boys here wanted everyone to know that they could do whatever they damn well pleased.

  Still, she wouldn’t mind having one here now, just to take the chill off. Like last fall when her father sent her around the point to look after Aunt Nance for a few days. Jack O’Mara said, I know that house. And Joyce said, you wouldn’t wake Nance with a shotgun. So she left her window ajar. Jack slipped in and warmed the bed until daylight. But of course it’s never that simple with a man. Never enough to wrap up together, get cozy, maybe fool around a bit. Because then his piece of business is sticking up like a broken bedspring, and you can either do something with it or forget about getting any sleep at all.

  Joyce shrugged off the blanket, twisted out of the robe and stockings and left them on the floor. She pulled the flattened pillow from behind her head and tried to punch some life into it. Gloria would hear about tonight, because she heard about everything. Then she’d say, Oh Joyce, I don’t know about that crowd. I don’t know if that’s the crowd for you, hanging around those parties at all hours.

  She closed her eyes and a heaviness settled in her legs. Sleep when you can, was the rule. The relentless traffic set windows shaking and lights blinking. Nobody complained, not after the first week or so.

  Gordon Delaney was the last man she wanted to see in the morning. But he managed the commissariat, doing up food trays for refuelling flights. He never looked busy. Often she would see him in the company of other men in suits, striding with purpose in the direction of the Big Dipper. He never looked her way, though he knew she was there. On a cigarette break a few days ago she had met a rather dim girl who worked at the commissariat. She said they were all treated poorly.

  Summer had come to an abrupt end, but the sudden frost didn’t stop people going out all the time. There wasn’t much point staying home at night, not in this freezing room with the radiator hammering away. If she gave up now she could just imagine the boys in the band going on about her. Guess she couldn’t take it. What do you expect? Only a young one from around the bay. Never seen a damn thing in her life. She wouldn’t have it. She didn’t mind any of them, not Gord Delaney or the band or the drunk fools with their pocket flasks.

  Mary said next pay packet, a crowd of the girls were flying into St. John’s for a day’s shopping. Step on the plane and they’d be on Water Street within the hour. Joyce resolved to go and come home with a couple of decent dresses of her own, properly fitted. She’d be ready for the next dance, the next crowd. Wouldn’t back away from the microphone anymore, either. Step right up to it. It won’t bite.

  //////

  They were the first to board, and sat in the front, where they could hear the goings-on in the cockpit. Joyce wasn’t sure she wanted to hear any of it. But at least she wasn’t sitting next to Maeve Vardy from the post office. Woman could talk. She had introduced herself to Joyce in the terminal, and declared that she knew St. John’s like the back of her hand, from working the entire war at the Caribou Hut.

  “What’s the Caribou Hut?” Joyce had whispered to Mary.

  “The hostel where they put up servicemen during the war. She got a husband out of it, but he was lost in the merchant marine.”

  Now Maeve was going on about an owl. “It was Gisbourne shot the owl himself, I guarantee you. Boom! Just like Davy Crocket.”

  Between the nattering, Joyce could hear the pilots talking. Shouldn’t there be more than a curtain separating the cockpit, because what if they had to talk about engine trouble or bad weather? People shouldn’t hear that. Both pilots were former RAF, and looked the part, with their practiced calm and brilliant hair going grey at the temples. Joyce had seen them at the Airport Club, one showing a diary he kept during the war. Every bombing mission recorded, noting the target cities, payloads dropped, and the number of crews lost.

  “Gisbourne’s on the river, fishing the big pools just past the turn,” said Maeve Vardy. “Henley’s Turn, you see? Every year he’s out to the same pools. He looks up and wouldn’t you know there’s a big old lopper staring him right in the face. Plugged it with one shot. Well over a foot long, it was.”

  “Nonsense,” whispered Mary, settling into her seat next to Joyce. “Gisbourne wouldn’t know a twenty-two if it took his own head off. Still lives with his mother.”

  The pilots talked the sort of gibberish Joyce overheard every day. “Thirty-six can…ceiling ragged…generator three.” But it sounded different, like everything was urgent and it all might go wrong at any moment. “Come on, darlin,” one of them said as the third engine coughed. Then all engines were going, and they were moving. The shaking went up the back and into her throat.

  “I know,” said Mary. “It settles after.”

  “It’s alright,” said Joyce, and closed her eyes to the shudder that turned everything blurry.

  When plans were hatched for a day in St. John’s, Joyce had said she mi
ght have to work. “Someone will change shifts,” said Mary. Then she said she already had two new outfits from Scheffman’s, including a green dress with a sheer overlay that looked like something from a magazine. All the girls laughed and said Scheffman’s smells like mothballs, just wait till you see the racks at Bowring’s. But ten dollars to get to St. John’s, and as much again to get home? Nearly a week’s pay gone, just like that. Think of it though, the girls said. Barely an hour to get from your room to the shops down on Water Street.

  “You know Briscoe? In that band?” asked Mary.

  “What?” Joyce turned, and for a moment saw ground rushing in the window, like fabric being ripped apart.

  “Roy Briscoe is in the band with you. Works at British Overseas.”

  “Yes?” The blur was nauseating. Her hands, Mary’s knees, the seat back in front of her.

  “He’s in for it now. Laid out some Englishman last night.”

  “Englishman?” A tilt, and lift, followed by a little dip that turned Joyce’s legs to water, before they settled into a steady climb. Someone let out a gasp behind her. But Joyce liked it better. Not so much noise and shaking.

  “Last night he’s having words with his wife outside the bar,” said Mary. “And it gets worse from there.” She leaned across Joyce’s lap and called to Maeve Vardy, “Tell Joyce about the racket last night. Briscoe and the British fellow.”

  “Oh my word!” cried Maeve, turning to Joyce. “But hadn’t you heard? Right outside the Big Dipper, Briscoe and the wife are having words. He gives her the back of his hand, just a little tap. And this little Englishman comes over and gets between them. Well, buddy, Roy doesn’t even blink. Lays into the stranger like this.” She mimed a punch with her small red fist. “And one of these.” A high jab with the other hand. The plane gave a surge, drowning out her voice. Joyce gripped her armrest, but no one else seemed alarmed. Maeve kept talking, pushing her nose to one side with a finger.

  “Not just any Englishman. No, sir,” she said, coming back into range. “None other than the Vice Chair of British Overseas, about to board for LaGuardia.”

  “Poor luck for Briscoe,” tittered Mary. “He’s in for it now.”

  “He’s in for it for sure,” cried Maeve. “B’ys, oh b’ys.”

  Joyce’s eye caught the window over Mary’s shoulder. The plane bobbed lightly against the horizon, level with small white clouds under an overcast canopy.

  “Do you want me to close it?” asked Mary. “Some people, the window makes them sick.”

  “Yes, maybe,” said Joyce, her insides lifting and falling with the horizon.

  Mary leaned into the aisle. “Someone said this morning that’s just a lot of old talk. There was no British fellow.”

  “Well, I got the rights of it, I’ll tell you right now! Never mind what someone said.”

  “But you egged her on,” whispered Joyce.

  Mary smiled and opened a magazine.

  //////

  Joyce made it to St. John’s without need of a sick bag, though she nearly lost her stomach in the lurching taxi that delivered them to the waterfront. She had ideas of a sequined dress with three-quarter sleeves. But in her excitement at the Royal Stores—more clothes than she could wear in a lifetime—she bought two wool skirts she might just as easily have found anywhere. A girl she didn’t know beckoned her to the appliance section and pulled at a creamy white door, which opened with a sucking sound. “Sensational new advanced design Philco,” said Joyce, reading the tag. “All the conveniences and refinements of modern refrigeration for the modern housewife.” Unspoiled by food, the interior was clean and inviting, especially the smooth dark of the ice box.

  They spanned the sidewalks and crowded the shops, lifting the lids on console radio sets at City Radio and Music and stroking the furs at Ewing’s. Joyce wrapped a fox stole around her shoulders. It was the full length of the fox, head and all, a polished clasp in place of its nose and jaw. They admired the men smoking outside the sailworks, and turned from the direct looks of the fellows outside Marshall Motors.

  After a nice lunch at Bowring’s, Joyce gave up on dresses and found a simple striped pullover that was just right. “Flattering!” said one of the girls. “Whoever you’re buying that one for, he’ll be drove mad.” She liked the racy figurines—nymphs with pubic mounds and pointed breasts—in the china cabinet at Thompson’s Jewelers. Maeve headed east to visit the Caribou Hut—“To say a prayer and shed a tear”—and the group scattered, agreeing to regroup at McMurdo’s and replenish their Beecham’s Pills before heading back to the airport.

  Joyce picked her way through a lane filled with dog droppings when a cold rain came on, driving her into a cramped shop where a gloomy-looking man offered her a free sample of Campana’s Italian Balm. Joyce extended a palm for a drop, and he watched her hands roll over each other. “Rub it right in,” he said.

  He asked where she was from, and invited her to freshen up in the little room out back. There was a girl who worked for him sometimes who kept her things there. It had a mirror, and free makeup samples.

  Joyce hesitated, and rounded the counter to step into the room, just to straighten her hair. A small table was crowded with cosmetics, the familiar smell mixing with a heavy, salty odour that made her anxious.

  “I’ll close up for a few minutes, so you won’t be embarrassed by anyone coming through,” the man called from the front. He bolted the door and flipped the sign in the window. Joyce found a hairbrush as he appeared in the doorway of the little room. “Where did you say you grew up?”

  “Cape St. Rose.”

  “Do all the girls from there look like Jane Russell?”

  “Who?”

  “We’ve a fine selection of stockings, like nothing you’ll see in Gander,” he said, filling the doorway so he nearly touched her knees. “If you want to change out of those old damp ones, eh? You’re all wet from that rain.” He lifted the hem of her jacket.

  “But I’ve got my flight,” said Joyce, near tears all of a sudden.

  “Hold on a moment. I’ve got the perfect shoe for you.”

  When he turned to his shelves she could see the shop door, its deadbolt like the one that locked her room. With a few steps and a quick turn of a hand, she was out.

  The flight home was sparsely seated, the plane buffeted by wind. Joyce, who had been nauseous since the strange encounter at the little shop, made use of the sick bag. Rinsed with stale water brought by the stewardess. The wind surged, and the aircraft strained against a leftward tilt. Joyce gripped the armrest and stared between her buckled shoes, head pounding. The sour taste in her mouth felt like her awful insides bubbling to the surface. She had abandoned her father, her brother. Shamed her mother’s memory with her willful behaviour. She swallowed, forcing back her disgust and humiliation.

  The turbulence ended, and a weak wash of sunlight filtered through the grey twilight.

  “Who’s Jane Russell?” she asked Mary.

  “You’ve seen her in movies.”

  “Have I?”

  “Maybe not out where you’re from. Did a man say you looked like her?”

  “How did you know?” Had Mary been to the same shop?

  “Your figure, it’s all they see.”

  One of the pilots came back to chat. “Eight years ago today we bombed Mainz,” he said. “Six crews lost in our squadron.”

  “My brother Lester flew over two hundred missions,” said Maeve. “Over two hundred. Easiest thing he ever did, he says.”

  //////

  Joyce thought she might show her purchases to Rachel. But Rachel was on her the moment she came through the door.

  “Come out with us.”

  “No, Rach. I’m on at eight.”

  “We’re going to the Officers’ Mess. George is taking us.”

  “George who?”

  “I
don’t remember. Come. Please?”

  George was a green-eyed British man who came in a car and brought them to his apartment in a building overlooking an old rubbish pit from the war. “RAF,” he announced. “Pathfinders Squadron 614. Navigator.” He poured drinks of gin, warm as bath water, no mix. Joyce was still reeling from the flight home. But George said they couldn’t go to the club until the gin was gone. He sat close to Rachel, an arm disappearing behind her back.

  Joyce had imagined the Officers’ Mess as exclusive and richly appointed. But the tightly packed tables and chairs had people colliding and stumbling, and a band playing Irish tunes brought Joyce’s headache back. They found a table, and George spent the next ten minutes talking to a man over his shoulder. Some story about leaking fuel. He was a bore, with his eager camaraderie and tattered sports coat.

  The large woman singing Irish waltzes had big fleshy arms that swayed in time to the music. There was no room to dance and nobody listening anyway, and bottles were going around with little glasses, and you had to drain a glass if someone put it in front of you. Rachel fixed her gaze on the table, mouth half open. George muttering into her ear.

  Joyce fell into a woman’s lap en route to the washroom, spilling her drink. She didn’t understand the toilet, yanking its long chain to no effect. There was a fire exit at the end of a hall, propped open with a brick. The stoop looked out on an empty lot where three soot-faced boys piled grass on a small, choking fire. They paid her no mind. She must have stood there shivering for a long time.

  At eight o’clock the next morning an elderly couple pushed a ticket at her, saying, Toronto, Toronto. Joyce tried to explain that their ticket was with KLM Royal Dutch, not TCA. She called the KLM desk, but the couple wouldn’t let up. Toronto, Toronto.

  “Jesus in the garden,” said Joyce, tapping the logo on her jacket. “You’re with KLM.” The old man tugged at his white silk scarf and clutched his silvery head, and the old woman snarled something that sounded a lot like swearing. A KLM agent arrived, and determined that while the couple had crossed the ocean on KLM, they were booked through to Toronto on TCA. The silver-haired man had simply pulled the wrong ticket from his raglan pocket.