Bess didn’t ask how she knew, but glared at William as though he were responsible for the whole mess.
“This isn’t Dad’s fault,” Emily said.“I knew it was coming anyway.”
“And you aren’t at all excited?”Bess asked, exasperated.
Emily looked at her with a heavy heart, shook her head.“No, Mom.I don’t want to marry Jem.”
Bess’s mouth hung open for a long moment before she turned away, tears in her eyes.Emily had hoped she could do this with her mother’s blessing, but she didn’t need her permission.Still, she felt sick about making her mother feel so rotten.
The conversation had gone around in increasingly exhausting circles for another half-hour until Bess eventually stormed off.
“She’ll come around,” her father had said, nodding from his seat in the large, worn leather armchair.“It’s a mother’s job to worry for her children.I understand that.But I’m not as worried.I know you can handle it.”He watched her intently for a moment.“Are you afraid?”
Emily thought of what her mother had said, the damage wrought on her father’s body in pursuit of the truth.She knew she would be okay; that she could even cope with a limited dose of the treatment alleged in the prisoner’s letter, knowing it would be so temporary.But she couldn’t deny that the prospect of it all made her apprehensive.She nodded.“A little.”
“I think about the women in the war sometimes,” he said.“The nurses especially.They were as gritty as the men, just in skirts instead of trousers.Carrying bandages instead of guns.Courage and fear were both written on their faces, too, just like the men.So often they coexist, don’t they, those things?I suppose because courage only existsbecauseof fear.It grows out of, and despite fear.”
The sound of distant kitchen clatter had filled the silence that followed.Emily knew she would need to go talk to her mother again.She couldn’t leave like this.
“I know you’re aching to prove yourself, Em, and now’s the time to do the really dangerous stuff, before you have a family,” her dad said.“And I don’t mean that as pressure,” he clarified.“I mean it as encouragement, and, frankly, as advice.The war didn’t come to me; I had to go because we all had to go.But I was terrified I wasn’t going to make it home.It broke my heart to know my girls were all waiting, that I might never see you again.It would have been a lot easier if it had just been myself that I had to be concerned for, that’s all I mean.”
He’d risen then, planted a kiss on her hair as he headed for the kitchen.“I’ll see what I can do to soothe her.”
Emily had gone up to her bedroom, where she now plucked her toothbrush and toothpaste out of the array on her bedspread, stuffing them into her small purse.It was a smart look for ladies to carry the clutch style, but Emily preferred a loop handle, which allowed her to hang the bag on her arm and free up both hands to hold her notebook and pen.She went to her dresser and pulled out a pair of underwear and a brassiere, tucked them into the bottom of the handbag.She supposed it might be odd when her bag was searched, as it almost certainly would be at the prison, but she had no idea what clothing or sundries would be allowed or provided, and it felt unprepared to set out on any sort of overnight trip without a fresh change of underthings.She also grabbed three pens from the cup on her desk.She felt naked without one.
She had just stood to go take a bath when her mother appeared in the doorway.
“May I come in?”
Emily nodded, a little unsure of what to expect, but glad that they were speaking again.She sat back down on the bed.Her mother joined her, and for a beat they just took each other in.
“Your father came to talk to me,” Bess said.“And he…reminded me of a few things I may have forgotten.”Emily watched her, waiting, stomach swirling a little.She loved and respected her mother very much.She didn’t want to upset her, but knew she had to do this assignment regardless of how Bess felt about it.
“Before I met your father,” her mother continued, “I worked on the line at the Princess Pat hairnet factory.”
Emily nodded.She knew that.
“You know your grandparents aren’t wealthy,” Bess said with a little dismissive twitch of the head, “and I had to contribute.When my father came back from the first war, he couldn’t work.He had some physical injuries, yes, but mentally, well…” She pressed her lips together—in sympathy or judgment, Emily couldn’t tell.“I was born right before the war broke out, and as you know, my parents never had any other children—I think for the same reasons he couldn’t work.He was just a shell of what he’d been before.So I was terrified, when the second war started, that your father would come home that broken, too.Or not at all.I feared I would end up in the same fix my mother had.Thank God it wasn’t as bad as that for us.At any rate, your nana held things together on her own as long as she could so that I could get some education, but I had to leave school at thirteen to go work.”
Emily listened with waning interest, wondering where this was headed.She knew all this.
“She worked in the Royal York laundry for nearly thirty years, working her fingers raw.She used to come home with burns on her hands, blisters from grazing those big copper cauldrons she boiled the sheets in.”
Emily had seen the scars, but a person didn’t ask for details about such things.“I never knew that’s what the marks were from,” she said quietly.
Her mother nodded.“Yes.I could have easily gotten a job alongside her, but she wanted better for me.So she got me the job at Princess Pat through a woman in Rosedale whose laundry she took in on the side, for extra money.The woman’s husband owned the place.He was a decent man, and he kept an eye on me.It didn’t pay as much as the Royal York, which was why my mother stayed there all those years.It was the most money she could make with so few skills, and no education.Aside from, well…” Her nostrils flared.“The point is, she didn’t want me coming home with burns, or to be harassed by the laundry supervisor, who was a lecher.With the things he said to her, and did to other laundresses…” She shook her head.“They should have poisoned his tea with bleach, that’s all I’ll say.”
“Mom!”Emily gaped.She hadn’t known her nana had put up with all that at her job.
“What I am trying to say,” Bess pressed on, “is that she wanted better for me than she’d ever had.She didn’t want my life to be as difficult as hers had been.And when I met your father that day at the cinema, well…we loved each other, he made a good wage, and I thought, ‘Excellent, I can stop working and give my own children a more stable childhood than I ever had.And if I have girls, they won’t have to work.They can have an education if they wish, stay in school longer than I did, maybe even attend university’ ”—she nodded at Emily, her spine straightening with pride.“Then they can marry well, and be taken care of.”
Emily sighed.She understood better now why Bess had been pushing her so hard toward Jem, and marriage.The campaign had deeper roots, was more well-intentioned than she’d given her mother credit for.“Mom—”
“I wanted your and Eleanor’s lives to be easier than mine,betterthan mine,” Bess said emphatically.“It’s what every good mother wants, really, if she’s worth her salt.No one wants their child to suffer.So when I hear about you willingly walking into aprison, to be hurt, or shamed, or…” She trailed off, eyes shining.“But your father reminded me that we gave you greater opportunities than I or your grandmother had so that you could havechoices.Because it’s always a lack of options that hangs women, in the end.But in making these choices: to delay marriage, and work in the man’s world where things are still so limited for us…I can’t help but feel as though you’re deliberately taking the difficult road when you don’t have to.”She searched Emily’s blue eyes as though looking for an answer.“But you are who you are, my dear, and I love you still.Lord knows I may not always understand you, but I love you, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Emily tried to see things from her mother’s perspective.Her concerns were all reasonable, really.The most daring thing Emily had ever done before now was enrolling as the only woman in her year in journalism school.
Emily had expected that upon graduation, she would be lucky to scrape a part-time junior position at one of the big newspapers or men’s magazines, knowing she would have to work twice as hard as her maleclassmates to succeed in the industry.She was luckier than she’d even realized when she landed the job atChatelaine: to be working at a publication that wasbywomen,forwomen, and in a woman-dominated office, made Emily feel like she’d won a prize.There were no other professional offices headed by a woman.That only happened in underpaid service work, where women drudged like her grandmother had in hotel laundries, starching businessmen’s shirts and boiling their soiled sheets clean—or, she thought with an uncomfortable start, in brothels like June Jones’s, where women laboured in ghastly conditions night and day, solely for the pleasure of men.There were no woman-led law firms, banks, radio stations.They simply didn’t exist.Chatelainewas it.
