Ellen rang the dinner bell.
I am used to this new family, Josephine thought as they assembled around the table, a haze of steam rising from serving bowls. She watched as George pulled out his chair, smiling stiffly, attempting to hide his discomfort at sitting down with women who once would have served him. Maud had made her usual place settings, names written on cardboard, decorated with water-coloured sprigs of holly. George was not sitting at the head of the table. Rather, Maud had placed Ellen where, all the years of George’s childhood, his father had sat.
“I did it by age,” Maud said. “See? Enid is at starvation corner.”
Flora laughed. “What does that mean?” She had forgotten to remove her apron, worked at the knot.
“The last to be served.”
“But you will still say the blessing, please, George,” Josephine said.
After the blessing, Josephine filled the plates, which were passed all the way around the table, pausing at Ellen’s end for the addition of gravy. Finished, she sat back, smiling. She broke a roll and spread it with butter.
“Mother,” George said. He had been glancing around the room. “I noticed shingles missing on the veranda roof.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And one of the storm windows has a broken pane.”
Maud waved her roll, swallowed. “A branch smashed into it, George. In that November storm, the big one.”
He cut his turkey into small pieces. He held himself close, elbows, mouth, eyes. Josephine noticed the parting in his hair, a white line, as if drawn with a ruler.
“Oh, Ellen. I have missed your rolls! And your gravy,” Lucy said.
“Flora makes the gravy now,” Ellen said. She sent Lucy a tight smile, avoiding looking at George.
“But who do you have for these things?”
“For what things, George?” Josephine asked.
“House maintenance. There’s no Mr. Dougan. You can’t let the place…just…”
“Run down?” Maud said. She did not wait for Lucy to speak first, as she once would have. “You think we are letting the place run down, George?”
“It will, with no man on the property.”
Josephine’s and Maud’s eyes touched.
“You…” Maud began. Her nostrils flared. “Have no idea…”
Josephine held up a hand, interrupted. “Did Cousin Carrie and her husband go down to the coast for Christmas, Lucy?”
“No, Mother. Aunt Azuba and Uncle Nathaniel went to St. John. Carrie has an important meeting between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s to do with the petition.”
“What petition?” George asked.
“The suffrage petition, of course. Oh my goodness, George. You need to leave the office more often.”
“The office, as you call it—”
Maud interrupted. “Did she convince him?” she asked Lucy, as if continuing a conversation.
“Mr. Turner? Yes, she did! That’s what I was about to tell you. Yes, she did! He will speak up for us in the legislature. He has great influence.”
Josephine saw that Flora and Enid would remain silent if she did not draw them out.
“Mr. Turner is a member of the legislative assembly for St. John,” she explained.
“You don’t honestly think it will pass in the legislature,” George remarked, at the same instant.
Maud began, “You just interrupted Moth—”
“Why not?” she demanded. Flushed.
His tone, Josephine thought. Exactly like my father’s.
“It…” George spoke directly across the table, addressing Lucy. He had not looked at Ellen, who sat on his left. Or at Flora, on his right. “It would be like asking you to climb up a ladder and fix those shingles. Or take down that storm window. You wouldn’t want to do it, once you saw what it really required. You wouldn’t, for example, want to have to…” He, too, flushed. His voice rose. “…manage a floor of factory workers. Like I have to.”
Lucy and Maud laid down their forks and looked at one another.
George smiled, slightly. He worked at a piece of crisp skin with knife and fork. “You see, it is just the way—”
“No,” Lucy said. “It is not the way. Not any more, George. You forget that I work on a factory floor. I see children working on a factory floor. You may think you treat your workers well, and perhaps you do, but other men do not. Men make laws, for example, that render married women the property of men.”
Maud drew a breath and opened her mouth. She leaned forward, hands in fists beside her plate.
“Girls,” Josephine said. “It’s Christmas. It’s the first time we’ve all been together since…”
A different silence.
“And now we have Flora and Enid. And it’s Enid’s first Christmas with us.”
“All right, Mother, I understand,” Lucy said. Dangerously. “But one last thing and then we will talk of…of the weather.” She pointed across the table at her brother. “You are wrong about us. I will prove it to you.”
“And so will I,” Maud added, under her breath.
“Enid was in the pageant,” Josephine said. She reached over and patted Enid’s hand. “Oh, I was so proud of you. Weren’t you proud of her, Flora?”
“She was…” Flora paused, pondering her sister. “I only wish our ma and papa could have seen her.”
Enid did not speak, but leaned forward, eager to see the expression on Ellen’s face.
George was silent for the rest of the meal. Josephine noted that he took a sober appraisal of every person at the table. His sisters—animated, informed. Ellen—entirely changed in appearance as she smiled at Enid, the lines in her cheeks folding upwards, softening her expression. The English sisters—at ease with the family, as Josephine had taught them to be. Herself—at peace.
Afterwards, when they did not go into the parlour, since the boarders were playing Parcheesi, he seemed at a loss, as if he could not retreat with them into the kitchen. As if there would be no room for him there.
—
Ellen said she did not feel capable of taking around the petition.
“What if they ask me questions, like? I’ll stay home with Enid.”
Enid spent Sunday afternoons in Ellen’s kitchen, earnestly filling out worksheets or doing sums or writing essays with the aid of a large dictionary, while Ellen’s arthritic fingers pushed and lifted, knitting mittens
