Chapter 96

From the Journal of Honey Sutton Jan. 14, 1939

… Doris and Jerry made their slow and painful way to Grace to offer her their condolences. No doubt they hoped that the careful show of alertness they put on would hide the fact that they were completely hung over. No doubt they had a high time in the club car on the train journey here. From Grace's sad and disappointed expression as she watched them trudge away afterwards, she wasn't fooled for a second. Toppy looked mortified to see her daughter and son-in-law trying desperately not to slump in their seats after they sat down. Bob was as grim as could be.

… Worn and threadbare as his old International Brigades uniform was, Harry Schmitz still cut an impressive figure at the podium. He was well-muscled, over six feet tall, and conducted himself with a dignity that was easy, but respectful of the occasion. "I can't add much to what Will just told you about Van. He was a true comrade to every one of us who served with him. None of us will ever see better. Being together in hell made us more than comrades. It made us brothers in a way that runs deep. Maybe even deeper than blood. You have to have been a soldier at the front to know just how deep.

I have a lot of memories of Van. One stands out. Once, he and I were in a cantina in Madrid. We were sipping our cognacs and enjoying the music of a jota combo. Halfway through the set, a gorgeous gal came up to Van and started to flirt with him. He tried to discourage her politely, but she wouldn't go away. Instead, she … made an offer that would have been hard for any red-blooded male to refuse. Van told her that he was married. I can hear the purr in her voice. 'And where is your wife? Across the Atlantic? She's there. We're here. What is stopping us?'"

Harry paused for a second, then resumed his story. "Van just shook his head. I won't ever forget his answer. 'She isn't there.'" Harry touched his heart as Van must have that long-ago evening, "'She's here, always.'"

Grace murmured something. The only words I could make out were Van's name and love. Then, she dissolved into tears and shook like a young larch in a storm as her mother held her close. Maisie leaned over her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. When she finally pulled herself together and sat up, Harry spoke to her directly. "Van was faithful to you that night and every other night. That was the kind of man he was. That was the kind of love he had for you."

Mother Bailey didn't like it when Grace insisted afterwards that they let Henry drive her and Cousin Jessie home after the memorial service. However, Mother Bailey is still a little weak from her pneumonia and Cousin Jessie is 93 years old. Neither of them needed to be out in weather that was twenty degrees below freezing.

Mother Bailey protested to Grace that they had talked about this. She agreed that they had. That was why Harry and Max were at hand to lift her up and carry her to her Packard if she tried to be stubborn. Max would drive her home unless she promised to go straight there herself. Cousin Jessie urged Mother Bailey not to fuss. Grace was only thinking about her health.

Mother Bailey looked at Cousin Jessie suspiciously and asked why she was so resigned to the two of them being carted off like baggage. Cousin Jessie admitted that Grace thought that she shouldn't be left alone in her state of health. After all, she could have died from the pneumonia and might have if it hadn't been for the new sulfa drugs.

Mother Bailey's tone was actually amused. "It appears Grace doesn't want to have to attend either of our funerals."

"No, I don't," Grace interjected sternly.

Mother Bailey smiled wryly, shrugged her shoulders and promised to go straight home. After politely refusing Henry's arm, she turned and walked with Cousin Jessie towards her Packard.

From the Memoirs of Grace Bailey -

The funeral procession slowly wound its way towards the New Bedford Cemetery and the Bailey family plot. A gun carriage pulled by four horses led the way. On it was Van's coffin draped in the flag of the International Brigades, a red, yellow, and purple tricolor with a three-pointed red star in the center. It was a magnificent banner. Toppy and Rebecca had every reason to be proud of their work.

In the car behind, I couldn't help but wonder how Ben Albert had managed to procure a gun carriage when Max, with all his Canadian Legion friends and acquaintances, had failed. When I asked him later, he had a ready but uninformative answer to go with the mischievous gleam in his eye. "Didn't Karl tell you? I'm a wonder worker."

He was certainly the most cheerful undertaker I ever knew. I never did find out how he obtained the gun carriage or what he did with it after the funeral. Neither did anyone else in New Bedford or Pinebury to my knowledge.

As the procession rolled along to the beat of two muffled drums, an honor guard of seven good men and true accompanied the gun carriage. Max, Bob, Harry, Jim, Ollie, and Dr. Barlow marched alongside, undeterred by the refusal of the local Canadian Legion chapter to endorse their action. Max, Bob, and Jim wore their Great War uniforms under heavy overcoats. Ollie and Dr. Barlow wore black suits to which they had pinned their campaign medals.

Will Lane followed behind. The doctors who had saved his life at Fuentes de Ebro had been forced to cut his already damaged and bloodied uniform to shreds to reach his wounds. Only his beret had survived the experience and he wore it now. No medals adorned his plain black suit. His country had awarded him no honors for the service to it that had cost him an arm and, very nearly, his life.

The streets of New Bedford were lined with people from one end of the route to the other. I recognized many of them as friends and neighbors, but some were strangers. I later learned that people from Pinebury, Northbridge, and even Sudbury came that day to pay their respects. Karl Schenken and his mother, Roolie, were there. I continued to hope that one of these years Karl and I would persuade her to abandon her stubborn independence and move to Pinebury to live with him.

Alden and Callie Cramp stood waiting outside the cemetery gates. I give Mr. Cramp credit. I'm sure that the mournful look he wore was due far more to sympathy for my loss than to regret that I had scheduled the funeral on a Saturday. I think he understood that there were far worse things than having to wait for Wednesday to publish a story on the event in the Chronicle.

The family and all of our friends who could attend gathered at the Bailey plot in the New Bedford Cemetery. I was touched to see that Sally and Mark Henry had come all the way from Winnipeg to pay their respects. Sally was plumper than she had been when I had last seen her as a bridesmaid at her wedding. Mark was starting to show a little grey. Would that have happened to Van and me in a few years if he had lived?

The Saarinens and the Ladners had also made the long trip to Northern Ontario to offer their sympathies. Sadie Cohen was there to represent her husband Al and the rest of their family. Gavin and Mary Palmer had even come all the way from New York. Both seemed deeply saddened by the loss of their old college chum.

The sky above us was an unbearably vivid shade of turquoise. It was hard to believe that a sun that could shine so brightly could produce so little warmth. When the gun carriage halted, all of the honor guard except for Will lifted the coffin off the bed and carried it to the grave. The harness for Will's prosthetic hook wasn't strong enough to allow him to carry such a heavy weight, so he followed behind.

Rev. Hall did not read a burial service, as Van wasn't a Presbyterian. However, he did offer a prayer which, probably in view of the weather, he kept short. "We are here today to commit a man's body to the earth and his soul to eternity. In life he styled himself an agnostic. However, having spoken to him several times, I can say that he did not do so as a boast of intellectual superiority. He did so as an expression of humility. He simply refused to pretend that he knew things which he did not know.

If he did not know whether God existed or not, he at least did not deny the possibility that He might. He was even willing to commend his spirit into His hands if He did. In the end, he called on the name of Jesus. I am neither the Father nor the Son. Nor am I the Holy Ghost. It is not given to me to judge a man's soul or to know what judgement God may render on it.

It is only given to me to pray for the salvation of the soul of a good man, a man who loved his wife and his family and who died because he risked his life for others. May God's infinite mercy and grace be upon the soul of Vanaver Mainwaring and upon the souls of all of us who yet remain in this vale of tears. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen."

After the Reverend took his seat, Dr. Barlow stepped back. Will took his place with the honor guard which, then, lifted the flag of the International Brigades above the coffin and folded it. Will's hook and remaining hand were more than sufficient for him to carry out his part in this procedure. The flag was handed over to Dr. Barlow. As a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Great War, he had held the highest rank of anyone in the honor guard, so the duty of the presentation of the flag was his.

Before he could carry it out, he had to wait for the rest of the honor guard to raise, fold, and hand to him the Canadian and American flags that had lain under the International Brigades tricolor. That done, he presented all three flags to me after a few words of praise for the courage and honor with which Van had served two countries. "Today, he is interred without honor from his own government or ours. However, I believe that the Canadian people know and understand what he and his comrades did for Canada. I believe that I am justified in saying as one of them that we will never forget. We will always be grateful."

After Dr. Barlow placed the flags in my lap, I reached under my veil to brush the moisture from my eyes. Then I thanked him. After he retired to rejoin the honor guard, the pen pals who had been so faithful and generous to Van's comrades in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion came forward. Phyllis Fraser, as their representative, presented a wreath to honor Van and through him all their friends from the International Brigades who, because they were willing to risk their lives for a country and people not their own, still lie in nameless graves far from their homelands.

At least their bodies do. I believe that their spirits, including those of the two pen pals whom Phyllis Fraser had lost in battle, were with us in that moment. It may be just an old woman's tricky imagination, but, sometimes, when I think back to the Spanish Civil War, I can feel their presence still.

I silently thanked God that Phyllis Fraser's third pen pal had survived his wounds from the battle of the Ebro and made his way back to America. Looking at these children, I felt humbled by what they had done for lonely soldiers, some of whom were far from home and some of whom had no homes when they joined the International Brigades. The cost of that decency was plain in their grief-haunted eyes.

However, in that same decency, something else was visible. I saw, as clearly as I had ever seen anything, their idealism, their dedication, and their conviction that a better day and a better life for everyone was not just a dream, but a possibility worth working for and, if necessary, worth fighting for. For the first time in too long, I could not help but feel that there might yet be some small hope for the world. If the stand made by Van and his comrades against the insane ambition of a power-hungry butcher and his allies could inspire and nurture such hope, then perhaps it had not been in vain after all.

There was no firing party. Van had endured enough gunfire when he was alive. Nor did I believe that anyone else there was in the mood to have their eardrums rattled by the crack of rifle shots. In the cold, biting air the sound would have been especially sharp and would probably have carried all the way to Manitoba.

For the members of the honor guard to turn to face the coffin and for each in tandem to raise a hand in salute was more than sufficient. Buddy Kane, one of Max's students from New Bedford High School and a trumpeter in the school marching band, raised my brother Jack's old bugle, lent to him for the occasion, to his lips. As my husband was lowered into the waiting grave, the solemn notes of "Last Post," appropriate for the last rites of a soldier who had perished serving in a Canadian battalion, sounded with aching clarity.

I cried many tears that morning. I suppose each one was healing to my wounded soul. There was some comfort in having laid my husband to rest in a fitting manner and in the knowledge that I had loved him and that he had loved me. Nevertheless, it was hard to have it brought home so forcefully that Van and I would never meet again on this earth. He was neither my first nor my last love, but, of all my loves, he was the one, more than any of the others, with whom I would have chosen to spend my life.

Afterwards, the family and our friends all gathered at Mother's house for a reception with tea and sandwiches provided by the New Bedford Tearoom. … At one point, the Ladners, the Saarinens, and the Schmitzes were all gathered together around Richard Ladner's last sketchbook which the Ladners had brought with them to New Bedford to show all of us. Harry was reluctantly explaining some of the sketches of his comrades and their life in camp while Johann and Ida looked on with pride. His manner was good natured, but when his listeners turned their gazes away from him to the pages of the sketchbook, a distant sadness crept into his eyes.

When he turned away to explain another sketch, I glanced sheepishly at the mantelpiece. It had been mortifying to have to admit to Lionel that I had arranged for his Empire clock to be brought out of the basement and auctioned off. The proceeds were donated to the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society. I hadn't known about my brother-in-law's change of heart regarding his plan to cheat German and Austrian Jews at the time. He shrugged his shoulders when I told him so. "It's a good cause. I wish I understood why Van believed so strongly in his cause that he was willing to die for it, but I don't, and he was. I suppose that makes him a better man than I am."

"It does." I tried to avoid too harsh a tone, especially after having misjudged him so badly before, but, in every corner of the world, the time was getting short for his kind of wavering.

Lionel smiled ruefully. "I finally managed to read Lord Jim. Van tried to persuade me to for years, but P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley are more my style. He was right about it, though. It really is a masterpiece. There was one line in it that fits him perfectly. 'He was romantic, but nonetheless true.'"

Before he and his family left, Max handed me an unopened envelope. I noticed that it bore my name and no stamp. Max explained that it had been enclosed with a letter to him from Del with instructions to deliver it to me. I was glad to learn that he was still doing well with his new winter job driving a snowplow for the city of Saskatoon. I read his letter to Mother and Maisie after everyone else had left.

It was very kind and sympathetic. Del expressed his regret for my loss and respect for Van's courageous stand against fascism. He was glad that I had loved and been loved by such a fine man for however short a time. He hoped that I would find comfort in the presence of my family and friends. I was touched, not just by the letter but by a wonderful realization that I would have had earlier if I hadn't been so blinded by sorrow and regret. "It seems I've been a little unfair to the men in my life. They haven't all gone away. Jim, Ollie, and Del have all stayed as friends. And I completely forgot about Max. He may not be an old flame, but he's always been a friend."

Mother smiled with good-natured amusement. "That's men for you. They can be foolish and wayward, and they will drive a woman to distraction, but they're good fellows most of them."

That night I had a good cry over the thought that my friends and loved ones had lives of their own to which they had to return. Their presence at the memorial and funeral and afterwards had been a comfort, but they couldn't keep me company forever. Sooner or later, I had to learn how to be alone with my grief without letting misery overwhelm me.

My tears eventually ran dry. With the great responsibility that had driven me since I read the telegram asking for instructions for the disposition of Van's body finally fulfilled, I couldn't help wondering. What next? Where do I go from here?

I placed a hand on my stomach but felt not a flutter. It was too early yet. Even if it hadn't been, I still would not have been fully satisfied. The child I was expecting was only part of the answers to my questions.

At least I had a sliver of hope that perhaps some answers might exist after all and that a search for them might be worthwhile. I sat for a moment longer not thinking at all, letting myself be filled with the stillness that surrounded me in my small room. Then, I bent down and reached for the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk.

My exploration of it produced a pile of five small diaries in which I had made sporadic entries over the years. Sooner or later, I had abandoned them all. Two months was the longest time I had ever managed to keep one.

My last journal was still there underneath where I had left it along with all that was best of my childhood. Had I really not laid a hand on it for over twenty years? A thin film of dust on the spine and edges which I quickly brushed away testified that I had.

Somehow, holding it now and turning it to the blank page after the last partial entry seemed right. After moving my typewriter aside, I took up a pen. Though my hand trembled slightly, I wrote two sentences recounting my father's death and testifying to his kind nature and his loving heart.

Skipping a space, I set down that day's date with a surer hand. Then I found myself writing compulsively. The day's events, my gratitude for the kindness and concern of those who loved me, and all my hopes and fears for the future poured out of me.

Next Week: Sunday morning. Jim Flett's announcement. Tinder piled high.