by Anna Porter
“Not until 4:00. Why?” They joined the line to shake hands with the Harrises.
“I’d like to talk to you about George,” Judith said quietly. “It’s for a magazine piece,” she added as he edged forward again.
Jennifer Harris extended a plump, short-fingered hand toward Max.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “George would have appreciated it.” She even smiled a little. Perfect decorum, Judith thought as she mumbled something incoherent about being very sorry. Jennifer looked straight over Judith’s left shoulder. Her plum-red mouth was fixed in a tight line. Her soft hand rested, like a dead mouse, in Judith’s palm for just a moment, then she said: “I hope you are going to write a fitting story about George.” She put the emphasis on “fitting.”
“Yes…of course,” Judith said, then collected herself. “He was a great man.”
“You know what I mean,” Jennifer Harris said, her voice rising a little.
“So good of you to come,” Francis said, bending to reach around his mother. “Judith, I would like to talk to you sometime.”
“Yes,” Judith mumbled. “Thank you.” Stupid, why had she said that?
“What’s your deadline?”
“They’ve asked for Friday, but…”
“Doesn’t leave you much time.” He shook his head as if in sympathy. “Could you make it this afternoon? My office?”
“Of course.” Amazing.
“Would 4:00 be a problem?”
“Not at all,” Judith said, a little too enthusiastically for the occasion.
They were past the Harrises, and Max turned to Judith.
“Whatever was all that about? The ‘fitting’ part?”
“I think she’s worried I’m going to write about the suicide. We’re supposed to believe that George killed himself, but we’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s not polite.”
“He killed himself?” Max whispered, surprised.
“That’s the prevailing opinion. I guess if it’s good enough for the police and the family, it should be good enough for the rest of us. I think Jennifer Harris wants me to leave it alone.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Max was looking at her, waiting. “Why?”
“Because I care about what happened to him, and I’m not sure anyone else gives a damn. They just want to bury the dead. Fast.” Judith hadn’t realized until now that she was angry. “Maybe it’s just the stubborn Irish streak I got from my father, but I want to find out what happened in the last few hours of his life.”
Max nodded. He started to move toward the cab line.
“I still want to talk to you about George,” Judith said quickly.
“I haven’t seen him in several weeks, and, even if I had, I doubt he would have confided in me about personal matters,” Max said quietly. “We drank together, talked a lot about books and ideas for how to publish them. I didn’t even know he had problems—other than the ones we all have.”
Francis suddenly appeared at Max’s shoulder.
“You have a moment?” he asked with a sideways glance at Judith, and began to steer Max toward the parking lot.
“Sure,” Max said.
Judith walked toward the cemetery. Most of the cars were leaving. Jennifer Harris sat in a black limousine, dim behind gray glass with a bunch of white lilies in her arms.
The CBC crew had pulled out. Good of them, Judith thought, not to come in for close-ups of the cremation. She preferred old-fashioned burials, the coffin lowered into the grave and covered slowly with earth. The whole dust-to-dust feeling the living could all share. She would write that into her will—a traditional funeral, just as she had wanted a traditional wedding. She and James walking down the aisle, James smiling encouragement. Here comes the bride. Forever and ever, amen. No second chances.
Max came back from the parking lot. His hands dug into his pockets for his gloves.
“I’d better be going,” he said.
“Just a few questions,” Judith pleaded.
Max pulled on his gloves, adjusting each finger and squeezing down on it, to fit snugly between the joints.
“I could drive down to the Park Plaza. We’ll have a drink and it’s easy to get a cab from there to the airport.”
Max checked his watch. “All right. A drink would be nice.”
He smiled when he saw the old Renault. He carefully repositioned Judith’s notepads and pencils on the dashboard, stuck her full Dominion Stores shopping bag on the back seat beside Jimmy’s muddy football gear and hockey gloves and dusted off the passenger seat before sitting down. He held his gold-monogrammed, black leather briefcase on his knees. Fussy and somewhat domesticated, Judith thought.
“Your husband is a sportsman, I see,” Max said with a smile.
“That’s my son,” Judith said. “Big for his age.” She was angry with herself immediately. Why did she still feel it was so important to be young? Stupid old-time conditioning. To prove to herself that she was beating it, she added: “He’s fourteen.” She maneuvered a risky left turn on Sherbourne and drew the car into the line of traffic on Bloor Street. Max didn’t seem to have noticed her discomfort, so she went on: “I’m not married now. Haven’t been for a while.”
“I’m sorry,” Max said.
Judith laughed. “I’m not—any more. Are you married?”
“Second time lucky,” Max said absently. “I’m not much of a loner.”
They reached the Roof Lounge at the Park Plaza a little after one. Judith took a table in the corner. It was a bright day outside, but here the tinted windowpanes and the soft red lights in the ceiling created an impression of early evening. It was the right atmosphere for a martini with olives. She didn’t even have to ask Heinz for the extra olives. Max ordered a martini too, twist of lemon, on the rocks, double.
“About George,” Judith said. “Drinking buddies do get to know each other, and you’ve known him for…”
“Twenty-nine years, I figured this morning.”
“What kind of person do you think he was?”
“For the magazine?”
Judith took out her notebook.
“Saturday Night,” she said.
“Significant. A great publisher. There are few of us left now in a world of MBAs and word processors. With books and authors the shortest route is not necessarily the best. There is no one tried-and-true method. Authors specialize in being different and George understood that better than most. That’s why he was successful.” Max leaned closer. “It’s hard to believe he killed himself.”
“Did he seem depressed when you talked to him?”
“No. When?”
“Yesterday. What was that about?”
“How do you know I talked to him yesterday?”
“George kept a running record of his phone calls.”
“Amazing.” Max shook his head slowly from side to side as if to shake off an unpleasant thought. “George wasn’t the type of man who would keep meticulous notes of telephone calls. He had too much grace for that sort of petty bookkeeping.” Max sighed and stared out the window.
Judith took a long slow sip of her martini, touching her lip to a chunk of ice. It felt comfortingly sensuous.
“So what did you talk about?” she persisted.
“Business.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Of course. But…” Max paused to brush a stray bit of fluff from his neatly crossed knee, “…I see no possible connection between that conversation and his apparent suicide. None. We talked about money. Percentages and advances. That sort of thing.”
“For anything specific?”
Max looked at her as if she had just asked the dumbest question he had ever heard.
“For an author.”
“Anyone I know?”
“I doubt it,” Max said. “Anyway. It was the sort of conversation George and I have had about a dozen times every year since I’ve known him. We were going to work out a joint ve
nture. Share costs. Split the royalty advance.”
“You’re not going to tell me who the author is,” Judith guessed.
“You’re right.”
“Why not?”
“The deal is still going ahead, I hope. Once I’m ready to unwrap it, I could let you know. Give you a Canadian exclusive.” He put just the right amount of emphasis on “Canadian” and grinned patronizingly.
“Did it involve a lot of money?” Judith persisted.
Max pondered that for a moment. “Depends on your point of view. Not too much for this book, too much for some others I’ve seen.”
“More than $100,000?”
“What sort of question is that?”
“Curious.”
Max chuckled.
“Maybe.” He waved at Heinz for a couple of refills.
“That’s all you talked about?”
“That’s all.”
Judith changed direction.
“You’ve met Francis Harris before?”
Max nodded.
“Not a patch on the old man, but don’t quote me on that. He doesn’t have the grace.”
“There is talk he might sell the company. Did George ever talk to you about selling F & H?”
“Never. He was married to the business. You know that. I hope you’re wrong about Francis. He could hire the right sort of people and hang on to the firm. Maybe his son will inherit the talent.”
What about his daughter? Never mind.
“Do you always have so many olives?” Max was gazing at Judith’s drink with apparent disbelief.
“Only in the Spring. Good for the digestion.”
The bar was starting to fill up. Two men came in and sat at the next table. One wore a green raincoat and carried a large brown attaché case. The other had papers in a blue folder, wore a cashmere turtleneck and a brown wool jacket with patches. His face was crumpled, friendly and vaguely familiar, tanned so that the creases showed up pale by contrast. He smiled at Judith. She smiled back.
“Has anybody considered the possibility that George simply fell in front of that subway train?” Max asked.
“No, that’s New York. The police say he jumped.”
Max checked his watch absentmindedly, then waved for the bill.
“I take it they have more to the theory?” he asked.
“They think he was depressed. That he owed too much money.”
“Ridiculous. He always owed too much money. That’s the nature of the business up here. Not enough people, too many American books. The Swedes have it easy. So do we. One bestseller on the list in the States, that’s 200,000 copies hardcover and maybe a million dollars in subsidiary rights—paperback, bookclub, excerpts. And movies…we option more books in a month than the Canadian movie industry would in its lifetime. It’s still tough to survive, but not as tough as George had it. What’s a best-seller here? Ten thousand?”
“Sometimes. We had a couple close to a hundred thousand.”
“George said the most he’d had for a paperback deal was $50,000. Point is, up here, you can’t ever get really lucky… But George loved it anyhow. Back in ’62 I asked him if he’d come to New York and work with me. That’s when I went to Axel. He could have had anything he wanted. Editorial control, big office, profit-sharing, eventually maybe a spot on the board. He didn’t even consider it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think he cared about money. He cared about books. And his authors. He wasn’t about to leave them.”
“Wouldn’t he have taken them with him? I mean, couldn’t he have still published them in the States?”
“Most of that stuff doesn’t travel. Too Canadian.”
Heinz deposited the bill on a small silver platter, exactly midway between them. Judith reached for it, but Max was quicker.
“I know about free-lancers,” he said.
On the way to the elevator, Max put an arm around her shoulders—a friendly gesture, hardly touching before it dropped.
“Good luck with the story,” he said. “Let me know what you find out.”
Judith left him in the lobby digging for change in his pockets, a fast phone call before he went to the airport.
She had retrieved the Renault from the underground parking lot and nosed it onto Avenue Road when a cab pulled out with Max in the back seat. His briefcase was open on his knees, he was writing in a book. She waved but he didn’t see her.
The southbound traffic cleared and, as Max’s cab passed, she saw the man with the creased face and patched jacket get into another cab.
Six
BY THE TIME Judith made it to Fitzgibbon & Harris, the sun had quit. It was 4:10 p.m. but it had begun to turn dark. Judging by the slate-gray clouds, Torontonians would be given their usual punishment for thinking too soon of Spring—an April snowstorm.
She decided not to bypass protocol and went in by the main entrance. The young woman at reception invited her to find a seat in the hospital-like waiting room while Gladys Whitaker was paged.
Judith had never felt comfortable in this chrome and glass room. The only concession to its surroundings was a black-painted, steel, free-standing bookcase a few inches from the wall on which someone had meticulously arranged Fitzgibbon & Harris’s latest offerings to the world of literature.
Judith had sat in this room only once, thirteen years ago, waiting for a job interview. Her kids were still babies, Jimmy just beginning to walk. They had moved into a new house in Leaside, ten miles and a hundred social strata from the one-bedroom apartment they had lived in on Spadina while James finished college. The new house had big bay windows and four bedrooms upstairs. James had opened his veterinary surgery downstairs, the family lived on the second floor. James used to bring some of the sick animals up to show Anne and Jimmy. They came in all shapes and sizes and ailments: broken wings and fractured legs, crushed, mangled, bitten, beaten, torn, with gashes in their stomachs and backs, with needles in their sides, with eyes missing; some just came to die. Even these James liked to hold and pet for a while. He believed it helped them relax. They were always quiet—the animals. Judith wondered why they became so still when they were in pain.
James would sit holding one on his lap for hours. In the evenings while he read his paper, watched television, wrote his reports and recommendations, he liked to cradle an animal in his arm. He was happy then. Maybe they all were. Much of the time Judith had been bored, though she didn’t know that at the time. She had thought she was going through a middle-class phase of liberation and a little bit of uninvited self-discovery. That, at any rate, had been palatable to James and boredom would not have been. She had been encouraged to go and find herself—and while she was searching anyway, why not look for a job?
Then, as now, it had been a gray day. George, who for all his sensitivity to human needs had never liked the idea of being on time, had kept her waiting here for about half an hour. She had bought herself a powder-blue floral-pattern wool dress, a beige silk scarf and a pair of gloves she had been determined to wear until the last possible moment. Her hands were chapped and red, her nails chewed beneath the carefully applied pink polish. She remembered her relief when Gladys Whitaker had finally come to usher her into George Harris’s office and George hadn’t wanted to shake her hand.
“Mr. Harris will see you now.”
Same voice. Same place. Time turned back a full thirteen years. Judith shuddered as she swung around. Gladys stood in the doorway, her back to the receptionist, her hands in front of her waist as if she were holding a bouquet. Her nails were perfectly shaped and painted carnation red to match her lipstick. Her brown eyes stared steadily at Judith. Waiting.
“Mr. Harris…” Judith trailed off uncertainly.
“Mr. Francis Harris,” Gladys said, impatiently.
Francis Harris, of course. Judith breathed in deeply. No time warp. She wasn’t losing her mind after all.
She had never liked Gladys, though they had exchanged only politeness. Gladys kept to hers
elf. She was exacting about her secretarial duties and had wrapped herself in George’s mantle of power, assumed but never stated. She drank soda water at the interminable Christmas parties and the men from the warehouse never asked her to dance. She was too porcelain beautiful, and too much George’s secretary.
“Mr. Harris and Miss Roy are both expecting you. Together.” With that she turned to walk down the main corridor. She didn’t glance back to see if Judith was following. Her dark-brown hair bounced up and down above her shoulders, each strand knowing its place.
Gladys’s office faced George’s across the corridor and through the glass partition Judith could see that she had been busy since yesterday. There were papers piled high on the floor, folders of various colors (George liked to keep different folders for different subject areas—yellow for accounting, pink for financial, brown for production) littered her desk. Their contents were arranged in mountainous layers next to the typewriter. Two of the filing cabinets were open, all their drawers pulled out. There were other drawers on the floor, lined up for easy access in front of the door.
Alice Roy and Francis Harris were sitting in George’s office at the low coffee table under the blue and gold painting of the prairies. Between them, a metallic green ashtray was overloaded with cigarette butts. The air was heavy with Gauloise smoke.
Francis stood with his hand outstretched.
“We were afraid you wouldn’t be able to make it,” he said, motioning toward the window. It had started to snow. The wind shook the windowpane with fierce gusts, throwing wet flakes and frozen rain at the glass.
Judith took his hand: long thin white fingers, cold and dry. She shook involuntarily as she held them, then drew her hand away quickly. Francis pulled up a third chair for her with its back to George’s desk. There were papers all over that too, files, folders and a couple of tall piles of manuscripts, some in cardboard boxes, some held together with rubber bands.
“It was good of you to come to my father’s funeral,” Francis said, folding himself into the low-slung canvas armchair.
“I wouldn’t have missed it,” Judith said. “I thought very highly of him.” What an inflated way of putting it…yech. “I mean he was a very special person.” She wasn’t making it better.
