“I don’t like to think of – well, tell me on thing, will you?”
“What?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Oh!” She smiled faintly. “How about Catherine Carver?”
“She was married. Will you tell me? Are you?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the way it should be, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You certainly take a direct method of trying to find out, don’t you, Jim? Yet it’s interesting. Very interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I seem to remember a little conversation about whether I was corrupt – or was it whether I attracted brutality and corruption?”
“I – I remember.”
“I do seem to bring it out in you, judging by your performance just now,” she said dryly. “I think some of those Negroes you worry about would agree with me, don’t you?”
“I made a mistake. I make mistakes with you because I love you. I thought Jackson had been your lover. People think so, Peggy.”
“I told you I had been very fond of Henry.”
“I still don’t know what it was like between you. What made you take to him?”
“It’s hard to know sometimes,” she said, “but I think I know why Henry appealed to me. He has a chip on his shoulder. But I knew why, Jim. Henry has pure feelings, and he gets hurt so easily. He’s always angry but he doesn’t want to be.”
“And he’s lame.”
“Yes, he’s lame. And he’s always in flight.”
“Always on the run.”
“On the run. Yes, in a sense,” she said, looking surprised. But he believed he could see where Henry fitted in with the Johnson family and the St. Antoine people, and he was glad.
“Maybe I still seem a little like a stranger,” he said. “Maybe later on, when you get used to me, it could be easier for both of us.”
“You worry me,” she said. “Why the hell I keep having you around, I don’t know. In heaven’s name please don’t be so humble! I hate it.”
“I – well…” he began helplessly. Then the wind rattled a loose window pane and he turned. “The glass there is loose. Isn’t there always a draft on you?”
“It rattled all last night,” she said, going toward the window. “I had a piece of paper in there to tighten it.”
“Has it come out?”
“I think I can fix it,” she said, pressing the folded paper tighter between the frame and the glass. “There.”
“I’m sick of this zero weather. I’m sick of the snow,” he said.
“So am I. Aren’t we due for a January thaw?”
“It’ll come. It always comes.”
“I like the summer better. I like the hot summer in the city,” she said.
“That’s odd. I like the city in the summer, too. It doesn’t get too hot for me.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Well, I might as well make some coffee.”
She put on the kettle, and while it was boiling she went to the mirror to examine the bruise. Her face was close to the mirror, and standing beside her, he showed her that the bruise was really under the eye. “Maybe it won’t blacken at all,” he said. “What a break that would be!” she said hopefully. The kettle began to boil. She measured out the coffee. He poured in the water. Doing these things with her delighted him, and he knew that he only needed the right to share this part of life in the room to have her under the siege of his love. When they were drinking the coffee he grew cunning. It was difficult for him to do any work at the Ritz, he complained. Phones rang, maids walked in, he wandered down to the lobby. “I don’t see how you get anything done there,” she said. Nodding, he led her on.
What he needed was a little place he could use as an office, a place where no one would bother him. When she agreed he said, “Say, why couldn’t I come here in the afternoons, Peggy?”
“You mean use my room?”
“I wouldn’t be in your way. You wouldn’t be here.”
“What do you think I am? Why, you’d be moving in on me.”
“But only when you’re not here.”
“Do you think I live my life on the sidewalk?” she asked, exasperated. “Just because you’ve found the door open a few times, is this room supposed to be a hangout?”
“I’ve just said you wouldn’t know I was here.”
“Why, you’d be living in my pocket, Jim. I don’t know what impression you have of me, but the fact is I have a private life. This room, damn it, is my castle. Well,” she added, looking around the bare room, “at least it’s my cottage. It’s the only place where I can be alone.”
“I know,” he persisted. “I wouldn’t bother you. I’d get out before you came home.”
“And you’d wonder where I had been.”
“No. Honestly I wouldn’t. I’d never ask.”
“And you seem to have taken a fancy to that bed.”
“I swear I wouldn’t bother you, Peggy,” he said, eagerly. “I’d do my work. It’s quiet here. Nobody would know I was here. I’d go before you came back.”
“In a funny kind of way I think you feel I need you here. Isn’t that it?” she asked, and when he shook his head vigorously she added, “I don’t need anybody around here.” But what she had just said surprised her. Maybe she suddenly remembered Malone barging in with her. Maybe she had some sudden doubt of herself and a remembered awareness that she liked having him around and in touch with her. “Well, if it’s so important to you,” she said reluctantly, “if you wouldn’t bother me, if you’d get out when I came home—”
“Thanks, Peggy,” he said, quietly exultant. He had wormed his way into the room, he would worm his way into her life and into her heart and take her life into his.
EIGHTEEN
At two o’clock next afternoon he was back in Peggy’s room taking off his overcoat and overshoes and putting them in the cupboard. First he tidied up the bureau, dusting off the spilled face powder and the hairpins. He made an orderly arrangement of the face cream and nail polish so he would have space for writing. Opening his briefcase, he spread out his papers on the bureau. It was too high for writing comfortably. He put a layer of books on the chair seat and then a cushion on top of the books and sat down. It was awkward and uncomfortable.
He wanted to get down some background material for his first three columns. He tried to work with the air of a man who had come to the one place where he could think with beautiful clarity. But the light from the ceiling was not good; he would hear a whirring noise from the floor above and jump up: it would be Mrs. Agnew’s vacuum cleaner. The woman had a passion for the vacuum cleaner. If she were unhappy or lonely or restless she ran her vacuum cleaner, and he would listen nervously to the whining until he wanted to scream. He would look around and frown, wondering how he got there. Instead of working in such a dump he could have been in his comfortable hotel room, or he could have used Foley’s apartment; yet he had let himself be chained in this musty-smelling basement with the odour of stale food seeping through the cracks in the door.
He had only one visitor, a strapping, good-looking young Negress who came to the room accompanied by a five-year-old boy. It was at five-thirty, when Peggy should have been home. The smart young Negress, who was abashed at encountering McAlpine, said that she was in the neighbourhood and wanted to take an hour to have a drink with her boyfriend and knew Peggy would mind the boy for her for that hour. McAlpine offered to look after the boy. She refused, and was puzzled by his obvious approval of her visit. But her visit for him was a vindication of his own judgment of Peggy. Not only Negro men but Negro women liked and trusted her.
Those moochers who used to come must have heard he was there on guard. No one came to disturb him. He would write grimly until his eyes got tired, then he would get up and stretch and saunter to the little back window and look out at the snow-capped fence and the cat’s footprints in the snow lea
ding to the three garbage pails by the gate. Then he would turn away from the window and stare morosely at each stick of shabby furniture and hate it for its cheapness. The smudges on the wall, the bare spots on the floor, and that odour of lighter fluid perfume she brought into the room every night filled him with disgust, and so did the little discoveries he made every day of her untidiness. Toast crumbs would be left on the burner, toast crumbs and cigarette butts, and the dregs of coffee in a cup; a stocking would dangle from a drawer or be tossed on the floor in the closet. His loathing of the room became a dull ache in his brain. His sense of order would compel him to tidy up the place as a gesture to the dignity of his work and his own self-respect; he would wipe off the burner and take the coffee cup along the hall to the bathroom to wash it. He kept asking himself bitterly why she hadn’t the sense to let him take her somewhere where they could lead an orderly life.
Each night when she came home from the factory she would look around, smile brightly and thank him for tidying up the room. She began to take it for granted that he was willing to play housekeeper for her and hardly bothered to make the bed. She was trying to provoke him, he thought, and drive him away. With all the resources of her slovenliness, she was cunningly protecting herself against him by inducing him to believe she was a slut. But the true sluts, he told himself, were meticulously clean on the outside. This flaunting of her untidiness was her way of repelling him.
He prowled around the room, searching in drawers and closets for scraps of evidence to prove that her carelessness with her clothes was part of her defiant resistance. On his knees before the lower drawer of the bureau he pulled out a silver bracelet, a little discarded beaded bag, and a pair of satin pumps saved from her college days. He got up slowly, the beaded bag in his hands, an exultant smile on his face, and stood in a trance. Then he hurried to the closet and looked at her black dress. Again he smiled. In that black dress which was so beautifully and simply cut she had true elegance and knew it; and when she put on that white silk blouse and black skirt she had her own peculiar distinction. Good style was instinctive with her as was her gentleness and the lovely tone of her voice. All the untidiness, the overall mess was her gesture of contempt for those who were passionately concerned with these things, for she knew she could emerge effortlessly with her own kind of superior elegance.
When she came home from work he would have the coffee made and serve her a cup, then sit in his chair by the bureau, crossing his knees and holding his cup while they gossiped and she stretched out on the bed. She would always love him for his coffee, she said. It was as if they were living together.
She would move around the room, and sometimes he would reach out and circle her hips with his arms and put his head under her breast, listening to the beating of her heart, and she would stand still, unprotesting, but uninterested, till her stiff stillness gradually took the heart out of him. Then she would smile to herself.
It was his privilege to stay there until she got dressed to go out for the evening. He did not ask where she would go. Nor did she ask him whom he would see. There were no strings attached.
He had to go to the Carvers’ in the evenings for conferences with Mr. Carver, and with those visits he believed he was clarifying his position. Mr. Carver was helping him with his work. They would adjourn to the library; they would remain alone there, and he would be so businesslike that Catherine hesitated to interrupt them. Mr. Carver became his editor; he himself was simply the conscientious newspaperman. He had drafted three columns, each one a development of the same idea. He wanted to express these ideas as stories. He wanted to tell of the lost men of Europe, the mass men who were driven by some death wish to surrender their own identity and become anonymous parts of a big machine: he intended to make the point by devoting each column to one character, one lost man. The plan and the treatment delighted Mr. Carver, who had some shrewd suggestions. “Keep it lively and personal. Always put flesh on the bones, Jim, and you can’t go wrong,” he would say. Then they would have a drink and Mr. Carver would talk about ice fishing. In two weeks he would be able to get away for a weekend, he said. It would be nearly midnight when they came out of the library, and Catherine, who had got bored waiting, would have gone to bed.
Going back to the Crescent Street room was like going home to his work, his happiness, his love, and that dream he had about four o’clock in the afternoon when his eyes grew tired from the bad light and he had to lie down on the bed, cupping his eyes with his palms and focussing them in the darkness behind the palms to rest and strengthen them.
In the dream he would give himself the time he needed before the Carvers heard of his attachment to Peggy. Sooner or later Catherine and her father would hear of it; but, given a little more time, he would be prepared. Given time, he and Peggy would be ready to emerge from the dark cellar world of illicit relationships and meet the Carvers. As yet they were not ready, and he could only pray his job wouldn’t be jeopardized by Catherine’s premature shocked discovery of his love for a girl like Peggy. But when the peculiar fury of Peggy’s defiance was exhausted they could emerge together.
In his scheming dream of breaking her resistance and remolding her, he failed to see that he was pitting himself against her; that he was justifying her instinctive resistance. He went on dreaming of her as she would be when she had yielded to him. He dreamt of the two of them meeting his friend Sol Bloom, the Jewish gynaecologist, whom he had called when he first came to town. Sol had been in New York. The short round-faced little doctor, with only a fringe of hair around his head, was one of the wisest and kindest men he knew. He could see Sol having a cocktail with him and Peggy. And Sol in his wisdom would say, Yes, she had those rare childlike qualities that the Chinese sages used to admire, she was spontaneous, acted only on impulse, never reflected, cared nothing for her circumstances, took no stock of the future. And after the cocktail he would take her to the theatre, to His Majesty’s if a play from New York were there, and between acts Catherine would be in the lobby, and, of course, there would be one shy diffident moment. But as a token of her own self-respect Catherine would invite them home for a drink and Mr. Carver would meet Peggy. Mr. Carver would be shrewd and worldly enough to make it plain he sought talent and energy in his employees, value for his money, and not the right to pick wives for them; the only vital question for him would be whether Peggy would do the newspaper and McAlpine credit, and of course he would soon succumb to her gentle charm. The first meeting with Angela Murdock would be more amusing; but even that meeting could come off easily with a warning word to Peggy. That expression of disapproval thagt had shone in Angela’s eyes when old Fielding had mentioned Peggy’s name was born no doubt of wounded pride. A spoiled woman like Angela had been unable to endure Peggy’s indifference; that had been the trouble. But if Peggy were friendly and enthusiastic Angela would like her. On a weekend he would take her to meet his father; yes, he could see them walking up the path to the house. And there at the open door would be his father in his best suit, restraining his natural eloquence as he tried to remember he was the dignified father of the columnist of the Montreal Sun. But her refinement, her simplicity and fresh intelligence would be too much for his exuberant father. “You have chosen a fine girl, Jim. She has poise and charm,” he would whisper enthusiastically. “Your mother would have liked her. Why don’t you get married here at home?” And that night of their marriage with her at last in the bed beside him: the incredible surprise of having her lying in the dark beside him, his hand on her breast, her neck, the curve in the small of her back…
His dream would be broken by the heavy beating of his heart. But he would go back to it to watch her turning to him, her lips parting, her head back and her eyes closed; and again the dream would break, always breaking like that before they entered the darkness and peace of their being together.
NINETEEN
With his clients big Wolgast had always made a joke about the fact that he was a Jew. Nothing was upset. It was very impor
tant that his relationship with the whole town should not be upset. None of his clients called him the “Jewish Lush” to make him something less than he was. Nor had French Canadian hostility to the Jews disturbed him. It only made him smile complacently. On St. Catherine East, the French Canadian shopkeepers and the restaurant owners and the tailors hated the Jews for encroaching eastward and for growing rich. But that kind of hostility was something you laughed about; everybody knew the French Canadians were hostile out of envy; it was a mark of respect. Amiable French Canadian sporting writers or a distinguished cartoonist like Gagnon came to his bar and joked about his race and theirs, and, besides, he had always had the cooperation of some French Canadian politicians when he needed to get his license renewed.
But no one who couldn’t go anywhere else had felt free to come into his bar just because he was a Jew. No one had ever shown that much contempt for him, he told himself – until today.
It was all clear to him. He was the one bartender in the whole Peel and St. Catherine neighbourhood that Peggy Sanderson had felt sure of, the only one who wouldn’t be able to feel insulted if she walked in with a dinge.
Rolling down his sleeves, he buttoned the cuffs, did up his shirt collar and took his coat from the hook and went back to the washroom to put on his tie. He had heard Peggy ask the Negro boy to walk her home. He took an address book from his pocket, got Henry Jackson’s phone number, and went to the phone and called him. He simply asked where Peggy lived; he wouldn’t offer any explanation. In the restaurant his partner, Doyle, was playing gin rummy with Tony Harman, the barber from along the street; and English Annie, the pretty fair girl with the bad teeth who was in love with Tony, sat there getting sore as usual when Tony lost.
“Take over for a while, will you, Derle?” Wolgast said. “Heh, you lug, where are you going?” Doyle protested. But Wolgast didn’t answer; he went out, and walked slowly up the hill on the way to Crescent Street; he walked with a slow solemn step, a big clumsy man in ill-fitting clothes who now had an extraordinary air of dignity.
The Loved and the Lost Page 16
