During her life she had seemed many things to many people. As a girl lonely, shy, and reserved, but this had been because she had suffered so much sickness as a girl. In her early twenties gay, reckless, and to some almost desperate in her eagerness to live and enjoy. Then as a young wife fulfilled and quiet, with a sparkling sense of humor and a wonderful capacity for making friends. But now when people thought of Catherine – this I knew – they thought of her as tragic because of the condition of her heart. Though she looked no older than her age, they thought of her as old because they knew – at least her friends did – that her time was limited.
She was also an artist, and had become so first out of loneliness and now because art was her chief hold on a world she loved and saw slipping away. She had come late to painting and had much to learn. She believed – I knew this – that if she could live long enough she would leave behind her some pictures the world would value. This Catherine was ambitious. This Catherine was also strangely solitary in her core and – I dare say this now – there were days when she seemed totally to exclude me because of this communion she had established with color and form. Yes, she was also ruthless. All artists are.
And finally there was the Catherine which had never died, the little girl who came out in her wistful smile, the little girl who had been alone and longed to be appreciated. Alone, and as a little girl knowing it, with her fate.
Her fate was that rheumatic heart of hers. Her strength, her essence, her mystery in which occasionally I had almost drowned – this I can only call her spirit, and I don’t use the word in a sentimental sense. Far from it. For to me this has become the ultimate reality, so much so that I think of this story not as one conditioned by character as the dramatists understand it, but by the spirit. A conflict, if you like, between the spirit and the human condition.
Some people have within themselves a room so small that only a minuscule amount of the mysterious thing we call the spirit can find a home in them. Others have so much that what the world calls their characters explodes from the pressure. I think of it as a force. I have recognized – and I am no mystic – an immense amount of this spiritual force in people whose characters, judged by the things they do, are bad. In others who are blameless I have found hardly any. Probably I will never be able to know what its real nature is; all I do know is that I know it is there. Call it the Life-Force if you prefer the modern term; call it anything you like. But whatever it is, this thing refuses to be bounded, circumscribed or even judged. It creates, it destroys, it re-creates. Without it there can be no life; with much of it no easy life. It seems to me the sole force which equals the merciless fate which binds a human being to his mortality.
Catherine had more of this mysterious thing than anyone I ever knew with one exception, and the exception was Jerome Martell. Is this another way of saying that she was not easy to live with? Or is it another way of saying that it was so impossible for me to imagine myself living without her that – without realizing I did so – I sometimes dreaded her because of my dependence on her?
Yet I loved her. She was my rock, she was my salvation, but I also loved her for herself. When she moved like a queen I was proud. When she smiled like a little girl I melted.
Have I described Catherine? I don’t think so. Probably I have only described myself.
They called me to supper and I was so preoccupied and silent that Sally said, “What is this, a funeral?” and took over the conversation, talking about a debate she planned to attend at the Union that night when all along she knew that I knew she intended spending the evening with Alan Royce if he called her up and asked her. I saw Catherine’s eyes twinkling, then contemplating me without twinkling, and I knew she had sensed I was disturbed. That was another reason why she was at times difficult to live with: she was so empathetic she could almost read my mind, and Sally’s mind, just as years ago she had been able to read Jerome’s.
Supper ended, and while Sally stacked the dishes to be cleaned in the morning by the woman who came in, Catherine and I took our coffee to chairs on either side of the hearth. I looked into the flames and was aware of her probing silence.
Then I heard her say: “Something is worrying you, George.”
“Is my face so obvious?”
She smiled again: “When you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
“My face is a Rorschach test. It says more about whoever looks at it than it says about me. And speaking of my face, it’s beginning to worry me. Inside the year they’ll be starting television in this country and my face on television – my voice may sound like Roosevelt’s, but my face!”
Again that smile of hers: “All right, dear.”
“All right what?”
“What do you think the Minister will want to talk to you about when you go to see him?”
“I haven’t the slightest clue, and I don’t think it means a damned thing. All they’re doing is going through the motions, even the Minister, and he’s the best of the lot.”
I looked across at her small, beautifully formed figure, at her heart-shaped face under that dark hair, at the strange serenity that came to her so often these days and had – I refused to admit it but I can admit it now – the odd effect of excluding me, as though she had gone to some place to which I would eventually arrive and knew all about it, while I did not. And yet she was happy tonight. She was at ease. Her health had been good all that winter, and winter had become her difficult time. She began talking about the spring and the garden in our country place, and mentioned that the seed catalogues should have arrived long ago. She planned and re-planned the gardens with an efficiency which would have exasperated me if I had not enjoyed gardening. Everything she did she tried to do perfectly, and if there were some things she wanted to do and lacked the strength to do herself, she still planned that they be done perfectly and I carried out her orders.
Sally returned dressed to go out with a different scarf over her yellow hair, and with an expression unwontedly shy she glanced at her mother.
“Is it all right if I use your phone?”
When she left, Catherine twinkled: “I wonder why she bothered asking? She never does.”
A few minutes later Sally reappeared looking like a secretive but very pleased kitten.
“I trust everyone here will be sleeping peacefully when I come home?” she said.
“Will you be late?” Catherine said, her head lifting over her shoulder.
“I hope so,” Sally said, and bolted.
Now Catherine and I were alone at last and how good it might have been. But I knew from her manner, if not from her expression, that she was aware that I had not told her the truth when I said I was not worried. She got up and put a piano concert on the phonograph and we listened without speaking. When it ended I took the record off the machine and sat down again.
“I suppose Sally has gone out with Alan Royce again?” Catherine said.
“I suppose so. Do you like him?”
“I think they may be good for one another.”
“Can you get used to it?”
Again she twinkled: “The hardest thing to get used to is Sally’s idea that I’m so old I’ve forgotten how she feels. I used to think the same of my own mother, remember.”
She got up and searched the record shelves and I felt desire as I watched the curve of her back, the lovely line of her shoulders, the full swell of her hips as she bent. Always, when I saw Catherine like this these days, these sensual images were touched with poignancy and I remembered and loved even better the image of her in a hospital bed five days after her second embolism when she had suddenly recovered from the paralysis.
“Look!” she had cried. “Both hands work today. Watch me tie this ribbon in my hair.”
Like a proud little girl she had tied the ribbon while I watched.
And then she had said: “It’s nice to know I’m not going to be a cripple. Don’t I keep on fooling them?”
And this expression had reminded me
of still another I had seen in her childhood after her first attack of rheumatic fever when I had come to visit her.
“Here I am again!” her little girl’s face had seemed to say. “Here I am again in spite of everything, and please nobody mind for I hated being sick.”
She came back to her chair and the music began playing and it was Louis Armstrong. This quiet, stately woman, this mysterious combination of so many characteristics, also loved New Orleans jazz, and as Louis’s bell-like trumpet rang into the room I thought that if her heart had been normal this would have been the music she would have preferred above all others, the kind which best expressed her.
I got up and held out my hands to her and she rose as I tugged and melted against me, and then I asked to see her new picture. I followed her into the bedroom where she painted and there it was on her easel, another of her joyous outbursts of color and form.
She had said to me once: “People with nothing to worry about can afford to paint the tragic pictures. I’m like the colored people. I’d rather be gay.”
And still I thought: How can I bring up the subject of Jerome? She thinks he’s dead. She has grown accustomed to that fact. She has even stopped dreaming about him. He will drain her vitality. He will bring up all that ocean out of the past and what will it do to us? I had no ordinary vulgar fears of Jerome taking her away from me. The truth was I did not know exactly what I feared. Perhaps myself? Perhaps her? Perhaps the knowledge of what life had done to us all? Perhaps having to face that knowledge again when all I wanted was peace and quiet?
“Catherine –” I began, and would have forced myself to tell her. And she, sensing that this was important, turned to me calmly. But at that instant the phone rang stabbing into the room, and as she was nearest she picked it up, spoke and then handed it over to me.
“Yes?” I said into the instrument.
Then I heard a voice I had not heard in years, a colorless voice deceptively humble.
“This is Harry Blackwell, George.”
I cursed myself for not having called Harry from the university, for I should have realized, after Jerome had told me he had been speaking to him, that the chances were good that he would want to get in touch with me.
“He’s back!” Harry cried in the voice of a man with an obsession.
“I know. He’s talked to me, too.”
Harry must be bald now, I thought. I had seen him only once in the last dozen years, and then only in passing, and the years had not been kind to him. Nothing had ever been kind to Harry. And yet I knew that since the war this nonentity had become a prosperous business man, and was probably worth several hundred thousand dollars.
“I’ve got ulcers,” Harry said, “and when he called me we were in the middle of inventories and they were bad. I mean the ulcers, not the inventories. And the gas pains got so bad I couldn’t think, and anyhow I thought he was dead. So I just answered a lot of questions he asked and let him go and then I took a pill and I still feel pretty bad. I never got to ask him where he’s staying and that’s why I’m calling you, George, for I guess you know. He asked about you and I told him about this college job you have. I’ve followed your career with genuine interest, George. Can I see you tonight?”
“I’m sorry. Tonight is impossible.”
“When can I?”
“Is it really necessary?”
After a short silence Harry said: “I always liked you, George.”
“I always liked you, Harry.”
“I’m going to do something this time. I know I’m not important like you, but I’m not a push-over any more, not like I used to be. Now it’s going to be different.”
The undertones in his voice made me frightened. Frightened of the unknown, for clearly I knew nothing important about this little man I remembered as an unemployed radio mechanic who now owned a thriving business just off St. Catherine Street.
I glanced sideways at Catherine but from her face I could tell nothing. Presumably she knew this was not a usual call, but in my work I met a lot of men she never saw, and it was reasonable to suppose that some of them were called Harry. All the same I wished she were not in the room.
“There’s the police,” Harry said, as though that settled everything.
“They know about him anyway. He saw them in Vancouver.”
“Where is he staying?”
“Look Harry – all that business went over the dam years ago. Don’t you think it would be better to leave it that way?”
“No, I don’t. And I’m not going to. Where is he, George?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you’re lying.”
“Okay,” I said.
Catherine rose and went out of the room, and as soon as she had gone I went over to the door, the telephone in my hand on the end of its long extension wire, and closed it.
“There’s Joan,” Harry said in that obsessed voice.
My memory for names was never good and it let me down.
“Joan,” he repeated. “My daughter, George, no matter what you may think.”
“I never thought otherwise.”
I had though.
“She’s Norah’s image, and it’s just like having Norah in the house having her here. She’s in the best girls’ school in the country, George, and soon she’ll be going to college, and she’s going to have a good and decent life.”
“That’s fine, Harry.”
“She’s going to have a good and decent life, and nobody’s going to bring up all that – that dirt.”
I breathed heavily. Was I getting old, or was I simply exhausted by crises and emotions?
“Harry, listen to me just for a minute, will you? What good will it do going to the police or starting anything? I suppose you can guess that his return has churned me up too. But there’s nothing I can do or want to do. He’s been in the camps, Harry. He’s been worse than dead for years. Whatever he did in the past, my God, he’s paid for it.”
There was a short silence.
Then Harry said: “He’s alive, and Norah’s dead.”
The implacable hatred in Harry Blackwell’s voice frightened me all the more because Harry, as I remembered him, had been such a gentle, mild and ineffectual little man. I looked at Catherine’s painting and what it represented was the exact opposite of this thing I heard in Harry Blackwell’s voice.
“Whatever else he may have come home for,” I said, “I’m sure it was not to make trouble for anyone. He’s a tired, beaten man. Probably he’s come home like a lost dog to his basket. You can be sure he’s bitterly sorry for any harm he may have done.”
Harry Blackwell answered as a Jew might answer a man who informed him that Hitler was sorry.
“Do you think a man like him can come back and say he’s sorry and that makes it all right? Do you think it’s going to be that easy?”
I shrugged and waited. He went on slowly and very deliberately. “Joan doesn’t even know he exists. His name has never been mentioned in her presence. What she knows about her mother is just what I’ve told her. I’ve told her that her mother was a lovely little lady who died when she was very young. I’ve told her Norah was wonderful.” His flat voice went hard. “And so she was before he came along and corrupted her, and made a whore out of her, and took her away, and left her like she was a whore.”
“He didn’t, Harry. He didn’t do it like that!”
“Don’t talk to me about what he did or didn’t do. Joan is her image. Joan is a pure and innocent little girl and she doesn’t know about that dirt.”
I thought this remark gave me an opportunity. “Why should she know now? If you ignore him, she will never know him.”
“His name is going to be in the papers.”
“What if it is?”
“She’ll hear about it.”
“I doubt it. She’s a schoolgirl, and I doubt if she will.”
“You don’t know how bad and cruel some people are, George. When the talk starts, she’ll hear. She’ll
be asked questions about this man they’ll all be talking about. Some kind friend will give her the idea.”
I had nothing to say to this, for I realized that he was quite possibly right.
“All I want is for you to tell me where he’s staying,” Harry said.
“I’ve told you already I don’t know that.” God, but I was tired of talking to Harry Blackwell. “But I’ll tell you the best I can do. He’s going to ring me in the morning and quite possibly he’s going to tell me he’s leaving town for the States. I’ll let –”
“Don’t give me that, George. Him go to the States! The Americans are smart. Do you think they’d let a man with his record into their country?”
“Anyway, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Just so long as you do,” he said, and the tone and words were a threat.
I hung up wondering what kind of image this deprived mollusc in the Great Barrier Reef of Montreal had formed of himself in the years when he had surprised himself by becoming a successful business man. But this was no question I could answer. I had little difficulty understanding the mentalities of famous politicians, but the minds of the individual common men they served and pretended to worship I understood no better than they did themselves.
CHAPTER V
Coming back from the kitchen with a drink in my hand – and this was tell-tale because I almost never drank after dinner – I sat opposite Catherine and saw the flutter in her carotid artery and marvelled how any human being could endure living with such extra-sensory perceptions as she had always had. No wonder Jerome had exploded against her. No wonder he had dreaded this capacity of hers virtually to read his mind. Had I possessed his violent vitality I would have dreaded it myself.
“That was Harry Blackwell,” I said. And I added grimly: “You will recall the name.”
The heart-shaped face turned to mine, gray eyes wide, and I swallowed half the whisky at a gulp.
“I was going to tell you this anyway,” I said. “It isn’t easy.” Still her lips and eyes were open. “Catherine dear” – I forced out the words – “there’s no easy way to say it. Jerome’s alive. He’s just come back to Montreal.”
Watch that Ends the Night Page 6
