“Thanks.” But Bernice was suspicious: she would always be suspicious with this woman. This time, it was the fear of being dismissed, without notice. Perhaps it was because Estelle had remained too long in the apartment.
“Is Estelle liking it here?” she asked. “I hear she’s going out quite a bit, lately, and meeting some of our young men …”
“Well, I going up now, and rest these old bones, ma’am,” Bernice said, giving Mrs. Burrmann the sweet smile which she had practised to please her mistress. But hearing about her sister going out with “some of our young men” — well, this was nothing for Bernice to smile about. Mrs. Burrmann stood watching her, until she got to the stairs, and then she followed her, and caught up with her. Bernice stopped and looked down from a step higher, looked into the pain and the unhappiness of her eyes. And Mrs. Burrmann knew it; and said in a voice that was deep with sorrow, “Thanks, Bernice, for everything. You’ve been very good, really, to all of us — even though things haven’t always been easy for you. Thanks again, and have a good rest.” She removed her hand; and went back downstairs. Bernice was shaken: but more important, she did not believe a word of it. It was to her, like a greeting from a stranger, on a crowded subway train. She climbed the rest of the journey to her room; holding on to the bannister where there was a bannister; and where there was none, on to her knee, her left knee which gave her such trouble. When she opened the door, Estelle was writing at the table. Bernice imagined that she was writing on the polish of the table itself. Estelle saw her come in, and she folded the paper, and put it into her handbag. She was already dressed. Bernice went straight for the chair by the window. “Lord!” she said, massaging her knee, pretending it was paining her unbearably. She rolled down her stockings and continued rubbing, saying all the time, “Lord!”
Estelle was ready to go. She said nothing. She napped her handbag shut. She put on her coat (Bernice’s coat, really). She went through the door.
When the door was closed, Bernice said, “Lemme see what this one have to say …” and she opened the letter, to see Lonnie’s handwriting. Before she got involved in it, she watched for Estelle coming out of the house. Agatha was to pick her up, she remembered Estelle saying. But there was no car parked nearby. Estelle came out. She looked up towards Bernice. Bernice held her head out of sight. And she watched Estelle wagging and stepping high, as if she owned the Boulevard. She was really a beautiful woman. With Estelle gone, there was a great burden taken off her spirit; and Bernice found out that moment, for the first time, that she really was happy that Estelle could find some place to go; and that she had friends — other than Dots and Boysie. Bernice now set her mind to Lonnie’s letter, without interruption. Darling love, Bernice, honey, (it began) I missing you bad bad, in a certain fashion. You know what I mean. I am one man who have not start fooling all about the place the moment his woman left the island. I faithful as hell with you, even though you have not write much and say much in the way of how you miss me. But I want you to know this. You may be up in Canada for three years going into four years, but you is still in my heart as you was before you even think about pulling out for the outside world. The child living with me now. I mean Torrence. Your mother treated me worst than if I were a dog. But she is your mother, and I am not going to say nothing bad concerning her. However, something I have to tell you in regards to Mammy and Estelle, before she left Barbados. Estelle was spreading it all over the island that she is not coming back down here. She staying up there. I hear from a friend of a friend of yours who Estelle write to last week, that you are taking out papers for Estelle. I am only the father of your child. Estelle is your flesh and blood. Work scarce as anything down here. The poor people getting more poorer. I broke as hell, too. So I beseeching you, Bernice, that if you ever put your hand on an extra dollar bill, think of Lonnie, and send down one, because I do not know what I going to do. Roses are red and skies are blue and the sea is green and I love you. xxxx. They is kisses for you. Respectively yours, Lonnie, your No. 1.
Bernice went straight to the chesterfield and sat down. The things in the letter: about Mammy; about Estelle; about home; about her child, Terence, and about Lonnie himself. It was a good letter; she liked it, and she found herself liking Lonnie too. At least, he had begun to show some interest in Terence. She was hearing Lonnie’s voice, and the sweet words he had written at the bottom of her letter: Roses are red and skies are blue … and the four kisses! And she felt very lonely, with a great urge, a great desire for Lonnie, lying on top of her. She lay back on her back; and spread her legs as if it was Lonnie who had pulled them apart. And she imagined Lonnie on her, making love to her; and she began to pant and breathe heavily, in rhythm to the stirruping which she remembered so well; and she was feeling good, as if it was real and she was coming to the end of the race, with the tape in front of her eyes, and then she jumped up from the bed. “What sort o’ worthlessness is this? Me, Bernice, jerking-off ’pon myself? God, a shame, a shame …” and she went to the bathroom to draw a bath; and wash away the sin of loneliness. She had tried it before (in recent weeks, with Estelle around, not as often) by rubbing herself with her finger to stimulate an orgasm. But each time, the meaning of it frightened her; and she would take a hot bath. Before this bath was ready, she opened the manilla envelope Mrs. Burrmann had given her, and into her lap fell four crisp twenty-dollar bills, an old crumpled ten and a five. Her income had been increased by five dollars a month.
“You make me feel like a man again,” the man was telling Estelle. She was looking at the coloured beads, strung on cord, that were the curtains in the Penny Farthing coffee house, on Yorkville. Tension had crept into their friendship, though, because she resented being taken each time they went out, to the small hotel on Avenue Road, where they would rush through an hour of hectic love-making; and where he would rush her on through the lounge, past the desk clerk with the eyes of a spy. Worst of all the compromise in the transaction, was the look on the clerk’s face, and the look in the man’s face. And once, when she was struggling with the cigarette machine (although she had two packages in her handbag) while the man paid his cash and got his key, she thought she heard the clerk say, with a laugh in his voice, “She must be a damn good screw, eh, Sam?”
But he could think of no place to take her; and now that it was cold weather, it was very uncomfortable in the back of his car, although it was a large black Buick. They had tried the apartment of a lawyer friend of his, but one night, the lawyer friend came in too soon (Estelle was standing on her virtues that night) and caught them putting on their clothes. She felt humiliated; very compromised. The tension in their affair rose with the inconvenience of being alone when they wanted to be. Once, when lust got the better of them, and made them almost insane with desire and plotting, he took her to the Four Seasons, a motor hotel in the downtown part of the city. But the clerk at the desk assumed the moral and ethical responsibility of the entire city, and refused to accept the man’s cash. “Listen Mack,” the clerk said to Mr. Sam Burrmann, B.A., M.A. LLB (Toronto), “not in here. Take her somewhere else. This is a decent establishment.” (But Sam had tried “it” in that decent establishment twice before, with two different blondes.) The clerk had said this to Sam, who did not tell it to Estelle. But she knew anyhow. He went back to his Buick and they drove around the city, building up mileage and courage; and thinking of a place. He was conscious of his pride, and of his position; and in a strange way, was mindful of her pride. She was his woman: he had not yet begun to think of her as his whore. But he wanted her badly; and he ate his pride and burned his oil and gas, and decided on a house on Jarvis Street. In a window, Estelle saw BED AND BREAKFAST, written on a dirty piece of cardboard.
“You make me feel like a whore.” She was thinking of the women back home she had seen going into houses like this. The way she had thought herself so much above them; and what she herself called them — bitches! — and now?
“You’re not, really. You’re not …”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t feel like one.”
It took the whole twenty-six ounces of Canadian Club whiskey to take the evil taste out of both their mouths. Since that night, the distaste of the house kept them from wanting each other (although they continued to meet) for almost two weeks.
Tonight, however, she was happy. The simple elegance of this coffee house, with its blue-and-white table cloths, and its ordinary painted-over hard bottom chairs, appealed to her. Back in Barbados, only the poorest of the poor would sit on these chairs; and she herself would not sit on them; but in this coffee house, in this country, they were charming to her. The man she was with had just told her he loved her. He did not want her to go back to Barbados. And she was very happy that he said he wanted her: she was also a trifle embarrassed through conscience, because her own motives for giving him her gift of love, were to put him in a position to be exploited. She must not think of these things, though, she warned herself; because she had given him a gift. If he wanted, or felt he had to give her a gift in return (perhaps assuring himself of another taste of her generosity), then she need not feel badly about his motives, at all. And that was what she decided. And having decided, she could then begin to enjoy the atmosphere of the coffee house. The man said he did not like the atmosphere of this coffee house: the music was too commercial, he said. But he came nevertheless, because it was a place where he could hide. He could bring a woman here, and his morals, or his guilt, or whatever it was that made him feel uneasy with a woman, not his wife, all these little inconveniences of conscience could be lost here, because it was taking place in a coffee house, in the Village, “among artist-types and beatniks,” as he said, more than once. Before Estelle, when he needed love and relaxation from the professional crowd of Malloney’s and the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Bar, he would go alone to the Twenty-Two (before many advertising men heard about it) or to Seventy-Three Yorkville, where he would sit and sip and dream of getting into bed with the Spanish woman who helped to raise the price, the attendance, and the consumption of expresso coffee, by wearing a pair of panties under a meshed pair of black tights, so suffocatingly tight, that it was uncomfortable for Sam Burrmann to sit quietly. But in the Penny Farthing with Estelle, he was uncomfortable: the customers were mostly young, with beards and long hair, and with a smell of freedom which was really the odour of uncleanliness and laziness.
Her attention was drawn to a big beautiful black man who came in as if he owned the entire street. Estelle was so overpowered by his beauty and his strength which seeped through his expensively tailored suit, that she had to stare. And then a small white man, neat and willowy, prim and feminine, with a beard and a guitar in his hand, said to the black man, “Hi, baby!” Estelle had to smile (the man she was with was already becoming jealous of the big black man) and admit that “baby” was a funny way to address this black mountain of a man. But the black man merely said to his friend, “Shit, baby! how you doing?”
“Damn Americans!” her escort said. “Whole place is full of them.” Estelle refused to dispute this judgement. “These coffee houses’re so depressing nowadays,” he went on. “Before, you could come here and relax, meet decent people … but now, well, wherever you go in Yorkville these days, you see a lot o’ Europeans, Italians, Germans, Greeks, Americans …”
The small guitar player was giving them a song, in a foreign language. The man with Estelle had to lean over to be heard. “And you know what I heard the other day? All these coffee houses are cells, cells for one thing or the other. If it isn’t some kind of nationalism, it is smoking pot. Kids with long hair, kids wearing jeans, kids in bare feet … they’re spoiling everything.”
“You come here often?”
“Well, no … sometimes, after work … to relax.”
“Instead o’ going home, Sam?”
“Well, I don’t mean it that way, though it is … But why are we so serious? Let’s enjoy ourselves, eh? Would you like some more coffee?” A short young woman, dressed in black, wearing a white band in her long black hair, came to serve them. Estelle wondered why she had to wear so much black. Agatha had pointed out to her, as they were driving through the West End, that all the women on that street, young and old, dressed in black, were Italian immigrants. And Estelle had looked at them, and had liked them. Black seemed to go hand in hand with Italian immigrants. But this young thing, serving coffee, didn’t suit black; and black didn’t suit her. Black shoe and black stocking, to boot! Estelle observed.
“That girl’s mother is dead, Sam.”
“What’re you saying?”
“Look at her.”
“How did you know?”
“She is dressed in black, from head to foot.”
And Sam laughed. “You have a weird sense of humour, believe me.” He was still laughing (and he had held out his hand, and rested it on Estelle’s knee, under the table) when a black man holding a white woman round her waist, entered. The man was wearing a very small felt hat. Estelle noticed it was much smaller than his head. His clothes were neat; and he was walking with a subtle kind of bravado. When he took off his hat, she thought something was wrong with his head. It was shining. His hair was slicked back, straightened and pasted close to his scalp; (Bernice’s hair would have been like that, almost, had she not been interrupted by the footsteps that afternoon. She looked at Sam, and smiled. He was the one who had interrupted them. Only she knew: and Sam!) only the man’s shoes were shinier and blacker. The man left his woman sitting, and came up to Sam, as if he had grown up with him. He slapped Sam on his back.
“Sam, baby!” His arms were open, as if to embrace Sam; and all the time he was grinning. “You old motherfucker, you!” Sam didn’t know what to do. He had hardly looked at the man long enough to recognize him. It was a peculiarity of his, this inability to look into a black man’s eyes.
“I don’t think I know you, sir … ”
“Shit, baby! Jeffrey! Ain’t you remember me, Jeffrey? Me and him and a few other ofay cats who used to gang up on those Jewish rabbits round Spadina in the good old days …” (He was now telling it to Estelle.)
“Oh.” He remembered. He remembered Jeffrey being beaten by the policeman; he remembered Jeffrey’s mother; he remembered fifteen, twenty, thirty years of things he wished he had forgotten. He had refused to think of it because he still carried the guilt of it with him. Apparently, Jeffrey couldn’t (or didn’t) remember the cause of his being sent to jail. “Yes, yes!” But Sam was not very enthusiastic.
“The guys tell me you’s this big cat now in town, baby! Swinging with the cats of the law. Man, you must be wailing in bread. I see you got you a nice chick, here, baby!” He beckoned to his fiancée; she was coming to join them. A few couples close by were finding the conversation very interesting. But Sam was nervous. “Hey, Sue! come and meet my old crazy side-kick from the old days, baby. This cat is a lawyer; but me and him used to groove back in them days, stirring up a lot o’ shit with the Jews and the Polacks …”
“Look, I’m sorry, sir,” Sam said, rising. “We’re just leaving. I was having some coffee with this lady, a client of mine, since …”
“Crazy, baby! I sure glad as hell to lay my eyes on you, baby. Gimme your card, man. Me and you gotta get together like in the old days. Perhaps I may throw a case or two your way, eh, buddy?”
“I am sorry, sir, but I don’t happen to have a card on me, right at this moment.”
“That ain’t no problem, baby,” Jeffrey said. “Take mine, then.” And he slapped Sam playfully on his arm, and said, “Surprise yuh, ain’t I? Drop by some time, man.” The card was the size of a usual calling card, and all it had on it, printed, was: JEFFREY’S 9223720.
“Okay, okay,” Sam said. The waitress was coming with the coffee he had ordered; he was trying to hustle Estelle out. “Look, I gotta go, I gotta go. Give me a call — at the office, sometime.”
“Crazy, man!” Even after Sam and Estelle left, Jeffrey was still talking about him to his fia
ncée. “That cat! That sweet motherfucker been swinging since he was a kid. Only God knows how much coloured babies Sam has in this place. That cat … ”
The afternoon the letter came, Bernice wept. It was the same letter she had written home; and now it was returned to her, stamped: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Everyone in the village knew Mammy. Bernice gave only one meaning to this strange message, stamped in black, uneven ink (she made a mental note of the colour of the ink!) and bearing the terrible message. “Mammy unknown in Reid’s Village, where Mammy was born and spent most of her sixty-three years?” — except the three years spent in the Canal Zone, in Panama, helping the Americans to build the Canal.
She rushed upstairs to her room, to be alone, to express this tragedy, in tears. She flung open the door, and screamed, “Estelle! oh God, Mammy dead!” And when there was no answer, only the drum beat of the record, stuck in its groove on the player, did she realize that she had seen Estelle leave, earlier. Nobody was home. It was four o’clock. No house was more like a graveyard than this large tomb, this Saturday afternoon, in the middle of spring.
She looked at the envelope again. She saw the handwriting on it; she saw the Canadian postage stamps; she saw the stamp stamped on it, in the Toronto Post Office; the other stamp from the Barbados Post Office when the letter first arrived there; and the series of other stamps made both in Barbados and in Canada, sending the letter on its long last walk back to her. Looking across the street, amongst the colours of spring, she tried to search the curtains at the third floor window, for Brigitte. She could not see her. She did not see her in the yard where the children played. There were no children in the yard. Brigitte had stopped by, late in the morning, to ask her to warn Boysie not to call so often: her policeman friend was becoming suspicious and threatening. And Bernice remembered she had listened, and had promised to tell Dots, but that Brigitte urged her not to. “You not tell Dots. Just Boysie, to warn him.” And she had pinched Bernice, knowingly, and like a conspirator; and had left. Bernice sat by the window, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to find some logic to contradict this tragedy. But all she could think of was Mammy: in a small house in a village by the sea, and boarded up in many places with pieces of tin-shingles made of large butter pails from Australia. She thought of the sea which had claimed Pappy’s life. She thought of Estelle, and of Marina Boulevard: the waves of leaves, brown leaves, red leaves, brick-painted leaves of spring raged round the front yards of the houses opposite. She could see the leaves taken up by the wind, and sent like sprays all over the yards; and then settling themselves nervously into a heap round the tall scarecrow of the maple tree in front of Brigittes house. This was too much like the storm which claimed Pappy’s life, so she stopped thinking about the leaves, and thought of someone to call. Dots isn’t home, there isn’t no damn sense in calling that husband o’ hers, ’cause he stupid as hell … Estelle outta the house as usual … now, what about Agaffa? Agaffa, hell! … and Henry? … Henry just as useless as Boysie. There was no one to call. “Mammy dead, far away in Barbados, and there isn’t one blasted living soul in the whole o’ Toronto Canada, that I could call on for help and assistance?”
The Meeting Point Page 21
