I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  “But you weren’t here,” she said.

  The phone went.

  “Hullo, Sonia. Yes, he looks fine—”

  This time she was on the phone for over half an hour. When she came back she said, “That was Sonia. I’ll be going with her to Toronto for a wedding. Then we’ll come back through Montreal. I’ll be away about five days. Why don’t you move in here instead of staying at the hotel? Why spend all that money just to sleep? You have everything you want. And it’s quiet. Here are the keys.”

  That’s how I came to be living in a senior citizen place in Ottawa. I was thirty-eight. Everyone else was over sixty-five. Most were in their seventies and eighties.

  Next morning I rang up Harvey Reinhardt.

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Let’s have breakfast. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. OK?”

  “That’ll be eleven thirty.”

  “Yeh. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to Nate’s and have breakfast. OK?”

  “OK,” I said.

  Harvey Reinhardt is the only one left in Ottawa from the old Lower Town gang. Just before eleven thirty I went down to wait outside the front glass doors. Mr. Tessier was also standing there, his shirt sleeves rolled up.

  “It’s going to be a hot day,” Mr. Tessier said. “It’s almost eighty now.”

  We looked at the small park opposite, at the still trees, the grass. It was very quiet.

  “I played in this park when I was a kid,” I said.

  “When I was a kid,” Mr. Tessier said, “it was a cemetery. When they widened the road they dug up skeletons.”

  Harvey Reinhardt drove up in a large olive-green car sending a wake of dust behind him.

  “When did you get in?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “You look the same,” he said.

  So did he. His straight black hair had thinned. But the stockiness, the grin, were the same.

  “How long is it since you were here?”

  “Five years,” I said.

  “Before we go to Nate’s,” he said, “I want to stop for a minute in Murray Street.”

  He drove by Anglesea Square—where Harvey and I used to play touch rugby—by the Bishop’s Palace, Brebeuf School, and into Murray Street. One side of the street had all the houses knocked down. The other side still had the houses I knew when we both lived here. But the doors and windows were boarded up. Sparrows flew in and out from the roofs. Harvey’s old house had become a store with a plate-glass window and REINHARDT FOODS painted on it.

  “Are you still in the butcher business?”

  “No,” he said. “I let my brother Albie have it. I set it up for him. He pays me two hundred dollars a week. I realized early on that there was more money to be made out of the by-products than in meat. For a while I made smoked meat, salami, hot dogs—then I got bored with it. I’m in hides. I’ll take you out there later.”

  And he grinned.

  “I’m the biggest hide man in eastern Canada.”

  I followed Harvey into Reinhardt Foods. The room was arranged as a supermarket selling only meat and poultry. The brother was not around so Harvey took me into the back. There was a room with carcasses hanging on hooks. Another room had meat in large vats soaking in brine. Sawdust on the floor. But the only activity was coming from another room. Beside thick wooden tables five men were energetically hacking away at hunks of meat. Separating the meat from the bone. They didn’t look at us all the time we were there. They just went on attacking the meat.

  Back in the supermarket Harvey’s brother appeared.

  “When did you get back?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Staying at the Château?”

  “No, in a senior citizen place.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “It’s where my mother lives. But she’s gone for a few days to Toronto.”

  He gave Harvey a cheque. As we were going out he said, very proudly, to me, “We supply the prime minister with food. We’ve got two smoked turkeys in the back. You know the address on Sussex Drive? Go and take a look.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  From there we went into Nate’s on Rideau Street. It was much cooler inside than in the street. Harvey ordered large plates full of smoked meat, chips, pickles, and rye bread.

  “Not bad, uh?” Harvey said, eating a forkful of smoked meat.

  “Delicious,” I said.

  “They get it from us,” he said. “I never thought you would be a writer. Christ, I thought Gunner would be a writer—not you.”

  “How is Gunner?”

  “He’s a professor at some university. He comes back every winter and we go skiing. We still go to Camp Fortune, Fairy Lake, Ironsides—”

  And I remembered the last time I went with them. But that was more than twenty years ago.

  “I want my son Henry to go to university,” Harvey said. “I told him he could learn about literature, art, science, philosophy, economics. But he wants to be a butcher. He likes it all. The blood, the killing, the whole lot. It must be in the blood.”

  He brought out two thick cigars, gave me one. And we had second cups of coffee, smoking the cigars in the air-conditioned room. A large blown-up photograph of Trudeau was on the wall opposite.

  “I’m still a socialist,” Harvey said. “But you can’t be a socialist in a capitalist economy.”

  He carefully took out a large wad of bills from his back pocket, paid for our breakfast, then put the money in the back pocket and buttoned it down.

  I felt the sticky summer heat as soon as we went out.

  “How long are you here for this time?” Harvey asked.

  “Just a couple more days.”

  “Next time you’re here,” he said, “I’ll take you out to see my plant. It’s in the country. I built it all myself—the machinery—the conveyor belts—the whole process.”

  We got back into his car.

  “The government health inspector is after me,” he said mischievously. And grinned. “I’m a polluter.”

  I like Harvey. I like his style.

  He drove slowly through the streets of Lower Town. “Before,” he said, “the small park, the playground, the streets and houses—all fitted together. Now, they knocked down a lot of the wooden houses—left gaps—and put up these high-rises. Suddenly the park is too small. The playground is dwarfed. Nothing seems to fit.”

  From Lower Town he drove over the Minto bridges to Rockcliffe and stopped at the lookout. We got out. It was warm and silent. The trees. The grass slopes. A heat haze over the river. Everything here looked so right and in its place.

  “I’ve got a problem,” Harvey said. “My daughter Clare won’t eat. She’s a sweet affectionate girl. But if you ask her to eat something—she refuses. If you insist, she gets angry, loses her temper. I don’t know how she keeps going. To get her to eat a cracker or a small piece of cheese we have to go through a whole performance—talking and coaxing. And when she finally does have a spoonful of something, I have to behave as if I’ve just won first prize in a sweepstake . . . We’ve been butchers for three generations. I love food. And what she’s doing is like a personal insult. She told me that she thinks life is pointless. I can understand someone in their thirties or forties or fifties saying that. But a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “When my sister Mona was growing up,” I said, “she didn’t feel like eating either. She kept to her room. She would go and close the door and stay there. Then we tried to get her to come outside. We had this dog kennel in our backyard. And she used to go in that. My mother would leave out some food for her. In front of the kennel. But she didn’t touch it. This went on for weeks. Until my mother put a toy blackbird in the grass by the food. Mona began to show some interest in this bird. And from that day
she got better. It took a little while, but she began to eat . . . I miss red-winged blackbirds. I don’t see them in England.”

  “Don’t they have blackbirds there?” Harvey asked.

  “They have lots,” I said, “but I haven’t seen any with red on their wings.”

  We drove for a while in silence. Then Harvey said, “We ought to spend a few days together. I’ll tell you the story of my life. And you can write it. It will be a best seller. We can go fifty-fifty on it. I’ll show this society up for what it really is. I can tell you things. Christ, did you know we were the poorest family in the street? We burned the furniture one winter to keep warm. When the electricity was cut my grandfather got some tallow and made candles, big candles, and we did our homework by this light. Did you know about that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And when I started going to high school they gave three things free at the cafeteria: Heinz ketchup, hot water, soda crackers. This combined together made a delicious soup. This was my daily lunch. I’ll tell you things that go on in business that you won’t believe. Everyone bullshits. This is the best. That is the best. It’s all bullshit. If you want to get on you either have to screw somebody or charm somebody . . . When the kids were small I advertised for a nanny in England. She gave me the baloney about being an Oxford grad. She came over. She had beautiful manners. She had character. But no money. What’s the good of having good manners, talking nicely, if you’ve got nothing to eat? Christ,” Harvey said, “why live now in England? That country is on the skids. The last good time they had there was during the war.”

  “I’m thinking of coming back here,” I said.

  We were now back outside the senior citizen building. The heat haze had gone with the afternoon and it felt cooler. Small, pink clouds were in a clear blue sky.

  “My mother believed,” Harvey said, “that there had to be rich people so the poor could live off them. Let me know when you’re next in town. Give me a ring. I’ll come and get you, show you the plant, and tell you about my life.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I left Harvey and went into Champagne Barn. It was like going into a quiet residential hotel. I decided to walk up the two flights of stairs to my mother’s flat. The carpets in the hall. The copies of the Citizen, the Journal, Le Droit outside the numbered doors. Between the buildings there was a connecting passage with the walls all glass where some men sat in their shirt-sleeves and played cards. Above their heads, on the wall, were large posters of Betty Grable in a tight sweater and red lips, and another poster, of Ann Sheridan.

  A woman went by and said, “Is that all you’ve got to do, play games?”

  Next morning I was sitting by the window, looking at the park and thinking (“This is what I miss in England—trees. Living, as we do, by the sea and all that stone. It’s as if something is missing in the diet. The lack of trees. When I’m with trees I feel better.”) when a police car with its flashing light drove up, followed by an ambulance. Men went into the building and came out carrying a woman on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face. She looked very grey. She still had her hair in curlers.

  Then they drove away.

  I went downstairs. I went over to Mr. Tessier.

  “I was just talking to her,” he said. “About an hour ago. We were watching them pull down that house. And I said—it sure don’t take them long to pull down a house.”

  “Have they taken her to hospital?”

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  I went to my mother’s flat and made myself a cup of coffee. There were the reminders of the past on the walls and on top of the dresser. I looked through a drawer, and found my logbook from the Air Force. And a pile of unused cards. There were Get Well cards, Deepest Sympathy cards, Happy Birthday cards, Happy Anniversary cards, Speedy Recovery. Several said Congratulations on your Success.

  Next morning my mother appeared just after six.

  “Look what I brought you,” she said. And excitedly took out pieces of wedding cake and assorted pastry from the reception, as well as salami, smoked meat, smoked salmon, hot dogs, bagel.

  “I know you like these things,” she said. “And what you get in Montreal tastes better than here. Now what would you like me to make you for breakfast. Some salami with a couple of eggs?”

  “Just coffee,” I said.

  “What’s wrong. Don’t you like this food any more?”

  “I do,” I said. “But I don’t want it now.”

  After the coffee I thought I would go out. It was my last day here. And Mother had started to make cookies for me to take back to England. She’s happiest when she’s cooking. Sometimes I think the only way she can reach you is through food.

  I put on my light summer trousers, a sport shirt, and my favourite light shoes so well worn that the leather was split on top in several places.

  “You can’t go out like that,” my mother said. “You’ve been on television. You’ve had your picture in the paper. Suppose someone sees you?”

  Outside it was like walking in a hothouse. It had just gone seven. I walked by Anglesea Square. The row of poplars was still. But now and then their leaves caught a passing breeze. York and Clarence had all the houses bulldozed to the ground. And all that remained standing were the trees. And a signpost saying Clarence Street. Another said York.

  On St. Patrick, Percy the Barber was closed. The door boarded up. But from a window I could see the layers of the years on the walls. Haircuts ten cents . . . minnows for sale . . . Ken Maynard at the Français . . . pictures of King Clancy . . . Albert “Battleship” Leduc . . . Howie Morenz . . .

  By the river it was quiet. The water hardly moving. The sun was coming through a haze. Trees. White bridges. A silver church steeple on the opposite shore. It was like an Impressionist painting.

  Then in Murray Street. The wooden houses, with the wooden verandas, only on one side. As I came near Reinhardt Foods I began to hear the hacking. Then I saw the men. Their window was open. They were the same five men I saw before. By the thick wooden tables . . . with the knives . . . the choppers . . . attacking the meat from the bone. Hack, hack, hack. While the birds sang. The black squirrels moved quickly and stopped on the grass. And now and again a breeze set the small leaves of the poplars moving. Hack, hack, hack . . . Hack, hack, hack . . .

  I would carry that sound with me long after I left.

  BECAUSE OF THE WAR

  I left canada in 1949 and went to England because of the eighteen months I lived there during the war. I met my wife because of the war. She was evacuated to Cornwall from London. She also had a weakness for displaced Europeans who had left their country. And I am European—one generation removed. For almost twenty-seven years we were happily married, raised a family, then she became ill and died.

  Soon after that the writing stopped. I’d go out in the morning to get the Times, do shopping, cook something to eat. Then go for long walks. Or I would sit in the front room, look out of the window, and listen to the wind, the clock, the gulls. The evenings were the most difficult.

  After seven months I realized I couldn’t go on like this. So I came back to Canada, to Toronto. A city I had never lived in before. I came mid-February (two months before a new book was to be published . . . it was the last thing I read to her in manuscript). I like Canadian winters. But after two weeks in Toronto I didn’t want to go out.

  I would only leave this room to walk to the corner store and buy two packs of cigarillos. And mail my letters. Then I would go to Ziggy’s supermarket. The neat piles of fruit and vegetables. Such lovely colours. And in sizes I wasn’t used to. The cheeses from all over. The different bread, bagel, salami, hot dogs—what abundance. Equipped with this I stayed inside, cooked, listened to the radio, made cups of coffee, smoked the cigarillos, and wrote letters to England, Holland, and Switzerland. I like a foreign city. But there was something here that ma
de me uneasy every time I went out.

  My publisher had got me this apartment. A large bare room on the seventh floor in the centre of Toronto. It looked shabby from the outside. But one wall was all glass. I watched passenger jets, high-rise office buildings, clusters of bare trees, and some magnificent sunsets. It was even more impressive at night. The lights inside the glass buildings were left on. They made the city look wealthy, full of glitter, like tall passenger liners anchored close together in the dark.

  On my first day I went to a bank on Bloor Street to open an account. A small grey-haired woman with glasses came to the counter. “What is your job?”

  I told her.

  She lowered her head and mumbled.

  “Unemployed?”

  “No.”

  As she wrote my name, address, and other particulars, I could see she didn’t believe I was in work. I wondered why. I had on a new winter coat. I was wearing a tie, a clean shirt, a dark suit. I had good shoes.

  I walked to the Eaton Centre. From the outside it reminded me of Kew Gardens—one greenhouse above another. And seeing people moving sideways on the escalators—like something from “Things to Come.”

  I had come to get a telephone. And when I came out with the telephone I was on a frozen side street. I didn’t know where north was. So I asked a woman in a fur coat.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she shouted angrily, waving her hand. “Go away, go away—just walk along—”

  I did walk along. The panhandlers kept asking, “Can you spare a quarter?” “Any change, sir?” Then told me to have a good day or else to take care. The cold wind blew loose newspapers down Yonge Street. It looked shabby and raw.

  But inside it was different.

  I’d come in from the cold to this well-heated building. Though the room was warm the air was dry. The toothbrush I left wet at night was like chalk next morning. And when I left out a piece of sliced bread . . . In the morning I woke to a high-pitched sound. It was the dry bread drying even more.

  In those first weeks I went for walks. And discovered a large Chinese section, a Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Greek . . . with their restaurants, bakeries, butchers, bookstores, and banks.