Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  One sunny afternoon last August, when she was taking a streetcar down College Street, before John got sick and went to the hospital without telling her where he was, she’d seen him driving his motorcycle, shining black and chrome. He came up beside the streetcar at a red light, and she didn’t wave or anything but she had a good look at him. His handsomeness, his jaw, the shape of his head, his taut, muscular arms, all of this stung her. He was self-contained; she had no idea what he was thinking. The light changed and he sped away.

  She felt an icy need for him in her blood. She thought about him all the time, if you could call it “thinking.” He shook her so deeply she was almost afraid of him, but he made her feel very beautiful.

  She didn’t pretend to agree with what she called “John’s politics,” which she understood to be as abstract — or as sensual, really — as those of her own father, who was a Liberal even in the way he had a Scotch and soda before dinner. She thought that men need their politics because they need to believe they’re part of a greater good. She was aware, of course, that John entertained ideas about communism and revolution, and she thought of it as an intellectual hobby, even an affectation, as if he’d taken up chess or a foreign language. At least he didn’t wear a beret. It was only in relation to John’s “politics” that Suzanne would feel friendliness for him, a compassionate, slightly domestic forgiveness, rather than enthrallment.

  In Suzanne’s country, money and goodness seemed naturally to coexist. The Canada she knew could easily afford to entertain criticism without feeling any compulsion to make uncomfortable changes. She’d read some Marx and he seemed irrelevant, historical; her mind wandered. Suzanne was preoccupied by John Norfield because she didn’t understand him and could never know him. He could never give her enough.

  John disappeared in January. Suzanne waited a week. She didn’t call Emmett, she didn’t want anyone to know that he’d really left her this time. He’d been very distant lately, watchful and unhappy, and now she knew in her gut that she had lost him. She gave it seven days, and then went to his apartment. She knocked at his door, but she already knew he was gone.

  She had her own key and let herself in. The place was silent. From the street came the sound of cars rolling over fresh snow. The windows were patched-in paisleys of frost, and a bit of condensation pooled on the wooden windowsills, but otherwise the place was spotless — except for a dirty coffee cup sitting on the kitchen table; it wasn’t like him to leave something like that, he was always so meticulous. She went into the bedroom, the sheets pulled army-tight, and looked on the bedside table. She remembered distinctly that she had unclipped her gold necklace and left it on the pretty saucer he kept there, a porcelain saucer painted with gold pheasants —the necklace was gone, he must have taken it.

  She opened his closet door. His clothes were in his closet, his woollen socks and laundered shirts were folded in his drawers, everything in its place. The only thing he’d taken was her necklace.

  She lay down on his bed, not bothering to remove her shoes. The room had no odour, as if he’d taken that too. It was cold, but she slept anyway. When she awoke, it was dark, and the phone was ringing.

  Chapter Five

  The phone was ringing. Suzanne stumbled to answer it. Surely it would be John. She had never been fully denied anything before and vaguely doubted that such a thing could ever occur. Then John’s voice.

  “Where are you?” she asked him.

  “Listen. You have to leave.”

  “Why? Where are you?” she asked again.

  “Have you got any money?”

  She looked around for her purse. “I think so.”

  “Get a taxi. Get out of there.”

  “I came to find you.”

  She thought she heard his sadness then; she thought she heard his yearning to see her, though he said not a word. The phone clicked several times; she said, “Hello?”

  Then he said, “Suzanne.”

  He spoke so tenderly, she answered, “What’s wrong?” But he had hung up. She put down the receiver and looked behind her. Someone was with her in the apartment.

  The kitchen was dark. Her purse was in there along with the key to John’s apartment, on the kitchen table, beside John’s coffee cup. She needed her wallet, she needed money to get a cab. The apartment prickled with silence and electric light coming through the window from the streetlamps. She heard a shoe move. Momentum, confusion, fear brought her to the doorway to the kitchen. She saw someone standing in the dark. She said, unreasonably, “John?” The dark figure moved slightly. Suzanne moaned. She stumbled to the door, fumbled with the lock, and ran out to the street.

  There wasn’t much snow but sheets of ice on the sidewalks and she’d left her coat behind. All was frozen, brittle and still, the street empty, except for a police car idling across the street. The police car did a fast U-turn on the road and rolled to a stop beside her, its tires crunching over the ice. A policeman got out and called her by name. “Miss McCallum.” He gestured, Get in.

  She sat in the passenger seat. The policeman was a balding man in his fifties, someone’s father. He didn’t say anything and didn’t look at her. The only kind gesture the man made to Suzanne was to turn up the heat in his car. She had been living at her parents’ house in Forest Hill since finishing her BA, and when she began to give the policeman her address he cut her off and said, “I know.”

  She rode in stunned silence for a moment, then asked, “How?”

  He had an impassive face, but still he looked at her quickly, as if to see if she was serious. In what sounded like a more fatherly tone, he asked, “What do you think you’re doing, hanging around with those kind of people?”

  She said nothing more then. She guessed that the policeman meant John, and John’s “politics,” and she didn’t want to make anything worse for him because she didn’t understand what was going on. The policeman had been watching the building. She thought it might be safe to tell him one thing. “There was a man in my friend’s apartment.”

  The policeman didn’t respond.

  The car pulled up before the house in Forest Hill and sat idling while she rang the bell; she didn’t have her key. She pounded on the door. Her mother, with her impressive coiffure, her satin dressing gown, opened, and said, “What on earth,” looking from her daughter and out to the police car, which was pulling quickly away, its brake lights already bobbing where the car lurched over the culvert separating the McCallum driveway from the road.

  Suzanne woke up in her girlhood bedroom in her parents’ house, feeling dispossessed. She had refused to say much of anything to her outraged mother last night but had come upstairs to bed.

  Now she went down and joined her parents at breakfast. Mama would not look at her, and her father greeted her with mild admonishment in his eyes. Mama was rigid, nibbling dry toast between her front teeth and finally slamming down her coffee cup, demanding, “Just what the hell is going on, Suzanne?”

  Suzanne’s father gave his newspaper a dry little shake, and now Mama was angry with him too. She said, “Don’t you dare make this out to be nothing!”

  “Perish the thought,” said her father.

  Mama, Suzanne, Hazel the maid — taking away the remains of the scrambled eggs — registered this as uncharacteristically mean.

  “I told you last night,” Suzanne said. “I was waiting for John and I fell asleep.”

  “But why were you out in the night like that?” Mama wanted to know. “Without your coat?”

  “I was sleepwalking,” said Suzanne.

  Mama quivered, silently beseeching her daughter to be normal, to have normal ambitions, to date nice men without a history.

  It was an ingenious lie, Suzanne’s. She had often sleepwalked as a child. The stories of her night-wanderings had been some of Suzanne’s favourites; it was fascinating not to remember an event to which she was central, though her mother told the stories as cautionary tales, a wary eye on her daughter, this vain young woman who d
idn’t know her own mind.

  Mama waited for Hazel to finish taking the dishes into the kitchen, then lowered her voice and informed Suzanne, “Your father and I have hired a private investigator to look into this, this creep you’re so keen on. This Norfield character.”

  “You did what?”

  “We must and we will protect you!”

  Suzanne hated everything about her mother this morning, her voice, her lips, her wrinkled throat. She and John had been watched, then, by her parents. The perverse intimacy of this, the violation, it was sick. She shouted, “You want to know about him, do you? I’ll tell you everything you want to know. This is a good man! This is a man who has suffered! He writes poetry!”

  Her mother laughed bitterly, and Suzanne threw down her napkin and rose to flee the room, knowing she’d blundered.

  With his right hand, her father reached and caught Suzanne’s wrist as she tried to pass, and he said, “I’m sure he’s a good man, Suzie. Just not right for you.”

  Mama hissed, “That is an under statement!” Now she tossed her napkin onto her plate and pushed away from the table. At the doorway, she lifted her chin and regained some of her irony. “Your university experiments are over, Suzanne. No more Mein Kampf, no more Das Kapital.”

  “Mein Kampf ?” said her father, laughing.

  “Oh, you know what I mean, Theodore! You will come to your senses, young lady. You will behave in a manner appropriate to your station.” Then Mama swept from the room.

  Her father gave Suzanne’s arm a shake and released her, amused. “She fumbled the ball, but she’ll probably win the game.”

  “You actually hired a private detective?”

  He shrugged to indicate yes. “I protect what’s mine.”

  Suzanne liked her father, but he’d never been physically demonstrative with her, had probably never even kissed her (he would let her kiss his forehead), and they’d never talked about anything more personal than tuition fees. She found it horrifying that he now knew that she’d slept with someone. Yet he was reading his paper now, as if he didn’t mind. Did her father ever think about pregnancy, or was the paternal mind itself a contraceptive? She felt woozy. And then overwhelmingly curious: what had he learned about John?

  “Well,” he began patiently, “as your mother had already informed me before I spent nearly a thousand dollars on a PI, John Norfield sells communist books. Now, whether or not that’s against the law seems obscure.”

  “It’s only illegal in Quebec.”

  He seemed pleased that his daughter knew at least that much. “Sit down, Suzie.”

  She did, and he said, “He was a POW in Hong Kong. It damaged his health. You know that. It’s a terrible thing to happen to a man. Some men never get over something like that. I understand how you might be drawn to the fellow. He’s obviously not stupid. But he seems to court trouble. And he’s had experiences that must make him seem — mysterious in your eyes. Even glamorous. Am I right?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not like that,” but fury and embarrassment seized her again. It was like that, it was exactly like that, and her father had to hire a private investigator before he could bother to try to figure it out.

  He looked at his watch and took up his paper again, adding more firmly, “Your mother might not know the difference between Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, but she has a woman’s instincts. Don’t wreck your life. It happens. Even to nice girls from good families.”

  Suzanne poured herself some coffee. It had become painfully obvious that she had to move out. This decision made it easier to sit with her father. She felt detached. Idly, she picked up the discarded front section of the newspaper and began to read. “Who is Klaus Fuchs?” she asked.

  Her father put down his paper, apparently surprised to hear Suzanne make an inquiry into the bigger world. The headline read, “KLAUS FUCHS CONFESSES.” There was a picture of a man with a mass of black hair and round black glasses. “A spy,” said her father. “Fuchs was a physicist working on the atom bomb in the war. For our side. He was also passing information to the Russians. He’s going to jail for fourteen years.”

  A spy. Suzanne studied the photograph. “Is he a communist?”

  “He’s a traitor.”

  She had the impression that her father didn’t know whether or not Fuchs had to be a communist to be a spy; she’d never in her life heard him say, I don’t know. She poured more coffee and read the newspaper report.

  Fuchs had given enough information to the Russians for them to build the bomb that had upset President Truman so much last fall, when John was in the hospital — when she’d irritated John by saying, “That levels the playing field.” Fuchs was supposed to be working secretly for the British and the Americans, but he gave the atomic information to the Russians. She studied his photograph. He looked like a scientist.

  She thought about John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima, the terrible story she’d read in The New Yorker magazine, that night she’d first met John. The slimy living bodies. Every atomic scientist is a criminal, she thought. Now everybody has the Bomb. Why were the RCMP outside John’s apartment? Because he, too, is a spy? It seemed impossible. John didn’t even have a university degree, he just read a lot.

  Suzanne went upstairs to her bedroom and began to pack. She had to move out. She’d have to get a job. She knew what to do. She would work in a camera shop somewhere. A camera shop would be a clean place to work; it would be like a blank slate, and even her awful mother couldn’t protest. Suzanne already had a Brownie camera and she’d taken some photographs of people and trees that she knew were good; she was also good at doorways and avenues. She had taken some photographs of John, when he let her — and she remembered that she’d been surprised, pleased but surprised, when he let her.

  Her father had a darkroom and he’d taught her how to develop film. She would be independent; she would join the working world; she’d work in a clean space, engaged in measuring light. It was a pure plan.

  She felt strangely calm, packing her camera and a change of clothes. “What was I thinking, all this time?” she muttered to herself while she packed. “I’m twenty-three years old.” She was still numb from last night, and from the stark possibility that she might never see John again. She wondered, For how long had he been watched by the RCMP? Did they think he was a spy like Fuchs? The craziness of it felt like an analgesic against the pain she’d soon feel if John really had disappeared. It was almost exhilarating to have lost what she thought was “everything.” John was everything.

  Her father stopped her when she was going out the front door with the big leather bag she’d used for books when she was at university. “It’s cold out,” he observed, conciliatory. He offered her a ride.

  It was her father’s considered opinion that this Norfield character would turn into one of those vets who just can’t move on after a war. He assumed that Suzanne would grow impatient and look elsewhere. A police car in the driveway didn’t faze him in the least; that’s what the force was there for. His was a family of eccentrics, had been for generations, sleepwalkers, all of them. Suzanne had the family spunk, the family brains. The beauty and eventually the money. If Norfield went after any of it, he’d — what? — kill him, one way or another, but it wouldn’t come to that: his daughter’s radical phase was on the wane. She was the kind of woman a man wants to marry. And she wouldn’t marry a shopkeeper with night-sweats and a bad liver.

  He dropped her off on Bathurst, ignoring the traffic that had to slide to a stop behind him. “Wait a sec,” he said, catching her arm, and with his mild, distracted affection offered his forehead for a kiss. He had a big, warm face. She asked him for change for the streetcar, and he topped it up with a five.

  Chapter Six

  She had to go back for her purse, which she’d left on the kitchen table in John’s apartment, beside his coffee cup.

  She took a streetcar, found a seat, and looked out the window, trying to see everything with the eye of a photographe
r. She thought, I have a tool to protect me from confusion. There was cloud cover. Her father had taught her that evenly distributed light reveals the object with less distortion. She would like that, a lucid perspective. She was not on solid ground. She would retrieve her purse. If the man was in John’s apartment, she’d take his picture.

  Klaus Fuchs was going to prison for fourteen years, but he was a scientist, he’d given the Russians real information. What was John? A war vet, a hero, a believer.

  She would go now, retrieve her purse, and photograph John’s apartment. If he didn’t come back, she’d have something, a memento. She hated the police for spying on John, and didn’t believe for a minute that he had done anything to deserve it. He’d seen how force works, in the war. He wanted it, like light, to be evenly distributed.

  A believer; she thought about that, getting down from the streetcar at the stop near John’s suite. It’s not the right word. A disbeliever. That’s better.

  Where do the believers live? In another country. There was no place for that kind of thing in Toronto. Everyone around here was an agnostic.

  How she longed for him to answer the door. But no one came when she knocked, not even the RCMP. Then she remembered, she’d left the key inside when she’d fled. She stalked down to the basement level and rang the super’s bell, told him that she was John’s sister and that he’d asked her to fetch some family insurance policies for their parents, got a key, climbed the stairs back up to the second floor, and went inside.

  It made her ache, the stillness of the place, steam from the radiators, a complacent winter sun, and now she was aware of the smell of Norfield’s soap, leather, wool. He had gone away, really absented himself. Such absence made her weep.