Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  He was physically surprised when he saw her. As if his body had forgotten her. Her legs were curled beneath her skirt. She saw him and stopped speaking; she put her hand down on the cushion and leaned toward him. She was pale, without lipstick.

  A man was seated in the armchair partially hidden by the entrance from the hall where Emmett now stood. Emmett saw the crossed legs, a pair of fine umber leather loafers; he noticed the socks, the expensive summer wool of the trousers, saw the man’s wrists on the arm of the chair, the hands framed by white shirt cuffs with bloodstone cufflinks, and he entered the room.

  John Norfield lifted his face, a half-smile, the wide mouth and finely defined jaw. “Hello, Emmett. It’s been far too long.” Emmett took John’s hand and pulled him up into an embrace, saying his name.

  They held each other, and when they pulled apart, Emmett said, “My god, it’s good to see you,” and, shaken, turned to sit beside Suzanne. The drapes weren’t fully drawn and the black window reflected back their shapes. John might have been followed. Emmett returned to close the curtains. Lowering his voice, he said, “Our daughter’s a light sleeper,” and indicated the dark stairway leading to the second floor.

  John lit a cigarette. There was a butt in the ashtray beside his chair. He’d been here long enough to smoke one cigarette. He looked older — not as an aged, declining man, but more defined, the narrowing destination of oneself. He wore his hair differently, slicked back behind his ears, parted in a clean line — he must use a comb to make such a definite part in his hair — and the tendons on his neck showed like wires sustaining his handsome head. His face was longer, a longer space between his nose and his lips. He held the cigarette close to his palm so his hand masked his mouth when he drew smoke. “It’s been ten years,” he said.

  For some reason, he said this as if it were a lie, though Emmett knew that was correct, it had been ten years — or close enough, nine and a half. Winter of 1950. It was now June 1959. You’d think a man like Norfield would lie easily, but he didn’t and he never had, in Emmett’s knowledge of him. There was always something voluptuous about the way John spoke a falsehood. Emmett heard the lush tone and glanced at Suzanne to see what she would make of it. Suzanne was focused on John, reading him eagerly. Emmett asked him if he’d like a drink. “No thanks.” Coffee?

  John crushed his cigarette out in his ashtray, no. “I was held up with some business tonight, here in town. I meant to drop by earlier. Now it’s late, isn’t it.” He spoke loudly, despite the light sleeper up the darkened stairs.

  “What business?” Emmett murmured. Then he announced, “I’m going to have a drink.” On his way to the liquor cabinet in the dining room, “Change your mind?” Now he was forgetting to keep his voice down. He poured himself whisky and drank it, poured more, then returned, glass in hand. “I want to ask you where you’ve been.”

  “Sure.” Then John said nothing. That familiar insincerity.

  Suzanne gave a slight gasp and a giggle. She began to trace figure eights on her bare calf, her skirt pulled aside for this purpose.

  To John’s right, on the narrow wall beside his chair, was one of the stylish photographs that Suzanne had taken of him: Norfield wearing a dark suit, seated in a chrome chair, cigarette smoke obscuring his unsmiling face, jazz cool. John twisted his neck to see it, quickly turned away. The difference the years had made. He had less confidence, or less hope. Emmett would never then have described John Norfield as hopeful; only in retrospect did he seem once to have been so.

  Emmett tried again, tentatively, “Of course you’ll understand, we wonder where you’ve been.”

  “Not wise.”

  “That’s all right,” Suzanne said soothingly, “you don’t have to say.”

  The way John looked at her — as if tantalized by an offer he couldn’t accept. He confessed dryly, without self-pity, “They looked after me quite well, considering that I was just a courier, a go-between.”

  Suzanne, almost in a whisper: “The Russians?”

  John winced. Emmett had seen him wince that way before; John disliked melodrama, even coming from Suzanne. He lit another cigarette, speaking with the cigarette in his mouth, “Is it quite safe to talk here?”

  Emmett said, “Sure.”

  “Not bugged?”

  Emmett loosened his black necktie and said, “No.”

  “You sure?” John smiled. “I haven’t had a candid conversation in a quiet room for — well, for a long time.”

  “Of course,” Suzanne said.

  “You seem well, Emmett,” John observed with just a trace of resentment. “The investigation didn’t put you off your game?”

  “You know about the investigation?”

  Suzanne made a small choking sound, her confession.

  “Things going well?” John meant in the aftermath.

  “Yes,” Suzanne answered on his behalf, “very well.”

  “I’m in the trade end of things, if that’s what you mean,” said Emmett. “Bauxite alumina, for one thing.”

  “In Jamaica,” Suzanne added with renewed or remembered loyalty. “And cod in Cuba.”

  John stared hard at Emmett, a quick take, and said, “Not anymore, to Cuba, I would imagine.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Still,” John said, speculating, “must be interesting to get close to a real revolution.”

  “The Caribbean isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I joined External.”

  John let cigarette smoke drift across his face. “What did you have in mind,” he asked languidly, “when you joined External?”

  “Asia.” Emmett went to refill his glass. “Do you have any news of Leonard Fischer?”

  “I believe he’s been sent northeast, to a village there. He tried to leave Russia, you know. He doesn’t have a passport, no papers. Not even Hungarian. Everything burned in the war, of course. It’s made him unpopular everywhere.”

  Emmett, in his exhaustion, imagined that he himself had set fire to Leonard’s passport by dropping the bombs that spilled the fire. He took a drink and asked, “Is Leonard safe?”

  John gave a nearly imperceptible shake of the head. “His lungs trouble him very much. Alas.” And there it was — the University of Toronto accent, fake Brit. “Russia isn’t so friendly to Jews, as it turns out.”

  John was very ill, Emmett saw that clearly now, and the love he felt for this man tasted bitter, returning like an addiction he thought he’d overcome. John fumbled to put his cigarettes inside his suit jacket, standing shakily in a suit shinier, shabbier than at first sight. He looked feeble and uncertain; his eyes were continually drawn toward the darkened stairs.

  Suzanne asked, “Do you need a place to stay tonight?”

  Emmett would never know how John might have responded to this proposal because now John was staring hard toward the staircase. He turned, and there was Lenore, seated on the bottom step in her white pyjamas, looking much longer than a child only seven years old, her bare feet on the cold floor.

  John’s slurred liar’s voice. “Oh, hello,” he said.

  “Hello.” Lenore mimicked him, matching John’s mild insolence.

  Suzanne rushed forward so all three adults, smelling of cigarettes and liquor and Suzanne’s tired Chanel, stood casting their shadows into the hall and onto Lennie in her white pyjamas.

  Suzanne nervously said, “Hello, darling.”

  Emmett made a move toward Lennie, but John beat him to it, going down on one knee before her. Lennie received him, neutral, but also interested and flattered, as if by her first suitor. “Do you know who I am?” John asked her.

  Lennie nodded yes.

  “Really. You’re a very bright little girl.”

  “You’re the man in the photographs.”

  “That’s right.”

  When Lennie stood, she was almost at John’s shoulder. He leaned toward her. Perhaps resisting the impulse to embrace her, his hands hovered, withdrew. She walked, waif-like, with him following in h
er wake, and surveyed the few portraits in their discrete positions through the main floor of the house. At each stop, John stood close to her. They made the rounds in silence so complete, Emmett could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock.

  Suzanne finally protested, “Lennie, it’s late. You must go back to bed. Tomorrow’s your birthday.”

  Lennie solemnly reiterated for John’s sake, “Tomorrow is my birthday. Are you going to come?” She laid it down as a regal duty.

  “Ah. No. I regret that I cannot.”

  She frowned and levelled at him her serious appraisal. “When, then?”

  “Mr. Norfield is just visiting,” Emmett said. Lennie shot daggers at him. Really, she was carrying the Princess in the Tower thing too far. “Lennie, baby, Mr. Norfield has to go home now, and you must go to bed, it’s very late for a little girl.”

  She ignored this and asked John, “Where do you live?”

  “In a suitcase,” said John.

  “Go to bed!” Emmett shouted.

  Lennie shot him another killing glance and then, absurdly, indicated to John that he must again kneel. When he had obeyed, she said, “Is it true?”

  John betrayed his own fatigue and bewilderment by looking up uncertainly at Emmett before responding limply, “Is what true?”

  “About the Russians taking care of you.”

  “I think you’d better listen to your father and go to bed.”

  “Have you got it?” she persisted in a whisper. “Did you bring it?”

  “Did I bring what?” John said, alarmed.

  “The secret atom.”

  John was getting to his feet. “Really, you should go to bed.”

  Suzanne seemed frozen where she stood. “What did she say?”

  Lennie pulled on John’s arm. “Give it to me.”

  “Mr. Norfield is leaving,” Emmett said.

  “I promise I’ll keep it safe. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “But I haven’t got it,” said John. He even searched his pockets anxiously as if in proof.

  “If you don’t give it to me right now, it might get out.”

  “It won’t.” John calmed himself, bent close to Lennie’s face and tenderly added, “It won’t get out.”

  Lenore shook her head. She backed away, took the first few steps backward slowly. With one last dire, disappointed dismissal — “I don’t trust you” — she went up the stairs.

  Emmett followed her into her bedroom and sat beside her on the bed while she arranged her limbs, as was her habit. He could hear their voices, John and Suzanne’s, downstairs. He patted Lennie in a vague attempt at comfort. “What was all that about?” he asked. She didn’t answer but laid herself neatly. It could be from television, he thought; she probably imagines all kinds of things, and the TV is all about the atom bomb right now, the Russians and the Bomb. She’d heard the word Russia on the news countless times, she’d heard it tonight, eavesdropping from the balcony. She was an imaginative child and shared her mother’s taste for melodrama. He asked, “Can you sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Well. Try.” He was impatient to get back downstairs. He kissed her, patted her leg under the light blanket, “Night-night,” and left her there, turning at the door to say, “I’ll be back up in a little while.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “Sleep.”

  When he returned to the living room, he found it empty. So was the kitchen, and the sunroom, the backyard. He went down to the basement, to Suzanne’s darkroom. The door was shut, he tapped softly and went in. Her red lamp was burning. She must have been here; she never left it on. The drawers where she stored her prints were closed. He knelt and opened the bottom drawer, looked inside, and then closed it again.

  The basement was chilly. The sweater she always wore when she was working in here had fallen off the stool and lay on the concrete floor. Evidence of a life that did not need him. The Scotch was wearing thin, and reliable fond love had turned, like the worm, into grievance. He turned off her lamp, went back up to the living room, and switched off the lamps there too, then sat on the couch in a path of light from the street.

  She came home long after midnight. She didn’t see Emmett waiting in the living room but went to the foot of the stairs and stood with her hand on the banister, looking up. Her arms were bare. He shifted in his chair to let her know that he was there. She startled, “Oh! Emmett, it’s you.”

  “Where have you been?”

  When she came closer, he could smell cigarette smoke on her clothing. “He’s dying,” she said. “That’s why he came back.”

  “Eleventh-hour conversion?”

  “I think he still feels the same. I mean, about Russia.”

  “He doesn’t look well.”

  “He just came to —” She waved toward the chair that John had occupied, as if he were still there, faintly receding. With greater resolve, defiantly, she continued, “He came for his notebook.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The black book he always had about him — you know how he used to write in it all the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, anyway, he wanted it.” She was wearing a gold necklace he didn’t think he’d seen before, twisting it around her finger.

  He thought of her darkroom, the empty bottom drawer. “And you’d kept his notebook for him, all these years?”

  She nodded yes. “And he wanted to see Lenore.”

  “Why?”

  She began to run her hand up and down, up and down her bare arm.

  “Why would he want to see Lenore?”

  She didn’t look ugly — she never could — but her face was abandoned, especially the eyes, which regarded him with all the neutrality of water. She made the slightest movement, barely a shrug.

  He reached to touch her hand to make her stop stroking herself.

  “Is she sleeping?” she asked.

  “I hope so.”

  Then her face seemed to come to life for him again. She called to him softly, “Emmett. Let’s go to bed.”

  They passed Lenore’s bedroom on their way to their own and saw her lying wide-eyed. Suzanne gave a low moan and would go in. “Come,” he whispered to her.

  He closed their door behind them. Suzanne was stiff, distant, and then he began to feel her stir and respond. He was almost dreaming, he shut his eyes while he caressed her. He’d pulled her under him, when the door opened. Suzanne slipped out from beneath him, sitting up and with a shaky voice was asking Lennie, “Are you all right?”

  Lennie stood at their bed. Suzanne took one of her pillows and put it down, and Lennie laid herself crossways at their feet. Then the customary arrangement of her limbs. Suzanne asked her if she needed the mohair throw and she shook her head — Emmett could hear her hair scratch at the pillow, No.

  The sheets were white and fresh. He curled on his side and tucked his hands between his knees. When he woke up in the night, aware that he needed to be careful not to disturb Lennie at the end of the bed, he could hear her, could hear her wakefulness. “I don’t trust you,” she had said. Maybe she was too intelligent, over capacity. Too wary. How easily she had adopted John’s cool accent. Today she was seven years old. How many hours had Lennie been awake? He did the math.

  Chapter Two

  The little man standing on the front stoop peered from under a hat that was too big for him, as was his grey flannel suit. He had papery white skin and teary pink eyes that blinked furiously in the midday sun. He looked like a white rabbit.

  Lennie’s birthday had dawned warm and quickly grew hot. She followed her father to the door, and when she saw the little fellow in the oversized grey suit standing there, she climbed up into Emmett’s arms, her feet dangling almost to his knees. “Yes?” he asked.

  “You are Mr. Jones.”

  He agreed, he was Mr. Jones. He thought he was speaking to a Fuller Brush salesman. Lennie laid her head on his chest and wound her legs around him. She was expecting that th
e arrival of the rabbit had something to do with her birthday.

  “Would you come with me?” Rabbit demanded.

  Emmett heard Suzanne clatter with the pans in the kitchen, preparing lunch, and he turned uncertainly toward the interior of his house, Lennie twisting so she could keep an eye on Rabbit. Emmett returned his attention to the little man and asked, “Who are you?”

  Rabbit looked from under the brim of his hat, blinking painfully in the sun. Despite the absurdity of his appearance, he assumed absolute authority. “Lieutenant Morton sends for you.” He stepped back to let Emmett pass.

  With some difficulty Emmett unwound Lennie and set her down. He made a move to indicate that he would go back inside to say goodbye to his wife, but Rabbit, by dint of a small impatient gesture, let him know that there no time, he was to come forthwith.

  He left Lennie standing at the open front door. “Tell your mother I’ll be right back,” he said. A black Buick was parked on the street. Rabbit ushered him into its backseat and shut the door, jumped in behind the wheel, and the car started to roll.

  A Mountie in khakis stood at the gate marking the entrance to wooded grounds surrounded by a stone wall covered in ivy. The Mountie casually saluted when the car pulled up before the gate and moved aside so the groundskeeper, rake in hand, could let them through. The car was now on a private road surrounded by birch stands mixed with dogwood. The floor of the forest was cleared and raked. Emmett felt naked without his wallet, his jacket and hat.

  They pulled up before a stone house with small windows. He tried to get out of the car, but there was no handle. Rabbit leapt out and around and opened the door for him, his eyes leaking, his white face with its pink eyes shrivelled against the hated sun. He piloted Emmett into the house through a massive oak door.

  Inside stood Robert Morton, stockier, rather better-looking than he was even a few years ago, in a dark suit with narrow lapels and unusually narrow trousers. He greeted Emmett politely, “Glad you could make it. I’d like you come this way, if you please.”