And I remember her leaving the house at twenty-nine minutes to eleven each Sunday morning, in rain and in sunshine, dressed in a black sharkskin dress down to her ankles, her arms manacled by the white ruffs, her neck ruffled also, and starched and ironed; black, worn Bible in her right hand, a walking cane in her left, she’d go to matins at St. Barnabas Anglican Church.
And I remember her returning to the house at one, to the house now filled with the smells of Sunday dinner. I walked with her many times: as a boy, and even as a man. It took her a longer time to walk back. And on the way back, she would walk and stop, and talk and inquire about children and chickens and women in the family way, and men in hospital or overseas. She urged all the women, even those who were not mothers, to attend the Mothers’ Union meeting at the church on Monday evenings. She would hold my hand during these Sunday journeys, for support, and then for love . . .
The office in which I am sitting now with this woman is in Toronto, on Bay Street, on the fourteenth floor, in a building whose insides and offices have been renovated to make them look old and English, and financial. This office is stiff and panelled. The woman wears black, and she’s as stiff as the ruffs on my grandmother’s dress. She has just told me that her services will cost me one thousand dollars, “two hundred now, the rest in four equal instalments,” to get me off the charge—“as a favour,” she adds, using the same voice I had heard my grandmother use when she gave me a Kit-Kat chocolate bar. But unlike my grandmother, she said it like a curse. “I have to charge you this amount because the charge is a serious one.”
Everything in this city is a charge. I am charged when I park my car in front of my house. I am charged to get permission from the city to park my car. I am charged if I do not get permission from the city. I am charged and I am charged.
The car suddenly stopped working the day after I was last charged . . .
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this about the way your grandmother brought you up. We all had mothers and grandmothers.” She says that as if it was a shame.
She lights a cigarette, swings her chair without making any noise. This office is so silent! It could be in Barbados in the small house at eight o’clock on any Saturday evening. She faces the buildings that look through the window at us, that show us the backs of women sitting at typewriters and moving behind screens; and all I have to talk to now is the silk of her black waistcoat. She is dressed like a man in a three-piece suit. The back of her head and the sweep of her hair make me feel her strength and her force, and I think of her as a man. Her muscles jerk each time I tell her something I remember. I’m giving her the evidence.
Without turning to face me, she says, “You’re charged with assaulting your son.”
“Assaulting my son?”
“You beat him up.”
“I slapped him.”
“You struck him with your fist. You smashed his ribs.”
“I disciplined him.”
“You didn’t discipline him. You assaulted him.”
“I disciplined him.”
“You brutalized the boy. The Crown will say you brutally assaulted him.”
Her back is still turned to me.
. . . and I remember that I came home one day, the end of the month, with my salary from the Civil Service, inflated as my ego. And my grandmother made me sit down, and she counted the money and gave me my share. One-fifth. She handed my mother her share—she didn’t mention my father!—and then she told me, “Because you’re drawing a paycheque, it don’t mean you is a man. You hear me?” And each payday she did the same thing, with the same regularity as her ritual of going to church. She met me at the door the next morning as I was leaving for work, and she told me, “You are still a child in this house. You will always be a child, no matter how old you get.”
I remember I came home after twelve-thirty one night, and even though I was twenty-eight years old, she said, while my mother remained silent in her approval, “You is not the man in this house! You hear me? Your father, wherever the hell he is, is the only man here.” She never gave me a key. The door was locked after that at eight o’clock each night.
I remember that when I passed the Cambridge school-leaving certificate which qualified me to enter the Civil Service, I decided to leave her, to escape her discipline, to emigrate, to have a better life in Canada. The moment I entered the front door, my grandmother came up to me, and I thought she had come to congratulate me. But in her hand was an old shoe. It belonged to my father. She held the shoe, tapping it nervously against her long dress, not smiling, with my mother sombre beside her; she said, “Once a child, always a child.” And then, with no warning of her change of attitude from anger to resignation, she broke into the hymn, one of her favourites, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past!” And when she could not remember the words, she improvised with “always a child, always a child . . .”
“Really! I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” the woman lawyer said.
The large chair wheeled around and I was facing her neck, with a long linked gold chain around it and an oval watch attached. I thought I could hear it ticking. It was soft and appeasing and soothing, that magnificent small oval piece of ticking and tocking workmanship. It hung between her breasts. On the outside. And it rested in the softness of her white silk blouse that had long sleeves with ruffles at the wrist. I imagined the muscles beneath the soft silk. She held the golden oval, grabbed it really, and immediately became tense. I could see the time. “Twelve-thirty,” she said as if she didn’t want it to be so late. “You’re living in the past. We need to know the present.”
I was trying to make her see that the defence of my present predicament and the future was to be found in my ability to remember the past.
“Everybody has a past.” She ran her hands through the thick files on her desk and gave them importance. She touched the bundles the way men riffle through huge sums of money. There were only three files on the desk. All the other briefs and opinions of jurisprudence she had already committed and kept in her head. I looked at her head. It was a large, prominent head.
“Forget your past. In the present circumstances, talking about your case, I would suggest that you forget everything about your past . . .”
And I remember thinking of those days in Barbados, secure because I knew where I would end up when I crossed the threshold of a door and ventured into the bright mornings or the sensual evenings; and I knew whom I would meet at the end of each street on each journey; I knew whom to call a friend and whom to ignore as enemy, and whom to love. I remember how bold and caution-less I was, for there was no need for pretences; and I knew that when I died I would be protected on all sides in the brown polished box, in the warm, thick welcome of dust and ashes.
“Oh, by the way,” she said, “please wear something dark, a conservative suit.” I knew I was dismissed, although she did not say so.
I missed my stop after that. On the way from her office to Millicent Street, where I live, where there was a bus stop beside the traffic lights two blocks before the street, I missed my stop.
In all the time I’ve lived in this neighbourhood of Italians, Portuguese, Indians from Pakistan, and Canadians who leave for work before the sun rises, I have never been sure which stop is mine.
In the summer and the warm weather, when I can see better, when the afternoons are not cold, bare, and white, and the road is not hazy as if covered by cigarette smoke and every house in the row looks alike, I can see for blocks and blocks in the almost West Indian road. And at six o’clock, behind the thick curtain like my grandmother’s “room,” I imagine I’m not in this cold, cramped, cruel country.
When I reach home, the lock on the front door is frozen. My hand is as frozen as the slit of the brass-coloured key. And when I put the key into the slit, I still have another key to put into the door. Two keys for one door. For this is a neighbourhood and a fortress of night latches and double locks, deadbolts and suspicion.
The children of this neighbourhood come out as numerous as Dutch bulbs in the summer; as thick as weeds after a rainfall in Barbados. And none of these children have ever said good morning in a language I could understand. Some of them, boys mainly, I would find sitting on my new couch with their shoes melting, running on my new carpet, bought on time from the Italian store where I paid more because I did not understand his English after he asked me if I had a language black people spoke. And my own son would be in their midst, eating popcorn and potato chips, speaking English like an Italian, and Italian too; and leaving the crumbs and destroying the pattern on the carpet.
My son is their age and equal in their language and customs. He can no longer understand the way I speak. And my discipline to him is the same as their language to me. With a new anger strange to me, and a new resentment each time I tell him the couch costs money, each time I tell him about my grandmother, he says, “I was born here.”
My wife leaves at ten in the evening for the Toronto General Hospital, to work as a nurse’s aide until seven or eight the next morning. Our lives overlap and crisscross and barely touch except for one day on weekends.
My son has again brought his friends into the empty house. He has his key. He’s a man. He cannot get into the house without his own key, for I get home from my cleaning job at five. Until four in the afternoon I run messages for the large firm on Bay Street where my woman lawyer works; and from nine at night and before they arrive the next morning, I clean their offices. My immediate boss, the manager, is a woman. Her boss is a woman, and the head of the firm is a woman. The only worker under me is another man, from Jamaica.
I’m a man with a wife and a son thirteen years old and a house with two locks on the front door. And still I have to justify and explain to a woman who does not know me, and scarcely knows my ability to pay one thousand dollars in fees, that I have the right, as my grandmother had the right, to chastise a child; and that biblical blessing drove me to discipline him.
Yes, as a man I drove my hand across his face when he continued to disobey me. And the blow blew this profanity from his lips: “You’re a damn old-fashioned West Indian. I was born here, man! I am a Canadian.” He said that to me. The words flew from his lips, and the uncontrolled venom and spit struck me in the face, cold as I was always cold when I stood for minutes on the exposed front step, trying to open the two locks.
I was still cold when I recovered from the words of his new allegiance. I am a Canadian repeated itself like an echo, like a bad dream that you have more than twice in one night. In the dream he said, You are dead and I am alive. I am alive but you are dead. My right hand was driven to the nearest object. We were standing in the kitchen, feet apart, for when he said it, spit from his mouth touched me, we were so close. My hand lifted the chair, and I felt the impact of wood on flesh and the disintegration of the chair in the rage and disappointment . . .
I did not sleep that night. I lay on my back in thought; and when the thoughts weakened, I heard the breathing beside me and the murmuring of speculation and hope. My wife had just come to bed. “That would teach him. Canadian children don’t have any damn discipline.” She pronounced the word dis-cip-pline. “I see some o’ them where I works talking back to their mothers in front o’ strangers, making the poor mothers shame-shame-shame, and even I myself have to turn my head aside, I does be so shame too!”
The boy had said nothing. He didn’t say another word about being a Canadian. I had made dinner for the two of us, which I did on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. And he sat on the same couch that had caused the problem, and I on the other chesterfield, and together we watched television in silent disinterest until ten o’clock, when he got up and left the room.
“I pay the ’lectric’ty and the taxes, as you ask me,” she said, making an inventory of her own thoughts. “I wish we could go home for Christmas. What I won’t give for a sea-bath!”
The moment he had left I felt very old and alone. I had tried to read the anger in his face while he was still sitting there, to see if it held such ugly disregard for me; whether throughout the long cowboy movie he had refused to look at me because we were really strangers already at war. I had tried to read his breathing and his disposition each time he changed the position of his elbow, or when he stretched his legs out and drew them in again, with each firing of the cowboy’s gun. But he had remained quiet. Once I even forgot that he was in the same room with me. “You know what I would like right now?” my wife was saying. “I could eat a flying fish with a dog!” I could not see exactly where the blow from the chair had landed, but I imagined it had struck him somewhere between his armpit and waist. His height and my own against his made that the likely spot. The tiresome voice of the woman beside me went on about flying fish and sea-baths . . .
The next morning he said, “I’m going swimming.” The city had recently opened a swimming pool and he and the neighbourhood children went there almost every day after school. I knew he could not swim; I thought I knew he could not swim; so I wished he would drown, and then I wished he would not drown.
A week passed. My son came and went. There were no crumbs and footprints on the carpet and couch. But one afternoon I saw footprints of different sizes on the bathroom floor, along the hall and right up to the front door. My son and his friends probably had not come at all. I couldn’t think he would again disobey my orders, even though I began to feel that a mark on a couch or carpet was such a small thing to lose my temper over. So these footprints on the imitation marble floor of the bathroom, and along the linoleum of the hall to the front door, could have been my own or my wife’s or his, or my dream or my thoughts. They could have been my wish for his disobedience so I could punish him.
He did not drown. And on the weekend he was still with us, and my wife was lying on her stomach, beside me lying on my back. I always lie on my back. The calypso music on the radio was soft. I was remembering my life back home, and comparing that life with this house full of furniture and electric kettles and electric blenders, equipment invented to make life easier. Cobwebs were in two corners on the ceiling. The left corner and the right corner. She turned over and noticed them and explained, “With all the things this place have to offer, don’t you know I have never find a cobweb broom to buy!”
“Northamerica have all the opportunities a man could ask for, girl . . .”
The calypso was one we knew and had danced to; and we listened, her leg on mine, between my legs, hands around my neck in a Boston crab of rough passionate love.
“The boy in? Go and look in his room and see if that hard-ears boy get home yet. Northamerica have everything but dis-cip-pline . . .”
I remember my wife talking as if she was dreaming, prescribing a life for her child in this city she had never grown to like or understand. On the one night we were home together long enough to be together, she spent all her time repeating this epiphany. That was on the Saturday night after the calypso program on CHIN-FM had ended.
Now, in all this time, remembering and relating my personal evidence to the woman in the law office, and remembering the incident with my son, I am still just inside the door with the two locks, standing on the linoleum, leaning against the wall that separates my house from the one through which I can hear music and heavy footsteps all hours of the night and day. I am hearing the music now. And I imagine that I can smell curry. Footsteps go up and come down; and as they come down, they seem heavier . . .
I take off my winter coat and start to think of the dark suit she told me to wear in the morning at ten o’clock. And I think about asking the woman, my immediate boss, for time off; and my bank manager, Mrs. Janet White, for a loan; and Miss Elizabeth Campbell at the mortgage company for a little more time. I am thinking about how I would have to approach all these powerful women in my life for help and sympathy. I think too of my grandmother as I began to think of all these women controlling my life. My thoughts are as hands clinging to my grandmother’s
long black dress when she moved over the rocks and fallen tree branches on the path to church.
I remember when I got out of bed and went downstairs and walked along this same hallway where I’m standing now, counting all these women I must approach for mercy. Just as I reached the bottom of the stairs to look into his room, I heard the neighbours’ curried music coming through the wall, as if the mallets that struck the drum had pierced its skin.
It was eight o’clock.
My wife had just got home. I was late leaving for work.
I passed over the noisy, cracked linoleum, opened the inside door to look through the peephole in the outside door with its two locks, when I saw the disfigured faces and eyes and large noses.
Through the peephole my vision of the faces was like a photograph held too close to the nose. I saw the shining buttons and the shining belt and the eyes that looked like glass; and I worked my eye down to the bottom of the hole to make the hole larger, to show me more focus on this disjointed watery picture. And it was at the bottom rim of the hole, like an eye filled with water, that I realized I was looking into the eyes of my own son.
“Pearl! Pearl!”
She came down, like the heavy bass drum next door, dressed in white oxford shoes and pink panties, and with her pink uniform ripped from the neck down to the bottom of her belly, as if she was giving rapid, violent birth. The zipper had stopped five inches from the bottom of the dress. My two screams had caught her in this Caesarean act.
I remember the police officer coming in, after showing the boy inside, and after the young Canadian woman had entered. The police officer closed the door, and I felt my living room turn into a cell. It was the first time I had been so close to a policeman. I smelled the serge and the leather and the polish of his uniform. And I saw the butt of his gun. I thought I smelled brass.
My wife sat with one hand to her mouth and the other closing the unzipped uniform. The policeman stood at attention beside my son, beside the Canadian woman.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 49
