Basic Black with Pearls

by Helen Weinzweig

  Just by crossing the road at College Street I got the impression that I had moved from excitement to respectability. It was as if the frontier began at the Y.M.C.A., whose sign, a large red triangle, was visible just a little west of where I now was. North of College was territory established by the bourgeoisie (my father’s favorite term of contempt). Everyone who passed me was patently on his way to some planned destination, moving with arms swinging.

  On approaching Bloor Street, I came upon a long lineup for the film at the New Yorker Cinema. I have seen Children of Paradise nine times. It is the only movie I will line up for. But now I must first queue up to buy a ticket, then go to the end of the line. We moved slowly, politely keeping our places, out of the sunlight into the bright lights of the lobby. There was a mass diversion to the candy counter, which gave me an opportunity to select a seat inside in the exact centre of the theater. Then, for the tenth time, I savoured the happiness of Baptiste and Garance; for the tenth time I suffered the lovers’ despair; for the tenth time I heard Baptiste tell Garance, When I was unhappy I slept. I dreamed . . . but people don’t like it if you dream. So they knock you about to “wake you up a bit,” as they say. Luckily, my sleep was tough, tougher than their blows, and I escaped them by dreaming . . . I dreamed . . . I hoped . . . I waited . . . My own grief was in such harmony with the plight of the lovers parted by a cruel fate that I felt I had made their story mine. To the stealthy dipping of fingers into popcorn boxes and to the silent sipping through straws all around me, I added quiet tears.

  When I came out, the sky beyond the Park Plaza Hotel was in bands of orange and pink. Little crowds waited at the four corners of Yonge and Bloor for the lights to change many times before deciding to cross the street. Some did not cross at all but turned about and went back in the direction they had come from. Is this typical of Sunday behavior? I wondered. I stood in the doorway of Grand & Toy, beside the subway entrance, resisting the magnet of habit, which, in this instance, was to go down the stairs, take the train to Eglinton, a bus to Lawrence, then walk five blocks to my house. The sun set, the streetlights went on, but still I stood there, in the dark doorway, unable to take the next step. What was I waiting for? The question evoked Coenraad once more, and brought to mind that time (I had asked for an anniversary celebration in Chicago) when he had sat out my tears and pleas and, sure of himself, had said,

  – That’s it. That is all. That is everything. Take it or leave it.

  I had refrained from the rejoinder that, to me, “taking it” was as routine as brushing my teeth.

  His ghost persisted, Take it or leave it.

  Recalling that even in spirit I was dealing with an expert in equivocation, I replied,

  – I will give you my answer later this evening. I went down into the subway, pleased.

  When I came to Cheltenham Avenue, my street with its centre-hailed family homes, three-storied, lawns and hedges and brightly lit entrances, I strode to my own house halfway down the block and went up the short walk to broad stone stairs, noting the numerous cracks and the loose wrought-iron railing, the cement footings having crumbled. I thought, the entrance will not withstand another winter.

  The front door was locked. My hands, groping inside my purse for the familiar feel of the leather case with its five keys (two car, one back door, one front door and bank deposit box), came up empty. At the bottom of the purse were my hotel key on its oversize hardboard tag and Andy’s key. I could not remember what I had done with my house keys. Had they been taken from me? There loomed the possibility that I would not be able to get into my own house: it took control not to beat upon the door with my fists. At the same time, paradoxically, I was not sure I wanted to go in.

  On this side of the door was a city of streets, subways, taxis, trains and planes. On the other side, inside my house, was an ineluctable sequence of worn words and stale acts. Even so, the choice to stay out or go back inside should be mine to make. I did what the children used to do if no one was home: I went through the gate to the garden and upon the cedar deck; I tried the glass doors opening out from the family room. They were unlocked. I remained on the deck in the dark, however, in order to watch Zbigniew as he slept in his easy chair. The Andersons’ dog next door began to bark, but someone put a stop to its alarm.

  Under the light of a reading lamp Zbigniew’s face in repose is the face of an aristocrat whose ancestors are in the history books of Poland. I have been shown their pictures. They are, like their displaced descendant, men with blond hair, square faces and small nostrils. Behind Zbigniew’s large lids are blue eyes, imperious in their gaze, which, now that I think of it, never change their color or expression. Relaxed, his mouth is full and curved; yet I remember it as a mouth with lips that barely open to speak. Awake or asleep I know he dreams of riding his mare across his (no longer his) fields, hunched over the shining back, straining towards a curve in the sky, which he reaches quickly, but he does not stop, because even in that short time the sky has straightened and he sees another curve towards which he must, he absolutely must, with every ounce of his strength, his and his horse’s, reach. I see him astride his horse in his grandfather’s Cossack costume, his knees dug into the mare’s flanks, his bare head against the wind, his coattails flying. And should some barrier suddenly loom up between him and that distant ellipse, he and his mount, the two now transformed into a centaur, will transcend the obstacle in a perfect arc. Such were the pictures evoked for me by my husband in the flowery speech of his youth, which, even in translation, I once found poetic.

  That Polish horse-and-rider were no match for the German tanks.

  Zbigniew took flight.

  In England he put on a blue-gray R.A.F. uniform.

  Zbigniew flew like the Polish eagle that was sewn on the left breast of his jacket and on the front of his cap, above the visor. He darted across the skies like the bolts of lightning which were the insignia of the Polish squadron.

  My husband is in his old Air Force jacket and cap, and as I continue to observe him through the plate glass, I cannot help but admire how well the jacket still fits him: the three brass buttons are done up; and how well the gray-blue shades become him now that there are touches of gray hair at the temples. As inevitably as the day itself recurs, on Sundays Zbigniew comes home at 4:30 from the stables, showers, puts on a clean white shirt and a dark blue tie and his old uniform jacket and cap, retires to the family room which will be exclusively his for the next four-and-half hours, it having been pointed out to us that the children and I have the use of the room all week long; then he goes through the stack of the week’s newspapers, starting with last Monday’s on top, speed-reading until he works down to the Sunday paper of that day, which he peruses, usually after dinner, until 9:30, at which time we go up to our bedroom. There he takes off his jacket and cap, crosses himself in memory of the others, similarly uniformed but dead, for he is the sole survivor of his squadron.

  But now he lets fall on the floor to his left the paper he has just finished reading and reaches for the next one from the pile on his right. I watch him unfold the newspaper page by page. He sits erect. His hands are strong but soft as velvet. An odd memory of those hands: I used to lie on my belly and he would stroke my back from my head to my heels. Then in my mind at the same time he began to stroke the back of his chestnut mare, with the palms of both hands, from mane to tail, over and over, slowly, lingering briefly at the tail before beginning again with the same rhythm at her neck. Silently, he would continue to stroke me, slowly, beginning at the back of my head, lingering briefly with his fingers between my legs. The image persisted. Then I would see his hand caress the mare’s nose, his face close to hers, uttering sharp cries of Moja kobylko, moja kochana kobylko! My beloved horse!

  Suddenly the paper in his hand is thrust down onto his lap. Something has caused Zbigniew to draw in a sharp breath, open his mouth wide in what must be a shout. A woman comes hurrying in, wiping her
hands on a towel. The woman’s back is to me; and since Zbigniew is absorbed in what he is reading to her, neither of them sees me pull aside one of the glass doors.

  That is me he is reading about.

  . . . and she took a taxi to Emergency, wearing a raincoat over her nightgown, her hair uncombed, in her son’s slippers, clutching a large black purse. At the hospital she could only make low moans in reply to routine questions. All the tests, blood and neurological, gynecological, X-rays in three dimensions, a brain scan, revealed no pathological cause for her distress. She claimed to have neither husband, children or other family; nor did she have a family physician. A social worker by examining the contents of her purse established that she had a good city address. A telephone call to that address established that she has a husband and two children and a father. Moreover, in the immediate vicinity there is a private medical clinic, where, it was ascertained, there are records of her, as well as the family. Accompanied by one of the hospital’s volunteers (name withheld on request) Mrs. Kaszenbowski was returned to her home, where, she kept insisting, she no longer lives . . .

  There is a moment, as after the eulogy at a funeral, when the words are allowed their full impact, considered, then weighed against the facts. Zbigniew let fall the paper, his hands limp at his sides. He and the woman were silent. Zbigniew fell back against the chair, the movement causing his cap to tilt forward so that his eyes were covered by the leather peak, giving him the air of a rake, a look so foreign to his nature that I had to stifle my laughter. The woman stood before him stock-still, with her head bowed. In her place I would have done the same: she was probably hiding a smile. Then he said,

  – I saw no reason for a private room. The practice of medicine does not alter with the number of beds. She received the same care and the same treatment in the public ward.

  There was for me a certain satisfaction that the newspaper report had had some impact on him. Moreover, when they left the room, the woman went ahead and Zbigniew followed with a step that resembled a shuffle. The evidence of his discomfiture gave me the courage to leave the garden and go around to the front door and ring the bell. I was moved also by a desire to see the faces of my two children. This feeling was immediately followed by a resentment that the woman would be summoning my children; in turn followed by the thought that I could, legally, oust her if I wanted.

  She opened the door.

  – Oh, it’s you! I’ve been expecting you.

  She welcomed me, I felt, by the way she held the door open wide, and swung her free arm in a manner that ushered me inside. Perhaps she had recognized me from the family snapshots in an album at the bottom of the buffet drawer, under the tablecloths. I stepped into the hall.

  – I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, she said affably. She seemed completely at ease in my house, as if she had always been there; whereas I experienced the kind of embarrassment one is made to feel in entering a museum near closing time. She was taller than I and much thinner, so that my black jersey dress was held up by bony shoulders and pulled together at the waist by a man’s brown leather belt.

  – My name in Francesca, she said. I was born in 1922 in Toronto on Grace Street, just above Dundas, in an attic room in a house owned by people named Tannenbaum. My mother refused to have another child, said she’d kill herself first, unless she could go to a hospital for her confinement. When I was eight she did kill herself, much to my father’s bewilderment, since, as far as he knew, he had never harmed her in any way. Somehow he managed to keep the police out of the situation — he was a clever man — lest the Children’s Aid take me from him. I was forbidden to speak of my mother’s death to anyone. I forged her name on notes to school. We moved after that to Clinton Street, above College, to a better house, owned by a couple named McGregor, again to the third floor. Despite the heat in summer and the cold in winter, my father preferred the cramped, dark enclosure of an attic room, for his studies, he said. He was removed from the encroachments of sordid bourgeois life, he felt. In his youth he had been an anarchist in Milan. He was arrested many times. Once he went on a hunger strike and came down with typhoid fever. His health was destroyed. I used to prepare the same meals for him every day; he could eat only dry toast, boiled chicken and mashed potatoes. He was a broken man in many ways.

  When I was thirteen I left Clinton Street Public School for the summer holidays with my ruler, pen, pencil, eraser and a scribbler on the first four pages of which was an essay, How I Will Spend My Summer Holidays. For the next two months we were supposed to fill up the rest of the book with accounts of the fulfillment of those hopes. I left also with a certificate to take me into high school, with an attached letter from the principal indicating a great scholastic future for me. That was on the last Friday of June. On Monday I was apprenticed to a machine in a factory making ladies’ hats; six months without pay, then thirty-five cents an hour if I proved myself. My father swore by the Virgin Mary and Her Son that I was sixteen and since he was an atheist he thought it was a good trick to play on the “capitalist exploiters.” To me he said, If one doesn’t work, one doesn’t eat. Remember, you belong to the working class and nothing will ever change that. Education makes no difference: a word mispronounced, the cut of your coat, the shape of your nose — you will always reveal your class. By remaining with the proletariat you will not be tempted to falsify your life. Since he was too ill to work and too proud to go on relief, I became his surrogate in the ranks of the proletariat.

  First it was the foreman, then the salesman, and ultimately my boss: by granting them small privileges — they were good family men and desired only a little titillation — I was able to make more money, get promotions, until I became, at sixteen, a forelady in the factory. In time I became experienced in matters other than millinery. Still I couldn’t get away from the factory. Affairs, marriage: I had no luck with men: my father’s predictions came true: I always ended up having to go back to work at a machine. So you see, for me now it is enough to live in a nice house. Where, and with whom, with love, without love, it does not matter. It is enough to live in comfort and dignity. Your husband is a kind man, never raises his voice; I always know exactly what I can count on. He asks only to be free to ride his horse on weekends. However, should you wish to resume your former place in this house, then of course I will leave. It is all the same to me; there are many lonely men in this world.

  I looked at my watch. It was 6:20. I could hear water running through the pipes. The children washing up for dinner. Francesca also looked at her watch. She said, They won’t come down until the very last second. I said, I know. They hate sitting down to dinner with their parents. She added, Ten minutes. We knew the reference was to Zbigniew who, at this moment, would be in the basement, polishing his boots. A tacit understanding arose between Francesca and me; we became bound by the same picture. We both saw Zbigniew at the workbench, with the cloths, brushes and polishes laid out. First he wipes off the dust and mud with an old towel. Then he dips his first two fingers into a jar of mink oil and slowly rubs the creamy substance into the leather. He waits for a little while then applies black polish. He waits another minute then vigorously shines the boots with a soft brush. Francesca said, Please stay; the children will be happy to see you. I handed her my coat, which she hung up in the hall closet. She added, I think they miss you, but I also think that they have accepted me. Their lives are unchanged.

  Anton and Dina came down the stairs together, precisely at 6:30, and said, Hi Mom, in passing. Zbigniew came through the kitchen at the same time and did not notice me until we were all in the dining room. There was some hesitation where I was to sit until Zbigniew rose and brought in a chair for me and placed it to his right. On my right was Dina, Anton across the table and Francesca at my former place at the end nearest the kitchen.

  – How have you been? my husband asked.

  – Very well, thank you, I smiled at him, how have you been?

 
– I’ve had a bad cold.

  Francesca, passing plates of cabbage rolls, said, I gave him a hot whisky and aspirins at night.

  – That was the right thing to do, I commented: Are you over your cold?

  – It hung on for weeks: it took it out of me: my routine suffered. I’m back on course now.

  – Your children, Francesca addressed me, your children do not like cabbage.

  Anton and Dina were suppressing laughter or rage, I could not tell. They made no noise, waiting, I knew, for the ordeal of the dinner hour to be over. Upstairs, under mattresses, was a cache of potato chips and chocolate bars. Their faces vacant, their eyes distrustful — what will become of them? I wondered.

  Francesca brought in cookies and peaches for dessert. I had baked the cookies and put them in the freezer; I had canned the peaches on a hot, humid day in September. It crossed my mind that it was too soon to open the canned peaches: they were intended for mid-winter, when their taste would bring memories of summer. I thought, I do not mind you taking my place; I do not mind you feeding my children; but you have no right to take as yours the peaches I sweated over.

  My anger, habitually, is wordless. Yet the children always sense what my thoughts are; and I always know that they know, because they have the capacity or the innocence to act out their discomfort. Anton and Dina rose together from the table, scraping their chairs (what happened to the rug?), deliberately backing away from the table in horror as if they’d been served live eels. Zbigniew laughed; and while they know it is his way of staying out of the situation, they pretended to be encouraged by his laughter. In high spirits they ran from the room. The meal ended in the silence I knew so well. I offered to do the dishes: that despised task, the washing up, was welcomed as escape. Francesca demurred, saying I was a guest after all, it was her duty, she didn’t mind, it was a privilege for her, she liked things tidy. However, the old habit persisted and I picked up four, five dishes to make my exit plausible. All right, she said, but I was only to rinse and stack: she had her own system for the dishwasher.