A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  It was time now for the salesman to play the game in reverse, to become "the hooked." He would look at my father slyly, cautiously.

  "Deal 'em?"

  "Deal 'em," my father commanded, and the salesman immediately produced a fresh pack of cards and they began, with great zest, a gin rummy tournament that might last for hours. To my delight, the players needled each other steadily and mercilessly. ("When did you learn to play gin rummy, this morning?" . . . "You should've played that hand with your feet instead of your head, you would've got a better result" ... "Maybe you got education, but it takes brains, not education, to play this game.") With each triumphant cry of "Gin!" from father, the salesman would smite his own forehead, raise his eyes to heaven, and cry aloud, "My God, this man is slaughtering mel" Finally the victim could bear defeat no longer.

  "I need a schnapps. Let's go up to my room."

  They drank rye-straight, no ice, no water, no ginger ale—while I drank in the splendid view of the city at dusk from the ninth-floor windows. To the south, the Michigan side of the border, and lake freighters riding high in the water

  with their holds empty, inching their way through the canal locks and up the St. Mary's River to take on iron ore and grain. To the west, the black, ugly expanse of steel mills spread against an orange sky-mills that belched and hissed and glowed, and poured smoke and the smell of sulphur across the horizon. To the north, dark green hills presided over by the stately Collegiate Institute. To the east, the for bidden territory: Simpson Street with its parched and pillared Local Establishment houses; and just out of sight and beyond the reach of smoke and sulphur, the Golf and Country Club. Other adventurers might find their fortunes by going west, but in this town you hadn't made it until you'd gone east.

  I loved this panorama. At this precise moment it was mine, exclusively mine: no other kid in the whole of Sault Ste. Marie-not even a Simpson Street kid-could share this view. This was my reward for having served, during the hours just past, as kibitzer, adviser (usually wrong), waterboy, cigarette-fetcher, window opener and closer, lamplighter, telephone answering service, and for having had the good sense not to laugh at the salesman's joke even though I had a pretty good idea what the Yiddish punchline really meant.

  Afterward, as we left the hotel, father counted up his winnings—four, perhaps five, dollars. I was impressed.

  ''Gee, he must be very rich to be able to lose that kind of money. Every time he comes to town you beat him in rummy."

  "He's not very rich. He's very smart. He makes sure I win most of the time. Don't you understand? You never bite the hand that feeds you. Remember that in case—God forbid—you ever become a salesman."

  Getting into the car I heard my father grumble, "Ach, it's a lousy life." His tone was edged in bitterness. I looked up at the ninth floor of the hotel. The salesman was probably ordering dinner from room service, or perhaps he was on his way to the Chinese restaurant for "prime juicy T-bone with golden french fries." A lousy life? Impossible. And I thought, happily: another three months and he'll be back with the spring line, and I'll get to see the view from the ninth floor again.

  After all, a boy's got to dream. It comes with the territory.

  Cafe Society

  Once again Jimmy Lee, proprietor of the Ritz Cafe, was in trouble. But this time it was no ordinary trouble such as, say, a complaint of the Health Inspector that the dishwater looked like crankcase oil, or a charge by a freshman constable that Jimmy Lee was serving booze in coffee cups—Jimmy, incidentally, was always careful to serve bootleg rye with cream and sugar on the side. No, this time Jimmy Lee was in real trouble. The trouble centred around one Doris Larue, Jimmy Lee's waitress, and a girl with important connections back in her home town of Blind River, about ninety miles east of the Sault. Six months ago she had been deserted by her lover in one of the booths at the Ritz. It was her first Saturday night in town, and she sat there, this half starved, half-breed girl, a living bundle of dirty laundry whom no one would want to bother washing. No one but Jimmy Lee, that is. Was it compassion that moved Jimmy Lee to give her shelter that night? Or was it some shrewd perception on his part? Did he, like some mythical prince, look upon this street-scarred female and suddenly realize that under her skin, that had the colour and texture of used sandpaper, lay a princess? Whatever motivated the proprietor of the Ritz was now unimportant, for today Doris, though she still lacked royal quality, no longer looked halfstarved. Indeed she had waxed plump, plumper than one would have expected of a girl who—perhaps for the first time in her poor young life—had been exposed to three square meals a day.

  One night, with the same absence of pomp and ceremony that had marked her initial appearance at the Ritz, Doris simply disappeared. A day later her important connections arrived from Blind River. They lingered over their coffees toward closing time, watching Jimmy Lee empty his cash register and switch off the electric outdoor sign. Jimmy Lee, not knowing that the last two patrons in the cafe this night were Doris' brothers, called to them, "You finish now, I gotta close up." A moment later all the lights at the Ritz went off, and the restaurateur and his two half-breed patrons punched and struggled in the darkness until Jimmy Lee was unconscious.

  The morning after the agony at Jimmy Lee's, I sat in the chair at Jack's Barbershop. My eyes were shut tight as clipped hair fell over my forehead and down my nose, but my ears were opened wide.

  "He sure looks like the devil," Jack said, snipping and clipping hair and smacking his lips. Jack's last name was "Apostle" and while he possessed neither the talent nor temperament to cut the Messiah's hair, he did have an air of self-satisfaction and moral righteousness that took the form of lip-smacking. Jack was speaking now of Jimmy Lee's physical condition. "Yep, he sure looks awful. Both eyes black. Jaw looks like one of them U.S. army balloons they got up in the air over the locks."

  "Did they get the guys who did it?" I asked.

  "Naw, the police ain't gonna bust their behinds on this sorta thing. Besides, it's natural justice anyway. I always say you should let natural justice take its own course."

  "Why did they beat him up?"

  Jack halted his scissors in mid-air and reflected for a moment. "Nope," he said, starting to clip again, "I don't think it's my place to tell you, young fella. Maybe you better ask your father. All I can say is, there used to be a law out west that a Chinese guy couldn't hire a white girl to work in his restaurant. They oughta have that law around here, by God!"

  "But she wasn't white," I pointed out.

  "Don't matter. Point is, she wasn't Chinese. These fellas should stick to their own. They got all sorts of funny ideas, you know."

  Apostle smacked his lips, reassuring himself that he was a normal, decent, everyday kind of citizen.

  By the time Jack sprinkled a few drops of sweet-smelling water on my scalp and applied the final comb-strokes, two or three neighbouring businessmen had come into his shop. The talk was exclusively about Jimmy Lee. Everyone wondered how he had survived the assault, though no one seemed particularly concerned that the law had been broken, or that Jimmy Lee was a bloodied and bruised victim.

  I ran next door to my father's store. "Did you hear what happened to Jimmy Lee last night?" I asked excitedly. "They say that girl's brothers nearly killed him. They say he really had it coming, too."

  "Who said?" my father asked, looking up at me from his desk.

  "All the men at Jack's Barbershop—"

  "All the men at Jack's Barbershop said that, eh?"

  "Uh huh."

  My father frowned angrily and returned to the papers on his desk.

  ''Bastards," he muttered. "Every one of them bastards." Was my father really in sympathy with Jimmy Lee? If he was, then he was very much alone for I, too, sided with the majority. There was no point in arguing with my father. He had his feelings, which only he understood. And I had mine. It never occurred to me that there might be another side to the story. Even if there were, I wouldn't have cared. Secretly I was glad the Brothers
Larue had beaten Jimmy Lee. I thought: now, if only they would set fire to the Ritz Cafe, and burn it right down to the ground!

  If the Ritz Cafe had a reason to exist, it certainly wasn't the food, nor was it the atmosphere.

  On Sundays the big special at the Ritz was cream of tomato soup. All other days of the week the soup-du-jour was home-made vegetable, a pale orange-coloured liquid in whose depths· there lurked, like a submarine, a long, slender slice of carrot that surfaced when agitated by a spoon, menacing any odd pea or bean that happened to be floating in the vicinity. Seven days of the week Jimmy Lee's menu-always announced, never printed-featured "loose beef" and "ahpoh pie," the former invariably over-done under a small lake of brown gravy, the latter invariably baked with tinned apples that tasted more of tin than apple.

  I doubt that Jimmy Lee ever heard of Cesar Ritz after whom this restaurant was named; in all likelihood the place received its name in the same manner Jimmy Lee had received his—offhandedly, on the spur of the moment. Years before, in Vancouver, Jimmy Lee had stood wide-eyed and open-mouthed before an immigration officer who was shouting something at him that made no sense at all, partly because Jimmy Lee—lately of Canton—understood not a word of English, partly because his comrades of the voyage-those who had shared steerage with him for what seemed an eternity—were confusing him, jabbering excitedly in Chinese and shoving, eager· to press well inland lest the new country should suddenly disconnect itself from the wharf and leave them to drift helplessly back across the Pacific. Finally, the uniformed officer, bored by the repetition of his routine questions, impatient at the inability of the Chinese to answer them, hastily scrawled a note on a slip of government paper. "Okay," he said, thrusting the paper at the young man from Canton, "your name's Jimmy Lee, remember that. Next!"

  As for the name "Ritz Cafe," perhaps Jimmy Lee had seen it somewhere on the long journey from Vancouver to Sault Ste. Marie. More likely it was suggested to him by the town's commissioner of business licences, the same municipal official who was responsible for creating such imaginative trade names as "Bellevue Hotel," "Peerless Laundry," "Royal Shoe Repair."

  Seasons came and went without much effect upon the Ritz Cafe. Its windows were always streaked with steam so that even in July the place appeared to be flushed and sweating with a mid-winter fever. Inside, untouched by the sun, stood two rows of booths constructed of plywood, varnished and revarnished, wiped occasionally with a dry greasy cloth when the crumbs and ketchup drippings became intolerable even by Jimmy Lee's sub-basement standards.

  Understandably, the Ritz Cafe hardly attracted the town's elite. Even American tourists, whose hunger for steak after a grinding day on Canadian roads often blinded them to life's finer amenities, sensed immediately upon venturing into the Ritz Cafe that they had blundered. Heeling sharply about like soldiers in training, they retreated to the sidewalk, scratching their heads in wonderment that such a vast dichotomy could exist between place and placename.

  Jimmy Lee's clientele, accordingly, was drawn from the lowest rung of the Sault's social ladder. In fact, the lowest rungs of many other communities' social ladders regularly sent representatives to the Ritz Cafe. Just about every itinerant drunk or vagrant—in that brief downhill interval between his arrival in town and his incarceration in the District jail—found his way to one of the booths at Jimmy Lee's. There the visitor would flop, unwilling or unable to pay for his toast and coffee, cursing and muttering at his Cantonese host, ignoring Jimmy Lee's screamed protests, until the black police Plymouth drew up to transport him to the lockup.

  By far the largest group of patrons at the Ritz Cafe were the Indians and half-breeds who drifted in and out of town: people without destinations, aimless, surly, their mackinaw jackets smelling like damp sawdust—they found no welcome whatsoever in the town's first-rate eating establishments and very little welcome in the second-rate ones; they therefore settled for the third-rate, namely Jimmy Lee's. But it was not at all a friendly settlement. Food and money were always traded grudgingly; only scorn was exchanged with any generosity. Often—particularly on Saturday nights when cheap wine had been flowing in back alleys and behind billboards and the Indians were of a mood to dance in the aisle between the two rows of booths while the jukebox blared the saga of "The Wabash Cannonball"—Jimmy Lee would decide that money wasn't everything in this world and, throwing open the front door of the restaurant, he would order his stomping, whooping patrons to cavort the hell out. Inevitably they refused. Inevitably there drew up two black police Plymouths, causing the night revelers to scatter, some retiring meekly to their booths, others escaping into Queen Street, while a handful of obstreperous customers were escorted like naughty schoolboys into the rear seats of the Plymouths.

  There were two other steady patrons of the Ritz in those days—my father and I. We lived in an apartment over my father's store, directly across the street from the cafe. My mother had died some years earlier, and my stepmother lay dying in the hospital. There was now no woman in our household, and so my father and I found it easier to take most of our meals in restaurants. As one might expect in a small town, the range of eateries was limited, dominated by Chinese and Italians, footsore sallow-complexioned men who found their ways from the Orient and the Mediterranean to this glorious land of golden french fries. We knew every menu in town by heart, even the freshly-typed menu at the Windsor Hotel where we ate in style once in a while when my father was feeling flush and had a desire for a crisp white tablecloth and a certain pink-skinned Finnish waitress.

  We ate frequently at Jimmy Lee's, mainly because it was there. It was, after all, the handiest cafe in town on a foul winter night. And it was cheap; a full-course steak dinner cost a mere forty-five cents (except on Sundays when the cream of tomato soup drove the prix fixe all the way up to fifty cents). Nevertheless, I loathed the Ritz; detested the drifters who slouched and slobbered in the neighbouring booths, the stained cutlery, the glasses marked with strange fingerprints and filled with cloudy water, the Soo Dairy calendar on the wall portraying a lazy-eyed jersey cow, the ambient tension whenever a drunk suddenly stumbled into the restaurant and slid clumsily into a booth shouting, "Hey, magahai! Gimme somethin' t'eat, right away, y'hear."

  I had no particular affection for Jimmy Lee either, for that matter. His manner with me was distant and abrupt most of the time. "What you want, boy?" was his standard greeting, and after that my orders were accepted, executed and delivered without further conversation. I could have choked on a chicken bone, drowned in my soup, keeled over from a sudden attack of ptomaine poisoning; it wouldn't have mattered a damn to Jimmy Lee. I was "boy," a face in the gloom that consumed loose beef and ahpoh pie and left a quarter and two dimes beside the cash register on the way out. In other restaurants on Queen Street it was different. Vic, an ancient Chinese who operated "The Savoury," liked to discuss the war and the economy with me and constantly pumped me about my father's current wins and losses on the stock market. Carmen, at the "Adanac Grill," would tell me about the way his "old lady" used to make spaghetti. Herman, who named his fish-and-chip shop after himself, was a frustrated piano player and we conversed about music over the roar and sputter of his deep-fryer. But with Jimmy Lee it was "What you want, boy?" Nothing more.

  "I hate this place," I would say to my father time and time again as we sat waiting for Jimmy Lee's infamous vegetable soup. "I hate the place, the people in it, and I don't like him either. Besides, I can tell he can't stand me. Why do we always have to eat here?" I knew the answer of course, but it was important for me to sound off, to reject my surroundings, declare my superiority to all of it, preserve my selfrespect. My father never bothered to reply in detail. "Don't worry about Jimmy Lee; he's just as much a mensch as any of us." That was all he would say.

  That assertion was always too much for me to swallow. "How can you call him a mensch? Some mensch!"

  I was referring, with contempt borrowed from other and older people in the neighbourhood, to Jimmy Lee's mode o
f living. Jimmy Lee was—as far as anyone knew—a bachelor. There were tales that he had deserted a wife and children back in Canton, which tales of course were never substantiated. There were other tales too: that Jimmy Lee slept with various Indian and half-breed women who worked as waitresses at the Ritz, sullen maidens in their late teens and beer-swollen matrons in their forties whom he allegedly lured into his room at the rear of the restaurant with cash and other forms of largesse. These tales, too, went unproved. Still, from time to time, small shreds of evidence suggested that the management's relations with his serving staff didn't simply begin and end in the public area of the Ritz. Why would Jimmy Lee purchase expensive silk stockings from my father's store? Why, on occasion, a dress or chenille housecoat? Who knew? The point was that whatever contact Jimmy Lee had with the female world was loveless and ephemeral. That much was plain to everyone. The clothing merchants along the block, the druggist, the barber, the manager of the liquor store—everybody gossiped about Jimmy Lee with a mixture of amusement and disgust. "Whenever you see him with his hand in his pocket," one of them quipped, "it's because he's either deciding to screw the government or screw a squaw." In the community's eyes Jimmy Lee was a lecher preying upon Indian and halfbreed females who appeared and disappeared like weeds.

  My father, to be honest about it, joined in much of the public speculation about Jimmy Lee's nefarious deeds, though with less relish than his colleagues along that stretch of Queen Street. But to me, privately, it was always the same protestation: "Don't worry about Jimmy Lee; he's just as much a mensch as any of us."

  At the time, I wondered what there was about Jimmy Lee that inspired such unaccustomed tolerance in my father. I say ''unaccustomed" because my father was never exactly the country's leading advocate of liberty, equality and fraternity. On the subject of his native land—Russia—he was patently schizophrenic. The land itself he loved passionately. ("You think this is a watermelon? Poof! You should see the watermelons we grew in Russia!") But the natives who inhabited that land he hated with equal passion. ("Brutes, ignoramuses, give 'em vodka and pogroms, that's all they're good for.")