“All right, Jacques, that’s fine,” Mr. Carver said. “Put the picture on the sofa for the time being.” And Jacques, his arms aching, left quickly.
“I’ll drive you anywhere you’re going, Jim,” Mr. Carver said affably.
“I’m only going back to the hotel. Doing anything now, Catherine?”
“I have a couple of girl friends calling for me in ten minutes,” she said.
“That’s my hard luck. I sort of counted on you coming out with me.” McAlpine’s tone was as disappointed as if he had really believed in the beginning that he intended to ask her to walk down Crescent with him and meet Peggy.
The snow was packed down into footpaths, and there was still no break in the leaden sky. Everything was still frozen hard. If Peggy were not working now, he thought she would be at home at this hour.
In the basement vestibule were three bells for the three apartments, each bell having a name under it, and the name Peggy Sanderson had been smudged by so many fingers it was almost indecipherable. He rang and went along with narrow hall to her room. He rapped and waited, then tried the door. It was open. “Peggy,” he called, wondering uneasily if the door was always open.
Then he heard footsteps in the hall, shuffling uneven foot-steps. A small unshaven man in a ridiculously long brown overcoat and a peak cap came toward him. He was at least sixty and he had a battered face and staring, stupid eyes. “What’s the matter, ain’t she in?” he asked, with a bad stutter.
“No, Miss Sanderson doesn’t seem to be in,” McAlpine said coldly.
“Jeez, ain’t that too bad!” The little old man, crestfallen, blinked his eyes. From an apartment upstairs a male voice began to sing, “Loch Lomond… the bonny bonny baaaanks of Loch Lomond.”
“Huh, listen to that bozo,” the man in the long overcoat jeered. “A guy with a voice like that. Say, I’m Cowboy Lehman. Everybody knows me,” he boasted. He was a well known moocher who ran little messages for everybody. And when McAlpine didn’t recognize his name he looked incredulous. “Look at these,” he said. “I brought her some swell Sunday editions.” He drew from under his coat a parcel of newspapers he had picked up in some lunchroom, and tossed them at her bed. With a sigh and a woebegone shrug he said sorrowfully, “Jeez, I wish she was here, mister.”
“Oh, I see, I see,” McAlpine said awkwardly. He reached in his pocket for a fifty-cent piece. “Here. Miss Sanderson would want to give you something, I’m sure.”
“Sure she would,” the moocher grinned. “Well, I’m on my way. She’ll be around. Just tell her the Cowboy dropped in.” And he shuffled out.
Everybody, simply everybody knows her, McAlpine thought as he walked out himself. Good God, who does wander in through that open door? On the street he looked up and down hopefully, waited a few moments with his hands in his pockets and then began to walk briskly down to the corner and east along St. Catherine. He had a plan. He hurried to carry it out. Passing the newsstand at Peel where the petty gamblers stood offering amiable insults to the girls, he whistled lightheartedly. He was anticipating a quiet solitary satisfaction.
And with the good feeling came the ready thought: I know how to place her. Right in Montreal at McGill was stringy old baldheaded Fielding with his marbles-in-the-mouth accent, who had been at University College in Peggy’s time and would have had her in his English classes and would know all about her. But he didn’t stop to phone Fielding. Instead he quickened his pace, looking up at the sky. The clouds were exhausted; the city had its thick winter blanket on. At Phillips Square he glanced at the statue of King Edward VII and smiled; he and the King were old friends. The King looked very cold.
Cutting across the square, he tried to keep track of the distance he travelled south, making sure it was only a few blocks; then he turned east, and came to a church. But it was the big stone church, St. Patrick’s. It was where the little old church ought to have been.
He approached a short, Napoleonic French Canadian. “I’m looking for a quaint little church around here,” he explained. “Not like this one. Very simple. A touch of Gothic, a touch of Romanesque.”
“Ah, yes,” said the French Canadian. “Let’s see now. There is a little old church along St. Catherine.”
“No, it’s not on St. Catherine.”
“Wait then. The Bonsecours Church – the Mariners’ Church with carvings. Everybody wants to see it. Take a taxi.”
“No, this one is right around here.”
“Ah, I have it. East along St. Catherine. Part of a convent – with a wax figure of little Thérèse of Lisieux in her coffin. Positively surrealistic.”
“Thank you,” McAlpine said, giving up, and they bowed to each other. He wandered around the neighbourhood, seeking corners and buildings he might remember. But he had missed the church and it bothered him. He had missed also the solitary satisfaction he had sought. And maybe it meant he would miss Peggy, too. If she had gone – with that door open to everybody – and if he couldn’t find her either…
Profoundly disturbed, he hurried up to St. Catherine and took a taxi to the Crescent Street room. Without knocking, he opened the door. She was there by the stove. His relief and his thumping heart made it hard for him to speak. She was there, really there: and he was so glad he didn’t notice she was wearing a suit of overalls such as women used to wear in munition plants during the war. It was only when she turned and looked at him that he became aware of her outfit and showed his astonishment.
TWELVE
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You looked so stunned.”
“Well, seeing you in that get-up—”
“Is that all?”
“I thought I had missed you.”
“Why?”
“And maybe the fact, too, that you weren’t at all surprised by my walking in on you.”
“All kinds of people walk in on me,” she said. “Now that you’re here, sit down.” When she had taken his coat she said, “Thanks for those snow boots, Jim. I’ve tried them on, and they fit beautifully.”
“How did you know they were from me?”
“Who else would do anything like that? Come on, sit down. Haven’t you ever seen a working girl before?”
“Sure, but you’re no mechanic. What are you up to?”
“In a few minutes I’m going to work.”
“In that outfit? Where?”
“A shoe polish and lighter fluid factory. I’m on the shift from four till midnight.”
“Oh, my God!” He threw up his hands.
“You’re comical. What does it matter where I work? I’m broke. I need money. And I’m tired of advertising agencies and so on.”
He almost said, And maybe you can’t get another job, maybe it’s true you have special tastes, maybe people around town are starting to treat you as an outcast; but he checked himself, fearing she might think that he, too, was withdrawing from her. “Just the same, you make quite a picture in that outfit,” he said. “Have you any paper?” On the bureau was some letter paper; he took a piece and sat down at the table.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Just sit there. I’m going to draw you.”
“Really. Are you any good?”
“If you don’t like it you don’t have to buy it,” he said, smiling. “How about helping me with a little background? What do you do in the factory?”
“I’m a crimper.”
“A crimper. What in hell’s a crimper?”
“I crimp the cans that have been filled with fluid.”
“And where’s the factory?”
“It’s a rickety old place down in St. Henri by the canal. And how that place stinks of the cheap perfume they put in the fluid!” she said, laughing. She began to talk gaily. At last she had found a place where she was sure she could be happy. The first day in the factory, she thought she would never get used to the crimping machine – it had a strange mechanical
power over her, the cans coming relentlessly toward her on the belt and her snatching at them and her foot pounding rhythmically on the heavy machine; but on the second day she was used to it and could look around at the others, and was reminded of her first days at school, when the faces of the other children looked rough and lopsided.
It was all noise and cursing and laughter with the girls being scolded by Mrs. Maguire, who had charge of them, and Mrs. Maguire being scolded by old Papa Francoeur, the foreman.
“At first I don’t think they welcomed me,” she said. “I guess I didn’t look right. But when people are poor they have to accept each other sooner or later, don’t they?” They let her eat with them at noon time. They all ate in the factory, sitting in a little circle presided over by old Papa Francoeur with his beard, a lusty old French Canadian who had pinched her behind. It was his privilege to pinch all the girls.
“I see,” Jim said unhappily, without looking up from his drawing.
“No, you don’t. You just don’t know Papa Francoeur,” she said calmly. The first day at lunch no one had spoken to her; but next day Mrs. Maguire offered her a cup of tea and said she might turn out to be the best crimper they had had all year, and the French girls, who had pretended they spoke no English, thawed a little. “And you know what Mrs. Maguire said? She said, ‘You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?’ And when I asked her what made her so sure she said, ‘I can tell by your eyes,’ and I laughed and the other girls winked at me. They knew I wasn’t. I think they were convinced I liked them, and before long they were telling me about themselves. It’s a good thing to have someone around you can explain yourself to… You know, Jim, each one of those girls has a secret ambition that tells a lot about them.”
With Mrs. Maguire it was a desperate hope that soon she would have enough money to take a trip to Niagara Falls, because she and her husband had never had a honeymoon and when they had first got married they had planned such a trip. And with Yvette Ledoux, well, there was an unhappy girl! She was always planning to take a job in another factory. The factory ahead where some other girl worked always looked beautiful, but she couldn’t move on because her husband, whom she didn’t love, had T.B. and wouldn’t live and wouldn’t die and she had to support him. But on the other hand Hélène Martin liked the factory; she liked it because it was a battleground where she could fight all day long with the other girls. And another kid, too, Michèle Savard, liked it because she was earning and saving and soon would be able to walk out of her crowded family and have her own cheap room in the St. Henri quarter.
But her happy eloquence, as she revealed how fully she must have made herself available to the factory workers, bothered McAlpine. He had a hard time concentrating on his drawing. “Wait a minute, Peggy,” he said. “Are you sure it’s safe for you down there?”
“Safe? What do you mean?”
“Well, coming home at such late hours.”
It was true that loafers hung around the railroad yards, she admitted, and on her first trip home a man in a peak cap and a short jacket, a man with a wooden leg, had followed her over the bridge, whistling at her and trying to catch up to her with his stiff rolling gait. But since that night she had had company. A young shipper, an eighteen-year-old kid with red hair named Willie Foy, wanted to walk her home because he had picked her out to be his girl, but he had to yield the right to old Papa Francoeur, who was sixty and had heart trouble – and what a droll character old Papa was with his gleeful talk about her shape! On the hill he gasped for breath; he had lots of lust but was afraid of a heart attack; his legs were always swollen from climbing the factory stairs, but he was in debt and couldn’t retire, and the only place he retired from, she said, her eyes bright with amusement, was the door to her house. There he was full of apologies, wanting her to understand he was still a robust lover but was simply all tired out.
“Very amusing,” McAlpine muttered, thinking, she makes herself available to these people and lets them think they can do things with her… Filled with jealous resentment, he pushed the drawing away from him and blurted out, “You can’t stay in that stinking factory, Peggy.”
“Yes, I can, Jim,” she said evenly. “You see, I want to stay there.”
“But you’ve got education, training, refinement. It’s all wrong.”
“Not to me, Jim. I like these people. To you it’s like riding third class. Well, I find that more interesting usually than riding first class. That’s all. How about the drawing? How did it turn out?”
He watched while she picked up the drawing and studied it closely, then went to the mirror and looked at herself. “You’re pretty good, Jim,” she admitted. “It’s me all right. Me in overalls.”
“Here. Give it to me. You need to be named, since we know at last what you are,” he said ironically, and he wrote under the drawing, “Peggy, the Crimper.”
“I like that, too,” she laughed. “Give it to me and I’ll pin it over my bureau.” She fixed the drawing on the wall and saluted it. Now the smell of coffee filled the room, and she got two cups from the shelf.
“Peggy,” he began, sitting down on the bed, “aren’t you being a little pigheaded?”
“I knew it – I knew it,” she said with a sigh. “That’s why I told you the other night to stop pulling at my coattails, professor. Now, let go.”
“For one thing, I know why you’ve lost your job.”
“Oh, so Foley told you,” she said sharply.
“He said you didn’t have your mind on your work, Peggy.”
“What a silly story!” She thrust her chin out. “I know why they let me go, Jim. I was waiting for it. The root of the whole thing is right there. Do you take your coffee black, like I do?”
“All right, Peggy. No sugar.”
“Oh, that patient tone of yours, Jim! If you’d only stop being so mild and injured. If you’d stop making me feel I’m abusing you!” She sat down with her cup of coffee. “I don’t want to abuse you, Jim. It’s just that – well, you’re so damned orthodox. And yet, I don’t know.” She frowned, her head on one side as she regarded him. “I suppose that’s not being fair to you.”
“Are you sure it isn’t?” he asked encouragingly.
“Since I know what you will say won’t impress me, why do I like the way you say it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Look. Don’t you know anybody else in this town?”
“Dozens of people. I know the Carvers—”
“Ah, yes, daughter Catherine. She’d be just right for you, Jim.”
“Oh, so you can be malicious! Good. Well, I also know Angela Murdock. In fact we’re going to her Sunday night party.”
“Angela Murdock. Well, well, well,” she said merrily. “Of course you’d be at Angela’s, surrounded by the city’s men of good will. You see, I’ve met Mrs. Murdock myself, Jim. Oh, that woman with her beautiful civilized comfortable tolerance!”
“I have respect for Angela Murdock,” he said. “I don’t agree with you at all.”
“Don’t you?” she asked. He had reddened and jerked his head back in a magisterial rebuke, and he looked so solemn that she began to giggle; she burst out laughing. It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh out loud. Her face puckered up, her eyes danced, her breasts shook in the kind of laughter he had been wanting to hear from her; it was so gay and free and infectious that it didn’t matter that she was laughing at him or at Mrs. Murdock. “Oh, Lord, I’m getting a stitch in my side!” she said. Then he started to laugh. She bent over and then straightened up, holding her side. But when her grabbed her lightheartedly and swung her around, shaking her and gasping, “This childish!” she started to double up again, and he didn’t want it to end.
“Well, to think I could get such a laugh out of Angela Murdock!” she said when she got her breath at last.
“I love hearing you laugh,” he said. “But how can you when you’ve lost your job – when you’re stuck down in some stinking factory? How can you be
so happy?”
“Well,” she began, frowning and reflecting. “maybe it’s a feeling in myself these days I’ve learned to trust.”
“What kind of feeling, Peggy?”
“I think it’s my whirling-away feeling.”
“Whirling away?”
“Yes. And it’s always led me in the right direction.”
“Since when? I mean starting from where?”
“You mean the first time I was sure of it?”
“Yes.”
“When I first left home.”
“Does that mean that you had a quarrel with your father?”
“Not exactly,” she said, slowly. “We didn’t quarrel. We sort of – well, reached an understanding.”
“An understanding about what?”
“A lot happened to my father after those small-town days. I suppose he learned how to get along with important people; and you have to do it if you’re going to be an important preacher. Anyway, he was called from one church to another, and now he’s pretty highly regarded in Hamilton. Influential people go to his church. A broker named Joe Eldrich, who was the chairman of the city hospital board, a broker, you know, made some investments for him.” With a shrug she added, “How did you think I got to college?”
“But this understanding…”
“Do you remember the Johnson family?”
“And the old house. Sure.”
“Well, one summer, after my third year at college, I was home and one of the Johnson girls, Sophie, wrote to my father. She had come to the city wanting to train to be a nurse. She wanted my father to help her get into the hospital. It seems there had recently been some scandal about admitting Negroes for nursing training. At the time I didn’t realize that the letter might have embarrassed my father, I was so pleased to hear that one of the Johnson kids had got some education. So I wrote Sophie that night, and a couple of days later I met her in a restaurant, and in no time we were good friends again. She was a smart, clean, straightforward girl. She told me that Jock – remember Jock? – was playing semipro baseball in Cleveland. Well, Sophie had sized up the local situation. She knew that if she didn’t have some pull she wouldn’t get into the hospital. Don’t think I was naïve about it: I wasn’t. I knew what I was up against. But with Sophie there smiling at me with such confidence and pride in our friendship I marched her right down to Mr. Eldrich’s office – you know, the broker, the chairman of the hospital board. He was shocked, I suppose, when I said I was counting on him. He concealed his feelings awfully well though. Making my point clearer, I told him I was taking Sophie home to dinner.
The Loved and the Lost Page 9