Bernice saw it happen, all of it, and she didn’t have the courage to lift a finger, to move, to scream, to call for help. She didn’t whisper any advice, as she had done earlier. It was too real; and too much of a dream at the same time. The brutality and the violence. She was still at the window (how long, she could not tell) when the car with the aerial returned. It stopped behind the parked car; a policeman got out; looked up at Brigitte’s window, and then walked between the houses. The light went on in Brigitte’s room; Bernice could see the policeman’s body outlined against the movie-screen curtains; and in a short while, the policeman came out again. “I scared the living shit outta that broad!” Bernice heard him tell his companion. They both laughed. “She won’t talk.”
“Well, anyways, we got this bastard, at last.”
They got into their car and drove off, quietly. The other car was still parked. Bernice saw it all. The violence and the brutality. She was about to undress for bed (although she knew it would be hard to sleep tonight) when she glanced at her sister, and saw her suffering; and decided that no matter how late it was, she had to call Dots … suppose that is Boysie out there, dying from those blows, suppose they left Boysie out there, bleeding to death.… The phone didn’t ring long, before someone answered.
“Dots, Dots? Where Boysie?”
“Christ, gal! You wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me damn foolishness?”
“Something bad happen to Boysie, Dots! Something …”
“Bernice! Boysie is here! He here laying-down side o’ me, snoring like a drunken man. How you mean something happen to Boysie? Bernice, are you going mad as hell?” And in her rage, she dropped the telephone. A chill went through Bernice’s body. I am losing my mind? Could I be really losing my mind? She closed the window, and the noise disturbed Estelle.
“Bernice, what time is it?”
“Two just gone.”
“I’ve been thinking, Bernice.…”
“Yes, Estelle.”
“I don’t really want to live in this country, Bernice. This place isn’t made for me … or for you … neither. I think I want to go home.”
“Yes, Estelle.”
“You think you could post the letter to Mammy, in the morning?”
“Let us wait and see if there is going to be a morning, first, girl.”
“In the morning, then.”
Bernice was about to undress in the darkness; but there was no need for the darkness now. And yet she didn’t want to turn on the light, because there was still a man out there, beaten up, and she had done nothing about it, and she felt the light would be too bright a finger pointing at her conscience. Estelle was talking again, and moaning; and in pain.
“Bernice, I am feeling worse.… I have to get something for this pain, man. I have to get something for this pain.…”
She turned the light on, and when she saw the blood in the bed, she almost lost complete control of herself, and of her senses.
“Jesus Christ, Estelle! … why you didn’t say something?”
Estelle was jabbering all the way down the speeding streets, and the lights were flashing backwards as the cars stopped to let the ambulance through. The siren was crying and Bernice was crying. In all her life in this country, she had seen and heard ambulances whizzing by, crying for the road, and she had seen people stand and wonder, “Who’s in there, this time?” And never once did she imagine the time would come when she would be travelling in one of them.
Estelle had got worse. Bernice had spent half an hour trying to get a taxi. But it was Friday and a bank holiday, and taxis were scarce. She had tried to get Brigitte, and there was no answer. She had tried to get Henry, and there was no answer. She didn’t call Dots. Everything was like a photograph, out of focus, and blurred by speed. The ambulance had come screaming across the Boulevard; and in that death of night and silence, had caused all the lights in the street to be turned on. Never had an ambulance ventured screaming on this Boulevard before! On the way out, Bernice saw a light burning in Mr. Burrmann’s study.
The driver had come to the front door, by mistake; and in spite of Bernice’s instructions to come to the side door. And after that, there was a quick succession of people, faces, comments and gossip; and finally, the siren and the traffic stopping, and the lights speeding into one line of colour; and Estelle muttering.
“I have to go to the immigration people in the morning, Bernice. Sam would be vexed if I didn’t go.… I have to go … he said so, Bernice … did he tell you so?”
“Shh! Don’t talk, Estelle. Don’t talk.”
“I want to have my baby, Bernice, I want to have my baby … when I have my baby, Bernice … do you know … do you think they’re going to take it away … I want to have it, and I have to go to see a gentleman.…”
“Don’t talk, Estelle, we soon get there, so don’t talk.”
They reached the hospital. The Toronto General Hospital, where Bernice wanted Estelle to be a nurse. The attendants rushed her through the Emergency Admitting entrance, and on to another stretcher on wheels. Events and people now ceased to mean anything to Bernice. There was no recognition of reality; just the long corridors of cement shining, and the shining walls and the fluorescent lights, and almost everybody in white. And then the ward, and the doctor, smiling and white and dressed in white; and the questions: Have you any other children, miss? Have you had a miscarriage before? (A miscarriage?) How much blood has she lost? When did the bleeding first become noticeable? How long has she been bleeding? You are her sister, aren’t you? Was there any tissue?
And the head nurse, Priscilla (one of the two young women who attended her welcoming party), now vicious, ferocious, an aggressive nurse, black, tightly built and commenting, “Another black whore! Oh Lord!” to the white nurse who didn’t want to comment on a racial subject, or patient. “They don’t even have any shame!” Priscilla said, making it clear to the white nurse that there are two kinds of black women. And Bernice, standing stupidly and frightened, by the door of the ward, seeing the porters lift Estelle onto another stretcher, and wheel her out of the room to the Operating Room; and Bernice left alone now, with Priscilla, who had forgotten that she had seen Bernice before (“I wonder if I know this face!”) in Bernice’s own apartment; and who had eaten Bernice’s peas and rice and chicken. The waiting, the waiting, the long fluorescent wait; nurses walking harmlessly, uselessly by, while her sister is lying on a stretcher, dying; and the black one, every now and then, passing near to Bernice, and grumbling purgatory and damnation on her own black race, because it has let her down in front of the white nurses and doctors.
“What you waiting here for?” she snapped, as if Bernice is a dog. “You don’t see they just take her down to the OR?”
“My sister, ma’am,” Bernice said, “I waiting for …”
“Look, we don’t want nobody waiting ’bout here, hear?” she said, cutting off Bernice. “Go down by the Emergency Waiting Room, if you want to wait. That is where you wait, down there. Not here.”
And a white porter came to Bernice, and rescued her; and took her down, by elevator. He showed her the waiting-room near the Operating Room. There was a man waiting there, too. Bernice waited (the man was standing with his back to her) and then a doctor came out, and she stood up, wondering whether this was Estelle’s doctor; but the doctor talked to the man who was waiting. “Why the hell you couldn’t get her here sooner, Sam?” The doctor knew the man. “I’m sorry. But we’re doing all we can.… I’ll call you later, at home.… Will you be home?” Nothing of what was said really registered with Bernice; nothing could register now.
She cried and cried; and walked out of the hospital crying, until she realized she was in a taxi riding back to Marina Boulevard, back to the house, in Forest Hill.
As she pays the taxi driver she pulls the letter from Lonnie out of her pocket, by mistake; and this she carries in her hand upstairs, into her apartment. She reads, but she does not know what Lonnie is really saying
to her, although she reads: But for old times sake, I begging you to send down a few dollars because St Matthias Church having the annual outing, and I am naked as a bird’s arse. I need a new suit. So see what you could do. Your loving man, Lonnie. PS Roses are red/Roses are blue/My love is true/Until I dead. Lonnie.
… hours later, she was holding the letter from Lonnie in her hand, thinking of Lonnie, thinking of her need of Lonnie; or of Henry. (The parked car was no longer there, she noticed. So the man, whoever he was, couldn’t be dead.) “Oh Lonnie, poor Lonnie,” she said. She heard Mr. Burrmann come in. And she became very frightened to be left in the house with him, alone. She gripped Lonnie’s letter firmly in her hand, for protection from Mr. Burrmann. She was thinking of Estelle, and of the man who had been in the waiting-room with her. Then the telephone rang. The hospital must be calling her, she thought. When she took up the receiver, she heard Dots’s voice, although she couldn’t follow all she was saying: “ … and I never knew that this place was so blasted cruel, Bernice, gal. Jesus God! when I see Henry’s face this morning … six o’clock this morning, Henry returned Boysie’s car that he borrowed last night … this morning when I rested my eyes on that poor man’s face, Jesus God, Bernice … and nobody, not even the police, can’t tell me nothing. Boysie, and Mrs. Hunter ripped hell when they saw Henry … but not one blasted person in the whole of Toronto can’t or won’t say how Henry come to get his face smashed in, his eyes swell up big big till they almost dropping out of his head.… Jesus God! this is a savage world.…” Dots went on talking and talking.
The Meeting Point Page 32