The Bigger Light

by Austin Clarke

  When they left the Colonial Tavern that afternoon, Boysie took him to a bookstore, The Third World, and bought him three books which he thought the boy should have read years ago. The boy thanked him, and five weeks later, which was the next time Boysie dropped in on Mrs. James, who was cleaning the apartment when he arrived, she said the boy really liked the books. “I can’t tell you what effect you have on that boy. He walks around the house with those books in his hands, all day. He takes one to school every day, and he tells all his school friends that a ‘big important businessman’ took him to hear jazz and bought him three books. He called me from school yesterday to say that the book is so interesting, would I allow him to miss gym, so he could read some more. Mr. Cumberbatch, what have you done to my boy?” Boysie felt proud. What greater things would he do for his own son! He had misjudged this young man, in the same way as he had misjudged those thousands of other young West Indians around the city. Soon after, he saw the boy.

  “How’s it going, man?”

  “Good, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Good, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  “Any problems?”

  “No, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  “What did you think of the jazz concert? You liked that kind of music? Perhaps, next Saturday, you and I will go back down to the Colonial, eh, or to the Science Centre, or to the O’Keefe, or even take a trip to Buffalo in my new car, and I could show you some Amer’can history, and even watch the falls at Niagara Falls, what do you say?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  Boysie was thinking of what the principal had said: that the boy showed no interest. Jesus Christ, Boysie thought, can’t this boy talk?

  “How do you like the books I gave you?”

  “They’re good.”

  “Which one did you decide to read first?”

  “The one you said.”

  “And how far have you got?”

  “Page fourteen.”

  Boysie quickly told him goodbye, and went on his business. The boy was a problem. Perhaps he should tell his mother about this. But before he left, he asked the boy, “Hey, man. When was it that we checked out that scene at the Colonial?”

  “Five weeks, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  “Oh, well … take it light, man.” Boysie was never good at mental arithmetic; but he knew he had to puzzle over the average number of pages a day this young man had read: “Ahhmmm! lemme see now; five weeks, seven days make a week, seven days … seven times five is … ahhmmm, seven twos are, seven … seven fours, twenty-eight … ahh, thirty-five. Seven fives are thirty-five, and thirty-five into fourteen … nooo! fourteen into thirty-five is, ahhmmm … shit, this boy can’t read at all!”

  Boysie became very critical of Mrs. James’s methods of dealing with the boy; he thought she made him do things which she should have got one of her daughters to do, that she was turning him into a sissy, that “shit, why am I getting involved? This woman isn’t my wife.” Mrs. James continued to be very kind to him. When he visited her on his way out, she would always have a glass of beer for him, and one morning, he was so tired from the previous night’s work, he sat and was so comfortable that after a second beer, something happened, and he was still there sitting in the same chair when the children came home from school. The children liked him, loved him, even; and he grew frightened that Mrs. James was putting them up to it, coaxing them, telling them things about him in his absence, to bring down this avalanche of feeling for him. Before he left their apartment to go straight to work, he had cooked them one of his specials, a Barbadian dish, and they were all calling him “Uncle.”

  “Come on now, you kids, say goodbye to Uncle Bertram, now.”

  Sometimes he would be sitting down with Mrs. James, just sitting and watching one of the many television daytime shows she watched, as if she felt that one day it would be her turn to get rich, to get the first prize, an outdoor barbecue set or a new American car; and he would become sad, and try to compare his life with Dots to his life with this woman. And the answer would be the same. Terror. He was becoming terrified of women. They were becoming such problems to him! He imagined himself coming home to this house, with all its noise (noise was beginning to bother him again: it must have been the television set and the radio and the record player which Mrs. James played all at the same time), to all these children; and wanting to go out, perhaps to play poker with his friends, just to escape; and being carried away with a good-looking hand and betting, “Two hundred on these pair o’ aces, here! I come to gamble tonight … shit, money is only money anyway, and I making it!” and what then would happen, if he had lost, and had had to come back to face all these mouths? “Uncle Bertram, can you take me to that place to hear jazz again?”

  “Unca Bertram, you take me, too?”

  “Unca, takee me, too?”

  “Berr-tramm, I need some money from you. You ain’t been uncling these kids o’ mine proper!”

  “Look, Boysie, haul your arse outta this woman’s house, eh!”

  Boysie was no longer sure of himself now. He had tried to encourage a friendship with Mrs. James, which he knew he was using as a buffet against what he considered as the lack of consideration he got from his wife. But Mrs. James had proved to be too clawing, all fingernails, always clawing; someone to whom he could not think of lending ten dollars (which she borrowed often), because with ten dollars she was laid bare and exposed with all the countless other ten dollars needed to make her solvent. She became dull, too. This was the biggest disappointment, because he had liked her friendship in order to get out of the cramped boredom which he had been experiencing in his own home. Dots was dull. He saw her awake very often; he saw her asleep most often. He had hoped that Mrs. James would keep him alive, and put a mild and sympathetic hand against the tide of age which he thought was the cause of his inertia. But Mrs. James proved to be clawing. From her, he learned every social problem in the city, particularly those problems that affected poor people. Mrs. James’s husband left her when their last child was not yet born; Mrs. James’s husband was out of work for most of the time the last child was being conceived; Mrs. James’s husband was a bouncer at a downtown bar; Mrs. James had had to work at two jobs when she was early in her last pregnancy, or when she wasn’t sick; Mrs. James took him to the Family Court; and Mrs. James took her children and herself to the Family Practice Clinic at the New Mount Sinai Hospital, once a week, in order to get medicine and medical attention, free; and Mrs. James told Boysie once of a middle-aged, grey-haired black lady who worked in that clinic, and who everybody liked because she was “such a nice person.” And Boysie had listened and had become very depressed and very saddened. He had continued taking her son to the Colonial Tavern to hear the Saturday afternoon jazz concerts, and they had eaten steaks and had drunk Scotch and orange juice, as they did each time and at each place they went together. But the responsibility of being a “father-figure” to this boy, which was the moral obligation Boysie assumed, and of being “Uncle” to the entire impoverished family, was more than Boysie could tolerate.

  He wished he could talk to somebody about this. To the Canadian young fellow. Or to Llewellyn, Bernice’s young man. Because there were things in the relationship between himself and Mrs. James (who progressively became less tidy in her appearance, and once said something to him which he felt only his wife should have said) and in his attentiveness to her children, and he needed someone to discuss these things with: he started to fear that one morning, as he went to knock on her door, that he would be transformed into a man married to her. He needed a son. He wanted a son. But he did not want so many children around him. He began to dream about her, and about being married to her, and about being unable to drive in his new car, and do things he liked doing, which were not many.

  Once he took the entire family for a drive to Niagara Falls, because Mr. James had forgotten he had promised to do so, ten years ago, and of course had never taken them; and when he wheeled his car into the u
nderground garage that night, tired and edgy and angry, the footprints of Mrs. James’s children were all over his luxurious upholstery, and the floor mats were painted by the potato chips and the crumbs of the hot dog rolls they had eaten going and coming. When they had got out at Niagara Falls, Boysie was so angry that he refused to watch the falls. His new car, in which he could escape from the noise around him, in which he felt safe and like a man, like a “man in his position,” in which he hardly heard the engines of other cars passing beside him, in his new car of which he had made a point of not letting Dots touch it, not even see it, Mrs. James had sat all through that distance, all through the noise of her children, and all she had said was, “Never mind the few spots, Uncle Berrtramm! A little soap and water and you would never know the difference. And anyhow, you are a cleaner!” Michael, his friend, his only friend now in the James screaming household of dirty paws and teeth filled with bits of potato chips and bread from the hot dogs and ketchup, he had sat, prim and proper, silent and inwardly annoyed that Uncle Bertram had allowed the others to drive in the car. Now he was no longer the only person in his family who had experienced the car.

  “So how far you reach in the book, now, young man?” Boysie had asked him, as he helped him brush out the potato chips and bread crumbs. Boysie was now talking more loosely than he had ever talked before he met the James family. He was becoming lax with his language. Once, when he had first met Mrs. James, he was talking in a proper Canadian-English manner, and she said to him, “But you don’t have to be so straight with me, Mr. Cumberbatch.” He had liked her informality then. As time went on, he found himself becoming more and more relaxed, and eventually he was talking as he used to talk when Henry was alive. Dots was reacting to his lack of formal speech, too. But she did nothing about it: she just made a mental note about his “humanness.” Boysie did not like this influence of the Jameses upon him. “So, as I was saying to you, Mister Michael, how far have you reached in the book now? You should be very far in the book by this time.”

  “Oh, the book!” The boy was absent-minded. He seemed always to be very far away from the present. “It is a very interesting book, Mr. Cumbatch.”

  “So, you must be well into it by now.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cumbatch. I am at page thirty.”

  Boysie saw the total hopelessness in his relation with the Jameses. But he was still not prone to drop the friendship. It had served him well against his earlier boredom, and he thought that he was perhaps overreacting. He had spent some happy times with Mrs. James, sitting in her cluttered but tidy living room, when the children were away. And she had given him confidence in himself, although she did not know that she had in fact done so. He always thought of the meal he had cooked them, and how the children begged him to come back the next day and cook for them. It was a simple meal. He was a simple man. It was peas and rice cooked in the juice of the chicken which he had parboiled first before cooking in grapefruit juice for five minutes, and then putting it into the oven. He had made a dish of souce as an appetizer, and he had put hard-boiled eggs into the salad, and had thrown a generous portion of brandy and Scotch into the cooking. Everybody was happy and full and drunk with food.

  “This is happiness,” Mrs. James told him, when the last child was somewhere behind the whispering partition from the living room. “This is the happiness that every woman asks for. Not that she expect every day to be a happy day. God know that most o’ my life I have been unhappy. But at times like this, Berr-tramm, I am happy I watched you cooking that meal for my family, and I have to confess that I wished you were my husband. I actually wished that you were my husband. And that I was Mistress Cumberbatch. I don’t mean that I am taking you away from your wife. I don’t even mean that I want you and me to be … well, you know what I mean. But standing there handing you all that pepper and hot things, which we never eat in our meals, I said to myself, This man could be my husband any day! And still, as happens in life, I know that the minute you are my husband and I am your wife, things will take on a different meaning, a different picture. That is life. And that is what I mean by telling you thanks, thanks very much for bringing this little happiness into my home, what little it is. You see what I mean, now?”

  She had looked very beautiful when she said that. She was the woman he had seen that first day when he brought her the pork chops, about which she never said one word afterwards (not even if she had eaten them, had thrown them out, or had liked the idea of his first gifts), and her hair was tidy and she was wearing a new dress, and without making it obvious, without making him feel uncomfortable, she had mixed five Scotches for him, while he was cooking, and the children were dressed for the occasion. That is all he knew, the children were wearing different clothes; he could not pinpoint the difference in their appearance, but they looked quite smart and clean, and he wished that he was in his home and that she was his wife, and that they were his children, so that when she said all that about the exchange of fortune and place and husband and wife, it took him quite by surprise, as if she had been reading his thoughts. For he had just said the same thing to himself, that it would have been a good thing if he could have exchanged her, in the presence of time and circumstance, for Dots, and miraculously replaced the goddamn cat by all these happy children, and live in a ready-made bliss. “But Dots so rass-hole miserable these days she must be experiencing her mini-pause!” And with Mrs. James’s explanation of the sentiment and the rush of feeling in which she had clothed her feelings, and the beauty in her face, in addition to the closeness of his legs against hers, and not one thought of seducing her in his mind or in the groins of his desire (he had not made love to his wife now for more than five nights, because she was either sleeping when he came in, or pretending to be, or she had left by the time he awoke), he wondered whether it was not he who was going through this pause in his anatomy which had caused this forbidding of hand and muscle from asking Mrs. James the question. It was bigger things he was involved with in their relationship, and he had always hoped that these bigger things would show him the light he had been searching for all these years. This bigger light.

  It had come when he least expected it. For instance, he had driven one morning, alone in the purring automobile, secure and feeling the rewards of his position of material comfort, right up to the International Airport, and had parked in the upstairs parking area, got out, taken the elevator, and going down had helped an older person with her bags, and had stood up for more than thirty minutes near the cigar counter, watching the redcaps and the throngs of West Indians pressing their faces against the expectant glass that cut them off, for a while longer, from their friends and relations coming into the country, some as bona fide immigrants, others as scamps and criminals and pimps and “unwanted persons,” as the government had begun to regard them. And Boysie had watched them, these young men and young women, in their loud dress, their colours out of all kilter, out of all perspective even if there were militant blacks among them, and he had watched them as people coming into his country. For he was here first. He was settled, he was a taxpayer, which he was quick to point out, in any matter of civic importance, and in some of no great importance, and he was a man who had written letters to the editors of all the newspapers and of the leading women’s journal in the country; had had them published, with his name under them. He was a man in a certain position, and he could therefore behave like any other Canadian citizen. “That’s the next thing I am going to do. Send for my Canadian citizenship. Not even Dots will know.”

  He had watched them and had felt secure with them in the country. They were not making any less noise as they waited for their friends and relations. They were not dressed any more suitably for the harsh Canadian winter. They were still talking loudly, and gesticulating and prancing up and down, and saying things to each other in loud voices which should have been secrets, or half-secrets, but which they said without regard for the ears of the neighbouring Canadians also waiting for friends and relations; but they
suspected that the Canadians could not understand their language. And some of the Canadians, in their faces and in their attitudes, moving a little farther away to allow an energetic West Indian to jump up above the heads of the others to see if “oh God, I see him, I see heem! He here! Oh God, Dresser arrive, boys! Dresser in Canada!” or to toss a cigarette to a friend nearby. They were the same as ever, and he loved them. He understood also why he should not like them, for they were really too noisy and unnecessarily loud and prone to display. “Jesus Christ, you see that young fellow there! the way he walking in them brown and red shoes, as if he is the only son of a bitch who ever wore shoes, and I know back where he come from, he never seen shoes!” And he understood why he should like them, because they were the same as he was: “I just making a damn lotta money in this country, but basically them and me is the same thing. I could pretend that I am a different man, whiching I am, but deep-down, if ever I should need a glass of water, in an emergency, who is the first person to come?” He thought about this for a while, and the facts of his history stuck in his conscience, and he had to admit that on all those occasions when he needed that glass of water, the first person who came running was not a West Indian. He should control his new emotions and sentiments about West Indians and remember that he was a Barbadian. He had said this before; he should stick to it always. He thought of those “friends-in-need,” and among them were the Canadian young fellow, his friend Mr. MacIntosh, and, and … “But still, our people have less money than the others,” he rationalized.