Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  Then Bill added almost in a whisper, “Thing is, somebody’s put a finger on the minister.”

  He meant Lester Pearson, minister of external affairs. A woman, Elizabeth Bentley, had named Pearson in her testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was nearly two years ago, it was old news, Bill was trying to pretend that he had some inside info. Emmett said, “The woman who gave that testimony about Pearson is pathetic. She’s insane.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Bill.

  By moonlight, Emmett could see the blue, broken blood vessels travelling over Bill’s swollen nose, the heavy lids and puffy bags under the eyes, and he marvelled that this was the face of a man with nothing to hide, nothing but self-interest masked by piety; a team player.

  Bill held out his brandy snifter, requesting a refill. When Emmett returned with their drinks, Bill took a big, functional gulp of brandy, heaved himself into a wicker chair, and said, “Now. Tell me about this prick Norfield. That his name? John Norfield. What’s he got on you?”

  Chapter Two

  Toronto, Fall 1946

  John Norfield had three scars in the shape of sunflower seeds pressed into the skin of his cheekbone from a childhood bout of chicken pox. It only made him more handsome, even beautiful. The women would watch the smile come and go in his narrow jaw. It wasn’t good humour they saw there, not in the sense that he was sharing the joke. He was a different kind of man, but then, people were different when they came home from the war. John Norfield was so terribly thin, the women said, gaunt; and his clothes hung on him, just so. That night a rumour went around his smoky party that he’d been a POW in a Jap camp.

  Emmett Jones, another war vet, a student at the ripe old age of twenty-six, didn’t know John Norfield, his host, having been brought by some classmates from university. He wanted to introduce himself and found Norfield in the living room talking to a girl. “Well, we had to,” the girl was saying. Her back was turned to Emmett, the green stuff her dress was made of rustled, revealed her white shoulders. She wore her blond hair in a roll, and he stared at the long, shapely neck. “With the war, we had to grow up fast,” she told John Norfield. She was dressed for a fancier party, so she looked out of place here, square, in her ballroom gown where most of the women wore narrow skirts and thin blouses, smoking cigarettes. Emmett looked over the white shoulders to see how this fellow Norfield would treat somebody like her. With smooth tolerance. A girl like that can say any kind of nonsense to a man.

  When John Norfield looked past her, directly at Emmett, his eyes changed aperture; everything changed, his interest, his expectations. Something like a lynx, a seething, cool interest.

  The girl wasn’t so fatuous as not to be aware that she’d lost Norfield’s interest, and she twisted to look up at Emmett Jones’s spectacles.

  Norfield leaned past the girl and stuck out his hand, “Hi. Welcome.”

  Emmett said hello, then hello to the girl.

  “Oh,” said Norfield, “sorry.” He put his face close to hers. “Susan, right?”

  “Suzanne.” She accepted this small slight with a neutral modesty that Emmett liked and then put her hand firmly in his. Emmett guessed from the handshake, the husky voice, the costly dress, that she had family; he was already wary of her father.

  John Norfield put an unlit cigarette between his lips and took her elbow. He had to speak close to her ear, over the party noise. “Let’s sit down, out of the crowd.” He indicated that Emmett was to follow.

  Suzanne in her green dress with an eggy white lining squeezed in at the end of a long horsehair couch while somebody gave over the armchair to Norfield and Emmett took the low ottoman, folding his long legs, his knees up around his ears. Suzanne settled, then gave a little cry and squirmed a magazine out from under her. “Oh! The New Yorker !”

  The party was loud, a lot of rye, a lot of rum, gin, beer, and marijuana, though few of the guests knew what it was, that sweet smoke. It was too loud to talk. Norfield indicated to Emmett, Have a look.

  But Suzanne had taken possession of the magazine. She showed a proprietary thrill in finding The New Yorker here, away from home, and shouted over the noise, “I adore their cartoons!” It might have been the cigarette smoke, it might have been that she didn’t have the confidence she pretended to, but she paled as she began to read, with a quick draining away of pride. She leafed through, stopping to read a bit, slowly turning a page.

  Emmett saw her and he felt disturbed, persuaded by her.

  There was a girl called Carmen at John Norfield’s party, in his surprisingly nice one-bedroom apartment on College Street. Or at any rate, she looked like a Carmen, alert breasts in a tight red sweater, launching herself onto Norfield’s lap, probably the girl who’d stay after everybody had left. She wrapped her arms around Norfield’s neck and kicked her feet, smiling at Emmett, saying, “Hi ya.” Then, “Oh! She’s got Hiroshima!”

  Suzanne’s face when she raised her head from the magazine was stricken, as if she’d been caught looking at dirty pictures. There was something young about her that would probably never go away.

  For a few minutes, the party chatter pounced on this particular New Yorker. They argued over how it was to be pronounced. Hero-sheema. Hear-ah-shima. A young man wearing the jacket of his army uniform with a red bow tie removed the magazine from Suzanne’s hand, as if doing her a favour. With drunken solemnity he pronounced, “I hope they drop a handful of A-bombs on Moscow.”

  Suzanne didn’t even raise her head to look at him but reached to retrieve the magazine and continued to read. Her eighteen-karat hair swept up in a French roll, her ankles crossed beneath her party dress, she could have been reading A Christmas Carol. Emmett Jones and John Norfield studied her. Emmett asked, “What is it?”

  “John Hersey’s thing on the A-bombs they dropped on Japan,” the drunken vet answered with clipped, elaborate sobriety. “They gave the whole issue to him. No cartoons.” Then, directed at Suzanne, “Hey, little girl, it’ll give you scary nightmares.”

  Carmen took a cigarette out of a silver box sitting on the side-table and put it between her lips for John Norfield to light. “The whole thing just makes me want to give up on the human race,” she said, the cigarette bobbing between her lips.

  Norfield put her off his lap. He looked unwell. Carmen pressed her palm against his cheek and said, “Hey.” Norfield waited for her to take her hand away.

  Suzanne’s lovely forehead under all that hair. Carmen caught Norfield looking at this pretty young woman in the green gown and told her, “It’s not news, honey.”

  “Oh,” said Suzanne. “I knew about it. That we dropped the Bombs. And ended the war.”

  “We didn’t. They did,” said the bow tie. “Americans. They’ll do anything, crazy bastards.”

  Suzanne handed the magazine to Norfield. The skin of a woman’s hands slipped off in “huge, glove-like pieces.” At the park near the river in Hiroshima, the “slimy living bodies” were searching for their dead families. In Hiroshima, the people in their homes, on the street, at school, they were burnt alive, little babies and children, their mothers and fathers, in a few bright seconds they were charred sticks, she knew that before, didn’t she. Or, surviving in fire and ash, getting sick, their skin falling off. “Thanks. My dad’ll have a copy, I’ll read his.”

  She looked like she needed air. Norfield reached for her hand and said, “Come here.” He took Emmett’s arm and pushed him ahead, ushered them out, and closed the door behind him, then the three of them stood in the silent hallway.

  They walked down to a diner near Spadina.

  “You’re just going to leave your own party?” said Suzanne, nervously flattered.

  The two men waited till she took a seat at the long counter and then they sat on either side of her, their legs touching her dress.

  “It was winding down anyway.” Norfield slapped the magazine onto the counter and shoved it toward Emmett. “Happy reading.”

  Emmett drew it to
ward himself but didn’t open it. He stared at the pleasant scene on its cover, a watercolour of a summery America taking its leisure. “I grew up there,” he said. “Not Hiroshima. East. In Kobe. Or near there, in a place called Shioya. In a kind of estate for foreigners.”

  The girl, Suzanne, said, “How exotic!” She looked lost for a second and then asked, “Do you still have family there?”

  “My parents are both dead.” He saw her shocked face and added, “It’s all right.”

  “Ah,” Norfield was saying, “that explains it.” He wasn’t paying much attention but was looking to the end of the counter where a man in a homburg hat had just sat down. Norfield’s complexion was yellow, his hands shook when he lit his cigarette. Emmett thought that maybe it was true about Norfield being a POW. You don’t look well after that.

  They sat with “Hiroshima: A Noiseless Flash” wrapped up in its busy cover illustration. With some effort, John Norfield was dragging himself into a sociable range for the benefit of his two new friends, who, he was aware, would find it strange to have their host take them from his own party.

  Norfield had a nasty, chemical taste in his mouth. One of the challenges in returning from Hong Kong was to remember that he had to appear to be kind. He’d been back in Toronto for ten months, out of a Japanese prison camp for more than a year. Not yet enough time to be reconciled to the easily won indulgences, the boredom of his fellow citizens in the Kingdom of the Golden Mean. In the camp, a Chinese couple, man and wife, starving, slipped food to him through the barbed wire. They did this two or three times. The last time, Norfield had already received their small package, concealed it under his shirt, and was walking away when they got caught, the man and his wife. It was the smell that gave them away; they’d wanted the food to be warm. They were beheaded in the prison yard while Norfield was forced to watch. That’s solidarity for you. Home now, six months ago, walking down College Street, he’d lost control of his bowels. It took a second; in a surge of terror the veneer he’d carefully applied was stripped away; he remembered how things really are, and he shit himself. Now he presented to Jones and this girl, Suzanne, his cool attentiveness. He knew that he was clean; he made sure of it.

  “So you grew up in Japan,” he said to Emmett, who just a moment before had asked him about his bookstore — Emmett had heard that Norfield ran a bookstore and dredged up a question: “So how do you like that kind of work?”

  Emmett swerved to try to intercept Norfield’s sudden interest. “I lived in Kobe till I was sixteen.”

  “What year was that?”

  “Nineteen thirty-six.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “I had TB.”

  “I had a cousin who had that,” Suzanne said and froze: the cousin had died.

  Norfield spoke dreamily so it was hard to reconcile what he said with how he said it. “Think the Japs might’ve murdered and raped more Chinese if they’d been better organized?”

  “No, I don’t. In fact, the opposite.”

  “Just got caught up in the frenzy, eh.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You speak Japanese?”

  Emmett said that he did.

  “Think you’ll ever go back there?” Norfield asked idly.

  Suzanne, her breathy voice, compassionate, “Without any family?”

  “Kobe got bombed pretty good, I hear,” Norfield said. “Nearly wiped out.”

  Emmett tightened. “That’s right.”

  In the greasy mirror behind the grill, Suzanne watched herself with the two men. It was her first year away from home, living in residence, Falconer House, which was nice. She’d never be able to go home again; even if she went back, she wouldn’t really be living there, not anymore. She saw that Norfield was looking at her. She was used to that, but this time it mattered.

  Norfield was looking at Suzanne, but he was talking to Emmett. “So? Ever going back?”

  “I hope to, one day. I want to find someone there. She’s sort of family. She’d be an old woman by now — if she survived.”

  “Much chance of that?” Norfield asked. “Survival?”

  “I hope so,” Emmett said again.

  “Full of hope, are you? Well. The Americans are their pals now. Never saw a country take defeat so easy. Duck to water.”

  Norfield droned on about the American military occupation of Japan, his voice flat, without inflection. Emmett was beginning to wonder if he could like him, and he scolded himself: cut the guy some slack. Then Norfield said, “Hey. What about China?”

  “What about it?”

  “You think the communists are going to take over?” Norfield raised his voice to ask this. At the end of the counter, the homburg hat lifted, and Emmett saw the face of a man his own age; he was surprised — he’d thought that a man dressed like that would be older. Norfield and the man in the homburg looked at each other in the mirror. Norfield gave a sudden grin with a fresh cigarette in his mouth.

  Suzanne said, “I should be going.” She climbed down from the stool. “Oh” — she opened her handbag — “my treat,” and laid down fifty cents.

  “How are you getting home?” Emmett wanted to know.

  Norfield said, “We’re going to take you.”

  Suzanne was stuck. The girls she’d come with were probably still at the party. Getting back to residence alone, the dark streets, thugs, muggers, vets. “Don’t you have to go back to your guests?”

  Norfield shrugged. “C’mon.”

  Chapter Three

  They escorted Suzanne McCallum to her residence, Falconer House, trotting her briskly between them. She felt their eagerness to be rid of her, and she was bewildered because she knew they were attracted — but that didn’t matter; they wanted her out so they could talk about who-knows-what. The first attraction is always between the men.

  Suzanne knew men by instinct. She didn’t know how she’d come by this wisdom, being an only child. And what good would it do anyway? Condemn her to boredom unless she could turn to steel like her mother; it would make her a great dance partner, though she didn’t know if such things would even continue to exist, after Hiroshima and all, after the death camps and the “noiseless flash.” Emmett Jones and John Norfield didn’t talk much on the way. She would’ve liked some real conversation. There was so much to talk about. But she was shut out.

  They practically tossed her at the front door, gave her thin segments of their faces, Emmett with his glasses like two O’s when the porch light caught them. And John, the way his teeth fit in his jaw, so thin, and then his mouth. He stood out of the light. Yet she felt his resentment.

  They each saw the hem of the green dress, and they turned away.

  “What time is it?” Norfield asked.

  Emmett had inherited his father’s watch. It was after midnight.

  Norfield asked, “Want to see my bookstore?”

  “Now?”

  “C’mon. Want a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.” Emmett figured that Norfield must have forgotten the TB. But after they’d walked in silence for ten minutes, Norfield said, “You don’t look like a consumptive.”

  “I’m not. Not anymore.”

  “That why you didn’t go over?”

  “I went over. Air force.”

  “See some action?”

  Emmett answered tersely, “Yes.” He pretended to be interested in the buildings they were passing. There was an element of yearning in Norfield’s question.

  Norfield dragged hard on his cigarette, then flicked it into the gutter. “My store’s here.”

  They’d arrived at a narrow storefront with a green shutter and door. Once inside, Norfield turned on a small lamp. The book dust made Emmett sneeze. He was tired and wished he hadn’t come.

  Norfield disappeared through a curtain behind the cash register and was gone for several minutes. Emmett called out, “Is there another light out here?” Norfield’s white face reappearing. Emmett sneezed several times, saying, “Can’t s
ee the books.”

  Norfield handed him a cup of coffee and turned on the overhead bulb. Full disclosure, shadowed eyes. “That what you want?” He turned it off. “Better?” He took the shade off the lamp and the room brightened. “You tired?”

  “I think I’m going to head on home.”

  Norfield held out his hand. On his palm lay two pills. He took one and popped it into his mouth, offering the other to Emmett. “This’ll take care of you.”

  Emmett tried to swallow the pill dry, as Norfield had, and then burned his tongue with coffee.

  Ten minutes later it hit him like joy. His hands could read. He could inhale the meaning of the books he slipped from the shelves. One word. One sentence. So he knew Bernard Shaw, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, Jack London, John Reed, D.H. Lawrence. “What’s D.H. Lawrence doing here?”

  “Think he’s bad?” asked Norfield. He came and stood close.

  “I don’t know. Sort of — homo.”

  Norfield laughed. He seemed — if not happy — exalted. He took the novel from Jones’s hands, set it down, and said, “I liked the ecstasy. I liked the beauty, when I was a boy, before the war. When I was a boy, I only believed in beauty. I was truly sublime, man.”

  Emmett felt Norfield’s voice like a hand on his spine. It was nearly too much. He didn’t want to leave, not anymore. They were standing close, beside the counter, and Norfield leaned back on his elbows. Emmett couldn’t take his eyes off John’s collarbone where he’d opened his shirt and loosened his tie. From every angle, John was perfectly made, and he smelled good, a fresh oniony heat. He didn’t look sick anymore. Maybe the pill had taken care of it.

  John said, “Before experience, everything’s just speculation. Before experience, we’re sleepwalkers. Deluded.”

  And in this way, Emmett and Norfield began a long night of talk, pacing, riffling the books. Norfield encrypted his stories, cut them up. He said he’d had three weeks of fighting in Hong Kong. Then he was a prisoner of the Japanese for the rest of the war. Four years in Japanese prison camps. “You speak Chinese too?” Norfield asked.